Why Corruption Scandals Don't Impact the Modi Govt Like They Did in Congress Era

It was a different time when questions were asked, and governments were held responsible by the mainstream media and TV news anchors. Those were times when governments were accountable to the people for their deeds and misdeeds through Parliament.

Not anymore.

Today, we live in a surreal time and are faced by a government and leaders who brazenly and arrogantly say, “Resignations are not tendered in our government”. This statement by the then home minister Rajnath Singh was the first indication of how much the nature of the State in India has changed since 2014.

Democracy is no longer defined by the Opposition’s space and the accountability of ruling elites and regimes, but by the count of the elections won and lost.

Today, the Opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, is ridiculed (and surprisingly, the narrative is bought by liberals too) as being "good-for-nothing", as he and the opposition are losing election after election. The narrative-makers forget how many elections Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani lost before they adorned the offices of Prime Minister and Home Minister.

But those were times of a democratic system in which the Opposition was respected and not insulted, and ministers were asked to resign if they were caught doing wrong things or involved in corrupt practices. 

Not anymore.

Corruption No Longer a Political Game Changer

Today, it is futile to ask a sensible question about whether the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Mohan Yadav, will resign in the wake of the Indian Express exposé of his and his family's alleged land deals once he assumed office.

It is again futile to ask another sensible question about whether or not a proper and impartial investigation will be done to find the truth of the allegation. Instead, social media monsters are being unleashed to justify the unjustifiable and prove the newspaper wrong, with no corroboration of facts and figures. 

Similarly, the Ram Mandir donation theft is a scandal that puts the BJP to shame. In fact, the Ram Mandir row, in my opinion, is the biggest crisis the forces of Hindutva are facing today, because it exposes the innermost hollowness of those who swear by lord Ram and the supposed honesty and commitment to the ideology they seemingly adhere to. 

The Ram Mandir movement is the reason for the BJP's ascendancy in Indian politics and its occupation of the pole position. The BJP and RSS family take credit for the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya and proudly call themselves Ram Bhakts, questioning the credentials of the devotion of others (those who have not visited the temple) after it was inaugurated by PM Modi on 22 January 2024.

But the same Ram Bhakts are now accused of stealing money and jewellery from the donation box kept at the temple. The SIT report suggests that the theft could be of Rs 200 crores. But an effort is on to whitewash the entire thing. 

Ram Mandir Row Should've Been a Wake Up Call

The Ram Mandir scandal has exposed the culpability of all three components of the RSS family: the Modi government, the Yogi Adityanath government, and the RSS.

The Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust was created by the Modi government as mandated by the Supreme Court's 2019 order on the Ram Mandir. Therefore, once the crisis had arisen, it was the responsibility of the central government to disband the trust to ensure the impartiality of the investigation and relieve office bearers of their responsibilities till they were exonerated of the accusations, but it did nothing. At the time of writing, the trust is intact despite Nripendra Mishra’s demand for the dismissal of the trust. 

The Yogi government can’t absolve itself either. In this case, it turned the entire criminal judicial system on its head. In criminal cases, the first step is to register an FIR and, if needed, start an investigation and make an arrest. However, in this case, the government constituted an SIT, which has no jurisdiction in such matters.

Finally, when pressure became too much to resist, FIRs were registered against eight, and an arrest was made, but the state took no action against Champat Rai and other powerful trustees who were running the show. Rather, Champat Rai was given a graceful exit. He resigned. For a government (in)famous for bulldozer justice, this was no action, rather an eyewash. 

But the biggest questions arise against RSS, which has been running the whole Ram Mandir movement's management since the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Champat Rai was an RSS man, and the majority of other workers employed in Ram Mandir are related to RSS, but RSS did not act when the story broke; it acted when rebellion started brewing from within.

Vinay Katiyar, the original leader of the Ram Mandir movement, openly criticised the Trust and Champat Rai. The case has moved after that, but the damage is done, and the credibility of the RSS is nicely soiled. 

Toothless Media, Armed Govt

The crisis could have hastened the process of arrests and more concrete action against the accused as well as the governmet, had the media been as good a watchdog as it was during Congress and Manmohan Singh’s time, when every story critical of the government broken by the media was religiously followed by other media outlets, and tough questions were asked daily. The relentlessness of the media was so intense that the aggrieved Prime Minister had to say that “history will be kinder to me”.

But today, those words seem to be from another era. I was expecting aggressive coverage and debates from TV channels and morning newspapers after the two big corruption exposes in MP and UP. Contrary to my expectations, both stories received only routine coverage.

Due to severe pushback from the digital media when the mainline media picked these very important stories, it was neither here nor there. The attempt was more to look objective and balanced with the killer instinct that killed the Manmohan government clearly missing. 

Let’s not forget, this is also the time when the Modi government is faced with serious indictment from students due to the NEET paper leak and CBSE faux pas, foreign policy goof-ups, and a serious crisis developing at the economic front. But the voices of the media are either silent or apologetic.

Is there any protest happening around the corruption cases? No. A large section of the youth got extremely excited when the Cockroach Janata Party hit the ground, asking for the education minister’s resignation, but it too has almost petered out.

In this context, Rahul Gandhi’s speech at the India Meeting summit should be an eye-opener. Gandhi rightly said that the old, traditional method of fighting the government will not work; political resistance has to be launched. 

In Need of a New Resistance

What does Rahul mean by resistance? It is an admission of failure of the entire system but, it is also an admission that the system has been captured to the extent that no traditional means of protest or narrative building will work. New means have to be devised to make the government accountable, and for that, new methods have to be invented to communicate with the people and convince them and prepare them for a longer battle.

Don’t forget that the traditional method worked during Manmohan’s time because it was a traditional government; the Modi government is neither traditional nor normative.

If it had been a traditional government of the old era, the Ram Mandir funds theft story would have led to not only the resignation of trustees but also their arrests as well, like it happened during Manmohan’s time. In a traditional government of that old era, the MP Chief Minister would have been asked to go by now. By now Dharmendra Pradhan’s political career would have taken a beating.

But then, those were different times when people's anger was allowed to raise its voice and Anna Hazare was permitted to sit on an indefinite hunger strike.

Will that time will ever come back in future? I am not very sure. 

(Ashutosh is co-founder of SatyaHindi and a former member of AAP. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)