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Apr

 South India Takes Kejriwal’s Arrest as Usual and Known Style of Modi Govt.

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Today’s Edition

New Delhi, 1 April 2024

N Sathiya Moorthy

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The arrest of Delhi’s AAP chief minister Arvind Kejriwal may have excited governments in the US, Europe and even the UN chief, but in south Indian states, there is only perfunctory reaction by the party’s INDIA bloc allies, particularly Tamil Nadu’s DMK chief minister M K Stalin.

It is not because south Indian voters back the proposition of the BJP centre’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), or are opposed to the AAP and Kejriwal, but only because they are beyond being surprised by events and developments nearer home and elsewhere in the country, especially since Modi-II regime returned to power five years back, in 2019. It is déjà vu for them, one more time, and another and yet another...

 

 

**********Nutshell**********

The recent arrest of Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and other political leaders in southern India has not caused much surprise or shock amongst voters or opposition parties. This is because such arrests have become a common occurrence in the region, particularly during the Modi-II regime.

The BJP has been using central agencies to raid and arrest opposition leaders, often in the context of economic offences. However, this has not necessarily translated into political gains for the party, as loyalty to the leader and party remains strong in southern states.

The arrest of Senthil Balaji, a DMK Minister in Tamil Nadu, for example, did not lead to any significant revelations about the wrongdoings of the incumbent government. Similarly, the infamous IT raid on the residence of former AIADMK Minister C Vijayabaskar at the height of the R K Nagar by-election did not lead to any further action.

The use of central agencies to target opposition leaders has been a common tactic of ruling governments in India, particularly during the reign of non-Congress governments. However, the anti-defection law and the Supreme Court's "Bommai verdict" have made it more difficult for governments to dissolve State Assemblies and impose the President's rule.

The use of central agencies to target opposition leaders does not necessarily lead to convictions or disqualifications, as court proceedings and stays can take a long time. In some cases, such as that of Tamil Nadu's DMK veteran K Ponmudy, a corruption case from previous innings led to his losing his ministerial position and membership of the Legislative Assembly.

Despite legal action, voters have often felt that such action is not good politics. For instance, central agencies chased and harassed D K Shivakumar, a senior Congress leader in neighbouring Karnataka, before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. However, he has since become the Deputy Chief Minister in the Congress Government of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.

In conclusion, the use of central agencies to target opposition leaders has become a common tactic in Indian politics, but it does not necessarily lead to political gains or convictions. Loyalty to the leader and party remains strong in southern states, and legal action by rival governments is often viewed with scepticism by voters.

 

 

Ask any senior journalist or even political party leader – name and symbol, no bar --- in any of these states for the number of their ilk that had been raided or arrested or raided and arrested in the past couple of years, and they would sit down, strain their minds, shake their heads off a couple of times, and give up. Then, they may turn to their mobile phones or switch on their laptops, to Google for names, dates and causes of arrest, not to forget the central agency that was involved – whether it was the ED or the CBI, or if it was the IT, if it was only a raid, no arrest.

That is to say, the anticipation of an arrest like that of Kejriwal, preceded by that of Kavitha, the politician-daughter of former Telangana CM K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) in the same ‘Delhi Excise policy case’, was waiting to happen, even without the Lok Sabha elections. But if anyone thought that it would upset the Opposition parties, both belonging to the INDIA bloc and otherwise, they were wrong. Nor were voters in the South surprised or shocked – for it to have any direct, immediate bearing on their electoral decision.

Still, where such arrests may hurt is in the context of the anti-BJP leaders and their cadres telling the voters how the nation was fast moving away from democracy. These leaders condemned Kejriwal’s arrest squarely but did not show similar enthusiasm towards criticising Kavitha’s detention, for the simple reason KCR as Telangana chief minister was at best playing hide and seek only with the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. To him, anti-BJP parties in his state and elsewhere did not exist. It is pay-back time, and he is at the receiving end. Or, so it seems.

The other one is neighbouring Andhra’s YSR Congress Chief Minister Jaganmohan Reddy, who too was caught in the BJP pincer, owing to pending cases and prospective raids. He supported the Centre inside Parliament all the time, and on most occasions outside, lest it should hurt PM Modi’s image and imagery. Yet, he now finds the BJP teaming up with his political rival, TDP predecessor, N Chandrababu Naidu, who badly needs the BJP Centre’s cover and guarantee, to escape poll-time harassment from the state police, which had arrested him once earlier on corruption charges that they have not proceeded with, still.

Poll management

Unlike in the North, which faced the ‘raid raj’ mostly during Modi’s first term, in the South and the East (read: West Bengal), his second five years in office have proved to be ominous for non-BJP governments, their ministers and politicians. Rarely has there been an occasion as in the North or even the East where following a raid or anticipating a raid, political leaders switch sides.

It may not always be the case in the years and decades to come, but in states like Tamil Nadu, loyalty to the leader, party, flag and symbol is strong – even if the leader concerned may have moved from one regional party to another in the interim. Say, for instance, in Tamil Nadu, DMK Minister Senthil Balaji was arrested months ago after an ED raid about his days as minister in the rival AIADMK government of late chief minister Jayalalithaa in 2014.

Expectations were that he would be quizzed also on the wrong-doings of the incumbent government of CM Stalin. Senthil Balaji was the minister for the all-important portfolios of Electricity and Energy, with not just twin but multiple possibilities. There is nothing to indicate that the central agencies have been able to extract anything that could be used to embarrass and/or harass Stalin and the ruling DMK.

Before arrest, Senthil Balaji was in charge of the party’s poll management in the western region as a whole, which included his native place Karur and also Coimbatore, the state’s second most industrialised city. As some DMK with a near-similar AIADMK background claim, if and if only Senthil Balaji was out in the open – even if on bail – state BJP president K Annamalai would not have considered contesting the prestigious Coimbatore seat in the 19 April first-phase Lok Sabha polls.

Annamalai is believed to be a reluctant customer even otherwise, having denied media persons’ suggestions in the matter for weeks and months, before ‘yielding to the high command’s pressure’. If media / social media reports are to be believed,

Senthil Balaji’s team is already out in Coimbatore, to ‘ensure’ the victory of DMK candidate, Gnapathy Rajkumar. However, the presence of AIADMK’s G Ramachandran has made it a three-cornered contest with actor-politician Seeman’s NTK candidate and 33 independents, making up the long tail.

Senthil Balaji is not alone. Before and after him, other DMK ministers in the state have been raided by one or the other central agencies in charge of economic offences in the past three years of DMK rule. Predecessor AIADMK ministers too were not spared even if the party was an election ally of the BJP at the centre, but none of them was touched, then or since.

Remember, the infamous incident in which the IT sleuths recovered a long list of funds received from state ministers from the residence of one of them, C Vijayabaskar, at the height of the R K Nagar by-election, post-Jaya...The Election Commission found it an adequate reason for countermanding the polling, but the IT has been in no hurry to follow up on the raid. However, now after the two parties parted company with the AIADMK shattering all hopes of a last-minute patch-up for the current elections, the ubiquitous ED too has raided Vijayabaskar in the third week of March.  

This apart, Tamil Nadu under BJP’s prospective AIADMK poll ally became only the second state after Delhi, when central agencies raided the State Secretariat, that to the offices of the Chief Secretary P Rammohana Rao, on charges of corruption. The case, if any, is yet to be prosecuted, even though he retired from service after completing his term years ago.

Enforcers’ enforcer

Having been ruled mostly by non-Congress governments in the last quarter of the previous century and by its national replacement in the last decade at a stretch, voters in the South are not unaccustomed to the ways and waywardness of those ruling the Centre and their eagerness to get the other out of the way, state after state, if it could be helped. President’s rule under Article 356 used to be the SOP, where defections did not work.

You now have the anti-defection law, where one does not know the outcome from the Supreme Court. There is also the ‘S R Bommai case (1994) from Karnataka, where the Supreme Court made dissolution of State Assemblies and imposition of President’s rule suo motu justiciable – that is, the Apex Court would automatically review every imposition of the President’s rule, keeping the dissolved Assembly in ‘suspended animation’.

Intervening central governments of the Congress, BJP and others, in the previous century were forced to ‘behave’. They did not intend to amend the Constitution to make the ‘Bommai verdict’ the acknowledged norm. None of them had the moral courage, even if they had the parliamentary and constitutional strengths, to negate the spirit and content of the verdict. But a way needed to be found – and central agencies that had played a smaller, facilitating role in the decades when the Congress was in power, and now ‘enforcers’, rather, enforcers par excellence.

From the politician’s side, in an era and generation far removed from the practices and even thoughts of the freedom movement, suffering imprisonment for a cause is not in anyone’s mind. Succumbing to the enforcers’ enforcer, for them, is the easy way out. The list, if you want to jot down the names and instances, is endless. Only some of them have shown up in the SBI records of the ‘poll bonds scam’. Others remain, and your neighbour(s) may be among them.

Disqualification or not?

Arrests and convictions by them do not matter in elections as long as a superior court has stayed them. Trouble starts only when the Supreme Court finally upholds the lower courts’ conviction or reverses their verdict to hand down a conviction and suitable sentence that may cause the ‘disqualification’ of the person concerned from contesting future elections or holding elected office.

In Tamil Nadu, again, in recent weeks, DMK veteran K Ponmudy lost his ministerial position first and also his membership of the Legislative Assembly after the Madras High Court suo motu reopened a corruption case from previous innings, settled by the lower court, and found him guilty. The Assembly Secretariat promptly declared his Thirukovilur seat vacant, prompting the EC to declare a by-election, along with the LS polls, on 19 April.

In between, the EC had stayed his sentencing and conviction, but the EC, possibly because of the confusion caused by the unexplained resignation of one EC and the hurried induction of two others, forgot to update the seven-phase poll schedule that the three ECs announced at a news conference. It then required the EC to issue a correction and declare that the Thirukovilur seat was not vacant as the State Assembly had already restored the seat to Ponmudy.

Does the voter care?

Before the Supreme Court reviewed its 2001 position recently in another case, the law remained that any stay of the sentence in a criminal case does not automatically confer a stay of ‘conviction’ that caused the sentencing in the first place. That SC pronounced that distinction in the case of incumbent Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, and declared that her election to the State Assembly, and the consequent appointment as Chief Minister was ab initio void.

Jayalalithaa had to quit / exit as Chief Minister until the SC held that she was not guilty in the ‘TANSI land deal case’ (through a skewed argument of ‘plea-bargaining’ that was not a part of the nation’s criminal law, before or after). She returned to power after winning back her Andipatti seat, where a party handyman had won when elections were previously held for her ‘vacant seat’.

But did the voter care? Before the Supreme Court had thrown her out, the Tamil Nadu voter had returned to Jaya with huge margins, not from one but four Assembly constituencies – as if to prove her argument of ‘political victimisation’ by the previous DMK Government of Chief Minister Karunanidhi, pending her Supreme Court appeal against the High Court upholding her conviction and sentencing by the trial court.

Tamil Nadu and Jaya were/are not the only instances where the voters felt and ruled that the legal action by rival governments was not good politics. Remember, how before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, central agencies were chasing and harassing D K Shivakumar, a senior Congress leader in neighbouring Karnataka. He was arrested but the question of conviction and sentence has not arisen because those very agencies have not followed up on his court cases, once he was out on bail. Today, with the approval of his voters, Shivakumar is the Deputy Chief Minister in the Congress Government of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.

Of all the present-day Opposition Chief Ministers, Kerala’s Marxist CM, Pinarayi Vijayan comes next only to Delhi’s Kejriwal. Central agencies have tried their best to brand him as a ‘gold smuggler’ following the arrest of a shady woman, whose trail, the agencies claimed, led up to the CM’s Secretary. Again, no trial, no conviction, and no sentencing, at least as yet, but they have not been able to link it legally to the CM. Hence, Pinarayi Vijayan has been spared, at least thus far.

Long ago, Bihar’s Lalu Yadav showed the world how his RJD was a ‘dynastic party’ after all by making his ‘non-political’ wife Rabri Devi chief minister, and causing the entry of his son Tejashwi Yadav into party politics and leadership, going all the way up to being the state’s Deputy Chief Minister on more than one occasion. At BJP’s topmost slot, yes, leaders like Vajpayee and Modi (both without families to call their own, to begin with) and of course, Advani did not entertain direct political roles for family members though in the case of the two older leaders, their families were known to influence political and government decisions.

Does it mean Kejriwal has another inning as Chief Minister, whatever the future of the case in which he has now been arrested, and those that may follow in the coming days and weeks? Thankfully for him, the Supreme Court has since pounced on the ED (and by extension other arms of governments, both at the Centre and in the States) to slap one case after another on a detained person, if only to deny him freedom after a court had granted him bail, or was likely to do so, based on the facts and circumstances of the case.

Even without it, once Kejriwal is out on bail, he may be able to resume work as Delhi Chief Minister, as already, the Delhi High Court has thrown out a petition seeking his removal owing to his arrest, asking the petitioner to cite the provision in law under which such an order could be passed. That is saying a lot – and a lot more, in the times we live in!

PS: In all ED and IT raids especially, the officers in the states, especially those ruled by non-BJP parties, are accompanied by a posse of CISF personnel, attached to the Union Home Ministry, for their security. This has the potential to set them off against the state police, whose domain it is and whose responsibility it otherwise is, to protect and secure officers of both the Centre and state governments, while on duty. This has the potential for trouble...

In TN again, incidentally, you have the unique case of the state police arresting an ED officer for demanding and obtaining Rs 20 crores in bribes, and his department going all out to secure his freedom, which they have been denying even for chief ministers and ministers...Something funny, if not rotten, did you say? (Words 2500)

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 (The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator)

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