A year of hope and change

There are reasons to be optimistic about civil liberties amid the Covid crisis

It is hard not to feel a sense of optimism and change about what is going on around us. I am not being facetious.

For some of us, this has been one of the worst periods in history. It has been said, by people as diverse as Arun Shourie, H D Deve Gowda and Sitaram Yechury, that the authoritarian state today is worse than it was during the Emergency. In many ways, this is true. The powers of the state which qualify our fundamental rights are being used to full effect by the Union government and also by many states.

Article 19’s freedoms have more or less ended fully. We have no right to free speech because the criminalisation of it through either sedition, contempt or defamation has meant it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak freely. This is especially so about speaking freely to power as recent events show.

The right to peaceful assembly under Article 19 never really existed. Readers may have noticed that in the West there are regular peaceful demonstrations of small size outside offices, shops and establishments with individuals holding up placards and chanting slogans. This is the freedom Article 19 gave us but has been taken away through legislation and regulation. We have the right to apply to the police station to gather and protest and the police has the right to approve, deny or not respond.

The right to form associations and unions has been hampered by the government’s overregulation of such spaces as the non-profit sector, where the most ridiculous laws have prevented the free practice of this right.

Similarly, the right to move freely and reside anywhere across India, also in Article 19(1) (d) and (c) is not really available for a variety of reasons. The right to practice any occupation, trade or profession was ended by the Supreme Court when it held that the right of the cow in Gujarat, even the unproductive one, was more important than that of the butcher.

The State has steadily cut away the freedoms through the years, and short of being struck down from the Constitution, they have more or less ceased to exist.

But they have not been struck down. India is quite unique as an authoritarian space where the government pretends it is following both the Constitution and its values. This is where, given the times we are going through, I find my sense of optimism.

The Centre’s loose and reckless use of laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on protestors, its deliberate looking away from the provocation of violence by ruling party members, and the judiciary’s inability to push back against this must necessarily come to a head. It cannot continue in this fashion for long and I am not being some sort of Pollyanna.

There is pressure on India to behave on rights issues from the United States and the European Union, which have both put India on notice. The US through its report on religious freedom and the members of the European Parliament through their motion, still to be voted on and delayed because of Covid, on the citizenship laws.

This will likely escalate in 2021 if the US voter rejects a second term for Donald Trump. The run-ins that individuals like Foreign Minister S Jaishankar have had with the Democrats on the rights in India are not a good sign for the Indian government. This year will see a more significant result than other years not because the US side has some strong views, but that India under this government has been pushing the envelope on rights to a point when it has raised hackles.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

 

The most important reason why things will change to my mind is that a focus will forcibly return on the important things. The economy and health care. If we ignore a tweak made in one of the quarters, India’s gross domestic product growth has been declining sequentially since January 2018. That’s nine consecutive quarters of sequential decline so far, punctuated now with a recession. This is coming with a set of nasty indicators on employment as shown by Mahesh Vyas on these pages (and was finally validated by the government’s ultimate release of the findings of the Periodic Labour Force Survey last year).

Indicators for the middle class, for consumption and employment are at their weakest in a long time and declining. This is not the sort of environment in which the government can push or even continue with more authoritarianism of the sort we have seen since 2015.

The hard territorial nationalism has melted at the border and the problem festers. How long can the government pretend it doesn’t exist and carry on as usual? Not long.

I could, of course, be wrong and the conditions we find ourselves in might result in more nastiness precisely for the reason that things are bad and distractions are needed. However, we are still operating in a democratic space where there is the opportunity to express dissent through voting. And we still have access to the judiciary even though it has disappointed many of us in its protection of freedoms. We still have a State that pretends that it follows the Constitution. Some space exists.

It is obvious the government has no idea of how to handle the Covid pandemic. Its draconian lockdown has scattered labour and with the shutdown of the railways (only some 250 or so out of the regular 16,000 daily trains are running) it is not easy for them to return. Normalcy is not returning soon, delaying the economic recovery. India’s case rise shows the cleanest representation of an exponential curve of any nation. It has not been in decline week on week since March. It’s possible India will lead the world in cases in a few weeks’ time.

Things are coming to a head in India in many ways and on several fronts. And when that happens, it often  results in change.