Aditya Sinha: Modi, the baap of all babus

AAP MLA Alka Lamba celebrates the judgment of Delhi High Court with party leader and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal at his residence in New Delhi on Friday PicPTIThe Delhi High Courts judgment that the Election Commissions disqualification of 20 Aam Aadmi Party legislators was bad in law is yet another example of this governments trampling of governance and democracy Aside from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shahs pathological hatred for Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his AAP though the raison detre for this hatred seems misplaced given Congress chief Rahul Gandhis recent political resurgence or Modis disdain of Parliamentary discussion evidenced in the way the Budget was approved without debate or Modis contempt for Constitutionally mandated consultative mechanisms like the Cabinet or the Reserve Bank of India in his decisionmaking the trampling referred to here is of the bureaucracyTwo days before Chief Election Commissioner AK Joti retired the EC on January 23 recommended to the President that the 20 AAP MLAs be disqualified following a threeyearlong saga in which the MLAs were accused of each holding an office of profit of Parliamentary Secretary The Delhi HC court struck down the appointments of the MLAs in September 2016 after which the AAP said there was no need for further EC hearing since the socalled office of profit no longer applied The EC nonetheless charged ahead without hearing AAPs side of the story mdash it claimed it gave AAP adequate opportunity to explain itself even though AAP argued there was no need to continue mdash and ultimately made its recommendation against the peoples representatives to the PresidentJoti is a former Gujarat chief secretary from when Modi was chief minister He is a former bureaucrat who has never attempted the faccedilade of neutrality as Chief Election Commissioner mdash his delinking of the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh Assembly election last December was so illogical he said Gujarat was still undergoing flood relief work a lie disproved widely in the state that he came to be seen as the worst CEC in Indian history worse than even Navin Chawla who famously used to interrupt EC meetings to go to the bathroom from where he would telephone the Congress party to take its advice His haste to disqualify Modis most hated opponents before he retired earned him from the AAP the sobriquet of letterbox of the PMOThe irony is that whenever you meet a BJP supporter the one thing that he or she cries loudest about after four years of achhe din is that their Great Leader does not get the support of the bureaucracy Their narrative is of a hardworking honest politician who sacrifices even his sleep for the benefit of the nation They have been saying this about Modi since June 2014 they have said the same thing for the past one year about UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath Incidentally when Kejriwal stays up late then he is accused of mistreating the bureaucrats When I was in Mumbai last month a film financier who is a BJP supporter moaned about how the bureaucracy was the biggest stumbling block to Modis dreams and plans being implemented Last week on Twitter a journalist whined about how Yogi was hardworking and insomniac but he was let down by the bureaucrats around him These are merely two instances of a muchrepeated narrativeIt is total nonsense One the political executive selects his circle of bureaucrats and ought to take responsibility for whatever they do or dont do so no point in blaming the bureaucrats as handy as it might be Two the bureaucracy is collectively crazy for Modi Perhaps it is part of a larger societal shift rightwards for instance from its judgments the higher judiciary appears to be more conservative than ever before The rightward shift of the bureaucracy started in the AB Vajpayee era and went further during the Manmohan Singh era like the former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai who made astounding claims of the notional loss in the telecom scandal that now stand debunked When Modi took over he couldnt have inherited a more willing or pliant bureaucracyYet Modis followers repeatedly make the bureaucracy its straw man nowadays It is convenient since the bureaucracy will not take on the BJP or Congress in a public spat AAP is another matter It likely believes BJP propaganda about an obstructive bureaucracy each imagining himself to be the exception to the ruleThis blaming of bureaucrats says more about Modi than it does about governances steel frame He had promised much but other than the insanity of demonetisation the chaos of GST and the Orwellian insistence on Aadhaar he hasnt delivered much Rural distress is widespread youngsters are not getting jobs and people are more insecure about the future These arent things bureaucrats can solve these require political solution and leadership Blaming the babus makes as much sense as suggesting a countrywide revolution in pakoda stallsAditya Sinhas new book will be out in 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