INSAF Bulletin 226, February 2021 International South Asia Forum http://www.insafbulletin.net Founding Editor: Daya Varma (1929-2015) Editors: Vinod Mubayi (New York) and Raza Mir (New Jersey). Editorial Board: Ram Puniyani and Irfan Engineer (Mumbai); Pervez Hoodbhoy (Islamabad); Dolores Chew (Montreal); Vamsi Vakulabharanam (Amherst). Circulation/website: Feroz Mehdi (On behalf of Alternatives, Montreal).
[1] EDITORIAL: MOBOCRACY IN THE WORLD’S “OLDEST” AND “LARGEST” DEMOCRACIES
Vinod Mubayi
The invasion of the seat of government, the US Capitol, in the world’s oldest democracy on January 6, 2021 by violent, right-wing, white supremacist mobs owing allegiance to President Donald Trump, has focused attention on the role exercised by a democratically elected Leader who incites his followers to commit destructive acts. The proximate reason for the invasion was to stop the certification by Congress of the victory of Joe Biden over Trump in the November 2020 election.
Attacks by white supremacist mobs on what they disdain such as black Americans or immigrants has a long history in a country founded as a colonial-settler state that carried out a genocide of the native American population and practiced de jure slavery until the civil war in the 1860s. Even after the so- called emancipation of the slaves it took barely a decade before de facto slavery known as Jim Crow that lasted almost another century was re-established in the American south following the period known as Reconstruction. While the civil rights movements of the 1960s removed some of the formal legal institutional racist structures, ingrained racist practices and attitudes have persisted among elements of the white majority, particularly the police.
Historically, the Democratic Party in the American south was the main purveyor of institutional racism but this role was assumed on a national level by the Republican Party following Nixon’s southern strategy in the late 1960s. Ever since then, most Republican politicians have openly encouraged white supremacists and Trump took this to a whole new level. While Trump’s attempted coup failed in its immediate purpose and he had to leave office, Trumpism survives as a force among his numerous supporters and in a large majority of the Republican party. The resentment and rage that fuels Trumpistas may worsen if the neo-liberal economy continues to deepen existing economic inequality and the culture wars remain unresolved. Thus, the specter of such mobs invading government buildings perhaps in state capitals rather than Washington, DC cannot be ignored.
Meanwhile, in the world’s largest democracy, mobocracy has been refined to an art by the ruling establishment of Modi and Shah. Most of this in recent years has occurred at a low level in BJP ruled states with tacit encouragement provided to mobsters belonging to BJP or one of the other Hindutva organizations to harass and torment and even kill minorities, mainly Muslims, and Dalits. A spate of laws criminalizing consumption of beef and cow slaughter, inter-religious marriage, and alleged religious conversions, has given license to mobs of goondas who proclaim themselves militant Hindus to pounce on individual or small groups of Muslims while police look the other way or actively participate in the harassment and violence. This practice reached its peak in late February and March, 2020 in the wake of the BJP’s attempt to denigrate and derail the very successful peaceful, non-violent demonstrations against the communal and discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) legislation. Violent mobs were quite openly instigated and egged on by local BJP leaders to intimidate, attack and, in several cases, kill Muslims who had dared to oppose CAA. The response of the Delhi police, which comes under the Union Home Ministry headed by Shah, ranged from active participation to feigned ignorance. Many who dared to counter the attacks and defend themselves and their supporters who marched and demonstrated in their cause have been jailed on a variety of trumped-up charges.
This use of mobs along with other measures to render democracy dysfunctional has been termed an executive coup by Suhas Palshikar in an incisive article in the Indian Express newspaper of January 12, 2021. He writes: “Executive coups are a product of a triad: Constructing a constituency of willing mobs, corrosion of institutions and producing a political establishment unconcerned with democratic norms.” The Modi-Shah effort appears so far to be much more durable and longer lasting than Trump’s hasty and short-lived attempt at forestalling the certification of Biden’s victory by the US Congress.
Palshikar emphasizes that the ruling BJP in India has been able to construct “a constituency of the mob” through a “carefully orchestrated and sustained use of mobs which are excited prior to being unleashed” using “a network of ideologically motivated organizations [that] systematically whips up mob mentality among sections that are emotionally pushed to the precipice.” It is thus able to use mob politics “in a nuanced manner with a rhetorical discourse legitimating the mob as the people.” Trump tried this too with his MAGA rallies particularly on the morning of January 6, 2021 when he directly incited his followers to attack the Capitol.
But the key difference with respect to the relative success of the executive coup in India under Modi until now and its relative failure in the US under Trump so far may lie in the performance of those other institutions especially the courts in adjudicating the claims and actions taken by the leaders. Despite the elevation of right-wing judges to federal courts by the Republican majority in the US Senate during Trump’s presidency, Trump’s avalanche of claims of election fraud after he lost in November 2020 were decisively rejected by both state and federal courts. The Indian courts, on the other hand, have till now, in general, supinely kowtowed to executive power, seemingly cowed by the majoritarian sentiments whipped up by Modi now prevailing in India. They have refused to question, let alone overturn, some of the more blatant assaults on the Indian constitution by the Modi regime.
To make matters worse, much of the Indian mainstream media, barring a few honorable exceptions, has functioned as a cheerleader for the BJP regime. The complete support of big capital in India to Modi has facilitated this process. The Modi government has fully reciprocated this favor as witnessed by its fervent promotion of “market-friendly” policies, such as the new agricultural laws, now being vigorously opposed by Indian farmers all over the country. In contrast, the US media by and large has been more critical of the Trump regime
In conclusion, one may note the bonhomie between Trump and Modi demonstrated in the Howdy Modi jamboree in Houston, Texas and the Namaste Trump spectacle in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. They share many personality traits such as a disdain for facts and truth, a pronounced authoritarian streak and a craving for adoring masses, aka mobs, they can incite through their rhetoric. The difference, of course, is that Trump is gone from the political scene unless he or a clone -- there are several candidates--, reappears in 2024. Modi, on the other hand, is still going strong aided by the Hindutva frenzy he and the shadowy RSS behind him have fostered unless the widespread and unprecedented ongoing farmers agitation reins him in. That, however, remains to be seen,
[2] BUDGET 2021 IS A CHANCE TO UNDO THE COVID-INDUCED INEQUALITY THAT HAS SURGED ACROSS INDIA
Nikhil Dey
Ideally, the government should increase the work entitlement for MGNREGA to at least 150 days, double the budget and put in place an urban employment guarantee act.
Let’s start with those who did well over the last 10 months. The Sensex index crossed the 50,000 benchmark for the first time on January 21, 2021, with a whopping 70% increase since April 2020.
The Oxfam inequality report, just released, gives an idea of how the economy has functioned, for whom, and where our policy interventions have left us. The wealth of Indian billionaires increased by a massive 35% in the last 10 months. The Oxfam report states that just the increase in wealth of the top 100 billionaires could sustain the MGNREGA for ten years.
This is at the same time that we have faced an extreme recession – with the first quarter in 2020 measuring a 23.9 % degrowth, unknown in the history of independent India.
Let’s look at who suffered. The same Oxfam report says that 1,70,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020. Innumerable studies have pointed to the shrinking workforce and the rising rates of unemployment, even while there are some signs of recovery in growth rates (CMIE), the highest levels of food insecurity and starvation known in recent times (Hunger Watch), distress migration and reverse migration, the casualisation of jobs, the workforce shrinking by over 13% for women (Nikore FLFP study) during the pandemic; children out of schools, and children beginning to go to work. Everything seems to have gone wrong with the economy, and working people have suffered deep distress.
To add to all the negative indicators, inequality has increased dramatically in spread and intensity, with Oxfam calling Covid an “inequality virus”. But growing inequality perhaps helps explain why one group is clearly bullish even while millions continue to face acute economic distress.
The pandemic has of course contributed to this distress. But so has one of the harshest “lockdowns” seen across the globe. The pandemic was, and is a natural calamity, but the lockdown is a policy measure. Relief measures announced were not matched by financial provisioning. Countries across the globe – not just from Europe and North America, put aside approximately 10% of their GDP to alleviate distress, and help rebuild their economies. In India too, the PM announced 10% of GDP as a relief and stimulus package, but if credit is removed from the calculation, real enhancement of relief in cash or kind, or enhancement of schemes and additional allocations, amounted to little more than 3% to 4% of GDP.
The lockdown related distress in India was unprecedented, and painful with millions of people from the unorganised sector hitting the roads to head home by any mode possible, because they had no job, income, or residential security in the places that employed them. This should have been a wake -up call of what needed to be done, not only to climb out of the effect of the pandemic, but also address and correct the underlying systemic injustice this mass exodus had made so obvious to everyone.
Instead, we have seen a government using this period to keep dividing people along religious lines, for political gain and consolidation, through a series of discriminatory laws and amendments. What has been worse, has been the enactment of laws and policies such as the farm laws and labour codes that further dilute the basic rights of farmers and workers.
What has actually helped working people in India to survive the pandemic, and not have food riots across the country, has been our food stocks, and bumper harvests despite the pandemic. While almost all other tangible production sectors including manufacturing, went through unprecedented periods of near-zero productivity, enforced by the strictest of lockdowns, the agricultural sector carried on despite all the risks and tribulations they had to face.
Farmers seem to have responded to the pandemic with a kind of economic maturity and understanding that the laws of nature have to be followed both in terms of survival, and in terms of productivity. While we had 23.9% negative growth in the first quarter, the agricultural sector was the only one that showed a positive growth rate of 3.5 %, and if it were not for agriculture, the figures would have been so much worse.
Amongst relief and revival measures we must acknowledge and understand what actually saved vast numbers of people from hunger, starvation, and destitution. If it had not been for MGNREGA and the National Food Security Act (NFSA), the distress would have been even more acute, and we would have probably seen food riots, anarchy, violence, and uncontrollable protests on the ground. These were laws that this government dismissed, and derisively commented on as useless handouts.
But when the country faced acute distress and unemployment, even as a functional platform of delivery, the government had only these schemes and laws to turn to. Let’s first look at the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and rural wage employment. The government allocated Rs 40,000 crore more to MGNREGA to make a total of one lakh crore. Experts pointed out that this was barely enough to actually cover the existing needs of MGNREGA.
Even as per the approved labour budget of 2020-21, for generating 336 crore person days of labour in the year, and covering the pending liabilities from previous years approximately 1 lakh crores would have been needed. Therefore, the Rs 40,000 crore did not really do anything to help alleviate the additional Corona disaster-related distress, and MGNREGA coffers are now running dry with only about 5 % of the budget remaining, and two high demand months of the financial year still to go. Almost 94% of the so- called approved labour budget has also been used up, leaving states struggling to accept the demand for work from people.
We approach this budget at a time when millions of people have migrated back to their villages, and many are still there. 1,56 crore new job cards have been issued, and an additional 2.79 crore workers have sought and got work through MGNREGA. At the time after the pandemic when 30% of women dropped out of the workforce, MGNREGA provided an additional avenue for paid work with 1.05 crore more women coming to work on MGNREGA this year. In fact, MGNREGA is one of the most progressive gender oriented forms of paid work where more than 47% of the workforce is women, who get work near home, on projects that strengthen their development infrastructure, and where money goes directly into their bank accounts.
In addition, there is an existing provision to expand MGNREGA relief to 150 days in case of a “natural disaster”. However, despite the dire need, with many households completing their 100 days of work; this provision has not been activated. It would also require higher financial allocation. Despite COVID-19 being an unprecedented national disaster, and letters from many states to the central government asking them to provide an additional 50 days of work and additional funds, the government of India has steadfastly refused to pass the requisite orders. The government’s refusal to strengthen one of the most cost-effective methods it has had available to provide employment security to people in distress is inexplicable.
The government instead seems determined to place its faith in the corporate sector, reforming labour laws comprehensively, through the four new labour codes slanted in favour of the employer, thereby further informalising the already vulnerable and distressed unorganised sector. Along with the recent farm laws, it is clear that the government believes that it is the corporate sector that needs support, and greater opportunities for profit.
This reveals the contempt for Indian workers, farmers and their contribution to the Indian economy, and why the Oxfam report shows the corporates have done so well. Unfortunately, it has increased their wealth, but not even trickled down in terms of jobs, and income security of the working people of India. Vast numbers of them will still have to look for wage employment in public works through MGNREGA, or some form of urban employment guarantee.
It is therefore important to see the budget as a place that makes some minimal advance based on what has worked. Ideally, the government should increase the work entitlement for MGNREGA to at least 150 days, at least double the budget to Rs 2 lakh crore, and put in place an urban employment guarantee act if it wants to make people a part of its revival and growth story. Otherwise, we can be sure that it will not be only farmers who will be on the streets in the next year, and yet another Dickensian budget, of contrasts and inequality, will have contributed to it.
Source: The Wire, Jan 26, 2021
[3] THE SEASON OF DISCONTENT: HOW HAS COVID-19 IMPACTED CIVIC MOBILISATION AND ORGANISING IN SOUTH ASIA?
Alizeh Kohari
The last public protest I attended was on 8 March 2020. Two weeks later, the world changed. It was already changing, of course – had already changed, perhaps – but we didn’t know yet how much or for how long. That day, the gardens surrounding Karachi’s Frere Hall heaved with humans, mostly women; in a satisfying inversion of the status quo, men were allowed only in the company of a woman or a non- binary person. First, we shuffled, single-file, through a metal detector; the day was muggy, and, if we carried water, we had to first sip it under the watchful eye of an organiser, so she could make sure we weren’t smuggling acid onto the premises. Guns, explosives, acid attacks – these were familiar threats. What we hadn’t yet learned to fear was the simple presence of other humans – their breath, their touch, the threat of contagion.
Many young Pakistani women will tell you that the Aurat March, a feminist movement that culminates in countrywide demonstrations on International Women’s Day, was their first experience of old-fashioned, flesh-against-flesh political engagement. In a region heavily segregated along gender, class and religious lines, public and collective forms of resistance hold immense power. But as COVID-19 maintains its grip on the world, has this form of politics become impossible?
As per one risk assessment, at least two countries in the region, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are poised to face unprecedented street protests for the next three years.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project, a US-based organisation which tracks unrest across the world, the frequency of protests plummeted across Southasia in March 2020, declining by nearly 300 percent from the start of the year. But this dramatic decline didn’t necessarily imply that resistance had dissipated. As large swathes of the world locked down, a research team led by political scientist Erica Chenoweth began collecting data on the various methods people were using to express solidarity or press for change in the midst of a global crisis. “Far from condemning social movements to obsolescence,” the researchers argued, “the pandemic – and governments’ responses to it – are spawning new tools, new strategies and new motivation to push for change.”
Chileans banged pots and pans from inside their homes, deploying a centuries-old protest tradition; Hong Kong activists began protesting virtually on social-simulation video game Animal Crossing. Organisers in Washington DC painted a mural on billionaire Jeff Bezos’s doorstep, demanding protections for Amazon’s workers. Car rallies became popular; mysterious protest messages on immigrant detention filled the skies; digital rallies, teach-ins and online information-sharing became increasingly commonplace.
Inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United States, street protests ramped up again over the summer. According to ACLED data, in Southasia – where social distancing was arguably always doomed – the number of protests in recent months have exceeded pre-pandemic levels. As per one risk assessment, at least two countries in the region, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are poised to face unprecedented street protests for the next three years. But even if the death of visceral politics was short- lived, it is worth asking: how did it affect organising in Southasia? And, as states seek to entrench autocratic and extractive logics under the guise of disease management, how does it continue to be affected? I spoke to activists across the region to find out.
A digital front?
In a region where internet penetration remains low, is it possible to summon the might of street power in the virtual sphere? What does solidarity look like under social distancing?
As India went into national lockdown in late March 2020 with a notice of only four hours, triggering the largest mass exodus in the country since 1947, labour activists, students, and researchers mobilised under the banner of Migrant Workers Solidarity Network (MWSN) to support the millions who were suddenly stranded. A helpline was launched for stranded workers, posters circulated on WhatsApp in ten languages, and volunteers recruited in different cities to coordinate relief efforts on the ground. On social media, #MigrantLivesMatter began to trend.
At the same time, troubled with cliched narratives about the migrant workers being bailed out by charity, some sought to document their agency and resistance. Sunil Tamminaina, a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University and coordinator for the Migrant Workers Resistance Map, told me in May: “There have been hundreds of instances where migrant workers actually resisted whatever abject conditionalities are being put upon them: they came on to the roads, demanded that food be provided, relief shelters be upgraded, wages be paid.” Tamminaina collected over a hundred and fifty such examples, creating an interactive map for MSWN to push back against the prevailing narrative and popular amnesia.
From Karachi, lawyer and rights activist Abira Ashfaq recalled an instance where a demonstration was in perfect keeping with public-health mandates: the ‘Justice for Bramsh’ protest against the extrajudicial murder of a woman in Balochistan in June. “It was outside the Karachi Press Club; people spread out and powerfully took over two entire streets, maintained social distance and wore masks.”
More and more activists are, however, expending the greater part of their energies online. In 2019, Ashfaq had been part of demonstrations in Karachi where dozens of people marched through the colonies facing imminent eviction due to the proposed revival of the Karachi Circular Railway. “Such protests do not seem possible at the moment,” she said. “I do see some leftist and radical youth and student groups maintaining street level action. Others are more cautious and have migrated to online conversations.” But the limits of such methods are clear.
“The bodies on the street still matter,” says Layli Uddin, a historian of modern Southasia and a professor at King’s College, London, who spoke to me over Zoom. “They’re much more ominous for the state. In some ways, they’re more effective now than ever, actually, because it shows that people are putting their lives on the line for causes that are seen as greater than their actual health itself.”
Activists will tell you the success of movements is often contingent on an alchemy of timing and circumstance.
As the pandemic threw existing state neglect into starker relief, some activists also sensed a change in receptiveness to their causes – particularly in the early days of lockdown – even as physical-distancing measures made it difficult to organise in person. In Islamabad, when capital authorities demolished an informal settlement in mid-April under cover of COVID-19, evicting 75 families, activist Ammar Rashid noticed the difference. “I’ve seen 10 or 15 katchi abadis [makeshift settlements] being demolished in front of my eyes,” he told me in May. “People are often not that sympathetic. You usually get responses like: ‘These are landgrabbers, it isn’t their land, the state is right to remove them.” Those people are much more muted right now.” Rashid also sensed an increased interest in calls for fairness and justice among the communities he organises, who are normally busy with their lives. “Right now, though, it’s an emergency situation. People are looking for answers.”
However, digital organising – as opposed to, say, corner meetings – can mean that the most disenfranchised are likely to continue being left out. Rashid observed that those who have access to digital media were much more active during the lockdown in mobilisation efforts. “Older comrades are less involved,” he told me. “But we’re trying to use this as an opportunity to build our digital infrastructure.” From Karachi, Ashfaq added, “Online and street work has co-existed for a while. The more interesting question is how much more social media is being utilised as a means of organising now than before the pandemic… and whether we’ve found ways to forge unities and transgress boundaries, band-aid rifts of class, ethnicity, religion and geography?”
Existing movements, caught unawares by the pandemic, are also using this moment to reassess longer- term aims and tactics. “Hopefully some of us will use this time to think, read, write, and connect so we can come out stronger and more informed in the ways systems of oppression work to reduce most people to bare existence,” said Ashfaq. “I do feel that after the pandemic is over, street action, marches, and building within communities will seem more relevant, necessary and an imperative.”
Activists will tell you the success of movements is often contingent on an alchemy of timing and circumstance: you can plod on in relative obscurity for years or decades, then the wind will change and your cause might catch fire. Political mobilisation, Uddin pointed out, doesn’t usually occur when you’re at your weakest. “When you’re laid off work, when you’re thinking about food, the energy to protest is taken over by a more fundamental need to survive,” she said. “Even though it is a very difficult time for mobilisations, I think they do need to happen now.” After all, moments of crisis hold revolutionary potential precisely because it isn’t just a crisis for people, she added – it is also a crisis for a normally intransigent state.
Blueprint for control
In November, I spoke to Sadaat Ruhul, an eighth semester student at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), who has been campaigning for a 50-percent tuition waiver since universities transitioned to online teaching. In the initial months of the lockdown, he told me, the streets were empty. But this phase of withdrawal from public life did not last very long. “Now if you come to Dhaka, or other parts of Bangladesh, you’ll see no attempts to enforce social distancing from the government and, as a result, from the people.” Educational institutions remain closed, however, even as businesses and workplaces have opened. In fact, the government has been extending the closure of schools and universities almost every month. Ruhul thinks this is because the Bangladeshi state is wary of the agitational power of students, not unlikely given the recent history of student activism in the country, including the 2018 movement for road safety. “If kids are dying on the street, students aren’t going to remain silent – we will come out in force and that might even topple the government,” he says.
Ruhul’s current battle is with the private university where he is enrolled. “The administration doesn’t really take a hard line if you’re protesting on national issues. They think you’re not coming for them.” But as he found out, their approach is different when the demand is something that, as he puts it, “hits their pockets.” In mid-November, Ruhul was expelled from the university after he participated in a campaign demanding for a 50-percent decrease in tuition fees. Or, according to the university, for “tarnishing the university’s image” – a code, he says, for hurting their bottom line. He is currently appealing the decision. “All the protestors, without fail, have received implicitly threatening phone calls to their homes,” he says, “When we announce a protest, there’ll be three vans full of the Chhatra League [the student wing of the ruling party].” In the weeks since I first spoke to Ruhul, he has been arrested and released on bail along with a fellow student, after ULAB filed charges of vandalism against both.
Nowhere, of course, is a state’s ability to lock down a region – both physically and virtually – more apparent than in Jammu and Kashmir.
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, protests are likely to increase, says an activist I spoke to in June. He was arrested, alongside fifteen others, for taking part in a Black Lives Matter solidarity protest in Colombo. The government was using the cover of COVID-19 regulations to quash dissent, he said. “Even before the pandemic, the Sri Lankan economy was on the verge of a crisis… the pandemic has expedited and worsened the situation,” he noted. “On the one hand, there’s an economic crisis; on the other hand, there’ll definitely be a democratic crisis in Sri Lanka.”
Sociologist Ahilan Kadirgamar appeared to agree. There already was considerable apathy in Sri Lanka about the Parliament’s handling of political and security crises in recent years, he told me in June, prior to the general election. “So, in this context and given the mounting economic crisis, people are looking for a strongman leader and a fairly consolidated government which doesn’t bode well for democracy.”
“I feel COVID-19 has been used by the state as a test case or blueprint of how they can shut down communities, detain people, contain movement, and block riots and protest,” said Ashfaq from Karachi. She gave the example of an incident where the police, invoking a law that allows the state to ban public gatherings, beat young swimmers from a low-income background at a beach. “Legally they have Section 144 [of the criminal code, which allows bans on public activities] and logistically, they’ve now seen how law enforcement and physical barricades can be employed to shut down an entire country, city or mohallah in a ‘benevolent’ curfew. They have a template for a city divided and barricades along class lines.”
Nowhere, of course, is a state’s ability to lock down a region – both physically and virtually – more apparent than in Jammu and Kashmir, which has been under an internet crackdown for over a year now. As Hafsa Kanjwal, a professor of Southasian studies and member of Critical Kashmir Studies, told me, under the cover of COVID-19, the Indian state has passed a series of laws that intend to change the demographics of the region: a domicile law that allows certain categories of Indians to claim residency rights in Kashmir, and a land law that gives non-residents access to non-agricultural land in J & K.
“Traditionally, street protests have occurred despite a communications embargo, organised by word of mouth and actual physical mobilisation,” a Kashmiri journalist told me, preferring to remain anonymous. “In recent years, social media anonymity had played a role, with its instant reach, but with the advancement in technology, it has become too risky. The first and the foremost peril is that the digital world leaves a trace.” Both Kanjwal and the journalist pointed to increasing crackdown on online expression. “The cyber police in Jammu and Kashmir has been really ramped up,” said Kanjwal. “A few weeks ago, we saw hundreds of social media users in Kashmir disappear, and now we can see that people are being very careful about the kinds of things they say online because they know that’s under watch. I think it’s going to be very difficult for people to organise in an increasingly digital world because the state is able to enact that surveillance in that space as well.”
Indeed, as progressive activists across the region petition their governments to pay attention to their most vulnerable citizens, they also worried about unwittingly arming them with more tools of control: what if the information the state – and some private actors – was collecting, and which people in their desperation were eager to share, was put to more nefarious use? Ashfaq recalled that early on in the pandemic, people were sharing ID numbers of people in need of rations on Facebook and WhatsApp. “This was done in good faith,” she said, “but it also exposes the data of the socially weak.” Rashid’s experience was similar in Islamabad: people, including women – who are usually less forthcoming about sharing personal details – were “falling over themselves” to provide their contact information, he said.
Tamminaina expressed similar concerns, with more than 5 million migrant workers in India being made to travel via special trains where identification was mandatory. “So that’s basically 50 lakh Aadhars that have been taken by the government without any obligation of protecting how this data would be used.”
Histories of shocks
Is there a period in Southasian history analogous to our current moment?
Uddin was reluctant to make a direct comparison: there have been past moments of stress followed by extraordinary mobilisation, subsequently followed by extraordinary state repression, she noted. But the current moment is also unprecedented in many ways: in terms of the technology available to the government and to ordinary people, its impact on citizen’s ability to mobilise, but also in terms of the scale of the failings of existing public infrastructure. Environmental studies scholar Kasim Tirmizey, however, invoked the years of the late 19th and early 20th century to suggest that present challenges are not so different from the past ones.
“This was a period which saw the formation of an international grain market that connected a sharecropper harvesting wheat in the Nili Bar to an English textile factory worker eating his bread for cheap,” Tirmizey told me over email. The Subcontinent – and Punjab in particular – underwent massive transformations in those decades: the assignation of private property and the subsequent creation of landlords and sharecroppers; the conversion, via canal irrigation, of plains inhabited by nomadic pastoralists into agriculture fields; the connection of these agricultural fields to the grain markets in London through the development of roads, railways, market towns, and the port of Karachi. “This imposed export-oriented agrarian economy produced famines in British India,” Tirmizey explained. “And it created the conditions for weakened immunity that made sharecroppers and landless labour highly vulnerable to the plague and influenza.” From the 1890s to the 1920s, more than 12 million people died from the plague in British India, and at least 12 million died from the influenza outbreak of 1918-1919, part of a global pandemic on a greater scale than COVID-19 today.
“What’s also interesting is that, in this period, we also find the emergence of anti-colonial movements like the Ghadar Party,” Tirmizey added. “These were Punjabi peasants who migrated to North America, East Africa, East Asia because of the famines, epidemics, and land squeeze occurring in this period. But along the way they turn to anti-colonial politics and make these links as well, between colonialism and pandemics.”
In the present moment, too, it is possible to identify broader forces at play: in Pakistan, for instance, food- price inflation may have already been a trend prior to the pandemic, connected to International Monetary Fund loans and the structural adjustments that came with it. However, Tirmizey also draws a connection with the state not prioritising hunger in working communities in its COVID-19 response. “I wonder how increasing food insecurity in the region is contributing to vulnerability to COVID-19. And it’s an open question whether food insecurity will become a mobilising force as it has been in the past.” As thousands of Indian farmers stage possibly the largest protest in world history, defying tear gas – and challenging expectations of what is politically possible during a global pandemic – just weeks after protesting Pakistani farmers were baton-charged in Lahore, the resonances across time and space seem increasingly clear. https://www.himalmag.com/the-season-of-discontent-pandemic-issue-2020/
[4] WHY THE INCARCERATION OF MUNAWAR FARUQUI SHOULD WORRY US
Arshad Alam
The show hasn’t started. A stand-up comic, Munawar Faruqui, is rehearsing his lines in a café in Indore. A couple of his associates are also with him. A shadowy figure suddenly enters the hall and starts yelling at Faruqui. He alleges that Faruqui has made fun of Hindu deities and thereby hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus. Extremely patiently, the stand-up comic invites this brand ambassador of hurt sentiments on stage and asks him if he has any evidence on the basis of which he is making such allegations. Faruqui reasons with him, tries to explain at one point that he does not discriminate amongst religions and even tries telling him that a certain irreverence is called for in order to appreciate any humour. But all this to no avail.
Reason and dialogue appeal to those who are willing to believe and participate in such principles. The man accusing Faruqui has already come prepared. He and his gruff group of men have already made up their mind and have come with an intent to punish Faruqui. Despite some support from the audience, Faruqui is forced to abandon his performance.
It helps that the person objecting to the planned show, Eklavya Gaud, is the son of the local MLA, Malini Gaud, having deep roots with the ruling BJP establishment of Madhya Pradesh. It certainly did not help that the stand-up comic was a Muslim. The police, without making any preliminary investigation regarding the veracity of the accusation, decided to cancel the show and arrested Faruqui, along with some of his friends. Clearly, things have come to such a pass in this country that one has to think about one’s religious identity even before cracking a joke.
The Indore police is on record saying that it did not have any evidence against Faruqui. They have admitted that the ‘incriminating’ videos are not the reason for his arrest. According to the police, Faruqui was arrested because he might have insulted Hindu Gods during the scheduled performance. They argue that the intent to do so was clear because he was overheard rehearsing some objectionable lines before the performance. Of course, the police did not hear them. The objectionable lines were heard by the complainant, Eklavya Gaud, who claims to be chief of Hindu Rakshak Sangathan. This might be the first case in which someone is being punished for a possible future thought ‘crime’.
Since January 1, Faruqui is under arrest and it is not just the police which is responsible for his tribulations. The local court denied him bail on frivolous grounds; the last one because the police forgot to produce the case diary. Despite the fact that the police station was right across the road from the court, they were given one full week to produce the case diary. Such little regard for the liberty of an Indian citizen is not just a commentary on the police but also the judiciary of the country. But then perhaps the real motive in all such cases is political: Faruqui’s case, like others, is one where the ruling establishment wants to prove to the Hindu majority that it is protecting them from the cultural and religious onslaught of Muslims.
This is an old hegemonic narrative of the Hindu right which is shared by major institutions of this country. So although the police have made it abundantly clear that they have no evidence against Faruqui, they can always rely on the courts to drag the matter so that the process itself become the punishment.
Such brazenness, once allowed, has no limits. Anticipating that eventually the courts in Madhya Pradesh will have to let go of Faruqui because of lack of any evidence against him, the Uttar Pradesh police now have unearthed an old and yet ‘incriminating’ video of his on the basis of which they are seeking his custody. This again is an old tactic of the police, used against many Muslim youth. By the time such youths are ultimately freed by the courts, they have lost years of productive life in various state prisons.
In any other country, this would have been a scandal. But in India, even the so called opposition wants such stringent laws to remain on the statute books so as not to appear any less nationalist than the ruling establishment. It is clear therefore that behind the political witch hunt of Faruqui, there is an elaborate inter-state collaboration between Hindu right wing groups, who are calling the shots from behind. The comedian is being made into an example of what can be done to a Muslim, if she is even perceived to be independently speaking her mind.
Faruqui’s case is one in which the judiciary, the police and the Hindu vigilante groups are on the same page, acting in perfect concert. The police and the Hindu right-wing groups have acted in tandem with each other since decades. What is more shocking is the attitude of the courts to keep a person in prison simply because his acquittal will create a ‘law and order’ problem. This logic given by the Indore court, while denying bail to Faruqui, is not just strange; it is in fact the clearest example of how far we have travelled on the path of majoritarianism.
Arshad Alam is a columnist with NewAgeIslam.com
Sabrang India 21 January, 2021
[5] THE NEW KHALISTAN CONSPIRACY: THE GOVERNMENT IS PLAYING THE SAME GAME THAT ONCE LED PUNJAB TO DISASTER
Hartosh Singh Bal
There is a familiar pattern to the right wing’s spin on the events of 26 January: condemning the farmers who reached the centre of Delhi, labeling them “extremists,” “Khalistani,” or simply “anti-national.” Perhaps it suits everyone to now find a scapegoat in people like the actor Deep Sidhu, who is accused of instigating protesters to hoist a flag at the Red Fort, and the supposed extremist elements who farmer leaders claimed had hijacked part of the protests. But what happened was predictable. The government and the farmer-union leaders would surely have seen this coming, and yet, they did little to forestall it.
The protests against the farm laws have been building up since September, when the laws were passed— for the first month and a half in Punjab and then, since late November, on the outskirts of Delhi. Over this protracted period, the negotiations went nowhere and the cadre became steadily impatient. Partly to appease the cadre, the farmer leaders themselves had built up expectations of a historic tractor match on Republic Day, circling the power centre in Delhi. The leaders and the Delhi Police failed to agree on a route for days. Barely two days before the march, they finally settled on a route that limited the march to Delhi’s outskirts. To no one’s surprise, the decision fell well short of the cadre’s expectations, which the union leaders themselves had fanned.
From the night of 24 January, the disquiet among the younger elements in the protest began to be openly articulated. On the afternoon of 25 January, Sarwan Singh Pandher, the general secretary of Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee—a major union at the protests—announced that their cadre would not follow the designated route. After Pandher’s speech, it was a given that a large number of the protestors would deviate from the route. Given a 15-hour notice of this likelihood, the Delhi Police seemed surprisingly unprepared for it.
The events of 26 January made clear that while the farmer leadership expressed the sentiments of the protesters, it does not control them. This was already evident to anyone following the protests closely. For instance, even the current location of the protests on the outskirts of Delhi is fortuitous, resulting from the youth cadre’s spontaneous decisions. When the unions began to move the protests out from Punjab, the leaders did not have a clear cut plan for reaching Delhi. Upon encountering police barricades on the border between Punjab and Haryana, at places such as Shambu village, many of the protestors took matters in their own hands and breached the blockade. The longer the protests go on without a resolution that is acceptable, the greater the possibility of a further loss of control.
In such situations, any assertion by a great mass of the farmer protestors will find articulation through the ethos of Sikhism. This was again evident from the nature of the protests. While the leadership is drawn from the Left, the cadre is largely Sikh, and regularly articulated issues through the lens of its identity. The imagery of Baghel Singh, an eighteenth century Sikh general, was pasted on every other trolley headed from Punjab to join the protests for Republic Day. Baghel Singh had laid siege to the Delhi of Shah Alam II, the Mughal emperor, and won. He imposed taxes on goods imported into the city, using the funds to build most of the major Sikh gurdwaras of the city.
This imagery of Delhi under siege explains some of what happened at the Red Fort but it is important to note it was not directed against the residents of Delhi. The contrast between the reality of what happened and the perception that is being created is stark. Lakhs of farmers moved through Delhi. There was no assault on private property, nor on civilians. The damage to the DTC bus took place because the police deliberately placed it in the path of the protestors. Beyond these facts are only the events at the Red Fort. Some protesters raised a flag and attacked the police. But even in the aggressive stupidity of those at the monument, care was taken to ensure the supremacy of the tiranga, the Indian flag, was not dwarfed by the Nishan Sahib, the Sikh flag, hoisted below it. In less than a day, enough has already been written about the Nishan Sahib to substantiate that it is no icon of Khalistan, leave alone of terror.
It is absurd to see the greater visibility of Sikh iconography in a protest dominated by Sikhs as a deviation from the ethos of the country when the cult of the Hindu rashtra is upon us. From a bhumipujan, or foundation-laying puja, for the new building of Parliament, to the prime minister in attendance at a puja to mark the construction of the Ram temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, we are awash in Hindu imagery.
When those who openly espouse Hindutva as a guiding philosophy find problems with imagery from other religions, the majoritarianism that defines the current government only becomes starker. Supposedly liberal commentators who join this echo heighten the perception that secularism is an idea in India that only minorities have to espouse, that the profession of sarv dharma sambhav—equality among religions—in practice only means that some religions are more equal than others.
But while the rest of the country can claim ignorance of the iconography of the agitation, this certainly does not apply to those in the national security apparatus, such as National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, who have dealt with Punjab since the 1980s. Given this, it is difficult to gauge why the security at the Red Fort was found hugely wanting on a day where its symbolic value was evident, and when there was ample warning that the route the breakaway faction was to take could easily lead to the monument.
In fact, a day before the rally, the media put out stories quoting Delhi Police sources, who said that “Pakistan-based ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and ‘rogue elements linked to Khalistani outfits’ are likely to hijack and disrupt the tractor rally.” The sources stressed that “a huge conspiracy has been hatched.” Are we then to believe the Delhi Police and the Indian security apparatus knew of this conspiracy and let it happen?
After the events of Republic Day, the actor Deep Sidhu has been much in focus, and he did have a part to play in the events. All we know for sure, however, is that his entry into politics was mediated through his proximity to Sunny Deol—a BJP member of parliament, but hardly an ideologue. Since then, Sidhu has publicly regurgitated a largely incoherent mix of readings, from Martin Luther King to Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the head of the Damdami Taksal, an orthodox Sikh group. But that he finds an echo among many of the young protestors is because the farm leaders have been unable to rein in this cadre’s impatience.
On the back of figures such as Sidhu, the government has sought to revive the bogey of Khalistan. An organisation such as Sikhs For Justice, which enjoys hardly any support in Punjab—as documented in a recent piece in The Caravan—has been designated a terrorist organisation. While SFJ has a clear separatist agenda, it has had no terror links, but has suddenly acquired a prominence that has little to do with its impact.
Meanwhile, the National Investigation Agency has sent out notices over the protests not just to Deep Sidhu, but to figures such as Jasbir Singh Rode, a nephew of Bhindranwale. This makes good grist for the right-wing mill, but a recent column in The Tribune on Operation Black Thunder—the siege of the Golden Temple in the late 1980s—highlighted the current establishment’s familiarity with the very extremists it is now condemning. Quoting Open Secrets, a 2005 book by MK Dhar, a former joint director of the Intelligence Bureau, the column noted that barely two months before the operation, “the IB had quietly begun supplying AK-47s to the then Akal Takht Jathedar Jasbir Singh Rode, who incidentally is Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s nephew. Rode, an IB operative who was anointed jathedar of the supreme Sikh temporal seat, was tasked to create a Trojan Horse comprising a 15-member squad to neutralise the terrorist gangs inside the temple.” Dhar was involved in the IB’s operations in Punjab. NSA Doval was then the agency’s joint director, and has since been credited with an intimate involvement in the operation. At the very least, it is fair to say that Rode and Doval are well acquainted.
This is an old and dangerous game that has been played before by a central government and has most recently been well documented by GBS Sidhu, the former special secretary of the Research & Analysis Wing of the Indian intelligence services, in his book, The Khalistan Conspiracy. Sidhu provides first-hand material on the Indira Gandhi government’s machinations in the early 1980s. He reveals how, even though there were ample opportunities to arrive at a settlement with a moderate Akali leadership before Bhindranwale became the dominant figure in the increasingly violent movement, on several occasions, the government went back on agreed commitments at the very last moment.
The book has been heavily promoted by right-wing commentators seeking to target the then Congress administration. But these very same figures are now setting the country along a similar path by labeling the protests the work of Khalistanis. In hindsight, the demands of the Akalis in the early 1980s, which related to issues such as river waters, to Chandigarh, to the live telecast of the kirtan at the Golden Temple, do not seem to be of a nature that should fuel the decade of militancy that did so much damage to Punjab and the rest of the country.
Through such figures as Doval, this government shares a continuity of thinking with the kind of machinations that had led Punjab to disaster in the first place. It should not be the case that, looking back two decades from now, we are counting the cost of a government’s egoistic stand over laws which have much that is wrong with them—a fact that the establishment has already tacitly conceded, while offering amendments and a freeze on implementation in negotiations with the protesters. https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/republic-day-khalistan-conspiracy-government-playing-dangerous- game-punjab-disaster
27 January 2021
[6] LETTER TO CHIEF JUSTICE OF INDIA
20 January 2021 New Delhi,
To
The Honourable Chief Justice of India,
Supreme Court of India
New Delhi,
Sub: Citizens open letter to the Chief Justice regarding delay in listing/hearing important and urgent matters affecting lives of millions of people–denial of justice through delay.
Your Honour,
At the outset, let us point out why common citizens do not talk about the Court’s conduct. Because they fear attracting contempt of court. However, some of us believe that we will be failing in our constitutional duty, if we do not stand up and give expression to what has been troubling millions of people in the country over the last two years, particularly the response of Indian judiciary to the abrogation of Article 370, the annihilation of the “state” of Jammu and Kashmir and the enactment of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019.
Abrogation of Article 370
As we may recall, the abrogation of Article 370 was followed by en masse detentions of opposition politicians, activists, and lawyers in the region. Further, a strict lockdown and communications blackout were imposed, keeping the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir in the dark over developments taking place in Delhi. The first challenge to the Presidential order was filed on August 9 before the Supreme Court. Following which, there were many petitioners from all over the country before the Supreme Court, including several MPs from the National Conference, Kashmiri citizens, including former bureaucrats, and various organizations. A five-judge Constitution Bench was set up on September 29, 2019 to hear the challenges to the abrogation of Article 370 and the State’s bifurcation into two Union Territories. This Bench is headed by Justices NV Ramana and comprises of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, R Subhash Reddy, BR Gavai, and Surya Kant. Since then and now, the Central government has taken many steps to further remove all features of Article 370 and to concretise the bifurcation, despite calls for the reinstatement of Jammu & Kashmir's statehood getting louder. Though it was said that, “The Supreme Court can always turn the clock back”, (Justice Kaul, October 1, 2019) the petitions were relegated to cold storage.
In the meanwhile, the central government has been left free to carry out its programme of dismantling all the protective measures for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, and change domicile law and property ownership law and reservations for the state subjects in state government jobs. Such major changes have been made that it will be virtually impossible to reverse these - putting the “clock back” will remain, like many other promises of Supreme Court, a mere chimera.
Let us also look at the outcome of Kashmir Times Editor Anuradha Bhasin’s petition questioning the restrictions that were imposed not only on the media, but also on movement and general communication in the region. After nearly four months, the Supreme Court delivered its judgment, recognising the Constitutional protection granted to freedom of expression and profession through the internet as a medium. However, precious little happened on the ground. The judgment empowered the same review committee set up by the same government which was imposing the curbs in the first place. It was like asking the executioner to protect the life of the person he wants to slay.
The Supreme Court it seems is unaware of the fact that a large part of the Jammu & Kashmir region is still facing internet restrictions, causing serious medical crisis at a time when the country is reeling under a pandemic.
Challenges to CAA
Turning to the CAA, in spite of the nationwide peaceful democratic protest and the global attention that protests against the Law garnered, the Supreme Court seemed to turn a blind to nearly 140 petitions challenging the legality of the CAA. These petitions are still pending before the Supreme Court.
Thousands of people were looking up to the Supreme Court for a swift and decisive pronouncement on the matter relating to citizenship. However, Mr. Chief Justice, it seems you did not think the issue of CAA was an urgent matter. You chose to give priority to questions such as those of religious practices raised in the Sabarimala review. Later you ordered the removal of the peaceful camp of protesters. The most interesting part of this was that police came to you seeking the Court’s approval for the removal of the protesters from Shaeen Bagh, though the police had the power to so. In that case, had the police removed the protesters at Shaeen Bagh, the protesters could have approached the Court for protection of their right to dissent and peaceful agitation. By giving the police the uncalled-for sanction, you ensured that aggrieved citizens had no recourse to justice. The real fact is that it was not the protesting crowd, who had blocked the entire road. They had left half the road open. Yes, movement of traffic was slow, but it was never held up. Actually, it was Delhi police which had blocked the road from all sides.
Habeas Corpus
Let us now look into how the Court has responded to the critical issue of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is an important instrument that acts as a check on government powers to restrict liberty of citizens. The fundamental purpose of the writ is to ensure swift review of illegal detentions. The key aspect of the habeas corpus writ is the urgency that is attached to it. This is because along with right to life, liberty is considered the most precious of all fundamental rights.
In August 2019, in two habeas corpus petitions related to Jammu and Kashmir your orders defeated the very spirit of the writ instrument, which has been described as “first security of civil liberty”.
On August 19, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury moved such a petition seeking the production before the Supreme Court of former party MLA from Kashmir, Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, informing you that when he had tried to visit the party leader, he was stopped by the authorities from entering Srinagar. Yechury had requested the court to direct the authorities to produce the former MLA before it and have the ailing politician admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Science in New Delhi.
Similarly, Mohammad Aleem Sayed, a law student from Kashmir, had moved the court against what he feared was the illegal detention of his parents in Anantnag in Kashmir. His petition too wanted a direction to the authorities to produce the family before the Supreme Court.
However, the bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi on Wednesday did not consider the question of whether the detentions were legal. Instead, it allowed both Yechury and Syed to visit Kashmir to meet their friends and family. The government was asked to facilitate Syed’s travel. Both Syed and Yechury have been asked to file reports to the court after their visits.
In Yechury’s case, the Court dismissed opposition from the Centre, which cited the sensitive situation in the Valley and allowed the communist leader to travel to Kashmir. While this was a positive intervention to which Yechury’s lawyers agreed, it is also a fact that the court has not, for the moment, moved to determine the validity of Tarigami’s detention. In fact, the order did not even issue notices to the Centre about it. Technically, the petition is still pending for admission.
Similarly, in the case of Mohammad Aleem Sayed, while facilitating his journey to the Valley, the court did not issue notices to the Centre. Allowing the petitioners to meet their friends and families in Kashmir does not in any way remedy the alleged violation of right to liberty. If anything, the delay in ordering notices to the government seeking explanation on the detentions indirectly allows the authorities to sustain the illegal detention, even if it is only for a few days.
Let us look at the case of Siddique Kappan, who has been under detention since October 5. The matter has been going ongoing since November 20. The Kerala Union of Working Journalists (KUWJ) had filed a habeas corpus petition before the Supreme Court challenging the detention of Kappan, who was arrested on his way to Hathras by the UP police days in relation to the death of a Dalit teenager from Hathras which had whipped up a storm across the country. He was arrested along with three other persons and has been charged with sedition and several sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). Senior Advocate, Kapil Sibal, appearing on behalf of the petitioner KUWJ, told the court that Kappan was not being allowed to meet his lawyer.
Instead of addressing the issue raised by Kapil Sibal, particularly as under Article 32 of the Constitution, you have the primary jurisdiction in matters of habeas corpus, the Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde asked Sibal why he had not approached the Allahabad high court instead of moving the Supreme Court. During that hearing, the apex court has also expressed its disinclination to admit the habeas corpus petition and instead asked the petitioners to move the high court.
But not all are unlucky as Siddique Kappan. Among those who were allowed to approach the Supreme Court directly under Article 32 petition in the apex court was the Republic TV owner-editor Arnab Goswami, who sought quashing of various charges filed against him by Mumbai police. These included a 2018 abetment to suicide case and a batch of multiple FIRs in different states stemming from a controversial programme on the Palghar mob lynching as well as one on Republic TV’s coverage of the crowds that had gathered outside Bandra railway station in Mumbai during the lockdown in which the channel had insinuated that the mosque had played a role in the gathering.
Strange is not, that it was only in the case of Arnab Goswami that the Court found it appropriate to say, “states must realise there's an apex court to protect the liberty of citizens”. Obviously Siddique Kappan did not merit such indulgence. The question is, should the SC show to the country that there are two sets of people, one more privileged than the other? If the erratic habeas corpus orders are anything to go by, the Supreme Court has uncritically accepted the government’s disproportionate claims about national security and given it precedence over the ideals of civil liberties.
The Indian Constitution created the Supreme Court at the apex of the Indian judiciary. It is the highest authority to uphold the Constitution of India, to protect the rights and liberties of the citizens, and to uphold the values of rule of law. Hence, it is known as the Guardian of our Constitution. When we look at the history of Supreme Court’s interventions in the past on issues of liberty we do feel proud. Let me recall a few instances.
In the case of State of Maharashtra vs. Bhaurao Punjabrao Gawande, the Supreme Court had made the following comments on the nature of habeas corpus:
“The celebrated writ of habeas corpus has been described as ‘a great constitutional privilege’ or ‘the first security of civil liberty’. The writ provides a prompt and effective remedy against illegal detention. By this writ, the Court directs the person or authority who has detained another person to bring the body of the prisoner before the Court so as to enable the Court to decide the validity, jurisdiction or justification for such detention. The principal aim of the writ is to ensure swift judicial review of alleged unlawful detention on liberty or freedom of the prisoner or detainee.”
Earlier, in Romesh Thapar vs. The state of Madras, (May 1950) Supreme Court had stated that, “Criticism of government exciting disaffection or bad feelings towards it, is not to be regarded as a justifying ground for restricting the freedom of expression, or of the press.”
In the writ petition No.5129 of 2012 N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, Printer & Publisher “The Hindu vs. the Union of India, Justice Abdul Quddhose said “A very important aspect of democracy is that citizens should have no fear of the government. They should not be scared of expressing views which may not be liked by those in power.” He went on to say, “Criticism of policies of the government is not sedition unless there is a call for public disorder or incitement to violence.”
The actions alluded to above, we are sorry to say, raise serious questions about commitment to constitutional obligations and the undermining of the independence and impartiality of the apex court. When the judiciary which is supposed to oversee all activities to be conducted within the framework of the constitution, itself violates its constitutional duties, then there is no remedy in law and the court becomes the first to be held in contempt of court as a constitutional body. In this situation, we feel it is appropriate to remember what CJI, Justice J. Varma had said, “The powers which are given to us are not provisions meant for personal aggrandisement. They are meant to sub serve the constitutional purpose and they are meant for upholding the majesty of the law.” (R.C. Ghiya Memorial Lecture, The Constitutional Obligation of the Judiciary, Delivered by Hon'ble Shri J.S. Verma, Chief Justice of India in 1997)
After all that has been said above, one wonders how the Supreme Court still believed that the people of India would find its “independent and impartial” intervention in the farmers agitation as just and legitimate?
In the end we submit that the Supreme Court Supreme Court needs to show that it is neutral and works under public transparency and that cases concerning the fundamental rights of a person are dealt without any biases.
Yours sincerely
Tapan Kumar Bose
[7] TIME FOR LEFT TO RE-IMAGINE CLASS, POPULISM’
Subhoranjan Dasgupta
The Bengal elections are knocking at the door. How will the parties, the Trinamul Congress (TMC) and the CPM in particular, respond? Can they form a united front by combining the crucial populist currents in their favour? Eminent political scientist Ranabir Samaddar, founder of the Calcutta Research Group explores these questions in a dialogue.
CPIML Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya has set the ball rolling. He has labelled the BJP as enemy No. 1 in West Bengal and the entire country. According to him, Trinamul and the CPM should compete with each other in their basic effort to defeat the BJP. Do you endorse this attitude and proposal?
The CPIML Liberation leader’s stand seems addressed to the situation in West Bengal, and I do not know if he has something more fundamental and general in mind. But I have no doubt that this will open a new chapter in the struggle for radical social democracy in the country.
At one level it is a call for a united front. But there are two prerequisites which need to be fulfilled in order to achieve a critical understanding of the political question of the united front in the current moment of history.
First, we must have a clear idea of the classes involved, for which the old class analysis will not suffice. Several old class formations have dissolved in the wake of neoliberal globalisation, and in their places we have a vast sea of amorphous, petty producing and self-producing sections, wandering groups of labourers, workers in gig industry and extractive operations, and accumulation through the operation of supply chains and through virtual modes, and an informal labouring force in close link with the formal world of production.
This turn in the political economy has given rise to populist rule in the states, by which I mean populists who are on the “left of centre” or at least are against neoliberal globalisation, and who carry the popular mandate. Yes, Right-wing populists are there, but the Right-wing populists quickly turn into hard authoritarians and have little in common with the populists I am speaking of.
Second, and this follows from the first, the politics of a united front must address the problematic nature of populism, and thus decide the vexed question of who to ally with now, and why to ally with the populists.
The CPM regards Trinamul as its main enemy and has rejected even the prospect of a competitive relationship between itself and Trinamul. How would this firm or intransigent position affect the outcome of the election in West Bengal?
The main worry is not whether the CPM’s firm or intransigent position will affect the outcome of the elections in West Bengal, but what will happen to the party as a consequence of its position.
Of course, the TMC has a tough task at hand. And as with populist destinies, populist politics will go up and down. But if the history of postcolonial capitalism is any guide, “people” as a category of politics will continue giving birth to new populisms.
The TMC may be defeated by the Right, yet their work on protection of the petty producers and informal sections of the working people and their entire economic theology built around the protection of the poor will stay on as a permanent feature of Bengal politics.
Make no mistake, a social war is being fought between capital and the subaltern classes who are behind the populists – the party of the punitive forces of the rich and the party of the populists. This is the matrix of all power struggles today and the social war of our time. Therefore I shall reframe the question: What will be the impact on the Left because of its inability to grasp the nature of the social war of our time?
CPM leaders, Sitaram Yechury included, have in their effort to categorise and clarify their position said that in order to defeat the BJP, they have to defeat Trinamul and in order to defeat the Trinamul they have to defeat the BJP. Do you regard this as a clear and candid political stand or do you think it is mere semantic quibbling?
I do not know if this is a clear and candid political stand, nor am I saying this is mere semantic quibbling. What I know is that this indicates great confusion among the leaders of the Left about the nature of populism. Apart from the fact that this pairing of the BJP and Trinamul tells us about their mad rush for Nabanna by any means, and therefore their conjuring of convoluted arguments, the fundamental root of this confusion is the inability of the CPM to come to terms with the phenomenon called populism.
They cannot call the TMC fascists; they cannot also swallow the fact that the TMC has incorporated many issues of their agenda, and has gone several steps forward in terms of the protection of the poorer sections of society, and are unabashedly welfare-oriented in nature and are against neoliberal globalisation.
We can extend Dipankar Bhattacharya’s proposal to the national level and say that only a firm and united Opposition can subjugate the BJP throughout the country. If this very difficult mission flounders, the BJP will continue to rule with a 30 per cent vote share. Aren’t the Opposition parties like the CPM unaware of this; can’t they read the writing on the wall?
Parties like the CPM are caught between two destinies. They belong to a nowhere condition. They neither have a national vision, by which I mean an idea about how to develop an all-India perspective of struggle based on the various popular political forces and existences, nor do they have a local vision, by which I mean an idea of a path to develop at the state level ---where opportunities arrive at regular intervals – an alternative mode of governance, alternative political experiments, and an alternative way to connect the national and the popular.
In India, what Antonio Gramsci had termed the “national-popular” has been actualised under historically concrete circumstances in local milieus – the milieus of the states – where language, culture, anti-caste movements, democratic politics, the presence of the lower classes in the public political arena and an anti- colonial legacy have combined to produce the “national-popular”.
Dipankar Bhattacharya’s statement attests to the realisation attained by a section of the Left of the prevailing conundrum. Perhaps the Bihar elections led to this welcome development. In any case, it is good, it makes sense. However, the logic has to be pushed further.
It is not a mere question of electoral opposition or alliance. It is a question of reconceptualising the people, the popular, and reimagining class through people and vice versa. This will lead to a reconfiguring of the tension between the national and the local. The tension is productive.
But, finally, if this indispensable reconceptualising does not take place at the local and national levels as a result of an ingrained myopic attitude, we should really feel worried about the Left’s future — is it not hurtling down the path of self-destruction?
[8] PAKISTAN’S ONE-PERCENT
Shahrukh Khan
A review of Rosita Armytage’s Big Capital in an Unequal World: The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan.
It’s a Friday night in Islamabad’s Gol Market, located in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods.
A pearly white Toyota Land Cruiser pulls up curbside: aluminum rims, sport fenders, extra side-view mirrors atop the hood, blacked-out windows, and a tinted windshield. The works. A group of friends disembark for a nearby restaurant, and a mustachioed chauffeur cautiously parks the V-8 next to a bevy of other snazzy cars.
Teeming about the collection of high-end restaurants are stereotypical figures that saturate the rank of Pakistan’s upper air: light-skinned customers and dark-skinned workers, English brandishers and Punjabi speakers, indigenous foodies and foreign cooks. Such an arrangement is common in other exclusive eatery-complexes in Islamabad, like Beverly Centre or Kohsar Market.
Among the many American-themed places that pepper the neighbourhood’s epicurean landscape is one called “Howdy!”—a Texas-inspired burger joint with services that might intrigue the average Westerner. A 25-year-old is celebrating her birthday and the restaurant has apparently arranged a custom- made cake for her. Young, proletarian waiters are taking pictures of the birthday girl and her friends. Customers of a more conservative persuasion occasion furtive, feverish glances at the collection of the girl’s insufferable, flashy guests and obnoxious aura. Some men, perhaps loafers, are grateful to simply witness the celebration unfolding before them, so that they can catch stares and glimpses of women— after all, that’s why they came there in the first place. The food—pricey as it is—was simply an excuse.
The capitalism that has materialized in Pakistan is taking the country in new directions—one that defies prevailing notions of what it means to be a capitalist society in an increasingly globalized world. The country’s complex public vivacity inspires painful, confusing reflection on how long contested and oft ambiguous concepts like “class” or “status” or “mobility” can capture the messy peregrinations of socioeconomic life in a country of frustrating contradiction.
Anthropologist Rosita Armytage is the latest to explore these issues, locking in on Pakistan’s ultra- wealthy. In her new book, Big Capital in an Unequal World: The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan, Armytage weaves in exciting stories with sociological theory in what makes for a worthwhile read.
Studies on class in Pakistan have tended to focus on the interaction between mobility, aspiration, and religious piety—Ammara Maqsood and Humaira Iqtidar have done important work on this. Iqtidar has looked at how pious Muslims, especially mass proselytizing groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat, avoid questions of power or inequality as they fit their religious aspirations into a neoliberal framework. Maqsood, in her study of the consumptive habits of middle-class Lahoris, argues that part of being modern is buying modern religious items and services. She also shows how consumptive patterns are different among the middle-class and the elite—and that the specific patterns of consumption among the middle-class reflect a contestation and challenge to the elite based on the difference in geography of vendors that sell religious items, and even the value attached to specific items themselves (some consumers see amulets as superstitious).
Armytage takes class analysis a step further but also narrows it, because the subjects of her study are neither seeking to change the hearts of the impious or looking to challenge anyone in an attempt to move up the class and social ladder. Armytage’s interlocutors are intensely committed to maintaining the status quo. And if change is to occur, it will be on their own terms.
The full range of this scholarship occupies a unique place among the company of indispensable studies of class in Pakistan, and in years to come, so will Big Capital—whether as a point of departure or as an object of critique.
Pakistan’s Elite
Armytage’s aim is to understand how and why the Pakistani one percent operate. Armytage anchors Pakistan’s distribution of wealth to the country’s short, volatile history that enabled and dislodged particular groups, their power, and their wealth.
She ultimately suggests that Pakistan’s elite have become proficient in navigating regional trade and foreign investment, refusing to suspend cultural practices that outsiders would perceive as corrupt. It is not uncommon for industrial business-folk to schmooze with bureaucrats or send kabobs to a police superintendent in return for favors down the line, such as access to import licenses or scarce raw materials. Armytage shows how these interactions are held behind closed doors, even as they are talked about quite openly. As Zahir, the owner of a major media company, boastfully put it to her:
?To be successful in business in Pakistan you need affluence, connections, parties, socializing…I keep a budget for entertaining and parties. I know everyone. I have all the powerful big boys on my speed dial…Anyone who is big enough has access to these devils. My family is responsible for fifteen per cent of the parties in Lahore— for those who matter, that is. It is only a handful of people who host these types of parties.
For Armytage, longstanding “primordial” affiliations—permutated to incorporate emergent, post-1980s new money types (or “Navay Raje”)—are what encapsulate and push the substance of wealth creation and distribution in Pakistan today. Navay Raje have shattered the dynastic monopoly that a handful of families have had on the country’s wealth, even though inequality continues to soar. Having broken into the establishment, Navay Raje now jealously guard their strategic position in society. They are adept at taking advantage of globalization by, for example, attracting foreign investment and Howdy’s-style fast food chains—but on their own terms:
The Pakistani elite retain a hyper-provincialised, highly localized form of business and finance that contradicts widely-held assumptions that the world is transitioning towards an era of globalized and standardized capitalism.
The localized panache of business in Pakistan resists the notion that the world is becoming more capitalistic in the Euro-American sense of the term. In fact, Armytage argues, Pakistan is a highly capitalistic nation that may offer more valuable insight into how the world operates “at large”.
Under such an arrangement, international private equity funds or investment banks cannot enter the Pakistani market without tapping into the local network of elites who act as gatekeepers to economic opportunity. Conventional standardized legal architectures that normally facilitate these types of transactions are thus of little use.
Exclusive Interlocutors
Armytage’s custodial interlocutors (mostly male) are of an exclusive preserve, but they are personalities average citizens know well. They speak in sometimes raspy, often affected voices while puffing their cigarettes or liberally consuming alcohol and snorting cocaine in private residential parties—where the vast majority of elite social incest-fests occur. The semiotic implications of wealth in Pakistan could not be more salient: these individuals and families are gatekeepers in the most literal and most figurative sense of the word.
The reader comes away with the impression that Pakistan’s elite have not attempted to forsake their mammon. They never had a reason to. If in our neoliberal moment, governments have become weaker in checking the power of wealthy individuals and institutions, then evident from Armytage’s analysis is that such an arrangement was baked into the very foundations of Pakistan. Not because someone like Mahbub-ul-Haq, the country’s finance minister under General Zia, was trained at the University of Chicago. The country never needed a Friedman or a Mont Pélerin Society. The political holdover from a colonial past and the challenges that came with building a country for South Asia’s Muslims spawned enough complications—incentives perhaps—for the complex of militaristic, bureaucratic, and political scaffolding that came to dominate state-making in the decades following independence. Hence, a culture of anemic regulation and rent seeking became standard techniques of civil society and statecraft.
Whither Race?
A departing point on Armytage’s positionality is worth mentioning. Speckled throughout her analysis, she self-consciously acknowledges how her positionality as a foreigner and as a woman affect interpretation and observation—a practice common in Malinowski-style ethnographies. But do her acknowledgements go far enough? Skin color and race hold more weight in Pakistan than she gives them credit for. One is reminded of the monkeyshines of a white American woman by the name of Cynthia Ritchie, a self-styled blogger who has found herself at the center of controversy in Pakistan. In her apparently benign attempt—accompanied by acerbic Twitter fights with critical, mostly liberal Pakistanis—to portray Pakistan in a positive light, Ritchie has attracted great condemnation. Critics say that Ritchie is a military prop—given her glowing, but selective portrayals of the country—and receives preferential treatment among Pakistan’s elite because of her race.
A common theme that runs through multiple socioeconomic strata in Pakistan (and certainly South Asia) is the aspiration for lighter skin, green or blue eyes, and even slim noses. Physical and epistemic realms of social practice—whether in Gol Market, the Islamabad Club, or showbiz—within which the elite exist, treasure, produce, and amplify such traits. Race is a remarkably important relic of the colonial yesteryear, one which Armytage spends curiously little time discussing—both in a self-reflexive and outwardly analytic capacity.
But in an age where technologies of difference like race or ethnicity have assumed doxological purchase in the domain of secular academia, perhaps it would be more prudent to nonetheless evaluate the merits of her arguments more straightforwardly—a position that the largely progressive discipline of anthropology would no doubt scoff at.
Conclusion
In a true scholarly form, Armytage deploys ethnographies like a blacksmith slams his hammer: to shape and define, solidify and congeal, and meaningfully weld together disparate narrative elements of otherwise banal and ordinary character. She deserves our thanks for that, and much more.
The darkening gleam of Pakistan’s wealthiest offers a troubling forecast about the viability of greater economic progress for what is now the world’s fifth most populous country. What’s more is the woefully inept tenure of a Prime Minister who promised far more than he could deliver on. Imran Khan maintains great popularity among the ranks of the comparatively wealthier and educated diaspora, but he could not be more detested by swathes of middle- and lower-class Pakistanis at home. His elite opposition has spared no effort in carping him either. If Big Capital can presage what is to come, then it is that the collection of wealthy, powerful actors will see to it that they get their way. And they will do it with or without the impeccable, swashbuckling political cavalier who furnished assurances of a Pakistan that would look starkly different from the one Armytage portrays.
Shahrukh Khan is a JD candidate at Emory University School of Law. He was formerly a high school teacher in New York City and graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Social Studies. https://www.jamhoor.org/read/2021/01/03/pakistans-one-percent
[9] A REPUBLIC OF PROTEST
Mukulika Banerjee
The culture of the farmers' protest is an extraordinary tableau that tells us what republican values look like.
In the days leading up to India’s Republic Day, we may want to pause consider the word ‘republic’. How is a republic distinct from a democracy? Why did India choose both to describe its identity? Is being a republic just the absence of monarchy (as in Europe) or does it indicate more? Much ink is spent on measuring democracy indicators in nations, but precious little attention is paid to a country’s credentials as a ‘republic’. How can those be measured?
The word ‘republic’ is gantantra in Hindi, and gan indicates ‘the people’. In a republic, the constitution makes people sovereign. In India, a fitting display of such popular sovereignty can be observed on the capital’s borders, where hundreds and thousands of farmers and agricultural workers, men and women representing 400 organisations, are staging an extraordinary protest against three new laws on agriculture that they want the government to repeal.
On Constitution Day last November, the protestors had headed to the capital to register their protest but the government tried to stop them in their tracks with water cannons, tear gas, metal barricades and even by digging up the roads. Overcoming them all, the farmers continued to march, finally setting up camp just outside the borders. A disinformation campaign was launched to discredit them, labelling them separatists, terrorists and anti-national. Their riposte was not fury but protest enacted with such civility, good humour and discipline that those identifiers sounded hollow. Arguments for and against their opposition to the laws have been made by experts in the eight weeks since their protests started, but here we may wish to pay attention to the culture of the protest itself – an extraordinary tableau that tells us what republican values look like.
Spread across a vast territory, protestors have been camped at Delhi’s northern, western and southern borders where dwellings have been constructed using tarpaulin, canvas and thousands of ‘trolleys’ (otherwise used to transport produce from farms to markets) and house farmers and their families. The protest sites have an air of vibrant efficiency – thousands of tents are managed by teams who clean, collect rubbish, arrange food, check security, provide fresh supplies, water, electricity as well as blankets. Farmers come and go, working a rota on their fields back at home and bringing back supplies when they return, while some camp permanently, refusing to leave until they win.
Meetings are held to discuss developments after each round of talks with the government and to plan the next manoeuvre. A central stage has been erected where high-profile visitors are invited to address the protestors, and organisers are alerted to their arrival through a system of walkie-talkies that connect them to colleagues managing entry to the sites. Members of pro-government media who had enthusiastically amplified the government’s defamation of protestors are kept out.
What we are witnessing is a specific kind of ‘movement culture’ whose mood is of quiet determination rather than anger. “We have not come to fight. One fights with enemies, not with one’s own government. First and foremost, we want to display that farmers have dignity and they have rights. And we have come to claim those rights,” one elderly man noted.
There is an undeniable influence of Sikhism on the grammar of the protests. A truly modern religion of India, it challenged the hierarchies of Hinduism and Islam, and its gurus had to face oppressive regimes to establish their new iconoclastic religion. In the present, Sikhism is remarkably welcoming of all and requires everyone’s kirat (action) and seva (service) – performed without any expectation of return. Every new person who joins the protests is encouraged to find something, however modest, to do. The newspaper Trolley Times, established specially for the protests, in its issue celebrating ‘solidarity’, narrates the example of a shy young woman who was encouraged to write the word ‘Inquilab (Revolution)’ on posts and pillars around where she was camped. She took to this finite task with zeal, inspiring others to do the same.
And there are of course the famous langars or community kitchens that serve anyone and everyone. Sikh children are habitually socialised into the preparation of food at gurdwaras and this training is evident at the protest site as hundreds of men and women rise early to participate in chopping, kneading, washing, rolling, stirring and serving food to thousands through the day. Adopting this ethic, a group of Muslim men from one of the poorest regions of north India, Mewat, have taken to running a round-the-clock chai langar serving hot milky tea in the bitter cold of a north Indian winter, and have won everyone’s hearts. The secret ingredient in their tea is the coveted cow’s milk (rather than the more common buffalo milk) which they source from their own cherished herds. Every household from their villages sends 2-5 litres of milk a day to keep them in regular supply.
Sustaining a protest of thousands in the bitter cold and in the face of constant smearing by the government is a challenge. Morale is maintained by visiting musicians, makeshift schools for students run by volunteers, some with PhDs, letters of solidarity sent by Indians abroad, and the wonderfully inventive book langars. Gyms, hairdressers and even shoe shining stalls have sprung up – all run by volunteers who turn up regularly, looking to find new ways to pamper and care, and do kirat and seva. Their activities serve not simply the farmers but everyone, including itinerant tradesmen, and residents of nearby slums. Christmas, the New Year, Lohri and Makar Sankranti have all been celebrated by everyone together. Republic Day on January 26 will be a high point.
Perhaps such a sustained display of solidarity and resolve over nearly two months has also been possible because the protagonists are farmers. In a poem published in Trolley Times entitled ‘Hamara Sabr’, the poet observes that the earth knows a farmer’s patience, for farmers wait to eat bread made from wheat they have sowed. Cultivation requires planting and vigilance, virtues that this protest needs. And there is courage. When January brought rain, slush and freezing temperatures, they laughed it off, noting that January rain was like ghee for the crops, a precious input. It also meant that their crops would get watered, freeing up time and energy for the protests.
What we witness today, therefore, on the borders of the capital of the Republic of India is a protest like none other. There is no single leader whom the farmers follow and there is only a committee that represents them. It is a project of world-making that shares a common purpose and a civility that generates solidarity. To visit it is a pilgrimage. A daily-wage worker who earns Rs 300 a day gave up his earnings to cycle for days from his village to visit the site. “I will find Guru Nanak among all those people when I get there,” he told a journalist.
The government has accused the farmers of bringing shame to the nation by bringing their protests to a planned crescendo on Republic Day. If anything, this may be a most fitting celebration of India’s republic.
Mukulika Banerjee’s book Cultivating Democracy will be published in 2021. https://thewire.in/rights/republic-day-farmers-protest