In 2019, look where you are going

I re-discovered recently that after Independence my father had written over two hundred articles for the National Herald, one of which was quoted on the floor of General Assembly of the United Nations. He wrote as either Barrister-at-law or Sanjay, who he believed was India’s first war correspondent reporting on the great battles of the Mahabharata to Dhritarashtra.

On 15 August 1947, I was one year and 11 days old—not quite a ‘midnight’s child’ but born to a never-ending morning whose future was vouchsafed in an otherwise troubled world.

We lived in a house full of people with people of all religions and castes, happily accepting the hospitality of a dalit female cook. To the house came lawyers, litterateurs, poets, Sanskritists, historians, politicians, even a Russian delegation whom my father welcomed in Russian, which he learnt in the Moscow of his youth.

Under the aegis of the Indian Council of World, packed meetings were held including with Mortimer Wheeler of Indus Valley fame—even Indira Gandhi, soon after she became President of the Congress in l959 but before she destroyed the Communist led Government in Kerala.

We believed in Nehru-led liberal democracy, State-led social justice, tolerant secularism, and non-alignment as consistent with contemporary choices. In 1951, India’s population was 361million. The greatest experiment in democratic socialist governance of the most diverse nation the world had ever known had begun.

After Nehru and Shastri’s death, Indian federalism was damaged, if not destroyed, by imposition of the emergency and President’s Rule on all regimes opposed to the Centre. Indira Gandhi handed over power to an incompetent Janata Party to soon return to power.

Rajiv Gandhi’s term in the Government was riddled with charges of corruption and naivety. When an unstable Congress returned to power under Rao, India liberalised its economy, joined the WTO, committed to globalism to invite foreign investment—a mantra that persists.

Social justice was relegated to imagination and just savings if any. Ignoring the pendulum Cold War years in which America’s unipolar power was welcomed as the ‘end of history’, India shuffled through BJP and Congress governments till 2014, with the BJP interlude from l998 to 2004.

The BJP’s rise to power was predicated on communal rath yatras to build a Ram Temple, the triumphant destruction of the Babri Masjid, attacks on secular painters and authors, banning books, murderous violence against minorities including killing a foreign missionary as he and his boys slept in a travel van.

Behind it was the Sangh Parivar, including the RSS providing not just an electoral army but constituents not afraid to intimidate, threaten and murder without effective remonstrance from political leaders. The electorate returned a Modi led BJP to triumph in many States and the Centre.

Who is this Modi and what does he stand for? Initially Modi was a failed politician with mighty ambitions. Transposed as Gujarat’s Chief Minister he presided over a programmatic holocaust in 2002 against Muslims which shocked the world. With visas cancelled in various countries, it seems astonishing that Modi was re-elected to power in Gujarat.

Within his party he staged a coup to become the leader of the BJP to proceed to the Prime Ministership of India with the help of a ruthless, aggressive Sangh Parivar in 2014. During this term, Modi misused Presidents Rule, toppling state governments in Arunachal, and used Governors and defectors to get power in Goa, Meghalaya and now Karnataka. The flag bearer of his politics is a saffron clad ‘yogi’ as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who believes lynching is not a major issue (but would obviously not want to be lynched himself.)

We are now in 2019. Modi now has completely changed his tactics. Realising that a Hindu communal campaign would be counter-productive, a new electoral ‘Modism’ was launched. First, the interim budget of February 2019 was about welfare and transfers to the poor, irrespective of the budget crunch.

Second, Pulwama and Balakot were used to project a muscular nationalism for all Indians other than ‘anti-national’ traitors. Third, a supposedly neutral growth-based economy was presented to the people which would launch India into a multi-trillion Dollar economy attracting foreign investment and to facilitate corporates eking just savings from the people.

Fourth, neutralising dissent was not on an overtly communal basis but by claiming it was against terrorists and seditionists. Fifth, affirming faith in the rule of law and an independent judiciary. Sixth, with the new mantra of economic growth and muscular nationalism, came the bogey of one nation, one-time election to boost Modi’s charisma.

Seventh, while not making Babri an election issue, the Sangh Parivar have revived the uncompromising and shrill campaign. Modi’s economic and muscular policy looks in one direction portrayed as neutral and the Sangh Parivar is allowed to look in another direction with communal fervour condoning hate and lynching.

If growth was the key, why was there so much communal unrest and above all murderous lynching especially over the cow when DN Jha, Kane and others have firmly established that Hindus ate beef. I would not go as far as Kashmiri Brahmin, Justice Katju, to deny an unfounded but sacral reverence for the bovine. But can such sentiment ever lead to beatings, killing and murder?

The political truth was while the government claimed to be neutral, the Sangh Parivar supporters and lumpen elements had a free hand to indulge in cowardly violence and claim ‘Hindu’ credit for it. In July 2019, 49 prominent citizens, including Shubha Mudgal, Konkona Sen, Shyam Benegal, Ashish Nandy and others, wrote to PM Modi to condemn the violence perpetrated in the name of Lord Ram, as defiling his name and branding people as ‘anti-national’ and ‘urban naxal’ because they dissented from government.

Modi did not respond. Instead 62 others including Sonal Mansingh, Kangana Ranaut, Vivek Agnihotri and others accused the 49 of hypocrisy because they did not condemn Maoist and Muslim separatist violence in Kashmir and being ‘intolerant’, relying on ‘false narratives’. Be that as it may: are not lynching barbaric? Modi was silent.

Soon after Modi came to power, a flurry of legislations were run through Parliament. The Triple Talaq Act criminalised the practice, even though the Supreme Court had declared it invalid. The Right to Information and National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) statutes were modified to virtually put incumbents on probation for re-appointment, having already made the lacklustre Pinaki Ghosh as Chairman of the NHRC. Labour legislations are being rushed through to further dis-empower trade unions. The anti-terrorist law is to be amended to target individuals in India on the pretext of proceeding against terrorists in Pakistan, but to be used against Indian citizens. Corporate law is to be re-worked. Minor legislations were sent to Select Committees but not controversial ones because the government claimed a majority to silence the Opposition and short-change Parliament itself.

The ultimate coup d’etat was the destruction of democracy and federalism in Jammu & Kashmir (JK). A volatile valley which had already become a valley of fear was downsized from a state into two federal territories: one without a legislature (Ladakh), the other (JK) with a truncated assembly with proposals for gerrymandering the latter.

J & K has its own Constitution of 1957, emanating from its Constituent Assembly. Has it been abolished by this totally unconstitutional move while J & K was under President’s Rule and without democratic consultation? JK’s accession to India was based on legal promises. Modi has thrown a dice to lose an already alienated valley.

Is this Fascism? The tenets of Fascism are (i) claim neutral economic policies to save the people and nation, (ii) win power through the electoral process, (iii) rely on the charisma of the ‘Leader’ for passionate support, (iv) create a muscular nationalism, (v) support the military in aid of jingoism, (vi) find common ground for targeting political enemies neutrally as terrorists and seditionists, (vii) evolve a foreign policy selectively to support the jingoism (in our case, Pakistan –reversing pro-Palestinian policies to support anti-Islamic terrorist Israel and anti-Islamic refugee policies), (viii) build a ruthless base of lumpens and fundamentalists who can go on a violent, even a killing spree to silence dissent, (ix) create celebrity propaganda machines and control the public and private media, (x) create laws and prosecutorial agencies to target individuals and groups, (xi) use majorities to diminish the role of Parliament, (xii) use constitutional and unconstitutional means to topple opposition governments, (xiii) control the judiciary and attack cause lawyers and activists.

India is now faced with a massive disempowerment of the people, trade unions and the media, undermining the peasantry, taking over universities, school and college education and controlling discourse. Freedom is in peril.

What we need is not electoral mahagathbandans but a grand alliance of workers and trade unions, dalits and tribals, economic support, massive protests of the kind Anna brought to Delhi, courageous journalists, intellectual direction as we face a dichotomy whereby supposed economic policies of growth. have displaced an Ambedkerite social justice-based democracy. This is not going to be easy because powerful State and non-State forces will be ruthlessly deployed against any such struggle. The arena of struggle is wide: the streets, elected bodies and elsewhere. I have always believed that ‘law’, too, is an arena of struggle.

Many years ago, after the World War, Labour leader Nye Bevan told ostensibly reformist Tories that while their eyes were looking at a dubious future, their feet were shuffling backwards.

He summarised: “They say to us ‘Look where we are looking’. We say to them ‘Look, look where you are going’.”