Pratap Bhanu Mehta - Thoki Raj: Creating order by trampling on law is one of the elements of Adityanath’s ideological success

By Dilip -
NB: The inclination to lawlessness is embedded in the political culture of the so-called Sangh Parivar; moreover it has spread through civil society. Some resist it, others encourage it and use it. The tendency was clear in the murder of Gandhiji, not to mention the involvement of the Congress in the mass carnage of Sikh citizens in 1984. Private armies, privatised violence and ideological subversion of policing and the justice system are destroying Indian democracy, and no one's hands are clean. Those who swore loyalty to the Constitution upon taking office and then proceeded to destroy it for their selfish purposes are criminals, nothing more, nothing less. They need not complain about Maoist violence, all they need to do is look in the mirror. DS

The killing of Vikas Dubey and the chain of events leading up to it throw a spotlight on governance in Uttar Pradesh and police reform more generally. The Adityanath political dispensation in UP is unique. Many Indian states tolerate acts of impunity and selectively suspend the rule of law. The Adityanath regime is explicitly ideologically committed to what is colloquially known as “thoki raj,” named after a statement attributed to the chief minister, “agar apradh karenge toh thok diye jayenge.”

The Broken Middle

The emperor's masks: 'apolitical' RSS calls the shots in Modi sarkar

This was evidenced in the way the cases against the CM himself were withdrawn. It was even more frighteningly in evidence in the way in which the government sought to quell the anti-CAA protests, by arbitrarily attaching people’s properties in ways that had no legal backing and prejudged guilt. Independent journalist Neha Dixit’s brave reporting on police violence in UP has been showing that, by the government’s own admission, even as early as February 2018, UP police was conducting four encounters a day, killing up to 40 people. The UP government seems to deploy the National Security Act against a variety of offences, as if using this Act were imposing a minor fine. Nowhere has a use of state violence been elevated to such an ideological raison d’etre. Creating order by trampling on law is one of the elements of Adityanath’s ideological success.

So while the killing of Vikas Dubey has parallels elsewhere, there is also a specific ideological context here. Dubey comes across as the kind of gangster who epitomises both the banality and horror of UP politics. He allegedly killed eight policemen with impunity, and was accused in several heinous crimes. But he was also part of a social and political power structure whose needs he served. In a political culture where demand for the rule of law is considered cruelty, and vengeance is considered humanising, no one is likely to lose sleep over this killing. But it is important we don’t lose sight of three points….


see also

Mukul Kesavan - Sulphur in the air: 1984 is not forgotten. Kamal Nath’s elevation as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh is a bid to normalise the nadir of our history as a republic
The Broken Middle - on the 30th anniversary of 1984
Archive on the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan
Bharat Bhushan - Did Pranab make a Faustian bargain?
The cultural non-politics of the RSS
Delhi gurdwaras to hail Indira Gandhi 's killers as martyrs? Why complain when Mahatma Gandhi's killers are lionised?
Delhi Police Archive on RSS activity in October-December 1947
More threats and lies from the RSS
Sabotage of Indian justice continues unchecked: Aseemanand’s ‘disclosure’ missing from court
The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism
मध्यमार्ग का अवसान : दिलीप सिमियन (The Broken Middle, EPW, November 2014)
1948: Supreme Court, RSS and Gandhi

Chitrangada Choudhury - 50 days after security forces charged with gangrape...

CHITRANGADA CHOUDHURY - Arrested tortured, jailed in south Bastar...

Chitrangada Choudhury, Ajay Dandekar – dealing with Maoists...

Chitrangada Choudhury Aga - Illegal mining's ground zero ...

Supriya Sharma - The story the Chhattisgarh police does not want you to read

Atul Dev - The attack on Soni Sori follows her attempts at holding the police in Bastar accountable

Report of Fact Finding Team of Editors Guild of India on attacks on media in Bastar 

KRISHN KAUSHIK AND ATUL DEV - “This kind of terror, we have not seen before”: An interview with the lawyers evicted from Bastar in Chhattisgarh

 Shaju Philip: Kerala CPM leaders give hero’s farewell to party leader convicted of murder

The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS

The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)






Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more