The Centre : From Fatherly Ombudsman To Partisan Player !

-

 BY R.K.MISRA

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth only makes a nation blind and toothless. So goes an old saying and the unfolding political narrative in the country gives reason to think as much.

Congress backed independent Jignesh Mevani’s  midnight arrest from Gujarat by the Assam police in April and BJP leader Tejinder Pal Singh Bagga’s arrest from Delhi by the Punjab police in May are a case in point.

 A gentleman in distant Assam disturbed by a tweet against Prime Minister Narendra Modi by a gujarati legislator seeks redressal of his hurt from the Assam Police which promptly flies out it’s personnel to haul him up before a court in the north-eastern state to assuage his ruffled feelings.

”The tweet has a propensity to disturb public tranquility, prejudicial to maintenance of harmony among a certain section of people”, says  the complaint. Bailed out after three days of police custody, Mevani is re-arrested for assaulting a woman cop and  sent to another five days custody before being bailed out again. Both Gujarat and Assam are BJP ruled states.

Next month it is the Punjab police’s turn to arrest BJP leader Tejinderpal Singh Bagga from Delhi for ‘ threat’ to Aam Admi Party(AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal who is also the Delhi chief minister. The hurt AAP leader of Mohali on  whose complaint the Punjab cops are spurred into action also complains of conduct  prejudicial to communal harmony. The  effort is however thwarted as the Punjab cops are stopped in Haryana and Bagga is taken back by the Delhi police .The police in Delhi comes under the BJP- ruled Centre and the cops from AAP governed Punjab  must cross  saffron administered Haryana before it can reach its own territory . Mevani points fingers at the PMO for his ordeal and the BJP at Kejriwal for Bagga’s.

In August last year, BJP leader and union minister Narayan Rane, also a former Maharashtra Chief Minister, was arrested for his remark on “slapping” present chief minister Uddhav Thackerey. Leader of the BJP opposition, Devendra Fadnavis,  also a former chief minister was quick to term it a revenge arrest. Ditto, the Maharashtra Vikas Agadi(MVA) when NCP ministers Anil Deshmukh and Nawab Malik found themselves arraigned by central agencies. The latest is the arrest of Satyender Jain, AAP leader and Delhi health minister who was arrested on May 30 by the Enforcement Department(ED) in a five year old case involving  alleged hawala transactions by a Kolkata based company. “Absolutely no truth and driven  by political reasons”, reacted Kejriwal.

 Jain is picked up  a day before the Prime Minister  holds a road show and addresses a rally in Shimla. He is also the AAP election in-charge for Himachal Pradesh burning the candle at both ends ,  after the party’s  three key office-bearers including state president Anup Kesari, general secretary(organization) Satish Thakur and Una district chief Iqbal Singh switched sides to the BJP in April  at a high profile function attended by BJP national president and minister Anurag Thakur. Jain’s incarceration would cripple the AAP election machinery in Himachal where the contest is turning triangular with Congress  and AAP both challenging the ruling BJP.

Is it mere coincidence that in near similar fashion  Gujarat Congress working president Hardik Patel joined the BJP on June 3, after quitting the Congress a month earlier. Both Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh  are BJP ruled and both go to polls later this year. AAP dissolved it’s Himachal executive in April and Gujarat executive  this month. Is it also merely a coincidence that a top Surat businessman-philanthropist who had joined AAP quit earlier this year taking the plea that politics was not his cup of tea, that  the stranglehold of police cases against Hardik is gradually loosening while those against Mevani is tightening, that other AAP leaders have already faced arrest on one count or the other. The list of coincidences is long.

But more than the coincidences it is the changing political  ethos that is a matter of concern. And the perception building up is that politics is now turning blandly partisan with the Centre itself a player  rather than a fatherly ombudsman in a union of states. So there are those that are governed by the Centre’s own and  then there are the Opposition ruled states. The one can do no wrong and the other no right. If the Centre  has its own agencies as witnessed in the arrest of ministers in opposition ruled states  so do the  states as was witnessed in the arrest of a sitting union minister and the BJP leader.

Time was when one chief minister visiting another state was welcomed ,irrespective of party labels. Then came a time of  feigned indifference to such arrivals and departures in each other’s territories to now when name-calling and detention of chief ministers, deputy chief ministers and ministers is seen. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was called a “maha-thug” by the state president of a rival political outfit and the former  retaliated by terming the chief an outsider in his own state.So much for political protocol and niceties governing mutual conduct !

However, in this race of plunging norms and blurring lines, it would do well to remember that the oddity introduced  today, will be the norm of tomorrow akin to a twelfth commandment. What you do unto others, will be done unto you !

(http://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4120/orissa-post/page/9#)

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When The Fear Of Death Died !

-
  BY R.K. MISRA Uss gali meein kuch hua, iss khabar se mar gaye ! Aur phir kuch log, marjane ke darr se marr gaye !! So says an eminent Urdu poet . He speaks of the phantom fallacy of a panic-stricken mentality when the mere news of happenings across the street caused some to die while others perished, felled by just the fear of dying. Cancer kills but the fear of cancer kills faster. Walk into a cancer care clinic and a miasma of despair hangs heavy. Emotions spread taunt on stressed faces, giveaway creases on knitted brows, and an anxious demeanor vainly dodging doomsday prophecies is plastered all over.   Unlike the star reporters of today, the journalism of yore frowned on the faintest attempt at putting self before news. The story spoke and the byline bore the burden. This once, a     sliver of liberty would be in order for I am both the subject and the object of this engagement having faced the diagnosis and fought the disease over the last one year. ...
Read more

Hindu Antecedent Of Muslim Jinnah

-
Image
BY R.K.MISRA Nearly 70 years after his death, Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s portraits continue to adorn places like Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Bombay High Court and Sabarmati Ashram in India. On the other hand, the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry building’s foundation stone states that it was laid by Mahatma Gandhi in 1934. Recently, BJP MP Satish Gautam sought to remove a Jinnah portrait from AMU. It was ironic because, instead of vilifying Jinnah, the Modi Government should have actually decorated the  Qaid-e-Azam , posthumously, with a Bharat Ratna because, it was Jinnah who created a Hindu-majority Bharat from the rarefied, nebulous India, while pushing the Islamists to a corner of the subcontinent and that was why the Deoband School opposed Jinnah! Had India remained undivided, its Muslim population would now have been around 600 million, vis-à-vis the Hindus’ 1,000 million. Would the Hindus have lived peacefully with this l...
Read more

The Indian Medicine 'Mixopathy'

-
    BY R.K. MISRA   Blending ideas and inspiration works wonders. Mixing memory and desire stirs imagination but    coupling Allopathy and Ayurveda can be painfully punishing. In plain terms it is like fusing chalk with cheese. If the country’s medical fraternity has been in ferment at the Narendra Modi- led BJP government’s pre-occupation with ‘mixopathy’, Gujarat went through a tense last week after the health department of the state government called a meeting to discuss ‘practice of Allopathy by those who have studied Ayurveda’. ‘Mixopathy’ is a loosely coined term used to describe the integration of alternative medicine systems, such as Ayurveda, with modern medical science which is also called Allopathy. The term is a combination of the words "mix" and "pathy", which means disease. The turmoil began after the Health Department of the Gujarat government issued a latter on December 27 calling for a meeting of senior officials and representa...
Read more