SOTER'S GOA: The bigoted game of cards and registers -Soter

Published in oHeraldo on January 27, 2020

The bigoted game of cards and registers

For those who have experiences of the Indian Emergency of 1974, the signs of an undeclared emergency prevailing in the country at this moment are very conspicuous. The fact that India has dropped 10 ranks to 51st position in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index is a shame. Even the judiciary is reported to be echoing the sentiment that the ‘country is going through a critical time’ and refused to impose curbs on protests and propaganda against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The judiciary’s observations, particularly on the indiscriminate use of section 144 of CrPC to suppress legitimate expression or exercise of democratic rights and the shutdown of Internet in J&K and the detention of Bhim Army Chief, is an endorsement of the public discontentment against the gross abuse of powers by the government. Even the prestigious universities in the country have not been spared from the government’s terror.

A Union Government afflicted with an anti-minority syndrome and a leftist paranoia, has resulted in horrific violence since 2016 under various pretexts of cow protection, love jihad, religious conversion and false accusations of sedition. The government’s latest obsession with a needless and discriminatory CAA and a preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), instead of tackling the rising unemployment, climate change and high inflation resulting from an economic crisis, seems to have the public saying enough is enough. This fanaticism with Aadhaar, digitalisation and demonetisation is ultimately a harassment for the poor and not the rich. Young India seems to be asking: how many identity cards and registers will it take to prove, to the very government they voted to power, that one is a bonafide citizen of India? Will the NRC and NPR ensure employment opportunities and ensure decent living standards?

The government’s complicity in the terror unleashed against young citizens in universities, for protesting against the oppressive and unconstitutional policies of the State, perhaps cannot get more naked than the shocking incidents witnessed in JMIU, AMU and JNU over the last one month. The unconstitutional methods of silencing dissent by the abuse of section 144 of CrPC and unleashing of goons to generate violence, in a bid to discredit peaceful anti-CAA protests and justify police brutality, has been sufficiently exposed by the media. Some have compared the recent violence against protesting students in Universities with the ‘Kristallnacht’ (the Night of Broken Glass) of 1934, a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazis in Germany, wherein the government authorities looked on without intervening.

The false narrative being marketed by the government to brand some prestigious universities as being dens of ‘tukde tukde’ (seditionist) and naxal gangs, just to create the environment for hijacking university managements and justifying police brutalities on students, has similarities to the terror politics of Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany which targeted intellectuals and ethnic groups perceived as enemies of the nation.

It’s paradoxical that a government which observes the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi also implements policies that are diametrically opposite to his idea of an inclusive India, in which freedom to dissent and right to equality are uncompromisable. The fascist like strategy employed by the government and its State machinery, of provoking citizens to fight each other on the streets over controversial political issues, appears to be the first of its kind in the history of independent India. It has hardly been known, in the politics of the last 70 years after India’s independence that in a bid to defend its policies a political party in government organised public rallies to counter the protest rallies by the opposition parties.

A government which gets rattled and delirious with slogans of ‘Azaadi’, an innocent poster of ‘Free Kashmir’ or the recital of a poem ‘Hum Dekhenge’ during the protests is definitely a worrisome situation for citizens in a democracy. The ban on students in a Gujarat university to fly kites with anti-CAA slogans on them is proof enough of the paranoia and panic setting in the government. The fact that the cadre of the political party in government has to go around town pulling down anti-CAA and NRC banners and posters and threatening young people protesting on the streets, contradicts the government’s claim that it enjoys wide support for its policies and programs among the people.

The progress and peace in the country has become casualty to a government with a sick mentality inherited from a primitive and abusive culture of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ and ‘victims of abuse being expected to suffer silently in order to protect the family pride and prevent unfriendly neighbors from taking advantage’. This is exactly why, every time public protests break out in the country, the bogey about Pakistan and China taking advantage of the situation gets raised in order to blackmail citizens into silence and justify the use of terror by security agencies. If the curbing of free speech and police brutalities to suppress dissent was synonymous with the colonial rule in India, then how can one justify the current political oppression and repression in free India?

What’s admirable in the current protests against the CAA is the resistance put up by young women to this bully government. The 4 minute speech at a government function by a school girl Diksha Talaulikar from a Cuncolim school, which went viral, was far more incisive than the empty rhetoric from political opportunists at most anti-CAA rallies in Goa. But while the political awakening in Young India provides that glimmer of hope for survival of democracy, it also needs to be borne in mind that for a government radicalised with the idea of establishing a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ by 2024, this is its ‘either now or never’ and ‘do or die’ moment.

(The author is a Social Activist.)

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