Zubair, Teesta, Bhima Koregaon 'Evidence': Why are India’s Institutions Silent? Seema Chishti 28 Jun 2022, https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/zubair-teesta-setalvad-bhima-koregaon-indias-institutions How much longer before the cloud hanging over India’s democratic record today morphs into a shroud?
India can remain a democracy only if institutions are responsive to executive overreach and say they believe in weighing in on the side of citizens to make sure that Constitutional promises of a free and fair application of laws are honoured. If all their decisions consistently have just one beneficiary, the State, giving it the ability to use the law as an executive tool for securing political victories, India is actively failing in fulfilling the promise.
we now appear to be discussing ‘institutional activism’, which attacks the rights of citizens and criminalises the defence of human rights. Repeated denouncements of the very concept of rights, at least twice by the Prime Minister and then the Home Minister, and even by the National Human Rights Commission, have had a chilling effect on institutions that were, in fact, meant to be safeguarding rights.