The former vice president also pointed to the “growing authoritarianism” across the world.
“Last week a writer in The New York Times noted that around the world authoritarianism is ascending. And added that the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has noted recently that over the past six years, the number of countries moving towards authoritarianism more than doubled than the number of those moving towards democracy,” said Ansari.
The former Vice President called Kumar’s book “a set of writings depicting a contemporary vision of our democracy”.
Kumar, who had served as the Union minister of Law and Justice in the Manmohan Singh government between 2012 and 2013, on his part made a collective jibe at the Opposition.
“It is wrong, for example, for the Opposition to find small pick holes here and there in foreign policies or defense-related things,” said Kumar, adding, “It was wrong for the Opposition to condemn the government security at the time of pandemic”.
The former Union minister had quit the Congress last year, claiming the party had lost touch with ground reality.
Wednesday’s book launch was also attended by former Supreme Court Judge Madan Lokur, Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha, ThePrint journalist Jyoti Malhotra, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister of Dr. Farooq Abdullah, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Hooda, Congress MP Karti Chidambaram & Lok Sabha MP Danish Ali.
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‘Worst thing when parties call each other names’
Hitting out at the opposition parties, Kumar, a former additional solicitor general of India, said, “the point is you can’t beat some people on their turf. If you are claiming a qualitative distinction for your politics, you can’t get into the competitive game with them”, hinting that the Congress and other opposition parties need to find their own distinct identity.
“The worst thing that you can do for your democracy is when political parties call each other’s names. Here it has been our tradition that you don’t call a person cannot see ‘blind’, but you call him ‘Soordas‘ [a blind, 15th-century poet],” said Kumar.
Jha, a member of the opposition party Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), agreed that the Opposition did need to introspect on certain issues.
“The very conversation between the government and the Opposition is a conversation based on animosity. Look at the language they [the ruling party] employ and awfully we also apply the same language,” said Jha. He added that the ultimate sufferers are not individual members of any party but the “idea of democracy”.
In his Kumar also writes that “Despite a proclaimed commitment to the rule of law, the country’s legal processes have failed justice in several ways, prompting the highest court to lament the ‘morality of justice at the hands of law’.”
He adds: “The politically expedient but ill-conceived reversal of the presumption of innocence as a cardinal rule of criminal jurisprudence in several statutes has facilitated the State’s overreach in a continuing diminution of the republic’s libertarian ethos”.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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