Congress a bunch of snakes, vendetta in its DNA
Politics and vendetta have gone hand-in-hand since times immemorial, across the globe. Rulers through the centuries have used it as a potent tool to keep a check on rivals, including siblings, nip any challenges in the bud and execute the challengers if needed.
In the Indian context, the British rulers followed the policy of vendetta against freedom fighters and revolutionaries and even murdered them in cold blood on the slightest pretext. With India gaining freedom in 1947 and becoming a democratic republic, rules of governance came into effect and the politics of vendetta took a back seat.
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru followed the constitutional mandate and never used state machinery, at least in an open and obvious manner, to suppress political opponents. Despite his differences on a number of issues with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, he carried both authority and respect, which he had earned during India’s freedom struggle. That was also an era when the Congress was still basking in the glory of its contribution to India’s Independence and had virtually no opposition.
However, the tide started to gradually turn with the ascendance of Pandit Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, as India’s prime minister. Her leadership was not only being challenged internally, she was also being increasingly threatened by the rise of opposition from both the Left and Right.
Thus started the Congress culture of political vendetta that got ingrained in the party’s DNA and has continued from the days of the Emergency in 1975 to when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government targeted the then Gujarat chief minister and now prime minister, Narendra Modi, over the infamous Ishrat Jahan encounter case.
Indira’s rising insecurity and her dictatorial style of leadership earned her several political opponents and she resorted to the use of intelligence agencies to muzzle dissent and the voice of opposition. This eventually led to the darkest chapter yet in independent India when Emergency was imposed in the country in 1975 and adversaries of all hues were mercilessly beaten up and simply thrown in prison. Media houses, barring a few, "crawled when they were asked to bend".
The dictatorial streak and the resultant insecurity that invariably comes when you run a political party as a personal fiefdom with the help of a small coterie of loyalists has only grown manifold in the Gandhi family over the decades. Fast forward from the Emergency to the Congress-led UPA government’s rule from 2004 to 2014 and those ten years are replete with instances where political vendetta and state machinery have been blatantly used to force opponents to toe the government’s line.
While the then prime minister Manmohan Singh was the face of the UPA government, it is no secret that the entire government machinery was managed and manoeuvred by Congress president Sonia Gandhi. It was in those ten years that large-scale scandals, corruption and cases of "fixing" political opponents came to the fore, when intelligence agencies were used to either cover the tracks in corruption cases or deployed for snooping, phone-tapping or unleashed to frame false cases as in the Ishrat case.
In fact, the brazen misuse of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which resulted in the probe into the alleged irregularities in the allocation of coalfield licences being compromised, had forced the Supreme Court to denounce the elite investigation agency as a "caged parrot" and "its master's voice".
In the Ishrat case, the then home minister of Gujarat and now BJP president, Amit Shah, was hounded by the Central government and its agencies in an attempt to frame them on charges of false encounter. Ishrat and three of her associates were gunned down by Gujarat Police in an encounter in 2004 as they were alleged to be part of module to assassinate Narendra Modi.
The UPA government used the CBI to file false cases against Shah to make him an co-accused in the Ishrat encounter. The target was to make the Modi government in Gujarat vulnerable, in order to destabilise it. In fact, such was the vendetta that the UPA government ensured Shah was not allowed to enter Gujarat.
A CBI court exonerated Shah of all charges in May, 2014 after it failed to find evidence against the BJP’s key strategist during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. However, that was not the end of the case. In a series of shocking revelations since last month, former bureaucrats of the Union home ministry have gone on record and alleged that the then home minister P Chidambaram rewrote an affidavit for the court that dropped all references to Ishrat’s Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) links.
While former Union home secretary GK Pillai has alleged that the affidavit was changed at the political level and P Chidambaram "bypassed him”, RVS Mani, former undersecretary (internal security) at the Union home ministry, has claimed that he was tortured by intelligence officials and forced to sign the second affidavit, which said that Ishrat was innocent.
The case is just one example of the elaborate conspiracy that was hatched by the Congress to prove that Ishrat was innocent and shot in cold blood on the orders of the Gujarat government in an attempt to implicate Amit Shah.
In a damning verdict in 2014, the court also discharged Shah from the alleged fake encounter killing case of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and the judge noted, “I found substance in the main contention of the defence that the accused is apparently shown to be involved in this case by CBI for political reasons.”
Political vendetta against rivals is just one part of the Congress tradition. The Congress has also used this tool at will to keep erring coalition partners in check and wielded the threat of a CBI investigation or reopening of old cases to force allies to toe the party’s line and myopic political interests. Both key Uttar Pradesh politicians – Bahujan Samaj Party's Mayawati and Samajwadi Party's Mulayam Singh Yadav – have often accused the Congress of misusing the CBI against them to suit its political agenda.
It is no secret that despite vehemently opposing the Congress on most issues, both Mulayam and Mayawati had supported the Congress in Parliament on key issues like the nuclear deal, Food Security Bill or presidential elections. In fact, it is rumoured that the CBI closed the disproportionate case against Mulayam and his family in lieu of his party’s support to the Congress on the Food Security Bill in 2013.
Similarly, another close ally of the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal's, Lalu Prasad Yadav, has been rewarded in the past for his support to the Congress. In the case against Lalu, the CBI did not challenge the order after the former Bihar chief minister was acquitted by a court.
Over the years, vendetta politics of the Congress at the Centre has also seeped to its state units. The Congress government in Karnataka, for example, has moved the Supreme Court against acquittal of Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa in a disproportionate assets case.
This case again smacks of political witch-hunting since the Congress government in Karnataka doesn't have legal locus standi against an elected chief minister of another state for an alleged crime that did not happen in Karnataka.
The Congress' appeal seems to be a feeble attempt to mar Jayalalithaa’s chances of another electoral win in the Tamil Nadu assembly polls that are due in May this year. Jayalalithaa has been ideologically opposed to the Congress and is considered close to the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre while the Congress has struck electoral alliance with her opponent, the DMK.
It is evident that during its 60 years in power, the Congress has evolved an elaborate mechanism to leverage the government’s intelligence machinery and attack political opponents and reluctant allies at will. They have been threatened, chased, tortured, cajoled and even awarded, depending on the task at hand.
In a vibrant democratic set up like ours, there is no place for such hate and vendetta politics, especially when fate of the political parties has to be decided by masses across the country. As the Congress would have realised after its big drubbing in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, these short cut methods to get power by hook or crook are not going to work anymore. Or has the Congress realised?