Nine Opposition leaders representing eight parties from across the country on Sunday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi protesting against the use of central investigation agencies and Raj Bhavans to undermine their governments in the states.
The Congress, Left and the DMK did not join this endeavour, initiated by Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (Bharat Rashtra Samithi) and his Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal (Aam Aadmi Party). Both of them are anti-Congress and apparently did not want to reach out to the party.
Three key Congress allies — Sharad Pawar (NCP), Uddhav Thackeray who leads his own Shiv Sena faction, and Tejashwi Yadav (RJD) — joined the effort. The Janata Dal United, which leads Bihar’s ruling coalition that includes the RJD and the Congress, did not.
The other party leaders to sign the letter were Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee (Trinamul Congress), Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann (AAP), Farooq Abdullah (National Conference) and Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party).
“We hope you would agree that India is still a democratic country. The blatant misuse of central agencies against the members of the Opposition appears to suggest that we have transitioned from being a democracy to an autocracy,” the letter by the Opposition leaders says.
The immediate provocation for the letter was the CBI arresting Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia of the AAP last week. The letter underlines that most of the politicians booked, arrested, raided or investigated by central agencies since 2014, when Modi became Prime Minister, were from Opposition parties.
“Be it Shri Lalu Prasad Yadav (Rashtriya Janata Dal), Shri Sanjay Raut (Shiv Sena), Shri Azam Khan (Samajwadi Party), Shri Nawab Malik, Shri Anil Deshmukh (NCP), Shri Abhishek Banerjee (TMC), central agencies have often sparked suspicion that they were working as extended wings of the ruling dispensation at the Centre,” the letter says.
“In many such cases, the timings of the cases lodged or arrests made have coincided with elections making it abundantly clear that they were politically motivated.”
The letter cites how the agencies go slow in the case of Opposition politicians who join the BJP, naming Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, Bengal politicians Suvendhu Adhikari and Mukul Roy, and Maharashtra’s Narayan Rane in particular. Mukul has returned to Trinamul for all practical purposes although he continues to be officially considered a BJP legislator.
Without naming the Adani group, the letter asks why the business conglomerate is not being investigated despite two public sector entities losing money they had invested with it. “...SBI and LIC have reportedly lost over Rs 78,000 crore in market capitalisation of their shares due to exposure to a certain firm,” the letter says.
“Why have the central agencies not been pressed into service to investigate the firm’s financial irregularities despite the public money at stake?”
The letter says the offices of governors across the country are acting in violation of constitutional provisions and frequently hindering governance in the states.
“They are wilfully undermining democratically elected state governments and choosing instead to obstruct governance as per their whims and fancies,” it asserts.
“Be it the governor of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Punjab, Telangana or the lt governor of Delhi— the governors have become the face of the widening rift between the Centre and states run by the non-BJP governments and threaten the spirit of cooperative federalism, which the states continue to nurture….”
