A Reminder That People Do Not Dissolve, Governments Do

Neera Chandhoke

In 1953, the working class rose in protest against the government in East Germany. And the celebrated poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht wrote his famously satirical poem: “Stating that the people/Had forfeited the confidence of the government/And could win it back only/ By redoubled effort. Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?”

We know that only poets can explore the depths of the human condition to tell us stories of betrayal. A government that has lost the confidence of the people will have to work overtime to regain it, suggested Brecht. It might prefer to dissolve the people and elect another. It is not easy to read an ironical poem or piece of literature. We have to learn to read between the lines. Only then does the political message of the poet imprint itself on our consciousness.

The ‘people’ is, of course, not a quantifiable demographic category. It is a political one; it refers to citizens who can influence public opinion either in favour of, or against the government. For authoritarian states the latter category has to be rendered irrelevant, and the former category has to be catapulted to the centre of the political arena. For instance, on August 5, 2019, the ‘people’ in Jammu and Kashmir were not dissolved. Leaders, their followers and collective political commitments were declared to be of no significance. They were thrown metaphorically into the wilderness of political nothingness. The Central government invented a political party and a political category called the people out of its supporters. People who disagreed continue to be subjected to a lockdown.

Subsequently, another section of our people was marked out for irrelevance by the introduction of religion into citizenship qualifications. Most of us kept silent and watched the unfolding scene quietly. But in December 2019 our students showed us how to reclaim citizenship rights that have been hijacked by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The outbreak of COVID-19 put a (temporary) end to enormously innovative protests. Politics as the right to challenge the power elite was muzzled by the lockdown. For the government, the lockdown has proved one of the most profitable modes of controlling recalcitrant populations, and gagging protests.

Into the political vacuum stepped the coercive arm of the Indian state: the police, the National Intelligence Agency, and the Central Bureau of Investigation among others. These agencies were galvanised to stalk and harass university students. The Central government has declared war on its own young people! India’s prisons, some of which had been emptied out for health reasons, have now been filled with university students and political activists. The state refuses to extend the right to preventive health to dissidents. They are placed outside the pale of an activity called politics, and outside the ambit of civil liberties and political rights. They are also simply banished from the sphere of humanity. This is not the way a democratic government should be treating citizens even if they have dared to question the might of the current leadership.

And now comes the twist in the tale. Students/activists are not being charged with dissent, they face allegations that they incited and fomented communal discord, and that they participated in communal riots that devastated North East Delhi in February 2020.

It is perhaps time to distinguish between two political moments. From December 2019 to March 2020 Delhi was rocked by two sorts of political mobilisations. From December 15 students, citizens and activists came together in politically imaginative ways to reclaim and protect their constitutional rights and that of their fellow citizens. February 2020 witnessed a different kind of political activity. Ugly incendiary speeches and calls to kill heralded the onset of a terrible communal riot.

What could be the link between the two mobilisations? The first one demonstrated the virtue of solidarity with fellow citizens, rejected paper citizenship, and enacted the rituals of performative citizenship. The second political moment branded the perfectly legitimate right of protest as traitorous, and mandated that ‘traitors’ be killed, which they were.

Anyone who knows a little about democracy knows that only this form of government respects the political competence of the public. Citizens have the right to hold a government they have elected accountable. Democracy is not only about majority rule. The majority principle is workable; it is hardly ethical. Democracy recognises the right of every citizen to participate in the making of decisions that affect her and her fellow citizens. That is why democracies encourage civil society as a sphere of associational life.

We know that our wellbeing is dependent upon the wellbeing of our fellow citizens. We cannot be free unless our community is free. This was the lesson of the freedom struggle, and this is the lesson India must re-learn. Freedom is an indivisible good, I cannot be free at the expense of others. And on a more instrumental note, I cannot be free for long if my neighbours are denied this right. Tomorrow will be my turn.

Moreover, I am free only when I have the choice to say yes or no. Integral to citizenship is the right to reflect, evaluate, and affirm or reject state policy. Our capacity to analyse, critique and propose alternatives to contested policy gives us agency, makes us the author of own lives, and endows us with the capacity to be the script writer of our own stories. Imagine a society in which everyone nods in acquiescence when the ruling elite speaks. Imagine a society in which no one addresses or speaks back to power. How dull; how unimaginative will that society be! History tells us that no society degenerates if its members dissent. It comes alive, it acquires vibrancy, it enables agency. But societies wither the moment members are coerced to agree with power holders.

Though individual acts of dissent are significant, they are not enough. People have to come together in a wide-ranging movement to protest against injustice. Gandhi showed us how to inspire millions of people to participate in civil disobedience campaigns against laws that are palpably unfair, clearly unjust, and demonstrably discriminatory. Indians not only mobilised to challenge laws; they did so in palpably creative ways such as breaking the salt law.

The movement to reclaim the right of citizenship that erupted in December 2019 tapped political imaginations precisely because of the creativity and the political imagination of the protestors. These protests have thrown up issues that are worth reflecting on. Citizenship authorises us to benefit from the services offered by the state – passports, education, health, housing, post-retirement benefits, the right to travel, the right to employment and above all the right to vote. Citizenship embodies a democratic relationship between the state and its citizens.

But citizens of a political community also owe each other obligations of justice and solidarity against state repression. Citizenship, our young people reminded us, is not only about our status as a holder of rights, it is about membership of a political community. It is a relational concept that establishes a bond based not on kinship or blood but on the fact that we are members of a civic community defined by a constitution.

The protests fell into the category of what is called performative citizenship. Indians marched holding the national flag in one hand and copies of the Constitution in the other, they assembled against the background of the national flag and representations of Bhagat Singh, Gandhi and Ambedkar. They sang the national anthem, read out the Preamble of the Constitution that promises, liberty, equality justice and fraternity, and transformed the Constitution into a public, accessible, and democratic document.

The Constitution is the anchor of our identity, the protector of our rights, our legacy and our culture. The occupation of public spaces, sit-downs on public roads, coinage of innovative slogans, and art works, proclaimed and enacted popular sovereignty. Despite the bloodletting in Delhi, these protests continue to challenge and interrogate the power of the ruling classes. The entire concept of paper citizenship disseminated by the government of India has been derailed, destabilised and rendered insecure. What we see today is citizenship as performance.

The rulers declare that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act will not take away citizenship from anyone. But as our young people recognised, provisions of the Act will set the ground for further disenfranchisement of those who have lived and worked in India since birth, who possess rights as full citizens, who own the Constitution and the national flag, and who are citizens of India by virtue of membership of a territorially grounded political community. We owe solidarity to fellow citizens who may be stripped of full citizenship rights, deprived of the right to live and work in a location of their choice, deprived of the right to have rights to protest, to assemble peacefully and without arms, and to share equally in the burdens and the benefits that a society has to offer.

These protests do not ask for the grant of new rights of citizenship. Protestors reassert their right as citizens to hold an elected government accountable for acts that harm those who voted them into power. They demonstrate that the people of India will not accept any act that might deprive them or their fellow-citizens of their rights in the near future or ever. They have reclaimed their basic Constitutional rights.

In the process an important issue has been thrown up onto the political agenda. We have to, once again, articulate our relationship to the state and obligations to fellow-citizens in the civic language of constitutional rights. We have to dismiss the implications of the CAA that India is a natural homeland for all Hindus wherever they live. The belief is dangerous; it will further divide the country, whereas civic citizenship will unite us. We have to reinstate periodically our obligation to vulnerable citizens in the vocabulary of solidarity. We have to insist that civic obligations are grounded in the place we live, in common memories, and in the experience of sharing equally the benefits and the burdens of a society.

The notion of civic citizenship critiques the distinction between citizens on religious grounds as illegitimate and as undemocratic. It informs us that there is need to repeatedly side with our compatriots in the struggle against hierarchies and marginalisation.

Till now, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders declared through words and deeds that any sort of dissent will not be tolerated, and whoever disagrees with the government will be charged with sedition. From mid-December to February citizens told the government that the corruption of citizenship by the introduction of religious criterion is not acceptable. Protestors proclaimed that the right to citizenship is ours by reason of birth, by reasons of belonging, by reasons of fidelity, by reasons of solidarity with fellow citizens, and for the simple reason that we bow their heads before the national flag and stand up in reverence when the national anthem is sung.

This is performative citizenship, citizenship as enactment, citizenship as participation in the political decisions of a society, citizenship as articulation of popular sovereignty, citizenship as owing obligations to fellow citizens, citizenship as status, and citizenship rights as prized possessions. What is the significance of paper citizenship before performative citizenship?

In the face of mass protests that caught the imagination of the world, aspirant leaders of the ruling ideology might have decided to divert attention to communal issues. The strategy is predictable and deadly. And then the pandemic struck. Politics went underground and the coercive arm of the state apparatus found an opportunity to punish leaders of a movement that demanded nothing but the reclamation of a right already granted.

The government has tried to dissolve that very section that is politically significant. But people do not dissolve except in moments of poetic irony, governments do. It is time for our ruling elites to recollect that in East Germany it was not the people but the government that was dissolved by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

(Neera Chandhoke is former professor of political science, Delhi University.)

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‘Did No Wrong’: Named in Murder Chargesheet, Delhi Doctor Who Treated Riot Victims Is Unafraid

Ismat Ara

Mohammad Imran, 22, was on the streets of Delhi’s Mustafabad with his father when suddenly the police started firing and instructing residents to go home.

It was February 25 and North East Delhi was in the grip of the kind of communal violence the national capital has not seen in the last few decades. Amid the chaos, a bullet hit Imran’s genital area, ripping apart his scrotum and penis. The bleeding would not stop. Imran’s family knew he needed immediate medical attention, but with the violence on the streets, they couldn’t take him to a government hospital.

Luckily for them, a clinic in Old Mustafabad was open – to provide first aid to victims of the riots. Run by Dr M.A. Anwar, Al-Hind is a small clinic. It is not equipped to be a hospital, in spite of its name. But considering Imran’s condition, Dr Anwar took him in and treated him. The next day, Imran was shifted to LNJP Hospital.

Nearly four months later, Imran, a daily wage worker, is still recovering. He believes Dr Anwar saved his life that day. “Had it not been for him and his selfless work during the riots, I and others like me who couldn’t reach big hospitals immediately wouldn’t have survived,” Imran says.

Lifesaver or murderer?

Imran was just one among the more than 600 patients Dr Anwar treated at his clinic during the riots. Many of them had been severely injured. The doctors at the clinic, including Anwar’s brother, Dr Meraj Ikram, worked 24/7, treating bullet, pellet, knife and stick injuries.

So, when Anwar learnt that he had been named in a chargesheet dealing with the murder of a 20-year-old waiter, Dilbar Negi, he was shocked.

Placing Anwar at an anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protest site at Farooqia Masjid, the chargesheet, filed on June 4, read:

“On the outside, this protest site had pictures of B.R. Ambedkar, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Mahatma Gandhi and the Tricolour was waved. However, one particular community was incited against the central government. Those who participated in this protest, who were incited, on the night of 23.02.2020 took part in the violence following which the FIR … was registered at police station Dayalpur. The organisers of the protest which took place at Farooqia Masjid are 1. Arshad Pradhan 2. Dr Anwar, owner of Al-Hind hospital. The above mentioned persons could not be interrogated; they will be questioned later and we will accordingly investigate.”

Anwar says he had not gone to the protest site that day. “On February 19, I had gone to attend my aunt’s funeral in Bihar. I came back home on the morning of February 24 and was sleeping because of fatigue when the protest was happening,” he says.

Moreover, Anwar claims he doesn’t know Arshad Pradhan, the other “organiser” named in the chargesheet. “I’ve heard his name, but never met him.”

Giving back to society

Anwar says he is being ‘targeted’ for showing ‘basic humanity’ and that the allegations against him are false.

“I have never believed in any kind of violence. Whenever police officers needed help to disperse crowds during the anti-CAA protests [through December, January and February], I always went around in the neighbourhood and people listened to me,” he says. “Once I even got hurt trying to disperse a stone-pelting crowd in Brijpuri. I was stuck between protesters and the police for almost an hour.”

The 40-year-old doctor is from Bihar’s Champaran region. He moved to Delhi 20 years ago and worked at the GTB Hospital for a few years before starting his own clinic in Mustafabad, where he also lives.

“I started my practice with a mere table and chair in a small room,” he recalls. “Slowly, over time, I managed to open a small clinic. There is a dense population of poor people in this area who earn their money from daily wage jobs and cannot afford expensive treatment at big hospitals. I started my out patients’ department, charging only Rs 50 as fee.” Sometimes patients could not manage even that.

Over a period of time, Anwar earned the respect of the residents of Mustafabad across communities. He was always there for them. “A patient is a patient,” he says in a no-nonsense manner.

When the nationwide lockdown was imposed in  March, all the medical practitioners in the area stopped working. Anwar, however, continued to  see his patients.

‘My work speaks for me’

The Al-Hind clinic has one hall, two rooms and 10 beds. There are three doctors and two other staff members. During the riots in Northeast Delhi, the clinic became a 24-hour hospital and emergency ward.

“The victims kept coming. We were busy 24 hours a day during that time,” says Anwar. “When you see the state of the victims, you automatically push your boundaries to help them.” Because of the violence the staff was also reluctant to come to work.

As doctors they were expected to be “professional”. But there were times when the brutality of the violence took its toll. Anwar recalls how his brother Meraj once burst into tears when he saw the blood-covered dead body of a riot victim.

“I had to hold him tight, this grown-up man who was crying, and tell him that doctors cannot cry, especially not at such a time,” Anwar recalls. “I told him, if you cry, people will lose heart and confidence.”

The communal violence in northeast Delhi left its horrific mark on the injured, uprooted many families, destroyed their homes and businesses. The one thing that remained constant was the care Anwar gave the riot victims after the riots as well.

“People were so scared of the violence that they refused to leave  their homes in Mustafabad,” he explains. “Some NGOs and local people helped with resources. Thanks to them, we were able to successfully give first aid to about 10,000 people.”

The residents of the neighbourhood provided the clinic with cotton, bandages, stitching material for stitching wounds, plaster, medicines and other first aid resources. Dr Harjeet Bhatti, national convener of the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum, a team of doctors from AIIMS, JNU and MAX Hospital and a team from the Waqf Board also contributed to Anwar’s efforts.

Every incident leaves its mark on an individual. During the riots Anwar and his colleagues worked round the clock to treat patients.  At times it was traumatic for them, too, to treat people injured in the riots, but it was necessary.

“But something dries up inside you,” says Anwar.

‘I am not scared. I have done nothing wrong’

The chargesheet has come as a bolt from the blue for Anwar and his family. His wife Sarwari finds it difficult to hide her anxiety. They have two children – a five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. “We will somehow get through this ordeal,” he says.

Then he reveals that he often received hate calls from unknown callers during those days. “They would abuse me and say I would have to bear the consequences of trying to help save people’s lives,” he says. He mostly kept his cell phone switched off after that.

Several of his patients also asked him to be careful, saying that he could be targeted by the police for his work during those days of violence in February. 

Anwar says he ignored the warnings. “I have always had good relations with the police in my area. We have often worked together to handle difficulties in the neighbourhood. Sometimes they come to me and the other elders of the area with problems and we all sit together and try to figure out a way to deal with them.”

Besides, he often conducts public meetings between the people and the police for mediation and welfare of the area.

“In any case, I was not committing a crime by giving aid to riot victims. Only those who have committed crimes should be fearful.”

For the people, by the people

Anwar always knew that the residents of Mustafabad respected him for the work he did, but in the last four months the bonds between him and the community have reached another level altogether, he says.

“Whenever anyone hears that I am not well they come to my house and offer to take care of me and my family,” says Anwar with a smile. “The people I helped during the riots come to me now and extend their support. They tell me they are with me in this fight. And if the need arises, they say they are willing to go to court for me. People are angry that I am being targeted…”

He has been summoned to the Delhi Police crime branch several times for questioning.

“I was asked about the dead bodies that had come to my hospital. I was asked to reveal the names of the organisers of the protests. I was asked, who funds the protests? Who gives provocative speeches?” Anwar says. “But how can I answer these questions when I was never part of the protests? How can I make unwarranted claims? This is why they are angry with me. I was threatened with the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act). My phone was confiscated. I still haven’t got it back.”

He adds: “Let them [the police] do their best to implicate me. They will fail. I have faith and my work speaks on my behalf. I have done nothing but help the victims of one of the worst riots the city has seen.”

(Ismat Ara is a freelance journalist. This article is courtesy: The Wire.)

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Assault on the Rule of Law and Article 19 of the Constitution of India

Statement of the Constitutional Conduct Group

4 July 2020: This statement by our group of former civil servants arises from our deep concern at the assault on the Rule of Law in India and on its citizens’ rights to free speech and dissent, basic elements of any democracy. The whole constitutional edifice is dependent on the Rule of Law, which implies the subjection of all the organs and instrumentalities of the state to the law and the absence of arbitrary power. The rights to Freedom of Speech & Expression, Freedom of Assembly and the like, guaranteed by Article 19 of the Constitution, are a corrective to the plight of the poor and the disadvantaged across the axes of income, gender, religion, caste and community. To uphold the rule of law and enforce the rights to freedoms, the judiciary must be the vigilant sentinel guarding the values of constitutional propriety.

Scholars like Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen have established that the elimination of famine, a colonial legacy in India, came from the clamour of the media, the legislatures and the courts as also concerns of political parties seeking re-election. Public Interest Litigation has given voice to the suppressed on issues like bonded labour, child labour and the illiterate without work or food finding resonance in the corridors of power. Article 19 of the Constitution of India guaranteeing freedom of speech is the key in this struggle.

The rampant erosion of the rule of law in evidence today militates against the actualization of the freedom of speech which is the cornerstone of democratic functioning. The gulf between the Rule of Law rhetoric and reality is getting wider and wider. The police establishments across the country appear to have become proxies for the respective ruling parties. Independent experts like Special Rapporteurs and members of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions associated with the United Nations, in referring to the arrest of eleven activists, including Kafeel Khan, Safoora Zargar, Akhil Gogoi and Sharjeel Imam, say succinctly: “These defenders, many of them students, appear to have been arrested simply because they exercised their right to denounce and protest against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), and their arrest seems clearly designed to send a chilling message to India’s vibrant civil society that criticism of government policies will not be tolerated.” Journalists like Gauri Lankesh, a free-spirited journalist writing in Kannada,  have been murdered, shot in cold blood allegedly by right-wing groups.

According to the Press Freedom Index of Reporters without Borders, India stands at 142 out of 180 countries in 2020, falling 6 places since 2015. Flagrant misuse of draconian laws of sedition and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) has led to the arrest of journalists, intellectuals, university students, film-makers, human rights activists and popular figures who dared criticise the present regime. When, as happened in Karnataka, in consequence of a school play critical of the CAA  a primary school teacher and the mother of a student  are charged with sedition and two young children aged 9 and 10 are questioned by police over many days, this becomes a theatre of the absurd.

Any criticism of government is considered “anti-national” and invites punitive wrath. The law of sedition, itself a colonial relic, is resorted to by a succession of governments, but its application has sharply increased. From 2016 to 2018, 332 persons were arrested under this law but only 7 convicted, exposing the absence of evidence and exercise of vendetta. The online portal Scroll.in reported that more than “10,000 Adivasis in Jharkhand have been accused of sedition and disturbing public order” in connection with the Pathalgadi movement.

In the case of UAPA, court proceedings drag on while detention continues. In the celebrated Bhima-Koregaon case several of India’s finest social and human rights activists like Sudha Bharadwaj, Shoma Sen and Gautam Navlakha and public intellectuals like Anand Teltumbde languish in prison under the malevolent label of “urban Maoists”, which consigns such exemplars of civic life to the reviled category of “anti-national”. Attacks on students of Jawaharlal Nehru University  and Jamia Milia Islamia  recently choked the rights of students and faculty to voice their criticism of the existing state of affairs, including the CAA.

The corona pandemic has been an excuse for curbing freedom of speech across States. A report of the Rights and Risks Analysis Group has it that 55 journalists were singled out for writing on the mishandling of the Covid situation: threats, FIRs, assaults and arrests were amongst the intimidatory tactics used. Though the largest number was in UP, such cases also took place in States with governments of different political parties. Dhaval Patel in Gujarat and Rahul Zori in Maharashtra, with FIRs filed against them, and Major Singh Panjabi being beaten up in Punjab by the police are examples. Earlier in the year, one Dr Indranil Khan in Kolkata was interrogated, threatened with arrest and had his phone and SIM card confiscated for commenting online of deficiencies in the supply of PPE to doctors and nurses working with corona patients. In a rare defence of the freedom of speech, the Kolkata High Court in his case said: “Freedom of speech and expression which is granted under Article 19 of the Constitution of India has to be scrupulously upheld by the State. If an expression of opinion brings the government into disrepute, it cannot defend this allegation by intimidation of the person expressing the opinion by subjecting him to prolonged interrogation, threatening arrest, seizing his mobile phone and SIM card and so on.”

When Siddharth Varadarajan, founding Editor of The Wire, faced criminal charges for reporting that the UP Chief Minister attended a religious event after the lockdown was announced, more than 4600 signatories protested, amongst them eminent academics, a retired Supreme Court Judge, a former National Security Adviser, a former Chief of Naval Staff and well-known persons connected with the arts. “A medical emergency should not serve as the pretext for the imposition of a de facto political emergency” they wrote.

The detentions in Kashmir of hundreds of political activists and the suspension of communications for several months after the revocation of its special status is a blot on India’s democracy, with Kashmir described by the International Press Institute as amongst the “world’s most repressive spots for the press.” In many parts of India, Section 144 is imposed for extended periods of time to prohibit the assembly of people despite the Supreme Court ruling that such curbs be restricted to emergencies.

Finally, the investigations into the riots in north-east Delhi have betrayed an institutional bias against the minority community. Dr M.A. Anwar, the proprietor of Hind Hospital in New Mustafabad, whose prompt action in providing help to injured people during the targeted violence in North East Delhi in late February 2020 was praised by many, including the Delhi High Court, is now named in a charge-sheet filed in a murder case and for instigating local people against the government on the issue of CAA-NRC. The UAPA has been used against activists who opposed the CAA through peaceful protest. People like Harsh Mander and Yogendra Yadav have been named in charge sheets even though they are not amongst the accused. Harsh Mander’s speech, which called for peace, was made in December, 2019,  weeks before the outbreak of any violence. Yet there are rumours of his intended arrest which, were it to occur now, would make a travesty of the law. Meanwhile, Kapil Mishra and Anurag Thakur, BJP leader and Minister respectively, who had openly called for violence, widely projected in the media, which followed almost immediately thereafter, face no action.

All Indians must unite in defence of the Rule of Law and Article 19, the repository of the democratic right to freedom of speech and to dissent.

SATYAMEVA JAYATE