Having closely watched two terrible ministers of human resource development, this has to be said: Murli Manohar Joshi was interested in furthering his agenda, but Arjun Singh was worse in a deeper sense. He was out to destroy institution after institution, treating all proprieties as things to be laid aside for instrumental goals. In some ways he was not an isolated case; he was symptomatic of what the Congress can do to institutions. Take another small recent example. Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of Rajasthan, appointed an inquiry commission to probe his predecessor, Vasundhara Raje Scindia. The commission was not formed under the Commission of Inquiry Act, and its mandate was so indiscriminate, its composition so controversial that even if it speaks the truth, it will be easy to dismiss it as political vendetta.

It could be argued that if the Indian state cannot make a case against Quattrocchi in more than two decades, even with non-Congress governments in power, it has no business prolonging the matter. But when there is a history of handling the CBI in a particular manner, it is difficult to make even commonsense judgments.

Why does this matter for mass politics? Who cares about seemingly esoteric institutions like the CBI or inquiry commissions? There is something to this scepticism, but it misses the point. Its propensity to treat institutions casually and instrumentally disables the Congress on so many critical fronts. The Supreme Court has given another half political opening to the Congress to attack the BJP. But in institutional terms, what can they accuse the BJP of? Interfering with the police and investigations? Not prosecuting the perpetrators of crime? Using Commission of Inquiry Reports selectively? What one might think of the danger that the BJP’s central ideology represents, of Modi’s guilt or innocence, is separate, and the danger that stems from them needs to be highlighted. But will the Congress be able to say with a straight face that it has never used similar instrumentalities to prevent the truth from coming out? The instrumentalities of evasion that the Congress has often resorted to, disables it from capitalising on the opposition’s weaknesses.

... contd.