Umar Khalid, the Historian

Muslims in India, somewhat like Adivasis, are always being told to ‘integrate’ and to join the ‘mainstream’. The difference with Muslims and Adivasis is that the former are seen as unwilling to be ‘mainstreamed’ and the latter as incapable of it. The assumption is always that the ‘main-stream’ is an upper-caste Hindu river, singularly flowing without any input from minority streams.  At the same time, when Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis fill the jails disproportionately and are denied bail when others get it for the same offence, then there is no admission of how the mainstream has excluded them. 

When a Muslim like Umar Khalid crosses boundaries, there is a further panic attack. A young articulate Muslim man who does not wear a skull cap, who is an atheist, who did his Phd from JNU in history on Adivasis in Singbhum is seen as an anomaly in the segregated world the RSS wants to create. The attempt is then to reduce him to just one aspect of his identity – so that whatever else he does or says or writes, in the end he must be seen merely as a Muslim, and by extension, violent, anti-national and a threat to the “Indian mainstream.” So dangerous that he has been in jail for three years without bail. It is not surprising that so many of the young people who were arrested for the anti-CAA protests were Muslim students at India’s leading universities. 

La Trobe University: Protest, Dissent, and the Struggle for Justice in India

Protest, Dissent, and the Struggle for Justice in India on 28 July 2022.

 

In this conversation, Professor Nandini Sundar discussed her widely read 2020 report on threats to academic freedom in India, recent arrests of academics journalists, and activists, and her three decades of writing and scholarship about Adivasi communities in Bastar district, Chhattisgarh. The conversation took place on the two-year anniversary of the arrest of Delhi University professor of English Hany Babu.  Professor Sundar discussed his arrest, and the arrests of other lawyers, activists and academics who have been charged in the infamous Elgar Parishad case. The conversation concludes with Professor Sundar’s thoughts on the rights granted to all citizens by the constitution of India.

 

We are extremely grateful to Professor Sundar, Ian Woolford and Gerald Roche for giving so generously of their time to share their knowledge and expertise with us.

 

If you were unable to attend the live event or would like to view or listen again, you will find the recording as follows: (you are welcome to share the links)

 

  YouTube 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEEZMZPlIiY

In Bastar's 'Shaheen Bagh', a Youth-Led Movement Quietly Perseveres

In Bastar's 'Shaheen Bagh', a Youth-Led Movement Quietly Perseveres

How Chhattisgarh has stalled a historic judgment

Ten years ago, on July 5, 2011, Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar delivered a historic judgment banning Salwa Judum, a vigilante movement started in in 2005 and sponsored by the Chhattisgarh and Central government, ostensibly to fight against the Maoists. The judges also ruled that the use of surrendered Maoists and untrained villagers in frontline counter-insurgency operations as Special Police Officers (SPOs) was unconstitutional. It directed that the existing SPOs be redeployed in traffic management or other such safe duties. Other matters, especially prosecution of security forces and others involved in human rights violations, and rehabilitation of villagers who had suffered violence, were left pending, since the State had been asked to submit comprehensive plans for this.

Ten years on, nothing has been done to implement the judgment. Instead, the State government has merely renamed the SPOs. They are now known as the District Reserve Guard (DRG). Conversations with DRG members have revealed that most of them are captured or surrendered Maoists and are given automatic weaponry as soon as they join the police force. Some of them get one-three months of training, and some not even that. They commit the most excesses against their former fellow villagers, suffer the most casualties in any operation, and are paid much less than the regular constabulary, all the reasons the judges had outlawed their use. A contempt petition filed in 2012 is still awaiting hearing. Although ‘final hearings’ commenced in December 2018 before another bench of Justice Madan Lokur and Justice Deepak Gupta, the judges retired soon thereafter and there has been no hearing since.

SC’s Shaheen Bagh Order: Fundamental rights for Commuters, No Country for Protestors

 For the last two years, while driving from Delhi University in north Delhi to my home in the south, I find that if I miss the small unmarked turn on the left off a flyover to go to ITO, there is no way I can reach central Delhi without considerable backtracking.  The government claims that the Pragati Maidan makeover that has blocked the road is for the public good, even if that claim has been contested, both by way of public petitions and legally. But whether or not it is indeed for the public good, can I assert that my rights as a commuter matter more than the project, especially since like many other projects, it is taking indefinite time? In a city that is increasingly bisected by flyovers, cyclists and pedestrians are routinely inconvenienced and blocked.  Are they not commuters too? In the government’s eyes they may be c-class citizens who need not be factored in while making urban plans, but technically they are still equal citizens even if not equal commuters. But would the courts even entertain their petitions?

Amit Shah's 'Bhima Koregaon Model' Used For Anti-CAA Protests

The recent arrest of Jamia student Asif Iqbal Tanha and two JNU students, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, both activists with Pinjra Tod, shows that the Union home ministry is convinced the ‘Bhima Koregaon model’ works and must be replicated.

What is this model? You start with a few arrests, for instance, the first round of the Bhima Koregaon five or the Jamia students Safoora Zargar and Meeran Haider. Then you widen the net indiscriminately to build up a picture of an immense threat to the nation from a nexus of Dalits and Maoists, Islamists and Marxists or whatever. In actuality, the major threat this government fears is the Constitution, in whose name all these activists have worked, and which the ruling party wants to gut.

As with the Bhima Koregaon struggle which was a symbol of Dalit assertion against neo-Brahminism, the BJP government is trying to completely change the narrative around the anti-CAA protests. At least six clear motives appear to be at work in both cases.

Why India Needs Scheduled Tribes to Educate Future Judges

https://thewire.in/rights/why-india-needs-scheduled-tribes-to-educate-future-judges

Five Acres in Lieu of Citizenship: Parsing the Ayodhya Verdict

The Muslims of India approached the Supreme Court for affirmation of their citizenship.  Instead, they were given five acres of land.

In their verdict on the Ayodhya dispute, the bench recognised “it is necessary to provide restitution to the Muslim community for the unlawful destruction of their place of worship.” But in sharp contrast to their lengthy exegesis on other issues – like the indubitability of faith, the archaeological evidence for a temple below the mosque, the way that historical texts must be read – there is absolutely no discussion of what ‘restitution’ means, and more importantly, what it might involve in this specific context.

“Go back to India and cover every statue of Gandhi so that he doesn't have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha

“Go back to India and cover every statue of Gandhi so that he doesn't have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150^th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha

Nitya Ramakrishnan (Advocate) and Nandini Sundar (Sociologist)      

We visited the Kashmir Valley between 5^th and 9^th October 2019. We spoke to a cross section of people in three different regions.

The art of creating ‘happy’ open-air prisons

In 2005 the BJP government of Chhattisgarh claimed that  Salwa Judum was a self-initiated people’s movement aiming to finish Naxalism, and people were flocking to Salwa Judum camps which would be models of development. Instead, all the people who were forcibly incarcerated in Salwa Judum camps fled back to their villages as soon as they were able and fifteen years on, the Naxalites are hardly finished, even if weakened. The villagers whose homes were burnt by Salwa Judum or those whose family members were killed in the conflict, and who have still not got justice, are living testaments to how lies purveyed by the media and ruling parties remain simply lies.

The Myths that are being sold to India on Kashmir

Two days after the parliamentary coup in Kashmir, I laid a bet with a Delhi taxi driver.  A year from now, he said, Kashmir would be ‘normal’, without the need for any troops. If there are still forces in Kashmir, however, he will throw a party for me in Mahipalpur. The ordinary citizen of India has been sold a myth by the RSS and the BJP, a myth which is as old as history – that colonization is primarily for the benefit of those being colonized.

Article 370: How much truth is there in the Government's claims?

https://www.bbc.com/hindi/india-49345020

Boycott the Ministers and Officials Attacking Academic Freedom

As an India-based scholar, as someone who is not a member of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), which is primarily located in the US though it has 7000 members worldwide, and someone who had no plans of attending the AAS-in-Asia conference in Delhi (July 4-8, 2018), the boycott call against the AAS-in-Asia is not something that would ordinarily bother me.

The boycott call arose out of the Government of India’s refusal to allow Pakistani scholars to attend the AAS meeting; and the AAS’s failure to take a strong public stand against this and inform its members in a timely fashion so that they could make their own choices about whether to attend while Pakistani scholars were being denied. 649 scholars protested against what appeared to be the AAS’s and the local host, Ashoka University’s quiescence in an unacceptable restriction on academic freedom. I was one of them, even though my primary anger was with the Government of India, and not with the AAS. However, feeling that this was not enough, over 200 of the signatories have also decided to boycott the conference, arguing that the AAS should have had the courage to cancel the conference altogether rather than submit to the ban.

Pathalgadi is Nothing But Constitutional Messianism So Why is the BJP Afraid Of It?

Across the country, the engagement of citizens with the Constitution appears to be in direct proportion to the administration’s abandonment of it. That is why the government is trying to criminalise the belief that it will deliver anything more than it is doing already.

(Jharkhand): On the freshly tarred road from Ranchi to Ulihatu, where Birsa Munda lived and which is now a prominent CRPF camp, several villages sport newly painted green stone slabs at the entrance, covered with constitutional provisions carved in white lettering. Protected by bamboo enclosures, these stones – symbols of the Pathalgadi movement – are anywhere between 8 and 15 feet high. In the past year and a half, this movement has spread rapidly across Jharkhand and the continguous areas of Chhattisgarh and Odisha. And the state governments concerned are not pleased.

The preamble to the Indian constitution asserts that “We The People of India.. Adopt, Enact and Give to Ourselves This Constitution.” If the people gave rise to the constitution, it stands to reason that they also gave themselves the right to interpret, analyse and propagate its contents in any form they want to so long as this is done peacefully.

Nothing stops citizens from asserting their fundamental rights by way of speeches or written pamphlets, or in stone pillars outside our homes. There are thousands of statues across the country of Ambedkar holding the constitution which serve not just as a reminder of his role in drafting it, but as a symbolic assertion of the document itself – that it is meaningful in people’s lives and it is they who give meaning to it.

Yet the Pathalgadi movement’s deep engagement with the constitution has state governments panicked, perhaps because it raises questions that they are finding hard to answer.

Irom Sharmila and the Will to Live a Normal Life

On March 30, 2016 a Delhi trial court acquitted Irom Sharmila on charges of attempting to commit suicide, recognising that hers was a political fight for the right to life, and not a death wish. When a friend and I visited her the previous evening in Manipur house, she expressed satisfaction that she had been able to make her point freely before the judge. Denied the opportunity to talk to friends or political comrades, shut up alone in a hospital room for nearly 16 years with only her minders for company, Sharmila’s fast was always about more than abstinence from food – it was also simultaneously the story of India’s longest serving political prisoner and her singular courage under incarceration.

MM Kalburgi and the death of rational enquiry?

Can a log which chisel and hammer cannot split
be split with axe and sickle?
Would a mind which
after being chiseled with the nectar of elders’ vachanas …
yield to the axe and sickle of the Veda and aagama?
It will not. 

The 17^th century vachana poet, Hemagalla Hampa might well have been writing of the 21^st century vachana scholar, M M Kalburgi, who was shot in his home on August 30th. Kalburgi was a Kannada epigrapher, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of essays Marga-4, and Vice-Chancellor of Hampi university. Can a clear, penetrating mind ever be vanquished by the petty tyrannies and guns of those who claim to own faith? Kalburgi’s name will live on, while even the police don’t seem to want to know the names of his killers.

A little memory can go a long way

A little memory can go a long way

It is the silences that attend media coverage of Yakub Memon’s impending execution and not the Shiv Sena’s aggressive calls for his hanging that hold a mirror to Indian democracy most clearly. Leading national dailies carry photos of mangled bomb blast sites and interview those affected, as if to justify the imposition of the death penalty; none ask why other victims must continue to suffer silently the indignity of watching their attackers go scot-free.

Indian National Interest

Indian National Interest (INI) requires that our environment be ruined, our people displaced, our resources thoughtlessly mined, all for the benefit of foreign companies, and for the private benefit of people in power. This is the only conclusion that we can draw after reading the recent Indian Express revelations on Essar alongside the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) affidavit in the Delhi High Court responding to Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai’s plea that her constitutional rights were being curtailed by the government stopping her from flying abroad to testify before a British parliamentary committee.

Do elections ensure democracy?

In a competitive bid to bare each other’s dirty linen this election season, political parties have raised the ghosts of 1984’s Sikh massacres and 2002’s Muslim pogroms. Each party claims that the other is guilty, but as for itself, it has been given, in that peculiarly Indian phrase, a ‘clean chit’.  

Mr. Modi tells us he will be found innocent in the “people’s court”,  and was “waiting to hear their verdict”.  Clearly Mr. Modi has no regard for any other kind of court, least of all a constitutionally appointed judiciary. He is not alone in this - every major political party seems to believe that winning elections is an alternative to judicial accountability.

No room for ‘others’

http://www.hindustantimes.com/ViewsSectionPage/ColumnsOthers/No-room-for-others/Article1-1010151.aspx#disqus_thread 

 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’.