As they say: If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. As they add: Better late than never.
Many people said, these last years, that Narendra Modi’s autocratic tactics were still heaps better than Indira Gandhi’s official emergency. Because Mrs Gandhi locked up the opposition and threw people in jail for no reason.
Ahem. Talk about a slippery slope.
Over these last dozen years, every time you have excused a breach of rights or law or propriety, you have ceded democratic space and constitutional rights, and created precedent. Every time you have justified disproportionate or illegal government action against citizens in the name of national security, you have stepped closer to the same treatment yourself. Every time you have said, “Well it looks bad, but the government must know what it’s doing,” you’ve been dead right, but not in a good way.
It’s a slippery slope, and you’ve slithered down it backwards, always looking up, always saying nah, this is not the same thing. Look the other way, in the direction you’re going.
You didn’t say much when the lynchings began, because those were ‘isolated incidents’. You were okay with locking up the entire opposition of Jammu & Kashmir in 2019, because Article 370. You were all right with the planted evidence and arrests in the case of the Bhima Koregaon 16, because ‘Soros funds NGOs’. You didn’t speak for journalist Siddique Kappan who was jailed for two years on his way to report a story, or for Umar Khalid who’s been in jail for over six years, because anti-national something something.
You accepted the release of rapists and murderers who were fêted by ministers of state. You celebrated strong, stable government without paying attention to what it was doing to Parliamentary process and debate, without paying attention to the laws passed, so that now we are in the stranglehold of selectively abusable laws that are duly being selectively abused. You bought the idea that there’s no alternative to this government. You looked at how the country is being sold down the river to Adani and gang, and thought wow, growth.
Today, you mind the protests, their leadership, and the political opposition, almost more than you mind that your electoral process is compromised and the government potentially illegitimate. Shouldn’t you be asking why the BJP is completely committed to defending the ECI and shutting down citizens, instead of joining the demand for free and fair elections?
It’s a slippery slope, and we are nowhere near the bottom.
Did you see Delhi on October 10? Layers of security cordons radiating out from Central Delhi, why? The police won’t say. You have a press card—so? Here, get in the detention bus after a little bit of a beating. Did you see the Big Brother-style loudspeakers mounted in the crossroads of central Delhi, from which a disembodied voice made Big Brother-style announcements? The phones were jammed, the metros shut, Delhi-bound trains cancelled, Abhijeet Dipke arrested in his airplane seat on the airport apron. Tens of thousands of police and other security agencies turned the capital of “the mother of democracy” into an outright police state.
After that day, the number of police and paramilitary forces deployed at every protest has been positively absurd. The police preemptively prohibits assembly, flat-out abducts protest leaders, detains hundreds of protesters, blocks journalist access, throws in the odd bit of molestation, purges protest content on the internet.
Did you follow the Kafkaesque arrest of Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, for waving the Indian flag at Jantar Mantar? Have you seen the series of laughable impediments put in the way of their bail—including that a person standing surety had long hair in one photo and short hair in another? You know, presumably, that the Special Executive Magistrate evaluating cases like theirs is simply a higher ranking police officer, which is to say the police is judging appeals against police action? Oh, and you heard about Babloo Rai, murderer put away for life, who the Allahabad High Court let off so that he can fight the 2027 election for the BJP, even though being a murderer with a life sentence disqualifies him from fighting elections?
You cannot make this shit up.
And all for what? Reminder: It was the charge of electoral malpractice that triggered Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. This government will never need to invoke a formal Emergency; today, we call its egregious excesses Tuesday.
The time to rail against these grotesque perversions of justice was when they first started to happen, not when they are institutional norm, but better late than never. The BJP began to degrade the idea of protest almost immediately after coming to power by taking the term ‘anti-national’, well, national—because after you falsely equate government with country, it follows that you falsely equate opposition with attacking the country. (Guess who else made that move? Hint: “Indira is India, India is Indira”.)
Twelve years later, the idea of dissent in India is so rat-eaten that peaceful protest is routinely called anarchy. The language of rights has been deliberately muddied with the language of ‘responsibility’ and ‘anti-Hindu’ and fused with ‘threat to public order’. Now leaders of peaceful protests are treated if they have a track record for violence and are threatening violence again. (The BJP version of protest is almost always violent, so they’re also just projecting.) Democratic governments campaign to remain in power, democratic oppositions campaign to replace them, and the people decide. A fair, transparent electoral process is the beating heart of the whole system. You win fair and square, everyone can see it, it keeps the peace. It’s the literal definition of democracy. Governments assume power, but the people are boss. If there’s widespread doubt about that process, you are shooting yourself in the democratic nuts.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects in the media are focussing on how the protests defy rules—obvs—instead of Modi and Shah’s criminal rigging of the Election Commission and its process. The more we discuss the modalities of the protest itself, the less we discuss what the protest is about: Our right to free and fair elections, and our right to vote in them.
Of course this government is not democratically-minded. It came to power swearing loudly on the Constitution, and proceeded to swear loudly at the Constitution through its actions. It fetishises state control. It is hateful and discriminatory towards whole classes of citizens. Its founding ideology is the opposite of constitutional.
There is a make-or-break feeling to this thing. We could keep slithering down that slippery slope, or with unity and perseverance, we could create a ski jump bend. And in this moment, those who in many different ways oppose the BJP-RSS’s unconstitutional, autocratic politics and policies, must stand shoulder to shoulder. If we don’t push back together, our already only ‘partly free democracy’ is toast.
The very dumbest thing in the world would be for protest leaders to be turf-guarding at this fragile moment. The Cockroach Janata Party is the Aam Aadmi Party/BJP’s/CIA’s puppet! Where were the Congress and the CJP when the Left was at the barricades? The Congress is using Neha Bora. What is the CJP’s ideology? Who’s funding them?
As they say: Opportunity is knocking at the door, and you’re complaining about the noise.
At a human level, I can understand the indignation that the leadership and foot soldiers of the left organisations and the Congress might feel about the CJP leaping out of thin air, winning traction and goodwill that they themselves have had to painfully claw out over years. They’ve been at it far longer, and endured everything that the BJP has thrown at them, without earning the solidarity that the ad hoc, improv-style cockroaches galvanised in a few short months. The cockroaches might point out that their movement ripped through India’s shameful normalisation of creeping fascism, mobilised a whole new generation, and reasserted public accountability and constitutional values in the national conversation, and that they are therefore the true leaders of the citizen protests that have gained so much ground since July.
All understandable human reactions. But please, get over it.
Have your differences. Many kinds of differences represent many different kinds of Indians. Be political parties or pressure groups or unions or alliances or formations or civil society groups. It takes considerable mass and gravity to mobilise enough people to move needles. Take the best of each other to win, and learn from each other when you fail.
But please, unite.
Tomorrow, October 23, is another protest day—one more in a wave of protest days sweeping through the world for excellent reasons. Somewhere down the line, change is inevitable. Here’s to redefining Achhe Din.
Source: Substack
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