NEW DELHI, 8 August 2004 — Politicians make few friends by their behavior. Something in their character, or perhaps their experience, makes them very resistible to common sense. Why did Shibu Soren waste a week in counterproductive drama when an immediate resignation would have checked the collateral damage to Dr. Manmohan Singh and the government?
It is obvious that Shibu Soren thought as a Union Cabinet minister he would never be arrested for a crime he apparently committed in 1975, even if that crime was nothing less than murder. The important question is not what he believed, but why he believed it. A generation that was not born in 1975 has already voted in two general elections. To possess a working memory of the great events that shook India in 1975, you have to be around 50. For most, 1975 is misty history, if it means anything at all. In June 1975, the prime minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, proclaimed an Emergency across the country that suspended democracy, civil rights and fundamental rights like freedom of the press. She did so in order to protect her chair after the Allahabad High Court, acting on a petition by the maverick Raj Narain, overturned her election because of electoral malpractices.
Acting on the advice of confidants like her then Law Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Mrs. Gandhi arrested virtually the entire opposition, and reduced the country to a state of stunned calm. Most Indians defied the Emergency as illegal and dictatorial, but no one seriously denied that during those 19 months, there was order. Not a dog barked without permission from the Congress. According to the official historians of the Emergency, some of the trains ran on time as well. (It is easy to sneer at “some”, but check with travelers of the period. They were still on the train that took Kim from Lahore to Jullundur.) Policemen clicked their heels and stood to attention while they sent up statistics about how many whimpering men they had forcibly sterilized in order to save the nation from a population explosion. It was order, order everywhere.
Shibu Soren, along with 68 others, was accused of leading a tribal mob that killed 10 people in Chirrudih village, most of them Muslims, in 1975. He was already a political figure. He founded the Sonat Santhal Samaj in 1969, when he was 25, and in 1971 became general secretary of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. Politicians without the least blemish on their reputations spent 19 months of the Emergency in jail, but the police had no time to frame a charge against Shibu Soren for the murder of 10 people. The police of Bihar (Jharkhand, of course, did not exist then, except as a demand) clearly had other things to do. The charge sheet against Soren was filed seven years later, in 1982. It took another four years for the judicial magistrate to take cognizance and issue summons.
Soren, involved in the incident at the age of 31, was already 42 by this time. Then came the years of true glory. For 18 years Soren did not answer the summons on a murder charge. He did not bother. No one else did. Between 1980 and 2004 he contested general elections five times, but the police and the legal system could not find him and force him to appear in court. So why on earth should Shibu Soren believe that the Ranchi police would suddenly discover who he was in 2004? Why would he have any respect for a law enforcement regime that has let him get away (with murder?) for 29 years, one year less than half his lifetime? And if a Cabinet minister does not respect the law of the land, why should any other Indian respect the law of the land?
Do remember, we are talking of a murder charge here, not pick-pocketing. Equally to the point: Why should Shibu Soren believe that any political party would want something as injudicious as his trial? Yesterday he was an ally of the BJP, and they did not want to know about anything as unhappy as murder. Today he is an ally of the Congress and the Marxists of all varieties, and they do not have any time to discuss murder. Soren has supped with everyone, and no one thought a murder charge made him untouchable. Let us examine the record. The Congress was in power in Delhi and Bihar in 1975, and Mrs. Indira Gandhi was back in saddle when the summons was issued in 1982. Nothing happened. V.P. Singh came to power in 1989, and along with him came the “Backward” wave in the north that installed Lalu Yadav in Patna. Neither was concerned about legal niceties relating to murder. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who became prime minister in 1991, was not only indifferent to a murder charge, but upped the ante and made Shibu Soren into a formal ally, although that honor did not come without a price: His cronies had to pass on a persuasive bribe to Shibu Soren. But the stakes were high. Soren saved Rao from defeat in a no-confidence motion.
Soren’s official biodata in Parliament records that he went to jail during his “struggle” against “moneylenders” but not that he was formally accused of bribery and survived only because of technical immunity. Nor does it include that he was charged with the murder of his private secretary, Shashinath Jha, apparently because the latter knew too much about the bribery deal. If the murder of ten people is not good enough to put you on trial, why should the killing of one more person bother anyone? Soren’s followers have a point, therefore, when they are puzzled by this sudden zeal for law and order.
There is a story to be told about the criminalization of our politics, but no political party has the credibility to tell it. When asked, Dr. Manmohan Singh, who is scrupulously honest personally, replies meekly that he cannot do anything about it because that would mean the fall of his government. That sounds like a head banana reading the obituary of a banana republic. The problem is not partisan, so the solution cannot be partisan either. If we expect Dr. Manmohan Singh to solve it alone, he cannot, and he will not. He is not going to surrender power in order to calm a sudden fit of morality in the system. Either this disease is uprooted by common effort, or it digs its talons deeper into the polity till a pseudo-politician/genuine-criminal becomes prime minister of India. If the political parties show the will, they will find a hundred ways to end this nonsense. One could suggest they begin with some introspection. It does not require knowledge of rocket science to figure out that Shahabuddin and Suraj Bhan in Bihar are not the paragons of virtue, and if Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan want to do something about the larger problem, all they have to do is deny them tickets. But of course both Lalu and Ram Vilas cannot be certain that if they take a stand on principle some other party will not hand out tickets to them. So here too there has to be some form of consensus among the recognized parties. The reason why criminals enter political space is because of the huge time lag between crime and punishment. Criminals are of two kinds. Those without a face, without a voice, fill the jails. Most of them are guilty; some are not, but remain in jail for technical reasons. No one helps them. The second kind of criminal is a power center. The police tend to buckle under two kinds of power. The power of money is an obvious temptation, and works up to the point where it can tip over into a scandal. The power of politics is more insidious, because it operates on a level of “understanding”. And so, even if a Shahabuddin or a Pappu Yadav is sent to judicial custody by a court, the police make life easy for them by providing “hospital” facilities for a suddenly fragile constitution.
In Uttar Pradesh the authorities often go the extra mile and turn the prison into a home away from home: The best food, an array of mobile phones, television sets — you name it, you get it. The criminal-politician emerges from this subgroup. There are practical options. There is a hierarchy of crime. Murder, dacoity, rape for instance are certainly higher on the scale of venality than misdemeanors.
A tribunal can be set up on the lines of the Election Commission, and take a call on the merits of any candidate’s past, without prejudice to the eventual decision of the courts. Yes, this is open to abuse. Yes, a dictatorial government can influence the tribunal to misuse its powers and reject the application of an innocent person. But there is a media and an electorate that will hold such executive authority accountable. I am not suggesting that this is the best option. So far we have used every justification to do nothing. A Republic can always take care of a few rotten bananas. The bananas must not end up taking care of the republic.
