There has to be a method in the madness. Many of the actions of the present government since it came to power four years ago would not otherwise make sense. A few examples indicate that the government has steadily worked in three parallel directions. These have been moves with the complexity of a chess game that is difficult to gauge, but in which the player not only has a clear plan, but is many moves ahead of his opponent.

First, the government has used its informal support base to create an atmosphere of fear and violence, and, through a smokescreen, has made a resolute effort to control aspects of a citizen’s daily life that she or he had taken for granted over seven decades.

Second, there has been a conscious attempt at replacing governance with subjective political intent, blurring the distinction between the party and the government in an extremely pugnacious manner.

Third, there has been a strenuous effort to alter certain contours of our constitution, particularly to change its structure from a federal to a unitary one.

This began within a year of the new government coming to power in Delhi, with the social imposition of curbs on certain personal choices. These freedoms are part of our inalienable rights, but, outside the realms of the law, there has been bullying and jostling to shake up the citizenry. From around May 2015, we saw a series of lynchings across north India, mostly against people from minority or Dalit communities who were not capable of retaliation.

By 2018, such targeted lynchings morphed into the spectre of mob attacks, usually against “outsiders” and underprivileged people. The numbers have swelled, while cow vigilantism continues unabated.

The police apathy now is difficult to comprehend. This abdication of police powers into the hands of lumpen elements, as at the Tis Hazari courts in February 2016, has turned our world into an abnormally chaotic one. The horror at Alwar, as one example, emphasises the inhumanity of our keepers of law and order. Conceptually, however, much worse has happened. In Jharkhand, a minister like Jayant Sinha, considered till now to be suave, sober and intelligent, has valorised lynch men, an action one party spokesman defended as being indicative of the popular will. The law is thrown out of the window, as indeed is the very basis of democratic values – the rule of law.

The second aspect of the change we are witnessing is another kind of uncertainty: the rule of the party has become more important than governance of the people. The unexpected, unnecessary demonetisation programme ended up showing us that there was apparently little black money in the system; it led, instead, to the destruction of many lives. This move was more a benefit to a political party or its members than an economic advantage to the nation. It was certainly a shrewd political move, as the people were asked to believe it was the way to end corruption.

And what direction has the nation’s economic prosperity taken? According to reports, the share of the top 1% in the country’s total wealth increased from 40.3% in 2010 to 49% in 2014 and then shot up to 58% two years later. This is the “staggering rise of India’s super-rich”, as The Guardian has put it – the exclusion of the poor from economic progress, a kind of “cleansing” as it were. The changes in laws pertaining to the funding of political parties have also resulted in more opacity than transparency, and gives legitimacy, even retrospectively, to possible foreign funding of our parties, a worrisome situation as citizens cannot know of foreign influences on our political process.

In its effort at controlling the body politic, the Bharatiya Janata Party has fought aggressively to win election after election, or control states where it has not won an electoral majority. It has invaded our safe domain of personal anonymity, despite a constitutional bench decision about the inviolability of the citizen’s privacy. The prime minister’s views are streamed through the internet and mobile phones into homes and schools. Aadhaar has been used, unnecessarily, to “control” that privacy, by suggesting that governance would be more “efficient” if personal details were linked across service provisions. The government wants to create and control a hub to track social media; in a pending matter challenging this in the Supreme Court, one of the judges reportedly said that if the government wished to monitor every social media message, India would be turned into a surveillance state. Prevailing over all this, like a blanket of fear, is the trolling brigade’s threats to anyone it does not approve of.

The third area of reform has been the attempt at changing constitutional systems surreptitiously. We have seen the passing of the Aadhaar Bill as a money bill so that it did not need the approval of the Rajya Sabha, a deliberate misinterpretation of Articles 109 and 110 of the constitution. Suggestions have been made to change time-tested structures of administration, bypassing the constitutional authority such as the UPSC, with no apparent benefits. The deployment of 800 officers from Delhi to the grassroots level to speed up development work is a nudge at shifting the contours of the constitution.

Even more problematic is the intent to change the essentially federal nature of our country and strengthen the unitary features for centralised control. An obvious example was the deliberate flouting of constitutional provisions in the administration of Delhi, when even the Supreme Court’s orders were ignored. Most brazen now is the specious argument of one nation, one poll. It would require cutting short the term of many elected state assemblies, and would forever remove the rights of the people to change their government through mid-term elections. After the initial round of such elections, how would the Centre keep state governments in place if those governments lost the support of its people? The only possible answer is Central rule for years together.

The bogey of efficiency and costs is just that, a false argument. Either way, how can the whole be less than the sum of the parts – unless the intention is to reduce the quality of supervision and “control” of the elections by the Election Commission. Nothing is more sacred than the electoral processes in each state and the Centre, independent of each other. There is an incorrect view that all activity halts once elections are announced; that is simply not true and the election rules do not mandate it.

The obliteration of the distinction between the government and the party is an extremely dangerous trend. The prime minister at election time spends days on end on the campaign trail, at the cost, one might presume, of efficient governance. On the other hand, the party president presents the government’s report card for four years of rule; it is he who, for instance, informs the people that the petroleum minister will take a meeting to reduce oil prices.

Is there a method in the madness? The direction, it seems clear, is to create a “new world order” for our nation, and change our federal polity into a unitary system dominated by one party. If this drive succeeds, democratic India – united by our grand plurality – will eventually be replaced by a majoritarian, unidimensional, regimented state.

Abhijit Sengupta is a former Secretary, Government of India.