India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 05 :: Feb. 27 - Mar. 12, 1999

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COVER STORY

Questionable intent

The dismissal of the RJD Government has nothing to do with the mounting atrocities against Dalits. It is part of a BJP-Samata Party design to capture through fiat the power that they have failed to obtain through an electoral contest.

AIJAZ AHMAD

THE lack of symmetry could not have been more obvious. Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government came to power at the Centre, an implacable campaign of hate, vandalism, murder and rape has been conducted against members of the Christian faith in particular and various minorities in general, including the Kabir Panthis in Jammu and Kashmir. This has happened across the Indian Union but most particularly in Gujarat and Maharashtra, where the Hindutva parties are in charge of government. Widespread involvement of the members and allies of the BJP and the Shiv Sena in these campaigns is an established fact, and it is no wonder that the functionaries of the Gujarat Government cooperated so little with the Minorities Commission when it sought to investigate the systematic violence that was committed by organisations known to be part of a fraternity that includes the ruling party.

Indeed, even the "census" of the Christian community that the Keshubhai Patel Government is conducting in Gujarat at present is demonstrably communal. Meanwhile, Mr. Thackeray and his Sainiks do not even try to conceal their communal vitriol, in word as well as deed. In this context, it should bear some emphasis that the highest court of the land has in fact ruled that secularism is a fundamental constitutional value and that it is legitimate to resort to Article 356 for the defence of this value. Threat to national security appears to be the only other issue where the apex court clearly recognises the suitability of such a drastic action.

On these grounds, then, if there is a State Government in India that deserves to be dismissed under Article 356 it is certainly the Government in Gujarat, and possibly that of Maharashtra as well. The ruling coalition would of course not think of such a step, but even the Opposition parties have not proposed it, precisely because this constitutional provision has been abused so regularly in the past and the Supreme Court has quite prudently sought to restrict its use as much as possible. The Left parties, in particular, have argued that such problems, including the problem in Bihar, must be addressed politically.

In sharp contrast to the BJP's refusal to take any kind of responsibility for the crimes of its cadres and allies, the Congress(I), headed now by Sonia Gandhi, had at least the decency to get Orissa Chief Minister J.B. Patnaik to resign his post and thus take moral responsibility for the torching of Australian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his two children, even though the prime suspect in that atrocity is said to be a member of the Bajrang Dal. The Congress(I) leadership has not made known its reasons for getting Patnaik to resign, but one hopes very much that the hair-raising brutalisation of Anjana Mishra, alleged to have been the work of one of Patnaik's close confidants, was as much the cause of its action as was the issue of India's bad image in the West after the cruel killing of the Australian missionary and his sons. The point in any case is that Patnaik went but Keshubhai Patel stays. By what right, then, has the BJP-led Government at the Centre so successfully obtained the dismissal of the Government in Bihar?

THE record of the governments of Laloo Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi is hardly defensible, to put it very mildly. About the caste violence itself, however, which became the proximate cause for the dismissal of the Bihar Government, at least four things need to be said.

First, it is a violence against those who are economically the most exploited and socially the most despised. Caste and class coincide here very closely. The Dalits who are the objects of this violence are, by and large, the most ill-paid and often unpaid agricultural workers; the Bhumihars and the Rajputs who have organised the Ranvir Sena are the landowners on whose lands the Dalits are forced to labour under the nastiest conditions. Many other kinds of abuse, such as the sexual abuse of Dalit women, arises out of that basic fact. All this is of course well known. A reminder is needed, however, because it is a sign of very great decline in our social consciousness that we are much more perturbed by the fact of social prejudice than by the fact of economic exploitation. And because we think mainly of social prejudice, we think of the violence against Dalits as essentially a law-and-order problem. Even the presidential consent to the dismissal of the Rabri Devi Government seems to suggest that all shall be well, or at least very much better, if there were to be a different administration - in effect, a BJP-Samata Party government under the guise of President's Rule.

DEEPAK KUMAR
A day after the massacre of 12 Dalits by the Ranvir Sena in Narayanpur, Laloo Prasad consoles grieving relatives of the victims. Security and social justice for the Dalits in Bihar was not at all an issue in the calculations of the BJP-led coalition Government while recommending the dismissal of the RJD Government.

Second, it is certainly the case that the particular kind of caste and class atrocities that the savagery of the Ranvir Sena symbolises is specially characteristic of Bihar. However, a careful study of empirical data has shown that in other respects the level of violence in Bihar is not notably higher than in most other States in the Union; some kinds of crimes are more frequent, other kinds less so ("Crime fiction", Frontline, October 23, 1998). In many respects, the situation in Delhi is far more serious. In other words, the image that many have of Bihar - as a State with a particularly high incidence of violence - has to do largely with the specially brutal character of the landlord-labourer relations, rather than the failure of administration.

Third, caste violence is a perennial feature of society in Bihar, as elsewhere in India, and it began escalating there from the early 1970s onward, but well before the rise of Laloo Prasad Yadav. That escalation was already a response from the landowners of the upper castes to the rise of democratic aspirations and, therefore, the increasing insubordination of those who have always been greatly subordinated, ritually as well as economically. The past nine years, when Laloo Prasad Yadav and then Rabri Devi have been at the helm of things, have undoubtedly witnessed a far greater escalation of that violence but again in direct response to growing resistance from the Dalits themselves, in a more and more organised fashion. Not all the victims of this violence have actually got organised for resistance. Much of the violence is terroristic and indiscriminate, precisely because it seeks to teach a lesson to all concerned, those who are already organised as well as those very many more who are yet not so organised. As members of the Ranvir Sena are reported to have said, they will kill even the babies because the babies can grow up to be guerillas. This violence shall not stop - not until members of one class or the other, either the landlords or the labourers, get defeated. If the structure itself does not change and yet the caste violence declines, that would probably mean that the Dalits have been beaten back into subordination. Those who are not a part of the BJP-Samata Party alliance, and who nevertheless want to control the violence through the application of Article 356 and the introduction of more paramilitary forces, should ask themselves as to whose interest these paramilitary forces are likely to safeguard, and whether or not Dalits can actually be protected administratively without being liberated socially and economically.

Fourth, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Company are undoubtedly guilty of not having done nearly enough to contain the Ranvir Sena. It is even plausible that Laloo Prasad would to a certain extent look the other way if the private armies of the landowners are teaching a lesson to the Dalits, among whom many are sympathetic to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, which even has MLAs in the Bihar Assembly; for Laloo Prasad, undoubtedly, those MLAs are a terrible nuisance. All this is possible, even likely. The fact remains, however, that the Bhumihar and Rajput landowners form the natural constituency of the Sangh Parivar, and Laloo Prasad can hardly be held responsible for the existence and activities of the Ranvir Sena in the way that the BJP is indeed symbiotically connected with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Hindu Jagran Manch and the like, all the tension among the various siblings notwithstanding.

This too means a couple of things. To the extent that Laloo Prasad is not an author of the landlordist armies, the dismissal of his regime-by-proxy cannot guarantee the end of violence. The violence of the Ranvir Sena shall decline and even disappear for a while, but for quite different reasons. The establishment of the BJP-Samata Party administration, in the name of the President of course, shall indicate to the Ranvir Sena that the balance of forces has shifted in its favour and that it can afford to hold its guns for the short duration of time while presidential attention is focussed on Bihar. Second, the paramilitary forces - the 30 or so companies that are already in Bihar and the 15 or so that have now been dispatched - shall help enforce a militarised peace so as to satisfy the President who is so justifiably perturbed by the violence of the past few weeks. Third, this shift in the balance of power shall force the members of the Marxist-Leninist groupings, even as they periodically gun down each other, to undertake at least some military actions against the landlords and their protectors, so as to keep up the morale of their own cadres. The paramilitary forces shall then respond in kind, which shall then make it possible for the BJP-Samata Party administration to shift public attention from the Ranvir Sena to the Maoists as the real source of violence. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, having captured through a presidential fiat the power that they had failed to obtain through an electoral contest, the BJP-Samata Party alliance shall proceed to build for themselves through the administrative machinery an electoral base for the future that they have so far not achieved through the electoral process. Such, roughly, is the design behind this particular misuse of Article 356, which is undoubtedly the most extensively abused Article in the whole Constitution. One hopes very much that the design shall fail. In the eventuality that it succeeds, the BJP will have staged something resembling a low-level coup d'etat.

THE design has been in the making for a while. It was during the election campaign, well before forming the Government in Delhi - and indeed very much before the recent atrocities by the Ranvir Sena which prompted President K.R. Narayanan to authorise the use of Article 356 - that Vajpayee had started promising the use of this extraordinary constitutional power in Bihar. This has been a constant theme ever since for the BJP but even more so for its allies in the Samata Party. They appointed Sunder Singh Bhandari, a senior president of the BJP and a man who has been in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for a longer period than either Vajpayee or Advani, as Governor of Bihar so as to elicit reports from there that could be used to persuade the President that there was no alternative. If they hesitated for some months, that was because too many allies in too many States - for example, Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, and Om Prakash Chautala in Haryana - were also clamouring for imposition of Article 356 in their respective States, while the Supreme Court judgment in S.R. Bommai vs the Union of India had restricted the scope of application of this Article and the BJP simply could not use this instrument to dismiss State governments run by other parties in too many cases.

Finally, Vajpayee decided in September 1998 to deliver on his campaign promise and sent up to the President the Union Cabinet's decision to invoke Article 356 in respect of Bihar. He was at that time elegantly rebuffed. Some five months later, in mid-February, the BJP-led Government revived the same resolution, with some additional supportive material, mainly no doubt the Governor's more recent reports but also accounts of the latest savageries committed by the Ranvir Sena. This time, remarkably, the President was persuaded. Why so?

That shall remain a mystery until the President himself some day reveals his own thinking that went into the latter decision. We can only surmise. One factor, of course, was that the BJP simply forced the presidential hand. It deliberately sent up the same resolution, with attachments, rather than send up a new one. It is plausible that the President was persuaded that the conditions had now been met which in his judgment had not been met in September.

The conditions he had then stipulated were essentially four in number: that there be a demonstrable breakdown of constitutional governance; that there be evidence that the Central Government had done all it could to persuade the State Government to remedy the situation, but with no effect; that the Central Government be able to get the decision ratified by a resolution of Parliament; and that the decision be defensible in courts of law. In agreeing with the Cabinet resolution, the President seems to have been persuaded that at least the first two conditions had been met. The latter two, pertaining to Parliament and the law courts, shall have to be met over the next two months.

IT is arguable that Vajpayee became the Prime Minister of India for the first time in 1996, and that the BJP first emerged as a ruling party - even if only for 13 days - owing to an indiscretion when President S.D. Sharma had the choice of inviting either the largest party in Parliament, the BJP, or the coalition most likely to form a more durable government, namely the United Front, and he chose to invite the BJP. It is also eminently arguable that it was the tremendous boost that the BJP got from that opportunity to form a government that then contributed to its much better performance in the more recent elections, leading to the formation of the Government that is still in power. In the present circumstances, President Narayanan has undoubtedly acted with the noblest of motives and out of great anguish over the repeated acts of atrocity on the part of the Ranvir Sena, but one still wonders whether there has not been yet another act of indiscretion.

That the BJP and the Samata Party had always wanted to use Article 356 to obtain the dismissal of the Laloo Prasad-Rabri Devi governments has been known for a long time; that had nothing to do with the atrocities that have now been cited. Indeed, the September resolution which President Narayanan had sent back for reconsideration had nothing to do with the issue of Dalits and the Ranvir Sena. The BJP, greatly helped by Governor Bhandari, had contrived to believe that the law-and-order situation in Bihar had deteriorated greatly, which in fact had not happened. One knew that the Ranvir Sena was in fact drawn from the caste and class base that was much closer to the BJP than to Laloo Prasad's party, and that the Samata Party was in mortal competition with Laloo Prasad for the middle-caste vote. Under the circumstances, it was quite clear that the use of Article 356 was being proposed out of the same kind of cynical calculation as had been the case in previous instances of misuse of this Article. Bihar was the only large State in the North where the BJP had no really big presence and it was going to use the machinery of the Central Government - the authority of the President, if possible - to build that kind of base, through means fair or foul. The question needed to be asked: why Rabri Devi and why not Keshubhai Patel? It is not clear that the question was ever posed that way.

That President's Rule would offer little security for the Dalit labourers and would soon become a part of the pull-and-shove among parties and factions within parties should have been obvious enough. The Samata Party settled its scores with Laloo Prasad, but then Union Home Minister L.K. Advani moved quickly to settle scores with his colleague in the RSS, Governor Bhandari, while Nitish Kumar moved quickly to support Advani. While this crisis was going on, rumours were floated that two BJP MPs were resigning in protest against Advani's manoeuvres in opposition to Bhandari, obviously to put additional pressure on Vajpayee to keep Bhandari in the Raj Bhavan. Meanwhile, four BJP MPs are rumoured to have thrown in their lot with former Union Minister M.L. Khurana. As the BJP-led Government sinks deeper into its flounderings, there appears to be much agitation in various sections of the Parivar. And even though Bhandari has been suitably placated, a credible administration is as much lacking in Bihar as has been the case, presidential intentions notwithstanding.

DEEPAK KUMAR
Governor Sundar Singh Bhandari leaves Patna for New Delhi on February 17, the day Advani stated in New Delhi that the Centre was considering "giving a non-partisan and apolitical administration" in Bihar.

MEANWHILE, neither the Janata Dal nor the Congress(I) has quite said what it intends to do. The Congress(I) in particular is in a quandary. Before the presidential decision could be foreseen, Sonia Gandhi had declared that Rabri Devi had lost the "moral authority" to rule; little did she know that she would soon be asked whether the loss of moral authority also amounted to loss of constitutional authority in a House that had just given Rabri Devi a powerful vote of confidence. Now, after the imposition of Article 356, the Congress(I) has failed to take a clear stand on a constitutional question of such magnitude, even though it will depend largely on the Congress(I) whether or not the BJP shall get a majority in the Rajya Sabha when the matter comes up for a vote in the two Houses of Parliament. Upon that may well depend whether or not the BJP-led Government shall survive. In this situation, then, the Congress(I) is much less concerned with the constitutional issues per se, and much more with what voting in one way or another would mean to its various constituencies in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh: Muslims, Dalits, the backward castes, Brahmins, and so on. It is not at all clear that it can act decisively during this time while the BJP itself seems to be in great disarray. Nor is it clear that the Congress(I) truly understands what it would mean if the BJP-Samata Party combine actually stabilises its position in Bihar - to the poor Dalits surely but also for the balance of political power in the country over the coming years.

Then there are the courts. Reports have it that West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu has advised Laloo Prasad to go to the courts - instead of pursuing a politics of bandhs and bluster. This is as it should be. The Bommai decision has established that in order for the use of Article 356 to be sustainable, it must be able to pass through both Houses of Parliament and, if necessary, the courts as well. The basic principle here is that the imposition of President's Rule has the same gravity in the affairs of a federating unit as the declaration of a state of emergency has in the affairs of the country as a whole. In essence, this is a situation that must never be allowed to come to pass.

The BJP seems to have arrived at a full-fledged internal crisis as well as a possible crisis with at least some of its allies. As its fortunes sink, more of its allies shall be calculating the cost of remaining under its umbrella. Much now seems to hinge on what the Congress(I) chooses to do; the fall of the BJP-led Government is no longer only a distant possibility. Security and social justice for the Dalits in Bihar, for which the President opted in favour of the dismissal of the State Government, is, however, not even an issue in these calculations. That requires a politics of a very different kind.

Aijaz Ahmad is Senior Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.