The BJP government has successfully reduced Parliament to a “notice board and a rubber stamp”, Senior Congress leader and Three-time MP Shashi Tharoor alleged at the Jaipur Literature Festival . “It is a notice board for the government to announce whatever it wants to do, and it is a rubber stamp because their crushing majority obediently passes every bill in exactly the form it comes from Cabinet,” he added.
In a report by PTI, During a session titled “Sustaining Democracy; Nurturing Democracy”, he claimed that tightening the already stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in a way that kept people like Siddique Kappan in jail for two years without bail is one of the many ways the current dispensation has “managed to depart from the democratic spirit of the Constitution”.
The government has been able to take “a lot of autocratic steps without ever having to declare an emergency”, the Thiruvananthapuram MP alleged, adding, “You can call this an undeclared emergency.”
“They did it under the ambit of the law and Constitution. Look at something like the tightening of the UAPA which has resulted in people getting thrown into jail without charge and bail in some cases for two years like the instance of Siddique Kappan,” Tharoor said.
He added that such incidents lead to questions about “whether our Constitution is too easily subverted in an undemocratic way”.
Kerala-based journalist Siddique Kappan was arrested in October 2020 while on his way to Hathras in Uttar Pradesh where a Dalit woman had died after allegedly being raped. He and three others were accused of having links with the now-banned Popular Front of India.
The Supreme Court granted him bail in that case in September last year but he continued to be in jail because of the money laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate. In December, the Allahabad High Court granted him bail in the money laundering case.
At the 16th edition of the literature festival, replying to a question about Parliament’s ability to hold the government accountable, Tharoor said, “Under (Jawaharlal) Nehru, we had a parliament in which even ruling party members could challenge their prime minister, the minister of finance was forced to resign over a scandal exposed by backbenchers and we saw the prime minister held accountable to Parliament even during the 1962 China war.”
