In New India, Can the Prime Minister Never Be Criticised?

With FIRs being registered against those who put up a poster critical of Narendra Modi, it appears the citizen does not have the fundamental right to express an unfavourable opinion of the government and the prime minister.

Some seventeen or so first information reports (FIRs) have been lodged by the Delhi Police against some jobless youths and daily wagers for putting up posters in Kalyanpuri in east Delhi. The poster asked the question of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as to why he had chosen to export vaccines needed by our own young people.

By no stretch of the public imagination may that text be construed as personally scurrilous or defamatory. The question explicitly pertains to a matter of administrative policy.

The ordinary citizen, especially now under an unprecedented national trauma, may be excused for wondering whether the government of the day must remain above public lament, however apocalyptic in lives lost for lack of oxygen.

If it is the case that, inter-alia, the government has come to mean the prime minister, it is for the reason that he is perceived to be in charge of everything, including the certification of the vaccine-taken hospital paper; that he never holds a press briefing while his cabinet remains a shadow-without-substance makes it all the more inevitable that common perceptions circulate as the presiding fact of India’s current executive culture.

This was not always so. A fact tellingly expressed in a recent editorial of the Saamana, organ of the Shiv Sena, the ruling BJP’s old and staunch ally at one time, who have consistently prided themselves for having taken a frontal part in the demolition of the erstwhile Babri mosque.null

That editorial states that the country is running on “systems” created by Jawaharlal Nehru; and then goes on to name pretty much all former prime ministers from the Congress Party.

However cheeky the motivation of the text may have been, the comment remains historically pregnant, and it will be well for us to understand fully what things may have been involved in the “systems” the Sena organ speaks of.

For now, one aspect may be foregrounded: a willingness, however painful, to listen to opinion contrary to the official one, and to resist the tempatation to turn the prime minsiter’s post into a royalty beyond reproach, nowhere more piquantly expressed than in an anonymous article that appeared in the Modern Review of Calcutta in 1937, titled “We Want No Caesars.” That article, it turned out, was written by Nehru berating his own dictatorial tendencies.

We also recall that Nehru used often to call in the legendary cartoonist, Shankar, and admonish him “never to spare me”.

Come 2012, and posters acidly critical of the then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, were put up, as the BJP went to town on the so-called 2G scam (it was to transpire that the CBI ‘failed miserably‘ in proving the charges and acquittals followed dime a dozen).

Manmohan Singh was featured on a Time magazine cover as “The Underachiever”.

(It is germane to recall that, notwithstanding the critique of neo-liberal economics that we socialists voiced as the then United People’s Alliance under his leadership chose to embrace, following the Washington Consensus of 1990, between 2004 when the UPA came to power and 2014 when it lost power, the Indian economy grew nearly fourfold in absolute dollars numbers. Underachievement?)

It would be interesting to know how that growth of the GDP in absolute dollar numbers has grown from 2014 to date. All we have heard for the last seven years is how India is getting to be a $5 trillion economy—travelling in rhetoric but hardly arriving anywhere near.

Much as the Congress Party protested against that anti-prime minister campaign, one does not recall that any punitive executive actions were initiated, or FIRs lodged.