INSAF Bulletin 229, May 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).
On the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, INSAF Bulletin pays homage to the memory of the working women and men of Paris whose epic struggle pointed the way to a better and more just world.
[1] EDITORIAL: AS DISASTER STRIKES, INDIA TEETERS ON THE BRINK
Vinod Mubayi
In the internet age, news of disasters is difficult to hide even for authoritarian regimes that try to stifle dissent or conceal images that show them in a bad light. The videos from India freely available on YouTube and Facebook are full of the most gruesome scenes of corpses piling up at crematoria, Shamshan ghats and graveyards, patients gasping for lack of oxygen on hospital beds, and people wailing and screaming in hospital parking lots for their near and dear ones to get medical attention. International and national newspapers and agencies are documenting in excruciating detail the disaster overtaking India that is now at such a scale that is impossible for the Modi regime to hide.
Everyone by now knows that the Indian govt had a whole year to prepare for a possible second wave of the pandemic by strengthening its vastly underfunded and ramshackle public health system. There was an urgent need to make sure of the availability of all the basic needs of those infected with corona and requiring treatment in the event a second wave of the virus hit the country–ensure an adequate supply of medical oxygen, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE), along with the development and manufacture of approved vaccines in sufficient quantity. However, the year, in retrospect, was wasted.
A summary timeline of events over the last year helps to recall the sequence of acts of commission and omission of the Modi regime in responding to the coronavirus since news of it reaching India emerged in January 2020. As Dr. Dahiya, Vice-President of the Indian Medical Association recently reminded us “Prime Minister Modi instead of making arrangements to fight Corona, ... preferred to organize the gathering of more than one lakh persons in Gujarat to welcome the then US President Donald Trump." This Namaste Trump gathering held in the Vallabhbhai Patel cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, (now renamed the Narendra Modi stadium, a practice of renaming sports stadia in one’s lifetime that Modi shares with such illustrious predecessors as Hitler and Saddam Hussain), undoubtedly became what came to be known later as a super-spreader event.
A month later, as corona infections mounted, Modi suddenly announced, with no advance warning and just a four-hour notice, a stringent countrywide lockdown with all long-distance transport canceled. That sent millions of migrant workers performing daily labor in metropolitan cities such as Mumbai walking hundreds of miles to their villages in distant states like Bihar with several dying on the way from hunger and disease. A month after as the economy tanked, Modi suddenly reversed direction and ended the lockdown asking Indian to light oil lamps and bang metal thalis to drive the virus away. This penchant for taking dramatic showbiz type actions, reminiscent of his demonetization decision that had a disastrous impact on the economy, is characteristic of all of Modi’s acts of commission that play to his ego and his considerable base of Modi-bhakts willing to applaud him like robots activated by a switch.
While infections and deaths continued to mount in India, the fact that they were happening at a lower rate compared to other countries like the US, UK, Italy, Spain and Brazil, allowed a sense of complacency to set in. Modi and his sidekick Amit Shah went back to their usual pursuits: buying opposition legislators and toppling elected governments in states ruled by opposition parties, persecuting and prosecuting dissenters, who dared to publicly oppose discriminatory legislation like the Citizenship Amendment Act, and promoting the takeover of larger and larger parts of the Indian economy by their favored cronies whose names happen to start with the first letter of the alphabet.
By September 2020, the number of corona cases had started to rise again although official numbers of fatalities remained relatively small compared to the US and Brazil. In the same month, this column had dubbed Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi the “three horsemen of the corona apocalypse” and predicted that India, then #3 in total number of cases would eventually catapult to #1 given its huge population and dysfunctional health care system. While the country was distracted by the pandemic, Modi’s team rammed through the legislature without consultation or debate and by means clearly unethical if not illegal, hugely controversial farm bills that threaten to disrupt and upend decades of government support to the agricultural sector. These bills promote a pro-free market approach that a vast majority of farmers fear would lead to the loss of their land to corporate entities. This fear has led to sustained protests by millions of farmers who want the farm bills to be repealed that have put the government on the defensive and the issue remains unresolved so far.
Meanwhile, critical infrastructure needs of the health sector continued to suffer neglect and a paucity of funds as projects to augment the supply of medical oxygen, to take one example of an essential item, remained unimplemented. A relative lull in the pace of new infections as winter set in allowed Modi to declare victory over the virus. Bragging about India as a Vishwa (world) guru, Modi asserted in a speech at Davos that India had saved humanity from a big disaster and would soon become a supplier of vaccines to the entire world. The experience of many other countries had already shown that the coronavirus could return in a second and even a third wave that could be more devastating than the first. But this was blithely ignored by Modi and his regime. Taking their cue from the leadership people began to ignore the elementary precautions of wearing masks and practicing physical distancing to stop viral spread.
Much worse was the regime’s decision to allow elections and massive election rallies in four states and one union territory along with the Kumbh mela festival in the north Indian town of Haridwar involving millions of worshippers taking a dip in the holy waters of the Ganges river. All these were slated to become super-spreader events. Warnings were given but ignored by Modi and his cohorts. To compound the disaster the elections in West Bengal were decreed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to be held over an unprecedented 8 polling days in contrast to previous years when elections were held in one or at most 2 days. This was done so that Modi’s BJP, which has relatively little following in Bengal could bring in supporters from outside the state to different cities for electioneering. Of course, this greatly increased the chances of further spread of the coronavirus and virtually constitutes a crime against the people of Bengal. The ECI is nominally an independent body but the Modi regime has succeeded in reducing all constitutionally independent arms of the government to virtual doormats of the Prime Minister’s office. With regard to the Kumbh festival the chief minister of Uttarakhand state, in which Haridwar is located, asserted that the holy water of the Ganges would purify the virus.
Astonishingly, as late as April 17 when infections were officially climbing well past the 100,000 per day mark, Modi, speaking at a campaign rally in Bengal without a mask as were most of his audience of tens of thousands, was boasting that he had never seen such a crowd before.
We can now exclaim (to paraphrase Shakespeare) “O, what a fall was there my countrymen, as you and I, and all of us fell down as damned incompetence flourished over us” as in the following week the official number of infections rocketed to a new world record of over 350,000 per day with the official daily death figure climbing to almost 3,000. These figures are widely admitted to be undercounts by perhaps a figure of 5 or 10 or even more due to the paucity of testing facilities and the widespread practice of simply writing “bimari” (sickness) as the cause on death certificates. From being the Vishwa guru, Modi has now reduced the country to being a Vishwa-bhikari (beggar). All the talk now about the world coming to India’s rescue is unlikely to plug many holes in India’s rickety and sinking health care system. Unless the roots of the crisis are addressed, however, any amelioration without basic changes will be simply exercises in headline management.
Modi’s style of management is best expressed as dadagiri (a Hindustani word meaning arrogance allied to braggadocio) combined with a mania for privatization, based on the so-called Gujarat model that he implemented as chief minister of that state. In social sectors, like health care and education, this model has had predictably disastrous impacts. Modi’s claims of just a month or two ago of India being the “pharmacy of the world” are now being revealed to be vain boasts when the country’s vaccine system is in deep trouble. The new policy of opening vaccination to all above 18 coupled with another directive where the Centre will take 50% of production leaving states and private individuals to fight for the rest has been labelled by a commentator as “a bizarre combination of ruthlessness and managing the headlines.” Far from being the world’s pharmacy, vaccine production in India will not meet domestic requirements for many months to come. Barely 10% of the population has received a dose and reaching a level of herd immunity is estimated to occur in 2023 if not later. Writing in the Indian Express of April 28, Pratap Bnanu Mehta described India’s vaccine policy as ad hoc social Darwinism lacking any epidemiological logic. “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. A perfect metaphor for our healthcare system.”
Reforming and improving India’s broken healthcare system is of course a must to save and protect the lives of the Indian people first and foremost and the onus for doing that rests on the Indian government. But given that India accounts for almost a fifth of the world’s population and recognizing the fact of global interconnectedness which let the virus travel from an animal market in Wuhan, China to all corners of the globe within a few weeks, can the responsibility for effectively tackling if not eradicating the virus within India rest solely on the shoulders of the Indian government? Especially one that has shown the depths of incompetence that the Modi regime has? What if the virus mutates further the longer it’s allowed to exist to forms that become difficult to treat with the current vaccines? These and related questions will not disappear by lighting diyas, banging thalis, uttering Vedic chants, or consuming “medicines” from Ramdev’s Ayurvedic “pharmacy.” Instead, they need to be seriously pondered and discussed by world experts in public health, epidemiology, and emergency disaster planning and solutions for a range of future scenarios need to be addressed. Notions of national sovereignty mean little to viruses.
Meanwhile, what needs to happen within India to stem and reverse the frightening descent into hell that is being experienced daily by thousands if not millions of its inhabitants? The simplest and most direct answer has been given by columnist Ruchir Joshi in the Telegraph newspaper of April 28, 2021:
“It’s best to state this simply: Narendra Modi needs to go. Amit Shah needs to go. Ajay Mohan Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath needs to go. The bunch of integrity-free incompetents Mr Modi has gathered around him as his ministers all need to go. In order for the country to launch the mammoth operation of recovery and repair needed for our survival, the departure of these people from positions of power needs to happen immediately — tomorrow is too late, yesterday would have been better.”
[2] HOW RSS LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE “TSUNAMI” THAT BJP IS EXPECTING IN WEST BENGAL
Amit Bhardwaj
In April 2017, West Bengal stood witness to scenes like never before. Districts after districts were taken over by men wearing saffron bandanas. They chanted “Jai Shree Ram,” and wielded swords and trishuls—tridents. Cities and townships such as Asansol and Birbhum had thousands of men thronging the streets. The saffron flags were mounted on vehicles, on houses and on shops. In Kolkata, tableaus featuring Hindu gods were taken out from different locations. In a state where Durga Puja is considered to be the biggest cultural-religious function, such gigantic fanfare around Ramnavami—a festival marking the birth of the Hindu deity Ram—was unprecedented. But as state leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh told me, it was not unexpected. This transformation was by design, a result of years of groundwork by the RSS. In the 2021 assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party is hoping to reap the benefits of this labour.
Similar scenes were witnessed during Ramnavami the next year, during which scuffles led to communal violence in Asansol and Raniganj. Soon, the “Jai Shree Ram” chant became BJP’s primary tool against the Trinamool Congress and the chief minister Mamata Banerjee. In the ongoing assembly elections, polarisation along religious lines appears to be the biggest factor influencing West Bengal’s voters—and the BJP appears to be the top contender against the incumbent TMC government. A decade ago, in the 2011 state assembly polls, the saffron party got a mere four-percent vote share. In the 2016 assembly election, it won only three assembly seats. But in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP surprised everyone by securing 40 percent of the votes in West Bengal.
In the 2021 assembly election, irrespective of the final result, there would be no denying that the BJP turned the tides in its favour. The TMC and Banerjee are facing their toughest electoral battle and opponent. The saffron party is claiming that Bengal is set to witness a BJP-tsunami. Many political pundits believe that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity and the home minister Amit Shah’s electoral strategy are the sole reasons for the party’s rise in the state. But behind the curtains, it was the RSS that laid the ground for these changes years back. Senior RSS functionaries in the state as well as ground-level workers told me the Sangh’s massive mobilisation and recruitment efforts, how it conducted awareness campaigns that focused on Hindu nationalist issues, and the successful expansion of the organisation.
The RSS leaders said that the Sangh Parivar had set a “Mission Bengal” in 2016 itself. In March 2017, the RSS passed a formal resolution to this effect. “Sangh jab nischay kar leta, to uss lakshay ko paane ke liye puri taqat laga deta hai”—Once the RSS decides on a target, it uses all the resources and might at its disposal to achieve it—Shibaji Mandal, an RSS leader, said. “RSS ne Bangal par resolution 2017 mein pass kiya. Tabhi se Bangal ko sudharane ka kaam chalu hua hai.”—The RSS passed a resolution of West Bengal in 2017. Since then, the work to mend Bengal has been going.
Mandal, a 43-year-old school teacher, is the baudhik pramukh—or intellectual head—of the RSS’s Central Bengal state unit. In the Sangh’s organisational framework, until recently, West Bengal was divided into two prants, or state-level divisions—South Bengal and North Bengal. The organisational expansion in districts around the state’s Birbhum district led to the formation of the third state, Central Bengal. The RSS’s Central Bengal unit exercises jurisdiction over five vibhags, which are divisions comprising roughly two or more organisational districts—these vibhags are Birbhum, Bardhaman, Bankura, Hooghly and Nadia. Possibly, the presence of factories and a sizable population from Hindi- speaking states had made the Sangh’s expansion easier specifically in areas such as Asansol, Raniganj, Durgapur and Birbhum.
I met Mandal, a second-generation swayamsevak—as the RSS’s activists are known—at the organisation’s Birbhum headquarters in April this year. The Sangh Parivar functionaries in the state and their karyakartas—workers—had been keeping busy for the past three months, and I had visited during a peak time of their packed schedule. Mandal was supposed to join another round of strategy and execution meeting to be held on the first floor of this RSS building that day. During our conversation, he addressed why it had become necessary to dislodge Banerjee and her party from West Bengal, and why the eastern state was so important for the Sangh.
The March 2017 resolution was passed by the RSS’s top decision-making body—the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha. In it, the Sangh expressed concerns over the rise of “jihadi elements in West Bengal,” and “encouragement to the anti-national elements by the state government due to its Muslim vote bank politics and declining Hindu population in the state.” To strengthen its case, the ABPS resolution referred to previous incidents of violence in the state. It criticised the Banerjee government for its “appeasement politics,” and urged the citizens “to create awareness against this Jehadi violence.” The RSS’s top- decision making body had also urged the Central government to take “firm action against these anti national Jehadi elements of the state”.
Biplab Roy, the 63-year-old pracharak pramukh—head of publicity—of South Bengal, shared two major concerns of the RSS while passing the March 2017 resolution, which, he said, was aimed to stop “the atrocities by the Islamic Jihadi elements.” He said, “There was a need to end the reign of terror including a crackdown on the corridors being used for trafficking of cows to Bangladesh. Hence, the resolution was passed. There was an understanding that if Bengal is not fixed, then it will become another Kashmir.” He further added, “It was also aimed to stop the idea of Bengali nationhood.”
Roy claimed that after the passage of the resolution, the Sangh Parivar used its energy in aggressive expansion. Targets were set for 2017, 2018 and 2019, and Ramnavami was to be used as a strength expansion exercise.
“The Ramnavami procession is a way to display aggression of the Hindu youth,” Mandal told me. “It was our shakti pradarshan”—show of strength. “And the groundwork for this was being done for months, since 2016.” Through different bodies and organisations, the Sangh Parivar had reached out to shrine and temples across Bengal in order to persuade them to organise grand Ramnavami processions. The target was to mobilise thousands of Hindu youth for the processions in every possible district.
The RSS facilitated setting up Ramnavami Udyapan Samitis for the purpose, and its sister organisations, such as Hindu Jagran Manch and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, were used as the face of the mobilisation drive. The RUSs were formed first at the district level then till the ward level. Mandal said that the procession taken out in April 2017 in Birbhum’s Siuri sub-division had 15,000 Hindus participating and in Rampurhat subdivision the procession had 15,000 to 20,000 supporters.
“In one stroke, thousands of youths ended up joining us in every district. The RSS’s organisational strength increased,” the 43-year-old RSS functionary said. He added that the BJP got the political dividend of this mobilisation and that the TMC was pushed on the backfoot to the point that even they were “forced to organise similar processions.”
This aggressive assertion of Hindutva in the name of Ram was something that West Bengal was witnessing for the first time—and the Ramnavami function was just the beginning. The Sangh Parivar kept upping the ante. That year, the Ramnavami processions were followed by the announcement by the Hindutva outfits such as VHP that they would be organising a Shastra Puja—a Hindu ritual that honours weapons during the festival Dussehra. But Mandal said that the extensive display of strength on Dussehra was discontinued after 2017 itself.
“While Shastra Pujan is an old tradition, we stopped the aggressive expansion of the programme right after the events that followed the 2017 event,” he told me. “Hundreds of cases were lodged against our workers for the Shastra Puja event.” Notably, even after the first grand Ramnavami procession, several participants including the BJP state president, Dilip Ghosh, were booked under the Arms Act for brandishing weapons. However, these developments had placed the BJP as the principal opponent to the TMC. And “Jai Shree Ram” became their principal slogan to target the party and Banerjee. The more she retaliated, the more legitimacy their actions appeared to gain.
The RSS functionaries told me that the Sangh Parivar swung into action in West Bengal from 2016 – the year when the BJP failed to make a dent in the assembly elections. The organisation’s insiders said that the Sangh did not want West Bengal to become “another Kashmir.” One of the central planks that the RSS focused on—which the state BJP unit under Ghosh has focused on as well—has been a propaganda campaign that “infiltration” from Bangladesh is disturbing the demography of West Bengal. To support their claim, they often pointed at the increase in the Muslim population in the state. After the partition, the Muslims formed roughly 19 of Bengal’s population. As per the last census, 2011, the Muslim population in the state stood at a little more than 27 percent.
“In 1980s, the RSS had conducted its own census to find out the impact of the infiltration in every district of West Bengal,” Roy, the prachar pramukh, told me in Kolkata. “But the CPM dubbed our census as bogus,” he added, referring to the Communist Party of India (Marxists). To make their case sound stronger, Hindutva leaders often compared the increase in the Muslim population in Bengal.
The Sangh Parivar also kept itself focused on appealing to the Bangladeshi Hindus who settled in the eastern coastal state phases. Tathagata Roy, the BJP leader and former governor of Meghalaya and Tripura, told me, “The RSS had kept itself focused on the Bangladeshi Hindu refugees and tried to bring them on board. Earlier, the CPM had control over this vote bank and used them to foster their electoral prospects.” Over the decades, the RSS has tried to set a narrative that the Hindus coming from Bangladesh are “refugees,” while the Muslims are “infiltrators.” Modi himself has used this distinction between “refugees” and “infiltrators” in his election speeches in West Bengal and Assam. The controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act passed by the BJP government in 2019 is a legislative reiteration of this narrative.
The option of online registration for RSS membership, which was introduced in 2013, also significantly helped the organisation’s expansion. It enabled the shakhas—the basic unit of the Sangh’s organisational structure—to easily find fresh recruits in their localities. According to Biplab Roy, the RSS has recorded one of the highest online membership registrations in West Bengal among the Indian states. He added that the memberships had witnessed a sharp surge after the former president of India Pranab Mukherjee visited the RSS headquarters in Nagpur in 2018. Following the visit, professionals such as doctors, designers, and teachers began showing interest in joining the Sangh in West Bengal.
The pracharak pramukh said that due to this new trend in Bengal, they had to change the strategy of only focusing on shakhas by introducing more milans—weekly meetings in a room or hall. Over a period of time, many of these got converted into shakhas. Between 1 and 15 March 2021, South Bengal alone witnessed over 400 new registrations, Roy told me.
He said there are 1,700 shakhas, 800 milan units and 300 mandalis—a unit that holds monthly meetings—operational in the state at present. He claimed that on average, nearly 4,000 swayamsevaks work in each of 294 constituencies of the state. There are pockets where the RSS is strong and then there are areas such as Murshidabad, a Muslim-majority district, where their presence is weak “due to demographic reasons.”
The Sangh Parivar has also been conducting “Jan Jagrans”—campaigns to spread awareness—among the voters in West Bengal. The RSS’s mobilisation in the state has been elaborate and massive. For instance, in February this year, it launched a forum called the Sachetan Nagrik Manch, which aimed to form a thousand groups in each constituency comprising RSS sympathisers and those who sought to oust the TMC from power, and use them to execute the Sangh’s mobilisation strategy. The RSS also formed committees at the state and at district levels.
According to RSS functionaries, through the Manch, the Sangh planned and executed a three-phase campaign in the state to oust the TMC. In the first phase, the RSS identified issues that they believed concerned the voters of West Bengal, which were compiled in leaflets and handbills for distribution. These issues included demanding due recognition to Bengali language, industrial development, a campaign against toshan—appeasement—and stopping Islamic influence in Bengali textbooks. The leaflets—roughly 40 to 45 lakh, according to Roy—were then distributed from February till the last week of March in Hindu localities and even in Muslim areas where the RSS had a presence.
The awareness campaign also included changes in the state’s school textbooks. The RSS officials claimed that words that reflected the Hindu culture were being replaced with alternative words or Urdu words under an “Islamic influence.” When asked about this, the prachar pramukh Biplab Roy told me, “Over the years, the words in the Bengali textbooks that reflected our culture were being changed in West Bengal.” Referring to the words for “rainbow,” “sky” and “mother,” he added, “For instance, they changed ramdhanu to rangdhanu, akash became aasmaan, maa was replaced by amma.” Roy questioned the intentions behind replacing “Ram” with “rang” in the Bengali word for rainbow.
In the second phase of the RSS’s voter-awareness campaign, the Sangh organised meetings of different groups such as women, intellectuals, youth and students, and influential personalities of the localities in each assembly constituency. According to RSS functionaries, nearly 800 to 1,200 such Jan Jagran meetings were held in each of 294 constituencies. As per their estimate, for every thousand meetings, nearly 8,000 RSS workers and sympathisers were mobilised. Through these meetings, the RSS’s campaign reached to the booth level. The target was to also increase the voter turnout, RSS officials said.
The third and final phase of the Jan Jagran campaign was more carefully woven. The senior RSS functionaries focused on the constituencies in a phase-wise manner instead of spending resources on all constituencies in one go. For instance, many senior Sangh Parivar functionaries, including those from the VHP, had camped in the Asansol-Birbhum area around 15 April. The voting in this belt was in the seventh phase and eighth phase—on 26 and 29 April. In these constituencies, the Sangh carried out a door-to-door campaign calling upon voters to use their democratic right.
In Asansol’s Burnpur town, I met Sachin Singho, a senior VHP functionary who usually operates from the Delhi office, at a park managed by the RSS, where the Sangh’s karyakartas were busy celebrating the Bengali New Year. The 66-year-old swayamsevak had come down to this region of West Bengal to oversee communications for the Jan Jagran campaign and conduct “background work which cannot be revealed in the public domain.”
He checked on the preparation for the Ramnavami procession and indicated to local workers that it should be grand. When asked for the reason, he replied, “This is the first Ramnavami after the foundation stone of Ram Temple in Ayodhya was laid. Last year, we couldn’t celebrate it due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Hence, it has to be grand.” At the same park, Tarun Banerjee, a swayamsevak and a former BJP functionary of Asansol, told me that the preparations were in full swing and that they intended to distribute nearly five thousand flags—to be mounted on vehicles and houses—in Burnpur on Ramnavami.
At the time, the preparation for the processions had made senior TMC and CPI(M) leaders nervous. A senior TMC leader and state minister told me, on conditions of anonymity, “We are confident of our performance in this region”—referring to the constituencies in and around Asansol. “But we are not sure what will happen after Ramnavami processions. If communal spats are triggered due to the processions, it could change everything in the polls.” Ultimately, the Sangh Parivar instructed their workers to call-off the large processions at the last moment amid a surge in the COVID-19 cases.
But the RSS did continue its Jan Jagran campaigns. “There is a need to unite the Hindus,” Singho said. “And for the same purpose, we are visiting the villages, reaching out to shrines and temples and the community-based organisations.” He added, “The Hindu voters are under attack in this poll. The dignity of Hindus is under attack in the rural areas. For us, the situation is similar to what we had witnessed during the partition of Punjab and Bengal during the Independence … And we are here to give social security to the Hindu voters.”
I also met RSS workers who were visiting voters on a regular basis and appealing them to cast their votes. Initially, they insisted that they do not take the name of any political party and keep themselves restricted to the issues. But their responses made it clear how they were indirectly influencing the voters. At one shakha held near a mosque in Burnpur, Ajay Verma, a 46-year-old RSS worker, listed the issues they discuss with the voters. These included the state of Hindus in West Bengal, appeasement politics, issues of national security, how China could not manage to take “even an inch of land” from India, the changing demographic of the state, and the need for development and industrialisation for job creation. Verma, who said he had served in the RSS for the past 30 years and dreams to see an “Akhand Bharat”—undivided India—before his death, claimed that the RSS workers list these issues to the voters and then ask them to vote for any party they want.
The fund collection for the Ram Temple construction, which was carried out across the nation, has also aided the RSS and the BJP. For instance, Poritosh Saha, a pracharak—full-time worker—in the RSS’s Burdhaman unit, told me that the Sangh Parivar mapped nearly 3.6 lakh households in the Paschim Burdhaman district during the fund collection drive. In Asansol itself, nearly 72,000 individuals had contributed for the construction of the temple in Uttar Pradesh's Ayodhya. In Birbhum, according to the baudhik pramukh Mandal, the total collection was nearly Rs 1 crore. Many functionaries overtly and covertly accept that the BJP will get the benefit of the fund collection campaign in the assembly polls because it is happening barely a few months after the drive.
The allegations of Muslim-appeasement politics against the Banerjee government and infiltration were recurrent topics in conversations with top RSS functionaries as well as its lower-rung workers. Predictably, these allegations get prominent space in the Jan Jagran campaign of the Sangh Parivar. This strategy and large-scale mobilisation is part of the RSS and BJP’s determined efforts to dislodge the Trinamool supremo from the power circles of West Bengal. However, barely two-decades back, the RSS- BJP and Mamata Banerjee were partners appreciating each other’s struggles.
While people remember that the TMC was part of the National Democratic Alliance and that Banerjee was a cabinet minister in the Atal Vajpayee government, it is largely forgotten that she was hailed at an RSS function in Delhi. During a book launch in September 2003, attended by top RSS functionaries, Banerjee was hailed as “Maa Durga’s avatar.” In response, she had eloquently praised the Sangh Parivar, noting that it was the first time she was meeting “top RSS leaders, but I realised immediately that these are the real patriots.” Banerjee then appealed to them to help her in dethroning the communists from West Bengal.
Several RSS functionaries confirmed to me, on condition of anonymity, that their organisation had unofficially sought votes for the TMC in the 2011 assembly elections to “end the reign of terror” of the Left Front government. Banerjee’s victory that year had ended a 34-year-long rule of the Left Front. The RSS units from districts such as Hooghly, Paschim Medinipur and Purba Medinipur had put more energy to bring the TMC in power.
A possible reason behind the RSS’s support to the TMC was that the Sangh was unable to expand its organisation in the state under the Left Front government. “Communist haanth se nahi maarta tha, pet ka bhaat marta tha”—The Communists didn’t use to physically attack us, they would block our source of income—Saha told me. Another senior RSS functionary alleged that during the Left Front government, individuals organising the shakhas were framed under false cases or trapped in other legal complications. This would then result in the shakhas shutting down.
After the Left’s fall, the shakhas started to mushroom in the state. According to Biplab Roy, in the past decade, the number of shakhas—which had dropped to nearly 800 during the CPI(M) rule—has reached up to 1,700. In fact, Saha, and other pracharaks like him, told me that the credit for the RSS’s expansion after 2011 goes to the TMC. “Her politics of Muslim appeasement created the opportunity for us,” Saha said. “It made Hindus feel vulnerable and we awakened.”
The VHP’s Singho said that the confrontation with the TMC increased after Banerjee was elected as the chief minister for the second time, in 2016. “In her first tenure, she didn’t oppose the Indian culture,” he said. “However, when elected for the second time, she got occupied with appeasement politics. Due to this anger started to simmer.” These are the allegations against a chief minister who provides funds to Durga Puja pandals across the state and had come under fire from opposition parties for announcing a stipend of Rs 1,000 for Brahmin priests.
One of the top Bengal functionaries made a candid revelation. On condition of anonymity, he accepted that the “Sangh through its off-shoot organisation started a campaign to portray Mamata Banerjee as the harbourer of terrorists in West Bengal.” He did not provide a specific timeline for when this began, but indicated that it was an ongoing process that began some years ago. By 2021, the BJP state president, Ghosh, began making such allegations against the sitting chief minister on the record. The BJP leaders do not substantiate these allegations with any credible reports or facts.
Yet, the Sangh Parivar has continued a campaign that is transparent in its religious polarisation. During the 2016 elections, the BJP-RSS campaign dubbed Banerjee as “Mamata Bano.” In 2021, leaders such as Suvendhu Adhikari kept calling her “Mamata Begum” during the campaign in Nandigram and even went to the extent of dubbing her as Bangladeshi. When asked about the campaign that tries to sully Banerjee’s character, the same anonymous RSS functionary got furious and started to defend the slander campaign against the TMC chief. “Whatever she is facing today is due to her politics of appeasement,” he said. “The highest number of sacrifices of RSS workers has happened in Kerala and West Bengal. This chapter will come to end in West Bengal in 2021.”
Over the years, the Sangh Parivar has witnessed a colossal expansion in West Bengal. Today, the Sangh Parivar is running several educational institutions such as the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, including schools under different names, such as the Saraswati Shishu Mandir and Ekal Vidyalayas. The RSS also has a number of sister organisations such as the VHP to help it in the state. Through its shakhas, it is attracting thousands of children volunteers, who are known as Bal Swayamsevaks. In fact, the only concern that RSS leaders expressed to me about their presence in West Bengal was that its women’s wings, such as the VHP’s Durga Vahini, had failed to make a mark.
In this election, they have brought together the entire human resource at its disposal to “awaken the voters” which essentially meant to mobilise them to vote for the BJP. The Sangh Parivar—which started its first shakha in Bengal in 1939—waited decades for this opportunity, having been stifled so far by the Congress and the Left Front. In 2011, they helped the TMC overthrow the communists. Over the next decade, they built an organisation to clinch Bengal. The RSS’s Mission Bengal has been a work in progress. In 2021, when the BJP is trying to clinch Bengal, it is the Sangh Parivar that created the fertile land and the tools to tilt. It is clear why the RSS is called the mother organisation of the BJP.
Amit Bhardwaj covers national political developments and tracks election bound states. He was formerly associated with Tehelka, Newslaundry.com and Tiranga TV. https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/how-rss-lay-groundwork-for-tsunami-bjp-expecting-in-west-bengal
[3] A NEW BORDER IN THE OLD REPUBLIC: THE CLASS AND CASTE-BASED CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN INDIA’S FARMERS’ PROTEST
Aditya Bahl
For the first time in the history of postcolonial India, two different parades marked the Republic Day 2021 celebrations in New Delhi. At the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president’s residence, the rightwing government organised a public spectacle of Hindu nationalism, parading tableaus of new temples and artilleries, and sanctifying them as emblems of the emergent ‘Hindu nation’. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the country’s capital, thousands of farmers and agrarian workers took out a ‘tractor parade’, protesting the new farm bills passed by the ruling government.
The contrasting political receptions accorded to the two parades epitomise the postcolonial condition, as enforced by the Indian state and as endured by its working people. While the political establishment openly applauded the new tableaus of Hindu nationalism, the police forces publicly brutalised the country’s farmers and agrarian workers, assailing them with a barrage of lathis and tear gas. Long after the official parade was over, the police violence continued unabated. And soon, the tableaus of bloodied farmers and workers suffocating in the plumes of tear gas became the unofficial postscript to the nationalist pomp of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Republic Day celebrations.
In capitalist societies, mass movements are, by their very nature, self-contradictory, and the masses who make up these movements know this all too well.
And yet, far from being a mere exception, this onslaught of state violence has long been the rule that governs everyday political life in India. Indeed, these tableaus of police brutality are only one part of a perpetual rightwing parade, a macabre succession of pogroms and lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, state- sponsored attacks on public universities, settler-colonial violence in Kashmir, a full-blown war against tribals in the mineral-rich forests of Central India, and regular arrests of activists, intellectuals and artists across the country.
A few hours after violently suppressing the tractor parade, the police forces commenced an extraordinary operation of fortifying the New Delhi borders: setting up multiple layers of metal barricades, barbed-wire trenches, six-foot-high walls draped in concertina wire and deploying heavily armed contingents of the Rapid Action Force and the Central Reserve Police Force. Indeed, it is as if a full-blown border has suddenly sprung up inside the bounds of the Indian state, decisively fracturing its body politic into two contrasting political visions.
Mass movements and contradictions
Currently, more than 500,000 farmers and agrarian workers have blocked and occupied three key highways that link the national capital to neighbouring states. They are protesting against the government’s decision to permit agribusiness corporations to take over the country’s farming sector. Over the past four months, the protestors have improvised their tractors and trolleys to construct a political commune on wheels. These cavalcades run up to 15 kilometres and have been furnished with makeshift libraries, 24/7 community kitchens, informal schools, open-air film screenings, and stages for political speeches and cultural performances. Even as the national media continues to caricature the protestors as either feudal illiterates or as outright terrorists, the protestors have continued to resolutely valorise their ad-hoc commune as an alternative people’s republic that tries to ensure egalitarian and communal access to basic human needs.
And yet, this ‘model republic’ is not without its own share of problems. Just like the society in which it has materialised, this mass movement remains riven with numerous class and caste-based contradictions. These contradictions are perhaps most clearly reflected in the popular slogan, “No Farmers No Food”, which has swiftly become an ideological lodestone for the emergent critiques of agribusiness corporations in the Indian public sphere. In fact, the slogan has gained immense political traction across the entire globe, as marches in Oakland, Toronto, and London resolutely echoed it while pledging their solidarity with this agrarian movement. But notwithstanding the seductive simplicity of the discourse of anti- corporatism that has cohered around this slogan, there are a few details that warrant our attention.
It is as if a full-blown border has suddenly sprung up inside the bounds of the Indian state, decisively fracturing its body politic into two contrasting political visions.
First, it is imperative to note that there are no ‘farmers’ as such and that the Indian peasantry is profoundly fractured along class and caste lines. Apart from the contradictions that separate the marginal and small farmers from the middle and large farmers, there also exists a more powerful political antagonism between the farmers and the agrarian workers. Given that 56 percent of India’s rural population is landless, it is surprising how popular slogans such as ‘No Farmers No Food’ conveniently ignore the vast proletarian majority of the country.
Moreover, the landless, too, occupy a variety of political-economic subject positions, thus resulting in a labyrinthine of class-based social relations: the waged labourers, who are often hired on seasonal basis only; the attached labourers, who are invariably kept in bondage by upper-caste landlords; and the sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who are subject to diverse leasing arrangements by the landowners. Meanwhile, in highly developed agrarian states, especially Punjab and Haryana, the rise of ‘reversed tenancy’ confounds these social relations even further, as a class of entrepreneurial tenants, who are neither small nor poor, enter the leasing market to increase their unit of cultivation and optimise the use of their agricultural machinery.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to own land in India is extensively mediated by the caste system. For instance, in Punjab, Dalit communities constitute nearly 32 percent of the state’s population, and yet, only 3 percent of the Dalits own any agricultural land. In fact, as per the National Sample Survey of 2011-12, 86 percent of the agricultural labourers in the state are Dalits. Given the baleful sway of caste over the distribution of land and labour, it is hardly surprising that the class-based antagonisms between rich and poor Jats are often overshadowed by their caste-based Jat solidarity, which, as it turns out, is invariably directed against Dalit labourers.
Similarly, just like there are no ‘farmers’ as such, there is also no ‘food’ as such. It is imperative to note that these farmers and agrarian workers are part of a vast and intricate regime of agrarian capitalism, wherein they serve to produce commodities for agrarian markets, which, for now, remain primarily regulated by the Indian state. This state regulation of the farming sector can be traced back to the mid- 1960s, when the Congress government first introduced the Green Revolution by heavily incentivising the new scientific and technological inputs, including tractors, High-Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, and new irrigation facilities.
One of the more critical incentives included the Minimum Support Price, a guaranteed procurement price that was, and still is, offered by the Indian state for any amount of grain that was to be sold in the state- regulated mandis. As the farmers were integrated into the project of postcolonial nation-building, their own subsistence became increasingly tied to this newfound regime of agrarian capitalism. If, in the beginning, they were incentivised to invest in new technologies and to produce for the market, then soon, the latest technologies became a necessity, and in the wake of increasing competition, the farmers found themselves increasingly compelled to produce for the market in order to survive. And before long, this capitalist regime of heavily mechanised and chemicalised agriculture ended up instigating a catastrophe of unbridled landlessness, indebtedness, and ecological degradation in several agrarian states, the foremost being Punjab.
Further still, even as the new science and technology rapidly increased the agrarian productivity of the country, it did not transform the ability of the workers to buy food. As of April 2021, the Food Corporation of India has amassed grain stocks of 56.4 million metric tonnes in the central pool. This is around 2.7 times the amount generally stipulated as the ‘buffer stock’. Despite this immense agrarian abundance, large swathes of the country’s population continue to suffer from chronic food insecurity. In fact, towards the end of 2015, 40 percent of the country’s children are undernourished, 50 percent of the women between 15 and 49 years are anaemic, and in the Global Hunger Index 2020, India ranks an abysmal 94th in a list of 107 countries. Could there be more damning evidence for the commoditised character of food?
Contradictions and critiques
As the mass movement enters its fifth month, the fraught entanglements of class and caste that are internal to it have started becoming sharper by the day. Over the past few weeks, several pamphlets and op-eds in the vernacular, especially in the Punjabi public sphere, have begun to scrutinise the contradictory rhetoric of anti-corporatism while posing important questions concerning its class and caste character. For instance, is this a movement being led by middle and large farmers? What is the role of landless labourers, especially the Dalits, in this struggle? Are we really witnessing an upsurge of the working people, or is this movement an expression of caste-based solidarities between the upper-caste Jats of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh? In turn, as the ongoing struggle spreads to other parts of the country, each marked by distinct agrarian economies and political groups, these questions have also continued to multiply.
While these inquiries play a crucial role in illuminating the political inconsistencies of this agrarian movement, they can, at times, also risk enabling some counterintuitive criticisms. In particular, an enduring obsession with the sociological make-up of the ongoing protests has given rise to multiple ‘purity tests’. For instance, ever since this mass movement first emerged, several political commentators in the mainstream media have regularly condemned it as a struggle led by middle and large farmers, who are only interested in safeguarding their private landholdings and preserving their existing political monopoly. It is hardly surprising that these misleading criticisms have primarily been made by neoliberal economists and agronomists who have openly supported new farm bills and have, in turn, continued to bemoan the ‘noisy democracy’ of the country that stands in the way of implementing economic reforms.
Given that 56 percent of India’s rural population is landless, it is surprising how popular slogans such as ‘No Farmers No Food’ conveniently ignore the vast proletarian majority of the country.
But of late, sections of the left have also drawn attention to the sizable presence of the ‘rural bourgeoisie’ – the landlords, the capitalist tenants, and the usurious traders – in these protests. While emphasising the contradictory character of this agrarian movement, they have expressed caution against romanticising it as a truly ‘revolutionary struggle’. Indeed, these sprawling contradictions are a cause for concern, to say the least. And yet, while brandishing these critical barometers to highlight the not-so-radical character of this movement, we also risk overlooking a relatively simple point: in capitalist societies, mass movements are, by their very nature, self-contradictory, and the masses who make up these movements know this all too well.
And so, instead of simply condemning these contradictions, it would be more useful to trace how they have continued to engender unexpected class and caste-based alliances and antagonisms on the ground, and how the working people are navigating these fault lines, while trying to radicalise a popular discourse of anti-corporatism into a genuinely anti-capitalist praxis.
Similarly, this movement’s class and caste character cannot be directly reduced to the class and caste positions of its protagonists. Instead, in order to ascertain the former, we will have to patiently track the cascading slippages between who is participating in this struggle, what their political attachments and aspirations are, and finally, how their political commitments get borne out in the presence of other actors in real-time.
The landed and the landless
The protests first started in Punjab during August last year, shortly after the ruling government first publicised its plans to implement the three farm bills. As the spectre of domination by large agribusiness corporations began to loom large, the farmers and agrarian workers promptly took to the streets. Led by different unions and grassroots feminist and Dalit workers’ organisations, they began an unprecedented state-wide operation of picketing, occupying, and shutting down numerous railway stations, toll plazas, corporate-owned silos, thermal plants, petrol pumps, telecom towers, and even malls. Some of these blockades were so successful that the coal supply to the power plants was disrupted entirely, and for a short period, Punjab was thrust into an electricity crisis.
However, only a few months before these astonishing wildcat acts of protest started choking the arterial networks of capitalist circulation, Punjab’s political situation was utterly different. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the landless labourers, the majority of whom are Dalits, began protesting against the bigger farmers of Punjab, the majority of whom are upper-caste Jats, demanding an urgent wage hike to survive the pandemic. But the Jat farmers not only refused to increase the wages but also commenced a complete social boycott of the Dalit communities in the villages. In fact, over the past two decades, the Dalit struggle to access and lease out the shamlat (common lands) has been met with several such boycotts and often with outright physical violence by the bigger Jat farmers.
The ability to own land in India is extensively mediated by the caste system. For instance, in Punjab, Dalit communities constitute nearly 32 percent of the state’s population, and yet, only 3 percent of the Dalits own any agricultural land.
Despite these searing antagonisms, in recent months, the slogan, Kisan Mazdoor Ekta Zindabad (Long live the unity between farmers and workers), has become a significant ideological lodestone for these emergent protests. And yet, this newfound unity between farmers and workers remains highly precarious, not least because it has been largely inspired by the ‘external’ threat of agribusiness corporations, which have been legally permitted to take over the country’s agricultural sector. Put briefly, if the farmers, especially the small and marginal ones, stand to lose their landholdings, then the workers too risk becoming entirely surplus to the new capitalist regime’s requirements. Still, their newfound alliance does not, by any means, obliterate their longstanding antagonisms. Instead, the tensions between them continue to subsist and have begun to gradually shape the political trajectory of this emergent movement.
Speaking to Trolley Times, a multilingual newspaper operating on the New Delhi border, Bhagwant Singh Samaon, the state president of Mazdoor Mukti Morcha, which is the Punjab chapter of the the All India Agricultural Labour Association, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation’s agricultural wing puts this precarious solidarity in perspective. While emphasising the increasing participation of landless labourers in the ongoing protests, Samaon suggests that a lot of work still needs to be done before the gaping lacuna between a popular political slogan and actual ground realities can be overcome.
But instead of abandoning this agrarian struggle altogether or simply condemning it as a movement of the bigger Jat farmers, the landless labourers of Punjab have continued to travel to the New Delhi borders from their native villages. Led by different workers’ unions and Dalit-led organisations, including the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh committee, Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union, and Pendu Khet Mazdoor Union, they are trying to stake their claim in the ongoing protests. After all, theirs is a dual fight, directed against both external and internal capitalists: first, against the imminent catastrophe of corporatisation, and second, against the banal violence of everyday exploitation and caste-based oppression perpetuated by the bigger Jat farmers in Punjab.
One infers from Samaon’s remarks that, for now, the unity implied in the slogan ‘Kisan Mazdoor Ekta Zindabad’ remains a political imperative, at best, one that is yet to be realised. And in this regard, it is also important to note that landless labourers are not alone in their two-pronged fight. Over the past decade or so, several farmers’ unions, especially those working with marginal and small farmers, have emerged as willing allies in their struggle for better wages and access to the village commons. In recent years, these unions have also offered protection to the Dalit landless workers against threats of physical violence by the bigger Jat farmers and have started building mutual-aid networks between marginal and small farmers, landless labourers, and Dalits.
The unions and the khaps
Meanwhile, as this movement spreads to other parts of the country, it is worth noting that the tactics used by farmers and workers in Punjab have not been replicated with the same intensity. For instance, protestors in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan have only taken to picketing the highway toll plazas. We are yet to witness a systematic emergence of blockades, pickets, and occupations at corporate-owned silos, thermal plants, petrol pumps, and telecom towers. In part, this might be because protests in these states have galvanised around khaps, the traditional caste and clan-based councils that form the bastions of Jat political power in northern India. And consequently, here, the political resistance to the new farm bills is being articulated in terms of the distinctive political structure of the khap.
Perhaps, the most crucial divergence lies in the conflicting conceptualisations of ‘farmers’ by the khaps and the labour unions. While the former tends to grasp the farmers as a separate homogeneous class, united by their attachment to agrarian land as such, the latter seems to be more attuned to the class and caste-based stratifications that internally divide the farmers from each other. The contradictions between these competing political conceptualisations are especially palpable in western Uttar Pradesh. Here, the political influence of the khaps is so entrenched that even the leading farmers’ union in the region, the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU), has long remained beholden to it. Instead of challenging the widely prevalent class-neutral ideology of agrarianism, the BKU actively perpetuates it and is openly dependent on khaps for the purposes of political mobilisation.
In recent years, the all-male councils of the khaps have been regularly criticised in the Indian public sphere for perpetuating casteism and rape culture. And the dreadful implications of their longstanding repudiation of class politics became even more apparent in the lead up to the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. During this period, this agrarian traditionalism became easy prey to the Hindu rightwing, which infiltrated and manoeuvred the khaps in order to polarise the agrarian community along the religious lines of Hindus and Muslims. Spurred on by the Islamophobic propaganda disseminated by the khaps at multiple mahapanchayats, the Hindu Jats ended up killing 42 Muslims, most of them landless labourers, and forced 52,000 Muslims to flee their villages. Meanwhile, in retaliation, the Muslims killed 20 Hindu Jats.
This capitalist regime of heavily mechanised and chemicalised agriculture ended up instigating a catastrophe of unbridled landlessness, indebtedness, and ecological degradation in several agrarian states, the foremost being Punjab.
In January, shortly after the Delhi police started fortifying the New Delhi borders, the BKU called for a mahapanchayat, a gathering of 12 different khaps, in Muzaffarnagar. Around 10,000 farmers attended the event, where they collectively resolved to support the ongoing blockades on the New Delhi borders and commence an electoral boycott of the BJP government. Similar gatherings soon followed this in other parts of North India, each culminating in similar resolutions. The Jat communities that had previously allied with the Hindu rightwing are now beginning to openly withdraw their electoral support to the BJP government. It is striking, however, that unlike in Punjab, the tactical horizons of these gatherings are limited to electoral resolutions only, and that so far, the khaps have offered little room for engaging the logics of oppression and exploitation that are internal to these Jat communities, which remain viciously divided along the lines of caste, gender, and class.
Meanwhile, the Islamophobic rifts that had violently erupted during the Muzaffarnagar riots have not been adequately addressed either. Although these gatherings and protests have registered sizable participation by Muslims, and some sporadic efforts have been made to redress the communal polarisation of everyday life in the region, thousands of displaced Muslims are yet to be repatriated. In fact, the members of the khaps and the BKU, especially those who were allegedly involved in the riots, have insisted that the Jats and the Muslims must forget the past and begin a new collective struggle against the three farm bills.
To be sure, however, these political resolutions, both to boycott the BJP and to renew the political alliance between the Jats and the Muslims, played a critical role in renewing this mass movement at a time when the brutal police repression on Republic Day had significantly jeopardised its future. Indeed, if the record turnout of women farmers in these khap mahapanchayats is anything to go by, it would seem that a radical political collectivity is on the horizon. And yet, one can hardly overlook how this emergent collectivity is, in the end, circumscribed by the political form of the khaps. In other words, Jat communities might collectively make different political resolutions, but it is unlikely that these resolutions will inspire a radical transformation of the everyday political life of marginalised communities, and abolish the ongoing subjugation of Muslims, Dalits, women, and landless labourers.
Meanwhile, in stark contrast to this traditionalist alliance between the BKU and the khaps, the regional wings of the same union in Punjab are steadfastly building a vibrant everyday political culture, which is not only acutely attuned to the divisions of class, caste and gender, but which also actively seeks to overcome these divisions. In particular, the BKU (Ugrahan) has been resolutely engaged in supporting the struggles of the landless labourers and the Dalit communities while also building multiple networks of female and feminist solidarities in rural Punjab. As a result of these efforts, thousands of Punjabi women, wearing bright yellow chunnis, the trademark colour of the Ugrahan group, are now not just participating in these protests but they are now actively organising the movement: occupying the blockades, composing and singing new protest songs, driving tractors and tempos, managing the stages, running the community kitchens, and so on.
Even in Punjab, however, the efforts to build solidarities across class, caste, and gender have their obvious limits. Tactically speaking, these efforts are largely subordinated by the popular demand to roll back the three farm bills. Consequently, even though the protests have opened new horizons for building these solidarities, there has been little engagement with the political implications of this reformist demand for marginalised sections of the Indian agrarian society. For instance, if the ongoing movement can successfully resist the corporatisation of Indian agriculture, will the female farmworkers, the landless labourers, and the Dalit workers simply return to the agrarian fields where they will continue to be politically and economically subjugated by the bigger farmers and landlords? As of yet, there is little clarity as to how these political solidarities will operate when the ‘external’ threat of corporatisation dissipates, and the ‘internal’ antagonisms start flourishing once again.
Still, notwithstanding their obvious limits, one can scarcely ignore that the mere emergence of these political solidarities marks a decisive break in the recent agrarian history of postcolonial India. For instance, during the late-1980s, the last time when agrarian protests of a similar scale erupted across northern India, the enormous rallies and marches had conspicuously debarred women, landless labourers, and Dalit communities from participating in the protests.
In fact, at the time, several agrarian historians had trenchantly criticised these protests as organised by a coalition of ‘rural capitalists’, who were merely interested in securing a greater share of state subsidies and profits for themselves, at the expense of landless workers. Indeed, the regional wings of the BKU in Punjab had been vigorously campaigning for setting up private agro-processing plants, even supporting the establishment of a Pepsi agribusiness project in the region. When compared to the capitalist aspirations of these unions in the previous protests, the present struggle has, indeed, come a long way, notwithstanding the contradictions that still continue to riddle it.
Coda: All roads lead to the border
In the wake of the violent police repression on Republic Day, the khaps and the unions are intensifying their organising efforts, and have started sending thousands of new tractors and trolleys to the blockades at New Delhi. But these new cavalcades are not just transporting more personnel and provisions to support the ongoing blockades. Instead, they are also bringing thousands of new people with diverse, even disparate, sociopolitical identities and commitments to join the blockades. In the coming days, the contradictory character of this mass movement is likely to undergo several unpredictable transformations, as protestors continue to grapple with these swirling contingencies, trying to make sense of their newfound alliances and antagonisms, trying to distill them into a broader anti-capitalist unity.
Already, some of these challenges are starting to acquire a definitive form. In the wake of the brutal police violence unleashed during the Republic Day celebrations, the mass movement currently finds itself in the midst of a tactical quandary. Hitherto, this movement had been sustained by constant political escalations. First, a series of militant direct actions by farmers’ and agrarian workers’ unions, which had clogged the arterial networks of capitalism in Punjab. Then, the decision of the protestors in Punjab to collectively start moving towards New Delhi, soon replicated by farmers and agrarian workers in numerous other states. Not unlike the direct actions in Punjab, these journeys, too, involved head-on confrontations with police forces who had set up numerous barricades along the highways leading to New Delhi.
But now, with the unprecedented fortification of the border at the national capital, such militant confrontations seem no longer feasible. Even as hundreds of new cavalcades of protestors continue to trudge towards New Delhi, there is a growing uncertainty around this one-sided flow of protestors, and how it might inadvertently lead to political stagnation. Indeed, these anxieties are not unfounded, especially when one notes how the political actions that first engendered this movement –blockades, pickets, and occupations – began to slowly wane once the New Delhi border became the singular site of struggle.
Naturally, then, in recent weeks, the unions have been forced to improvise new political tactics that look beyond the ongoing blockades at the New Delhi border. Beginning in March, several union leaders travelled to West Bengal, in order to campaign against BJP in the lead-up to the ongoing state elections. Meanwhile, the regional wings of BKU set out to renew and expand the ongoing agrarian struggles in Punjab. The BKU (Ugrahan) and Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union organised a ‘maha rally’ directed at building grassroot solidarities between the marginal and small farmers and the landless laborers.
We will have to patiently track the cascading slippages between who is participating in this struggle, what their political attachments and aspirations are, and finally, how their political commitments get borne out in the presence of other actors in real-time.
Simultaneously, they also laid siege to a dry port in the Ludhiana district, run by the Adani group, one of the biggest agribusiness corporations in India. Meanwhile, the BKU (Krantikari) commenced a blockade at the railway line outside a grain silo in the Moga district, owned again by the Adani group. Additionally, 25 national highway toll plazas have been freed for the past six months. Elsewhere, calls are being made for building solidarities with industrial workers employed in the informal industries that ring the periphery of New Delhi. And most recently, the farmers’ and agrarian workers’ unions have planned a collective march to the Indian parliament in the month of May.
The uncanny diversity of these tactics is exhilarating, to say the least. And yet, these improvisations also reflect, even perpetuate, the contradictory character of this mass movement. As of now, electoral parliamentarism appears to be inextricably enmeshed with militant blockades and pickets. Similarly, the popular discourse of anti-corporatism appears to be inescapably embroiled with a still-fledgling working- class politics, which intends to target more than just the three farm bills in question.
In the coming days, these disorderly entanglements will continue to confuse our critical barometers, flouting alike the political expectations of both secular nationalists and traditional Marxists. While disclosing the seeming inadequacy of existing political paradigms, these tactical experiments have stemmed from the need to find a political form that is adequate to the radical demand for complete emancipation from the ever-worsening violence of state and capitalism. And even if these experiments do not immediately fulfil this need, they at least make perceptible the myriad challenges that stand in our way.
In the meantime, one thing is clear: we cannot simply wish away the contradictions that riddle this mass movement. Instead, they form the incontrovertible reality of our times. The future of this movement, and the prospects of our collective emancipation, lie in the anxious churn of these very contradictions. After all, we are not just contending with this ongoing struggle against capitalism and state, but rather there is also a struggle within this struggle. Mass movements will be only as radical as we will make them be.
Aditya Bahl is a PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. His essays on postcolonial politics and culture have appeared in Verso, The New Inquiry, Spectre, Trolley Times, and others. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including NAME/AMEN (Timglaset, Malmö, 2019) and Mukt (Organism for Poetic Research, NYC, forthcoming in 2021). https://www.himalmag.com/a-new-border-in-the-old-republic-farmers-protest-india-2021/
[4] BJP HAILS PM FOR “DEFEATING” COVID-19
[Lest we forget]
The BJP on Sunday hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for having “defeated” Covid-19 as also legislative reforms such as the three farm laws, labour codes, merger of Public Sector banks, New Education Policy.
The PM told the ruling party’s national office-bearers in a meeting to take the benefits of the new reforms, particularly in Agriculture and Labour to the people.
The office-bearers passed a political resolution thanking the Prime Minister for the reforms in the Agriculture sector and his able leadership in effective handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, BJP vice president Raman Singh said at a press conference. He said the resolution also highlights the Garib Kalyan Yojana during the pandemic, comprehensive budget and diligent handling of the situation on the Line of Actual Control with China.
The meeting, which was also being attended by the BJP state unit presidents, assumes significance as it came amid fierce protests by a section of farmers in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh against the three new farm laws. The farmer union leaders have been stepping up their attack on the Modi government over the issue. The BJP is also readying for the Assembly polls in five states, including West Bengal, where it expects to expand its footprint.
The political resolution was euphoric about the PM’s “able, sensitive, committed and visionary leadership” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The world was speculating over how India with its vast population and limited healthcare infrastructure would face the challenge…A year later, as the BJP holds its National Office-Bearer meeting, it can be said with pride that India not only defeated Covid-19 under the able, sensitive, committed and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi but also infused in all its citizens the confidence to build an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’. The party unequivocally hails its leadership for introducing India to the world as a proud and victorious nation in the fight against Covid19,” the resolution said.
The BJP asserted that the three contested farm laws are aimed at doubling the farmers’ income.
“The government brought in three farm laws in the interest of farmers to ensure they get the right price for their produce, their farm income doubles and that they have the freedom to sell their farm produce where they want to. To meet these ends, the PM Modi-led central government has brought in three Farm Laws. The party applauds the Central government under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi ji for bringing in the three laws,” said the resolution. It blamed the Congress for “misleading” the farmers.
“The Congress along with some other parties and people is trying to mislead the farmers about the farm laws. It is unfortunate that the same Congress and its supporters who once talked about bringing in such laws are today trying to mislead the farmers only and only for their politics. It is for this reason that the Congress, which has been repeatedly talking about discussions has not been able to highlight the points in the farm laws which it disagrees with. The party believes that the laws were necessary for the welfare of India’s farmers and had been in demand for a long time,” the resolution read. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/bjp-hails-pm-for-defeating-covid- 19/article33896405.ece
The Hindu Business Line, February 21, 2021
[5] INDIA IS COLLAPSING UNDER A SECOND WAVE OF CORONAVIRUS. CALLOUSNESS AND INCOMPETENCE ARE KILLING US
Barkha Dutt
In 2020, it was the sight of millions of daily-wage workers walking on the national highways of India, fleeing the cities for their villages, that defined the covid-19 crisis in the country. Now, in 2021, the country’s blundering, callous and shortsighted response to a second wave is chillingly captured at overrun graveyards and cremation grounds.
The second wave of covid-19 is sweeping through India with the ferocity of an inferno; misplaced triumphalism, complacency and willful incompetence have brought us to our knees. And the official numbers — India just reported the world’s largest single-day spike, with more than 300,000 coronavirus cases over the last 24 hours and more than 2,100 deaths — do not even begin to tell us the truth.
In Surat, Gujarat, a cremation site that had been closed for 15 years was reopened because the city ran out of places to burn the dead. At the Ramnath Ghela funeral grounds, the iron bridges in the furnaces have melted and corroded from the round-the-clock pyres being lit on it. The undertakers at the grounds said they are burning at least a 100 bodies a day. The official numbers for the entire state in the same week placed the fatalities at 78.
In Ghaziabad, an industrial town not even an hour from New Delhi, I saw bodies wrapped in white sheets in the back of rickety old cars. It can take an entire day before space opens up for a cremation. I counted 20 bodies in a single hour, on a day when the official data placed the casualties at eight.
We may never know for sure how many lives are lost to the virus.
In cities across India, the tragedy is the same: Hospitals are turning away patients because they no longer have beds, oxygen is scarce, medicine is not available at pharmacies, ventilators are nowhere to be found and patients run out of money trying to get treated.
In this hour of national emergency, high-flow oxygen is the most critical shortage, since it is the only therapeutic treatment that helps patients live. Its absence has led to hospitals to petition courts for intervention and even beg for it online.
“It’s gold dust,” a doctor told me wryly, “everyone wants it and there’s none to be had.” Another doctor on the front line shared horrifying instances of patients having to share one concentrator between them as their oxygen levels plummeted.
Patients are asked to sign consent forms before admission to some hospitals, accepting the risk that they may die from insufficient supply of oxygen. It is the 2021 version of signing your own death warrant.
Inside a pediatric intensive care unit in Mumbai, I saw an 18-day-old infant strapped to a ventilator machine, trembling every few minutes from the impact of all the cables and gadgets plugged into her tiny frame. Nine of the 17 children admitted here since April 1 are seriously ill. Soonu Adani, a pediatrician, told me that “in 2020, children rarely needed to be hospitalized, now it’s very different.”
Many of those dying during this second wave seem much younger overall. At funeral sites, almost all the deaths I reported have been people under the age of 50; some were in their late 20s.
Through this carnage, in a galling example of tone-deafness, election rallies — mammoth gatherings in the hundreds of thousands — had not been canceled in the eastern state of West Bengal until just a few days ago. Even then, they were just scaled down and not scrapped.
The Modi government has made many fatal errors. It had no contingency in place for the pandemic’s second wave. The vaccine rollout was inexplicably slow. Bureaucrats dragged their feet on clearances of foreign-made vaccines, losing two critical months. So confident were they of having fought off the first wave that vaccines were exported or gifted to smaller countries, making people, including myself, feel a misplaced sense of pride when we could ill afford it.
But nothing was more galling than to see our politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, continue to address political gatherings as people are dying and our hospitals are collapsing. Modi’s decisions to call off the campaign should have come much earlier.
It all hit home for me this week, as I rode with my father, a diabetes patient in his 80s, in an ambulance to the ICU. The severe crunch on the health system made my family decide to use a private ambulance. When it arrived, it had a one-man crew, the driver. There was no paramedic. It turned out that the single oxygen cylinder in the ambulance (which we had to use during traffic, which is made worse by the random barricades placed by the police to check whether citizens are breaking the lockdown) did not work. By the time we got to hospital, my father’s oxygen had fallen dangerously low.
It was my incredible privilege that allowed us to finally secure an ICU bed.
Then I thought of the countless families I have talked to in the past few weeks across India, who never even had that fighting chance.
In all our anger and grief, Indians deserve answers. There must be accountability. How did we get to this point?
Heads must roll. As a doctor told me: “when someone dies because you could not provide him oxygen, that is not a natural death; this is murder.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/22/india-covid-deaths-collapse-modi-barkha-dutt/
[6] IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO SAY THE GOVT HAS FAILED. WE ARE WITNESSING A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
Arundhati Roy
During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further. From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans). With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid- sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. “If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” he said.
“Shamshan! Shamshan!” the mesmerised, adoring crowd echoed back.
Perhaps he is happy now that the haunting image of the flames rising from the mass funerals in India’s cremation grounds is making the front page of international newspapers. And that all the kabristans and shamshans in his country are working properly, in direct proportion to the populations they cater for, and far beyond their capacities.
“Can India, population 1.3 billion, be isolated?” the Washington Post asked rhetorically in a recent editorial about India’s unfolding catastrophe and the difficulty of containing new, fast-spreading COVID- 19 variants within national borders. “Not easily,” it replied. It’s unlikely this question was posed in quite the same way when the coronavirus was raging through the UK and Europe just a few months ago. But we in India have little right to take offence, given our prime minister’s words at the World Economic Forum in January this year.
Modi spoke at a time when people in Europe and the US were suffering through the peak of the second wave of the pandemic. He had not one word of sympathy to offer, only a long, gloating boast about India’s infrastructure and COVID-19-preparedness. I downloaded the speech because I fear that when history is rewritten by the Modi regime, as it soon will be, it might disappear, or become hard to find. Here are some priceless snippets:
“Friends, I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension … It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona all over the world. It was said that there would be a tsunami of corona infections in India, somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said 2 million Indians would die.”
“Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18% of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”
Modi the magician takes a bow for saving humanity by containing the coronavirus effectively. Now that it turns out that he has not contained it, can we complain about being viewed as though we are radioactive? That other countries’ borders are being closed to us and flights are being cancelled? That we’re being sealed in with our virus and our prime minister, along with all the sickness, the anti-science, the hatred and the idiocy that he, his party and its brand of politics represent?
When the first wave of COVID-19 came to India and then subsided last year, the government and its supportive commentariat were triumphant. “India isn’t having a picnic,” tweeted Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the online news site The Print. “But our drains aren’t choked with bodies, hospitals aren’t out of beds, nor crematoriums & graveyards out of wood or space. Too good to be true? Bring data if you disagree. Unless you think you’re god.” Leave aside the callous, disrespectful imagery – did we need a god to tell us that most pandemics have a second wave?
This one was predicted, although its virulence has taken even scientists and virologists by surprise. So where is the COVID-19-specific infrastructure and the “people’s movement” against the virus that Modi boasted about in his speech? Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes. Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for the felling of city trees. Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find. Parks and car parks are being turned into cremation grounds. It’s as if there’s an invisible UFO parked in our skies, sucking the air out of our lungs. An air raid of a kind we’ve never known.
Oxygen is the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange. Senior politicians, journalists, lawyers – India’s elite – are on Twitter pleading for hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. The hidden market for cylinders is booming. Oxygen saturation machines and drugs are hard to come by.
There are markets for other things, too. At the bottom end of the free market, a bribe to sneak a last look at your loved one, bagged and stacked in a hospital mortuary. A surcharge for a priest who agrees to say the final prayers. Online medical consultancies in which desperate families are fleeced by ruthless doctors. At the top end, you might need to sell your land and home and use up every last rupee for treatment at a private hospital. Just the deposit alone, before they even agree to admit you, could set your family back a couple of generations.
None of this conveys the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and, above all, the indignity that people are being subjected to. What happened to my young friend T is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar stories in Delhi alone. T, who is in his 20s, lives in his parents’ tiny flat in Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi. All three of them tested positive for COVID-19. His mother was critically ill. Since it was in the early days, he was lucky enough to find a hospital bed for her. His father, diagnosed with severe bipolar depression, turned violent and began to harm himself. He stopped sleeping. He soiled himself. His psychiatrist was online trying to help, although she also broke down from time to time because her husband had just died from COVID-19. She said T’s father needed hospitalisation, but since he was COVID-19 positive there was no chance of that. So T stayed awake, night after night, holding his father down, sponging him, cleaning him up. Each time I spoke to him I felt my own breath falter. Finally, the message came: “Father’s dead.” He did not die of COVID-19, but of a massive spike in blood pressure induced by a psychiatric meltdown induced by utter helplessness.
What to do with the body? I desperately called everybody I knew. Among those who responded was Anirban Bhattacharya, who works with the well-known social activist Harsh Mander. Bhattacharya is about to stand trial on a charge of sedition for a protest he helped organise on his university campus in 2016. Mander, who has not fully recovered from a savage case of COVID-19 last year, is being threatened with arrest and the closure of the orphanages he runs after he mobilised people against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019, both of which blatantly discriminate against Muslims. Mander and Bhattacharya are among the many citizens who, in the absence of all forms of governance, have set up helplines and emergency responses, and are running themselves ragged organising ambulances and coordinating funerals and the transport of dead bodies. It’s not safe for these volunteers to do what they’re doing. In this wave of the pandemic, it’s the young who are falling, who are filling the intensive care units. When young people die, the older among us lose a little of our will to live.
T’s father was cremated. T and his mother are recovering.
Things will settle down eventually. Of course, they will. But we don’t know who among us will survive to see that day. The rich will breathe easier. The poor will not. For now, among the sick and dying, there is a vestige of democracy. The rich have been felled, too. Hospitals are begging for oxygen. Some have started bring-your-own-oxygen schemes. The oxygen crisis has led to intense, unseemly battles between states, with political parties trying to deflect blame from themselves.
On the night of April 22, 25 critically ill coronavirus patients on high-flow oxygen died in one of Delhi’s biggest private hospitals, Sir Ganga Ram. The hospital issued several desperate SOS messages for the replenishment of its oxygen supply. A day later, the chair of the hospital board rushed to clarify matters: “We cannot say that they have died due to lack of oxygen support.” On April 24, 25 more patients died when oxygen supplies were depleted in another big Delhi hospital, Jaipur Golden. That same day, in the Delhi high court, Tushar Mehta, India’s solicitor general, speaking for the government of India, said: “Let’s try and not be a cry baby … so far we have ensured that no one in the country was left without oxygen.”
Ajay Mohan Bisht, the saffron-robed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who goes by the name Yogi Adityanath, has declared that there is no shortage of oxygen in any hospital in his state and that rumourmongers will be arrested without bail under the National Security Act and have their property seized.
Yogi Adityanath doesn’t play around. Siddique Kappan, a Muslim journalist from Kerala, jailed for months in Uttar Pradesh when he and two others travelled there to report on the gang-rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Hathras district, is critically ill and has tested positive for COVID-19. His wife, in a desperate petition to the chief justice of the Supreme Court of India, says her husband is lying chained “like an animal” to a hospital bed in the Medical College hospital in Mathura. (The Supreme Court has now ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to move him to a hospital in Delhi.) So, if you live in Uttar Pradesh, the message seems to be, please do yourself a favour and die without complaining.
The threat to those who complain is not restricted to Uttar Pradesh. A spokesperson for the fascist Hindu nationalist organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – of which Modi and several of his ministers are members, and which runs its own armed militia – has warned that “anti-India forces” would use the crisis to fuel “negativity” and “mistrust” and asked the media to help foster a “positive atmosphere”. Twitter has helped them out by deactivating accounts critical of the government.
Where shall we look for solace? For science? Shall we cling to numbers? How many dead? How many recovered? How many infected? When will the peak come? On April 27, the report was 323,144 new cases, 2,771 deaths. The precision is somewhat reassuring. Except – how do we know? Tests are hard to come by, even in Delhi. The number of COVID-19-protocol funerals from graveyards and crematoriums in small towns and cities suggest a death toll up to 30 times higher than the official count. Doctors who are working outside the metropolitan areas can tell you how it is.
If Delhi is breaking down, what should we imagine is happening in villages in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Madhya Pradesh? Where tens of millions of workers from the cities, carrying the virus with them, are fleeing home to their families, traumatised by their memory of Modi’s national lockdown in 2020. It was the strictest lockdown in the world, announced with only four hours’ notice. It left migrant workers stranded in cities with no work, no money to pay their rent, no food and no transport. Many had to walk hundreds of miles to their homes in far-flung villages. Hundreds died on the way.
This time around, although there is no national lockdown, the workers have left while transport is still available, while trains and buses are still running. They’ve left because they know that even though they make up the engine of the economy in this huge country, when a crisis comes, in the eyes of this administration, they simply don’t exist. This year’s exodus has resulted in a different kind of chaos: there are no quarantine centres for them to stay in before they enter their village homes. There’s not even the meagre pretence of trying to protect the countryside from the city virus.
These are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like diarrhoea and tuberculosis. How are they to cope with COVID-19? Are COVID-19 tests available to them? Are there hospitals? Is there oxygen? More than that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern? There isn’t. Because there is only a heart-shaped hole filled with cold indifference where India’s public heart should be.
§
Early this morning, on April 28, news came that our friend Prabhubhai has died. Before he died, he showed classic COVID-19 symptoms. But his death will not register in the official COVID-19 count because he died at home without a test or treatment. Prabhubhai was a stalwart of the anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley. I stayed several times at his home in Kevadia, where decades ago the first group of indigenous tribespeople were thrown off their lands to make room for the dam-builders and officers’ colony. Displaced families like Prabhubhai’s still remain on the edges of that colony, impoverished and unsettled, transgressors on land that was once theirs.
There is no hospital in Kevadia. There’s only the Statue of Unity, built in the likeness of the freedom fighter and first deputy prime minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who the dam is named after. At 182 metres high, it’s the tallest statue in the world and cost $422 million. High-speed elevators inside take tourists up to view the Narmada dam from the level of Sardar Patel’s chest. Of course, you cannot see the river valley civilisation that lies destroyed, submerged in the depths of the vast reservoir, or hear the stories of the people who waged one of the most beautiful, profound struggles the world has ever known – not just against that one dam, but against the accepted ideas of what constitutes civilisation, happiness and progress. The statue was Modi’s pet project. He inaugurated it in October 2018.
The friend who messaged about Prabhubhai had spent years as an anti-dam activist in the Narmada valley. She wrote: “My hands shiver as I write this. Covid situation in and around Kevadia Colony grim.”
The precise numbers that make up India’s COVID-19 graph are like the wall that was built in Ahmedabad to hide the slums Donald Trump would drive past on his way to the “Namaste Trump” event that Modi hosted for him in February 2020. Grim as those numbers are, they give you a picture of the India-that- matters, but certainly not the India that is. In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but die as disposables.
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”
Try not to pay attention to the fact that the possibility of a dire shortage of oxygen had been flagged as far back as April 2020, and then again in November by a committee set up by the government itself. Try not to wonder why even Delhi’s biggest hospitals don’t have their own oxygen-generating plants. Try not to wonder why the PM Cares Fund – the opaque organisation that has recently replaced the more public Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, and which uses public money and government infrastructure but functions like a private trust with zero public accountability – has suddenly moved in to address the oxygen crisis. Will Modi own shares in our air-supply now?
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”
Understand that there were and are so many far more pressing issues for the Modi government to attend to. Destroying the last vestiges of democracy, persecuting non-Hindu minorities and consolidating the foundations of the Hindu Nation makes for a relentless schedule. There are massive prison complexes, for example, that must be urgently constructed in Assam for the two million people who have lived there for generations and have suddenly been stripped of their citizenship. (On this matter, our independent Supreme Court came down hard on the side of the government and leniently on the side of the vandals.)
There are hundreds of students and activists and young Muslim citizens to be tried and imprisoned as the primary accused in the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place against their own community in north-east Delhi last March. If you are Muslim in India, it’s a crime to be murdered. Your folks will pay for it. There was the inauguration of the new Ram Temple in Ayodhya, which is being built in place of the mosque that was hammered to dust by Hindu vandals watched over by senior BJP politicians. (On this matter, our independent supreme court came down hard on the side of the government and the vandals.) There were the controversial new Farm Bills to be passed, corporatising agriculture. There were hundreds of thousands of farmers to be beaten and teargassed when they came out on to the streets to protest.
Then there’s the multi-multi-multimillion-dollar plan for a grand new replacement for the fading grandeur of New Delhi’s imperial centre to be urgently attended to. After all, how can the government of the new Hindu India be housed in old buildings? While Delhi is locked down, ravaged by the pandemic, construction work on the “Central Vista” project, declared as an essential service, has begun. Workers are being transported in. Maybe they can alter the plans to add a crematorium.
There was also the Kumbh Mela to be organised, so that millions of Hindu pilgrims could crowd together in a small town to bathe in the Ganges and spread the virus even-handedly as they returned to their homes across the country, blessed and purified. This Kumbh rocks on, although Modi has gently suggested that it might be an idea for the holy dip to become “symbolic” – whatever that means. (Unlike what happened with those who attended a conference for the Islamic organisation Tablighi Jamaat last year, the media has not run a campaign against them calling them “corona jihadis” or accusing them of committing crimes against humanity.) There were also those few thousand Rohingya refugees who had to be urgently deported back to the genocidal regime in Myanmar from where they had fled – in the middle of a coup. (Once again, when our independent supreme court was petitioned on this matter, it concurred with the government’s view.)
So, as you can tell, it’s been busy, busy, busy.
Over and above all this urgent activity, there is an election to be won in the state of West Bengal. This required our home minister, Modi’s man Amit Shah, to more or less abandon his cabinet duties and focus all his attention on Bengal for months, to disseminate his party’s murderous propaganda, to pit human against human in every little town and village. Geographically, West Bengal is a small state. The election could have taken place in a single day, and has done so in the past. But since it is new territory for the BJP, the party needed time to move its cadres, many of who are not from Bengal, from constituency to constituency to oversee the voting. The election schedule was divided into eight phases, spread out over a month, the last on April 29. As the count of coronavirus infections ticked up, the other political parties pleaded with the election commission to rethink the election schedule. The commission refused and came down hard on the side of the BJP, and the campaign continued. Who hasn’t seen the videos of the BJP’s star campaigner, the prime minister himself, triumphant and maskless, speaking to the maskless crowds, thanking people for coming out in unprecedented numbers? That was on 17 April, when the official number of daily infections was already rocketing upward of 200,000.
Now, as voting closes, Bengal is poised to become the new corona cauldron, with a new triple mutant strain known as – guess what – the “Bengal strain”. Newspapers report that every second person tested in the state capital, Kolkata, is Covid positive. The BJP has declared that if it wins Bengal, it will ensure people get free vaccines. And if it doesn’t?
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”
Anyway, what about the vaccines? Surely they’ll save us? Isn’t India a vaccine powerhouse? In fact, the Indian government is entirely dependent on two manufacturers, the Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech. Both are being allowed to roll out two of the most expensive vaccines in the world, to the poorest people in the world. This week they announced that they will sell to private hospitals at a slightly elevated price, and to state governments at a somewhat lower price. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the vaccine companies are likely to make obscene profits.
Under Modi, India’s economy has been hollowed out, and hundreds of millions of people who were already living precarious lives have been pushed into abject poverty. A huge number now depend for survival on paltry earnings from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which was instituted in 2005 when the Congress party was in power. It is impossible to expect that families on the verge of starvation will pay most of a month’s income to have themselves vaccinated. In the UK, vaccines are free and a fundamental right. Those trying to get vaccinated out of turn can be prosecuted. In India, the main underlying impetus of the vaccination campaign seems to be corporate profit.
As this epic catastrophe plays out on our Modi-aligned Indian television channels, you’ll notice how they all speak in one tutored voice. The “system” has collapsed, they say, again and again. The virus has overwhelmed India’s health care “system”.
The system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health, far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated, because things that are important but do not strictly qualify as healthcare have been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34%. The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet study shows, 78% of the healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets.
Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime.
The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.
The hashtag #ModiMustResign is trending on social media. Some of the memes and illustrations show Modi with a heap of skulls peeping out from behind the curtain of his beard. Modi the Messiah speaking at a public rally of corpses. Modi and Amit Shah as vultures, scanning the horizon for corpses to harvest votes from. But that is only one part of the story. The other part is that the man with no feelings, the man with empty eyes and a mirthless smile, can, like so many tyrants in the past, arouse passionate feelings in others. His pathology is infectious. And that is what sets him apart. In north India, which is home to his largest voting base, and which, by dint of sheer numbers, tends to decide the political fate of the country, the pain he inflicts seems to turn into a peculiar pleasure.
Fredrick Douglass said it right: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” How we in India pride ourselves on our capacity to endure. How beautifully we have trained ourselves to meditate, to turn inward, to exorcise our fury as well as justify our inability to be egalitarian. How meekly we embrace our humiliation.
When he made his political debut as Gujarat’s new chief minister in 2001, Modi ensured his place in posterity after what has come to be known as the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. Over a period of a few days, Hindu vigilante mobs, watched over and sometimes actively assisted by the Gujarat police, murdered, raped and burned alive thousands of Muslims as “revenge” for a gruesome arson attack on a train in which more than 50 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive. Once the violence subsided, Modi, who had until then only been appointed as chief minister by his party, called for early elections. The campaign in which he was portrayed as Hindu Hriday Samrat (“The Emperor of Hindu Hearts”) won him a landslide victory. Modi hasn’t lost an election since.
Several of the killers in the Gujrat pogrom were subsequently captured on camera by the journalist Ashish Khetan, boasting of how they hacked people to death, slashed pregnant women’s stomachs open and smashed infants’ heads against rocks. They said they could only have done what they did because Modi was their chief minister. Those tapes were broadcast on national TV. While Modi remained in the seat of power, Khetan, whose tapes were submitted to the courts and forensically examined, appeared as a witness on several occasions. Over time, some of the killers were arrested and imprisoned, but many were let off. In his recent book, Undercover: My Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva, Khetan describes in detail how, during Modi’s tenure as chief minister, the Gujarat police, judges, lawyers, prosecutors and inquiry committees all colluded to tamper with evidence, intimidate witnesses and transfer judges.
Despite knowing all this, many of India’s so-called public intellectuals, the CEOs of its major corporations and the media houses they own, worked hard to pave the way for Modi to become the prime minister. They humiliated and shouted down those of us who persisted in our criticism. “Move on”, was their mantra. Even today, they mitigate their harsh words for Modi with praise for his oratory skills and his “hard work”. Their denunciation and bullying contempt for politicians in opposition parties is far more strident. They reserve their special scorn for Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, the only politician who has consistently warned of the coming COVID-19 crisis and repeatedly asked the government to prepare itself as best it could. To assist the ruling party in its campaign to destroy all opposition parties amounts to colluding with the destruction of democracy.
So here we are now, in the hell of their collective making, with every independent institution essential to the functioning of a democracy compromised and hollowed out, and a virus that is out of control.
The crisis-generating machine that we call our government is incapable of leading us out of this disaster. Not least because one man makes all the decisions in this government, and that man is dangerous – and not very bright. This virus is an international problem. To deal with it, decision-making, at least on the control and administration of the pandemic, will need to pass into the hands of some sort of non-partisan body consisting of members of the ruling party, members of the opposition, and health and public policy experts.
As for Modi, is resigning from your crimes a feasible proposition? Perhaps he could just take a break from them – a break from all his hard work. There’s that $564m Boeing 777, Air India One, customised for VVIP travel – for him, actually – that’s been sitting idle on the runway for a while now. He and his men could just leave. The rest of us will do all we can to clean up their mess.
No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.
Arundhati Roy is a writer. https://thewire.in/government/india-covid-19-government-crime-against-humanity
[7] PAKISTAN’S PRIME MINISTER LINKS RAPE TO ‘VULGARITY’ AND HOW WOMEN DRESS
Salman Masood
An outcry has erupted in Pakistan after Prime Minister Imran Khan blamed a rise in rape cases on how women dressed, remarks that activists denounced as perpetuating a culture of victim blaming.
Mr. Khan made the comments on a live television show this week when asked what the government was doing to curb an increase in sexual violence against women and children. Mr. Khan acknowledged the seriousness of the problem and pointed to the country’s strict laws against rape.
But, he said, women had to do their part.
“What is the concept of purdah?” he said, using a term that refers to the practice of seclusion, veiling or concealing dress for women in some South Asian communities. “It is to stop temptation. Not every man has willpower. If you keep on increasing vulgarity, it will have consequences.”
The uproar was swift.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent group, demanded that Mr. Khan apologize for his remarks, which it called “unacceptable behavior on the part of a public leader.”
“Not only does this betray a baffling ignorance of where, why, and how rape occurs, but it also lays the blame on rape survivors,” the group said.
Seeking to tamp down the anger, Mr. Khan’s office issued a statement on Wednesday saying that the prime minister’s remarks had been misrepresented.
“The prime minister spoke about the societal responses and the need to put our efforts together to eliminate the menace of rape completely,” the office said in the statement. “Unfortunately, part of his comment, consciously or unconsciously, has been distorted to mean something that he never intended.”
Mr. Khan’s government has faced immense pressure to speed up justice for rape survivors after a series of assaults sparked demands for the death penalty to be applied to such cases. In December, the government passed a measure that said men convicted of rape could be sentenced to chemical castration.
There are few reliable statistics on rape in Pakistan, but rights activists say it is a severely underreported crime, in part because victims are often treated as criminals or blamed for the assaults. Thousands of protesters took to the streets last year after a top police official in the eastern city of Lahore said that a woman who was raped on a deserted highway was partly to blame for the attack.
To critics, Mr. Khan’s comments this week reinforced misogynistic attitudes that made the problem worse for women.
“Victim blaming and policing women’s clothing choices both perpetuate rape culture,” said Laaleen Sukhera, a Lahore-based author and public relations consultant.
“Everyone and everything seems to be blamed except the actual perpetrators,” she said.
Even Mr. Khan’s first wife, Jemima Goldsmith, a British heiress, weighed in on Twitter. “The problem is not how women dress!” she wrote in one post. In another, she said that she hoped that Mr. Khan had been misquoted because the man she knew had different opinions.
Before he became prime minister, Mr. Khan was a cricket star and A-list celebrity who cut a glamorous figure and was known as a ladies’ man. He married Ms. Goldsmith in 1995, and they divorced in 2004. But he became increasingly conservative in the mid-1990s after he entered politics, and has been accused of being overly sympathetic to the Taliban in recent years.
To women’s rights activists, Mr. Khan’s comments this week were only the latest example of the challenge they face in finding support for their causes in the deeply conservative society. Organizers of women’s rights marches on International Women’s Day last month have said they have been accused of “vulgarity” for seeking equal rights.
“It’s already tremendously challenging for women of all ages in public spaces in Pakistan, whether on the streets or at work or in the digital space, even in their own homes,” said Ms. Sukhera, the author in Lahore. “Regressive preaching prevents women from reclaiming what’s rightfully theirs, and must be addressed.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/world/asia/pakistan-rape.html