Liberty Leading The People, painting by Eugene Delacroix exhibited at the Louvre
Why women? Why are they protesting (when they should be at home cooking and cleaning and looking after their children)?
You’ve heard that question, in its many variants, since the anti-CAA protests erupted in mid-December 2019. So have I — most lately last evening, when a few of us were discussing contemporaneous events.
Part of the discussion was triggered by a post I had written yesterday about the Woman in Red who became a totem of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, and of Marianne the young drummer girl who triggered the march on Versailles that proved to be seminal in the French Revolution. And the talk veered, as such talks inevitably do these days, to Shaheen Bagh.
It only occurred to me gradually that the question stems not from genuine curiosity, but from a puzzled bafflement — a sense that authority, which knows how to use brute force against the dissenting male, is stymied when confronted by a defiant, determined woman. Remember these moments?:
From left, an unidentified student holding out a rose to a policeman in riot gear, in the immediate aftermath of the JMI violence of December 15; JMI student Ayesha Renna confronting policemen who were beating up a male colleague; the dadis of Shaheen Bagh blessing the police officer who blocked their intended march to the residence of Home Minister Amit Shah.
The thing that baffles me about the “Why women?” question is the tone of irritated wonder, as if this were something new and strange. The small group I was with last evening was mostly young, all but two still in college; it was supposed to be an informal chat about narrative writing but it became about the protests, and “Why women?”
I wondered at the time whether this was one of the signs of an age where information is so plentiful that we consume everything but retain nothing. Women leading protests is not only a phenomenon as old as protests themselves, more often than not it is the participation of women that has tipped the scales (again, this is an essay for another day).
So, as aide memoire, here she is, the woman protestor, in all her avtaars: Defiant, determined, gentle, fierce, tearful, joyful, proud, implacable…
Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested outside Buckingham Palace, January 1914, during the suffragette protests. Emmeline Goulden, as she then was, attended a protest event when she was 14, and became a frontline campaigner for women’s rights. She later married Dr Pankhurst.French suffragettes burning election posters, May 1935, as part of protests demanding the right to vote.Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, who on December 1, 1955 refused to vacate her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in an act of civil disobedience that was seminal in the civil rights movement In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as an official, numbered contestant. Race official Jock Semple (in black) tackled her when he realised she was a woman; Switzer’s boyfriend shoved Semple to the ground and ran interference so Kathrine could complete her run. Women were officially allowed to run the Boston five years later, in 1972.Women in Black (website) was founded in 1991 as a worldwide movement opposed to war, militarism, and all forms of violence. This unnamed protestor was part of a WiB anti-fascism demonstration in Novi Sad, Serbia, in December 2005Police personnel detaining a Tibetan woman participating in the Tibetan Women’s Uprising Day in front of the Chinese Embassy in Delhi, March 12, 2008.2013 was a particularly fraught period in Bulgarian history. In the first quarter, protests against the Boyko Borisov government broke out over excessive water and electricity bills. In May of that year, the successor Plamen Vasilev Oresharski government faced protests over a whole laundry list of causes, institutionalised government corruption being the main one. In November, students of Bulgaria’s Sofia University first staged an ‘Occupy’ of the campus, then took to the streets protesting rising poverty and unemployment. In one of the iconic images from that time, a girl student tearfully begs police officers to refrain from using force against her fellow students. A kneeling woman holds up a feather in the face of police gearing up to break an anti-fracking protest in New Brunswick, October 2013. Read more about the protest here.The Gezi Park protests in Turkey produced lots of iconic moments, such as the Woman in Red I’d referred to in my post yesterday. Here is another one — an unnamed woman, arms spread wide, taking the full brunt of a water cannon blast on herself.Also from Istanbul’s Taksim Square, 2013, this image of a woman protestor flashing the V sign against the backdrop of clashes between rioters and the police.December 2014: An unidentified woman dances in front of riot police during a mass protest against the forced eviction of a building in IstanbulThe victory sign, high and proud in the face of adversity, appears again — this time at Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution. Worth remembering that the revolution against the Hosni Mubarak government began in January of 2011 when in the space of a week, two men set themselves on fire protesting issues that were rooted in poverty, rising prices, and institutionalised corruption. In September 2016 the Charlotte, North Carolina police shot and killed 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott at an apartment complex near the University of North Carolina, sparking protests that rapidly turned into riots as the police attempted to use force to repress the initial protest. Here a woman, hand bloody from a beating, confronts a police officer in full riot gear.July 2016: Protests erupted in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following the fatal shooting of Anton Sterling. Ieshia Evans, one of the protestors, walked up to police in full riot gear and allowed herself to be arrested; resulting in a striking image that went viral as an illustration of the real power of the powerless.Paris has its dadis, too. June 2016: There she stands, alone and unafraid, confronting riot police during a protest in Paris against proposed reforms that were seen as anti-labour. A lone granny squats on the road, blocking riot police to keep them from moving on protestors during the anti-government demonstrations in Seoul, South Korea, April 2015September 2016: A young girl facing down a riot policeman during pro-democracy protests in Santiago, Chile
February 14, 2018: A lone gunman opened fire within the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 and injuring a couple of dozen others. The resulting ‘March for Our Lives’ protest saw this impassioned speech by student Emma Gonzalez, equal parts grief and unbridled fury, where she called BS on everyone from the President and the FBI and NRA on down.
This list could go on but I’ll stop here, with a bonus link I found on Huffington Post that rounds up ‘60 stunning pictures‘ of women in protests around the world.
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, Delhi police has filed an 800-page chargesheet in connection with the December 15 violence at Jamia Milia Islamia University, when rioters had set fire to buses and private vehicles. 17 people have thus far been arrested in this connection.
Remember the spate of videos that mysteriously leaked the other day, purporting to show that the students had indulged in violence, and the police had entered the university campus as a result? (The police are reportedly now trying to figure out how they leaked. It is problematic for them on two counts: One, it is hard, actionable evidence of unprovoked brutality that damaged property worth over two crore; more importantly, it totally demolishes the concerted, coordinated efforts over time to paint the protestors of Jamia as destructive rioters). Remember the India Today ‘expose’ of rioting students? Remember the breathless, condemnatory reporting that appeared in Times of India, Mirror Now, Republic, Times Now, DNA, Zee, Aaj Tak and other outlets, all unquestioningly toeing the official line handed to them, never mind if in the process they were criminally slandering a university and its students?
Remember the manufactured consensus that while the police action was bad, so sorry, what to do, they were only doing their duty and the students deserved it? (The media’s role is laid out in this Alt News fact-check).
Remember the police denying that they had fired on the students, and then back-tracking after an internal investigation revealed that shots had in fact been fired? Remember how, during the Delhi election campaign, BJP leaders had repeatedly demonised the JMI students, with Kapil Mishra slyly equating them with Kasab, of 26/11 infamy? Remember Nirmala Sitharaman accusing Sonia Gandhi of “shedding crocodile tears” on behalf of the brutalised students? Remember Amit Shah saying in one breath that the “police did not go after students”, and in the very next breath saying “Don’t you think that the police should take action? Police have to take action because that is their duty and the right thing for them to do.” Remember Shah justifying the police action on the grounds that students pelted stones?
Remember the Supreme Court — the CJI, no less — in a remarkable example of circular logic refusing to hear an urgent petition against the state-sponsored violence on the grounds that “the rioting must first stop”?
Remember how, less than 24 hours later, several police officers from the area had been mysteriously transferred? It turns out that the Special Investigation Team, in the wake of the outing of compelling videographic evidence, has asked for the duty roster of policemen who were stationed in the area that night.
Here is the thing — the police acted as they did because they had a sense of impunity, the surety that there would be no consequences. Such an assurance had to come from the highest echelons of the police — and they, in turn, would never have passed such orders without the nod of the ministry they report to. Which, in case it needs reminding, is the MHA, under Amit Shah.
Now cracks have begun appearing in the official version, and these cracks are widening by the day. The SIT says it will be questioning those policemen who were on duty at the time, and hint at the possibility that FIRs could be filed against them. If that happens, and admittedly that is a big if considering what is at stake, then low-level cops will crack, and talk about the orders they received. This whole sorry chapter isn’t over yet, not by a long way.
In other news, senior advocates Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran, on the directions of the Supreme Court, visited Shaheen Bagh for initial discussions with the protestors intended to find a solution to the blockade, now into its third month. They were welcomed with a standing ovation.
I was following the events live across various social media channels, and the moment that stood out for me was when the interlocutors suggested that the media be asked to leave, to which the response was “We are fighting for freedom, and we will not allow anyone’s freedom to be taken away.”
I began this post musing on women leading protests, and why male authority figures find it bewildering. I’ll circle back to it on this note: Though there are literally dozens of SB-style protests around the country (Frontline has an extended essay on this; here is a story of how, thanks to police brutality in Chennai, another Shaheen Bagh has sprung up there and, by way of thumbing their collective nose at the police action on Valentine’s Day, played host to a wedding), the original Shaheen Bagh has become a persistent, annoying burr under the skin of the government as evidenced by the continued efforts to demonise it.
TimesNow ran a breathless, high-decibel ‘Big Story‘ on how Teesta Setalvad — another woman activist, another red rag for a patriarchal government and its propaganda wings — had been “coaching” Shaheen Bagh protestors on how to talk to the SC-appointed mediators. Um — so? How exactly is it a problem for protestors — lay protestors, unused to the ways of courts and lawyers — to take advice?
Elsewhere, Facebook users took to circulating what they claimed are images of condoms found in the gutters of Shaheen Bagh — reminiscent of the BJP MLA who claimed “that daily 50,000 pieces of bones, 3,000 used condoms, 500 used abortion injections, 10,000 cigarette “pieces”, among other things, are found at JNU, where girls and boys dance naked at cultural programmes.”
In passing, why does right wing propaganda, particularly where women are part of the protests, depend so much on sexual innuendo? Meanwhile in UP, yet another BJP MLA has been accused of serial rape.
PS: I am off this blog till late Sunday evening — a workshop, and a couple of other commitments, therefore.
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.
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.
In a previous post I wrote of Hitler, of fascism, of the means to the murderous end that was euphemized as “the final solution”. I expected there would be pushback, and I got what I expected. The politest feedback – I had to sift through a lot to find It – suggested that I was using words I had read somewhere without any understanding of their true meaning; that I was egregiously misapplying those pejorative terms to the India of today; that my “screed” was driven by blind hatred of Modi.
The thing is, I am by no stretch the first to use those words for the RSS/BJP machinery – others, with far better knowledge and qualifications, have used these words before. And these terms were used well before Modi even became Chief Minister of Gujarat, let alone Prime Minister of the country.
One such leading light – a Harvard scholar, an educator, a politician, a former Union Law Minister no less, named Subramanian Swamy – wrote this way back in 2000 to warn us of what was coming, and he was prescient. He was also meticulous in outlining the various steps in the RSS process:
(1) Discredit your opponents and protect your friends: (2) “Shake public confidence in every institution that can circumscribe or act as a speed-breaker for the RSS juggernaut; (3) Script new history; ready the blueprint for the coming agenda; (4) Bridle the electoral system.
The RSS game-plan is ready, Swamy wrote then, only the date for the final blitzkrieg remains to be picked.
Think back to those four steps Swamy outlined. I could have linked a few dozen current examples to illustrate each of them, but I’m going to leave it up to you: As you think back over the past six months, as you read the headlines today, how many of those boxes do you think you can tick?
“Of course,” concluded Swamy, “the good news is that the game plan can fail. I live on the hope that in India, no well-laid plan ever works. India, after all, is a functioning anarchy. That has been the undoing of every attempt to straitjacket its society. That is why we are still the longest continuing unbroken civilization of over 10,000 years. The RSS is, luckily, our counter-culture. The vibrations of Mother India will, I hope, be its undoing.”
I share in that pious hope. I cling to it when, after a day spent shuddering at the incessant stream of bad news, I go to bed at night and try to get some sleep. But then I wake up next morning, and this is the world I wake up to:
In Bidar, northern Karnataka, a 11-year-old breaks down in tears over the plight of her mother, who is in police custody, along with the principal of her school, Shaheen Primary and High School, on charges of sedition. For the crime of staging a play that sought to educate the students on the inequities of the CAA. A court decided to defer hearing their bail application by a week.
Meanwhile, also in Karnataka, a court ordered the police to serve notice on Nityananda, who on securing bail in a case of rape had fled the country. The police told the court that Nityananda is on a “spiritual tour”, and hence there was no need to serve notice on him.
In Allahabad, a court has granted bail to rape accused BJP leader Chinmayanand; the court order is, put mildly, problematic. Remember that bit about protecting your friends and discrediting your opponents? While on that, the Income Tax department withdrew tax evasion cases against Tamil superstar Rajnikanth – who, yesterday, came out with a statement supporting the CAA.
But to revert to Bidar, yesterday was the 5th successive day police entered the school and subjected the students – of classes 4, 5 and 6 — to intense interrogation over the play. The police action is based on a complaint lodged by one Nilesh Rakshala, an “activist” of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS.
The “activist” alleged that there was a line in the play about whacking the Prime Minister with a chappal. The police, which has copies of the play, and video, have found no such line. But a mother and a school principal are in custody, the police enter the school every day for extensive interrogations, a chappal is among the “evidence” they have collected, and a 11-year-old wends her way to a neighbor’s home, weeping quietly over the fate of her mother.
“We want to ask the police have they read the constitution? Have they read the JJ Act? Why are they treating children as adult accused?” Advocate Vinay Sreenivasa asking why ministers are roaming free after hate speech and sedition law being misused to harass students @TheQuintpic.twitter.com/6gb26FZtZD
In Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, BJP workers attempted to put up a pro-CAA banner outside a school, and hassled students who tried to stop them. A BJP MLA led a mob into another school objecting to anti-Modi graffiti on a wall. Also in Bangalore, where a junior BBMP official acting on an unverified complaint by a BJP leader had demolished 200-plus homes and rendered 5000 or more homeless, another shantytown is now being threatened with demolition because, “Bangladeshis”. “Do you decide nationality by looking at a person’s face?”, the court asked the police while hearing petitions relating to that earlier demolition — well, apparently they do, and will continue to do so.
Meanwhile in Punjab, school children were made to sign a pro-CAA banner. A similar attempt to force students to write postcards congratulating the PM was made in Gujarat – it failed only because outraged parents protested. In Ahmedabad, BJP workers are going around collecting postcards in praise of the PM. Praise, even by force, is good; a poster calling for national unity, though, not so much:
Good morning. Y'day at India's premier Art Fair in Delhi, police removed an artwork which said "Hum Ek Hain" (We are One) 👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/DxhvrzW2gB
In Bombay, 50 people have been charged with sedition over a slogan at a Pride rally, on the basis of a complaint by a BJP leader. Also in Bombay, a cab driver overheard an innocent conversation, drew the wrong conclusions, and all hell broke loose. (Here is an unrolled thread on the incident)
In Delhi, where the campaign is into its final day, the Election Commission has found DCP Rajesh Deo in gross violation of rules by attempting to “adversely affecting the elections” through his press conference where he alleged that Kapil Gujjar, the gunman who fired at Shaheen Bagh the other day, was a member of the Aam Aadmi Party. The allegation is, according to the man’s own father, untrue:
Listen to Gaje Singh, #ShaheenBagh shooter Kapil Gujjar’s father.
“My son not a member of AAP or any party. Is a supporter of PM Modi and Amit Shah.”
In whichever case, he must be punished no matter what his political inclinations. pic.twitter.com/gJ4NoHIky5
No surprise here, either in the false allegation or in the EC taking note of it (In my post yesterday, I’d made this exact same point); what is surprising though is the punishment handed out, which amounts to a day’s paid leave.
Also in Delhi, also during the campaign, BJP national spokesperson Sambit Patra put out a tweet suggesting that an AAP leader had called for the establishment of the Shariya nationwide. It is, of course, a lie – the word used was “zariya”, not “shariya”. It is also, of course, extremely inflammatory. And it will, of course, go unpunished. (That Patra lied is not surprising – this is your periodic reminder that it was Patra, aided by Arnab Goswami, who first aired the faked “tukde tukde” video.)
In Bihar, where student leader turned politician Kanhaiyya Kumar has been leading a ‘Jan Gan Man’ rally across the state, his car was attacked and damaged; the driver and Kumar have reportedly been injured, the former badly.
Kumar launched his month-long rally on January 30 at Champaran; it moved to Gopalganj and Siwan on day two; to Chapra and Muzzafarpur on day 3; to Sitamandi on day four; to Madhubani on day 5; and to Dharbanga yesterday, day six. The crowds have been phenomenal, and they have been growing; the pressure is correspondingly greater on the BJP which shares the government in Bihar.
In the dead of night in Azamgarh, UP, police threw stones, fired teargas shells, and flooded a site where women have been holding a Shaheen Bagh-style sit-in protest. Several women are reportedly injured, some seriously.
Also in UP, police uprooted a wedding pandal because they thought it was erected for an anti-CAA protest. Elsewhere, India Today pointed to a series of discrepancies in data in the Budget presented by Nirmala Sitharaman (who apparently had time to decipher the Harappan script but not to run the numbers); the ministry without acknowledging the error quietly corrects it. In Goa, an NCP MLA demanded on the floor of the assembly that tigers who eat cows should be punished, just like humans. Air India cancelled the ticket of a man who was flying to the US because his name happened to be Kunal Kamra. Not THE Kunal Kamra, just A Kunal Kamra. Do you laugh? Do you weep? Do you “laugh, that you may not weep”? Do you, even as you weep, cling on to the few remaining shards of hope, if you can find them?
I wrote about that hope in a recent piece for The Wire. As the headlines pile one on the other in an endless cascade of misery, the combined weight pushing me into a dark, dank, dismal place, I think of Vaclav Havel’s question:
“Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope…”
Perhaps.
I hope the “vibrations of Mother India” – vibrations you can feel as you approach any protest site, anywhere in the country, and there are plenty for you to choose from – will save us. But I also hope she’d buck up about it, because time is running out. And time is running out not because Modi and Shah are rushing to implement the CAA/NPR-NRC, but because the RSS has been prepping the soil for a very long time now, and they are nearly done.
It is not what you see – the shakas, the drills, the flag marches, the occasional shows of strength. It is what you don’t see: that for decades now, the RSS has been quietly insinuating itself into the institutions that prop up India’s democracy.
It has pushed its brightest minds into academics, had them write the prescribed exams and enter the civil services – the IFS, the IAS, the IPS; it has pushed some of its best and brightest into the armed forces and into the media. And over the years, over the decades, these seeds planted have taken root, and grown; these recruits have steadily climbed the promotion ladders and are now increasingly in places of influence.
Swamy’s piece dates back to 2000; the process was in place well before that. With apologies for the length, here is an extended quote from an interview I did with NCP chief Sharad Pawar back in 1998:
Talking of mistakes, a very senior BJP leader said that the Congress made a big one when it didn’t allow the Vajpayee government to survive the vote of confidence… Why?
The argument I heard was that if the Congress had abstained, the Vajpayee government would have survived the vote of confidence. But being in a minority, it would not have been able to achieve anything at all, and in time it would have fallen. And with its fall, the stability plank would have been lost to the party for ever…. The BJP should never be allowed to rule, it is too dangerous. For instance, Advani was a minister during the Janata government — and in his short tenure, he managed to fill his ministry with RSS people, and that gave us a headache when we came back to power.
The BJP and the RSS practise the politics of infiltration. I’ll give you an example. Before the fall of the Babri Masjid, Bhairon Singh Shekawat and I were negotiating with the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Ram Janambhoomi people, for three days we had intense negotiations. We reached a stage where, in one more day or maybe two, we could have come to an agreement. But at that time, the senior RSS person involved in the discussions said he had to leave for three days.
I asked him why, I argued with him, told him nothing could be more important, but he was adamant. So finally I asked him where he was going, and he said Hyderabad, to attend the seminar of the Indian History Congress. I was quite shocked that he thought a seminar was more important that this.
That is when he explained. The IHC controls the way Indian history is written and studied, it approves syllabus and textbooks, it has total control. And the key weapon of the RSS is education, its goal is to rewrite Indian history to suit its agenda. In fact, the RSS is already doing it — the portrayal of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as anti-Muslim is only one example, they talk of how Afzal Khan tried to trick him and how Shivaji killed Afzal Khan, that is the story the kids read about, but conveniently, no one menions that Shivaji’s chief army commander was a Muslim, that he personally constructed three mosques for Muslims… one of my candidates in the state is a direct descendant of Shivaji Maharaj, and his family still pays money for the upkeep of these mosques, but this is never mentioned. Shivaji maintained that all communities and religions should live in harmony, but look how that is being distorted today!
Sorry, but how does all this tie up with the IHC?
To be a member, you have to do post graduation, and masters, in Indian history. So over the years, the RSS has been systematically selecting students, instructing them to study history, and getting them into the IHC, at last count the RSS-oriented students are 46 per cent of the society. Another five per cent, and the RSS will control it, and then it will write Indian history to suit its own ends. That body is like that, it plans ahead, and works systematically to achieve its goals. In fact, I must say that though the RSS and the BJP are my political enemies, I admire this quality in them, they plan for the future and they work steadily towards a goal.
Think of all that as you go through the stories linked above; think of it when you next read of an inexplicably wrong court judgment or hear of an unjustifiable police action. It is not that they are following the orders from Modi and Shah – their mission predates those two, and will continue after those two.
I’m not sure what the solution is, or even if there is a solution at all. Maybe these nationwide protests are the first faint signs of those vibrations Swamy talked about. You can only hope — so I’ll leave you with an image gallery of what hope looks like:
These images, of the scene at Shaheen Bagh when a group of Sikh farmers joined the protesting locals, are courtesy @meharbandaaz and others. The cover image of PM Narendra Modi at a defence expo in UP is courtesy LiveFist
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.
Everyone: There’s so much anger and helplessness flooding my thoughts, I worry that soon there won’t be any room for other emotions, like dread.
The New Yorker’s Colin Nissan is savagely sarcastic about the zeitgeist. Read — it will feel like you or I could have written this, about the world we find ourselves in. A world where, says the Economist on its latest cover, Narendra Modi’s sectarianism is eroding India’s secular democracy.
The Economist’s India cover stories down the years is a stark illustration of how the country we know has changed under Modi. Churumuri rounds them up:
The concerns over centralisation of power in the first year turned to scepticism over the reforms route in 2017. The question mark before the general elections of 2019, has ended in a complete negation of the path India has embarked on, in 2020. (2/2) #CAA_NRC_NPRpic.twitter.com/yeT5mR5HPc
Still, this latest cover sounds exaggeratedly alarmist, until you consider Kailash Vijayvargiya, national general secretary of the BJP. Who says he suspected that some workers engaged in constructing a new room at his home were Bangladeshis, because of their “strange eating habits” — to wit, they ate poha. From the story:
I have not filed any police complaint yet. I only mentioned this incident to warn people.”
Speaking at the seminar, Vijayvargiya also claimed that a Bangladeshi terrorist was keeping a watch on him for the last one-and-a-half years.
“Whenever I go out, six armed security personnel follow me. What is happening in this country? Will outside people enter and spread so much terror?” he asked.
Just another of the BJP’s motormouth brigade sounding off, right? And making accusations that, on the face of it, are so absurd they are downright laughable? (I mean, a national BJP leader has a Bangladeshi terrorist following him around for a year and a half — he knows it, but neither his security, nor the police, nor the GoI’s extended intelligence machinery, can do anything about it?)
In passing, if poha now ranks with beef on the BJP’s list of suspect foods, wonder what Vijayvarghiya makes of Narendra Modi, who is on record as saying poha is one of the things he likes to cook?
We dismiss such idiots at our own peril, though. For this is classic gaslighting — he is speaking not to those who can think for themselves, but to that other constituency, of hardcore bigots, who merely want a peg to hang their internal prejudices on. This gaslighting, and the consequent normalisation of prejudice, has dangerous real world consequences. Thus:
A day after shanties belonging to hundreds of labourers were illegally razed by a BBMP official, fear has gripped migrant workers in east Bengaluru, with as many as 600 leaving the city even as authorities justified the action citing lack of time and money for verifying documents.
The administration — in Yedyurappa-run Bangalore — has no time or money to check whether there is any truth to an allegation, so they just demolish a few hundred homes and put a thousand or so people on the street. People, mind, with all proper documentation, including some who are native Kannadigas. Remember, this began with a BJP MLA posting a video of a shantytown and alleging that the residents were illegal Bangladeshi migrants. Elsewhere:
Thousands of migrant workers, mostly employed in coffee estates across Kodagu, were taken to three centres in the district on Thursday as police carried out an identity verification exercise. The centres in Madikeri, Virajpet and Kushalnagar towns were teeming with crowds as police conducted both offline and online identity verification.
The action, say the police, was because of “the security threats these people pose”. What threats? Based on which investigation? Where is due process?
An Amit Shah talks of the “termites” from Bangladesh. A Vijayvarghiya talks of his suspicion that some people eating poha are illegal Bangladeshis. Stupid comments on the face of it, but it accomplishes the purpose: “Bangladeshi” is the cover that confers legitimacy on their actions; Muslim is the enemy they are going after.
The law, which is meant to be a bulwark against such acts, is of no use. In BJP-ruled states where the leaders have passed on their prejudices to the hand-picked senior police officers and given them a loose rein, it is a case of act first, think up reasons later. As for instance in Uttar Pradesh, where…
As more and more cases against protesters charged with attempt to murder and rioting during anti-CAA protests in December began failing legal scrutiny and courts started granting bail, police in Muzaffarnagar invoked a stringent provision of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 — almost a month after it booked 107 people — and claimed that protesters used children “for illegal activity”.
Which is to say, when the initial charges — of “rioting” — fail to hold up, the police come up with something else. And when that fails to hold up (as it will), they will come up with something else again… No sooner than lawyers successfully fight one charge, than another pops up.
This zeal is selective. For instance, in the daily rush of events we seem to have forgotten that today, January 24, is the 19th day since masked thugs armed with iron rods, hammers, bottles of acid, entered the JNU campus, with the connivance of the VC and with the benign tolerance of the police, and caused mayhem. Several of the perpetrators have been identified, via video and cellphone messages — and yet, there has not been one single arrest, no FIR against any of them. On the other hand JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh and several of her colleagues face charges of criminal vandalism for an attack on the university’s server rooms on January 1 — an attack, as an RTI inquiry revealed, never happened.
This is the playbook in its entirety. Use public platforms and captive media to demonise, to other. Then act — no matter how untenable the action is, because the objective is not to apprehend and punish actual wrongdoing, but to make life unliveable for those the government deems its enemy. And when words are not enough, try more direct methods. As, for instance:
According to the Kathirur police Prabesh allegedly hurled steel bombs towards the police picket in front of Kathirur Manoj Smrithi Kendram, an RSS office.
“He threw bombs during the wee hours of January 16 morning. Following the arrest he has confessed that his aim was RSS office. Kannur, being politically sensitive region, any attack on political party offices will be regarded as an act by the opponent,” Kathirur SI Nijeesh said.
Unpack that slowly. An RSS “worker” threw a bomb at his own party office, regardless of the fact that he might have ended up killing his own people, so that blame could be put on the enemy — the political opposition, the “radicals”, whoever. This happened in Kannur, ground zero for RSS-sponsored terrorism. Where, among many incidents, there was this: Lethal bombs recovered from an RSS-controlled temple where they had been hidden. Remember this?:
“They are putting their life in danger to make these things (bombs) for self-defence. That’s how little faith they have in the law and order system in place,” he said.
The man saying RSS workers are making bombs for self defence, risking their lives in the process, is RSS leader (RSS, not one of those convenient “fringe groups”) Valsan Thillankeri — who was at the forefront of the 2019 violence at Sabarimala, where, again, bombs were hurled at the homes of political leaders.
It’s getting to where Colin Nissan’s sarcasm in the New Yorker piece doesn’t feel like sarcasm any more; it is actually a thing.
Everybody: You know those moments between crying about one thing and crying about the next thing, when you finally have time to catch your breath and just cry about nothing?
Shruti Rajagopalan, one of my favourite columnists on all things to do with economics, turns her attention to the Constitution and, with a tick-tock narrative, shows us how we got here. Read — it is the background you need to understand the present.
CNN has a detailed report sourcing Amnesty International on the troll armies and related propaganda tools that have made Twitter hell for women politicians and activists. Related, the Independent (London) has a similar story.
Since Kerala came up earlier in this post (and since I linked to my posts yesterday), here is a Caravan backgrounder that tells you how, and why, Kerala became ground zero for the RSS.
You read about Davinder Singh. You read about Samarpal, the BSF jawan caught carrying a lethal bomb into a CRPF camp. Now read this story, of how army personnel in Kashmir are commandeering the cars of citizens at night. Why would the army, which has vehicles to spare, need to surreptitiously commandeer private cars at night? What are they doing, that they cannot do in their own official vehicles? The questions just keep mounting, and each unanswered question adds to the dread that the situation in the Valley is much less than even the more pessimistic of us feared.
I’ll be back here later today in case this post needs updating. In the meantime, I will leave you with this comprehensive — and highly evocative — collation of the protest music that is emerging out of the ongoing revolution. I’ve been listening to some of these on loop. And also with this image, that got fixed in my mind when I saw it while surfing Twitter last evening:
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.
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.
Smoke Signals 
