Another of the serious offenses listed in the charge sheet is that Dr. Saibaba is the joint-secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), an organization that is banned in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh where it is suspected to be a Maoist Front organization. It is not banned in Delhi. Or Maharashtra. The president of RDF is the well-known poet Varavara Rao who lives in Hyderabad.
Dr. Saibaba’s trial has not begun. When it does, it is likely to take months, if not years. The question is, can a person with a 90 percent disability survive in those abysmal prison conditions for so long?
In the year he’s been in prison, his physical condition has deteriorated alarmingly. He is in constant, excruciating pain. (The jail authorities have helpfully described this as “quite normal” for polio victims.) His spinal cord has degenerated. It has buckled and is pushing up against his lungs. His left arm has stopped functioning. The cardiologist at the local hospital where the jail authorities took him for a test has asked that he be given an angioplasty urgently. If he does undergo an angioplasty, given his condition and the conditions in prison, the prognosis is dire. If he does not, and remains incarcerated, it is dire, too. Time and again the jail authorities have disallowed him medication that is vital not just to his well-being, but to his survival. When they do allow the medicines, they disallow the special diet that is meant to go with it.
Although India is party to international covenants on disability rights and Indian law expressly forbids the incarceration of a person who is disabled as an under-trial for a prolonged period, Dr. Saibaba has been denied bail twice by the sessions court. On the second occasion bail was denied based on the jail authorities demonstrating to the court that they were giving him the specific, special care a person in his condition required. (They did allow his family to replace his wheelchair.) In a letter from prison, Dr. Saibaba said that the day the order denying him bail came, the special care was withdrawn. Driven to despair he went on a hunger strike. Within a few days he was taken to the hospital unconscious.
For the sake of argument let’s leave to the courts the decision about whether Dr. Saibaba is guilty or innocent of the charges leveled against him. And for just a moment, let’s turn our attention solely to the question of bail, because for him that is quite literally a question of life and death.
No matter what the charges against him are, should Professor Saibaba get bail? Here’s a list of a few well-known public figures and government servants who have been given bail.
On April 23, 2015, Babu Bajrangi, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre in which ninety-seven people were murdered in broad daylight, was released on bail by the Gujarat High Court for an “urgent eye operation.” This is Babu Bajrangi in his own words speaking about the crime he committed: “We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire, we set them on fire and killed them … hacked, burnt, set on fire … We believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don’t want to be cremated. They’re afraid of it” (“After Killing Them I Felt Like Maharana Pratap” Tehelka, September 1, 2007).
Eye-operation, huh? Well, maybe on second thought it is urgent to replace the murderous lenses he seems to view the world through with something less stupid and less dangerous.
On July 30, 2014, Maya Kodnani, a former minister of the Modi government in Gujarat, convicted and serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for being the “kingpin” of that same Naroda Patiya massacre, was granted bail by the Gujarat High Court. Kodnani is a medical doctor and says she suffers from intestinal tuberculosis, a heart condition, clinical depression, and a spinal problem. Her sentence has been suspended.
Amit Shah, also a former minister in the Modi government in Gujarat, was arrested in July 2010, accused of ordering the extrajudicial killing of three people—Sohrabuddin Sheikh; his wife, Kausar Bi; and Tulsiram Prajapati. The Central Bureau of Investigation produced phone records showing that Shah was in constant touch with the police officials who held the victims in illegal custody before they were murdered and that the number of phone calls between him and those police officials spiked sharply during those days. Amit Shah was released on bail three months after his arrest. (Subsequently, after a series of disturbing and mysterious events, he has been let off altogether.) He is currently the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the right-hand man of prime minister Narendra Modi.
On May 22, 1987, forty-two Muslim men rounded up in a truck by the Police Armed Constabulary (PAC) were shot dead in cold blood on the outskirts of Hashimpura; their bodies were dumped in a canal. Nineteen members of the PAC were accused in the case. All of them were allowed to continue in service, receiving their promotions and bonuses like everybody else. Thirteen years later, in the year 2000, sixteen of them surrendered (three had died). They were released on bail immediately. A few weeks ago, in March 2015, all sixteen were acquitted for lack of evidence.
Hany Babu, a teacher in Delhi University and a member of the Committee for the Defense and Release of Saibaba, was recently able to meet Dr. Saibaba for a few minutes in the hospital. At a press conference (on April 23, 2015) that went more or less unreported, Hany Babu described the circumstances of the meeting: Dr. Saibaba, on a saline drip, sat up in bed and spoke to him. A security guard stood over him with an AK-47 pointed at his head. It was his duty to make sure the prisoner did not run away on his paralyzed legs.
Will Dr. Saibaba come out of the Nagpur Central jail alive? Do they want him to? There is much to suggest that they do not.
This is what we put up with, what we vote for, what we agree to.
This is us.
First published in Outlook, May 18, 2015.
MY SEDITIOUS HEART
On a balmy February night, aware that things were not going well, I did what I rarely do. I put in earplugs and switched on the television. Even though I had said nothing about the spate of recent events—murders and lynchings, police raids on university campuses, student arrests, and enforced flag-waving—I knew that my name was still on the A-list of “antinationals.”
That night, I began to worry that, in addition to the charge of criminal contempt of court I was already facing (for “interfering in the administration of justice,” “bashing the Central Government, State Governments, the Police Machinery, so also the Judiciary,” and “demonstrating a surly, rude and boorish attitude”),1 I would also be charged with causing the death of the eternally indignant news anchor on Times Now. I thought he might succumb to an apoplectic fit as he stabbed the air and spat out my name, suggesting that I was a part of some shadowy cabal behind the ongoing “antinational” activity in the country. My crime, according to him, is that I have written about the struggle for freedom in Kashmir, questioned the execution of Mohammad Afzal Guru, walked with the Maoist guerrillas (“terrorists” in television speak) in the forests of Bastar, connected their armed rebellion to my reservations about India’s chosen model of “development,” and—with a hissy, sneering pause—even questioned the country’s nuclear tests.
Now it’s true that my views on these matters are at variance with those of the ruling establishment. In better days, that used to be known as a critical perspective or an alternative worldview. These days in India, it’s called sedition.
Sitting in Delhi, somewhat at the mercy of what looks like a democratically elected government gone rogue, I wondered whether I should rethink some of my opinions. I thought back, for instance, on a talk I gave in 2004 at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, just before the Bush-versus-Kerry election, in which I joked about how the choice between the Democrats and the Republicans—or their equivalents in India, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party—was like having to choose between Tide and Ivory Snow, two brands of washing powder both actually owned by the same company. Given all that is going on, can I honestly continue to believe that?
On merit, when it comes to pogroms against non-Hindu communities, or looking away while Dalits are slaug
htered, or making sure the levers of power and wealth remain in the hands of the tiny minority of dominant castes, or smuggling in neoliberal economic reforms on the coat-tails of manufactured communal conflict, or banning books, there’s not much daylight between the Congress and the BJP. (When it comes to the horrors that have been visited upon places like Kashmir, Nagaland, and Manipur, all the parliamentary parties, including the two major left parties, stand united in their immorality.)
Given this track record, does it matter that the stated ideologies of the Congress and the BJP are completely different? Whatever its practice, the Congress says it believes in a secular, liberal democracy, while the BJP mocks secularism and believes that India is essentially a “Hindu Rashtra”—a Hindu nation. Hypocrisy, Congress-style, is serious business. It’s clever—it smokes up the mirrors and leaves us groping around. However, to proudly declare your bigotry, to bring it out into the sunlight as the BJP does, is a challenge to the social, legal, and moral foundations on which modern India (supposedly) stands. It would be an error to imagine that what we are witnessing today is just business as usual between unprincipled, murderous political parties.
Although the idea of India as a Hindu Rashtra is constantly being imbued with an aura of ancientness, it’s a surprisingly recent one. And, ironically, it has more to do with representative democracy than it does with religion. Historically, the people who now call themselves Hindu only identified themselves by their jati, their caste names. As a community, they functioned as a loose coalition of endogamous castes organized in a strict hierarchy. (Even today, for all the talk of unity and nationalism, only 5 percent of marriages in India cut across caste lines. Transgression can still get young people beheaded.) Since each caste could dominate the ones below it, all except those at the very bottom were inveigled into being a part of the system. Brahmanvaad—Brahminism—is the word that the anti-caste movement has traditionally used to describe this taxonomy. Though it has lost currency (and is often erroneously taken to refer solely to the practices and beliefs of Brahmins as a caste group), it is, in fact, a more accurate term than “Hinduism” for this social and religious arrangement, because it is as ancient as caste itself and pre-dates the idea of Hinduism by centuries.
This is a volatile assertion, so let me shelter behind Bhimrao Ambedkar. “The first and foremost thing that must be recognized,” he wrote in Annihilation of Caste in 1936, “is that Hindu society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives [who lived east of the river Indus] for the purpose of distinguishing themselves.”2
So how and why did the people who lived east of the Indus begin to call themselves Hindus? Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the politics of representative governance (paradoxically, introduced to its colony by the imperial British government), began to replace the politics of emperors and kings. The British marked the boundaries of the modern nation-state called India, divided it into territorial constituencies, and introduced the idea of elected bodies for local self-government. Gradually, subjects became citizens, citizens became voters, and voters formed constituencies that were assembled from complicated networks of old as well as new allegiances, alliances, and loyalties. Even as it came into existence, the new nation began to struggle against its rulers. But it was no longer a question of overthrowing a ruler militarily and taking the throne. The new rulers, whoever they were, would need to be legitimate representatives of the people. The politics of representative governance set up a new anxiety: Who could legitimately claim to represent the aspirations of the freedom struggle? Which constituency would make up the majority?
This marked the beginning of what we now call “vote bank” politics. Demography turned into an obsession. It became imperative that people who previously identified themselves only by their caste names band together under a single banner to make up a majority. That was when they began to call themselves Hindu. It was a way of crafting a political majority out of an impossibly diverse society. “Hindu” was the name of a political constituency more than of a religion, one that could define itself as clearly as other constituencies—Muslim, Sikh, and Christian—could. Hindu nationalists, as well as the officially “secular” Congress party, staked their claims to the “Hindu vote.”
It was around this time that a perplexing contestation arose around the people then known as “Untouchables” or “Outcastes,” who, though they were outside the pale of the caste system, were also divided into separate castes arranged in a strict hierarchy. To even begin to understand the political chaos we are living through now, at the centre of which is the suicide of the Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, it’s important to understand, at least conceptually, this turn-of-the-century contestation.
Over the previous centuries, in order to escape the scourge of caste, millions of Untouchables (I use this word only because Ambedkar used it, too) had converted to Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity. In the past, those conversions had not been a cause of anxiety for the privileged castes. However, when the politics of demography took centre stage, this haemorrhaging became a source of urgent concern. People who had been shunned and cruelly oppressed were now viewed as a population who could greatly expand the numbers of the Hindu constituency. They had to be courted and brought into the “Hindu fold.”
That was the beginning of Hindu evangelism. What we know today as ghar wapsi, or “returning home,” was a ceremony that dominant castes devised to “purify” Untouchables and Adivasis, whom they considered “polluted.” The idea was (and is) to persuade these ancient and autochthonous peoples that they were formerly Hindus, and that Hinduism was the original, indigenous religion of the subcontinent.
It was not only Hindu nationalists among the privileged castes that tried to embrace the Untouchables politically while continuing to valorize the caste system. Their counterparts in the Congress did the same thing, too. This was the reason for the legendary standoff between Bhimrao Ambedkar and Mohandas Gandhi, and continues to be the cause of serious disquiet in Indian politics. Even today, to properly secure its idea of a Hindu Rashtra, the BJP has to persuade a majority of the Dalit population to embrace a creed that stigmatizes and humiliates them. It has been surprisingly successful, and has even managed to draw in some militant Ambedkarite Dalits. It is this paradox that has made the political moment we are living through so incandescent, so highly inflammable, and so unpredictable.
Ever since the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded, in 1925, this ideological holding company of Hindu nationalism (and of the BJP) has set itself the task of making myriad castes, communities, tribes, religions, and ethnic groups submerge their identities and line up behind the banner of the Hindu Rashtra. Which is a little like trying to sculpt a gigantic, immutable stone statue of Bharat Mata—the Hindu right’s ideal of Mother India—out of a stormy sea. Turning water into stone may not be a practical ambition, but the RSS’s long years of trying have polluted the sea and endangered its flora and fauna in irreversible ways. Its ruinous ideology—known as Hindutva, and inspired by the likes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler—openly proposes Nazi-style purges of Indian Muslims. In RSS doctrine (theorized by M. S. Golwalkar, the organization’s second sarsanghchalak, or supreme leader), the three main enemies obstructing the path to the Hindu Rashtra are Muslims, Christians, and Communists. And now, as the RSS races toward that goal, although what’s happening around us may look like chaos, everything is actually going strictly by the book.
Of late, the RSS has deliberately begun to conflate nationalism with Hindu nationalism. It uses the terms interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. Naturally, it chooses to gloss over the fact that it played absolutely no part in the struggle against British colonialism. But while the RSS left the battle of turning a British colony into an independent nation to other people, it has, since then, worked far harder than any other political or cultural organization to turn this independent nation into a Hindu nation. Before the BJP was founded, in
1980, the political arm of the RSS was the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. However, the RSS’s influence cut across party lines, and in the past its shadowy presence has even been evident in some of the more nefarious and violent activities of the Congress. The organization now has a network of tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and hundreds of thousands of workers. It has its own trade union, its own educational institutions where millions of students are indoctrinated, its own teachers’ organization, a women’s wing, a media and publications division, its own organizations dedicated to Adivasi welfare, its own medical missions, its own sad stable of historians (who produce their own hallucinatory version of history), and, of course, its own army of trolls on social media. Its sister concerns, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, provide the storm troopers that carry out organized attacks on anyone whose views they perceive to be a threat. In addition to creating its own organizations (which, together with the BJP, make up the Sangh Parivar—the Saffron Family), the RSS has also worked patiently to place its chessmen in public institutions: on government committees, in universities, the bureaucracy, and, crucially, the intelligence services.
That all this farsightedness and hard work was going to pay off one day was a foregone conclusion. Still, it took imagination and ruthlessness to come this far. Most of us know the story, but given the amnesia that is being pressed upon us, it might serve to put down a chronology of the recent present. Who knows, things that appeared unconnected may, when viewed in retrospect, actually be connected. And vice versa. So forgive me if, in an attempt to decipher a pattern, I go over some familiar territory.
My Seditious Heart Page 83