In early 2009, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC mounted an exhibition using Nazi propaganda material — posters, movies, newspapers, pamphlets, paintings — to show how the Fascists skilfully, subtly, spread the venom of anti-Semitism; to show how these messages, this propaganda, helped to create and nurture a climate of hate so widespread, so embedded in the collective psyche, that an entire nation stood by and watched, with indifference and even with a “they had it coming” acceptance, as over 6 million Jews were ruthlessly harvested and slaughtered in what Hitler, cloaking murderous intent in mundane words, called “the final solution”.
One of the most compelling exhibits of the State of Deception exhibit was a painting, commissioned by the Nazis, that showed a young Hitler speaking to a handful of followers. The circa 1937 painting, by Hermann Otto Hoyer, was used in the exhibition as a riveting example of the power of speech, of propaganda, to normalise unimaginable evil.
The painter titled it ‘In the beginning was the word‘, a reference to the first line of the Gospel according to John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God.’
In the beginning was the word…
Ajay Singh Bisht, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, opened his campaign for the Delhi elections yesterday. And this is his opening gambit:
First day of Yogi's campaign in Delhi. kicks off the campaign with this line –
Watch a clever, calculating, cold-blooded demagogue at work — a man who rose to power on the back of the muscle power of his own private militia, a man who on assuming power cancelled all the serious charges that had piled up against himself and his fellow-travellers, a man who has so normalised violence and hate in the state he rules that even as he was campaigning in Delhi, this happened in his home state and caused barely a ripple:
What boli? Where has the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, even attempted to talk to the protestors at JMI, at JNU, at Shaheen Bagh? At the over 60 Shaheen Bagh-style 24/7 sit-ins across the country? At the millions who have turned up for protest meetings across every single state in the country?
Bisht’s message is one of sly justification; it asks you to assume that the government has attempted to reason with the protestors — when, on the very same day, Law Minister RS Prasad said the government was “ready” to talk to the protestors. See the orchestration?
Officially, the government — after 50 days of unleashing the full might of its stormtroopers, in police uniform and out of it — is “ready to talk”. Simultaneously, the party’s star campaigner (Bisht has 12 rallies scheduled in a span of six days) plants in your head the thought that talks have failed, and only the “final solution” is left.
It is the time-honoured technique of the Fascist; the pre-emptive justification of the natural born killer. “We are all reasonable men here,” is how Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone opens his “peace” speech to a roomful of the most powerful mafiosi of the fictional time of The Godfather.
Bisht is a reasonable man, pointing out, reasonably and calmly, that the government has exhausted all its options and now has no recourse but to kill.
In the beginning was the word…
Note the calm, matter of fact tones. Note that this is not even incitement to violence — it is an open promise that extreme violence will be used. Note the brazen confidence with which he is able to make such a speech, a confidence that can only stem from the knowledge that all the institutions meant to protect the citizen against such as him — the police, the courts, the election commission machinery — have been suborned, subverted, neutered.
This is what happens when that happens. Activist Saket Gokhale, in a piece of protest-theatre that will enter the textbooks one day, officially asks the Delhi Police for permission to take out a march chanting the goli maro saalon ko slogan — and the police actually grant him permission because in the times we live in, even the police are no longer sure about what is legal and what is not, what is permissible and what is not.
The @DelhiPolice has, shockingly, granted me permission to hold a rally chanting “desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko.”
The permission was given to me today when I visited Parliament St. Police Station.
The permission has since been revoked and Gokhale, in turn, responded with a perfectly valid question — if a Minister can do it, if crowds of people can march along Delhi streets chanting it with impunity, then why can’t he?:
Saket’s peskiness invites an involuntary giggle. But when you are done laughing, think of what this incident tells you. Think of how badly the police have been hamstrung that it has to twist itself into pretzels in a situation where, in more normal times, it would not only have denied permission outright but even acted against the petitioner for daring to so openly seek to defy the laws of the land. How did this come about? Because of what the ruling party has systematically done, what it has enabled. Thus:
Map Bisht’s words to Amit Shah’s campaign opener — ‘In logon ko sazaa deni chahiye ya nahin?’. Map that to Anurag Thakur leading a crowd in chants of goli maro saalon ko. Map that to BJP MP Parvesh Verma, in a highly communal campaign speech, saying in as many words that the people of Shaheen Bagh will enter “your homes” to “rape, kill, your wives and daughters”.
There it is, the saffron rag waved to both enrage the mob and to permit, even provoke, violence. In its immediate aftermath the Hindu Sena — yet another of the private militias the saffron brigade privately operates and publicly distances itself from — called its followers for direct action against Shaheen Bagh today, February 2. It called for the militia to “do what the police is unable to”. It made the call openly, its president spoke to camera with that same sense of impunity that characterises the speeches of Bisht, of Thakur, of Shah.
The plan has since been called off; the “Sena” making a virtue out of necessity by claiming that its action was being used by anti-national forces to create a “riot-like situation” — a classic example of how the right wing projects onto the “enemy” what it intends to do.
Remember, though, the words of the Hindu Sena’s call to action: It calls on Jats and Gujjars to unite and take radical action against Shaheen Bagh. And on the exact same day:
Kapil Gujjar, responding to the call. (Scroll has a round up of videos of his attack). Justifying it. Cloaking it, normalising it, with the “Jai Shri Ram” chant that — in an ultimate insult to the maryada purushottam the saffron brigade has totemised — has been subverted into a war cry of the hate-mongers. Why did he do it?:
“Kyunki humaare desh mein aisa nahi chahta, humaare desh ek Hindu rashtra vaadi kshetra hai
There it is, the justification the RSS and the BJP have used historically to justify their hate-filled agenda, their genocidal intent.
Pause for just a second, here, to see how the BJP hate machine operates. The party did not have any official comment, no condemnation, on Verma’s nakedly rabble-rousing speech. But on Saturday, from among the 303 MPs it could have picked from, the party chose Parvesh Verma to move the motion of thanks in response to President Kovind’s pre-Budget speech.
That is how you enable — by maintaining a studied silence on an issue, then doing something that sends a signal to both party and base that you are absolutely ok with the action.
In this connection, note that the Prime Minister is yet to say a single word about the hate-mongering his party is engaged in, and about three discrete acts of violence that are a direct outcome of the campaign vitriol.
In this connection, remember too that Amit Shah in a campaign speech defined the choice facing Delhi voters as being between “Narendra Modi , who conducted airstrikes and surgical strikes on Pakistan’s soil to kill terrorists, and on the other, there are these people who back Shaheen Bagh. You have to decide.”
Remember that this speech was made some three hours aftera gunman had fired at protestors at Jamia Milia Islamia University, injuring one.
In the beginning was the word…
Now see this: The BJP’s new campaign song, released yesterday, the same day a gunman fired twice at the protestors in Shaheen Bagh. Consider the opening gambit:
Samay aa gaya chalo nikalein Dilli se dharne waalon ko Yaad karo urban naxal ko empower karne waalon ko
It is time we evict those sitting on protest in Delhi Remember those who empower Urban Naxals
Bharat ab lachar nahi to, Dilli hi lachar rahe kyun Sabak sikhao bharat ke uthan se darne waalon ko
India is no longer helpless, why should Delhi be Teach a lesson to those who fear the rise of India
This is the party governing India; the party that already controls law and order in the national capital; the party that is now campaigning to control what is in effect a glorified municipality.
(Remember that in the run up to the 2014 elections, the BJP had at its national executive meeting in Delhi adopted a formal resolution that it would grant full statehood to Delhi if it came to power. That this promise was part of its 2014 election manifesto. Remember that when it comes to divisive acts such as the CAA, the BJP points virtuously to its manifesto and says, oh, but we said we would. Remember that statehood to Delhi, a promise made in 2014, has not been spoken about since. Ask yourself why).
This party, so totally devoid of issues, so completely barren of ideas, so aware of its own lack of ideology and appeal, is now nakedly, openly, falling back on the one thing it knows to do: sow hate; incite violence; then point to that violence, and to the resulting toll, to ask for votes. And the hell with the cost.
“Teach a lesson“.
In the beginning was the word. And the word was hate.
One of the posts on that stream deserves particular mention. Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski advises her daughter and granddaughter: “DO NOT BE INDIFFERENT”. Words that resonate — or should — with every one of us today.
As it happens, I am reading a book called Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power, by Stephen Greenblatt. And what he says in the preface to set up his book is worth noting (emphasis mine):
“A king rules over willing subjects,” wrote the influential sixteenth century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, “a tyrant over the unwilling.” The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.” Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? …
Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?
How much of what Greenblatt writes about do we recognise in ourselves, our leaders, and our country, today?
Interestingly, the official handle of the Shaheen Bagh protestors (which is worth following — there are some smart minds at work) was quick off the mark to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz, and use it to reiterate the vow that gross inhumanity will not be allowed to recur, thus linking the excesses of Nazi Germany to the current repressive policies of the Modi regime in India.
All of this is beginning to get under the collective skin of the ruling party. Home Minister Amit Shah addressed an election rally in the Babarpur area of Delhi yesterday and inter alia, said: “Your vote to the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate will make Delhi and the country safe and prevent thousands of incidents like Shaheen Bagh.”
Think about it — the home minister is publicly, falsely, implying that Shaheen Bagh — an “incident” — is somehow making the country unsafe. (It was in course of this speech that a young man, who had the courage to shout an anti-CAA slogan at an Amit Shah rally, was hit with chairs while the HM waved his hands around feebly, then continued with his speech).
Amit Shah is wrong, of course. On two counts. Firstly, as anyone who has spent even a few minutes at Shaheen Bagh will tell you, that protest is the most remarkable sign of a people’s awakening even in these fraught times, when every day brings a dozen stories about abuse of power and twice as many stories about resistance. And secondly, because repressing Shaheen Bagh will not “prevent” more such “incidents” — the protest has already inspired a legion of similar protests around the country, as this incredible thread collating sit-ins countrywide should indicate.
Shah should study this thread; it will tell him, if he doesn’t know it already, that the day he uses force against Shaheen Bagh — and that day is coming, sadly — he will unleash forces that will destroy him. In which connection, Shah might also benefit from reading this piece by Ashutosh Varshney, which lays out the current dilemma for the government: damned if you attack, doomed if you don’t.
Despite logic and common-sense dictating otherwise, why do I believe that Shaheen Bagh will see violent reprisals sooner than later? Because the growing drumbeat of propaganda against the protestors there indicates official orchestration and planning. Check out the language — of an elected member of the Lok Sabha, no less. Check out the vicious gaslighting, the open call for mass murder.
#WATCH: BJP MP Parvesh Verma says, "…Lakhs of people gather there (Shaheen Bagh). People of Delhi will have to think & take a decision. They'll enter your houses, rape your sisters&daughters, kill them. There's time today, Modi ji & Amit Shah won't come to save you tomorrow…" pic.twitter.com/1G801z5ZbM
Why is this man — this genocidal maniac, son of BJP politician, former Chief Minister of Delhi and former Labour Minister of India the late Sahib Singh Verma — not facing immediate arrest, and action under the most stringent provisions of the law?
Now consider the latest example: the other day, alleged journalist Deepak Chaurasia, who on his TV program has systematically demonised the protestors, went with his entourage to the site, and was driven back. There was some jostling, shoving, pushing — which was promptly amplified into a “lynching”.
Shaheen Bagh on its official handle almost immediately put out a statement condemning the incident, but that was ignored by the media, which went into paroxysms of self-pity about journalists not being allowed to function. Arnab Goswami in his official capacity as president of the National Broadcasting Federation (the fact that he was elected to this post by his peers in the television media is in itself a comment on the state of the media) issued a lengthy condemnation.
Then, yesterday, Sudhir Chaudhary the editor in chief of Zee News landed up, escorted by a strong contingent of police (Why police? And what business does the police have, provided an escort to a journalist ostensibly going someplace to report? Who gave them the orders?). And with him was Deepak Chaurasia.
This time, Shaheen Bagh protestors changed tactics — they chanted, shouted slogans, refused to talk to the two “journalists”. And Chaudhary spun it as an indication of how riotous the Shaheen Bagh protestors are. They pushed women to the front and the men hid behind, he said — echoing, precisely, the words of Ajay Singh Bisht the other day. See how the propaganda machine works, smoothly and in tandem?
Chaudhary, it might be worth pointing out, is one of two senior “journalists” arrested by the Delhi crime branch on the charge of blackmailing industrialist and MP Naveen Jindal. Following the BJP’s rise to power, the charges have been allowed to lapse through lack of follow-up; meanwhile, the government provided him X Category protection.
PostScript to the above, added at 5.45 PM: This happened. Two men brandishing pistols intruded in Shaheen Bagh and threatened that lashein girenge. There you have it, the direct consequence of Shah talking of “shocks” while demonising Shaheen Bagh, Thakur (see below) leading hate-filled chants, the BJP hate machine including journalists getting into overdrive. Indian Express has a story.
Elsewhere, Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur attended an election rally yesterday afternoon. With the critical 2020-’21 budget due for presentation in just five days. This happened:
Shocking: It was a local BJP leader from Delhi back then, its now a front line BJP leader and MoS Finance, Anurag Thakur who is leading the crowd to chant “Desh ke gaddaron ko, Goli maro salon ko”.
That is a Union minister, calling for mass murder. And not just indiscriminate, either — in his speech leading up to this volley of sloganeering, he explicitly mentioned Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal as the gadaars. A Union minister. Naming “traitors”. And leading a chant that traitors should be shot dead.
In tandem with the above, read about Nalini Balakumar, who was arrested for the ‘crime’ of holding up a ‘Free Kashmir’ banner and who has just received bail. She was booked under Section 124 A (Sedition) and Section 34 (common intent) of the Indian Penal Code. This, remember, is the incident that prompted the Mysore Bar Association to declare that none of its members would defend her case — an egregious instance of lawyers sworn to defend the law violating its most basic principle, that every person is entitled to a defence. Here is the bit, though, that should really give you pause:
The government counsel noted that by opposing the CAA, Nalini held an anti-government view.
That is the India of today — it is ‘seditious’ to hold an ‘anti-government view’. Presumably it is neither seditious, nor criminal, for a federal minister to call for mass murder, as Thakur did the very same day.
India Today “debated” this. Amit Malaviya, speaking in defence of Thakur, said it was the crowd that had chanted the goli maro line — a defence as risible as it is reprehensible.
But you expect that from Malaviya and his ilk, who are officially appointed and paid to defend the actions of the party. What is indefensible is that Rajdeep Sardesai, one of the seniormost journalists in the country, and a celebrated icon of the profession, sat in the host’s chair and listened po-faced to Malaviya’s ridiculous defence, without a single attempt at push-back. Martin Luther King said it best:
“When all this is over, what we will remember is not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
The sheer insanity of this incident — Thakur leading a chant that calls for murder, the police doing nothing about it, the media enabling it — is best underlined by activist Saket Gokhale (who has been brilliant during these dark days, and is someone you should follow), who did this (He explains his line of reasoning in this thread):
Important:
I’m applying for permission to @DelhiPolice this week for taking out a rally chanting “desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko”.
This is the only way left for getting Delhi Police to answer whether this disgusting slogan is allowed under law.
Speaking of whether it is ok to chant that slogan, it might be worth mentioning that the man “credited” with coining it has been given a BJP ticket to contest the Delhi elections.
More from the chamber of horrors that this country is turning into. Remember, when you see such instances, that it is hate-sodden rants of the BJP leaders, the ministers, the TV anchors and Amit Shah’s “internet yodhao” that both permit and enable such vile behaviour. Remember that every single one of them has blood on his hands.
This is pro CAA/NRC rally held in Mangalore where #RSS goons can be seen raising slogans against Muslims (threatening to chop them off) also they openly threatened local MLA Mr. UT Khader that they will chop him as well. Any police action against them? pic.twitter.com/urUMTLvo36
They said that the JNU servers had been vandalised. They filed FIRs against JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh and 17 others for this act. They said that because of the vandalism, CCTV footage of the masked thugs, armed with iron rods, hammers and bottles of acid, who entered the campus and for three hours unleashed hell, was not available.
Wait, unpack that. The charge of vandalism was used by mass media — particularly the two leading English news channels, and the leading Hindi channels — to suggest that the horrific attacks of January 5 was retaliation, and therefore somehow justifiable. The vandalism itself was used to justify the inability of the police to track down the culprits — never mind that social media did a great job of tracking several of the ring leaders down within 48 hours; never mind that a senior ABVP leader said on TV that they had taken bottles of acid with them for “self defence”.
The story has since unravelled. An RTI inquiry revealed that there was no vandalism. And now, another RTI inquiry indicates that there is in fact CCTV footage — which won’t be released because it has been “withheld by law enforcement agencies”.
Which is to say, the police filed false charges; the police know the identity of the attackers; the police were culpable in allowing the attacks to go on unhindered; the police have all the evidence they need — and, as of today, 23 days after the attack, there has not been a single arrest.
However, Bhim Army chief Chandra Sekhar Azad was arrested in Hyderabad two days ago — for the crime of arriving in the city to attend a rally that had already been announced, and had all the requisite permissions. Now this: A group of Hyderabad University students were detained for about eight hours while police “investigated” whether they had any “connection” to Azad.
For a moment, assume they had. So? What is the crime? Under what statute of the IPC is it prohibited for me, or you, or those students, to know Azad?
Alongside this, read this deeply reported piece by Anoo Bhuyan detailing how the government and the police actively prevent hospitals from treating those wounded in police actions against protestors. The police actions are illegal in themselves; the state machinery then compounds it by blocking treatment to the victims — just another artefact of this sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas regime this country voted for.
The thuggery of the police is exceeded only by the thuggery of the ruling party — and, not for the first time, the police comes off worse for wear when uniformed thuggery collides with political thuggery. Here is the latest instance:
Welcome to the goondaraj of @myogiadityanath@BJP4India MLA beats up and threatens to kill police officials in UP
This shouldn’t be shocking while you have a CM with multiple criminal cases against him pic.twitter.com/fWcMwMuH5o
Beaten up by lawyers owing allegiance to the BJP, and not a yip. Beaten by random MLAs in Bihar, in Gujarat, in Uttar Pradesh, and not a yip. Given half a chance, though, only too happy to beat up women, children, students. This is the state of the law and order machinery under this regime. And then there is this:
"I will shove that child you are sitting with, right where it came from".
Lucknow Addl DCP Vikas Chandra Tripathi To a woman protestor with her child@Uppolice, rotten from top to bottom
And this latest example comes from a state where, according to India Today — remember, a channel whose star anchors are Rahul Kanwal and Rajdeep Sardesai — a poll has shown that Ajay Singh Bisht is, for the second year in succession, the best performing chief minister in the country.
“When you were merely asked to bend, you crawled,” said LK Advani in the immediate aftermath of the Emergency. He hadn’t seen nothing yet, then — this is what conscienceless crawling looks like. And this is how hate is enabled, normalised, in this country.
BJP IT cell head Amit Malaviya posted a video clip suggesting that journalist Arfa Khanum had called for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. It was picked up by BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra and by the serried ranks of blue-tick propagandists owing allegiance to the party (the list is contained in the story linked to). It was a classic case of suggestio falsi, a clip mischievously edited to suggest that Khanum said something she did not.
A viral video clip purportedly shows a woman protestor in Lucknow — a Muslim — complaining that the Rs 500 per day the Congress pays those who attend protests is pitifully little. It is, in case it needs mentioning, misleading.
Then there is the other kind of propaganda — suppressio veri. Back in December there was a news story about the felling of over 40,000 trees in the Talabira forest in Odisha to facilitate the expansion of an Adani mine. Shortly thereafter, Minister for Environment Prakash Javadekar released the latest edition of the India State of Forest Report, and said forest cover in the country had increased by 30%.
Aap chronology samjhiye — the good news comes as narrative-reshaping palliative shortly after the bad news hit the headlines. And now it turns out, according to a researched story in Scroll, that 29.5% of land claimed as forest does not in fact have any trees. See how this government works?
It is regular, predictable. It lies — even in Parliament, which is an offence in itself. It obfuscates. It fudges data. As for instance Minister for Tourism Prahlad Singh Patel did in Parliament when he claimed that the abrogation of Article 370 and the clampdown on Kashmir did not have a quantifiable impact on tourism in the Valley (a laughable claim even on the face of it — I mean, how on earth do you with a straight face say that blocking public movement does not affect tourism?)
An RTI inquiry now reveals not only that the minister was lying, but that the impact of the hit is much greater than even the pessimists had imagined. The ministry’s own figures show a 71% decline in tourism revenues. For the BJP via its official handle in Tamil Nadu, Kashmir’s plight — with its livelihood ruined, its politicians jailed, its voices silenced — which should be a matter of national concern, is a joke.
But why is any of this a surprise? In 2018, the Supreme Court castigated the real estate firm Goel Ganga for blatant violation of environmental laws and for wreaking massive environmental damage, and fined it Rs 105 crore. Almost immediately, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari — who, they say, is one of the better, more efficient ministers in a Cabinet clearly starved of talent — did this (Emphasis mine; read this slowly, the sheer scale of the effrontery, the casual disregard for even the highest court in the land, takes some getting used to):
Eight days later, Nitin Gadkari, the union minister for road transport and highways, wrote to the then environment minister, Dr. Harshvardhan, asking him to consider Goel Ganga Group’s request to effectively undo part of the Supreme Court’s judgment by reinstating an office memorandum issued by the environment ministry on 7 July 2017.
The Supreme Court had struck down that particular Office Memorandum terming it “totally illegal”. Government departments use office memoranda, or OMs, to clarify specific laws or policies.
That, in one sordid example, is the government we have, the one we re-elected recently with an even greater majority. A government where one minister tells another to reinstate an order that the Supreme Court, no less, had declared “totally illegal”.
Anti-corruption — the biggest electoral plank of the BJP — has been repeatedly shown to be a sham. Here is yet another example: the opaque electoral bonds scheme cooked up by the late Arun Jaitley. This is the scheme activists have been opposing in court ever since it was first introduced; the scheme Modi’s own law ministry said was illegal but he decided to go ahead with it anyway; the scheme the Supreme Court has enabled through the ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ route; the scheme the BJP has been by far the principal beneficiary of since the beginning. Here is the brilliant Nitin Sethi, cutting through the opacity, showing us the light — take the time out to watch, to listen. Because “You cannot be indifferent”:
That is enough corruption for the day. How about competence? The MGNREGA, a scheme to provide at least partial employment to the poorest and the most disadvantaged, is facing a severe funds crunch. Funds have run out, fifteen states “are already in the red” — that, at least, is the language of this report; what it actually means is that in fifteen states, the poorest of the poor have not been paid for work they have done. (Note: jargon obfuscates meaning.)
Elsewhere, only three in ten farmers have received actual benefits from the Pradhan Mantri Kisan scheme the government spent tons of money publicising, per another RTI request.
Last September, there was uproar when the news broke that the government had not been able to pay the CRPF its ration allowance. It is now the turn of the Border Security Force to announce that the cash crunch is so severe it is unable to pay salaries for January and February.
Or how about this? The Minister for Environment Prakash Javadekar, no less, claimed in December that the uproar over pollution was unnecessary; that “no Indian studies” had shown any causal link between pollution and people’s health. He was wrong — actually, he was lying — then. Here is more news: An IndiaSpend deep dive not only causes premature death, but also infertility, birth complications, defects in newborn children, and still births. Read that, keeping in mind that 15 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India.
In this parade of grim news, I actively went searching for rays of light. And I found one such in this thread by Surekha Pillai, where she chronicles instances of regular, ordinary folk doing extraordinary things to help heal our wounds. Check out those individual stories, those people Surekha chronicles — when the history of this period is written, it is the names of such that will be starred.
“Nearly one thousand people (Muslims protesting the CAA) who had turned up for the protest transformed into volunteers to clear traffic and crowds so that the procession could move through Thrissur town without any hurdles.”
Read the story; it is just one of thousands of reasons why I am proud of my home state, which resolutely refuses to be tainted by communal poison despite the desperate efforts of the saffron brigade.
I began this post with a mention of Auschwitz and, by extent, of fascism. These days, that word is thrown around a lot, as are comparisons between the BJP and the Nazi regime of Hitler. How valid is the comparison? How much of it follows from what is happening around us, and how much of it is knee-jerk, alarmist, exaggeration?
To even begin to think of such questions, it is necessary first to wrap our heads around what fascism means, and how it differs from your common, garden variety bigotry. Given the cataclysmic nature of the Holocaust, there are literally thousands of books that examine fascism, in theory and practise; there is so much literature on the subject you could spend a lifetime reading, and still merely scratch the surface.
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale, and the author of several books, at least three of which are must-reads for our times: How Language Works, How Propaganda Works, and How Fascism Works. What follows is an abridged, edited (in the sense that I skip paragraphs now and again, so do note that the paras are not contiguous) extract from his foundational text on fascism (Emphasis is Stanley’s):
I have chosen the label “fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.
Fascist politics includes many distinct strategies: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity.
The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.
Fascist politics can dehumanize minority groups even when an explicitly fascist state does not arise. By some measures, Myanmar is transitioning to democracy. But five years of brutal rhetoric directed against the Rohingaya Muslim population has nevertheless resulted in one of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing since the Second World War.
The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them”…. appealing to ethnic, religious or racial distinctions…
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history by creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.
Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them”, by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity.
As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous. … “We” are hardworking and have earned our pride of place by struggle and merit. “They” are lazy, surviving off the goods we produce by exploiting the generosity of our welfare systems, or employing corrupt institutions, such as labor unions, meant to separate honest, hardworking citizens from their pay. “We” are makers; “they” are takers.
Done? Ok — as you read that abridged list of the symptoms of fascism, how many times did you find yourself nodding and thinking, yeah, I recognise this? How many times, as you read, did you find yourself thinking of some contemporary headline (as, to cite just one example, the bit about the attack on universities, or to cite another, sexual anxiety as exemplified by the growing pushbacks against women-led protests in the country today?)
How many times in your reading did you find yourself thinking, yeah, this is us?
If the answer is “a lot” or “all the time”, congratulations — 75 years after the horrors of Auschwitz, we have jumped out of the pages of the horrific past and, having failed to learn from our shared history, have begun to repeat it.
Here is a handy checklist of symptoms:
Remember the quote from the beginning?:
DO NOT BE INDIFFERENT
PS: I will not be updating this tomorrow due to some personal work that takes me away from the desk. Be well, see you Thursday.
“THE VALUE of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind.“
Those words have been running through my mind on loop since yesterday. Words that pithily, pitilessly, hold up a mirror to ourselves and to our standing as citizens in “the largest democracy in the world”. We are just a vote, to be sought once in five years and to be ignored in the interregnum. And it is this realization that, finally, has brought people in their millions out on the street – rising prices, falling employment, the inequities of the CAA/NPR/NRC are merely the symptoms of that much larger disease; the disease of a democracy that does not value its most fundamental unit: the citizen.
Vemula, a sentient human being, a dedicated student, a young man with aspirations, has been reduced to a statistic (23rd Dalit suicide in premier institutions), to a documentary (the Death of Merit), to yet another “anniversary” on the grim calendar of blood-spattered memory, read his last letter again, slowly; the final words of a young man so “desperate to start a life” that he ended up ending it.
YESTERDAY was also remarkable for a speech made at the ongoing Raisina Dialogues – the 5th edition of a conference of global thought leaders the MEA, under whose aegis it is organized, says is themed around ‘Navigating the Alpha Century’; a forum that is designed to articulate India’s policy on vital issues, including national securit.
“What we saw in Kashmir, we saw radicalisation happening… These people can still be isolated from radicalisation in a gradual way, but there are people who have been completely radicalised. These people need to be taken out separately and possibly taken to some deradicalization camps. We have deradicalization camps going on in our country.”
That is General Bipin Rawat, inaugural holder of the newly created post of Chief of Defence Staff, telling the world that India has – has, not is planning – its own version of China’s infamous ‘Vocational Education and Training Centers’ in the Xinjiang region.
It is worth noting that the Chinese camps were the outcome of a “people’s war on terror” first announced in 2014; that they are internment camps operated for the purpose of “indoctrinating” Uyghur Muslims since 2017.
Note that shortly before this speech, Rawat spoke of following in the footsteps of America post 9/11.
“We have to bring an end to terrorism and that can only happen the way Americans started after the 9/11 terror attack. They said let’s go on a spree on global war on terror.”
Now connect the dots. The man who heads the defence forces in the country is calling, first, for a ruinous external war (Against who, exactly? The General leaves that unsaid, leaving the identification of the target to our own internal prejudices) – never mind that the model he wishes to emulate has cost the United States an estimated $6.4 trillion and counting, and resulted in the loss of an estimated 480,000 lives.
And as a corollary, he wants to institutionalize the ‘deradicationalization camps’ – a slightly more politically correct phrase for the infamous Nazi concentration camps. Again, the key questions are left unvoiced, and unanswered: Who identifies those in need of such ‘deradicalization? Under what laws? What is the standard of proof that you have been ‘radicalized’?
What does the ‘deradicalization’ program (which, according to the General, already exists) comprise of? Where are these existing camps, when were they founded, who is in those camps now, how were they identified, under whose oversight do these camps run…? (There is scope, and need, for an RTI here).
And one final question: What sort of man has this government elevated to the specially created post of the head of defence services?
Sidelight: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, now in India on a charm offensive that has included paying floral tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, announcing a $1 billion investment (while on which, someone should ask about the $3 billion investment announced three years ago), and tweeting maudlin word salads, ran into multiple headwinds.
For starters, his attempts to get a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi hasn’t worked (thus far), for reasons both political and economic. Then, Minister for Commerce Piyush Goyal, using the forum of the Raisina Dialogue, said Bezos’ promised investment was no big deal – a statement that has irked Indian and international investors.
“Until now it used to be a matter of pride to announce such big investments into India,” said the chief executive of an MNC. “But if this is the response companies are going to get from the current dispensation, they will think twice before making or announcing investments here.”
Years of reading headlines announcing investments, and then looking in vain for some sign that the announcement yielded actual results on the ground, have made me dismissive about such announcements. On this, I belong to the ‘Put your money where your mouth is’ school of sceptics. But even so, to hear the minister for commerce diss a major global businessman at a global forum was unusual – until you connect the third dot:
Mr @JeffBezos , please tell this to your employees in Washington DC. Otherwise your charm offensive is likely to be waste of time and money . https://t.co/L06kI0AqLn
Chauthaiwale is the BJP’s ‘In-Charge, Foreign Affairs Dept’, per his bio. He is point person for the BJP’s attempts to reach out to Indians abroad and to get them to participate in pro-CAA rallies. And basically, he is with this response taking Bezos out behind the woodshed to administer a spanking for the negative coverage Modi and the BJP have been getting in the Washington Post. Just one more instance — adding to the earlier one involving MEA S Jaishankar and US Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, and the recent instance where a BJP lawmaker suggested that Satya Nadella of Microsoft needs to “get educated” in the wake of the CEO’s remarks about the CAA and immigration — that speaks to show how thin-skinned this government is, how intolerant of questioning.
Jeff Bezos should go home tell Washington Post what is his impression about India,” Chauthaiwale told Reuters. “The Washington Post editorial policy is highly biased and agenda driven.”
What astonishes me about these knee-jerk attempts at brow-beating is this: What do they think a win is, in such a situation? ‘See, we ticked him/her off’ — is that it? Does that suffice? Because surely anyone with even half a brain can see that such muscle-flexing never ends well, not when applied against those over whom you have no coercive state instruments to use. I mean, what exactly are you going to do to the Washington Post next — cancel your subscription? Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: Never pick a fight with a fellow who buys ink by the gallon and paper by the ton.
I’ll leave these thoughts here for now, and come back later in the evening to add a list of links worth reading. (Oh, and you add your links, too).
PostScript: A couple of hours after I’d written of the various comments made about Jeff Bezos, comes this response:
The promise to create one million new jobs over the next five years comes at a time when unemployment in the country has risen to decades-long highs. A CMIE report put unemployment at 7.7% in December 2019; alarmingly, the sharpest uptick is seen in rural unemployment. The Economic and Political Weekly had in December done a deep dive into India’s unemployment situation, which is worth a careful read. And Livemint reports that a government battling a crippling cash crunch is likely to create 16 lakh fewer jobs in 2020. The growing distress is manifest in scenes such as this:
And against all of this, what the government choses to do is pick a fight with someone who holds out the promise of job creation, rather than sitting down with him to work out ways in which the process — assuming there is serious intent behind the announcement — can be speeded up. Ironically, this, at around the same time:
Home Minister Amit Shah: People saying negative things in India always talk about unemployment. When they talk about unemployment, a question arises in my mind. You have ruled this country for 50-60 years, what measures did you take to solve the issue of unemployment. (15.1) pic.twitter.com/tnSWSvqtVp
This whole thing reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the gallon and paper by the ton.”
Reading List:
Adding to the chorus of universal condemnation, Nature magazine has an essay calling on the government to stop the violence in India’s universities and colleges. The bit that stands out: “Many of the government’s supporters are upset that university students, academics and scientists are also opposing the new law. But they must know that freedom of expression is core to a university’s mission; that the ability of citizens to protest peacefully against government policies is a right, not a privilege; and that the state should provide protection for such dissent. Without it, no opposition would be able to present its case to the public — as members of the current government and its supporters did in the years they were out of power.”
The Davinder Singh saga continues to throw up questions — as in this piece examining the 2017 encounter on the basis of which he was awarded the President’s Medal.
Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar Azad has finally been granted bail. Some of the conditions attached are appalling; most notably the rider added by Judge Kamini Lau of the Tis Hazari Court that Azad cannot visit Delhi for the next four weeks in light of the upcoming elections. Azad meanwhile was received outside jail by his supporters, and proceeded to the Jor Bagh masjid.
Sadaf Jafar, who was recently granted bail, speaks to Outlook magazine about the treatment she endured in jail, and her stories are horrific.
Going back to the earlier story involving General Bipin Rawat and the “radicalization camp”, Sanjay Sipahimalani uses the book A Bookshop in Berlin to look at life in Nazi Germany. See if this passage resonates: “On Kristallnacht, Frenkel witnessed Jewish shopfronts being smashed and interiors burnt and looted. “Whoever tried to defend himself or to save his property was manhandled and abused. This time, there were bloody, murderous encounters. Everything took place under the very noses of an uninterested police force.”
A story on the wave of protest comics that have appeared in the wake of the anti-CAA protests
Time magazine takes an in-depth look at the phenomenon of women fronting the anti-CAA protests
IMPORTANT: Official documents contradict the MHA’s claim that Aadhar numbers will not be collected as part of the NPR process.
In The Print, freelance journalist Ashutosh Bharadwaj accesses reports filed by the Uttar Pradesh police on the Hindu Yuva Vahini — the private army founded and led by Ajay Singh Bisht, on the back of which he rose to power. It is, to put it mildly, scary. And symptomatic of the rot in India’s biggest state.
On Muhammed Ali’s birthday, read this lovely Twitter thread about the boxer’s interaction with Bertrand Russell against the backdrop of Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam war. Also read this post recalling the time the famed boxer came to Madras, as it was then, and met then Chief Minister MG Ramachandran.
Via Tushar Gandhi’s Twitter stream, we learn that this government has ordered that images shot by legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination have been removed from Gandhi Smriti. Suparna Sharma has a detailed, timely blogpost on the issue. And these are a selection of the photos:
The thing about bullies — when outed or confronted, they twist themselves into pretzels to back down. How on earth could his statement — made on the stage in course of the Raisina Dialogues, where everyone could see his lips move and the words come out — possibly be “taken out of context”? Alternately, what according to him is the “context” in which he said what he did, and what is the “context” of this about face now?
Smoke Signals 