Jammu and Kashmir is no stranger to heads of the state being arrested. Sheikh Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir’s prime minister, was deposed and then arrested in 1953. The charges of conspiracy of ‘espousing the cause of an independent Kashmir’ came much later in 1958. The latest J&K Re-organisation (Amendment) Bill 2025 tabled in the parliament will provide such actions a cover of legitimacy by safely changing the chronological order to criminal charge, arrest and finally removal.
The entire political brass of the state including its present chief minister and hopeful aspirants have all tasted the bitter pill of being imprisoned in 2019. As the new bill sets to rest the buzz of rumours over statehood, further erosion of powers of the elected government, cleaving of Jammu and Kashmir or cleaving and adding territories from neighbouring states to form a new entity like pieces of Lego set, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah may be caught grappling with the new reality.
Since October 2024 when he was elected as the Union Territory’s first chief minister, he has oscillated between caution and sycophancy in a wishful yearning to extract something from the BJP without unequivocally taking up the concerns of his voters, in an obvious bid to avoid getting under the skin of the central government. If this bill is passed, would he now bend over backwards or lay prostrate before them to evade the same fate his grandfather met?
Three Bills & What they Mean
But this isn’t just about Kashmir. Two other bills were tabled in the parliament and together, these three will change the face of Indian politics drastically. The Narendra Modi government surreptitiously and abruptly drafted three bills and tabled them in the Lok Sabha just before the present parliament session ends. In three fine strokes, the government has not only transplanted Kashmir’s haunting legacy across India but completely inverted core democratic norms.
The three bills tabled in the parliament - Government of Union Territories (Amendment) Bill 2025; the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill 2025 and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill 2025 seek the removal of the Prime Minister or chief minister of a state or Union Territory when arrested or detained on serious criminal charges for 30 days in a row. If any one of them is arrested and detained in custody for consecutive 30 days for offences that attract a jail term of at least five years, they will lose their job.
While this may seem well-intentioned in its goal of eliminating corrupt politicians. However, it fundamentally contradicts the "innocent until proven guilty" principle that forms the bedrock of Indian criminal jurisprudence. Disqualifying candidates based on pending charges and not convictions is unconstitutional and unjust. Existing provisions in the Representation of the People's Act already address this concern by disqualifying elected candidates convicted of serious offences.
Between Stated Purpose & Charade
It may even appear to be an equalizer since these bills would theoretically even hold the prime minister accountable, alongside other ministers and chief ministers. However, given this government’s track record of dismantling democratic institutions and weaponizing investigating agencies to settle political vendettas offers little reason for such comfort and confidence.
In the last decade, while the Modi government has exceedingly used Central Bureau of Investigation, National Investigating Agency, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department to co-opt, coerce or punish dissenters and adversaries, the institutions of accountability and justice have been so hollowed out that nobody can dare to lift a finger at the prime minister in whom all power is vested.
So, while his authority can’t be challenged and his wrongdoing cannot be called out, Modi’s government will be bestowed with unbridled powers to wantonly dismiss governments in the states by arresting ministers and chief ministers.
The three bills will further weaken decentralization of powers. The increasing pattern of political witch hunt during Modi’s regime demonstrates that this will be further used as a weapon to disrupt opposition governments, compel dissidents to fall in line or perish.
Representative democracy faces an even graver threat. These bills arrive on the heels of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists in Bihar, which shockingly reveals how swathes of citizens can be excluded and disenfranchised arbitrarily, and the Congress party’s expose on ‘vote-chori’ which shows how fake voters can be added en masse like bulk commodities.
These unfolding sagas coincided with Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech, in which he minced no words while sketching his vision of India based on the retrograde principles and ideas of the RSS, based on the ‘othering’ and belittling of all non-Hindus, and based on the notion that everybody else is a “ghusspaithya” (infiltrator).
These simultaneous events point to a decisive acceleration of Modi’s authoritarian brand of functioning, and there are signs that this will be taken to the next level where Modi becomes the supreme authority and his henchmen the new era ‘sahib bahadurs’ under whose patronage and command the loyalist ‘political royals’ would rule or lose their princely estates (Read: states and union territories), at whose pleasure the citizens will be cloned or electorally invisibilised.
Beware, we’re entering a new Raaj of the brown sahibs!
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