24 December 2019
I start with this headline as topic not because I am trying to retort to Mr Tejaswi Surya MP for his mention in the Town Hall at Bengaluru, where this reference came in context of ‘othering’ the opponents of the CAA and NRC. I am trying to piece together a journey of India, where I am simply trying to puncture her ‘secular polity’ based on her track record.
Post Independent India’s bloodiest pogrom of religious fanaticism is one which is still shrouded in mystery and secrecy. It happened in Assam, which is the source of all our recent troubles over the foundational assertions of citizenship and Indianness. It happened and will continue to happen because of the fundamental aspect of Indians which we keep denying but which Mr Surya boldly asserted, that Indians were by and large never for any ‘namby pamby secularism’! This was Nellie 1983, Assam under Congress CM Hiteshwar Saikia and PM Indira Gandhi. The TD Tiwari Commission ( Shri TD Tiwari, a retired bureaucrat, was former Chief Secretary of UP) recorded all the evidence and submitted a 600 pages report within six months, but it was such damnation, that it stayed under wraps.(https://mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/66_RTI_NE_AK_280714.PDF)(https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/thirty-two-years-later-nellie-massacre-remains-all-forgotten)
It laid the foundation for bureaucratic and police behaviour in subsequent incidents of religious/sectarian violence, in Punjab, Delhi (1984 riots), Gujarat (2002) and those that took place in Mumbai, Bhiwandi and elsewhere at the height of the Ram Mandir agitation. Only unlike Assam, FIRs filed have been processed and accused tried in courts in respective of both eh Anti Sikh riots as well as the Anti Muslim riots. Reconciliation and Justice still eludes victims, rehabilitation and reintegration eludes all manner of refugees from Kashmiri Pandits, to Muslims and Sikhs as a structured government programme taking the support of all stakeholders of society!So India did reveal her prejudice rather early, finding a way for riots to emerge with their own environment of violent retributions, only today, the riots have become so tactical, with such limited threshold levels that they have converted to individual lynching, as a escape for pent up prejudice and rage against the ‘other’! So whatever happened at Jamia, now happening in UP, is happening despite the fact that unlike Pro CAA rallies, Anti CAA rallies had ordinary citizens carry the Flag and Constitution of the country, had protesting public sing the National Anthem and yet the urge to ‘sort’ them out went out of hand for our law enforcement.
If you thought that anti Tribal, anti Naxal propaganda and action was recent, think again. During UPA rule from 2004 to 2014, Naxalism was at its height briefly before it fizzled out with the death of ‘Kishenji’, a charismatic Che Guevara wannabe, and those dire predictions of Red Corridors become a Red Country turned out to be only fancy imaginations on paper. Yes, India came up with unorthodox solutions in insurgency, not just ‘hearts and minds’ but also boosting a counter insurgent neighbourhood militia, in J&K it was called Ikhwaan, in Chattisgarh is was called Salua Judum. Again, it was a kind of outsourcing of local policing, since the local police had long lost their roots to communities they served in. Remember that the Justice Aggarwal Commission recently concluded reported that the killing of 17 civilians in tribal areas was ‘cold blooded murder’ (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/chhattisgarh-encounter-2012-judicial-probe-1624610-2019-12-03) and now connect to reports of similar such murders in Punjab during the reign of legendary Supercop KPS Gill, then connect to the murders of Ishrat Jehan, Kausar Bibi, Prajapati under another super cop wannabe Vanzara in Gujarat.
So the trend of policemen enforcing their ‘justice’ on unarmed civilians is again not recent. It started with good reasons of abandoning of procedure and legal support for police operations at the height of the militancy in Punjab, it was also a Mumbai side show where periodically the mafia was put in its place by the administration through ‘shoot outs’, and it became a genre of counter insurgency and anti terrorism campaigns with a clear evident status of unaccountable and unwarranted actions by law enforcement.
So today if the Pune Police have held a dozen activists including lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj for ‘urban naxal’ actions, that without a chargesheet they have extended custody of these people for more than a year now, if forensics have determined that the computers(lap top devices) of youth who apparently plotted to kill the PM Mr Modi in a related case were tampered with and evidence was planted against them, and if you link it with the same Pune police action against a Delhi professor in a dawn raid at his house without warrant or judicial process, where after six hours of holding the family against their will, they confiscated all their devices, you see how it started with our othering of wheel chair bound Professor Sainath who seventy years after our Independence was charged with sedition and sentenced to 10 years for pro leftist writing… Vittala a Tribal journalist with PARI Network tells you why Bhagat Singh, tea powder and sugar along with some research papers about the Naxal movement saw him detained for four months in 2012. So if you connect the dots, you can see how Establishment India viscerally hates and hounds those whose ideology is left of centre and their actions are progressively harder!
I am not here to say that what is happening now is not unprecedented in scale and scope, but what is important for us Indians to appreciate is that the evidence of our nation state from our very existence as Independent Statehood has been a record of this progression, from stated inclusivity to intended exclusivity, from secularism to Hindu majoritarianism. This transformation coopted large swathes of our society of otherwise very civil and educated elites who were simply enablers goading us towards this current precipice where we seem to be very close to reaching a point of no return.
To be poor, to be a woman, to be not of the Suvarna castes of Hindu caste system, to be a Muslim, all of this is right now a legitimate target of Establishment India. India is working on a reverse Malthusian model, where it feels that it can leave behind a more robust and progressive nationhood for posterity, if only it can do a staged or cultured ‘final solution’ for these segments that it feels pollutes its sacred core.
I leave you with this exchange with a person of Indian origin who is comfortable in his ‘Sanskrit mother and Indian’ skin while working in Germany and who engages in a rare civilised manner on Twitter-
He:A controlled ritual of violence is a method in curbing a chaotic explosion of violence. Many cultures have it, although we have lost this in India. We should revive it.
Me:Culling?
He:Yajña.
Me:Which one? Aswamedha? Putrakameshti? Or you wish for sequestration or selective targeting like how many nations have done with ethnic minorities?
He:Where did I say anything about targeting minorities? Are you out of your mind!!?
So all those pious and privileged assertions are punctured by just this simple exchange. Even now, the situation is such that the person here thinks I am out of my mind for suggesting in the open what is weighing on his mind! India, I feel has travelled too far, because in Koderma in Jharkhand the BJP held on to its seat and because the BJP merely lost a dozen seats, instead of being routed if the reasons for their loss were to hold true there. The fight for the soul of India appears to be a losing one, our civilised edge as we once assumed is now hanging by the proverbial thread…
indiarubberman.com 