To online partisans of Opposition parties who see the hidden hand of the Aam Aadmi Party or the BJP in the CJP’s successful mobilisations, if the suppression of Jantar Mantar 2.0 doesn’t discredit your conspiratorial daftness, you’re probably immune to lived experience.
Jantar Mantar 2.0 will spur pundits to think of the electoral implications and limitations of civil society movements led by insurgent Cockroaches. Can Abhijeet Dipke and gang outlast Narendra Modi’s monstrous Leviathan? Will they make the slightest difference to the Uttar Pradesh elections early next year? This is an op-ed parlour game because we can’t know, just as we knew nothing about the antecedents and prospects of Jantar Mantar 1.0. Better, then, to delight in the strange magic of this moment.
The Border Security Force has been deployed to guard Delhi’s perimeter, as if it were a cantonment town in the NWFP, not the capital of a subcontinental republic. The last time an Indian ruler in Delhi felt as besieged as Modi apparently does was two hundred and twenty-five years ago when Shah Alam, the heir to the much-shrunk Mughal empire, presided over a beleaguered city-state. As the Farsi doggerel had it, “Sultanat-e-Shah Alam/Az Dilli ta Palam”.
Inspired by this, the prime minister dispatched his policemen to the airport to board the plane and performatively arrest Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka. Nothing illustrates the Cockroaches’ digital connection with their young audience better than Dipke’s video of the police in the plane’s aisle (policewomen in front, policemen bringing up the rear) closing in on him. You can occasionally see his hand in the frame but you can’t see him; it’s like a first-person shooter game; you experience the action directly through the eyes of the main character.
So while Ozymandias sits hunched in the heart of his Lutyens maze at 7 Race Course Road (or Lok Kalyan Marg), having deployed forty thousand policemen to guard his place in history, Dipke and his colleagues are in perpetual motion trying to make him history. The overkill involved in turning New Delhi into a ghost town, wholly populated by policemen clothed in the home ministry’s autumn collection — camouflage and khaki — makes the government seem a little mad. Even the chief justice of India, not a critic of executive overreach, felt moved to observe that shutting the city down amounted to using a hammer to kill a fly. This wasn’t, to be clear, an attempt to rein in the suppression of October 10, more a suggestion.
Since the CJI’s last aperçu on insectoid youth spawned the movement that Modi is currently trying to squash, this new makkhi metaphor must have worried the hardworking ranks of Delhi Police who had occupied Jantar Mantar and its environs just so that encroaching Cockroaches could not. Watching early morning video from the barricaded protest site, it was obvious that the young men and women who made up the massive police contingent were of the same generation as the protesters they were trying to keep out. In a curious way, Dipke had conjured up thousands of Cockroaches in uniform, remotely. There were shots of uniformed women taking young women in civvies by the hand and walking them into police vans and buses. I couldn’t help wondering what they thought of the Cockroaches and their demands. If Western cohort labels have any meaning in India, did the fact that both constables and Cockroaches were Gen Z complicate this stand-off at all?
The scale of the government’s draconian bandobast to thwart Jantar Mantar 2.0 is a kind of teach-in that demonstrates to ‘mainstream’ middle-class India how nominal the rights of Indian citizens are when the State chooses to override them. Students from Pune riding the Goa Express to Delhi were forced off the train at Itarsi by police who offered neither formal warrants nor any sort of legal justification for their actions except for citing an order ‘from above’ to maintain law and order. Hotels were told to not admit guests, mosque congregations were told to keep their young from protesting, internet connectivity was suspended in a radius of four kilometres centred on Jantar Mantar and scores of CJP leaders and others were pre-emptively detained in the name of law and order.
This was a lesson that people in India’s borderlands like Kashmir and the Northeast and in its tribal hinterland had learnt much earlier. The novelty of this phase is that it is pan-Indian and is systematically designed to create a purged and pliant electorate across the country. The vehicle of this Inquisition is the Election Commission and the Special Intensive Revision is its sword arm, designed to scythe vast swathes of the Indian electorate off the rolls by either declaring them dead or defaming them as ‘infiltrators’. Modi’s vision of One Nation, One Election is precisely this: coordinated Union and state elections based on electoral rolls purged of hostile voters, controlled via a docile Election Commission’s centralised software.
The scale of the EC’s SIR-enabled purge is staggering: roughly 130 million voters have been ripped off voter rolls and cast into limbo. Lakhs of voters have been mysteriously added to UP’s electoral rolls. The Supreme Court has shown no sign of reforming or pausing this arbitrary process; it has acquiesced in the ‘temporary’ disenfranchisement of voters in West Bengal, for instance, on the curious ground that if reinstated, they will be able to vote the next time round. Given the fact that the process for reviewing SIR deletion is so clogged that the EC itself has estimated that it could take up to twelve years, the court has effectively acquiesced in the indefinite suspension of the right of tens of millions of Indians to vote.
Given the deference of the apex court and the determination of Modi’s government to create a bespoke electorate, Indians know that between now and the next general election there is one grand issue that dwarfs all others: the struggle to stop the sangh parivar from remaking the rolls to create a fixed majority. Newspapers have reported on BJP members lodging thousands of Form 7 objections against Muslim neighbours. This hydra of a vigilante majoritarianism joined to a rogue Election Commission must be fought to a standstill.
By a happy coincidence, the CJP is at hand to help fight this battle. Those who wondered how the CJP would sustain its momentum after its first symbolic win, the scalp of Dharmendra Pradhan, now have an answer. The task of protecting the electoral foundation of a democracy is a great non-partisan cause, a gift for a civil society movement buoyed up by the young. It doesn’t hurt the CJP’s cause that the Election Commission has dragged its feet on enrolling eighteen-year-olds as they become eligible to vote. Given the viciousness of the ruling dispensation’s response to the October 10 protest, this is a struggle that will run and run.
To online partisans of Opposition parties who see the hidden hand of the Aam Aadmi Party or the BJP in the CJP’s successful mobilisations, if the suppression of Jantar Mantar 2.0 doesn’t discredit your conspiratorial daftness, you’re probably immune to lived experience. The struggle against Modi’s electoral Inquisition will be long and hard and there is more than enough for everyone to do. Despite the government’s best efforts to shut Delhi down, Neha Bora and her friends turned up to protest outside Dilli Haat before being abducted in a police bus. It’s hard to dam up an uprising and this one will play out on the streets of this country under the omniscient gaze of a digital People. Hum dekhenge.
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India’s self-incubated East India Company
Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen
