Over the top

Global Demonstration 30th January

Binayak Sen, on christmas eve last year was sentenced to life imprisonment on flimsy evidence (mostly a planted letter, hearsay evidence; find more here) for spreading ‘disaffection’ towards the state. Section 124A of the Indian penal Code mandates an absolute unconditional love for the state. Beware, you may be charged with sedition under Indian law (a section that has outlived the British Raj who introduced it) if you express any feeling that falls an inch short of devoted love and adulation. Critiquing state practices of land grabbing, tribal dispossession, inadequate (read no) rehabilitation, extrajudicial killing, torture and the  curious phenomenon of salwa judum fit the bill of falling out of love with the state. In other words, ‘disaffection’. Notwithstanding what the Father of the Nation boldly proclaimed almost 90 years ago–that sedition was the highest duty of a citizen, not many in the state machinery and corporate media seem to share the same sentiment. Close to a century, colonialism has taken its roots in India. Last year, in  what was an unbelievable show of unbridled love for the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party demanded that Arundhati Roy and others who shared the stage with her in a Seminar in New Delhi on Kashmir, be charged with sedition. Roy famously remarked that Kashmir was never an integral part of India, a sentiment echoed by thousand other Kashmiris. The frenzy that erupted has few parallels in the history of media circus in the country. The net tightens around Roy thundered a channel. Arundhati Roy’s ’seditious’ speech, echoed others.

With Binayak Sen, the media has been kinder. However the witch hunt by the State has filled up the gaps of unkindness not contributed by the media. Shortly after Sen’s sentence, his wife was slammed with an FIR, which was, after insistence by the Union Home Ministry (which in turn acted only after rights groups took up the matter) dropped.

Today, the Free Binayak Sen Campaign has taken the world by storm, demanding the immediate release of Sen and protesting against his unjust sentence. Demonstrations in front of the Indian Consulates in London, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Washington and a growing Facebook campaign prove that the campaign has come here to stay. A hopelessly romantic assertion is– here at the ground of the tireless protests and the long marches, democracy rings the strongest, the values embedded in the Constitution stands the tallest; the chants of ‘free democracy’, ‘we are all binayak sen’, ring sharper than all the media frenzy of hunting down civil liberties and fundamental rights to life and freedom. Egypt, anyone?

For more information:

http://www.freebinayaksen.org/

In two separate incidents, a Bangladeshi girl was ‘lashed to death‘ and a Dalit girl in India had her ‘body parts chopped off.’ In Bangladesh, 14 year old girl, accused of adultery was publicly lashed under Islamic Sharia law. In India, a 16 year old Dalit girl had her nose, ear and a part of her hand chopped off when she resisted to rape. The same tale of brutality continues, everywhere. Not so surprised anymore. We have internalized shock, haven’t we?

The world’s most famous political prisoner was released today amidst jubilant supporters, hundreds and thousands of them, who flocked at her residence. Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel laureate and Amnesty International’s most prominent prisoner of conscience was under house arrest with the latest period of detention spanning 7 1/2 years. She spent 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest or in jail.

Supporters flock as Aung San Suu Kyi is freed

In 1990, in her essay Freedom from Fear, she famously set right the equation between power and corruption expressed first by Lord Acton in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887.  Suu Kyi said–

‘It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it……..Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions, courage that could be described as ‘grace under pressure’ – grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.’

Grace is Aung San Suu Kyi today.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Cosmos was brought out of chaos, darkness was turned into light. In the end, everything walks backward, perhaps to reiterate  and re-establish the original position.  And so we see how civilization is regressing in a police state that has rendered all constitutional values redundant. The big media doesn’t care much about Salwa Judum or draconian legislations like Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) or the resultant chilling tales of slaughter of man and his rights. The art of not writing (to borrow this phrase from Shubhranshu Chaudhury) has set in firmly. Chhattisgarh is the new Pandora and you would know what I mean if you have seen Cameron’s latest.

80% of Chhattisgarh’s population lives in rural areas. Majority are adivasis or tribals. Almost 80% of the working population is dependant on agro-based industry. The state is rich in mineral resources, forests, fertile farmlands. And hence the most ideal target for frankensteinian neo-liberalization. Land, which is understandably so important for people who are dependant on land for their survival have been plundered by a greedy state machinery backed by Indian and multinational corporations gulping down natural resources. Hundreds of MoUs have been signed by the State and the Central government to exploit natural resources at the expense of the already marginalized people sitting on the brink of destruction of life and livelihood so ominously upheld by the country’s apex court so many times.

Okay let us not digress to justice and rights.  The last time someone raised his voice, CSPSA came to the rescue of the state and the world witnessed the assault on the values, the fathers of the Indian Constitution so tenderly tried to protect. Binayak Sen happened. Next in line is perhaps a Gandhian activist called Himanshu Kumar, who did the silly thing to question the authority of the state to kill people. Himanshu’s Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA) filed at least 600 complaints against human rights violations by the state and fake encounters by the uniquely immune Chhattisgarh police. Now the target is everyone who dares to question the infallible state. Taking a stock of voices raised last year, it can be pretty neatly surmised. Kopa Kunjum of VCA underwent arbitrary, unjust and illegal detention. A lawyer Alban Topo who was  accompanying Kopa was also taken, beaten up brutally in custody and kept in 18 hours of illegal detention. The two were not informed where they were being taken or why they were being taken in gross violation of Supreme Court’s guidelines in D.K. Basu case.

Sometime around December 2009 approximately 120 people from numerous organizations representing 10 states participated in a Campaign against Sexual Violence and State Repression meeting at Raipur in Chhattisgarh. A representative group of 39 members had set out from Raipur to Dantewada to extend support and solidarity to the tribal women who had filed complaints before the National Human Rights Commission. The team was stopped at least thrice, interrogated, threatened and finally not allowed to enter Dantewada. Such incident has been replicated with different sets of people countless times. A professor of sociology’s note after her visit to the state was on similar lines.

The SPOs in their jeeps followed us some way from Jagdalpur to Raipur, even when we were on the bus. In addition, two armed constables and an SI were sent on the bus to ensure we got to Raipur. We overheard the SI telling the armed constables to “take us down at Dhamtari” but fortunately this plan was abandoned. Poor man, he narrowly missed getting a medal for bravery, and as the good DGP tells the readers of the Indian Express, it would have been passed off as an attack by Naxalites. On reaching Raipur, the SI was confused. Shouting loudly and forgetting himself, as bad cell connections are wont to make us all do, he said “The IG and SP had told me to follow them, but now what do I do with them.”? The voice on the other end told him to go home. We flew out of Raipur the next morning. In real terms, this was a rather pointless exercise for the CG govt, since we were scheduled to come home the following day anyway. But symbolically, it allowed the SPOs to gloat that they had driven us out.

Again, Sodi Sambo, one of the witnesses and victims of the horrific killings at Gompad village in Dantewada (described as an ‘encounter’) was taken away by the police when she was on her way to Delhi for her treatment. Responding to a subsequent petition filed, the last torch-bearer of justice, the Supreme Court ordered the Chhattisgarh state not to interfere in Sambo’s journey to Delhi.

The most amusing part, if any in the entire chaos is the systematic, unbiased categorization of anyone who questions the authority or doubts the good intentions of the state as ‘Naxalite supporters’. Such christening however is unavailable to the ones at the bottom of the state’s priorities; so let them be called  ’Maoists‘. It is a remarkable phenomenon that a two year old’s fingers were chopped off on the suspicion that the child was a suspected Maoist.

Far away in the comfort of the capital, as I furiously type away, Chhattisgarh seems as unreal as a dystopia. It is a journey backwards, to a state of chaos.

—Jhuma Sen

Arundhati Roy is perhaps one of the most passionate writers of non-fiction. I call her a writer of non-fiction for fear of being ridiculed by a relatively elite mass who would refuse to acknowledge her as a politico-social analyst. Given my way, I would want to call her as one of the most brilliant writers of modern India’s intricacies and a passionate one at that. For one thing, Roy doesn’t mince her words. It is this bluntness that is unsettling; Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (see Himal Southasian’s review of the book) therefore triumphs at the very outset by its caustic yet witty title (the article Listening to the Grasshoppers appeared earlier in Outlook though) and the ensuing pages that hold the quality ‘unputdownability’.

Listening to the Grasshoppers is typically Arundhati Roy–candid, interactive, investigative and overall thought provoking.  Roy has however never been this raw in her analysis, criticism and reflection before. As Roy herself clarified the democracy talked about in the book is not the idea or aspiration of democracy but the working model of democracy that survives in India–the western liberal democracy and its variants. Heavily flawed but the known devil.

She takes us through the state sponsored Gujarat carnage of 2002 and writes how progress and genocide have historically been brothers in arms. ‘Union and Progress’ are the ‘twin coordinates of genocide’ she writes. There is no terrorism like state terrorism she confides and I agree.

Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely to happen is that the majority of the Muslim community will resign itself to living in ghettos as second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil rights and no recourse to justice. What will daily life be like for them? Any little thing, an altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas at a traffic light, could turn lethal. So they will learn to keep very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep around the edges of the society in which they live. Their fear will transmit itself to other minorities. many, particularly the young will probably turn to militancy. They will do terrible things. Civil society will be called on to condemn them. Then President Bush’s canon will come back to us:  ’Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’

Only Roy could be so direct and prophetic.

My personal favourite is ‘And His Life Should Become Extinct’: The Very Strange Story of The Attack on The Indian Parliament‘. Roy’s brilliance in analysing (although I have a hunch that ‘exposing’ will be a better term) media tamasha fuelled by shoddy investigation and astoundingly crass politicians shines through. Afzal Guru fell victim to a justice delivering machinery that prioritized satisfying the ‘collective conscience’ over well, providing justice. Whose justice is it anyway? Afzal still languishes waiting for an appropriate day to be hung while BJP screams ‘minority appeasement’. All for the want of a horse shoe nail!

Neo-liberalism has opened gates for what Roy calls ‘ecocide’–displacement of millions to tap natural resources at the behest of the corporate giants. In order to create what Roy refers to as the ‘Good Investment Climate’ the State intervenes only when there is a need to open fire on unarmed adivasis in peaceful demonstrations to prevent encroachment.

Nine is not Eleven (And November isn’t September) is poignant, however doesn’t leave the desired effect that it should have had. Oversimplification may have been the cause. But the essay makes a point–“Dangerous, stupid oversimplification like the police are good/politicians are bad… Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes when people in India were beginning to see that, in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators often exchange roles”

All in all, you may agree with Roy, you may not agree with her, you may buy the uncompromising urgency with which she speaks or you may not. But like all Roy works, you will ponder before you make your choice. That is Listening to the Grasshoppers for you.

–Jhuma Sen