The threat of Prime Minister Narendra Modi attempting to destroy the Constitution is a clear and present danger. There should be no doubt about this.The way Modi has conducted himself since becoming the prime minister gives one the impression that he has more than subtly declared, “I am the Constitution.”No prime minister destroys the Constitution by declaring so from the rooftops. He does so through his actions and also through the actions of his supporters. Modi has been a master in this exercise, as he is a demagogue first and last.If parliamentary democracy is an orchestra, the conductor is no one other than the prime minister, especially when the ruling party has a majority. What one witnessed in the past ten years was not a great symphony but a cacophony of jarring notes.There are instances galore. The doctrine evolved by the bards of the prime minister – that Modi should not be criticised and attacked as he is the leader duly elected by the people – is itself a travesty of the Constitution.Shockingly, Modi did not answer a single question during the question hour in the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha in the past ten years, showing how little the prime minister cared for the constitutional scheme of things.Modi will have the dubious distinction of being the first leader in independent India who did not engage with questions in parliament.Question hour is seen as the soul and essence of parliamentary democracy, when the opposition can raise any question to the government. It is not an accident that Modi has not addressed a single press conference since May 2014 – the underlying theme is that the leader is above all.Detractors of Modi have rightly cornered the prime minister, declaring that a third term for him will be the end of the Constitution. The problem is that they have not fathomed the damage done by Modi so far and how much time and effort would be needed to set things right.Without declaring that he wanted to do away with the Constitution, Modi, in the past 10 years, has acted in various ways to dilute the spirit of the sacred document that is central to running the world’s largest democracy.For Modi, destroying the Constitution has been work in progress, and it will be a journey downhill if five more are added.Take the example of the outgoing Lok Sabha. Modi saw to it that there is no deputy speaker for the last five years, an unprecedented thing in the annals of India’s parliamentary democracy.There is a method in the madness. As per parliamentary convention, the post of the deputy speaker is given to the opposition, though no such mandate exists in the Constitution. So Modi might have been forced to give the deputy speakership to the opposition, especially the Congress, which had got the highest numbers among the non-BJP parties.Modi in the past 10 years has deliberately ignored the essence of the Constitution while running parliament. The constitutional or the parliamentary scheme of things, of referring Bills to the appropriate standing committee for greater deliberation, was virtually done away with.This is despite the fact that short cuts during the passage of some measures have more than once badly boomeranged on the government, especially the prime minister.The three ‘black’ laws on agriculture, which gave a bloody nose to the government some time ago in the face of fierce protests by farmers, were passed in a jiffy amid opposition protests. Several of the Bills were turned into laws by the government taking advantage of the ruckus in parliament, some were passed after presiding officers had thrown out most of the opposition members from either the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha.Unlike no other prime minister, Modi used the rules and regulations of parliament to throttle democracy amid spacious charges that the non-BJP parties were showing disrespect to the Chair. As if by design, these presiding officers repeatedly sang paeans to the prime minister in a bid to taunt the hapless opposition.Modi, in a devious way, devalued the chair of the presiding officers themselves, sending the signal that they have to behave or else. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the then Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan learnt that she was not being renominated. The ruling party took so much time to decide the candidate that tai, as the eight-term Lok Sabha member is fondly called, smelt a rat and announced that she is retiring.Again, there was a method to the madness. Her successor Om Birla, who presided over the outgoing house, always looked towards the ‘right’, where the treasury benches sit.We have this from the authority of Rahul Gandhi. When the Congress leader was repeatedly attacked in the Lok Sabha by BJP members, including senior ministers, for certain remarks he made during a UK visit some two years back, he met the speaker on his return. He told Birla that as part of natural justice, he needed to be given an opportunity to respond to the allegations. The speaker, Gandhi recalled, neither said yes nor no. He just kept on smiling. What happened later came as a shock.Gandhi was disqualified from the House, using a conveniently timed conviction in a defamation case – the first instance of a prominent opposition leader being proceeded against in such a way in the past 75 years.Observers of the parliamentary scene have not forgotten that some years back how Modi ensured passage of a controversial bill by dubbing it as a money bill so as to circumvent the Raya Sabha which did not have the majority of the BJP at that time. The SC later ruled that it was not a money bill.It was the Aadhar bill which SC later cleared. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, in his dissenting judgment, had observed that it was a fraud on the Constitution.Interestingly, Modi did not pay heed to the constitution of the BJP as well. In 2019, Modi appointed J.P. Nadda as the working president of the party in place of BJP President Amit Shah, who had become Union home minister. There is no provision of a Working President in the BJP constitution.Parliamentary democracy runs through dialogue between the government and the opposition. Tragically, the sense of the opposition has always been that the prime minister has never taken any initiative furthering a dialogue, nor has he ever gone out of the way to reach out to them.The job of the opposition is to oppose, expose and if possible, depose. So, it is but natural that the opposition will seek answers to burning questions. But the Modi dispensation has not allowed debate on any controversial issue, may it be the Chinese incursions in Ladakh, the Galwan incident or the Adani exposeIronically, when it suited him, the prime minister projected India as the world’s largest democracy so that he is seen as a leader of the largest democratic nation on earth. The G-20 summit held in New Delhi was a case in point.The tragedy of India under Modi is that the prime minister brought to Parliament the worst democratic practices followed in Gujarat under him. The Gujarat model under Modi was to temporarily expel the opponents from the Assembly and pass the legislative business in a hurry in their absence. This ‘Gujarat model’ has hurt the Constitution by bringing the opponents on the firing line irrespective of whether they are right or wrong. Their only fault was that they were not on the right side of the government.Dr B.R. Ambedkar had suggested that the Constitution is a foolproof document for India’s parliamentary democracy, but it will all depend upon the character and integrity of the men at the helm and how they go about the task. Modi has ensured that the worst fears of the makers of the Constitution turned true.Sunil Gatade and Venkatesh Kesari are New Delhi-based journalists.
