Author: Radha Rajan
Publication: Vigilonline.com
Date: February 4, 2009
"Politics is the ideal of the kshatriya,
and the morality of the kshatriya ought to govern our political actions",
wrote Aurobindo in 'The morality of Boycott', the last article in his masterly
and unparalleled exposition on Passive Resistance in April 1907. The BJP leadership
would do well to sit up and pay heed to these words. The Chief Election Commissioner,
by asking the President to remove Navin Chawla as Election Commissioner has
stuck his neck out for the health of this country's democracy; and every one
of those legal and constitutional experts and the usual mandarins in the media
castigating the CEC for making this recommendation, are without exception,
those with highly remunerative careers drawing sustenance from the politics
of minority-ism. People who care about the country and its high democratic
institutions should not permit the CEC's courage in putting a spanner in Congress
and Chawla's works to become futile and fruitless. This is the time to stand
up and break the polite silence over the growing trend to defile and corrupt
high institutions where an undeserving candidate's loyalty to this family
and the individual tilts the balance at the time of appointment.
"Those who don't appoint the Election
Commissioner can't remove him", said Kapil Sibal and a truer word hath
not been said. There is no UPA, much less a Congress; there is only Sonia
Gandhi. She hand-picked the Prime Minister, the NSA, the incumbents to two
of the country's most sensitive constitutional posts including the Rashtrapati
Bhavan and the two Election Commissioners who have triggered the crisis by
planting a constitutional IED inside Nirvachan Sadan. Each and every one of
them personally, or someone in the family is a Sonia Gandhi (family) loyalist/close
friend. If anyone can remove Navin Chawla, only Sonia Gandhi can.
Constitutional experts agree that the last
call on the issue can be taken only by the President of India. Not that the
President of India can act independently; he/she can ask the CEC to remove
an Election Commissioner only if the Cabinet so advises the President. This
brings us back to the core theme of this column - when an extra-constitutional
authority appoints undeserving candidates to high constitutional positions
for reasons other than merit, then no person so appointed and who owes his/her
ascent to Sonia Gandhi is going to make any move to remove another Sonia Gandhi
loyalist. That is the truth about the state of this country's democracy. But
will she? Sonia Gandhi, a practicing Christian, breezed into Tirupathi, bypassing
the established, mandatory custom of signing the register by non-Hindus who
desire to seek darshan of the Bhagwan. If the lady can offer short shrift
to the presiding deity of Tirupathi, she can dare anything.
If we cut out the verbiage casting aspersions
on Gopalswamy Iyengar's character and professional integrity and ignore the
hot air ranting of our experts and mandarins, the core submissions of the
vendors of politics of minority-ism, including the Law Minister HL Bharadwaj
are -
1. The 'C' in the CEC is only ornamental and not substantive
2. The CEC cannot recommend, suo motu or otherwise, the removal of any other
EC
3. Navin Chawla will succeed Gopalswamy Iyengar as CEC
Fali Nariman, the jurist who our vendors love
to quote on just such an occasion, on the other hand, makes the customary
genuflection to his political ideology but nevertheless makes the following
core submissions -
1. The issue falls in a constitutional "grey area" because the constitution
is not clear about whether the CEC has suo motu powers to recommend the removal
of an Election Commissioner
2. But to his mind (which is not relevant at all) the CEC has no suo motu
power
3. The Supreme Court had left the issue wide open two years ago when the issue
first came up before it
4. Navin Chawla has no 'right' to automatically ascend to post of CEC. That
the senior-most person has been promoted to the post is only government practice
and not a matter of law or Constitution
Had Fali Nariman summoned the courage and
taken his argument further in national interest, he would have said that the
Chief Justice of India too ascends to his post, no matter how undeserving
he or she may be, only because he happens to be the senior-most in the assembly
line. The ascent has nothing to do with merit and his appointment is more
a matter of practice than a point of law or Constitution. Noted political
commentator BS Raghavan (retd.) senior bureaucrat from the Union Home Ministry
has made startling revelations about Navin Chawla's extremely dubious antecedents.
Excerpts from Shri Raghavan's damning disclosure about Navin Chawla's disreputable
past deserve to be quoted at length -
"I can boldly assert that I am the only
living former civil servant who, as a Member-Secretary of the high power Committee
to advise follow-up action on the report of the Emergency Excesses Inquiry
Commission chaired by the former Supreme Court Chief Justice, J.C.Shah, had
dealt with every aspect of the Commission's indictment of Mr. Navin Chawla,
who is currently in the news for the wrong reasons.
As part of our mandate, even though Justice
Shah himself was an eminent jurist with thoroughness as his forte, in order
to make assurance doubly sure, we went into his entire report with great objectivity
and an open mind to convince ourselves that his findings were duly substantiated
by oral and documentary evidence.
At the time of the Emergency of 1975-77, Mr.
Navin Chawla was Private Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Kishan
Chand (who later committed suicide unable to bear the 'humiliation' following
the adverse finding about him in the Shah Commission's report). According
to Justice Shah, Mr. Chawla, along with his cohorts in the police at the time,
"exercised enormous powers during the emergency because they had easy
access to the then Prime Minister's house. Their approach to the problems
of the period relating to the citizens was authoritarian and callous. They
grossly misused their position and abused their powers in cynical disregard
of the welfare of the citizens, and in the process rendered themselves unfit
to hold any public office which demands an attitude of fair play and consideration
for others. In their relish for power, they completely subverted the normal
channels of command and administrative procedures.'' Shocking material!
Mr. Chawla was also found to have exercised
'extra statutory control in jail matters', including 'the treatment of detenues'.
Not confining himself to dictating to his boss as to the persons to be arrested,
he also prescribed how they were to be treated in prison. For instance, he
was for constructing special cells with asbestos roofs to "bake"
certain prisoners. Kishan Chand pathetically admitted to Justice Shah that
he was not a free agent and Mr. Chawla used to receive instructions directly
from Sanjay Gandhi and he (Kishan Chand) came into the picture only to the
extent that he was required to fulfill some technical formalities.
The L. P. Singh Committee had no doubt that
the shocking material contained in the Shah Commission's report indeed made
Mr. Chawla unfit to hold any public office and that he deserved to be summarily
dismissed from service without any further inquiry or proceedings, invoking
the special powers under provisos (b) and (c) of Article 311 of the Constitution.
This precisely was the fate Mr. Chawla would have met with but for the fall
of the Janata Government and return of Indira Gandhi to power resulting in
the restoration to coveted posts with a vengeance of all those indicted by
Justice Shah.
Appointing a person with such a background
to the Election Commission which is the fountainhead of all other institutions
of democracy was itself a brazen defiance of norms of accountability and decencies
of public life. This is quite apart from the allegations of bounties received
from the Congress Government in Rajasthan and a number of Congress MPs.by
the Jaipur-based Lala Chaman Lal Education Trust established by Mr. Chawla
and his wife, and the unsavoury speculation engendered by the Government of
Italy conferring on him the Mazzini award in March 2005 'in recognition of
his efforts to forge a new relationship with Italy and strengthening existing
bonds'". (End quote)
Now the last is significant for two reasons.
The first which tickles my curiosity - how did the UPA government which quakes
in fear of Savarkar and his legacy permit their minion to receive the Government
of Italy award given in the name of Mazzini, Savarkar's hero? And second,
"his efforts to forge a new relationship with Italy" is euphemism
for being a committed Sonia Gandhi loyalist and family doormat. This penchant
by US and Europe to give awards to anti-Hindu activists is becoming more brazen
by the day. This penchant includes Magsaysay awards, sundry Peace Prizes including
the Nobel Peace Prize, Human rights awards, and now more recently, the American
Library of Congress Kluge Prize for Arun Shourie's 'eminent' historian, Romilla
Thapar. Now read this together with the Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan
berating the Orissa government for inaction in the fake rape of the nun case
because he was "receiving innumerable calls from abroad", and we
have impermissible interference by and intrusive interest of foreign governments
in India's internal matters.
A man who has been indicted for gross human
rights abuse during Emergency, a man who was profiteering from an NGO run
by his wife, a man who 'persuaded' MPs to part with their MPLAD funds to oil
his wife's NGO, and a man who has been publicly held unfit to hold any public
office is elevated by Sonia Gandhi as Election Commisioner with a view to
delivering him at the end of the assembly line as CEC at the time of the next
Lok Sabha elections. This and only this is the issue.
The BJP cannot be making polite constitutional
noises on Advani's blog nor send nincompoops into TV newsrooms on the issue.
Politics is the work of kshatriyas, as Aurobindo pointed out. We need warriors
in the BJP who will un-sheath their daggers to fight this no-holds-barred
war. The ultimate objective of a political party is to win elections and become
the ruling party. If the process is turned into a war, then winning the elections
becomes the objective of the war. Noble souls, living by dharma, including
kshatriyas enter the battlefield to wage war dharmically. But the true kshatriya,
in this case, the BJP must realise that their war strategy is determined by
the enemy. If the enemy enters the battlefield determined to win the war at
any cost, including playing foul and dirty, then the kshatriya has to change
his tactics and fight the enemy effectively to defeat him.
Justice and righteousness are the atmosphere
of political morality; but the justice and righteousness of a fighter, not
of the priest. Aggression is unjust only when unprovoked; violence, unrighteous
when used wantonly for unrighteous ends. It is a barren philosophy which applies
a mechanical rule to all actions, or takes a word and tries to fit all human
life into it.
The sword of the warrior is as necessary to
the fulfillment of justice and righteousness as the holiness of the saint.
Ramdas is not complete without Shivaji. To maintain justice and prevent the
strong from despoiling, and the weak from being oppressed, is the function
for which the kshatriya is created. 'Therefore', says Srikrishna in the Mahabharata,
'God created battle and armour, the sword, the bow and the dagger'.
This is Aurobindo again, in The Morality of
Boycott. There is a growing feeling in the Hindu community that the BJP has
lost the spirit of the kshatriya which defined the party once. The BJP must
get into, not the election mode but the war mode. These elections, which the
UPA, by playing dirty has converted into a war, must be fought by the BJP
as war. Its greatest inspiration at this time can only be the young and angry
Congressman, Aurobindo.
