 "Kejriwal’s arrest does not endanger India’s democracy; hyperbolic discourse masks deep pessimism in electoral process")
The brouhaha over Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest, and the apocalyptic narrative that India has descended into an autocracy because a sitting chief minister has been taken into custody by central investigative agencies, is disingenuous. The merits of the case will be decided on the basis of hard evidence. The status of a public figure cannot determine the outcome of a judgement or stall legal proceedings.
It is perhaps natural for the Opposition to defend the Delhi chief minister even though it is the Congress party that had first targeted Kejriwal for ‘liquorgate’ scam. After all, it is election season. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Interestingly, the Opposition’s reaction to Kejriwal’s arrest has been a little muted. That isn’t surprising. Politicians tend to have a better understanding of the pulse of the people.
That certainly can’t be said of our chattering class. What has been strange to observe is the fanatical hyperbole and incendiary rhetoric in sections of media and in writings of liberals and ‘public intellectuals’ who have turned the AAP supremo’s arrest on corruption allegations into a ‘test case’ for Indian democracy.
Two key points are worth noting in the rabble-rousing discourse around Kejriwal’s incarceration. One, the grave allegations of corruption in the liquor policy scam, that have landed almost the entire top rung of AAP leadership in prison and unable to secure bail despite repeated attempts, are being glossed over as inconsequential or touted as an example of Centre’s ‘vindictiveness’.
Two, Kejriwal is being invested with mythical powers. He apparently possesses preternatural political acumen and enjoys phenomenal popularity. Difficult to imagine that AAP was swept away in the last general elections in 2019 with the BJP polling over 50 per cent votes in all seven seats.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThis is where calls for Kejriwal’s preferential treatment is mystifying. Columnist Manu Joseph writes in Livemint that “millions of voters” are “enraged by Kejriwal’s arrest” and that the BJP is “underestimating” the fact that “many people who do not vote for Kejriwal still like and admire him.” Joseph doesn’t mention the source of his data.
Some columnists hold that Kejriwal is not just a politician but an unbeatable “idea” that shakes the BJP to its core and therefore the tyrannical Modi government has focused all energies, flouted all democratic norms and brought down the crushing weight of central agencies on the charismatic Opposition leader to conquer the “final frontier”.
For instance, in a remarkable inversion of logic in describing someone accused of money laundering and charged under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), Shekhar Gupta writes in The Print that “if Kejriwal is today an idea, the ‘idea’ he and his politics grew around was a no-holds-barred fight against corruption. That is the reason the Modi government has now tarred him and his entire party and government with the same brush: corruption.”
This argument resembles AAP’s claim that Kejriwal and his colleagues are all innocent (even as the case awaits judicial verdict) and the AAP supremo is at the receiving end of a witch-hunt due to his ‘rising popularity’. The Enforcement Directorate’s allegations against Kejriwal, which also includes an alleged conspiracy involving arrested BRS leader K Kavitha, are not even worth a mention.
The mainstreaming of a victimhood narrative in public discourse, that seeks to absolve Kejriwal as a moral necessity regardless of the legal merits of ED’s case against him, has gone side by side with an insidious discourse that frames India as an autocracy heading towards “full blown tyranny”.
The discourse is set on an axiomatic position that India is no longer a democracy, and only the degree of its descent into autocracy is in question. This analytical framework aims to shift the terms of the debate and delegitimize the results of the upcoming elections. This is ironically the very definition of undermining the democratic process.
To quote Ashutosh Varshney in Indian Express, “The new developments in India’s polity, including the arrest of Kejriwal, now seriously challenge the future validity of the electoral democracy claim.”
Some have gone a step further and given their rhetoric a freer rein. Writing in the same newspaper, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that “…the arrest of Kejriwal, in the middle of an election, is an unprecedented display of impunity. If this moment does not galvanise resistance in the name of democracy, India’s freedom will be imperiled for a long time to come.”
At a time when the case is sub-judice, the call for ‘resistance’ is designed to erode trust in the judiciary and fan the flames of civil disobedience. Moreover, when an election is just around the corner and a so-called ‘tyrannical government’ can easily be overthrown peacefully through electoral mandate, such statements indicate a deep-seated pessimism that the public at large might not agree with the narrative that Kejriwal’s arrest ‘endangers democracy’.
As Tavleen Singh writes, once again in Indian Express, “For those opposition leaders who routinely mourn the death of Indian democracy, I have bad news. On my recent travels, I talked to a range of ordinary voters and met nobody who believes that democracy is dead.”
Some questions need to be asked about the timing of Kejriwal’s arrest since so much is being made of it. The Delhi chief minister skipped nine summons from ED, the first of which was sent in October last year. It is evident, therefore, that Kejriwal could have participated in the legal proceedings much earlier if he wished to.
So, who is responsible for the timeline of Kejriwal’s arrest? The ED? Which summoned the AAP chief nine times? Or the judiciary which rejected his attempts at preemptive bail and allowed the central agency to take him into custody? Or are the central agencies to be blamed for following legal procedures?
The disapprobation of central investigative agencies, and the pressure being put on the judiciary are subtle attempts at distorting the legal procedure to achieve political objectives. Is it the argument that despite all the irregularities that Kejriwal has been accused of, despite his non-cooperation in the probe, all legal procedures should be suspended to “uphold India’s democracy”? To argue that upholding India’s democracy requires probe agencies to slack off and turn a blind eye to wrongdoings is to undermine the principles of justice and equality before the law.
As the Kejriwal case becomes a lightning rod for India’s democracy, let’s go beyond the rhetoric to look at how the judiciary has been treating the case. On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court turned down Kejriwal’s interim plea seeking immediate release from ED custody and fixed the next hearing on 3 April, extending his stay in prison.
Incidentally, the Delhi High Court had on 21 March refused to grant the Delhi chief minister any protection from ED action against him in the liquor policy case. Kejriwal was arrested later that night. The AAP supremo moved the Delhi High Court again on 23 March, seeking an urgent hearing but his request was again rejected by the court and the case was scheduled for hearing on Wednesday (27 March) after the court reconvened from Holi holiday. It doesn’t seem as if the judiciary shares the view that keeping Kejriwal in jail for his alleged misdeeds will be tantamount to stripping India of its democratic credentials.
The events at the Supreme Court have been curious. Following his arrest, initial reports suggested that Kejriwal will move the Supreme Court for immediate relief. Accordingly, on the morning of 22 March, a day after ED took him into custody, Kejriwal’s legal team led by Congress leader and advocate AM Singhvi sought an urgent hearing from CJI DY Chandrachud.
According to a report in Indian Express, “the CJI told him to approach court number 2 presided by Justice Khanna where a special bench of Justices Khanna, M M Sundresh and Bela M Trivedi was hearing Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader K Kavitha’s petition challenging her arrest in the Delhi excise policy case.”
It seems Justice Khanna had agreed to hear the matter and the special bench was set to take up the petition later in the day when Singhvi, who had been pressing the CJI for an “urgent hearing”, withdrew the petition and said his client would approach the trial court instead. What triggered this sudden change of heart from Kejriwal’s legal team?
It turns out that the special bench that was set up to hear Kejriwal’s plea had earlier turned down a similar request from BRS leader Kavitha, also implicated in the same case and arrested by ED a week earlier. Hindustan Times reported that “while refusing to entertain Kavitha’s plea for freeing her on bail, the special bench said it would not entertain a bail plea directly merely because a petitioner happens to be a political person or can afford to come to the Supreme Court directly. She was asked to go to the trial court first.”
In their hurry to paint Kejriwal’s arrest as an “assault on democracy”, critics seem to have overlooked the problematic aspects of the assumption that the Delhi chief minister is the victim of “political vendetta”. Alongside the fact that Kejriwal’s cabinet colleagues Satyender Jain and Manish Sisodia have been incarcerated since 22 May and 23 February, respectively, in connection with the Delhi Excise policy case, and have been unable to get bail, the charges against the Delhi CM are grave.
The ED has called him the “ key conspirator” in the liquor scam, alleged that hawala operators were used to send money to Goa for AAP’s election campaign and claimed that “these charges were also corroborated by one of the candidates of AAP for Goa elections of 2022 who said he received funds for election expenses ‘ in cash’ from the AAP volunteers in Goa.”
It goes without saying that allegations are not evidence. However, it says much about the rampant victimhood narrative that a leader facing serious charges of financial irregularities is being held up as a mascot of probity in public life.
The Opposition’s stance has been no less hypocritical, if a little muted. The Congress in February last year had released a statement accusing Kejriwal of being implicated in the liquor scam in which, the statement claimed, “at least a 100-crore kickback has been established.” Such is the political compulsion of the day that Ajay Maken has since been sidelined and Rahul Gandhi now claims that Modi is a “scared dictator”.
The outrage over Kejriwal’s arrest among the Opposition ranks is less about the ‘health of Indian democracy’ and more out of an insecurity that Modi has broken an unwritten rule of not targeting the political class for graft when in power and the entire political class has very little leverage over him.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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