Power corrupts…

(In a [paywalled] newsletter for The Morning Context earlier this month, I had written about the troubles roiling various National Sports Federations (NSFs), the looming threats of a ban on the All India Football Federation and on Hockey India, and how sports administration in this country got to this precarious point. What follows is an update, largely about the AIFF and a series of court hearings that occurred over the last few weeks).

A funny thing happened in the Supreme Court last week, during ongoing hearings into various petitions filed by, and against, the AIFF. Senior Advocate Gopal Shankaranaryanan informed the bench, headed by Justice DY Chandrachud, that the AIFF was not able to provide a comprehensive list of players — both male and female — who had represented India at the international level. “We don’t have any such database,” Shankaranaryanan quoted an AIFF official as saying.

Under compulsion, the AIFF finally produced a list of around 180 male footballers, and 3 — three — women footballers. The list was so superficial it did not even include the name of Oinam Bembem Devi, the Manipur-born footballer who has represented India 82 times and is the recipient of both the Arjuna Award (2017) and the Padma Shri (2020).

“Ten years ago,” Shankaranaryanan told the Court, “a woman player represented India thrice at the international level. Later, she got her law degree and when her parents told her that she had to choose between football and a career in law, she chose law. And she is standing right beside me now — my junior, Jhanvi Dubey. She could tell you the names of at least 20 women who have represented India.”

A startled Justice Chandrachud hit the pause button on the proceedings and segued into a discussion with Ms Dubey.

Why such a list was needed in the first place is part of a longer story.

Sports gets its Overton window

For the longest time, the administration of NSFs was straight out of the feudal playbook, controlled by entrenched officials who, with the support of politicians and others with vested interests, held on to their positions of power for decades.

The first real challenge to entrenched authority came in the form of Supreme Court advocate Rahul Mehra (Twitter) who, as I detailed in the Morning Context piece linked above, started filing Public Interest petitions that drew attention to acts of maladministration and malfeasance in various NSFs.

Mehra got lucky in that the Delhi High Court judge who heard the early petitions — Judge Nazmi Waziri — was himself a college-level boxer with a keen interest in sports. As petitions proliferated, the Delhi High Court in an unusual step created a special Sports bench.

Kabbadi was among the first to feel the heat. Its problems began with an indifferent showing at the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia, following which an outfit calling itself the New Kabbadi Federation of India went to court over the selection process followed by the Amateur Kabbadi Federation of India, which is the governing body officially recognized by the Sports Authority of India. 

The Delhi High Court first stayed the election of office bearers to the AKFI, and subsequently appointed an observer — Justice (Retd) SP Garg — as observer for the selection trials held in September 2018.

Justice Garg, by his own admission, had no clue about the sport, which he does not follow — but that is beside the point of this post. The big picture outcome was that the courts became increasingly involved in attempts to clean up sports administration.

Initial judicial interventions largely dealt with discrete issues — an official overstaying his prescribed tenure, for instance. More recently, however, courts began considering the entirety of sports administration — more accurately, maladministration — and taking the view that it is time to revisit the founding documents of the various NSFs.

AIFF’s own goal

Indian football moved from the sports pages to the front pages of mainstream media when, on June 24, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) warned the All India Football Federation that it had to put in place a revised constitution within 38 days and conduct properly supervised democratic elections to the leadership posts before 15 September, or face a ban.

A ban would have immediate and costly repercussions — India is slated to host the FIFA Women’s U-17 World Cup in October, and a ban would take away that right. On 27 July, Home Minister Amit Shah tweeted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had approved the signing of guarantees for hosting the event.

Earlier, responding to a petition filed by Rahul Mehra, the Delhi High Court had appointed former Chief Election Commissioner Shahbuddin Yakoob Quraishi, who had also served as Secretary to the Ministry for Sports and Youth Affairs, and former national football captain Bhaskar Ganguly as administrators, with the brief of drafting a new constitution.

At that point, Praful Patel was into his third term as president of the AIFF. The Delhi High Court had, as far back as November 2017, quashed Patel’s tenure as president and asked SY Quraishi to take over as administrator. Patel appealed against the order, with Reliance Industries-affiliated attorneys appearing on his behalf, and got a stay.

Patel’s tenure officially ended in 2020 but, citing Covid and related issues, he ducked holding fresh elections and continued in office for a further two and a half years, until the Delhi Football Club, represented by senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, appealed to the Supreme Court against Patel’s illegal continuance in office.

On 18 May, a Supreme Court bench led by Justice DY Chandrachud, along with Justice Surya Kant and Justice PS Narasimha, finally kicked Patel out of office and appointed former Supreme Court Justice AR Dave to manage the affairs of the AIFF in tandem with Quraishi and Ganguly.

Stating that the existing state of affairs was “not in the interest of proper governance of the federation”, the SC bench asked the Committee of Administrators headed by Dave to facilitate the adoption of a new constitution for the AIFF, in accordance with the Sports Code (Full text) and other relevant guidelines.

The SC bench further asked the CoA to prepare electoral rolls for the conduct of proper elections to the AIFF executive committee and to carry out the day-to-day governance of the AIFF. This, the SC bench said, would be a temporary arrangement until the new constitution is ratified and fresh elections are held.

The SC’s decision to appoint Dave to head the CoA was born of the realization that Quraishi was dragging his feet for a good five years since his initial appointment by the Delhi High Court. He had submitted an early draft of the constitution in 2018, but the document was problematic on a whole range of issues. Dave was brought in to provide some adult supervision.

Praful Patel goes off-side

The road to hell et cetera…

Bhaskar Ganguly is aging, ailing, and disinclined to pay much attention to the legal side of things — all he wanted was whatever was good for the boys and girls playing football. So the heavy lifting had to be done by a 71-year-old former judge of the SC with minimal experience in sports administration, and a former CEC who was born two months before India attained Independence. Ranged against them were the state associations, most of them headed by feudal ‘landlords’ with ties to politics.

On 22 May, four days after the SC order, Praful Patel sent a memo to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, informing the latter that the Indian Supreme Court had removed him and his executive committee from power. Patel asked Infantino not to take any precipitate action such as suspending the AIFF, and personally “vouched” that Indian football will soon be back on track.

The intent of the letter was to position the Supreme Court as outside interference, and Patel himself as football’s savior.

On the heels of Patel’s missive, a delegation of FIFA and Asian Football Confederation officials landed in India and held meetings with state associations, with the AIFF, with sports ministry officials and with the CoA. They asked that Indian football clean up its act; mandated a proper constitution to be in place by end-July, that this constitution be approved by all state associations by the first week of August, and properly managed elections to the executive committee be held by September latest.

 Worth pointing out here is that the CoA, during its tenure, had been sending multiple emails over time to FIFA, keeping the global body appraised of all developments. The CoA, strangely, even sent FIFA a draft copy of the proposed constitution — strangely, because FIFA is a global regulatory body that has no locus standi when it comes to approving a member body’s constitution.

In any event, FIFA sent a few comments which the CoA duly accommodated in the draft constitution, which was placed before the Supreme Court in the last week of July.

During this hearing, Rahul Mehra made the point that this is the first time the Supreme Court will consider the constitution of a government-recognized NSF. It is therefore precedent-setting, and the outcome could become the template for all other NSFs. Given this, Mehra said, there is a need to make the exercise as comprehensive as possible, and to not rush it due to some externally imposed deadline.

All parties — the sports ministry, the local sports associations, and the CoA — agreed with Mehra’s point. For its part, the SC bench ruled that as a first step, democratic and fair elections overseen by the CoA will be conducted and a properly constituted executive committee will be put in place.

Synchronously, the draft constitution will be vetted by the state associations and all other stakeholders, any and all objections will be taken into consideration, and it will be finalized and set in stone in the space of three months or so. Again, all concerned parties were in full agreement with the SC proposal.

But where are the women?

The one sticking point, throughout this extended process, was the discomfort the state associations felt at the mandate that half the members of the general body should be sportspersons. This, association representatives felt, would result in their becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Status quo ante is that the general body is comprised of 72 members — two each (the president and secretary respectively) from each of the 36 state and Union Territory associations. The recommendation placed before the Supreme Court was that half of them — 36 members — should be sportspersons.

The criteria for a sportsperson to be eligible was, per the recommendations, that he/she should have represented the country on the football field at least once, and should have retired from international football at least two years before the date of elections. But even with such minimal qualifications, several of the state associations were likely to have problems filling their quota with qualified representatives. Hence the idea was tweaked, and it was proposed to have an association of former footballers comprising 18 men and 18 women, agnostic of state affiliation. This was again tweaked to a final recommendation that representation be on a 2 to 1 ratio, with 24 men and 12 women in the general body.

This is where Bembem Devi and Jhanvi Dubey came in — when it came to creating a list of eligible players, the AIFF told lawyers appearing on behalf of the CoA that they had no database of those who had played football for India, nor how many matches each had played at the international level.

Finally, the concerned parties came up with an ad hoc list of 30 names — players who had represented India at least once, who had retired at least two years prior, and who were under the age of 66 (This last to ensure that their tenure does not extend beyond the mandated maximum age of 70).

Via the AIFF website, the CoA is also attempting to get former players to register, in order to widen the field of available candidates — the goal being to pick the top 24 most capped male players who fulfill the criteria listed above, and also the top 12 most capped women, ditto.

Praful Patel flings a monkey wrench in the machinery

Following the Supreme Court order of Thursday, August 4, Praful Patel — who remains a member of the FIFA council — wangled a letter from FIFA to the CoA, the gist of which was that the CoA had not adhered to the assurances given to FIFA and to the promised timelines.

The FIFA email was sent on Friday, August 5 — not to the CoA, but to Sunando Dhar, a Patel appointee who is acting secretary general of the AIFF. Dhar promptly leaked the letter to the media. The Hindustan Times, and subsequently other mainstream outlets, went to town on the possibility of a FIFA ban. The CoA, as well as its lawyers, came to know of the letter only via the news reports.

The actual letter was forwarded to the CoA only in the second half of Saturday, August 6. “The idea,” Gopal Shankaranarayanan pointed out on a call, “was to give the appearance that the CoA was tardy and negligent.”

Meanwhile, on the 6th, Praful Patel called for a meeting of the 36 state associations and told them that the FIFA letter is of great use to them in getting their own way. Use it as best you can, Patel told the associations; we got the letter to help you. The CoA and its lawyers are now in possession of the recording of that meeting, and the full list of attendees.

It is a different matter that Patel had no authority to summon such a meeting in the first place.

Armed with this letter, representatives of the state associations met with joint- and under-secretaries of the sports ministry, asking for urgent intervention. Their demands included that there be no sportspersons in the general body.

The state associations filed an application in the Supreme Court, saying in sum that some sportspersons can be accommodated in the executive committee, but not in the general body. The CoA for its part is recommending that 36 of 72 members in the general body, and a minimum of 5 of the 12 members of the executive committee, should be former players.

Essentially, the sports associations were using the FIFA letter as a hammer to beat the SC-appointed CoA into submission.

The CoA, which has preferred to soft pedal and try to get all stakeholders to arrive at a consensus on all points, appears to have had enough — on Wednesday, August 10, the CoA filed a contempt petition in the Supreme Court (Full Text).

The petition, in essence, says that Praful Patel has abused his position as FIFA council member “to orchestrate a campaign among the state associations to undermine the various steps” taken by the Supreme Court, including having former footballers involved in governance and administration. The petition attaches copies of Patel’s correspondence and, crucially, the transcript of the meeting Patel had with state association representatives on the 6th.

In a hearing before the SC bench on the morning of the 10th, advocates appearing for the CoA told the court that there have been documented attempts to interfere with the court-mandated electoral process; and that these attempts were being orchestrated by those who have been removed from office by the court.

Additional Solicitor General Sanjay Jain told the court that the sports ministry’s intervention was on the basis of the FIFA letter. The court has asked the CoA and ASG Jain to get together and sort out the confusion.

Advocate Menaka Guruswamy, who appeared for the state associations, told the bench that the associations have filed an application — and got ticked off by Justice Chandrachud, who told her, inter alia, that the court does not “appreciate your back door methods to defeat the orders of the court. If your clients don’t want football in India, so be it. We have taken serious note of your conduct and we are watching it.”

The SC bench will hear the case again tomorrow (August 11). I’ll post an update following the hearing.

PostScript: The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, who had begun an audit of the AIFF’s accounts, has in June expanded the scope of its audit to cover the entire duration — 16 years — of Praful Patel’s tenure.

PS2: This piece — as also the Morning Context piece written earlier this month, is based on a review of 100s of pages of court documents, and extensive conversations with advocates Rahul Mehra, who is the lead petitioner in many of the cases now making their way through the courts, and with Gopal Shankaranarayanan, who appears on behalf of the CoA. I am grateful to the two advocates for sparing considerable time in the midst of much.

Relevant Documents:

October 10, 2017 order of the Supreme Court affirming the roadmap and timeline for the AIFF

A special leave petition filed by AIFF August 3, asking for the dilution of some recommendations

FIFA’s letter dated August 5

The CoA/AIFF response to FIFA’s letter of August 5

Contempt petition against Praful Patel moved on August 10

CAG audit to cover Patel’s tenure

(Lead image courtesy khelnow.com)

Update from SC hearing, August 11:

The SC, among other statements, said it will decisively interfere if any attempt is made to sabotage India’s hosting of the U-17 Women’s World Cup. Via Live Law, here is an update on what happened in court on Thursday, August 11.

The woman in red and other stories

With all that we have going on right here in India, a protest in Gezi Park, in Istanbul, seems remote, unconnected — until you begin to read more deeply and start mapping parallels between the happenings in Turkey and what is unfolding in India. I’ve been meaning to write a longish essay drawing on those parallels and underlining the lessons Gezi Park has for us here, but that will need to wait till I am done with the workshops I have to conduct later this week.

(For a quick primer, here is the Wiki entry and a timeline. If you want to go deeper, two books make a good starting point: Under the Shadow by Kaya Genç and Twitter and Teargas by Zeynep Tufekci.)

Gezi Park is on my mind today because of unfolding events over the past 24 hours. Yesterday, in Istanbul, the court sprang a surprise when — despite all indications during the prolonged hearing of the case — it acquitted businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala and eight others.

In 2015, an Istanbul court had struck a blow for the rights of the citizen when it acquitted dozens of people who had been arrested for their participation in the 2013 protests in Turkey. The court ruled that the people were merely exercising their right of freedom of assembly.

Kavala was arrested in October 2017 (15 others, including a journalist and an actor, were arrested around the same time) for his involvement in the same events. While the government’s lawyers obfuscated and initially refused to elaborate on the charges, media outlets close to the Recep Tayyip Erdogan government ran stories accusing him of being “a business tycoon with a shady background”; of “having contacts” with a group of terrorists; of being behind the Gezi Park protests and “transferring significant amounts of funds to certain places.” Does any of this have a familiar ring?

A formal criminal indictment was filed only in March 2019, two years after Kavala’s arrest and incarceration in a maximum security prison, It accused Kavala and the other the defendants of being the “masterminds” behind the Gezi Park protests, of “attempting to overthrow the government through violence”, of being agents of philanthropist George Soros — long story short, a kitchen sink of charges long on rhetoric and short on indictable offences backed by hard evidence. Does that have a familiar ring to it?

Yesterday, the court sprang a surprise when, in a judgement that went against the grain of the lengthy proceedings (during which defence attorneys were routinely hindered, including right at the end when they weren’t given the time they sought to respond to the prosecution’s closing statement), it ordered the release of Kavala and eight other co-accused.

The echoes of the applause greeting the verdict had barely died down, however, when Kavala was re-arrested on charges of involvement in a failed 2016 coup. He had spent over two years in jail on charges that couldn’t stand up in court despite the best efforts of the government; he spent a few minutes breathing free air before he was returned to the Silivri maximum security prison on the outskirts of Istanbul. Does that sound familiar?

The Erdogan government in Turkey is the closest modern parallel to events unfolding in India, and for that reason is worth following closely for the many lessons to be learned. One starting point (besides the two books mentioned earlier) is this podcast, where Amit Varma and Pranay Kotasthane discuss the phenomenon of protests in modern-day networked societies and the ways various authoritarian governments are adapting to deal with them. Below, a short reading list of stories from Gezi Park:

Tufecki, whose book I’d mentioned earlier, wrote this urgent, breathless blogpost from the thick of the protests, a post in which the incoherence arising from writing in the moment with limited connectivity is balanced by the knife-sharp immediacy of her observations.

What is most noticeable is that just as in India, there is a proximate cause for the Gezi Park protests (the threat of demolition of the park, a rare space in central Istanbul with trees and space for people to walk about), but that single cause has since grown to encompass a laundry list of grievances against the brutal Erdogan regime. Also worth noting is the self-policing by the protestors, who are aware of the risk of third-party violence tainting their peaceful struggle:

In fact, even the slightest scuffle is in the park calmed down immediately.  I observed this first-hand when a visiting youngster, about 14 or 15, tried to pick a fight with an older man claiming that he had looked at his girlfriend the wrong way. Dozens of people immediately intervened, calmed the youngster, took him away, helped his girlfriend, asked her if she was okay, and generally made sure it was all calm again. “Not here, no fighting, not here” is heard as soon as any tensions arise. People are very proactive. This is not a let-and-let-live space in those regards (though it is in many others).

Turkish author Elif Shafak writes of the smiles, the laughter, the pervasive sense of joy that marks the protests in defiance of teargas:

The most retweeted messages are those with jests and puns and wordplay—and graffiti. On a wall in hasty letters: “The rich kids have better gas masks, we are jealous.” Nearby in an alley is writing that says: “Revolutionary Gays Everywhere.” One graffiti complains: “I could not find a slogan yet” while another one says cheerfully, “Welcome to the first traditional gas festival.”

….

The protests have coined a term. In a live TV interview the prime minister called the demonstrators “çapulcu,” which means “looter” or “marauder” in Turkish. The social media was quick to pick up the word and redefine it as “someone who fights for his/her individual rights.” In the blink of an eye a neologism was formed, half Turkish, half English. The Turkish noun was transformed into an English verb. Now Wikipedia has a new entry: “Chapulling.”

The next day, all over the Internet there were messages using the new word: “I will be chapulling today,” or “Everyday we are chapulling,” or “Tomorrow I shall chapul again.”

Author Elif Batuman atmospheric, ‘been there’ piece for the New Yorker is rich in detail and insight about Istanbul’s penchant for protesting, even if most of those protests turn out to be futile. And then there is this bit about the joy the protestors display, despite the risks, the threats and even the actuality of violent counter-measures:

On my street, spirits seem to be high. Someone is playing “Bella, Ciao” on a boom-box, and I can hear cheering and clapping. But every now and then the spring breeze carries a high, whistling, screaming sound, and the faint smell of pepper gas.

While on teargas, pepper spray et al, this piece from the Guardian about how it became big business is worth reading. For background on Erdogan, and Turkey’s descent into unbridled authoritarianism, there is this 2012 piece by Dexter Filkins for the New Yorker.

Author Claire Berlinski, who was there, wrote this richly detailed account that will remind you of scenes we have been seeing and hearing about from protest sites across India:

And it was glorious — a huge innocent carnival, filled with improbable (I would have hitherto thought impossible) scenes of nationalist Turks mingling amiably with nationalist Kurds, the latter dancing to some strange ghastly species of techno-Halay, the former pumping their fists in the air and chanting their eternal allegiance to something very nationalist, I’m sure. Balloons lit with candles sailed over the sky; hawkers sold every species of Gezi souvenir, and the only smell of pepper in the air came from the grilled meatballs served in hunks of fresh bread and sprinkled with chilli powder….

And then there is Ceyda Sungur, an academic attached to the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Istanbul. Her day job made her more aware than most of the long-term costs of the planned razing of 100s of trees in Gezi Park; she walked out of the university and, unwittingly, into the history and iconography of contemporary protests when this happened. (Also read this account from The Guardian). Here she is (Image courtesy imgur.com):

When I first saw this image, by some odd association of ideas I remembered Marianne, the 13-year-old who at around 7 AM on October 5, 1789 went to the market place at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, picked up a drum and began thumping out a marching beat, thus setting in motion a chain of events that we now know as the October March, a seminal moment in the history of the French Revolution. (While on this, the pivotal role of women in protests throughout history is the subject for an essay for another day).

Here is what Sungur has become to Gezi Park, and to the history of protests:

One final thought about Istanbul, about Gezi Park — the protests began on May 28, 2013. There has been no resolution yet; the protests continue with undiluted vigour. Keep that in mind when you ask yourself how long the anti-CAA protests can — must — go on. The short answer is, for as long as it takes.

Shifting to our own shores, here are a few stories you should read:

Shruti Rajagopalan‘s take-no-prisoners column for Livemint calls out the Supreme Court for its utter disregard for habeas corpus, in light of a recent speech by Justice DY Chandrachud (full text) affirming the individual’s right to dissent. The nut graf:

He (Chandrachud) invoked the word “liberty” 16 times and “freedom” 14 times. Last week, after six months of detention, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, two former chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir, were charged under its Public Safety Act (PSA), a law that allows detention without trial for up to two years. Worse still, hundreds of others are waiting for their day in court for the ruling on their detention. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, who expressed enlightened ideas on liberty in his lecture, belongs to a court (with 32 other learned justices) that has not set aside the time to hear habeas corpus cases of hundreds of Indians detained in Kashmir. This apparent contradiction requires further examination.

A Reuters report underlines the risk of the increasing use, by Indian police forces, of facial recognition software to identify and potentially harass those taking part in protests. Back in December, Indian Express had broken the story of how the technology, court-sanctioned for use to help police identify missing children, was now being used to create a database of alleged “rabble-rousers and miscreants”. Express had earlier last year run an explainer on the AFRS system that provides background and context.

While on the police, hundreds of cases have been filed in dozens of cities across the country against anti-CAA protestors. They all have one thing in common — not a single one of the charges has thus far stood up to judicial scrutiny. Here’s the latest example, from Karnataka where the high court has granted bail to 22 people booked in connection with the December 19, 2009 protests in Mangalore and observed, inter alia, that the police investigation “appears to be mala fide and partisan”. The money quote from the bail order, in a case where the police charged protestors with using stones and weapons to attack them:

The photographs produced by learned SPP-I depict that hardly any member of the crowd were armed with weapons except one of them holding a bottle. In none of these photographs, police station or policemen are seen in the vicinity. On the other hand, photographs produced by the petitioners disclose that the policemen themselves were pelting stones on the crowd“, states the Order

In passing, while we celebrate these instances of protestors being released on bail, keep in mind that getting bail is not vindication — the protestors, who as the judge observes here were sinned against, not sinning, still have to go through the whole process of court appearances, which is exactly the reason the police resort to such tactics.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, who had earlier said the NPR exercise would not be permitted in his state, appears to have changed his mind, and his tune: He now says that there is no harm in NPR. Widespread state-level opposition to the Centre’s rollout of the NPR is the only realistic way Amit Shah’s plans can be stymied; if Maharashtra goes back on its initial objection, it weakens a growing coalition of states willing and ready to face down the central government over the issue.

Related, the UIDAI has — on the basis of an anonymous complaint — asked an auto driver (and reportedly, over a hundred others in one neighbourhood) in Hyderabad to prove his citizenship. This is one of the very real fears the CAA/NPR/NRC has instilled in people — that anyone with a grudge can file an anonymous complaint, which the authorities can then use to harass you. For what it is worth, the UIDAI has via news agency ANI issued a clarification which, in the patented fashion of all such clarifications, puts the onus on the media for having “misrepresented” the facts. Sir Humphrey Appleby said it best: “No, Prime Minister, a clarification is not to make oneself clear. It is to put oneself in the clear.”

In Kashmir, police have resorted to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to register cases against people using proxy servers to access social media. The move is intended to deter locals from telling the world about what is happening within the sealed off bubble that the state has become, and follows on the heels of a video of ailing Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani making it past the state’s firewalls and onto social media. FIRs have been filed against those who “defied government orders and misused social media platforms,” the police said in a statement without, however, explaining why uploading a factual video is “misuse” whereas the government can claim, in Parliament and on international forums, that normalcy has been restored in the Valley.

Quartz, meanwhile, reports that the government’s internet ban has sparked an exodus of students and businesspersons, particularly start-ups, from the Valley. Also from Kashmir comes the news that panchayat polls, originally scheduled to take place in March, have been postponed. “Home Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir…has advised the Election Authority to consider deferring of the conduct of polls based on credible inputs from the law enforcement agencies,” the notice read. J&K comes under the central government — which, just a week ago, played tourist guide to yet another group of random European Union officials as part of its ongoing propaganda exercise intended to show that all was well in the Valley. And here we are, citing “security concerns” to explain the government’s inability to hold panchayat elections.

Regular readers will recall that I’ve been saying the much-hyped trade deal (it was supposed to happen during ‘Howdy Modi’, but didn’t) was unlikely to materialise during the upcoming visit of Donald Trump to India. Here is the confirmation.

It will likely happen only after the 2020 Presidential elections in November, we are told. What we are not told is that you don’t know who will become the next President, and what his attitude, and that of his party, will be — so can we just agree that the trade deal will not happen in the foreseeable future? As recently as last night IST, Trump had this to say:

“Well, we can have a trade deal with India, but I’m really saving the big deal for later on,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House for a trip to California. “I don’t know if it will be done before the [US presidential] election. We’re not treated very well by India, but I happen to like Prime Minister Narendra Modi a lot.”

Modi happens to like Trump a lot, too (why, is not so clear), as evidenced by the daily stories of preparations to roll out the red carpet. As for instance:

Ahead of President Trump’s visit, who will arrive in India on February 24 and is expected to visit the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department has released 500 cusecs of water into the Yamuna to improve the condition of the river. The water has been released from the Ganganahar in Bulandshahr to improve the “environmental condition” of the river. Yamuna flows adjacent to the boundary wall of the Taj Mahal.

A “cusec” is a measure of flow (one cubic foot per second). “Released 500 cusecs” means nothing as a measure of volume unless there is a time attached to it — “500 cusecs for one hour”, for instance, would mean 18 lakh cubic feet of water.

But never mind that example of the media lazily regurgitating a bureaucrat’s press note without application of mind, the point is, the government is doing everything it can to create a Potemkin facade ahead of the Trump visit. It’s worth remembering that as recently as the Delhi election campaign UP chief minister Bisht, whose government ordered the release of water to “improve the Yamuna’s condition”, was blaming Kejriwal for the sorry state of the Yamuna. Also from UP, this latest example of a state that has totally, completely failed its citizens:

This government has often, and with justification, been accused of lack of attention to detail. Think demonetisation when, among other things, it turned out that the government had not anticipated the need to recalibrate ATM machines when rolling out new notes of a different size. Or GST, whose provisions are still being “tweaked”. But when it comes to the Trump visit, no detail is too small to escape the government’s notice. How’s this?

Ahmedabad is prepping up to host the POTUS and to ensure that the city is clean, the municipal corporation has now sealed three paan shops at the airport circle. Notices have been pasted outside the shops mentioning that if the shop-owners try to remove the seal, legal action will be taken. The initiative has been taken to make sure that all the roads and walls around the Ahmedabad airport remain spick and span.

Elsewhere in UP, Congress leader and poet Imran Pratapgarhi has been fined Rs 1.04 crore fine for participating in anti-CAA protests. Apparently that is his share of the Rs 13.42 lakh it costs to deploy RAF and PAC personnel at the protest site. Note that this is a magistrate, no less, fining someone for exercising his right to dissent — a fundamental right, as Justice Chandrachud said just the other day. Here is your reminder that it costs the country Rs 1.62 crore per day to provide security cover for Narendra Modi.

Seven sailors have been arrested for passing on information to Pakistan.

And finally, for today, read this Vice investigation into the first known use of deepfakes in an Indian election. And be afraid. Be very afraid, because it is suddenly that much easier to manufacture “proof” against whoever the government wants to destroy (Imagine this tech existing say in 2016, when the government and captive media combined to create the totally false allegation that “Bharat tere tukde honge” slogans were raised by Kanhaiya Kumar and others during the JNU protests of that year. It was easily disproved then; today, the “supporting evidence” will be far more persuasive thanks to tech, and the resulting effort to disprove the allegation that much more difficult.

Republic of Spin

Spin — the massaging of facts to make them palatable or, as someone once put it, “the artistic moulding of the unshapely clay of truth” — is not new. David Greenberg, in his book Republic of Spin, traces its origins back to the ancient Greeks (though they called it rhetoric back then).

What is relatively new is that spin is no longer an activity that follows in the wake of facts — it has replaced facts. A case in point is the video that surfaced (linked in my previous post) late Saturday night, of the police action inside Jamia Milia Islamia University on December 15.

Within hours, the Crime Branch released two other clips, widely publicised by various right wing handles, which show incidents from before the police entered the library premises. Here is the first one:

QUIT PAINTING #Jamia Students as Saints. This CCTV Footage shows Student Goons with stones in hands which they pelted at police from inside #JamiaMillia . Delhi Police was right in giving them taste of their own medicine#JamiaUnderAttack #Isupportdelhipolice #JamiaProtests pic.twitter.com/vr8RU3iKJu

— Rosy (@rose_k01) February 16, 2020

It shows a milling throng leaning over the railing of a balcony, jostling for a better view. It shows the students entering the library. It does not show the stone pelting the post alleges.

A close relative, of hard right persuasion, sent me this clip with similar claims, excoriating me for supporting the JMI students who, he said, were “jihadi thugs”.

Where is the stone pelting? “This clip shows the scene immediately after they threw stones,” said my relative with fact-free conviction. I reminded him of a scene from an old Malayalam movie, where a bunch of conmen flog paintings to the relatives of dead people. In one instance, they tell the son of a dead man that his late father wanted a picture of a horse in a grassy meadow. But when they unwrap the canvas, it turns out to be bare. Where is the grass, asks the son. The horse ate it, says the conman. So where is the horse? Arre, when the grass is gone, what will the horse do there? When the grass grows back, the horse will return.

Which brings up the second clip:

Video of riotous Jamia students after damaging public property rush to hide in the library . All before the cops come to get them . This is the first part of that video floated by ppl like Faye !
RT and let the world know ! pic.twitter.com/iqR568Jonf

— Karuna Gopal (@KarunaGopal1) February 17, 2020

The video shows students rushing into the library seeking shelter. It also shows some students already there. The messaging says it shows riotous students “after damaging public property” rushing to hide from the cops. What is the allegation that these students came here after damaging public property based on?

And all of this is prelude to this third clip:

This clip shows police — some with masked faces — entering the library and beating up students armed only with books.

Pause right there. On December 18, this is what the police said:

An officer of Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police-rank, who is part of the probe into the violence that erupted during protest in and around Jamia Millia Islamia on Sunday, denied that the police entered its library and thrashed students.

“A DCP-rank officer took a video in which it is shown that students were asked to leave the library… they were then taken to a safe place with their bags on their heads so that they would not be hit by stones. Whether the library was ransacked is a matter of investigation. Our force did not enter the library,” the officer said.

So that is lie number one: The police did enter the library. Can we agree that this is now beyond dispute? Can we therefore agree that the police lied?

The exculpatory narrative is that the students damaged public property outside the university, then ran into the campus; the police entered on their heels and beat them up. Take those points in order:

One, the police on December 17 arrested ten people for the violence outside the university that they used to justify their intrusion onto the campus. None of them were students. Also: The police announced a Rs 1 lakh reward for information on those who were party to the violence outside the university on December 15.

In other words, those already arrested — on the basis of evidence, presumably — were not students; as late as February 10, the police was still looking for information on others involved in the rioting. How does that jell with the argument that the students inside the library — none of whom have their faces masked and are, therefore, easily identifiable — were responsible for the violence?

And if they were in fact responsible, as is being claimed not by the police but by propagandists, why have they not been arrested and charged? Why is the police, almost two months after the incident, still looking for information?

Secondly, and crucially, how did the police enter the campus without permission? Here is JMI VC Najma Akthar setting out the issue:

“I object to just one thing. We are with police when they have to look for criminals. But when they are coming to a university, they have to ask us so my proctor goes with them. That’s the only protest. Secondly, our university’s name should not be dragged in because we have nothing to do with it,” Akhtar said.

“If they (police) had asked us, we would not have denied permission. We would have asked our proctor to accompany the officers so that he could help them identify the students and ensure they are not humiliated. My university is closed and we are on vacation. Most of my students have already left the campus. How can we have 20,000 students participating in the protests?”

A contemporaneous account is worth reading for context, one that inter alia talks of police entering a mosque within the campus and beating up students who at the time were offering namaz. Were they chasing rioters? That remains one of the unanswered questions lost in the din.

Give the police the benefit of doubt, however. Say for the sake of argument that they were chasing rioters armed with weapons and stones the CCTV footage was not able to pick up. Then think ahead to the events of January 5, involving the same Delhi police, at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The police report of that incident says that there was a spell of violence earlier that afternoon; that a senior police official had toured the area and assured himself that the situation was under control. Then this:

The second spell of violence started before 6 pm, when members of the JNU Teachers’ Association and some students had gathered at Sabarmati dhaba for a ‘peace march’. According to eyewitnesses, the protest came under stone-pelting by masked men, who then barged into the nearby Sabarmati hostel and ran riot.

At around 6.45, the VC sent a message to the police asking for increased deployment at the main gate — this, while masked and armed thugs (unlike the ‘evidence’ being trotted out about JMI, here the videos clearly show hammers and iron rods in the hands of the marauders) subsequently identified as belonging to the ABVP were running riot inside. The police received numerous calls about the ongoing violence, and therefore were clearly aware of what was happening inside the campus. And then:

“The policemen found a group of 40-50 rioters carrying sticks were vandalising properties in the hostel and assaulting students there. The police used a public address system to warn the mob not to damage property and disperse peacefully. Despite warnings, the mob continued the violence and paid no heed to the police orders,” Arya said.

The Delhi police enter JMI without permission and beat up students who had no visible, demonstrable connection to any violence. One student lost an eye as a result of the police action. The same Delhi police, on actually seeing a group destroying property and assaulting students, is content with asking them to be good boys and girls and stop misbehaving — an appeal the rioters paid no heed to. What is the police supposed to do in such a case?’Stand by and watch’ is the wrong answer.

There is more:

However, despite already having the university authorisation to intervene, as per the FIR, the police force stopped at the gate and waited for an official permission to enter the campus.

What explains this behaviour? The lead paragraph of the story cited above says:

As a mob wielding sticks, iron rods and hammers assaulted students and damaged property on Jawaharlal Nehru University campus on Sunday night, police teams stood outside the gate and entered the campus only at 8pm. The police explained that they were waiting for an official permission from the varsity administration to enter the campus, as required by the law.

Waiting for official permission as required by law. The same police that 20 days earlier entered a university campus with no permission.

Unless the law referred to above was passed after December 15, the police who entered JMI were in clear and flagrant violation, yes? The supposedly exculpatory videos being passed around are therefore worth bupkis, yes?

Further, if permission is not given, the police cannot enter a university campus even if it knows there is violence within. Vide:

At 6.24 pm, after violence had broken out, Vice Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar messaged at least three top senior police officials. Strangely, instead of asking them to contain the violence quickly, Kumar said, “Considering the volatile situation in JNU campus, I request you to station police at the gates of JNU campus so that they can quickly reach the trouble spot in the campus if a law and order situation arises.” 

“In case a law and order situation arises”, says the VC — while rioting was actually going on within the campus. What qualifies as a law and order situation, then? One more unanswered question.

In any case, the law-abiding Delhi police waited outside the gates, at the VC’s instructions. And then?:

What followed was dozens of men, their faces covered with mufflers, chanting slogans — “Desh ke gaddaro ko, goli maaro saalo ko”, “Naxalwad murdabad’ and “Na Maowad, Na Naxalwan, Sabse Upar Rashtrawad” — not allowing ambulances to reach the campus by puncturing tyres and smashing windows. They did so next to a police barricade and in front of a police detention van, with many of the men chanting slogans of ‘police zindabad’.

The men threatened journalists not to click photos or come nearby and also manhandled Swaraj India head Yogendra Yadav. All this while, over 250 policemen looked on without intervening.

Even journalists were not spared:

They also did nothing when scores of ABVP supporters, including a good number of middle-aged men, started harassing journalists, students and ordinary people waiting outside the main gate, hurling abuses and forcing them to chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. They even assaulted India Today reporter Ashutosh Mishra as he was reporting live, calling him a “jihadist” and “Naxali”. Rohan Venkataramakrishnan of Scroll was surrounded by a mob as he tried to record a video on his phone, pushed around and hit on the head. He said several policemen were standing only a few metres away, but they didn’t intervene. Siddharth Ravi of the Hindu was gheraoed by masked men outside the campus. Ayush Tiwari of Newslaundry was told to chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai” by two men outside the gate. The very next moment, a policeman approached and told him, “Bhaag yahan se.”  Go away.

All of this happened outside the gates. Accepting that the police did not enter to contain the violence within because they didn’t have written permission, what stopped them from intervening in such clear instances of violence outside the gate?

At every single point in the whole sorry mess, the actions of the police fail even the bare minimum scrutiny. And this is the police force we are expected to believe. While on that, Home Minister Amit Shah (who directly controls the Delhi police force) spoke at an official function yesterday, and this is what he had to say, just hours after the videos of the police brutality in JMI surfaced:

“Despite all the anger and provocation, Delhi Police should remain calm but it should also be ready to deal with the miscreants with firm hands to protect the people.”

Remember this example of the police being “provoked” but still remaining “calm” and protecting the people with “firm hands”?:

#JamiaProtest IF THIS DOESN'T CHILL YOUR BONE. THEN IM SORRY YOU'RE BOT HUMAN!!!! I SAID WHAT ICSAID pic.twitter.com/TLtOPbA2OO

— 🌻 (@watermelon6ugar) December 15, 2019

Meanwhile facts, like murder, will out. A few more videos have now come out.

new jamia footage part 1 pic.twitter.com/SUwICO38jJ

— Surekha (@surekhapillai) February 17, 2020

pay specific attention to when a masked policeman tried to destroy a jamia CCTV. okay that's all. pic.twitter.com/FFn79U36Dz

— Surekha (@surekhapillai) February 17, 2020

While on unanswered questions, here is one more: How did these videos leak, and from where? JMI universities had earlier said the police had taken CCTV footage for their investigations (which, two months later, are still going on). Which means the police, and the HRD ministry that controls them, are the only ones with access. So who leaked? Why? (As I was writing that, I remembered a Sir Humphrey Appleby line from Yes Minister: “The ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top”).

In context, remember also that on the exact same day, December 15, there was a similar police action in Aligarh Muslim University, resulting in widespread injuries.

All of the above are facts. Now for a segue into supposition/deduction: The protests in the wake of the passing of the CAA caught the home minister by surprise. And — since that is the only method he knows — he responded by unleashing his police force in an orgy of violence, hoping to terrify the protestors into submission. The protests escalated as a result — so he used a tame VC and the uniformed personnel as enablers, but this time relied on the private army that masquerades as the BJP’s student union to indulge in another orgy of violence. Because bullies will be bullies.

In other news, Donald Trump is coming to India. We are building a wall to ensure that no eyesores — you know, poor people living in slums — spoils the schmooze-fest of two of the world’s leading narcissists. It is estimated that Rs 100 crore or more of taxpayer money will be spent on “beautifying” Ahmedabad — in other words, in creating a Potemkin facade of prosperity — for a visit that will last for three hours. And 10,000 policemen will be on duty to ensure that, god forbid, no protestors sneak into the celebrations.

But that is okay, we are told, sometimes you have to spend money in the larger interest — which, in this case, is the Indo-US trade deal all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have been working on for more than two years now. In its desperation to get something out of the visit, India announced its readiness to permit the import of US chicken legs, turkey, blueberries, cherries and various dairy products.

All to no avail. USTR Robert Lighthizer was expected in India this week to sit with Indian officials and iron out the details of a trade deal. He has, however, informed the Indians that he is unable to travel — which basically means the deal is kaput, at least for now. And to make things worse, the US putting India in the list of developed nations means further economic strife. But never mind, we will have a grand event, with lots of pictures of Modi and Trump traveling on a road strewn with Rs 3.7 crore worth of flowers, and…

In other news, after Amit Shah announced the other day at the TimesNow summit that over the next three days he was ready to meet anyone who wanted to discuss CAA and related issues, the dadis of Shaheen Bagh took him at his word and announced they were marching to his residence to seek an audience with him. The march was blocked, and permission was denied. Bonus in this story of the incident is the lead image (which I am using as the cover image for the day) of the dadis blessing the police officer with whom they were trying to negotiate permission. In passing, the Supreme Court begins hearing the government response in the hearings into the Shaheen Bagh protests.

We will shortly get a Ramayana-themed train, yay, with bhajans and everything. We spent Rs 644 crore in four years to promote Sanskrit, also yay, though the story doesn’t say what this promotion consists of, and what the outcomes were. The Modi government wants scientists to research the possibility of creating shampoos, oils and cancer-curing drugs from cow dung, very much yay. Modi himself spent Sunday unveiling another statue, this time in his home constituency.

And since we could use all the distractions we can get to deflect from anything resembling actual news, the always reliable Subramanian Swamy has asked that investigations be reopened into the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi because apparently, it cannot be “fully established” that Godse was the killer, and there is something about an “Italian revolver”, and… oh well.

In good news — or at least, in terms of clutching at straws — Supreme Court Justice JY Chandrachud spoke out against the criminalisation of dissent (The full speech is here, and it is worth reading):

“The blanket labelling of dissent as anti-national or anti-democratic strikes at the heart of our commitment to protect constitutional values and the promotion of deliberative democracy,” he said.

While on justice, earlier today the Supreme Court told the government that it has to give permanent commissions, and command posts if eligible, to women who opt for it. The ruling has retrospective effect.

“The Centre’s submissions that women are physiologically weak are based on a deeply entrenched stereotype that men are dominant and women are basically caretakers. Taking care of family is a woman’s job. This is deeply disturbing,” said the SC.

And because we could all use a laugh just every once in a while:

*Presently not working*
Best matrimonial ad. pic.twitter.com/CB1FpYgVVH

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) February 16, 2020

Update, 7.30 PM: The JMI video leaks are beginning to give the sense that someone’s bright idea boomeranged. If the original idea was to give the cops an out, to excuse their behaviour, the exact opposite is now happening as streams of new videos are being outed and more lies thereby getting exposed. Here is the latest in the series:

#IndiaTodayExclusive | Caught on camera: Cops enter Jamia campus, fire teargas shells#6PMPrime LIVE at https://t.co/4fqxBWbTYl pic.twitter.com/UJwoVbSCdB

— India Today (@IndiaToday) February 17, 2020

Remember that the cops justified breaking the law and entering the campus without permission by saying they were in “hot pursuit” of rioters.

Asked why police had earlier denied entering the library, (Special SP (Crime) Praveer) Ranjan said Delhi Police stood by their position that they “entered the campus in hot pursuit after rioters started going inside the campus and began pelting stones at police”. He said that “there is a video of the Joint CP requesting them to talk”.

So much for that. And my understanding is that this is going to get much worse. Which leads to a thought: When people protest against a government, one of the major tipping points happens when people within the establishment begin siding with the protestors, either overtly or covertly (at some point, I hope to do a longish essay on how various protests in the age of social media and citizen journalism played out). This is now beginning to feel like one of those moments: the leaks are coming from inside the system, not from the protestors.

Where Justice goes to die

On February 5, a mundan (ritual shaving of hair) ceremony was conducted for the daughter of mid-level bureaucrat Diwakar Nath Mishra, a joint secretary in the Ministry of Commerce. In attendance were President Ram Nath Kovind, PM Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and other high-profile members of the government.

Diwakar Nath Mishra is the son-in-law of Supreme Court Judge Arun Kumar Mishra.

Yesterday, February 14, Justice Mishra heard a petition filed by Sarah Abdullah Pilot, sister of incarcerated Kashmir politician and former chief minister Omar Abdullah.

Abdullah, who was in preventive custody for a period of six months, was recently charged under the stringent provisions of the Public Safety Act. The dossier submitted by the J & K police in support of the detention makes claims that are so bizarre they defy belief.

Reviewing Sarah Pilot’s petition, Justice Arun Kumar Mishra postponed the hearing by three weeks, and then bargained it down to 15 days, setting the next hearing for March 2. He said – a Supreme Court judge actually said – this:

“If the sister could wait so long, then 15 days doesn’t make a difference.”

Read LiveLaw’s real time coverage of the proceedings in the highest court in the land – in tandem with the news report above on the mundan ceremony —  to realize how, and how completely, justice has been subverted.

I need to clarify that none of this constitutes criticism of Justice Mishra – even though he has been in the crosshairs of controversy more times than you can count; in fact, it was Mishra who, on being named to hear the case of the death of Judge Loya, triggered four senior judges to take the unprecedented step of holding a press conference to express their angst.

But yeah, this is not a criticism.  Aap chronology aur facts samjhiye, bas. And this clarification, which I make with all possible emphasis, is necessary because a day earlier, the Chief Justice of India and two of his colleagues were hearing a case relating to the distribution of child porn via online communications tools when, in a surprising non sequitur, the CJI observed:

“There are instances where institutions like Parliament and SC are defamed with derogatory comments. Why should it not be explored how to stop circulation of such comments?”

And this is not the first time, either – shortly before taking over as CJI, SA Bobde had talked about feeling bothered by criticisms of judges.

So there you have it. The CJI’s concern is not with whether the criticisms of the courts and of Parliament are genuine or not; his concern is, how do we silence criticism.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on a military convoy in the Pulwama district that killed 40 CRPF personnel. As recently as the just-concluded Delhi elections, several BJP campaigners including Ajay Singh Bisht were pointing to Modi’s retaliation for the attack while seeking votes (never mind that the only quantified, verifiable outcome was that India shot down one of its own helicopters, killing seven).

There were several commemorative pieces in the media yesterday, including some that pointed out that 12 months later, there is no official word on the inquiry into the massive intelligence lapses that resulted in the attack. The one that caught my attention was this piece in the Hindustan Times.

The crux: Families of those killed in the attack say that they are still waiting for the promises of compensation to be fulfilled. Which is sad, but hardly surprising – the armed forces are yet another prop for displays of hyper-nationalism, trotted out when convenient for propaganda purposes, ignored/forgotten the rest of the time.

Read, also, this excellent Polis Project report from the time, about the facts, and the obfuscation, surrounding the attack – and particularly on the role of the media in adding to the confusion. And this round up of questions that remain unanswered, twelve months on.

In Kashmir, the economy continues to unravel. The latest manifestation was an unusual advertisement in local papers, inserted by trade bodies, indicating their inability to pay back loans because business had been brought to a total standstill. The ad is worth reading in full; here is the money clip:

In the advertisement, the trade bodies, including Kashmir Chambers of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) and Kashmir Traders and Manufacturers Federation, said that after August 2019, business community was completely devastated and exhausted.

“Our survival is under threat and our humble submissions to the banks is that at once stop calling us defaulters. We believe there may be two types of defaulters; willful defaulters, which we as community strongly protest to be called or named as; circumstantial defaulters, which we have been forced to be,” they said.

And while on that, more economic bad news: exports shrunk for the sixth straight month in January.

In Deoband, in the Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, the local administration is asking residents of Muslim-dominated colonies to remove the national flag flying on their terraces. Pause to let that sink in – a community that is constantly asked to prove its patriotism is being asked to remove the national flag they are flying.

In Aurangabad, Bihar, police made several arrests following an anti-CAA protest that turned violent. The FIR and case diary submitted in court are farcical beyond belief – including, but not limited, to the arrest of the same person for violence at two different locations at the exact same time.

Meanwhile in New Delhi, 10 persons arrested by the police in connection with the incident of molestation at Gargi College have been let out on bail. They spent less than 24 hours in custody; the police say they have evidence that these persons broke down the college gate and trespassed, but no evidence that they molested anyone. Meanwhile, as I pointed out in my post yesterday, Dr Kafeel Khan, who after prolonged incarceration was finally given bail last week, was not only kept in jail in violation of the bail order, but now has draconian NSA charges filed against him.

In Karnataka, just the day before yesterday, the high court had ruled that slapping Section 144 to curtail protests in Bangalore was illegal. So the police have taken to giving permission only if those applying sign surety bonds of up to Rs 10 lakh. The police commissioner says it is to ensure that protests don’t turn violent, the same justification that was earlier used to impose 144. This, despite the fact that protests have been on in Bangalore since early December, and there has not been a single incidence of violence reported. Clearly, the BJP government in the state is hell bent on stopping protests by whatever means it can.

That determination extends to BJP’s vassal states, like Tamil Nadu where, last evening, police decided to use force to prevent a Shaheen Bagh-style sit-in from evolving. Several were injured, over 150 people were arrested, one 70-year-old man died in the panicky stampede that ensued.

Embed: https://twitter.com/pinjratod/status/1228405361469771777?s=12

In the age of social media news, even news the authorities would prefer wasn’t widely circulated, gets around at warp speed. And more than the news, it is the visuals – graphic, gory, incendiary – that spread with incredible rapidity, rousing people to anger and provoking a backlash. Before the night was out, the reverberations of Washermanpet began to manifest all across the state. This thread only partially captures the protests that erupted across the state – several in Chennai itself, others in Trichy, Coimbatore, Vellore, Madurai, Tenkasi, Pudukottai, Ooty, Thanjavur… — in the wake of the police action.

This is what the BJP and its allies don’t get – that the more force they use, the more determined people will be to resist. In the coming days, this will only intensify as political parties take up the cudgels – and for the AIADMK/BJP combine, which faces a crucial election next year, this is just another fatal misstep in a series of missteps they have been making in the last few months.

While on the BJP’s almost Pavlovian use of force in the face of resistance, Kanhaiyya Kumar was attacked last evening, on the 15^th day of his 30-day yatra across Bihar. A bit from an eyewitness account is worth highlighting:

The air rattled with the incendiary cries of “Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko”, a chant now associated with supporters of the government who feel opponents of the Citizenship Amendment Act or CAA, cleared by parliament in December, are anti-nationals.

There were seven attacks prior to this one, and the reason is not hard to seek: though the media continues to deny him oxygen, his Twitter stream is sufficient indication that on the ground, the response to his roadshow is nothing short of phenomenal. He belongs to arguably the poorest national party in India today, one without the resources to turn out crowds in large numbers, and yet every meeting of his is standing room only, and the timeline clips of his speeches are an indication of how effortlessly he connects with the crowds, wherever he goes.

The BJP was clearly caught on the wrong foot here – Kumar started his roadshow on January 30, just when the BJP was neck deep in the Delhi election campaign; now he is off and running in front, seeding the ground, and the BJP can’t afford to mount an extensive campaign just yet for – the election in Bihar is in October — fear of audience fatigue.

Staying with violence and the state for a moment longer, the Delhi police has decided not to make any arrests in the February 5 attacks on JNU. Despite the plentiful evidence, the police will merely file a chargesheet and leave it to the courts to decide whether arrests are needed – this, in a case where masked thugs armed with iron rods, hammers and bottles of acid entered a university campus to cause mayhem, and there is plentiful evidence of both the acts and the identity of the perpetrators.

In Uttar Pradesh, there are now 34 lakh unemployed persons according to government figures; this is 12.5 lakh more than there were just two years ago. Ajay Singh Bisht has been promising employment, and the Central government has been trying, through various events, to entice investors to set up operations in the state.

“No new investment has come despite lot of talk from the CM. All investment came under Akhilesh Yadav’s regime. The rising law and order disturbances in UP have now added to the crisis. The economic slowdown reflects in these unemployment figures of UP,” Singh said. The National Statistical Office (NSO) had earlier said UP had the highest unemployment rate in urban areas, at nearly 16 in the quarter ended December 2018, compared to the all-India urban unemployment rate of 9.9%.

The implications, for a state with a population the size of the United States, is mind-boggling. And this situation has come about almost entirely because Modi and Shah, in yet another of their “masterstrokes”, decided to install Bisht as CM on the theory that he would consolidate the Hindutva vote and convert the state, which sends the largest number of MPs to Parliament, into a Hindutva fortress. To channel Bill Clinton, “It is the economy, stupid”; when people have no jobs, no way to put food on the table, they will turn against you sooner than later.

The BJP hierarchy, meanwhile, is busy walking back the damage it did to itself in Delhi. There was Shah at the TimesNow summit the other day, which I had pointed to in an earlier blogpost; now here is Prakash Javadekar saying he never called Arvind Kejriwal a terrorist. And here is Javadekar saying it:

Never called Arvind Kejriwal a terrorist: Prakash Javadekar

Seems Mr Javadekar forgot this 🙂https://t.co/qW2HrgsnKF pic.twitter.com/FM2aiQz3OL

— Ravi Nair (@t_d_h_nair) February 14, 2020

But then, who are you going to believe — a Union minister, or your own lying eyes and ears?

It is not that they lie – politicians lie, all the time. It is just that they are brazen about it; that they will lie about something even when there is videographic evidence to the contrary – I mean, Shah has repeatedly lied that there was no plan for a nationwide NRC despite the fact that it was he who talked of the plan on the floor of the Rajya Sabha, so I suppose Javadekar’s latest is merely par for the course.

Speaking of walking back, the BJP’s post mortem of its defeat has concluded that hate speech has nothing to do with it – the fault lies with the Congress, which ran a tactically weak campaign, and the fact that too many star campaigners hit the ground, with the result that the candidates were busy making arrangements for them and had no time for their own campaigning.

Well, duh! Ignoring the fact that fielding all members of the Cabinet, over 270 MPs, seven chief ministers etc was a decision of that political Chanakya Amit Shah, there is the inconvenient fact that star campaigners only go where the local candidate requests their presence. But it is not the illogical conclusion that should worry you – it is the swift repudiation of the impact of hate speech on the results, which basically means we are going to get more of the same in the elections to follow.

Meanwhile, at the TimesNow summit I had touched on in yesterday’s post, Amit Shah said:

I have full faith that on basis of 3 million ton, we can achieve an economy of 5 million ton.

Trying googling to see how many media houses covered that gaffe. Then google the word ‘pappu’, and see how many media houses did not gleefully latch on to instances where Rahul Gandhi misspoke, and even how many distorted what he did say to suggest that he misspoke (remember the infamous “potato factory”, for instance?). Rahul Gandhi is also supposed to have said Modi was to blame for unemployment among eagles (He did not).

Shah, however, appears to have learned something from his recent defeat. After a campaign where the BJP mocked those who would sell their nation for Rs 200 worth of free electricity/water, Shah says now that if the BJP comes to power in Bihar his government will provide Rs 200 worth of free electricity to every family.

In Ahmedabad, the local administration is laying in orders for Rs 3.7 crore worth of flowers to beautify the road Modi and Trump will drive along – just one more line item in a massive beautification drive being undertaken so two narcissists who don’t like each other very much (see yesterday’s post) can indulge in an extended photo-op.

India hopes to get some sort of trade deal out of this, but for reasons I’d mentioned in my previous post, that is unlikely. Not that the GoI is not pulling out all stops to try and get something, anything out of this to wave around in triumph – in fact, the government is so desperate for a deal, it has reportedly told the US this:

India has offered to allow imports of U.S. chicken legs, turkey and produce such as blueberries and cherries, Indian government sources said, and has offered to cut tariffs on chicken legs from 100% to 25%. U.S. negotiators want that tariff cut to 10%.

The Modi government is also offering to allow some access to India’s dairy market, but with a 5% tariff and quotas, the sources said. But dairy imports would need a certificate they are not derived from animals that have consumed feeds that include internal organs, blood meal or tissues of ruminants.

There is more. And all of this will hurt India’s agrarian industries at a time when it is already under enormous distress, besides hurting both the poultry and dairy industries. But hey, anything for the sake of a “win” to boast of, even if that win is Pyrrhic. Here is the story, in a nutshell, via cartoonist Satish Acharya (who you should follow):

Elsewhere in Gujarat, in a college in Bhuj, 68 college girls were forced to remove their underwear to prove that they were not menstruating. Just another waypoint in the ongoing Talibanisation of the country and its education systems. It all happened, says the school principal, a woman herself, with the permission of the girls.

In the midst of all this gloom and doom (and there is lots more, but I’ll spare you), the Maharashtra government has decided to build homes for Mumbai’s famed dabbawallahs, the efficiency of whose meal delivery system has been studied by Harvard Business School, eulogized by the BBC, been held up as a model of Six Sigma, and formed the subject of an extended presentation at the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver, among other honors.

A photographer bought barren farmland near Ranthambore and let it grow back into a forest. Now it is home to tigers and other wild fauna.

PS: There will be no post tomorrow. Have a nice weekend all.

Justice delayed…

Approximately 140 petitions have been filed, most of them in different courts across the country, challenging the constitutional validity of the Citizenship Amendment Act. Earlier this month, the government went to the Supreme Court to argue that there could be confusion if different courts handed down conflicting verdicts. In response, the SC decided to hear all the petitions itself, and issued a notice to this effect on January 11. So far, so good.

Today a three-member bench headed by Chief Justice SA Bobde sat to hear the combined petitions — and the sitting ended with the SC giving the Center four weeks to file a response.

Pause right there to consider the absurdity. The Centre knows that petitions have been filed. It had received copies of all these petitions. It was the Centre that went to the SC to ask that all petitions be heard by the apex court. In other words, it knew that the constitutionality of the CAA has been challenged. Why does the SC figure that it needs four entire weeks more to prepare a response?

Think of it in common-sense terms. I do something. You challenge it as being illegal. We end up in court. Why do I need time to answer the question of why I did what I did? I knew that when I was doing it, no?

Further: When the petitioners asked that the implementation of the process be stayed until the constitutionality is decided, the SC declined to impose any stay “without hearing the Center on the matter”.

Again, how does that make sense? What the SC is being asked, here, is to stop all proceedings until the case is heard. That is a direct plea for redress within the purview of the court; temporary relief until the SC can hear the actual petition. Why does the Center need to be “heard” on whether the SC can grant a stay?

On a side note, one of the first reactions to the SC’s refusal to grant a stay of proceedings came from the Shaheen Bagh protestors: “And hence, the revolt shall go on…”

If you want a sense of how bizarre these court proceedings are, here is a blow by blow account.

One more point to keep in mind: The SC says it is examining whether the petitions should be heard by a five-member bench.

On August 5 last year, the Center scrapped Article 370 of the Constitution. Petitions challenging the validity of this action have been pending in the SC. Today, a five-member bench of the SC said that before examining the validity of the scrapping of #370, it will first decide whether a seven-member bench should be constituted to hear the case.

So wait. Today, a three member bench is deciding whether to have a five member bench hear one petition, while a five-member bench is deciding whether to have a seven-member bench hear another petition… And so we go, round and round the mulberry bush. The sad part of it is, the apex court is not even pretending any more that it is on the side of the Constitution, not of the Center.

There is a reason ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ is a cliche — because it is true.

In this connection, consider a news story that came out this morning: India has slipped down 10 spots on the Democracy Index, and is now ranked at #51, its worst ranking since the list first started in 2006. Further, it has been slipping steadily down the ladder through the Modi years.

As I was pointing out on Twitter a while ago, democracy is about a lot more than holding elections once in five years. If in the intervening period you subvert every single pillar that holds up the democratic edifice — the courts, Parliament, the media, and so on right down the line — then you are a dictatorship, and elections are merely a Potemkin facade.

In other news, direct tax collections have entered the negative zone for the very first time. In other words, there is less money in the government treasury than we thought even a day earlier. And since misfortunes don’t come singly — a news report suggests that the Life Insurance Corporation could be facing enormous financial difficulties. The LIC, remember — first port of call for middle class families looking to invest their money safely.

In connection with the ongoing furor over the CAA/NPR/NRC mess, read Rukmini’s report showing why, and how, India’s poor are likely to be enormously affected irrespective of their religion. Because? No birth certificates.

The NIA, investigating the case of Davinder Singh, has not filed charges of sedition. That is the country we live in now: Shouting slogans, liking someone’s Facebook post, drawing a cartoon, holding up a protest sign, all of this and more is “sedition”. But a serving officer of the police force transporting wanted militants, with a price on their heads, through checkposts in a car laden with arms and explosives is… what… a peccadillo? This is why, and how, trust in this government erodes with each passing day. The NIA being hastily given charge of the case led to allegations of a cover-up; just a conspiracy theory, many said at the time. But now? How do we still deny the possibility that Davinder Singh was operating as an agent of the state, to carry out a false flag mission, some kind of terrorist act that the government could then use to justify a crackdown?

No roundup is ever complete without mention of Uttar Pradesh, so here is your daily horror story: Turns out that FIRs filed by the Firozabad police are cut-paste jobs. The whole story is WTF — read it for yourselves. And when reading, remember that earlier point I was making about the crumbling pillars of democracy.

One K Prabesh has been arrested for hurling a bomb at a police picket in Kannur, Kerala. He is an RSS worker. Put those things together: Bomb, RSS worker, Kannur. Remember that last year, no less than Amit Shah launched a “jana raksha yatra” in Kerala protesting against “Red terrorism”. (It’s a different matter that he got so mercilessly trolled that he ran away after just one day, citing urgent work in Delhi).

The argument was, “Red” cadres are indiscriminately killing BJP workers, and the hotbed of the violence is Kannur. It is not a new argument — in fact, it is so old that back in 2017, I wrote a post about it which is worth resurfacing in context. And the pushback I got for that post led me to write another, which too is relevant today.

And, PS to the above, one Adithya Rao has been arrested for placing explosives at an airport. In Mangalore, where there was orchestrated violence on the sidelines of anti-CAA protests. Where police used the violence to justify firing, which a people’s tribunal has condemned as excessive use of force. Where a truck bringing chairs for an anti-CAA protest was set on fire. Where the police, presumably under the misconception that the area is not part of India, has sent notices to people from Kerala to explain their presence at or in the vicinity of an anti-CAA protest. Read all that in tandem with the placing of the explosive (and with Davinder Singh, and the RSS guy who hurled a bomb at a police station, and the instances I cited in my blog posts linked here) and tell me you don’t see a pattern.

Tangentially, I want to bring up a pet peeve here: the indiscriminate use of the word “alleged”. Consider the headline of the story linked to above: RSS worker arrested for allegedly hurling bomb. Huh?! How can a bomb be “allegedly hurled”? I keep seeing such bizarre usages with increasing frequency — like, the other day, there was a news story with the line “… a video allegedly showing…”. Again, huh? A video shows something, or it does not. Duh!

Sticking with Kerala for a minute more, the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit (SSUS), located at Adi Shankara’s birthplace Kalady, in Kerala, has become the first university to pass a resolution against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Wait for this to catch on, and for more and more universities to adopt such resolutions.

In bizarre news for the day, it now turns out that Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, hacked the phone of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. The first thought that came to mind when I read this? February 20, 2019. When MBS visited India. And Modi broke all norms of protocol and went personally to welcome him at the airport.

I’ll leave you with these for now — and go off and re-read Kafka’s The Trial, which I have been thinking about all afternoon, ever since I read about the Supreme Court’s latest act of denial through delay.

The sound of silence

I woke up this morning and, while still beneath the covers, reached for my phone. I checked mail, messages, WhatsApp, and Signal to see if anything had come in while I was asleep that would impact my day: someone I needed to meet, someplace I needed to be at. I then rapidly scrolled through my Twitter timeline to see if anything major had broken during the night.

I made myself a cup of coffee, came to my workdesk, fired up my laptop, and opened the ‘Morning News’ bookmarks folder, within which I collect the sites I need to check to get a broad overview of what’s happening in the world.

It’s my daily routine, and on the rare days when my internet provider stuffs up, or I am traveling in some remote area where the connection is splotchy, not being able to do any or all of this leaves me uncomfortable; I am aware of a nagging sense of unease.

Think for a moment about Kashmir, where all of those things I take for granted — the ability to check messages, to keep myself updated on happenings in my country and around the world, to check my bank balance and plan my finances, to work, to read for profit and for pleasure — have all been shut down since August 5 last year.

Executive Editor of Kashmir Times Anuradha Bhasin had approached the Supreme Court challenging the shut-down and seeking immediate lifting of the restrictions on communications. That was on August 10. It took the Supreme Court six months to hear the case — and when it did, it declared that the shut-down was “unconstitutional”. (The judgment is here for those interested).

So what would you expect the Supreme Court, the ultimate defender of the Constitution, to do in the case of an act it deems unconstitutional? Order that restrictions be lifted? What the court in effect did was tell the government, what you did was wrong, so you review it and do what you think is right.

Leaving it to the government to review its own unconstitutional act was never going to end well, was it? It didn’t.

I’m no lawyer (and if there is one thing I’ve learned in three-plus decades as a journalist, it is to not write about things I am not qualified to understand). But we now — if we are outside Kashmir, that is — have access to lawyers who are on social media; that access has meant that media houses are able to tap into them for informed commentary.

There is an abundance of such commentary on the net, accessible via a simple Google search. Here are just four that I think is worth reading to get a broad understanding:

• In this piece, constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia places the SC judgment of January 10 in context of the court’s actions (and inactions) in a previous case of suspension of basic human rights: the Emergency.
• Here, Bhatia points out that while the SC judgment does little in the way of providing immediate and total relief, it does lay the groundwork for future legal challenges against the Modi government’s indiscriminate use of the internet shutdown as a weapon to stifle dissent.
• Manu Sebastian in Live Law questions the SC’s failure to address the “emergency” nature of the case it was hearing, and argues that this failure is hugely problematic.
• Apar Gupta argues that when it came to choosing between human rights and the government of the day, the SC leaned towards the latter. It is, he says, a ‘statist interpretation’ of the law.
• Dushyant Dave notes the cautious optimism the SC judgment has led to, and says it is a sign that the rest of India has reconciled itself to the ‘othering’, the ‘orphaning’ of Kashmir. (A point I will come back to later, because that is what led me to write this post in the first place)

There is plenty more in the form of commentary, but the above stories suffice to provide a broad overview of the legal minuses — and a few slender silver linings — of the judgment. But what of the aftermath?

The GoI has partially restored broadband and 2G services in J&K. And you can access 153 websites that the government has “whitelisted”. There are other provisions, restrictions, but focus on just these for now and ask yourself — how does this comply with the SC judgment?

But that is precisely the point: the government’s gameplan is to do as little as possible in seeming compliance, then wait for a legal challenge to emerge. (And given the tardiness of the SC in hearing the original complaint, it is a fair assumption that between them, the GoI and the SC can continue to run out the clock).

There is another clause the GoI has inserted into this partial restoration of the internet: ISPs have been ordered to build firewalls to ensure that the people of Kashmir have no access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms.

“There are fears that locals will log on to these social media platforms and upload videos recorded in the past five months, posing threat to the current calm in Kashmir,” a senior police officer told The Hindu. “Besides, Pakistan may also use the social media to coordinate with militants.”

“Fears”.

The GoI “fears” that the people of Kashmir might go on social media to upload videographic evidence of what happened in the state during the six-month blackout. So what is it precisely that the GoI fears? That stories such as this — dismissed thus far as coming from “vested interests” — will now come out into the open? That the full extent of the damage — both economic and social — will begin to come out? That the human rights abuses will now get a public airing?

While going through an Evernote folder last night, I came across this story I had saved, of the lengths to which Kashmiris have had to go to access basic communications facilities. And I just went back and checked the list of the 153 websites the government has permitted Kashmiris to access.

If I was in Kashmir now, I’d be totally hamstrung. I can’t access WhatsApp, or Twitter, or any other social media sites — which is the first thing I do every morning. And not a single one of a little over four dozen websites I check each morning for the news appears in that list.

In a piece this morning in The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan makes the larger point:

Make no mistakes: This firewall is an augury of what the future holds for us all if the Modi-Shah approach to fundamental rights is allowed to prevail. For the first time since the Emergency, the government is arrogating to itself the right to tell citizens what they can and cannot read. Indeed, Modi has gone step beyond Indira Gandhi. She ‘only’ had her censors black out select news items and opinions. Our Dear Leader, on the other hand, has decided that digital news of any kind is to be blacked out from Kashmir.

How are we still silent? How did we remain silent about this gross, continuing injustice all these six months? Why was this egregious and continuing violation of our basic rights not important enough for us to take to the streets en masse? How did we slip into this mindset of thinking of Kashmir as being somehow not a part of India, of thinking that its concerns do not concern us? How did we become okay with what Dushyant, in the piece linked to earlier in this post, called the “orphaning” of Kashmir?

When I began blogging again recently, after a prolonged interval, I had started my first post with a quote from MLK Jr’s seminal “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. I’ll leave you with that same quote, because the thought MLK expressed is, I think, central to our today’s and tomorrows.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.