How deep shall we dig?

Recently a young Kashmiri friend was talking to me about life in Kashmir. Of the morass of political venality and opportunism, the callous brutality of the security forces, of the osmotic, inchoate edges of a society saturated in violence, where militants, police, intelligence officers, government servants, businessmen and even journalists encounter each other — and gradually, over time, become each other.

He spoke of having to live with the endless killing, the mounting ‘disappearances”, the whispering, the fear, the unresolved rumours, the insane disconnection between what is actually happening, what Kashmiris know is happening and what the rest of us are told is happening in Kashmir. He said: ‘Kashmir used to be a business. Now it’s a mental asylum.”

The more I think about that remark, the more apposite a description it seems for all of India. Admittedly, Kashmir and the North East are separate wings that house the more perilous wards in the asylum. But in the heartland, too, the schism between knowledge and information — between what we know and what we’re told, between what is unknown and what is asserted, between what is concealed and what is revealed, between fact and conjecture, between the ‘real” world and the virtual world — has become a place of endless speculation and potential insanity. It’s a poisonous brew that is stirred and simmered and put to the most ugly, destructive, political purpose.

Each time there is a so-called ‘terrorist strike”, the government rushes in, eager to assign culpability with little or no investigation. Similarly, in the United States the government used the lies and disinformation generated around the September 11 attacks to invade not just one country, but two — and heaven knows what else is in store.

The Indian government uses the same strategy not with other countries, but against its own people.

Over the past decade, the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces runs into tens of thousands. Recently, several Bombay policemen spoke openly to the press about how many ‘gangsters” they had eliminated on ‘orders” from their senior officers. Andhra Pradesh chalks up an average of about 200 ‘extremists” in ‘encounter” deaths a year. In Kashmir, in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated 80 000 people have been killed since 1989.

Since the Mufti Mohammed Sayeed government came to power in October 2002 on the promise of bringing a ‘healing touch”, the Association of Parents of Disappeared People says there have been 54 custodial deaths.

These figures would make any Banana Republic proud. But in this age of hyper-nationalism, as long as the people who are killed are called gangsters, terrorists, insurgents or extremists, their killers can strut around as crusaders in the national interest, and are answerable to no one.

The Indian state’s right to harass and terrorise people has been institutionalised, consecrated, by the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota). It has been promulgated in 10 states.

A cursory reading of Pota will tell you that it is draconian and ubiquitous. It’s a versatile, hold-all law that could apply to anyone — from an al-Qaeda operative caught with a cache of explosives to an Adivasi [indigenous person of India] playing his flute under a neem tree, to you or me. The genius of Pota is that it can be anything the government wants it to be. We live on the sufferance of those who govern us. In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister Jayalalitha uses it to stifle criticism of her government. In Gujarat and Mumbai it is used almost exclusively against Muslims. In Gujarat, after the 2002 state- assisted pogrom in which an estimated 2 000 Muslims were killed and 150 000 driven from their homes, 287 people have been acccused under Pota. Of these, 286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh!

Last month I was a member of a peoples’ tribunal on Pota. Over a period of two days we listened to harrowing testimonies of what goes on in our wonderful democracy. Let me assure you that in our police stations it’s everything: from people being forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses to being beaten and kicked to death.

A majority of those booked under Pota are guilty of one of two crimes. Either they’re poor — for the most part Dalit and Adivasi. Or they’re Muslim. Pota inverts the accepted dictum of criminal law — that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Under Pota you cannot get bail unless you can prove you are innocent — of a crime that you have not been formally charged with.

Essentially, you have to prove you’re innocent even if you’re unaware of the crime you are supposed to have committed. And that applies to all of us. Technically, we are a nation waiting to be accused.

It would be naive to imagine that Pota is being ‘misused”. On the contrary. It is being used for precisely the reasons it was enacted. Of course if the recommendations of the Malimath Committee are implemented, Pota will soon become redundant. The Malimath Committee recommends that normal criminal law be brought in line with the provisions of Pota. There’ll be no more criminals then. Only terrorists. It’s kind of neat.

Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform us that the gross domestic product growth rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods. Government storehouses are overflowing with grain.

Outside this circle of light, farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide in their hundreds. Reports of starvation and malnutrition come in from across the country. Yet the government allowed 63-million tonnes of grain to rot in its granaries. Twelve million tonnes were exported and sold at a subsidised price, which the Indian government was not willing to offer the Indian poor.

Utsa Patnaik, the well-known agricultural economist, has calculated that in the period between the early 1990s and 2001, grain consumption has dropped to levels lower than during the World War II years, including during the Bengal Famine, in which three million people died of starvation.

As we know from the work of Professor Amartya Sen, democracies don’t take kindly to starvation deaths. They attract too much adverse publicity from the ‘free press”. Dangerous levels of malnutrition and permanent hunger are the preferred model these days. Forty-seven percent of India’s children below three suffer from malnutrition, 46% are stunted.

Utsa Patnaik’s study reveals that about 40% of the rural population in India has the same grain-consumption level as sub-Saharan Africa. Today, an average rural family eats about 100kg less food in a year than it did in the early 1990s. The past five years have seen the most violent increase in rural-urban income inequalities since independence.

But in urban India, wherever you go — shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals — you have TV monitors propagating that election promises have already come true: India’s Shining, Feeling Good.

You only have to close your ears to the sickening crunch of the policeman’s boot on someone’s ribs, you only have to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged, broken people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor — and you will be in that other, beautiful world. The singing, dancing world of Bollywood’s permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, permanently happy Indians waving the tri-colour and Feeling Good. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell which one’s the real world and which one’s virtual. Laws like Pota are like buttons on a TV. You can use it to switch off the poor, the troublesome, the unwanted.

There is a new kind of secessionist movement taking place in India. Shall we call it New Secessionism? It’s an inversion of Old Secessionism. It’s when people who are actually part of a whole different country, a whole different economy, a whole different planet, pretend they’re part of this one. It is the kind of secession in which a relatively small section of people become immensely wealthy by appropriating everything — land, rivers, water, freedom, security, dignity, fundamental rights including the right to protest — from a large group of people. It’s a vertical secession, not a horizontal, territorial one. It’s the real Structural Adjustment — the kind that separates India Shining from India. India Pvt Ltd from India the Public Enterprise.

It’s the kind of secession in which public infrastructure, productive public assets — water, electricity, transport, telecommunications, health services, education, natural resources — assets that the Indian state is supposed to hold in trust for the people it represents, assets that have been built and maintained with public money over decades — are sold by the state to private corporations. In India 70% of the population — 700-million people — live in rural areas. Their livelihoods depend on access to natural resources. To snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is beginning to result in dispossession and impoverishment on a barbaric scale.

India Pvt Ltd is on its way to being owned by a few corporations, such as Reliance, the Sahara Group and, of course, major multinationals such as Bechtel, General Electric and so on. The CEOs of these companies will control this country, its infrastructure and its resources, its media and its journalists, but will owe nothing to its people. They are completely unaccountable — legally, socially, morally, politically.

Quite apart from the economic implications of all this, even if it were all that it is cracked up to be (which it isn’t) — miraculous, efficient, amazing — is the politics of it acceptable to us? If the Indian state chooses to mortgage its responsibilities to a handful of corporations, does it mean that this theatre of electoral democracy that is unfolding around us right now in all its shrillness is entirely meaningless? Or does it still have a role to play?

The free market (which is actually far from free) needs the state — and needs it badly. As the disparity between the rich and poor grows, in poor countries states have their work cut out for them. Corporations on the prowl for ‘sweetheart deals” that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and administer those projects in developing countries without the active connivance of state machinery — the police, the courts, sometimes even the army.

Today corporate globalisation needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It’s called ‘Creating a Good Investment Climate”.

When we vote in India’s national elections [ending May 10], we are voting to choose which political party we would like to invest the coercive, repressive powers of the state in.

Right now in India we have to negotiate the dangerous cross-currents of neo-liberal capitalism and communal neo-fascism. While the word ‘capitalism” hasn’t completely lost its sheen yet, using the word ‘fascism” often causes offense. So we must ask ourselves, are we using the word loosely? Are we exaggerating our situation, does what we are experiencing on a daily basis qualify as fascism?

When a government more or less openly supports a pogrom against members of a minority community in which up to 2 000 people are brutally killed, is it fascism? When women of that community are publicly raped and burned alive, is it fascism? When high courts and police officials collude to see to it that nobody is punished for these crimes, is it fascism?

When 150 000 people are driven from their homes, ghetto-ised and economically and socially boycotted, is it fascism? When a government issues an edict requiring the arbitrary alteration of school history textbooks, is it fascism?

In Russia they say the past is unpredictable. In India, from our recent experience with school history textbooks, we know how true that is. Now all ‘pseudo-secularists” have been reduced to hoping that archaeologists digging under the Babri Masjid wouldn’t find the ruins of a Ram temple.

But even if it were true that there is a Hindu temple under every mosque in India, what was under the temple? Perhaps another Hindu temple to another god. Perhaps a Buddhist stupa [religious structure]. Most likely an Adivasi shrine. History didn’t begin with Savarna Hinduism, did it? How deep shall we dig? How much should we overturn?

And why is it that while Muslims who are socially, culturally and economically an unalienable part of India are called outsiders and invaders and cruelly targeted, the government is busy signing corporate deals and contracts for development aid with a government who colonised us for centuries?

Directing people’s frustrations into violence is not always enough. In order to ‘Create a Good Investment Climate” the state often needs to intervene directly.

In almost every instance of police firing, those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants. When victims refuse to be victims, they are called terrorists and are dealt with as such. Pota is the broad-spectrum antibiotic for the disease of dissent. There are other, more specific steps that are being taken — court judgements that, in effect, curtail free speech, the right to strike, the right to life and livelihood. The exits are being sealed. This year 181 countries voted in the United Nations for increased protection of human rights in the era of the War on Terror. Even the US voted in favour of it. India abstained. The stage is being set for a full-scale assault on human rights.

So how can ordinary people counter the assault of an increasingly violent state?

The space for non-violent civil disobedience has atrophied. After struggling for several years, several non-violent people’s resistance movements have come up against a wall and feel, quite rightly, they have to now change direction. Views about what that direction should be are deeply polarised. There are some who believe that an armed struggle is the only avenue left. Leaving aside Kashmir and the North East, huge swathes of territory, whole districts in Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh are controlled by those who hold that view.

Others, increasingly, are beginning to feel they must participate in electoral politics — enter the system, negotiate from within. (Similar, is it not, to the choices people faced in Kashmir?) The thing to remember is that while their methods differ radically, both sides share the belief that (to put it crudely) — enough is enough. Ya Basta.

There is no debate taking place in India that is more crucial than this one. It’s outcome will, for better or for worse, change the quality of life in this country. For everyone. Rich, poor, rural, urban.

Armed struggle provokes a massive escalation of violence from the state. We have seen the morass it has led to in Kashmir and across the North East.

So then, should we do what our prime minister suggests we do? Renounce dissent and enter the fray of electoral politics? Join the roadshow? Participate in the shrill exchange of meaningless insults, which serve only to hide what is otherwise an almost absolute consensus. Let’s not forget that on every major issue — nuclear bombs, big dams, the Babri Masjid controversy, and privatisation — the Congress sowed the seeds and the Bharatiya Janata Party swept in to reap the hideous harvest.

Between them they have eroded any real choice that parliamentary democracy is supposed to provide. The frenzy, the fair-ground atmosphere created around elections takes centre-stage in the media because everybody is secure in the knowledge that, regardless of who wins, the status quo will essentially remain unchallenged.

Personally, I don’t believe that entering the electoral fray is a path to alternative politics. Not because of that middle-class squeamishness — ‘politics is dirty” or ‘all politicians are corrupt”, but because I believe that, strategically, battles must be waged from positions of strength — not weakness.

The targets of the dual assault of communal fascism and neo-liberalism are the poor and the minority communities (who, as time goes by are gradually being impoverished.) As neo-liberalism drives its wedge between the rich and the poor, between India Shining and India, it becomes increasingly absurd for any mainstream political party to pretend to represent the interests of both the rich and the poor, because the interests of one can only be represented at the cost of the other. My ‘interests” as a wealthy Indian (were I to pursue them), would hardly coincide with the interests of a poor farmer in Andhra Pradesh.

A political party that represents the poor will be a poor party. A party with very meagre funds. Today it isn’t possible to fight an election without funds. Putting a couple of well-known social activists into Parliament is interesting, but not really politically meaningful. Not a process worth channelling all our energies into. Individual charisma, personality politics, cannot effect radical change.

However, being poor is not the same as being weak. The strength of the poor is not indoors in office buildings and courtrooms. It’s outdoors, in the fields, the mountains, the river valleys, the city streets and university campuses of this country. That’s where negotiations must be held. That’s where the battle must be waged.

Right now those spaces have been ceded to the Hindu right. Whatever anyone might think of their politics, it cannot be denied that they’re out there, working extremely hard. As the state abrogates its responsibilities and withdraws funds from health, education and essential public services, the foot soldiers of the Sangh Parivar have moved in. Alongside their tens of thousands of shakhas [branch meetings] disseminating deadly propaganda, they run schools, hospitals, clinics, ambulance services, disaster management cells. They understand powerlessness.

Meanwhile the traditional, mainstream left, still dreams of ‘seizing power” — but remains strangely unbending, unwilling to address the times. It has laid siege to itself and retreated into an inaccessible intellectual space, where ancient arguments are proffered in an archaic language that few can understand.

The only ones who present some semblance of a challenge to the onslaught of the Sangh Parivar are the grassroots resistance movements scattered across the country, fighting the dispossession and violation of fundamental rights caused by our current model of ‘development”. Most of these movements are isolated and, (despite the relentless accusation that they are ‘foreign-funded foreign agents”), they work with almost no money and no resources. They’re magnificent fire-fighters, they have their backs to the wall. But they do have their ears to the ground. They are in touch with grim reality. If they got together, if they were supported and strengthened, they could grow into a force to reckon with. Their battle, when it is fought, will have to be an idealistic one — not a rigidly ideological one.

At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom and in dignity. For everybody. We have to make common cause, and to do this we need to understand how this big old machine works — who it works for and who it works against. Who pays, who profits. Many non-violent resistance movements fighting isolated, single-issue battles across the country have realised that their kind of special-interest politics, which had its time and place, is no longer enough. That they feel cornered and ineffectual is not good enough reason to abandon non-violent resistance as a strategy. It is, however, good enough reason to do some serious introspection. We need vision.

We need to make sure that those of us who say we want to reclaim democracy are egalitarian and democratic in our own methods of functioning. If our struggle is to be an idealistic one, we cannot really make caveats for the internal injustices that we perpetrate on one another, on women, on children. For example, those fighting communalism cannot turn a blind eye to economic injustices. Those fighting dams or development projects cannot elide issues of communalism or caste politics in their spheres of influence — even at the cost of short-term success in their immediate campaigns. If opportunism and expediency come at the cost of our beliefs, then there is nothing to separate us from mainstream politicians.

If it is justice that we want, it must be justice and equal rights for all — not only for special-interest groups with special-interest prejudices. That is non-negotiable.

We have allowed non-violent resistance to atrophy into feel-good political theatre, which at its most successful is a photo opportunity for the media, and at its least successful, simply ignored. We need to re-define the meaning of politics. The NGO-isation of civil society initiatives is taking us in exactly the opposite direction. It’s de-politicising us. Making us dependent on aid and handouts. We need to re-imagine the meaning of civil disobedience.

Perhaps we need an elected shadow parliament outside the Lok Sabha (the Indian Parliament), without whose support and affirmation Parliament cannot easily function.

A shadow parliament that keeps up an underground drumbeat, that shares intelligence and information (all of which is increasingly unavailable in the mainstream media). Fearlessly, but non-violently, we must disable the working parts of this machine that is consuming us.

We’re running out of time. Even as we speak, the circle of violence is closing in. Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us. —