This Republic Day finds India in turmoil. As the fury bubbled, I wished Jayaprakash Narayan were here to direct the swelling tides of anger that threaten to overwhelm our cities. The massive surge he rode had no focus. The focus this time — the Citizenship Amendment Act — is chimerical. The excitement in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, Lucknow’s Ghanta Ghar and other places is captured in the Bengali word hujug. It’s like England’s South Sea Bubble or the Kalgoorlie gold rush when a lame man led a blind one to the fabled mines. Yet, despite the title of a once-famous film, there’s never a rebel without a cause. Young India would not have been on the rampage if discontent did not go far beyond the CAA recalling JP’s demand for what he called a sampoorna kranti (total revolution).
The CAA, which sparked off this explosion, is reduced to third place in Calcutta hoardings reading “NO NPR. NO NRC. NO CAA”. Are the first two targets of public anger — the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens — inherently objectionable or do people expect them to be flawed like Assam’s NRC which left out nearly two million names? That charge can be levelled at almost every clerical enterprise. Twenty-six years after my mother’s death I still can’t close a joint account I had with her in the State Bank of India because her name appeared as “Indrani” instead of “Indira” and the bank doesn’t see its way to rectifying its mistake. India is careless and callous. The protesters are no different, I suspect, in their individual areas of responsibility.
It would be different if the NPR and the NRC were regarded as objectionable because the government cannot be trusted with the information. Who will govern then? And how? A young niece, in every way a rational professional, refuses to produce any papers or comply with any requirements. Her defiance is widely echoed because fear stalks the land. With fear comes an acute sense of peril. It’s 1974-75 all over again. That fear might arguably make sense for Muslims, explaining their biggest demonstrations since Independence. The abundance of hijab, niqab and burqa recalls the rank Islamophobia of Narendra Modi’s comment about identifying trouble-makers “by their clothes”. It reminded people of his churlish rejection of a Muslim cap on another occasion. The harsh response to protests, confusing cause and effect, have revived grim memories of voters’ lists being murderously abused in the 1992-93 Mumbai killings. Gujarat’s 2002 bloodbath is another horrendous memory. Can NRC/NPR details be similarly exploited? It’s more likely that the gamut of Muslim grievances has found an outlet in a single issue. The festering sense of wrong over a common civil code, triple talaq, Article 370, police brutality in Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University and Uttar Pradesh in general, lynchings by so-called gau rakshaks, ‘love jihad’, ghar wapsi, and the revelation that like British Blacks, Muslims are over-represented in prison feed into the narrative of discrimination. Heaven help India if the crude tirades of Dilip Ghosh, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal chief, who vows to shoot dissenters “like dogs” and “throw out” the “lungi brigade” become the norm.
But real or fanciful, all this is a far cry from the core promise of the CAA which inspired the present upsurge. I cannot believe that Indians, not even Indian Muslims licking their wounds, really resent Hindus from Bangladesh, or even Afghanistan and Pakistan, who have been living here since before December 31, 2014 being granted the security of Indian citizenship. Reading newspaper reports of what the protesters have to say and listening to their perorations in television chat shows, I don’t get the impression the actual provisions of the CAA get top priority from anyone. This centrepiece of the law seems to be a matter of profound disinterest as speakers quickly veer off at a tangent, plunge into irrelevancies or rake up side issues. Even Mamata Banerjee’s diatribe about Bengalis being hounded out of states under the BJP and its devious machinations to reward foreign donors has no bearing on the CAA. No one is obsessed with the notion either that the CAA is the first step to a Nazi purgatory or that a handful of Bangladeshi Hindus will eat them out of hearth and home if their continued presence is regularized.
Given the economic downturn and the lengths to which Central government agencies and spokesmen go to fudge figures and pretend they are running a far more efficient ship than the Congress ever did, the young are worried that jobs might become even more scarce. Or that those few that are available will be grabbed by proteges of a regime that makes no bones of promoting ideological favourites. The pervasive corruption to which Transparency International has again drawn attention, the International Monetary Fund’s humiliating observation that India’s poor performance has dragged down global growth and India’s 10-place plunge in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global democracy ranking are compounded by persistent misrepresentations by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
The ruthlessness with which universities and other institutions are being brought under official control and placed under loyalists causes similar anxiety. One of Afro-Asia’s few relatively free societies seems doomed to intellectual servitude with history, science and philosophy losing out to the mumbo-jumbo that luminaries like Modi and West Bengal’s governor, Jagdeep Dhankar, trot out to sycophantic applause. Although all these misgivings have combined to make the CAA appear the target of popular wrath, the only specific allegation levelled against it is that the law is ‘unconstitutional’. That is for the Supreme Court to decide. Perhaps some of the 143 petitions now before it contain substantive arguments but if the CAA is “brazenly divisive”, as Amarinder Singh says, that is only because the government’s opponents think they have found in it a battering ram to which all Opposition leaders will lend their heft. I wonder what apex court judges will make of Pinarayi Vijayan’s view that if a handful of Bangladeshi Hindus are accepted as citizens, millions of others — ethnic Indians from Fiji and Malaysia, Bangladesh’s Biharis, Pakistan’s Mohajirs, Balochs, Sindhis, Pakhtuns, Hazaras and Ahmadiyas, Myanmar’s Rohingyas, Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims, and even Bhutanese Christians — should enjoy the same right. It is presumptuous to suppose that Afro-Asia’s chronic economic refugees who turn up at Stockholm or Toronto airports claiming to be victims of religious persecution would find Kanpur or Coimbatore equally attractive.
The rationale of Partition confirmed the Indianness of Bangladeshi Hindus in 1947 but they stayed behind basically because they had nowhere to go. They were the poor of the earth. They still are. Hindu zamindars who deposited the revenue they collected in the collectorate long ago transferred their assets to Calcutta. Most bhadralok professionals already had a foot in each camp. Apart from a sprinkling of lawyers and junior bureaucrats, those who remained were cultivators and fisherfolk. As Trinamul Congress’s Derek O’Brien wrote, the debate ultimately boils down to the rich versus the poor. “It’s the same the whole world over, It’s the poor what gets the blame, It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, Isn’t it a blooming shame?” according to the old song.
Who cares? JP knew that the fight against oppression and the erosion of civil liberties was more important than a change of guard at the top. He attached the greatest importance to solving the problems of unemployment and inflation, to revitalizing planning and reforming the electoral process. Realizing the limitations of parliamentary democracy, he joined Vinoba Bhave and spent 20 years “searching for some other way”. It’s only because India is still searching that mischievous agitators can distort a token gesture of compassion like the CAA into an ominous threat.
