When Kashmiris say they don’t feel part of
India, they are only reiterating a truth that Indian politicians and
governments voice all the time. What else does it mean when politicians
and large sections of the media talk of how happy ‘Indians’ are at the
hanging of Afzal Guru, when his execution
is touted as a cathartic closure for ‘India’.
The
last time I checked, there was curfew in Kashmir and thousands of other
justice-loving people were deeply unhappy at the secretive execution,
and at the use of the death penalty to fulfil some atavistic blood lust.
How else to read the judges’ pronouncement — even as they noted
discrepancies in the police version of his guilt — that the hanging was
required to satisfy the ‘collective conscience’? In fact, Durkheim’s
phrase ‘collective consciousness’ conceals the manufacture of consent
through the media, the courts and other institutions. And contrary to
his prediction that in an interdependent and complex society we would
see a growth in reparative justice, in India, what we see is the growth
of a vulgar retributive justice, where primal passions are deliberately
inflamed to create a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
‘Us’ in the context of contemporary India means the Bajrang Dal who
distributed sweets to celebrate the hanging and blackened the faces of
people with opposite views; it means the rightwing goons who groped and
sexually abused female protesters outside a Delhi college last week with
full police connivance.
But ‘us’ also includes the cynical
coterie of Congress politicians who periodically decide to join the BJP
bandwagon for electoral purposes. If opening the locks of the Babri
Masjid and legislating against the Shah Bano judgement were permanent
blots on Rajiv Gandhi’s claim to be secular, his son’s installation in
the formal pecking order of the Congress has been accompanied by the
opportunistic hanging of Afzal Guru.
Sonia Gandhi may have
pleaded against the death penalty for Rajiv’s killers, but unless her
party takes a principled position against the death penalty for all,
this will seem like the rest of her liberal outreach programme, designed
to ensure her own good name.
‘Them’ includes all the ordinary people of India — who have had their
lands forcibly acquired, their homes burnt, their relatives killed —
in riots and pogroms. ‘Them’ are the seditious fisher folks of
Kudankulam, the grave security threats who inhabit the mineral rich
villages of Dantewada, the Naga elder and the Kashmiri woman.
And then there are some whose status as ‘us’ or ‘them’ depends on the
political calculations of the day. Balwant Singh Rajoana, on death row
for the assassination of former Punjab chief minister Beant Singh, may
not be hanged because the Akali lobby is important to ‘us’. But clearly
it is not important enough for the victims of 1984 to get justice, in
which case they fall into the ‘them’ category.
We are told that the ‘Law’ has taken its course, the ‘Law has come
full circle’. Where is this law when the widows of Delhi 1984 are still
waiting for justice — and people like HKL Bhagat have died before they
could be hung (not that this was ever a worry for him); when the
murderers of Gujarat 2002 are still roaming free, and having the EU and
others cosy up to their government? Did the law come full circle when
the murderers of Bathani Tola were acquitted? Where was the law when
thousands of mass graves were uncovered in Kashmir and thousands
‘disappeared’; where is this law when women are raped and their rapist
officers or jawans get full protection under the Armed Forces (Special
Powers) Act (AFSPA)?
Deponents at the Verma Commission
provided a number of cases in Kashmir where the courts had prima facie
indicted army personnel, but the central government refused to give
permission to prosecute. The Upendra Commission clearly found that
Thangjam Manorama was raped and murdered by personnel of the Assam
Rifles in Manipur, but not one person has been punished. In
Chhattisgarh, young bravehearts who filed rape cases against special
police forces with great difficulty — resulting in arrest warrants
against the accused — are being coerced to take their statements back.
But then, I forgot, Kashmiris, Manipuris, the adivasis of central India —
are not ‘us’, they are not ‘Indian’.
When asked why the AFSPA is needed to protect armed personnel — since
rape can never be done in the line of duty — high-ranking officers come
on television to say that 99% of the charges against the army are
false, and the women are put up to it by Maoists and militants. So shall
we assume then, that the women of the North-east, of Kashmir and
adivasi India are congenital liars? Or that the law is designed to
ensure they are fair game, a welcome pastime in the ‘course of duty’? Or
perhaps, more simply, these women are not ‘Indians’.
If to be Indian is to accept the death penalty, if to be Indian is to
accept the unjust hanging of a tortured man born of a tortured and
alienated people, if to be Indian is to accept the rapes of my sisters
and the impunity of its officers, let me say in the words of the Turkish
poet, Nazim Hikmet, “Yes, I am a traitor, if you are a patriot, if you
are a defender of our homeland, I am a traitor to my homeland; I am a
traitor to my country… if patriotism is the claws of your village lords,
… if patriotism is the police club, if your allocations and your
salaries are patriotism,… if patriotism is not escaping from our
stinking black-minded ignorance, then I am a traitor.”
