Reinterpreting rules for sustaining power

In 1725, poet John Byron wrote a satirical work ending with ‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee’ on how celebrated composers George Frideric Handel and Giovanni Bononcini were often compared and mistaken for each other. Perhaps, the same could be said on the current statecraft practised in the United States and India by reinterpreting rules and conventions for sustaining power.

Currently, President Donald Trump, backed by Republican leaders, is hurriedly trying to nominate a conservative candidate to the Supreme Court to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They want to take advantage of the Republican majority Senate, with elections just over 40 days away.

By doing so, current Senate majority Republican leader Mitch McConnell is flouting his own rule which he framed in 2016. Although President Barack Obama had nominated a candidate eight months before the 2016 elections to fill in the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, McConnell had rejected it, saying that the next President should decide the appointment.

Trump’s facetious justification is that unlike in 2016, the President controls the Senate and he can do what he and the Senate feel like doing. This has created bitter polemics. Democrats have threatened to take retaliatory measures if they win the Senate and the White House.

A similar drama was played out in India in the Rajya Sabha. On September 21, Deputy Chairman Harivansh refused to order a division of votes while discussing the highly contentious agriculture Bills. The Opposition complained that these Bills, which would affect crores of farmers, were not discussed at public forums and were hurriedly passed by a brute majority in the Lok Sabha.

The Opposition members requested the Bill to be referred to the Select Committee. The Deputy Chairman refused and allegedly hurried up with the vote. Opposition members then wanted a division, which he ignored. A bedlam resulted. The government was quick to hold eight Opposition members guilty of causing disorder.

A leading national daily contradicted this in its editorial: “To begin with, the disorder was triggered by the Chair’s refusal to order a division” when rules are clear that a counting of votes has to be ordered even if one member demands it.

A popular tabloid, which is an add-on to the largest circulated Indian daily, which is usually pro-government, was more specific. It said that when the ruling party’s floor management suddenly realised that the BJD of Naveen Patnaik “had a change of heart” and “when numbers looked tricky for the NDA, Harivansh, the deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha, did the job for the treasury benches.”

The other parallel between America and India is over their policy towards crime and law and order management. Both governments have no patience for mass protests: Trump for the Black Lives Matter movement; the NDA for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) agitations. Both feel that organisers of such movements should be held responsible for violence even if they did not start it.

Trump chose, as the Washington Post said, William P Barr as his ‘Roy Cohn’ at the Justice Department as his ‘aggressive protector of his personal interests’. Roy Marcus Cohn is the famous American attorney who had assisted Senator McCarthy’s notorious witch-hunt of suspected Communists in the early 1950s.

On September 17, 2019, Barr asked federal prosecutors to start filing ‘sedition charges’ (waging war against the nation) against nationwide civil protesters under the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in different cities. These protests had originated after the killing of George Floyd and mistreatment of others, ending up with the incident in Kenosha on August 23 when Jacob Blake was shot at four times on the back. Trump visited Kenosha, a white-dominated city (80 per cent) on September 1.

On September 12, he justified the killing of Michael Reinoehi, an Antifa (anti-Fascist coalition) activist, by US Marshals in Washington state. At the same time, he refused to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old right wing militia member who had shot dead two men in Kenosha on August 28.

Barr has given a new interpretation to the US sedition law, shocking long-term employees of the Justice Department. He wanted the federal prosecutors to add ‘seditious conspiracy’ to the charges already filed by them against protesters for assaulting federal agents, damaging government property, arson and failure to obey lawful orders in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and other cities.

In a similar manner, the protests against the CAA had rocked India since December 12, 2019. The countrywide protests were because the amendment had excluded nearly 20 lakh people, both Hindus and Muslims. Protests were also held abroad by people of Indian origin in several cities.

Alleged vigilantes supporting the majority community tried to retaliate against the protesters. On January 20 this year, about 50 masked people entered the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University and assaulted students and teachers. This was meant to terrorise student agitators. The media alleged police complicity and delayed cognisance. As of now, there is no clarity whether any chargesheet has been filed.

Riots erupted over the anti-CAA protests on February 23, 2020, in east Delhi when President Trump was visiting India. Mob violence during the next 72 hours was the most serious in Delhi since 1984. It left 53 dead, most of them from a minority community, while 79 houses were damaged, 327 shops gutted, four mosques burned, and thousands rendered homeless.

On September 16, the Delhi Police filed a 17,000-page chargesheet, including under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, against 15 anti-CAA protesters who were mostly from the minority community. The Police Commissioner’s public explanation to Julio Ribeiro on September 15 indicated that 410 cases were registered on complaints from the minority community. ‘The other community accounted for 190 FIRs.’

Even a constable’s training school teaches the age-old judicial decision in 1929 of the Madras High Court Division Bench (Waller and Cornish JJ) that cross-riot complaints have to be tried together. Why was this not followed in this serious incident to allay the feelings of minorities? Why were the BJP leaders who provoked the riots also not charged?