Kingshuk Chatterjee Telegraph picture

An “authoritarian government is doing all it can to destroy institutions and curb the space for dissent” but there are signs that the institutions are finally showing some resistance, a Jadavpur University professor said on Tuesday.

“The institutions are realising that their freedom matters. That’s why a Supreme Court judge last week had said there had to be space for dissent in a democratic order,” Shibasish Chatterjee, a teacher of international relations, said on the sidelines of a seminar on “International Relations and World Peace” at Scottish Church College.

“I think the institutions will rebound. Otherwise, they will lose the capital they have created for themselves…. Similarly, I think an election commissioner at certain point of time would definitely try to make for the lost ground.”

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud of the Supreme Court had on Saturday said the true test of a democracy was its ability to ensure space for every individual to voice his or her opinion without fear of retribution and the way the State treats dissent.

The judge, speaking at a programme at Gujarat High Court, had said the blanket labelling of dissent as “anti-national or anti-democratic” struck at the heart of the commitment to protect constitutional values.

Chatterjee said if he had to draw a parallel between the regime of Adolf Hitler and that of Narendra Modi, he would say India was “better placed at one level”, given that the country’s constitutional democratic structures are strong.

“No matter what kind of people would come to power, what kind of agenda they might have, but to do away with those democratic checks in full would not be very easy, given that the country’s constitutional democratic structures are strong. Our innate differences and complexities and plurality... would complicate the project of an authoritarian government,” said Chatterjee.

He was a speaker at the first Ananta Kumar Sarker and Snehalata Sarker Memorial One Day Seminar at the college.

Kingshuk Chatterjee, a professor of history at Calcutta University, who was the other speaker at the seminar, said if the institutions could “survive the threat of Emergency”, they could do it again. “The same institutions have proven resilient in the past, they might do that again,” he said.

An alumnus of the college, 92-year-old Annapurna Sarker, who had graduated in 1946, has donated Rs 3 lakh to institute the annual seminar.

Scottish Church College principal Arpita Mukherjee, said: “She suggested at a time when there is so much of tension prevailing around we should hold a seminar on the topic of peace.”