Tag Archives: Delhi

Anatomy of a pogrom

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They say the toll thus far is 13 24, as of 6.30 PM this evening. They whisper that the actual toll is much higher. Maybe we will know in time what the actual human cost is or, as has happened many times before in the course of state-sponsored pogroms, maybe we never will.

Never mind parsing the numbers, though — even one life sacrificed at the altar of the cold-blooded political calculations of those who rule us (rule, not govern, because there is zero sign of governance) and of the unthinking, unfettered hate of their bigoted base would have been one too many.

That hate manifested in scenes such as this, playing out on the streets of the national capital:

Or this incident, one among the many dozens over the past three days that we will never be able to live down:

Call it by its right name — this is a pogrom, not a “riot”. Ashutosh Varshney, who has written the book on the subject, lays it out in a thread in which the money quote is this:

The cap is made to measure. It fits, perfectly. The events in Delhi over the past three days is no “riot” but a systematic campaign of elimination targeting the Muslim community. That it was planned to this end is painfully evident from the reports flooding in — including, but not limited to, this video of stones being brought in by the truckload the night before the violence began:

The Indian Express has a chilling timeline-driven narrative of thugs preparing for the attacks under the unseeing eye of the police. It goes on to document the deliberate targeting of Muslim homes and shops for violence, for arson.

As late as 9.30 last night, with Section 144 and shoot at sight orders in force, a Muslim settlement was torched by a mob acting with impunity. Police were present; they said they were “unable to interfere“.

An 85-year-old woman was burnt to death in her home. A mosque in Ashok Nagar was vandalised and torched, as were homes in the vicinity (See embedded clip earlier in this post), and a Hanuman flag planted atop its dome. 24 hours after the incident, the flag still remains in place. And a clip that has since been verified damns the police as active, willing participants in the mayhem:

The police even colluded with rioters to ensure that ambulances bearing victims were not allowed to enter the Al Hind hospital, as testified to by many including Dr Harjit Singh Bhatti. A 14-year-old boy with a gunshot wound was among those who were denied timely treatment. A doctor’s brother was among those who died while awaiting the treatment that the rioters and police refused them.

It took lawyer Suroor Mander’s midnight knock on the door of the Delhi High Court to produce a court order (the full text) asking that police provide protection to the ambulances. This clip is worth highlighting:

“Highest constitutional functionary move in Z+ security. This is the time to reach out and show that this security is for everyone,” Justice D S Muralidhar said in the matter on Al Hind hospital moved by Suroor Mander. “We can’t let another 1984 scenario happen in this city; not under the watch of this court.”

Serving and retired IPS officers pointed to the Delhi police force’s inexperience in dealing with riots — an experience that starts right at the top.

Inexperience might — might — explain why the police did not take preventive measures in time despite the signs of impending riots being painfully evident (Remember how stones were trucked in on the night before the rioting began). But it does not explain why the police participated in the stone-throwing, why it joined rioters in ‘Jai Shri Ram’ chants, why it shielded the rioters, why it indulged in actions such as in the clips above. Or the one below:

Inexperience certainly does not explain the visual below of a policeman in full gear directing rioters who are gathering stones:

Members of a Hindu mob, armed with crude weapons, begged the police to let them attack Muslims. “Give us permission, that’s all you need to do,’’ one mob leader said. “You just stand by and watch. We will make sure you don’t get hurt. We’ll settle the score.’’ Then he used a slur to refer to Muslims.

That reported quote from a New York Times story is telling. Which protestor, if he did not know for sure that the police was on his side, would actually go up to a cop — while armed — and ask for permission to attack Muslims, or anyone for that matter? Any cop worth his uniform and pay check would have immediately arrested the whole sorry lot and thrown them behind bars.

In the heart of Delhi, late night on February 25 while the Home Minister and the state chief minister and the Commissioner of Police were “appealing for peace” and “monitoring the situation”, and while Section 144 was in force, newly-elected BJP MLA Abhay Varma marched through the violence-addled Mangal Bazaar area of Lakshmi Vihar at the head of a band of supporters who chanted ‘goli maro saalon ko‘ (Shoot the bastards, in case it needs translation). Shoot at sight orders were in force at the time, for what that is worth.

The coordinated assaults across multiple locations had one significant feature in common — they were at their most virulent in the areas where the BJP had won seats in the recent assembly elections. Which is to say, where the party had numerical strength — which, in practical terms, means they were reasonably sure, particularly given the backing of the police, that there would be no real organised resistance. See the map below:

Also clear is that the first part of their mission is in a good way to being accomplished, as this video of the Muslims of Mustafabad leaving the area with their belongings shows. The second mission — clearing Jafrabad of the Shaheen Bagh-style protest that had taken root there, which was the thrust of Kapil Mishra’s infamous speech — was also accomplished, with not a little help from the police.

It is equally clear that the BJP-led thugs were aware of the illegality, the criminality, of their actions. Thus the systematic assaults on journalists who, at considerable risk to life and limb, covered the riots. One was shot; four others were brutally assaulted; rioters checked the religion of journalists they caught before assaulting them.

Ayush Tiwari of Newslaundry posted a contemporaneous account on Twitter. TOI photojournalist Anindya Chattopadhyay has a chilling first-person account, which starts with the rioter who offered to put a tilak on his forehead to ensure his safety as he headed into the midst of the riots.

“We were not allowed to shoot or record any of what was happening,” writes Runjhun Sharma of CNN-News18, adding that she and other journalists were told “Don’t take your phones out of your pockets, just enjoy the view.”

And here, with horrifying detail, is Ismat Ara, of FirstPost:

‘I was scared they would catch me for being a journalist, molest me for being a girl, lynch me for being a Muslim’

Rioters — and the brain-dead apologists that infest social media — argued that Hindus were retaliating for the killing of their own. “What about Rahul Solanki?”, several asked on my timeline. It is an age-old tactic of the Hindutva terrorists — instigate violence, then claim that it was a spontaneous reaction to the other side’s violence.

Well, what about Rahul Solanki? His father Hari Singh Solanki, sitting in the hospital beside the body of the son who died when he stepped out of his home to buy groceries, blamed Kapil Mishra — not the Muslims — and demanded that action be taken against the BJP “leader”.

“Kapil Mishra set Delhi on fire and then hid in his home. Our children paying the price, getting killed” — Hari Singh Solanki, father of the murdered Rahul.

A mob burned down a shop belonging to a Hindu that was being run by a Muslim. Here is what a trader, also a Hindu, from the area had to say about the incident, about who was responsible, about the role of the police. Also read what the Hindus of Ashok Nagar had to say about the mosque that was destroyed in their area. Elsewhere, a Sikh — a Supreme Court lawyer, no less — asks members of his faith to form peace committees, to set up langars for the victims. Hindus sheltered 25 Muslim families all through yesterday and today, until the police could rescue them and take them to a nearby hospital. And then there was this:

There is humanity still in our minds and our hearts, despite the BJP’s best efforts to stamp out all vestiges.

At the end of the Delhi election campaign, Amit Shah said hate speech maybe — maybe — cost his party. And yet, just yesterday, BJP Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh Jairam Thakur says only those who chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ have the right to remain in India.

While BJP leaders continued to pour fuel onto the raging flames, while the PM after three days of rioting contented himself with a word salad about the “immense warmth” — presumably emanating from a burning city — with which India had greeted Trump, and an anodyne appeal for peace; while politicians either went missing in action or busied themselves with photo-ops (like Arvind Kejriwal’s dharna at Raj Ghat, or his visit to victims in various hospitals, or his statement of a “positive meeting” with Amit Shah), or actively turned against those seeking help (as Kejriwal himself did when, late night last night, he had water cannons sweep his street clear of protestors even as thugs owing allegiance to his own party unleashed violence on the protestors at Jafrabad), it was left to the people to step up, to speak out.

There was a joint Hindu-Muslim peace march in the Brij Puri area; elsewhere people formed a human chain to ensure that schoolchildren could return home in safety. Hindus went around reassuring their Muslim neighbours that they were not alone; gurudwaras opened their doors to Muslims who were fleeing from their torched homes and the Jathedar of the Akhal Takht has asked all gurudwaras in the capital to offer all possible help to victims..

On the fringes of the cataclysm the BJP has visited on the national capital, this also happened: In Bihar the government voted unanimously in favour of an anti-NRC resolution. 70 MLAs belong to Nitish Kumar’s JD(U); the next largest group in the ruling coalition is the BJP with 54 MLAs. All of whom voted in favour of the anti-NRC resolution.

The next major election is in Bihar, in October this year, and this vote is a clear indication that even the local BJP leaders are aware of — wary of — the public sentiment, which has been gathering a head of steam thanks largely to the efforts of Kanhaiya Kumar who, as I write this, is into the 26th day of his 30-day road trip across the state and drawing enormous crowds.

The rally will culminate in Patna in five days with a public meeting demanding that the state government block the NPR/NRC; this resolution is likely an attempt to take the wind out of Kumar’s sails. From what I’ve been seeing, and from the clips of his speeches I’ve been following on his timeline, I suspect though that it is not going to be that easy — the Patna rally, unless I’ve totally misread the signs, is going to be a clear indication to the ruling dispensation that there is a right side and a wrong side to this argument, and that the people will be unforgiving of those who pick the wrong side. But we’ll see…

Elsewhere, the Supreme Court — which a wag on Twitter renamed the Supine Court recently — has yet again postponed a hearing it had scheduled in the issue of the Shaheen Bagh protests, saying “Let everything cool down first”.

Remember that when the SC was approached to intervene following the December 15 violence at JMI, its response was that it would listen to such pleas after the violence had stopped — analogous to a fire brigade responding to a four-alarm fire by saying it would wait for the flames to die down before responding.

And it is worth saying, in so many words, that the SC’s serial abdications of responsibility in cases ranging from the lockdown of Kashmir to the state-sponsored violence in JMI is a major contributing factor to why we are where we are today.

It is left, then, to the lower courts to stand up for what is right. A Division Bench comprising Justice Muralidhar and Justice Talwant Singh of the Delhi High Court heard a Harsh Mander plea into the ongoing violence in the national capital, and it was quite something (Read the blow by blow account by LiveLaw via the link).

In a cringe-worthy performance, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said he had not seen the video of the Kapil Mishra hate speech that was the proximate cause of the hearing (Begs the question: If the SG hadn’t seen the video that was central to the case before he appeared in court to respond to the petition, how incompetent is he?). He asked what the urgency was, and suggested that the hearing be postponed.

Judge Muralidhar wasn’t having any of it — after first castigating the SG, the judge ordered the video to be played in court, then asked the SG and the officer representing the police, Deputy Commissioner Rajesh Deo, to watch it, read the transcript, and respond after a break. Read the proceedings — here is a minute by minute account on Scroll, as does Live Law; it is a handy reminder of how judges function when they remember that they are there to protect the Constitution, the rule of law.

In late-breaking news just as I was writing this:

And in response to that, the Solicitor General of India, no less, argues that this might not be the best time to be filing FIRs against those BJP leaders. Painful as it is, try and wrap your head around that argument from the lawyer representing the government of India.

“They beat me till they broke me. I begged them and they beat me some more, viciously. They made communally charged slurs and took (BJP leader) Kapil Mishra’s name. I don’t remember much. I just hoped my children were safe. I can’t bear to look at my photograph, my legs shiver with pain.”

They took Kapil Mishra’s name, says the victim of the gruesome assault that is captured in the lead photo of this post. Kapil Mishra, banned twice for hate speech during the Delhi campaign. Kapil Mishra, who made the hate speech the SG and DCP haven’t had time to listen to yet. Kapil Mishra, against whom the SG is in no hurry to instruct that an FIR be filed. And again, the SG got spanked by the judge:

“You showed alacrity in registering FIRs for damages to property and arson. Why aren’t you registering it for these speeches? Don’t you even want to acknowledge the presence of a crime? Just register FIRs!”

Worth pointing out here that despite a full-scale pogrom in the national capital for three days and counting, the police has not seen fit to take one single individual into preventive custody. Unlike, say, in Kashmir where hundreds remain in custody, some under the draconian PSA, despite there having been no trouble of any kind in the lead-up to the abrogation of Article 370.

Also, in context, work mentioning that the Supreme Court collegium has recommended the transfer of the widely respected Justice Muralidhar, provoking a protest by lawyers.

It is ironic, meanwhile, that the rioting, the mayhem and all these stories on the fringes happened precisely when dozens of crores of rupees were pumped into a spectacle that was supposed to showcase the bonhomie between the world’s largest and oldest democracies.

It is typical of Modi that he skipped the press conference at the end of Donald Trump’s tour, leaving it to the US president to take questions on the CAA.

It is symptomatic of the ineptitude of this government’s foreign outreach that all that effort and money went into an event that produced nothing in the way of a substantive trade deal, or in fact a deal of any kind whatsoever.

And while on irony, the expensive spectacle staged by Modi and his minions not only failed to attract positive notice within the country and around the world, global media — both print and television — focussed on the riots that were tearing the capital apart (and more than one commentator pointed to the tone deaf nature of Trump’s statement that the US and India were committed to fight global Islamic terror, at the precise moment, and in the precise place, where Muslims were being targeted for annihilation).

Sections of the Indian media desperately kept the focus on Trump at the Taj, and Melania attending “happiness school”, and what the menu was at the Rashtrapathi Bhavan reception (more irony: the star was biriyani, the very dish the Shaheen Bagh protestors have been demonised for eating), global media was unsparing. Chris Hayles of MSNBC in fact pointed to the fact that Trump was silent about the riots:

And that comment was a gentle prelude to Hayes’ show last night, where he tore into the two leaders. Watch:

The POTUS press conference didn’t go that well, and an incident also served up a reminder of why Modi refuses to meet the press (and also makes you wish that India had the kind of media the US still has, despite Trump’s best efforts). Here:

It is easy enough for the likes of Piyush Goyal, on behalf of the government, to call publishers and editors and browbeat them into tamping down on negative comment about Modi and his minions. It is not for want of trying, though — yesterday, the government pressured Hotstar and Disney India into deleting a John Oliver segment on Modi, that had aired on the eve of Trump’s visit. The outcome? On YouTube, the video has over 5.3 million views at the time of writing this.

I’ll leave you with Oliver’s famous last words here:

It is incredibly depressing to see India heading in this direction…. Because India, the home of this enduring symbol of love (the Taj Mahal) frankly deserves more than this temporary symbol of hate (Modi).

PostScript: Events are happening at too great a pace just now to make sense of; I’ll leave this round-up here, as a document of the major events of the past 48 hours, and write around it later, once things have simmered down somewhat and there is room for meditation, for thinking it all through.

Credit: The lead image, emblematic of everything that is wrong with India today, was shot by Praveen Khan of Indian Express. And below, a little reminder of our times, for our times.

“Twas a famous victory”. Wasn’t it?

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‘Burn out’ is an actual thing. I learned this the hard way, after writing well over 20,000 words on this blog in the space of a week – and, in between the writing, reading books on authoritarianism/fascism, the media and propaganda, protest movements around the world, and related subjects.

I spent the last four days or so in a sort of daze, unable to really process anything I was seeing and hearing into cohesive thoughts. I know I need to rejig how I do this – not documenting, not writing, is not an option in these times but equally, writing every single day is not viable either.

So: I’ll do daily round-ups of the news that I think it is necessary to highlight, to document, to collate so individual items are not lost in the surround sound; about once in four or five days, I’ll write essay-length pieces on issues I think need exploration.

I’m not the only one suffering from burn-out, by the way. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has not been seen or heard from since the morning of February 11. His Twitter stream is dormant (except for a retweet of a plug for a public engagement today where he will apparently talk of drug trafficking); while his titular boss Modi and other BJP worthies were quick to “welcome the verdict” and promise Arvind Kejriwal “full support”, Shah has been conspicuously silent; he has also been conspicuously absent from his office.

Burn-out. Besides masterminding the vicious, dangerously toxic, no-holds-barred Delhi campaign (which has repercussions that will ramify well beyond this election cycle; remember for instance that around midnight on February 11, an AAP MLA’s convoy was fired upon, killing one) which involved all Union ministers, and almost all BJP chief ministers and MPs, he personally led 44 rallies and roadshows and also went door to door in a 13-day span.

For all the post-facto sound bites about this being a “local election” and the BJP having accomplished its objective by increasing its existing tally and improving its vote share, Shah was clearly in it to win it.

From the bits and pieces I’ve been able to pick up behind the scenes, Shah’s motivation was not to gain control of the glorified municipality that is Delhi, per se. He saw this – particularly in light of the party having swept Delhi in the 2019 national election – as his opportunity to shed the tag of Modi’s consigliere, to emerge out of Modi’s shadow, to be recognized as a leader in his own right, one capable of winning elections on his own (Note that Modi was used for just two rallies – one at the start, and one towards the end, of the campaign).

The resounding thumbs-down by Delhi voters has put paid to that ambition — and that is a good thing, since the last thing this country needs is a Shah turbo-charged by the confidence of victory. The elections to follow, in Bihar later this year and in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal in 2021, are too complex for him to even attempt to put himself front and centre without a confidence-boosting win under his belt.

For me, that is the single biggest takeaway from the Delhi results – that it stopped Shah in his tracks. That the criminal campaigns of Pervesh Verma, Anurag Thakur and their ilk met with a resounding rebuff is just a corollary; this was about Shah, and Shah alone, and he needed to be stopped, and Delhi did the deed with spin-proof emphasis.

That said, I am conflicted about the Delhi outcome. The defeat of the BJP is of paramount importance, simply because the next general election is a long way off and this fight to reclaim the moral core of this country cannot wait for four years – it has to be fought in the here and the now, and the answer to that is the brewing Centre versus State battle across multiple fronts, most urgently the resistance to the nationwide implementation of the NPR.

At the time of writing this Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and West Bengal have officially passed resolutions against the CAA (and emphasized their resolve that the NPR process will not be permitted in these states). Yesterday, in direct defiance of Governor Kiran Bedi’s strong messaging, Puducherry became the first Union Territory to pass an anti-CAA resolution).

In order to fight and win the battle of our times, it is necessary to shrink the BJP footprint in the states, to reduce its sphere of influence, to destroy the nation-wide hegemony it enjoyed even as recently as this time last year. The non-BJP states will take strength and support from each other; the more such states there are, the stronger the resistance and the harder it is for the BJP to fight on multiple fronts. (This is also the reason Bihar, which goes to polls in October 2020, is critically important – with Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Chattisgarh out of the BJP net, Bihar is the one big state other than Uttar Pradesh that remains in the Hindi heartland).

Delhi doesn’t change the map of influence since it was not controlled by the BJP earlier, but by retaining Delhi, AAP has ensured that the sequence of the BJP’s state-level losses is maintained and has prevented the BJP from finding a makeweight for its loss of Maharashtra and Chattisgarh.

It’s not the win itself that makes me queasy, therefore; it is the manner of it. At no point did Arvind Kejriwal and AAP stand up in support of Shaheen Bagh, of JNU and Jamia and other centers of protest. At no point did AAP take the BJP’s polarizing rhetoric head-on; at no point did it directly contest the message the BJP was fighting on. With this result: the BJP believes that it was its stand on the CAA, its demonizing of the opposition as “gaddaars” deserving of “golis”, that enabled it to increase its vote share by a tick over 6%, and therefore it will now double down rather than back off.

A toxic idea that is uncontested will, like all cancers, metastasize. This was the thought uppermost in mind as I watched the last leg of the campaign, and monitored the results, but then Mihir Sharma argued the point brilliantly, so I’ll avoid repetition and link to his piece instead (One crucial clip below, but read the entire article – you must):

It might feel wonderful to declare that this was the voter in Delhi rejecting divisiveness and declaring her disagreement with what the BJP had to say, but that would be a brazen misinterpretation of what has actually happened. In fact, the BJP won the argument. It simply did not win the election. The AAP has not disagreed with the BJP on the themes or substance of its critique of Shaheen Bagh, of the anti-CAA protests, and so on. Arvind Kejriwal himself complained the problem with the CAA was that Indians themselves were not getting jobs. He also declared that if given a free hand, he would clear Shaheen Bagh in a couple of hours, and that nobody had the right to block traffic indefinitely. Quite amazing hypocrisy from a man who rose to power on a record consisting solely of pointless, fruitless, and interminable protest. If the BJP’s campaign has been one of open malice, the AAP’s campaign has been no less damaging to India’s soul. This is a victory of not just cowardice, but of submission to the BJP’s core values. 

As the results came in, Omair T Ahmed on Twitter came up with a thread on similar lines, which was then expanded into another must-read article on the subject. The crux:

That is also the failure of AAP, or the limit of its reach. It can’t, and won’t, challenge higher politics. Bijli, sadak, pani are all well and good, but not if the bijli is provided in detention centres, where the sadak leads, where pani is served to those stripped of citizenship at the whim of a bigoted and incompetent government, as has happened in Assam….

That politics of deflection and cowardice reached its inevitable nadir when AAP suggested that the ladies of Shaheen Bagh abandon their protests for the sake of Delhi’s elections—without once even being able to summon up the courage to speak on the issues. When people are protesting about their very citizenship, to suggest that this can be abandoned for the sake of a politics of mere service delivery was both outrageous and presumptuous. 

And in its post-election editorial, the Hindu makes a similar point. Between them, these three pieces sum up the reasons (at least, most of them) for my discomfort: that THE most emergent battle of our times, the one that has brought millions out onto the streets and kept thousands permanently camped at 24/7 protest sites across the country, was not won because it was simply not fought.

The consequence? In Delhi, the BJP secured 3.6-plus million votes, and these votes give it sufficient validation to double down on the toxicity. We, all of us, will pay the price for Kejriwal choosing to whiff rather than swing for the fences.

In passing, the utter decimation of the Congress has come in for much derision, but it is worth noting that while the Congress – from what I gather, tactically – opted to run a lukewarm campaign in Delhi in order not to split votes, the party has shown the moral courage to stand with the protestors and against hate.

Delhi PCC chief Subhash Chopra resigned owning responsibility for the party debacle (despite the obvious fact that the debacle was not his fault, but that of a leadership that opted to bail). It is worth noting though that when the full might of Shah’s police was unleashed against protestors in Delhi, he was constantly at the forefront, fighting for the release of those who had been illegally detained. It is equally worth pointing out that in both Delhi and UP, whenever the state-sponsored violence against protestors peaked, it was the Congress that the protestors and activists reached out to – and the party’s local activists always responded.

I hold no brief for the Congress and I am thoroughly vexed at a party that, even in these parlous times, is still busy fighting internal battles over the question of leadership – but equally, I admire the fact that Priyanka Gandhi at great personal (and, as Kejriwal demonstrated, political) risk was present at India Gate, at AIIMS to inquire into the welfare of protestors who bore the brunt of official and unofficial thugs; at Daryaganj when state violence peaked; and just yesterday, at Azamgarh in UP to stand with the protestors – UP, a state where the leaders of the two big local parties, Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati, have been conspicuously silent on the reign of terror unleashed by Ajay Singh Bisht.

The Congress, unlike AAP, the Samajwadi Party, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, has shown the willingness to take the hard knocks and keep right on fighting — and this, to my mind, outweighs its decimation in Delhi. Can it do more? Yes. Should it? Yes. But to its credit, it is at the least not running away from the larger battle for the sake of smaller wins.

The Battle of Blenheim (1704) prompted British poet laureate Robert Southey to write ‘After Blenheim’, a poem on the senseless cruelties and sheer pointlessness of war. Here it is in full, and here below are two clips relevant to our times:

“With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby, died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

“They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

…..

“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he;
“But ‘twas a famous victory.”

Kejriwal adroitly side-stepped a battle that needed to be fought; the result was “a famous victory”, but as Mihir and others argue persuasively, the long-term outcome, sadly, has been to affirm the BJP’s conviction that polarisation is the best – the only – weapon left to it. And this is going to cost all of us.

I started this piece talking of burn-out; I’ll end it with a reiteration of how this blog will work going forward. There will be a once-daily round-up of the stories I think it is important for you to take note of; every once in a while, at the rate of around once a week, I’ll step away from the quotidian and write at length about larger issues.

PS: I’m not going to spam your timelines with the daily round-ups – you know how to find your way here if you feel the need.

Cover image courtesy Yahoo India

Update, 4.40 PM: Every point needs a good counterpoint, and there is none better on the net today than this one by Pragya Tiwari, who you should follow because she is an excellent writer. Here’s the money clip:

Refusing to let the BJP dictate the agenda is less indicative of ideological compromise than of a tactical move. Focusing on denouncing polarising propaganda is noble but it can also have the opposite effect of entrenching it and forcing even fence sitters to take defensive positions.

Lies, damned lies, and then there’s the BJP…

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This story opens with the line “The Shaheen Bagh shooter Kapil Gujjar admitted to the Delhi Police that he joined the Aam Aadmi Party in early 2019.” It goes on to talk of photos being recovered showing him and his father with various AAP leaders.

The story was first flashed by ANI, immediately picked up by other agencies, then flashed on TV channels, and later made the subject of much red-eyed “debates” by the likes of Arnab Goswami, Rahul Shivshankar, Navika Kumar et al.

The father and other family members have since denied any connection with the party and explained how the supposedly incriminating photos came to be – but that is neither here nor there; it is now “established” that AAP is behind the Shaheen Bagh violence. Or, as DCP Rajesh Dev says, “We have him in remand for two days and we will establish the conspiracy”. Not “we will investigate”, mind. (The earlier shooting at Jamia has been conveniently pushed off the radar by calling him out as a minor; two men on a scooter who then fired a gun at the Jamia protestors are yet to be traced, though witnesses gave the police the number of the vehicle).

So it is a he said/he denied story, right? Except for the timing – conveniently just ahead of polling date, to further underline the BJP’s argument that AAP is responsible for the violence in Delhi. (While on this, the BJP needs to make up its mind – is AAP supporting Shaheen Bagh and feeding the protestors biriyani, as Ajay Singh Bisht keeps complaining, or is it behind the violence intended to disrupt those protests? Which is it?).

But taking the story at face value, here is the problem: As per the rules governing election campaigns, official bodies are not allowed, during the period of a campaign, to name any party in connection with alleged acts of criminality. This rule is precisely to prevent parties from floating incendiary allegations against each other.

The Delhi Police – which spoke not officially, but through anonymous and therefore subsequently deniable “sources” – is in flagrant breach of that provision. The Delhi police reports to the Home Minister (NB: During an election campaign the police is officially under the control of the Election Commission – in the current dispensation, how much that is true in practise I’ll leave for you to judge); there is only one party that gains by muddying the waters, so draw what inferences you will.

Interestingly, the Delhi police report was released – or at least, leaked by “sources” – to the media in the evening. However, Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari was already talking about it, officially, earlier that morning.

Speaking of probes, it is now a month since 100 or more masked thugs entered the Jamia Milia Islamia JNU complex (apologies, I mistyped, thanks all who caught it and alerted me), armed with iron rods, hammers, and bottles of acid and unleashed unhinged mayhem. Judging by this report, the special investigation team set up to inquire into the attack seems to work thus: It summons someone – actually, someone who had in a sting actually admitted his role in the attack and asks, son, what is this, why did you do this? And the youngster goes who, me, I was fast asleep at the time. To which the SIT goes, all right then, off you go.

I mean, the SIT is yet to even question Komal Sharma, the ABVP member who was identified as being part of the attack by the police themselves – “because her phone is switched off”. So now you know — if you do something criminal and find yourself the target of an investigation, switch off your phone. Problem solved.

While progress is slow to none on actual, serious, cases, the concerted attempts to demonise Shaheen Bagh continue – the latest instalment being the allegation, doing the rounds of social media and WhatsApp, that the protestors burned the national flag. Which, predictably, is a lie.

As was the earlier one – a ‘sting video’ released by BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malaviya that purported to prove that the protestors were being paid Rs 500 per day. The story was picked up by TV channels, “debated” with much heat on TimesNow and Republic, and further amplified by various official and unofficial BJP leaders. (And the BJP has a lot of amplifiers – 18,000 at the least, as per this story). Again, predictably, the video was faked.

If you are even mildly surprised/shocked, you have been living under a rock. Remember the BJP is led by Amit Shah, who as far back as 2018 had with a nudge and a wink asked his “social media warriors” to use fake news to spread the “message”:

Related, remember how Shaheen Bagh is just a bunch of pesky Muslims holding the country to ransom by blocking a major road? Women with nothing to do, just sitting there and being fed biriyani by the chief minister of Delhi? So yesterday this happened: Eight busloads of Sikhs travelled all the way from Punjab to Shaheen Bagh to stand in solidarity with them. (An open, 24/7 langar has been set up, also by the Sikh community, and has been running for the past several days and no, they don’t serve biriyani).

So, the Sikhs came, of their own volition, yesterday, and this happened:

Why? Under what law, on whose authority, on what grounds did the police prevent the group from going to Shaheen Bagh? In whose interest is it to show that the protest there is driven only by one community? And while on that, note what is now becoming a usual occurrence: “Police without name tags”.

Update, 1.20 PM: The delegation of Punjab farmers, after overnight drama and considerable negotiations with the cops for safe passage, have reached Shaheen Bagh.

In the stream of news about protests in various parts, way too numerous now to keep track of, there was this item that stood out – not for the locale, not for the turnout, but for how the Indian Embassy, located in the capital of the United States, responded:

Author and environmentalist Edward Abbey said it best:

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.

Yesterday was a “big news day” in more ways than one. In Parliament, the Ministry of Home Affairs made an important announcement:

The framing of the story is interesting: “MHA makes it official: No plans of NRC”. Whereas in actual fact, what the MHA said in Parliament is (Emphasis mine): “Till now, the government has not taken any decision to prepare National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) at the National level.”

Never mind that this has been the official line of the government — “Till now” – all along. Never mind that when introducing the CAB in the Rajya Sabha the Home Minister categorically, and to considerable applause from his side of the aisle, said NRC will be rolled out countrywide. This latest “official” statement was promptly used by various media channels to ask what the protestors were still going on about, since the government has, you know…

AltNews has a fact-check connecting the various dots. A related point needs to be made: Right from the outset, the nationwide protests have always been about the deadly dangerous trifecta: the CAA plus the NPR plus the NRC. The CAA is now a law, therefore a fact of life. The NPR process is ongoing, and has in fact been further funded in the latest Budget. To say the NRC has not been thought through, or to stall with weasel words like “not yet”, is disingenuous, for the simple reason that the NPR is the natural pipeline for the NRC. If there is no move towards the NRC – which makes Shah not merely a liar, it also means he breached Parliamentary privilege by lying on the floor of the House – then the NPR does not need the 11 additional questions that have been tacked on to the previous version.

But hey, the MHA released a sufficiently vague “clarification”, the media seized on it to justify the government’s stand that the protests are misguided; that narrative fills the TV channels and the media space, mission accomplished.

While on the MHA, note that both activists without, and Parliamentarians within, have begun to systematically question the government, officially, about the gaslighting it does unofficially. Thus, in Parliament yesterday, the junior minister in the MHA clarified that “no such case of Love Jihad has been reported by any of the central agencies. In fact, he pointed out that the term love jihad is not defined under the current laws.” Read this story.

Remember that no less than the Supreme Court asked that ‘love jihad’ be probed – that is to say, the top court in the country asked for a probe into an act that has not even been defined in law. Remember that the National Commission on Minorities also demanded a probe. Remember the stream of sensational stories emerging from the probe, such as this one which brought up an ISIS connection.

And finally, remember that the MHA yesterday only said what the NIA had said – after wasting money and manpower on a “probe” – back in 2018 itself: That there is no such thing as love jihad. Now ask yourself, who is responsible for so many damaged lives and reputations, for so much distress? Who pays the price?

NDTV, supposedly one of the last surviving bastions of both liberalism and good journalism among the English language channels, decided to host BJP MP Parvesh Verma on prime time. It is worth noting that the Election Commission has banned him from campaigning following a speech in which he claimed the people of Shaheen Bagh will enter “your homes” to “rape and kill your wives and daughters” – a fact the NDTV anchor Nidhi Razdan is perfectly well aware of, as this segment shows.

The BJP found a workaround by getting Verma to speak in Parliament in support of the President’s pre-Budget speech – an opportunity the MP used to make a no-holds barred campaign speech in which, among other things, he called a leading opposition MP ‘Rahul Firoz Khan’. And now a leading TV channel gives him, gratis, another platform to campaign from because that is what the show amounted to – all in the name of ‘balance’.

See how the media enables those who traffic in hate? In a stirring speech in Parliament the previous day, TMC MP Mahua Moitra had referred to Verma being asked to speak in the Lok Sabha. “You may have the constitutional authority to do so,” she told the BJP, “but what about the higher authority, the moral authority..?”

Even this may be overstated,” says the Wall Street Journal in a scathing indictment of India’s latest budget, “as the country’s official economic data has become more politicized and less reliable.” Business Standard, in a strong editorial, says the Budget – remember that, according to the hype machine, the PM had taken personal charge of the process and “big, bold decisions were expected” – echoes the WSJ line when it says the budget should have been fact-checked, and also tells you why this lack of credibility is critical:

This is, in effect, a recognition that the credibility associated with official pronouncements has been undermined, and there is a need to recover it. Such an effort is particularly important at a time when India is increasingly depending upon foreign capital to fill the gap caused by a collapse in private investment and overspending by the government.

While reading budget-related news, I came across this item: In July, the President, Vice President and Prime Minister will get to travel in spanking new special planes procured from Boeing. This story puts the estimated cost at Rs 8,458 crore.

In the run up to the Budget, I recall reading stories such as this one, which said that all three wings of the armed forces were delaying much-needed procurements because of a fiscal crunch, and hoping the former defence minister, now the finance minister, would do better this time round. It was not an alarmist piece — the CAG, no less, had in a scathing indictment questioned the government’s inability to provide proper boots and prescribed nutrition to the soldiers fighting in the Kargil sector, pointed at delayed payments to soldiers, and to other anomalies.

The same defence correspondent, writing after the Budget was presented, said the budgetary provisions were inadequate. Not enough to meet defence needs, says Business Insider. The defence budget belies all expectations, said the Financial Express. On the same site, another piece actually calls out this budget as “a dampener for national security“. Remember “national security”? The central plank of Modi and the BJP? Remember the jawans fighting on the border, who are regularly recalled to the public conversation whenever an election is imminent? Or used as props in a photo op with the PM in designer gear?

But it’s okay, says General Bipin Rawat, India’s first Chief of Defence Staff. Can’t pay pensions? We’ll just up the retirement age, he says, seemingly unmindful of the fact that he is actually saying he expects soldiers to fight on to the age of 58. Can’t buy the equipment we need to get up to speed? No problem, we will find “alternate sources” of money. And so on. Where do you even begin to point out that the financial mismanagement of the government is severely compromising not merely the education, the health, the employment opportunities of the lay citizen, but also the nation’s security — at a time when the government, through its intemperate rabble-rousing, has actually managed to make enemies out of even erstwhile friends?

On January 22nd, the SC heard the combined petitions against the CAA. It needs to be remembered that dozens of petitions had been filed in various courts around the country; the government argued that the SC should take over and hear them all and the SC agreed. And it “gave the government four weeks to answer”.

Why the government, which presumably thought it through before bringing the bill to Parliament and getting it passed, needs time to explain why it brought the bill is neither here nor there – the fact is, the SC not only gave the government oodles of time, it also refused to impose an interim stay while the case is being heard.

And so, yesterday, this happened: dozens of Supreme Court lawyers, no less, marched through the streets of Delhi protesting against the CAA, and the SC’s dereliction of duty. All this, while the BJP goes around claiming that the protests are politically motivated, and the work of “one community”.

There is so much more that is happening, and needs to be documented, but time is in short supply so I’ll leave you, for the day, with just this one story which is illustrative of so much that is wrong about the way our country is now run:

Remember how, a few weeks back, a BJP MLA posted a video of a shantytown that, he claimed, was a den of illegal Bangladeshis? Remember how, on the basis of that video, a junior official in the BBMP — with the police guarding the operation — demolished some 200 huts in the shantytown, making approximately 5000 people homeless, in an operation the BBMP claimed had no official sanction? The case was heard in the Karnataka High Court yesterday. This is what the court said:

However, the court observed that the complaints were general in nature and did not specifically point to the property. “There is nothing on file to indicate that police inspector visited the site to verify if there are Bangladeshi immigrants,” the division bench observed on Monday.

“It began with the letter of the police to the land owner to remove structures and in this situation we are of the view that the state will have to rehabilitate those who have been dispossessed,” court said in an interim order while seeking the government’s response on February 10.

The court asked the state advocate general how the police could act on mere suspicion. It said that strict action must be taken against the police inspector who issued the notice since the police had assumed the power of a civil court to issue the order.

That is all it takes today. A video making random, unsubstantiated allegations is all it takes to destroy lives and livelihoods.

I don’t have a link for this, but I remember about a month or so ago coming across a Kanhaiyya Kumar interaction in course of which he was asked the question: Why are students protesting, when they should be studying? His response, in translation, ran thus:

Education is not merely about memorising how 6 million people were killed during the Holocaust. Education is also about understanding how normal people, an entire country, stood by and watched it happen. Education is about learning the signs, and ensuring that it does not happen in your country. And that is why the students are out on the streets today — because of education.

How did we stand by, and watch this systematic deterioration, all these years?

PostScript, at 1.14 PM: On January 1, Gunja Kapoor got a New Year guest — she was “honoured” by a follow from Narendra Modi. Earlier today, she wore a burqa and infiltrated Shaheen Bagh. What she intended to do is unclear.

A campaign of hate

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This morning, I saw a startling thread on my Twitter timeline. Joe Walsh, a Republican candidate for the 2020 Presidential elections in the United States, went for a Donald Trump rally in Iowa and asked some questions of those waiting in line to enter.

Does Trump lie, Walsh asked. “No”, was the answer. It was the wrong answer — as of mid-December, Trump has made 15,413 “false or misleading claims” — Newspeak for “lie”. That is an average of 14.6 lies for each day in office. He has lied more often in 2019 than in the previous two years put together.

Has Trump played golf while in office? No, Walsh was told, unlike Obama, Trump has never played golf while at work. Again, wrong answer. Trump has played golf so often, so visibly, that there is an actual site dedicated to tracking his golfing days, and what it is costing the taxpayers (a small matter of $125 million and counting). His last golfing day was February 2nd — literally two days before this Iowa rally.

Nobody knew, or cared, that the US fiscal deficit now exceeds $1 trillion. Nobody thought Trump had done something bad — impeachably bad — in Ukraine. Everyone thought it was China, not the US, suffering because of his trade tariffs.

Where do you get your news from? How aware are you of the vast gulf between what is happening and what you think is happening? How do you know what is real, any more? What, today, is “news”, anyway?

Back in the day, when JNU boiled over with the fabricated ‘tukde tukde‘ allegations, I started writing a series of posts on what ‘media’ is today, and how we got here. I started with Rajeev Chandrasekhar — who at the time was the primary investor in then then fledgling Republic TV channel — and his definition of news, and how to measure it.

The second piece in the series looks at how we got to this place, where we don’t even have a clear definition of news anymore. “We live,” I wrote at the outset, “in a world where it is increasingly impossible to differentiate between news and noise, to distinguish signal from surround sound, to differentiate real events from manufactured ones. And we did not get here overnight.”

The third in the series explores the question of when and how the deterioration accelerated — with the downgrading of the role of the editor, and the entry of excel jockeys who would hold newsrooms accountable not for facts, for truth, for deep reporting but for clicks, and page views, and unique users.

The fourth, borrowing from Daniel Boorstin’s seminal — and still relevant — book The Image, looked at how the media manufactures the things we unquestioningly believe are true. Then I looked at a discrete incident of how the media pushed a fake story — and how it triggered a tragedy. And at an egregious breach of journalistic norms and ethics from nearer home, centering on Kulbhushan Yadav (anyone remember him?). Also at a case study of how poison spreads, involving India Today and its much-feted anchor Shiv Aroor.

These pieces are long, your time is short, and I am not even sure if any of this matters any more. But these last 24 hours I — as a journalist now 32 years in the profession — have been thinking of the role of the journalist, of the media, in helping to create this dystopian world we live in today. And it seems others are, too: It came up in a totally unrelated phone call with a friend, and it came up right at the outset of a lunch yesterday with another friend, and that is just in the last 24 hours. It occurs to me that it is time to put the news back in “news”, and I intend to try. Finding people who see the need and are willing to back it is a challenge but what the hell, if not now, then when?

Are you following the Delhi election campaign at all? If you are, yesterday would have struck you as a particularly memorable day — in a Hall of Shame sort of way — in what has been a particularly execrable campaign. And that is only partly because the Prime Minister personally entered the fray, and through what he spoke about and what he refrained from speaking about clearly indicated the mindset of his party.

What he chose to speak about is, mostly, Shaheen Bagh which he characterised as vote bank politics. He said:

It begins with a blatant lie: There has not been a single “assurance” of substance from this government, barring sweeping declarations that “no one will be affected”. It then morphs — without any relevance whatsoever — into his much-touted, and ultimately ineffective, “surgical strikes” and makes “these people” the anti-national enemies who question him. And then, there it comes, the clear dog-whistle: He mentions three particular protests and sites to raise the bogey of some dark, shadowy, dangerous “politics behind this” — without specifying what it is that is dark and dangerous about it.

Here is the PM, in his own voice (and to large swathes of empty seats). Listen to him, and to how the crowd reacts as he hits the high spots:

Seelampur. Jamia. Shaheen Bagh. What is the commonality? See the map below:

Map courtesy FactChecker.in

An incomplete, crowd-sourced map of protests countrywide (one which does not even list the over sixty 24/7 non-stop, Shaheen Bagh-style protests across the country) shows, at last count, 458 anti-CAA protests in the country. It lists 17 in his home state of Gujarat. Hell, it lists 34 in Delhi alone. The map in its entirety — and again, remember this is incomplete — is a graphic, stunning indicator that what began as a protest has morphed into a revolution that encompasses the entire country in its sweep, leaving no corner untouched.

But: Seelampur. Jamia. Shaheen Bagh. A clear dog-whistle for the dogs of war primed to listen, and to act — as three men with guns have acted thus far; as a Hindu Sabha mob, held back by a three-layered barricade and a very strong police contingent, acted. And as, even as I was writing this, a crowd at Jamia acted:

Modi’s appearance on the campaign trail was in the role of accelerant; his job was both to give official imprimatur to the intense communal rhetoric that has characterised this election cycle, and to kick it into a higher gear.

The program of incitement was premiered as early as December 20, when Kapil Mishra led a pro-CAA rally in dally to the chants of goli maro saalon ko. That first appearance of the slogan prompted considerable outrage — except within the BJP, which rewarded Mishra with a ticket to contest the Delhi elections. (That is how the BJP finds its candidates — from the dregs. Remember Tajinder Bagga?)

It was Home Minister Amit Shah — the man, in case it needs reminding, who is responsible for the maintenance of law and order in this country — who kicked it off with his February 26 rally, where the goli maro saalon ko slogan was raised and where Shah turned the heat on Shaheen Bagh. Buses were burnt, cars were burnt, if “these people” come back Delhi will not be safe, the always fact-free Shah told the crowd.

Something happened that day that we neither noticed, nor remember today:

However, the party has distanced itself from such sloganeering. The party president in Delhi, Manoj Tiwari said that neither he or BJP supports such remarks. He also asserted that BJP was contesting elections along the lines of developmental issues like health, water, and cleanliness of Yamuna.

On the very next day, February 27, Union minister Anurag Thakur — in a vivid demonstration of just how far the party had “distanced itself” from that murderous slogan — actually led the crowd in the chant.

Did the party “distance itself” from Thakur? No. Despite the fact that no less than three former chief election commissioners pointing out that his actions were deserving of criminal proceedings. In fact, the party upped the ante the very next day:

In one of the most brazen acts even by the standards of a party that has taken brazenness to unimagined levels, when the EC banned Verma from campaigning for his incendiary remarks, the BJP promptly nominated him to speak on the motion of thanks for the President’s pre-Budget address. And Verma used his speech not to talk of the budget, but to do this:

“Shaheen Bagh protest against the CAA is anti-national as the protesters demand for separation of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir from India. They want Jinnah’s azadi… This is not Rajiv Feroze Khan’s government. It is Narendra Modi’s government… CAA will not be rolled back.”

That is a Parliamentarian, son of a former chief minister of Delhi and also a minister in the Union cabinet, referring to a fellow Parliamentarian, tainting his parentage, and implying that his father was a Muslim. (Which, even granting for the sake of argument is true, which it isn’t, is not a crime or a fault — at least, not yet.)

Another Union minister, Prakash Javadekar, calls Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal a terrorist. Kejriwal walks straight into the unsubtle trap and in course of a town hall, talks of how he has built schools, tell me, am I a terrorist?; how he has built mohalla clinics, tell me, am I a terrorist?, and so on in that vein.

Rookie mistake, because he merely amplified an allegation so ridiculous it deserved to be mocked, not taken seriously and responded to. And that sprung the trap — Javadekar got to expand on his earlier throwaway statement, to run with it (while flanked by the state BJP chief and the sloganeering Thakur):

TimesNow, one of the BJP’s leading propaganda channels, was outraged by the use of the word “terrorist”. Not over Javadekar, though:

We have “proof”, says Javadekar, secure in the knowledge even in what is ostensibly a press conference, no one will ask him why in that case the Central government has taken no action, why it is allowing a proven terrorist to occupy the office of chief minister of the national capital. Not one reporter asked that blindingly obvious question — the statement, however, was carried in every paper, every site, on every channel.

It shouldn’t surprise you, though. Remember this? At a 2017 election rally in Palanpur, Gujarat, the Prime Minister of this country no less accused his predecessor of participating in a shadowy meeting with various senior Pakistani officials, and raised the bogey of a conspiracy. And Amit Shah promptly upped the ante and named Hamid Ansari — see the unsubtle dog whistle there? — as the vice president the PM did not name.

The sequel is equally worth recalling. The Congress raised its customary “uproar” in Parliament. The PM chose not to attend. And the speaker said this:

“All elections are over, the things that are said on the roads shall not come to Parliament…I am not allowing you to raise the issue,” Mahajan said

Yeah, sure, the PM said something that falls squarely within the definition of criminal defamation of a former PM, but hey, raat gayi baat gayi, come on now.

Meanwhile the party which, its chief claimed, was fighting on the planks of development, and security, and education, and health, kicked off February with the release of its second campaign video — one that raises, through clever juxtaposition of words and images, all the old bogeys: urban Naxals, rioting by Muslims, Pakistan… Scroll breaks it down for you frame by frame to underline the hate, the incitement.

“Teach a lesson to those who fear the rise of India,” the song says. “Give an answer, Delhi, to those who love Shaheen Bagh.”

The local unit of the BJP added another layer of vilification:

Consider those lines: “Why are the rapist-killers of Nirbhaya smiling/Who is it who is saving them?” Consider the calculated cynicism of a party that, knowing fully well that the rapists are running out the clock with appeal after appeal, and that the state government and its CM Kejriwal have no role to play in the process, still chose to peddle that line. (You could argue that the words don’t explicitly point to Kejriwal — they don’t have to, the always reliable, and reliably insane, Javadekar already made the connection:

And here, in the final lap of the election campaign, is the BJP’s ultimate weapon — a man who rose to power on the back of riots, a man whose first act on being gifted the chief minister’s post by Modi himself was to cancel approximately 20,000 criminal cases against himself and his fellow travellers, has entered the field to connect the dots: Shaheen Bagh. Biriyani (What on earth is Bisht’s obsession with biriyani anyway?). Riots. Rahul Gandhi. Pakistan. Terrorism. (All spliced in with misquotations and lies about what Dr Ambedkar said, and lies about what Modi’s government has accomplished):

Pakistan, which for the BJP is a much more reliable vote-getter than “development”, “education”, “health”, “peace” and all the rest of it, gets 7 mentions in the space of just 44 seconds (and then gets linked to Shaheen Bagh, and Kejriwal):

‘Is this the most communal campaign ever?’ is the theme of several editorials and opeds in the last few days. No. Every single campaign run by this party has been on these same, predictable lines: ratchet up the fear of some unnamed “others”; invoke a grab-bag of “enemies” including but not restricted to Muslims, urban Naxals and Pakistan; slander the opposition with allegations up to and including treason, all supposedly backed by “proof”…

What does it tell you about a party that, just three days after presenting a budget in the midst of a failing economy, has nothing to say about its plans to reverse the slowdown, its plans to create employment, to promote health and education, to raise farmers’ incomes, to address any of the multitude of ills the country faces today? What does it tell you of a party whose only message, its singular appeal to voters, rests on hate of some unnamed but terrifying “other”?

Speaking of journalism, here is an outstanding example of what depths it has sunk to. At a town hall, a journalist actually thinks this is worth asking. And — what is even worse — a politician, a sitting chief minister, instead of asking the journalist what this has to do with his fitness as a candidate and telling him that religion should not be misused for performative politics, actually obliges:

Remember how Modi and the rest keep harping on how the protests are “despite the government’s assurances”? Here is the latest: In Parliament today, the Home Ministry announced that there are no plans for a nationwide NRC till now. Watch Amit Shah, introducing the CAB, on the floor of the Rajya Sabha:

It will come, he says here. Not yet, says his ministry today — an assurance that means absolutely nothing because the NPR, with the additional questions as distinct from the 2011 form has already been rolled out (and the budget presented on February 1 has set aside Rs 4,568 crore for the exercise. And the NPR is the precursor of the NRC, vide the Citizenship Act of 2003, and vide Shah himself.

The only reason for this seeming “clarification” just now is to buttress the government’s claims that the concerns have been addressed, and also, importantly, because Kerala, West Bengal, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra have already announced that they will not permit NPR within those states, and other states are also preparing similar announcements.

A government that does not know how to admit, let alone correct, an error is using the Delhi election campaign for two interconnected reasons: To use the smoke and mirrors of multiple statements to somehow validate its intentions, and by demonising the opponents of the CAA/NPR/NRC, to polarise the electorate and somehow hope that this polarisation will crystallise into success at the polls.

Will it work? I don’t know. I’d hope not — because “working”, in the sense of translating polarisation into electoral success, will mean a validation of the tactic, and we have far too many examples already of the immense harm such polarisation, industrialised and weaponised — as it is, and will continue to be — has caused.

I want to end this, though, with some things I found. Like this moment at Shaheen Bagh, when a Sikh group that has been actively engaged in helping the people of Kashmir showed up at the protest site in solidarity:

Or this enormous, response crowd at a rally in Madhubani, in Bihar, that turned out to protest the CAA/NPR/NRC:

Or this crowd that turned up at Kodungallur, a temple town in the Thrissur District of Kerala, to hear Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar Azad speak (in Hindi, a language largely alien to the average Malayali, thus necessitating translation):

And then this speech, by TMC MP Mahua Moitra, in Parliament yesterday where she opposed the motion of thanks for the president’s pre-Budget speech. Click on the link, listen to the speech, it is worth your while:

I’ll leave you with this thought from Moitra’s speech:

“…because the people of India are on the streets today, and they are beyond your ability to silence”

A thought for our times

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This morning, the first thing I did (after making myself a cup of coffee) was to put on my earphones and listen to Ravish Kumar of NDTV reflect on the events of yesterday.

Those events in their red hot immediacy fuel rage and despair in equal measure but, as Ravish says, they also merit — demand — a period of calm reflection. Ravish reflects so we don’t have to. Please take the time out to listen till the very end.

A personal note: In the midst of all this I managed to do my back some damage, so I’ll be resting it today. My next blogpost will therefore be tomorrow — and maybe it is a good thing, maybe this time is best used reflecting not on the immediate events, but on what lies beneath, and what looms ahead.

Take care, be well, stay safe.

The U-turn sarkar

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May 25, 2014: The then Delhi BJP chief Harsh Vardhan says that the first issue he will take up with the prime minister, if his party won the Lok Sabha polls, was the cause of granting full statehood to the capital city. The move, he said, would solve the problem of multiple authorities; he said the NDA had earlier tabled a relevant bill in Parliament but the successor UPA government had not followed up.

Harsh Vardhan’s predecessor Madan Lal Khurana had made a similar demand in 2003, coincidentally, again, just ahead of assembly elections. “The BJP leadership at the Centre says it is drafting a new Delhi Statehood Bill,” the article points out. “This is something it had done in 1998 as well, a few months before the assembly elections in November that year.”

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