Facade & Fascism

3 October 2019

It is only in the last few decades actually, that human values have been enshrined in legal cannon, values that we today individually would like to take for granted. Values that now allow us to declare insolvency and not be subjected to bondage to redeem debts for starters! Values that allow us to meet another human fair and square, with our eyes beholding theirs, with neither caste nor creed nor religion being held in between us, with a guarantee of equality before law.

Why I wish to mull and recall these is not because Mr Chidambaram’s family tweeting on his behalf  ran a short thread about these things and how Gandhi fought such a sterling battle for the right of individual freedoms, but because yesterday in a court in USA a former police officer Ms Amber was convicted of murder by a jury. Briefly the case is a ‘hate crime’, an equivalent of Mohammad Ahlaq being killed in his house by a lynchmob in down town Meerut a few miles from the national Capital- Delhi. This police officer entered an apartment of a black man, Botham Jean, and put into him bullets that killed him, claiming that her entering his home was on suspicion and not intrusion, her killing was a part of duty and no wanton murder.(https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/amber-guyger-botham-jean-verdict/index.htmlhttps://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/amber-guyger-botham-jean-verdict/index.html

We know America under Trump has become more liberal with this ‘othering’ business, where a kind of White Conservative radicalism has been espoused by Trump that looks upon African Americans, Latinos and others as ‘unwanted’ and ‘immigrant’ out to deny America her Greatness. ( Make no mistake- the man toasted at Howdy Modi Rally in Houston is the one who is making it almost impossible for Indians to settle in USA now!) This is exactly the kind of atmospherics that is now attendant in India clearly, which was also behind the motivation for the people to do what they did to Ahlaq. And like Ahlaq whose refrigerator was inspected its meat sample sent for laboratory study to confirm the suspicion that it was bovine, the police in Dallas too studied the case from the angle of whether Botham Jean was a ‘Person of Interest’ and whether his conduct offered grounds for the treatment meted out to him, and perhaps the resistance to arrest did lead to his being shot dead by an officer of the law?

On duty police officers now have body cams on them, that record their encounters with the public to determine whether excessive force was used, whether the engagements were within the bounds of policing as per the Police Copybook. After a spate of killings which left the US Law enforcement community on the back foot, starting from the famous use of excessive force on Rodney King in Los Angeles nearly 3 decades ago(https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots), where the jury verdict of Not Guilty led to rioting in LA, the improvements in accounting for police actions has led to the attending police officer on duty’s body cam recording the last moments of Botham Jean. The story of the off duty Amber was that her son was in the apartment, her apartment and she entered what she thought was hers, assumed late Botham was an intruder and fearing for her son, fired on him.

 In the last one year, Botham Jean’s ghost has watched first the police officer suspended, then dismissed for violating her off duty code of conduct, for discharging her service weapon, particularly her actions observed by the officers who rushed to the crime scene immediately after receiving her 911 call! Now her trial concluded, the jury took less than a day, seeking a clarification for difference between manslaughter and murder and  a legal principle called the castle doctrine. Castle doctrine is important because, it accepts that no policing agency can without ‘probable cause’ and due warning seek recourse to violating any individual’s premises, his or her home being termed a castle of their rightful safety and privacy! So just think how Pune police recently entered the house of a professor in Noida and took his laptop and gathered all his notes and seized the mobile phones of all the family in an ‘inquiry’ raid conducted more than a year after arrests were made in the Bhima Koregoan case!  The police were able to do this with impunity, with no need for warrant, did not have the presence of local police, and the team was an all male team that stormed the flat of this hapless Indian citizen.(https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/bhima-koregaon-case-du-professor-hany-babu-booked-for-sedition-home-searched/cid/1703974)

Of course, we are Indians. For us this Constitutionality is a convenient tool, when at the receiving end we will hoist the flag and at other times we will look askance, is it? The jury in the Botham Jean case returned a verdict of guilty for murder! And now her sentencing will be done by this weekend and she faces a probable sentence of life in jail without parole, because she was a police officer at the time of her offence! I don’t need to remind you how the killers of not just Ahlaq roam free today, that even the killers of a police inspector who was on duty in uniform are out on bail today! 

When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we must understand the crucial difference between Us and Them. Western Democracies still have Constitutional process that is largely functional, unlike India which appears to have descended into a chaos, where justice is served only in the breach. Coming back to Mr Chidambaram, in response to his tweets, many attacked him stating that he was good riddance jailed for his corruption which too Gandhi would have found revolting. So I asked one person who had so tweeted, and this gent was kind enough to reply as well, and in a rare confession accepted that he was ignorant. Ignorant of the distinction between custodial enquiry and undertrial custody, of how the phrase convict is reserved only for a person convicted by a court of law, or how the phrase undertrial is intended only for a person who is accused under law and against whom a trial court has accepted the chargesheet and judicial proceedings have begun! Then he took recourse to Karma, saying that Mr Chidambaram must have abused his high office that is why Jail time is visiting him in this fashion!

Karma! Indians use Karma like face tissue ( since they don’t use toilet paper!) for explaining any thing happening which is not in the clear of law. A JNU student disappearing as Najeeb has done is Karma, Kanhaiya Kumar and his friends were falsely implicated is their Karma (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/jawaharlal-nehru-university-kanhaiya-kumar-umar-khalid-anti-national-sedition-963198-2017-02-28) or that paediatrician Dr Kafeel who was tagged as mass murderer after deaths in a ward in Gorakhpur government hospital and pilloried by social media, TV studios and even ordinary people now being cleared of all charges (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/hope-murderer-tag-is-wiped-now-says-dr-kafeel-khan-after-clean-chit-in-gorakhpur-oxygen-deaths-tragedy-1603815-2019-09-27) is also Karma. Is Karma a chameleon or Karma have any principles at all?

Indians need to introspect, how they civility and sense of justice is being hijacked by this fascist ideology and nationalist jingoism, by this sense of strong majoritarianism and brushing aside of concerns for rule of law and due process! This is what yesterday in an interview the veteran Industrialist Rahul Bajaj alluded to, when he described the ‘lynch mob’ mentality!

It is not mob mentality, fatalism or Karma, we are using all these as crutches as screens to hide the actual monster at play in our country unchecked and unbridled- fascism! Here we are on Gandhiji’s 150^th Birth Anniversary and we must hold unto us the distinction between this facade as ordinary citizens and reveal the fascism that holds us in its thrall!