Listen to this article:

“If people protest, you slap cases,” Bombay high court admonished the prosecution.

“All citizens are being made slaves of the Indian government… They cannot stage protests, they cannot agitate – what is all this?” Justice Madhav Jamdar asked. Earlier this July, he quashed the externment of activist Sayeed Ahmed Waheed Chaudhury.

Going through the bunch of first information reports against Ahmed Chaudhuri, the judge asked whether shouting slogans like “BJP government murdabad” and “Amit Shah murdabad” is treason. “Can’t citizens raise such slogans? It’s a right of the citizen if he chooses so.” Justice Jamdar reminded the police that they were public servants  and “not servants of the PM or CM.”

Justice Jamdar was only stating a well accepted constitutional and legal position. High courts, the Supreme Court and eminent jurists have been repeatedly emphasising that Article 19 of the constitution gives the right to free speech – which includes the right to criticise the actions of the state.

Listen to what Justice D.Y. Chandrachud emphasised when he was the Chief Justice of India. Right to question the government, he had reiterated, is an inherent right. He did not give any room for misinterpretation of this right.

Prime minister Narendra Modi himself, in his happier days in 2015, had said that questioning government is a citizen’s right and vital for democracy. Inaugurating the tenth annual convention of the Right to Information Act, he said, “People should have a right to question the government. This will increase their faith in democracy.”

But this was when his supporters believed that Modi had a solution for every problem and whatever he touches becomes gold. In two years, things changed. The Central Information Commission and Right to Information were rendered toothless. A revision of the rules gave him powers to fix the salary of the information commissioner and other commissioners, and also the powers to change their tenure.

Simultaneously, all other statutory watchdog panels such as the University Grants Commission, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Comptroller and Auditor General were made dormant. Meanwhile, the enforcement arms of the government were undergoing massive changes. The Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau........

© The Wire