Institutions of democracy in India had never been under attack as they were now, the well-known novelist and writer Nayantara Sahgal said. Speaking at a conclave organised by a group of retired civil servants in New Delhi recently, she said the groundwork of indoctrination being attempted since the present dispensation assumed power at the Centre had achieved some success and artists and writers like her were feeling the heat.
Comparing BJP president Amit Shah’s boast that his party would rule the Centre for the next 50 years to Hitler’s claim that the Third Reich would rule for 1,000 years, she said, tongue-in-cheek, that Shah was being modest.
Imagining a conversation between a historian and a contemporary rewriter of history, she said a historian was likely to ask the present-day rewriter of history how the latter would project the Rajput king Maharana Pratap as a victor in the 1576 Battle of Haldigatti against Mughal emperor Akbar’s forces. The latter, she said, however, was likely to tell the former thus: “Because we say so.”
Historical evidence shows that Maharana Pratap fled the battlefield with more casualties on his side and later continued his guerilla warfare against the Mughals. Thus the revisionist claim that he prevailed in the war—because the Mughal army failed to capture him or pursue his army after he fled—is disputed.
Expressing her view that the political situation today, unlike the period of Emergency and after, was not clearly defined, Nayantara Sahgal expressed the hope that institutions of democracy would be robust enough to withstand the current challenges.
Harish Khare, former editor-in-chief of The Tribune , traced the moral demise of newspapers to the moves to bring editors down from a high pedestal. The practice of self-censorship within the newspapers can, in turn, be traced to the era of national security in the 1990s, when institutions vied with one another to defend “national security” and to stifle dissent in its guise, he said. The great undoing of the present regime, Khare said, was its mediocrity and its redeeming feature was its “collective incompetence”. “The bully succeeds when he instills fear in the other; therefore, the media should submit itself to most rigorous scrutiny,” Khare said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the first politician to understand the vulnerabilities of the media, he said.
Justice Jasti Chelameswar, former judge of the Supreme Court, said some amount of interface between the executive and the judiciary was unavoidable and, therefore, his dissent in the 2015 National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) judgment endorsing the government’s role in the appointment of judges should be understood in terms of that interface. The majority had quashed the NJAC set up by the Centre to appoint judges as unconstitutional and violative of the independence of the judiciary.
Justice Chelameswar observed that if the Supreme Court had held that a collegium of three or five judges must be involved in recommending the judges for appointment to the High Courts and the Supreme Court, matters equally important like the appointment of judges will also by implication require the Chief Justice of India’s consultation with the collegium. He thus asked whether the Chief Justice can allocate cases among the benches of the Supreme Court irrationally. He underscored the point that more people should raise their voices when things went wrong in order to bring about change.
Justice Chelameswar, who retired on June 22, was one of the four senior Supreme Court judges who held an unprecedented press conference on January 12 questioning the allocation of sensitive cases to preferred benches by the then Chief Justice, Dipak Misra, in his administrative capacity as the master of the roster. The move had led to a controversy over the Chief Justice’s powers.
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