News Desk<\/p>\n
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi threatened to turn the country into a one-party state, The news magazine reported in an article published on November 28. The paper cited the premier\u2019s continues erosion of checks and balances.<\/p>\n
Starting with from the arrest of prominent Indian journalist Arnab Goswami in early November the Indian government ministers decried the act and called it assault on free speech.<\/p>\n
Judges at the supreme court turned their attention to an urgent plea, the article stated. The hearing was short. \u201cIf we as a constitutional court do not lay down law and protect liberty, then who will?\u201d one judge proclaimed.<\/p>\n
That evening Goswami swept out of Mumbai\u2019s Taloja prison into a rapturous crowd.
\n\u201cThis is a victory for the people of India!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
According to The news magazine, Goswami\u2019s case represented not a test of freedom so much as a test of power. \u201cGoswami\u2019s case represented not a test of freedom so much as a test of power. The world\u2019s largest democracy is headed to a future that is less, not more free,\u201d the article read.<\/p>\n
Victims of Goswami\u2019s criticism in his show were often critics of government policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are typically reduced to a corner box as Mr Goswami swells into a finger-jabbing prosecutor, denouncing them as \u201canti-national\u201d or, worse, an agent of Pakistan,\u201d the weekly newspaper magazine stated.<\/p>\n
With Indian government\u2019s intentions, Goswami spent just a week in police custody and India\u2019s topmost judges ignored the court\u2019s backlog of some 60,000 cases to schedule a bail hearing within a day of the anchor\u2019s appeal, it the article reported.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s prisons hold twice as many inmates awaiting trial, some 330,000 people, as they do convicts.
\n\u201cA majority of these \u201cundertrials\u201d come from minority groups and a quarter have spent more than a year behind bars,\u201d said Leah Verghese, a law researcher.<\/p>\n
When the Modi-led government annexed the special status on Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) in August 2019 thousands of its residents were detained.<\/p>\n
The Indian court entertained only a handful habeas corpus petitions, same as Goswami\u2019s, out of more than 550 writs.<\/p>\n
The article further reported that in 2017 Modi slipped through parliament a controversial law that created \u201celectoral bonds\u201d, asserting that as a budgetary matter it need not be scrutinised by the upper house, which was not then in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) control.<\/p>\n
The supreme court of India still had not examined the constitutionality of the innovation, which allowed unlimited, anonymous donations to political parties.<\/p>\n
\u201cJudges have yet to take up include the imposition last year of direct rule on Kashmir and some 140 legal petitions against the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which by inserting religion as a criterion for citizenship undermines the secular nature of the Indian state,\u201d The news magazine reported.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis government has done so much damage to personal liberty,\u201d says Ajit Prakash Shah, a former high court judge. \u201cBut the courts, especially the supreme court, have watched this indiscriminate and violent trampling of dissent like mute spectators.\u201d<\/p>\n
The article reported that it was a judge\u2019s ruling that Indira Gandhi, perhaps the country\u2019s most powerful prime minister, had cheated in an election that prompted her in 1975 to plunge India into a 21-month emergency, during which she threw opponents in jail and ruled by decree. \u201cLegal professionals now liken the current moment to that darkest period for Indian democracy,\u201d the article stated, adding, Many cogs in India\u2019s institutional machinery are not merely complacent, but have grown complicit in a project that threatens to turn the country into a one-party state.<\/p>\n
The news magazine quoted Vice-Dean of law at Oxford University and author of a paper, \u201cKilling a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts\u201d, Tarunabh Khaitan, that at least during the emergency the threat was clear that details India\u2019s institutional decay.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we have now is a wolf in sheep\u2019s clothing,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is no full-frontal big-ticket attack on democracy, but there are multiple, simultaneous attacks on all fronts. We are sleepwalking into authoritarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
News Desk Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi threatened to turn the country into a one-party state, The news magazine reported in an article published on November 28. The paper cited the premier\u2019s continues erosion of checks and balances. Starting with from the arrest of prominent Indian journalist Arnab Goswami in early November the Indian government […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17985"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17986,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17985\/revisions\/17986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}