The electoral battle has truly begun

A Division Bench of the Supreme Court is hearing the bail plea of Manish Sisodia, the imprisoned former Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had arrested Sisodia under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the now-scrapped Delhi excise policy case in March. The ED’s case is that the money illegally collected from beneficiaries of the policy had gone into the coffers of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

The use of Central enforcement agencies and the Delhi Police to keep opponents busy is a tactic which has not been tried out so emphatically by previous rulers.

Last week, the judges asked the ED why it had not arraigned AAP, the alleged main beneficiary, and concentrated only on Sisodia and Vijay Nair, AAP’s head of communications. Incidentally, the ED arrested Sanjay Singh, AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP, the very day that Sisodia’s bail plea was being heard. The ED sought to embroil him in the same PMLA case, thus effectively emasculating the AAP’s top leadership before the next Lok Sabha elections in 2024.

The truth is that not one political party in India can fight elections without money. That is simply not possible. Even the BJP, which gets the bulk of its funding from corporates through electoral bonds, where donors are assured of anonymity, is allegedly not averse to receiving kickbacks from contractors of government works, as the people of Karnataka were told by the Opposition before they voted in the Assembly elections earlier this year.

If the ED is compelled to arraign political parties as the accused, the BJP’s allies in the NDA could also meet a similar fate. For instance, the unified Shiv Sena used to control the Bombay Municipal Corporation for many decades. It was universally known that 10 per cent of any contract given by the corporation went to the corporators in whose jurisdiction the works were commissioned. And the corporators, in turn, passed the bulk of these earnings to the party.

It is because of the imperative of raking in the bulk of the collections that the Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena is busy winning over the serving corporators. Every week, local newspapers print the list of names of such ‘Aaya Rams’ who have crossed over. If the apex court insists that the political parties that stashed the illegal collections must be prosecuted along with those leaders who collected the monies, all parties in power in the states, at least, will be in trouble.

The election fever has set in well ahead of the Lok Sabha polls in 2024. The arrest of Sanjay Singh, an influential figure in Delhi politics, was just one indication of its advent. In Telangana, the BJP is mounting a strong challenge to the entrenched BRS. Since there will be a triangular rivalry between the BRS, the Congress and the BJP, with Owaisi’s Muslim-centric party likely to grab quite a few seats in Hyderabad city, the ruling party has a fight on its hands.

The ED has dragged in Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao’s daughter in the Delhi excise policy case. The use of Central enforcement agencies and the Delhi Police to keep opponents busy is a newly honed tactic which has not been tried out so emphatically by previous rulers.

I had not glanced at the articles published on the news portal NewsClick. It is only after the Delhi Police raided its offices and the homes of the portal’s promoters that I learnt more about its operations. The police claim that the portal has been financed by Neville Roy Singham, an American millionaire of Sri Lankan origin who is said to be financed by China.

The evidence to show that Singham got money from China is not in the public domain. That the money was given to publish stories to denigrate the BJP and PM Narendra Modi in particular has not been clearly spelt out. Since I have not seen any such article, I would not be influenced. The police probably feel that many citizens have been influenced! But does that merit arrests and sealing of the portal’s office?

Presently, NewsClick’s founder and HR head are in the Delhi Police custody. The Editor’s Guild of India has protested loudly and strongly. The stridency of the guild’s protest shows that the media is concerned about the restrictions being imposed on journalists, whose job it is to confront power, lest it descends into an autocracy.

The police action against NewsClick is another salvo fired by the Union Government before voters wend their way to the polling booths. But do voters get easily swayed after reading such articles? Most educated voters must have already made up their minds on whom to vote for. They may even vote differently in the Assembly polls to be held later this year and the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. The bulk of the voting public does not read English newspapers. Very few of those who do may be accessing NewsClick. So, if the Delhi Police want to bring in a Chinese angle to the discussion, it has to be more specific and convincing.

In its anxiety to stem all criticism, the BJP and its undisputed leader should not ignore the downside of utilising state power to silence critics and opponents of the regime. In a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai, where every 10th resident is a decision-maker, there are murmurs of disgust at the unalloyed use of such power. Many of these grumblers are not proponents of one party or the other. But they and their families had voted for the BJP earlier because it had filled them with hope. That sheen is slowly wearing off because people have begun thinking for themselves rather than getting swayed by propaganda.

The BJP has a well-oiled propaganda machine. It functions like clockwork. But voters, too, have seen through all the tall promises and assertions of popularity and dissected them in the light of what they expect for themselves and their families. You cannot fool all the people all the time. That is a truism that all politicians and political parties must keep in mind all the time.