| Published on 05-10-2007 In National |
| Viewed 1405 times |
| Bandh Violators should be sent to Jail |
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Written by
N.R.Mohanty |
The Supreme Court was right in its decision to declare the bandh call given by the ruling DMK and its allies illegal. But the apex court was wrong in suggestingthat it had the right to recommend the removal of theTamil Nadu government for violating its order.
What the Supreme Court ought to have done was to haul up the leader of the ruling party, M.K Karunanidhi, on contempt charges and send him to jail for daring to defy its express order. The Court should have acted on the principle that the buck stops at the top.
It was imperative that the Supreme Court acted decisively so that the smaller players of Indian politics, like T R Balu, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi and sundry Left leaders, who have been hailing Karunanidhi as the role model, were put in place and some sanity prevailed in our democratic set-up.
When the Supreme Court banned the bandhs in 1998, it acted on behalf of the millions of the people of this country who had no other option but to suffer the political hooliganism silently.
All of us have faced the situations when criminals masquerading as politicians swamp the streets to enforce bandhs. As a student in Berhampur town in Orissa, I was witness to the depredations of the left parties, which had a strong base in the district. Quite often the student and youth wings of these parties would paralyse the entire township to demand the reinstatement of their leaders suspended for adopting unfair means in the examinations.
And what did they want to prove? They wanted to tell the college authorities that the entire town showed
solidarity with the suspended students. But the fact was that an overwhelming majority of students of the college itself wanted the suspended students to be expelled. But they could not say it openly, for that
would have meant inviting the wrath of the muscle men.
Criminalization of the protest methods has not been a prerogative of the left parties alone. Almost all
political parties have taken to it, provided they had enough strength to flex their muscles. Left parties, for example, are incapable of calling a bandh in major cities of Bihar, as they simply don't have the cadre to enforce it. But they do it with aplomb in their strongholds.
The BJP is now making a virtue of the Supreme Court decision on bandh to take on its political rivals, but the fact is that it has not hesitated to paralyse normal life for partisan ends. Didn't we see it resorting to Chakka Jam all over the country a few days ago on the Ram Setu issue, subjecting hundreds of thousands of people to inconvenience, rather torture?
The Congress, which has been largely responsible for the degeneration of the democratic culture in the last three decades, has also contributed in no small measure to this criminalization process. The regional parties are no less guilty. The smaller parties which revolve around individual leaders -- be it Mamata Banerjee, Jayalalitha, Sharad Pawar, Bal Thackaray, Lalu Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan or the like – have found it expedient to mobilize their supporters by calling for bandhs periodically.
But all the parties, big or small, have justified bandhs on democratic premises. The CPM leader Prakash Karat said the other day that the court could not take away their democratic right to protest. Yes, Mr. Karat, a bandh would certainly be a democratic mode of protest, if it were voluntary. But it is rarely so.
Even when an opposition party gives a call for bandh and the state government is determined to prevent it by deployment of security forces, the scope for coercion remains, because there can never be enough security to give protection to all those who need it in every part of the territory. If your vehicle is damaged or the goons enforcing the bandh vandalises your business outlet, then you may spend a lifetime running around for compensation. So people prefer to keep indoors. And the political parties claim that it is all voluntary!
The CPM, in fact, made the democratic logic stand on its head when it called for bandhs in West Bengal where it was the party in power. When the security forces withdrew and let the party cadre dictate on the streets, the complete success of the bandh was a foregone conclusion. But every time the CPM called it a 'democratic victory'. Many ruling parties, DMK being the latest, have emulated the CPM's example all over the country. The DMK's case is indeed the most absurd. After all, it is the ruling party in the state; it is also part of the union government. Then whom was it protesting against?
What is most disconcerting is that even after the Supreme Court's explicit order declaring the bandh call illegal, Karunanidhi & Co. resorted to the subterfuge of a hunger strike while the vandals unleashed themselves over the hapless people.
This must come to an end. People of this country have for long suffered at the hands of the self-centric
politicians. Our institutional mechanism does not allow the people to take them to task, except during the elections. In the intervening period between two elections, the political class has a free run. Even in the elections, the people have very limited choice, as most of these politicians are birds of the same feather. The people of Tamil Nadu had thrown a corrupt Karunanidhi out and brought Jayalalitha in. But they found Jayalalitha equally corrupt and showed her the door. But then again Karunanidhi re-entered the scene as the people were left with the Hobson's choice.
When the political system is so hobbled and the democratic choice before the people is so limited, one
expects the Supreme Court to stand firm to come to the rescue of the people. The court's decision on bandh has brought solace to millions of silent people of this country. The apex court must not be cowed down by the ranting of the political parties. It will win the support of the silent majority of the country if it sends the political bigwigs to jail for criminalising the democratic process. |
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