Guns, Placards, and Dignity
It has been a sobering week.
On my way back from the doctor’s clinic the Wednesday before previous, handed a lengthy prescription of anti-chickenpox medication, I had expected a fortnight of fatigue and body ache. For the first few days, my body followed the script.
I was laying in bed last Sunday, watching an India vs West Indies cricket match and casually scrolling through Twitter, when I found the video of students from Jamia Milia Islamia forming a human shield to protect one of their friends against the peaceful, lathi-wielding, Delhi Police. Later that night, social media timelines bore pictures and videos of policemen, in cricket helmets, opening fire at Aligarh Muslim University.
I must admit, I am desensitised to violence in India. Part of it is because of the frequency with which people in this country choose canes and guns as the answer to ideological conflict; part of it because of the current political climate in India, which legitimises communal hatred; and part of it, undoubtedly and most importantly, is because I’m privileged and unlikely to be ever hauled up on ideological or communal grounds by this nation’s protectors of law and order.
This wasn’t the first case of the establishment trying to arm-twist dissenters, or using violence against the defenceless, or targeting students who have a mind of their own and can see through whatever the government is trying to do in the name of necessity. Yet, something about the two videos — of the female Jamia students and the firing at AMU — kept me up the entire night with many questions in mind, most of them existential and distressing.
Like many others, I have read up whatever I could on the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, their implications in isolation and in conjunction with each other, and come to an opinion. That opinion isn’t important, because far more qualified, educated and capable people, who have studied more about policies than most of us put together, are already demystifying it on the streets and on social media. If you’re looking for a source to educate yourself even further (always a good idea, I’m told), I’d point you in this direction.
The country-wide protests — led by students, or millennials, as we all have patronisingly called them so often — organised in dissent to the bill but largely in solidarity with those subject to state-sanctioned violence, have possibly been the brightest rays of sunshine to touch this nation in a long time. On a personal level, it was incredibly moving to see the pictures from August Kranti Maidan, India Gate, and Valluvar Kottam.
Sandwiched between those pictures were disturbing videos of Ramachandra Guha getting dragged away by Bangalore policemen — a move that deeply reflected the current state of political discourse in India. This video led me to two questions that I wish to find answers to, someday. One — how fragile an institution do you have to be to feel intimidated by the best minds of your own country? Two — more importantly, where have we reached as sentient human beings if we feel the need to manhandle a 61-year-old historian with nothing but a poster in his hand?
A quick word on the former. Right after Guha got detained, BJP Karnataka’s Twitter account claimed people like him claim to be more renowned than they actually are. Guha’s detention and this tweet sparked off a few things. An entire army of supporters joined in the chorus and started replying to every tweet about and by Guha with questions on the lines of “but who are you?”. Within a few hours of his detention, major international publications came together to admonish any decision making between the state and the police that could lead to such a thing. It is debatable whether those in the high offices of BJP’s social media teams, or even their rabid fanbois, know much about the Streisand Effect.
Now about the second question. In different forms, it’s something I have often thought about, not found the answer to, and moved on. As a function of shortening attention spans, our targets for outrage are disposable. The greatest gift these protests have given us is a hard knock on our privilege and a chance to ask ourselves a few questions, irrespective of our beliefs or opinion on politics, bills, and laws.
So here goes. Have we, in our untiring efforts to align to an ideology, reached a point of indifference where water cannons and rifles are seemingly necessary tools of communication? Has political mileage overtaken compassion?
History won’t judge us by the color of our flag, but the humanity we carry within. Ramachandra Guha once wrote “In the war for power, the first thing we lose is dignity”, and it’ll be a bloody travesty if we decide to sacrifice what’s left of our dignity at the altar of ideological difference.
