Most of the 760 universities—and the 35,000 colleges affiliated with them—spread over India are in a state of advanced decline. In the name of improving higher education, Modi announced the creation of ‘Institutes of Excellence’. Institutions invited to join this new layer of hierarchy will be given hundreds of crores of rupees of public money. The principal condition for admission to this club is a record of academic excellence. One of the colleges selected for inclusion in the category was Jio Institute. Founded by Modi’s billionaire cheerleader Mukesh Ambani and named after his mobile phone network, Jio existed only on paper: there was no campus, no curriculum, no faculty, no student. It was a phantom institute, decorated with the ‘eminence’ tag on instructions from the prime minister’s office.34
A host of existing central universities, meanwhile, have been granted ‘autonomy’ by Modi. What this heralds in practice is the gradual elimination of governmental support and the inevitable introduction of exorbitant tuition fees by universities compelled to fend for themselves. The result: the most disadvantaged students—such as the students at JNU, a nightmare for Hindu nationalists—will become further marginalised.
The defence that Modi is devolving powers through the grant of autonomy to universities—that his tinkering is all part of a high-minded administrative streamlining uncontaminated by ideological imperatives—is belied by his own decision to dismantle the University Grants Commission and replace it with a new central body vested with heightened powers of oversight over the ‘autonomous’ institutions. Since 1976, education has been a concurrent subject: both the state and the union governments are responsible for it. The termination of the University Grants Commission will mark the most significant transfer of power in this area from the states to the centre in at least four decades. A single agency under the thumb of the union government will henceforth decide what is taught, how it is taught and who teaches it. This is a major triumph for the BJP and the RSS, which have sought for decades to seize education.35
In 2017, the government constituted a committee of scholars to produce, in the words of its chairman, a ‘report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history’. According to the minutes of their secretive meetings reviewed by Reuters, which was the first to alert the world to its existence, they were labouring to ‘establish a correlation’ between Indian history and the vast body of Hindu mythology.36 Doing so would confer legitimacy on the Hindu-national belief that Vedic culture emanated from autochthonous inhabitants of India, and not migrants from western and central Asia. It is a bogus belief, debunked by DNA studies of ancient settlers in northern India, who originated, it is now clear, in central and western Asia.37 The diligence with which the distant past was illuminated must also be applied to the task of revamping how the relatively recent past is filtered and taught. The previous millennium was a calamitous period for India. By papering it over with untenable tales, secularists infantilised Indians, insulted their memories and rendered them susceptible to the piffle purveyed by Hindu nationalists.
But a corrective to the well-meaning distortions enshrined in the curricula by secularists cannot come from the luminaries of the current dispensation, who are beneficiaries of those distortions. They are bereft of the intellectual equipment and emotional equanimity essential to explicate the past sincerely without seeking to avenge it. Education to the Hindu nationalists is a vehicle for the transmission of a collection of risible fables fabricated from an admixture of insupportable superiority complex and incurable inferiority complex that is the trait of self-pitying ethno-religious nationalists everywhere. Indian schoolchildren, already at the mercy of an educational system that withholds from them an intelligibly forthright accounting of their country’s disturbing past, now appear destined to be conditioned by the ludicrous yet lethal pseudo-history that Modi and his confreres—many of whom today sit atop India’s most eminent institutions—internalised in the boot camps of the RSS. They are men consumed by resentments. Their cure is rage and fantasy.
One of Modi’s appointees to the staff of the Indian Council of Historical Research, or ICHR, an august body created to oversee and disburse funding for historical research, began his job by publishing a demand for ‘an unqualified apology’ from India’s ‘most learned historians’ for obscuring ‘systematic anti-Hindu violence’ that had gone on apparently ‘for 1,400 years’, and called time on the ‘eminent’ intellectuals and the ‘high-profile’ and ‘sophisticated’ media, and their ‘political patrons [who] are now so agitated and apprehensive that [their] sort of history might soon be replaced by authentic history’.38 But the construction of an ‘authentic history’ requires a bare minimum of expertise that Modi’s nominee for the ICHR’s chairmanship—an obscure academician from Andhra affiliated with the RSS—patently lacked. The new chairman’s most substantial body of work appeared not in distinguished peer-reviewed journals but on his blog, where he expounded, among other things, on the utility of the Hindu caste system (‘working well in ancient times and we do not find any complaint from any quarters against it’).39
Instead of ‘authentic history’, school textbooks in state governments run by the BJP are now congested with lies. In Madhya Pradesh, a state until recently in the BJP’s pocket, students have been taught that India won the 1962 war against China. Textbooks in Rajasthan, omitting any mention of Nehru, teach children that the state’s revered medieval chieftain, Maharana Pratap, who was trounced by a Mughal force in 1576, ‘conclusively defeated Mughal emperor Akbar’.40 As Rajasthan’s education minister explained, the objective of this grotesque anti-history ‘is to bring the true history, culture, philosophy, ancient science and heroes of [India] to the fore … to evoke an emotional and spiritual sentiment in the society. This is required for [India] to become “Vishwa Guru” [world leader]’.41 In Maharashtra, the Mughal period has been effaced from history textbooks.42
The intellectual poverty of the new regime has been on near-constant display since 2014. Satyapal Singh, Modi’s minister for human resources—the department responsible for education—believes that Darwin’s theory of evolution is ‘scientifically wrong’ and ‘needs to change in school and college curriculum’. How did he alight at this discovery? Because ‘nobody, including our ancestors, have said they saw an ape turning into a man. No books we have read or the tales told to us by our grandparents had such a mention’.43 Benightedness, alas, is not an isolated phenomenon in Modi’s cabinet. The prime minister himself believes, as he told an audience in 2014, that ancient Indians had mastered ‘genetic science’. Exhibit A of his evidence for the claim was Karna, the thwarted anti-hero in the ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata, who was ‘born outside his mother’s womb’. The elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha was adduced by Modi as Exhibit B to argue the case that ‘our ancestors’ had perfected ‘the practice of plastic surgery’.44
Nehru had wanted to promote a ‘scientific temper’ in the Indian mind. Modi has fostered an anti-science outlook. At the Indian Science Congress of 2015, inaugurated by the prime minister himself, academicians from across the land that once produced boffins such as C.V. Raman and Jagadish Chandra Bose tabulated the scientific achievements of ancient Indians. Among other things, Indians, they said, had built jets capable of interplanetary travel and placed a man on Mars. Indian cows, meanwhile, converted the grass they ingested into ‘24-carat gold’.45 As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had written a preface to a ‘history’ book for school students which informed them that the Hindu god Rama had flown the first aircraft.46 As prime minister of India, he oversaw the diminution of the country that not so long ago had acquired a global reputation as a ‘knowledge power’ into an international laughing stock. But what is a reputational loss for India is a psychological gain for Hindu ideologues. Indians’ confusion about their past, the chronic mismanagement of education, the powers of patronage—Modi exploited every crack and opportunity to suffuse institutions erected to wash away ignorance with the unenlightenment necessary
to hasten contemporary India’s conversion into a modern avatar of the pristinely high-tech Hindu fairyland he and his Hindutva kith genuinely believe once flourished in the subcontinent.
In 2017, Modi made the most far-reaching power-grab in recent memory. He piled on, stealthily, to that year’s Finance Bill—a special class of legislation exempted from the traditional checks of the upper house of parliament, where the BJP sits in the opposition benches—a stack of amendments tailored to expand dramatically the executive’s power.47 The government gave itself extensive authority to make appointments to appellate tribunals, regulate the terms of service of the appointees and to terminate them. More disturbingly, it vested tax inspectors, who have a hoary history of being deployed to exact political vengeance, with the power to raid any property without the need to disclose the purpose of the raid—not just to the person being raided but even to the tax tribunals. The law, moreover, could be applied retrospectively. Having campaigned on the promise to clean up politics, Modi introduced provisions in the same bill allowing any individual or private company incorporated in India to make potentially unlimited donations to political parties through the purchase of ‘electoral bonds’—promissory notes issued at state banks in multiples of thousand up to ten million rupees—and scrapped the prohibition that prevented corporations from giving more than a small portion of their net profits. The most extraordinary part was that the donors’ and recipients’ identities were to be kept confidential from the public. If all this wasn’t outrageous enough, a year later, the government amended, without debate, a law that banned foreign donations to Indian political parties. Enacted ex post facto, the change not only emancipated the BJP and Congress from legal sanction—both parties were found guilty by a Delhi court of violating the law in its previous incarnation—but also opened the sluice gates to (anonymous) overseas money. A foreign company with an Indian subsidiary can now effectively channel unlimited amounts of cash to India’s legendarily venal political parties.
The baleful effects of Modi’s legislative power-grab on institutional autonomy have already become apparent.
The Election Commission of India is a marvel to behold. It has overseen the conduct of largely free and fair elections for decades in a nation riven by violence and awash with illicit money during the polls. The behaviour of this illustrious institution in the age of Modi betokens a distressing attrition of its autonomy. When the slippery device of ‘electoral bonds’ was first announced by the government, the ECI reacted furiously, denouncing it as a ‘retrograde step as far as transparency of donations is concerned’ and demanding its immediate withdrawal.48 But when Modi pretended not to notice and pressed ahead with his plan, the ECI performed an about-turn and endorsed the scheme as ‘a step in the right direction’.49 What exactly prompted this change of mind is not known. What is known is that, in the intervening period, the ECI made another unusual decision to Modi’s advantage when it delayed, by a whole month, state-wide elections that were scheduled to be held in Gujarat in November 2017. The official reason for the postponement—that the BJP government in Gujarat needed more time to carry out ‘relief work’ following heavy flooding earlier in the year—was shaky for two reasons. First, there had been far worse flooding in Jammu and Kashmir in 2014—300 people were killed—and yet the ECI had refused to adjourn the vote in that state. Second, the one month by which the ECI deferred the election in Gujarat was filled with electoral rather than relief activity by the BJP government. As the Indian Express outlined, ‘a slew of financial sops were announced, big-ticket projects were launched across the state, and several [union] ministers and BJP chief ministers travelled [to Gujarat] to address election rallies’.50 After casting his own vote when the elections finally were held, Modi proceeded to stage an improvised campaign march in flagrant violation of the ECI’s codes. No action was taken against the prime minister.51
In the end, the only beneficiaries of the ‘relief work’ for which the election was delayed were the prime minister—intent on not losing face in his native state—and the BJP. The ECI’s uncharacteristic decision generated, in the judgement of one of its own former chiefs, a credible ‘ground of suspicion’ that it had helped enable an outcome favourable to the ruling party.52 If the perception of the ECI’s integrity is the basis of its credibility, the submission of political parties to the ECI’s authority is the condition of its viability. Modi’s immediate political gain was predicated, as always, on the violation of conventions critical to the survival of Indian democracy. The enormity of the ECI’s accommodation of the BJP, having gone largely unnoticed in a country distracted by the theatrics of the ruling dispensation, will become painfully clear when other parties clamour for the leeway generously extended to Modi—and, when denied it, defy the ECI exactly as Modi did.
Rewriting the Constitution is the highest ambition of Hindu nationalists.53 The greatest obstacle in realising it are the courts. At the lower levels of the judiciary in India, there is malfeasance and incompetence. At the apex, there is integrity and rectitude. Debilitated during Indira’s dictatorship, the Supreme Court, unlike the lower courts, rebounded with fury and gradually created for itself a role that has often exceeded its original purpose. The court has effectively arrogated to itself legislative powers. For the most part, the decisions of its justices have been in accordance with liberal social mores—which explains the institution’s international prestige—but they have also on occasion been reprehensibly reactionary and unconscionably majoritarian: such as when a former chief justice restored a criminal law notorious for being used to persecute gays on the basis that ‘the orifice of the mouth is not, according to nature, meant for sexual or carnal intercourse’, or when the capital punishment awarded to a Kashmiri militant was upheld on the grounds that ‘the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied’ if he was executed. Judicial trespass was always a symptom of the sickness that courses through the other branches of the government. In a republic ravaged by a succession of subversive executives empowered by supine legislators, the Supreme Court attained popular legitimacy as the crusading custodian of constitutional democracy because of its overreach. Indians demoralised by political dysfunction have come to regard the Supreme Court as the republic’s deus ex machina, its saviour, and, like a hypochondriac who swallows antibiotics to fight off a common cold, become habituated to petitioning it to resolve matters that ought to remain the business of the executive and the legislature. This dependency is profoundly unhealthy, but what necessitated it is the poor health of Indian democracy.
The Supreme Court was the one institution that put up the stiffest resistance to Modi’s rise to national leadership. After the bloodletting in Gujarat, the court castigated him as a ‘modern-day Nero’ who was ‘looking elsewhere when … innocent children and helpless women were burning’ and ‘probably deliberating how the perpetrators of the crime can be protected’.54 That Modi survived such a bruising indictment and wormed his way into the republic’s highest political office is a reminder that institutions are not self-animating creatures. What they do is contingent upon those who people them. The exoneration Modi was granted in the lead-up to the general elections by a special probe deputed by the apex court to investigate his complicity in one of the many massacres of 2002 appears, in retrospect, almost foreordained. Tasked with gathering facts in a state whose entire administrative machinery functioned as Modi’s marionette, it ended up producing a report held in place by fiction, as the distinguished lawyer and journalist Manoj Mitta, who followed the inquiry more closely than just about anyone else, has observed.55 The solitary interview one of its officers held with Modi ‘was more to place Modi’s defence on record rather than to ferret out any inconsistency or admission of wrongdoing’ on his part.56 The advice of the Supreme Court’s amicus to the special probe that criminal charges could reasonably be framed against Modi based on his alleged instructions to the police to ‘go soft on Hindu rioters’ was rejected.
Despite this clean bi
ll, Modi’s history in Gujarat threatened to generate legal jeopardy for him in the future. The fate of his closest comrade, Amit Shah, was still uncertain when Modi became prime minister: a special court constituted by the Supreme Court in 2012 was deciding whether to put Shah on trial for the murder of a Muslim man. A month after Modi took office, the presiding judge was removed from his job. Six months later, his successor, an upstanding judge named B.H. Loya died in the most mysterious of circumstances the morning after spending a night at a government guest house. Loya’s replacement, M.B. Gosavi, dropped the charges against Shah within three weeks of being given charge of the case.57 The sequence of events could have been dismissed as a coincidence were it not for the allegations of foul play advanced in 2017 by Loya’s family. The judge, his family said, had withstood fierce pressure to deliver the correct verdict before he died. The opposition then alleged that two of Loya’s friends, with whom the judge had apparently shared his ordeal, had also dropped dead: one from the top of a building, another on a train.58 Even as details of Loya’s puzzling death were slowly trickling forth and a clearer picture of a criminal conspiracy to choke the lower judiciary was beginning to congeal, the Supreme Court became embroiled in what seemed like the most apocalyptic crisis in its history since Indira’s dictatorship.
In January 2018, four of the top court’s seniormost justices made history by staging an unprecedented press conference to issue a direct warning to Indian citizens that ‘unless this institution is preserved … democracy will not survive in this country’.59 The integrity of the highest court in the land, they explained, was being imperilled by the manner in which important cases were being assigned by the chief justice to benches of his choice with ‘no rationale’. Loya’s death was not an unimportant factor in the justices’ decision to alert the public to the threat to the court’s independence, as Ranjan Gogoi, the man then next in line to be chief justice, admitted.60 It was abundantly clear from what was left unsaid that the insulation between the executive and the Supreme Court—the final court of appeal, the last hope of the republic’s endangered Constitution—was rapidly dissolving under Modi.
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