The BJP-led coalition government in Manipur, which faced a severe existential crisis recently after three of its legislators resigned and major partner National People’s Party walked out, has seemingly weathered the storm for the moment. The NPP has now tamely returned to the BJP fold after its MLAs were whisked away to Delhi to meet BJP and NPP leaders. The Speaker, Y Khemchand, has ensured that the BJP would continue to have a majority by selective application of the Tenth Schedule.
But there are troubles ahead. The first of these is an unrest among the BJP’s own legislators, unhappy that there are not enough Cabinet berths left for them. The seeds for this were sowed at the very start of the government’s tenure. The March 2017 Manipur Assembly election threw up a hung verdict, with the Congress emerging as the single largest party winning 28 of the 60 seats. The BJP won 21. However, Governor Najma Heptulla invited the BJP, which needed to rope in at least 11 outside MLAs, to form the next government.
The BJP managed this, but by buying loyalties with Cabinet berths. As the ceiling on Cabinet size for the state stipulated by the Tenth Schedule is 12 including the chief minister, this is proving very expensive. The BJP ended up giving away seven spots to allies leaving only four for BJP legislators, besides the CM. This underlying discontent remains even after the immediate storm, especially since the next elections are just a year-and-a-half away and many would be contesting against these allies in ministerial positions.
But this is not the only problem in front of the ruling party. As a minority party in power, in its self-preservation bid, the BJP invited eight Congress MLAs to defect to it. The Speaker then refused to act on the disqualification petitions against them under the Tenth Schedule for three-and-a-half years, except for one who was disqualified after the Supreme Court intervened. However, when some of the remaining defectors wanted to return to their original party, he promptly disqualified three of them. A lone Trinamool Congress MLA also wanted to leave the BJP-led alliance, and in this case, the Speaker took up a suo motu case and disqualified him within a day, without even giving the MLA an opportunity to defend himself.
It is unlikely that these MLAs will not seek legal intervention. What also needs to be noted is, although a no-confidence motion against the government did not materialise this time, the Assembly will have to be convened for its Summer Session probably sometime in August and this is when trouble can resurface if the mess within the ruling party and the Assembly is not swept clean by then. Overturned with impunity in all this is the idea of rule of law, and it is a tragedy that the state Assembly and government are responsible for this, setting a precedent that can only be characterised as dangerous in this strife-torn border state. The Manipur case also reminds one of what Fareed Zakaria contended in his influential book Future of Freedom.
Democracy, he said, can only be meaningful if it is predicated by a culture of liberalism. At its crux, this liberalism is about an innate sense of rectitude that all civilised societies acquire. This manifests more pronouncedly in the treatment of rule of law as sacrosanct. This idea cannot have been better illustrated than in the famous verbal duel in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for all Seasons between Thomas More and his young assistant William Roper on what an offence against the law is. When More had an opportunity to arrest a known tormentor spying on him, Roper asked him to do so immediately. More refused, saying the man has broken no law. To which a bewildered Roper reminded More that the man has broken God’s law. More’s retort was classic: “Let God arrest him then,” he told Roper.
The esteem with which a liberal democracy is expected to hold the idea of rule of law is beautifully encapsulated in this. This is also probably the best picturisation of secularism—defined as separating religion from state. By contrast, in an illiberal society, Zakaria notes, democracy would end up not only reduced to a farce but can even be dangerous. He goes to the extent of saying liberal institutions such as liberal education, courts, free media, etc., can flourish even without democracy, such as in Singapore, but democracy without liberalism can tear nations apart, as it happened in the former Yugoslavia. It is anybody’s guess which of these scenarios Manipur would fit in.
This is a state where the idea of rule of law has been almost completely done to death, that too outrageously in the highest institution of democracy. This is a state that has brazenly reduced the Tenth Schedule to a convenient tool in the hands of the party in power to either coerce or encourage legislators to defect, whichever profits those in power the most, defeating the very purpose of this legislation when it was conceived.
Pradip Phanjoubam
Editor, FPSJ Review of Arts and Politics
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)