Mukul Kesavan - The burden of proof: India seems to be in the middle of a counter-reformation
NB: People across the world know that the US Republican Party frontrunner for president is using the infamous dog-whistle method to instigate violence if he were to be denied the nomination. The violence at his rallies is seen as a forerunner of things to come. What has this to do with India? Its simple - the allies of the RSS have begun their latest round of spreading violence in the name of patriotism. The behaviour of some of these 'patriots' in the JNU controversy is no secret. They indulged in open hooliganism, even within court premises. The Dadri murder showed how the politics of communal incitement works for the Sangh Parivar. The Latehar murder of two Muslim cattle traders is the latest example.
Now our ruling party has said the refusal to shout Bharat Mata ki Jai is anti-constitutional. In the face of its contempt for the rule of law, this is not just ironical, it is another instance of the politics of the dog whistle. They know well what is happening, and they are in control of what is happening. A Union Minister makes a vicious communal speech calling for the final battle etc, and is given a clean chit by the Union Home Minister. The Sangh's apologists are moved to tears by the PM's Good Sufi speech, but seem to be on sleeping pills when it comes to the elephant in the drawing room. Let it be said clearly that these latest statements by the BJP leadership are an incitement to violence. The Government of India is led by a party that encourages vigilante violence in the name of patriotism. Those sworn to uphold the Constitution, are destroying it. An ideological coup is unfolding under our noses. Kesavan's comment below is the best summation I have read so far of this coup. Good luck to all. DS
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Mukul Kesavan - The burden of proof
We seem to be in the middle of a counter-reformation where new inquisitors refuse to take our citizenship, our innocence if you will, for granted. We - some more than others - are asked to prove our innocence and perform our Indianness to their satisfaction. We should refuse... as free citizens of a great republic we have nothing to prove.
Now our ruling party has said the refusal to shout Bharat Mata ki Jai is anti-constitutional. In the face of its contempt for the rule of law, this is not just ironical, it is another instance of the politics of the dog whistle. They know well what is happening, and they are in control of what is happening. A Union Minister makes a vicious communal speech calling for the final battle etc, and is given a clean chit by the Union Home Minister. The Sangh's apologists are moved to tears by the PM's Good Sufi speech, but seem to be on sleeping pills when it comes to the elephant in the drawing room. Let it be said clearly that these latest statements by the BJP leadership are an incitement to violence. The Government of India is led by a party that encourages vigilante violence in the name of patriotism. Those sworn to uphold the Constitution, are destroying it. An ideological coup is unfolding under our noses. Kesavan's comment below is the best summation I have read so far of this coup. Good luck to all. DS
***********
Mukul Kesavan - The burden of proof
We seem to be in the middle of a counter-reformation where new inquisitors refuse to take our citizenship, our innocence if you will, for granted. We - some more than others - are asked to prove our innocence and perform our Indianness to their satisfaction. We should refuse... as free citizens of a great republic we have nothing to prove.
Citizenship is a
birthright; patriotism is an acquired attribute. None of us bawled "Bharat
Mata ki jai" or "Jai Hind" in our cribs but we were,
unconditionally, citizens of this country before we were continent and well
before we learnt to think or act or walk or speak. This shouldn't need saying
but in the present political climate, underlining the bl***ing obvious becomes
a duty. Citizenship, in the jargon of medical insurance companies, is a
pre-existing condition. Our rights as citizens cannot, should not, be taken
away from us unless we break our republic's laws. It follows from this that
citizenship and its attendant promise of life and liberty, cannot be subject to
litmus tests of patriotism devised by political parties, celebrity
nationalists, bureaucrats and gau rakshaks. But increasingly they
are.
Just the past week
produced four examples of the way in which this birthright is being challenged
by people who would argue that being law-abiding is not enough; Indians have to
demonstrate that they are good citizens. The implication in each case is that if
we aren't able or willing to perform designated patriotic exercises (or
distance ourselves from unpatriotic ones) our standing as citizens, our rights,
our liberties can legitimately be taken away from us. Let's discuss these four
challenges in ascending order of awfulness.
Anupam Kher, a
distinguished actor who has recently acquired a reputation as the roving
scourge of the politically correct, visited the Jawaharlal Nehru University's
campus earlier this week to challenge the legitimacy of the post-bail political
narrative first set out by Kanhaiya Kumar in his celebrated speech. In the
question and answer session that followed Kher's speech, someone argued, in
defence of JNU's student community, that the slogans shouted on that fateful
evening, celebrating the imminent disintegration of India and denouncing those
who had a hand in executing Afzal Guru, had been raised by outsiders. Kher's
response was revealing. Did you, he asked, referring to JNU students in
general, tear down the posters that celebrated Afzal Guru? No, you didn't. They
remained stuck to the walls of university buildings for days.
It was for Kher, a
'gotcha' moment and it tells you everything that is important about thesarkari narrative
on JNU. To be physically proximate to unpatriotic utterance calls your Indian
bona fides into question. So the fact that JNU's students let those posters
stay on JNU's walls was culpable in itself. For Kher, the university's students
had been found wanting in Indianness. Instead of scraping the posters off the
buildings as any passionate patriot would have done, they had lived with them.
This inertness, was a kind of complicity. Citizens have to prove themselves.
Citizenship, in Kher's view of the world, isn't a birthright; it's a kind of
probation and you only truly belong when you learn to perform your patriotism.
But Kher, despite his
proximity to the ruling dispensation, is a private citizen. His opinions don't
formally represent the view of the State. It's a much more serious business
when the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language circulates a form to
writers in Urdu, asking them to certify that their books - novels, short
stories, plays, poems, memoirs etc - contain nothing that is critical of the
policies of the government or the interest of the nation.
The NCPUL encourages
literary production in Urdu by buying books in bulk, and according to the Indian
Express, this new form is meant to put Urdu writers on notice "...that
in case of a breach, the NCPUL can take legal action against the author and
take back the monetary assistance".
The NCPUL is a
government organization and it answers to the ministry of human resource
development. The decision to get Urdu writers to sign on to this form was taken
last year. It is, on the face of it, extraordinary that the government of India
should ask writers to guarantee that their books contain nothing that is
against "the policies of the government" or "the interest of the
nation" or that is likely to cause "disharmony of any sort between
different classes of the country". It is bad enough that a government
should ask writers to self-attest that their novels and poems and essays are
utterly conformist and docile, but it is particularly worrying when writers in
a particular language, Urdu, who happen to be overwhelmingly Muslim, are
singled out to sign this humiliating undertaking.
The NCPUL director's
justification is breathtaking in its candour. "Since we do not have the
manpower to scrutinise every single line of each book, this form helps us place
the onus on the authors." The onus for what? Are Urdu writers, in the
opinion of the NCPUL and the HRD ministry, in the habit of cobbling
anti-national and communally inflammatory material into their work? Curiously,
the equivalent policy of the National Council for Promotion of Sindhi Language
contains no such stipulation. The lesson to take away from this seems to be
that some citizens are allowed to take their patriotism for granted while the
patriotism of others (in this case, writers in Urdu) needs formal
self-attestation.
This bullying
enthusiasm for applying loyalty tests to law abiding citizens reached a new low
when the Maharashtra assembly unanimously voted to suspend Waris Pathan, on the
charge of disrespecting the country. Pathan's 'crime' was refusing to say
"Bharat Mata ki jai" when a Bharatiya Janata Party member
of parliament insisted that he recite this slogan. The Nationalist Congress
Party and the Congress joined the BJP in asking for Pathan's suspension and the
Speaker caved in to their demand despite the fact that Pathan had done nothing
to warrant suspension in terms of the assembly's own rules. Pathan's
willingness to say "Jai Hind" as an alternative invocation of the
nation was disregarded.
Pathan was following
the lead of his party leader, Asaduddin Owaisi, who had announced a few days
earlier that nothing would make him say "Bharat Mata ki jai"
It is one thing to criticize Owaisi's declaration as a form of political
grandstanding (as Javed Akhtar did in Parliament); it is quite another to
suspend a democratically elected member of the legislative assembly for
refusing to jump through political hoops at the behest of hostile fellow
legislators. In a country in which MLAs have been known to hold up proceedings,
throw furniture about and even assault each other, to punish an MLA for not
saying something, for refusing to mouth a slogan that he felt was contrary to
his religious principles, is truly Kafkaesque. The rights of citizenship, the
rules of representative government are being cynically bent to accommodate a
bullying jingoism.
My last example is a
hideous tragedy. A man and a 12-year-old boy taking oxen to a cattle market
were lynched in a village in Jharkhand and hung from a tree. They happen to be
Muslim. The five men arrested in connection with these murders happen to be
Hindus. One of the five happens to be connected to a cow-protection society.
The superintendent of police in charge of the case thinks that, prima
facie, this is a case of cattle looting gone wrong, but he is also
investigating other possibilities including ideological motives related to gau
raksha. On social media some right-wing commentators favour 'personal enmity'
as the likelier explanation.
They could be right
but all of us should be deeply worried about the manner of this lynching. If
this was a violent robbery that just happened to end in murder, why were the
victims, one of them just a boy, left hanging on a tree? A hanging isn't just a
murder, it is a kind of execution. When two Muslims in the cattle trade are
lynched in this demonstrative way, it is reasonable to wonder if a message is
intended.
Jharkhand is a state
ruled by the BJP. Unlike the lynching in Dadri, this one happened on its watch.
This doesn't mean that Mohammad Majloom and Inayatullah Khan are exhibits A and
B in some indictment of the BJP's Jharkhand government. We don't have to argue
complicity to point out that Narendra Modi's regime, which Arun Shourie mocked
as the UPA plus a cow, has consistently dog-whistled about cow protection.
Local party workers, MLAs, MPs, ministers, chief ministers said vile and
temporising things after the Dadri lynching. The BJP has consistently
equivocated in the aftermath of gau-rakshak violence; it
should surprise no one if it turns out that Mohammad Majloom and Inayatullah
Khan were lynched because their killers felt a sense of ideological impunity.
Majloom and Khan quite
likely died because in contemporary India, Muslims herding cows or eating meat
aren't always given the benefit of the doubt. As with Waris Pathan and Urdu
writers and JNU's students, the burden of proof is sometimes reversed. We seem
to be in the middle of a counter-reformation where new inquisitors refuse to
take our citizenship, our innocence if you will, for granted. We - some more
than others - are asked to prove our innocence and perform our Indianness to
their satisfaction. We should refuse. There is no satisfying an Inquisition and
as free citizens of a great republic we have nothing to prove.
