Parallels with renaissance man Victor Jara seem inadequate here, but while the government lost no time to felicitate this poet, playwright, musician, artist, activist, English literature lecturer, feminist, journalist, trade unionist, political theorist, champion of farmers' rights, working-class hero and loving uncle (they even named a street Safdar Hashmi Marg within a week of his murder) the arts continue to be underfunded. Our museums -- the only recorded memory of what it's taken to build this nation -- are a disintegrating piece of dog-shit in the rain. Our agrarian sector is such that farmers -- once the cornerstone of this nation's economy -- are committing suicide in thousands every year. Workers' rights are summarily fucked over from Vibrant Gujarat to Silicon Karnataka. And every single establishment from the NFDC to our censor boards has been politicised, compromised and pasteurised.Over twenty years ago, in an interview with the New York Times, Safdar said "I believe socialism will win in ten, twenty, thirty years. It cannot fail. Capitalism is struggling with its contradictions: the pressures of an inflated economy, greater competition, low growth rates, huge debts. And it won't be long that the bubble bursts, like it did with the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. There will be more like those." Prescient, perspicacious, prophetic. But what he didn't predict was that civil liberties, the rule of law, habeas corpus and freedom of speech could have come to such a sorry pass in this country he loved so much, and so fiercely.
Meanwhile, in Parliament, they've just dressed up the same old whore of a Patriot Act and are pimping her as the new virgin on the block.
Happy goddamn new year. And best of fucking luck. But before any of that, a look at how we got here...
Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent.
Okay, so we had something called the TaDA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities prevention act) which was a bit like Patriot Act Lite. We let it have a ten-year run, then got rid of it because it had a conviction rate of less than 1% and it frankly didn't help in curbing terrorism.
Then we got something called PoTA (Prevention of Terrorist Activities act) which was pretty much standard Patriot Act stuff. Which means it could piss over you, your great-grandmother, and every other fundamental-rights-claiming twit in the middle. And to fantastic use it was put too. People disappeared, people were tortured, people confessed, that kind of thing. The only discernible progression over TaDA was that the conviction rate under PoTA was 2%. And terrorism continued unabated in India. So, just two years later, we got rid of that too.
Then, just last week, with the stroke of a pen the Parliament pushed through something called UAPA, and with the dull thwack of a rubberstamp, our invertebrate President (not like there's another kind) made it law. Elle, ay and double-fucking-you... LAW.
Now, this is one mean bastard of a law, in the sense that it's still PoTA, but it now has the backing of not just the right-wing, flag-waving, hypermasculine, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, fascist lunatics, but also the centrist parties. In short, it's become law much the same way the Patriot Act became law... one big terrorist attack on Bombay's fat and rich (for a change), and the entire Parliament rallies behind a draconian finger-nail-pulling, unconstitutionally-wiretapping, habeas-corpus-screwing, six-months-without-trial, guilty-until-proven-innocent law that's then passed without so much as a slap on the wrist or even a ceremonial tsk-tsk. The UAPA is so beyond the pale that even Amnesty, whose political independence I've always been a bit unsure about, has come out with scathing response... "The so-called “war on terror” has led to an erosion of a whole host of human rights. States are resorting to practices which have long been prohibited by international law, and have sought to justify them in the name of national security."
All of this begs the "emperor-has-no-clothes-on" question that mainstream media (with the notable exception of The Hindu) just ain't asking: If our anti-terror laws are getting sharper sets of teeth year after year, why is it that terrorist incidents have increased in India over the years? Hmmm.
That must be because they hate us. They hate our freedom. They hate our democracy. Hmmm. Why do they hate us? They hate us because they hate us. It's an evil ideology. Hmmm. They live in caves, we'll smoke them out, blah-de-blah-de-blah...
Kristallnacht, Karnataka, Kandhamal...
Barely 100 days after its ascendance to power in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, the right-wing BJP government slammed down its calling card. In just under four months, nearly 60 pre-meditated major attacks were orchestrated against churches and other Christian prayer halls across the state. That's one attack every two days. Apparently, even stormtroopers need to rest every other day.Among the reasons given by the Bajrang Dal (the BJP's militant wing) for the "retaliatory" violence was that a pamphlet issued by an evangelist group in the state allegedly contained derogatory remarks about Hindu gods and goddesses. Never mind the minor inconvenience that the printing press mentioned in the pamphlet was bankrupted ten years ago, and that its owner is now running a weaving business.
This is our very own Kristallnacht.
Kandhamal in Orissa (also ruled by a BJP coalition), saw its churches vandalised, torched, or razed to the ground throughout the year. A nun was gang-raped and paraded naked in broad daylight under the watchful gaze of policemen, on the same day that another missionary was burnt to her death. Thousands of Christians were hounded out from their villages and, months later, many are yet to return from makeshift relief camps.
Among the reasons given by the VHP (the BJP's organising wing) for this "retaliatory" violence is that local Christians had killed a VHP ideologue. Never mind the minor inconvenience that the said ideologue was killed by Maoists who, last I checked, are a bunch of godless sandal-wearing freaks like myself.
This, too, is our very own Kristallnacht, but don't expect an international outcry. Far from it.
Our "free press" did little more than a drive-by commentary of what had been unraveling under its gobsmacked nose for months. By September, Kandhamal dropped below the news radar. And barely a month later, there were more pressing things to breathlessly gush over... the relocation of Tata's Nano plant to Narendra "Genocide" Modi's Gujarat, the knighthood of Shahrukh Khan by some Malaysian geriatric squad, a beauty queen pimping her lobotomy on a global catwalk, some tupenny-bit Bollywood actor's navel sighting, the launch of some late-Sixties piece of electronic circuitry into lunar orbit.
This meticulously designed and deployed visitation of violence against India's minorities could, ostensibly, be cited sometime in the future as justification for a terrorist strike against this nation, just as the militants that took Bombay hostage for over sixty hours last November cited the Kashmir and Gujarat genocides for their actions. But what if the rot runs deeper, and wider?
The Police State Has Always Been Here. We Just Didn't Know What To Call It.
Last September, Lakshman Kailash was picked up from his Airport Road flat in Bangalore, the world's software sweatshop, and spirited away to a prison across the state border for nearly fifty days without a trial. Why? Because someone had posted some blah about Shivaji on the popular social networking site Orkut, and Lakshman's telco mistakenly gave his IP address to the pigs. Next thing po-boy Lakshman knows, he's woken up by the brown shirts, his computer is scanned, he's interrogated for hours, and then he's sent to the gulag. The media, of course, thinks nothing of it. No questions raised about how goddamn wrong this whole thing might be. Not a word about freedom of speech. Not a word about privacy laws. Not a word about state jurisdiction. Not a word about habeas corpus. Nothing. Diddly-fucking-squat. Instead, the whole debate (if I may use the term loosely) revolved around "oh, they caught the wrong guy!"
I too think Shivaji was a shit-streaked asshole, along with all the neanderthals that eulogise him. So, what happens next? Do they come and get me for thoughtcrime, just like they got Lakshman?
BRB, there's someone at the door...
...okay, I'm back. It was just the newspaper guy. Beat the shit out of him.
Speaking of thoughtcrime, get a load of this...
Just a fortnight back, some enterprising young fella named Jameel Ahmed (working with Bosch, Bangalore, the aforementioned software sweatshop of the world) made the godawful mistake of suggesting that Muntadar al-Zeid, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush, was a hero. Next thing po-boy Jameel knows, he's detained by the police, questioned by several high-ranking police officials, taken to his house where a large number of documents are seized, his SIM cards and laptop are sent to forensics to retrieve information, and -- hold your breath -- a deputy commissioner of police shamelessly tells the media that “we are planning to use the detained man to crack old cases.” Would that be Advani, Modi or Thackeray?
It would appear, as Winston Smith stoically noted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, that "thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death."
Driving With Moslems
A report card of the Police State's outstanding performance would be incomplete without a mention of what happened in the last week of 2008. The world's by-now-famous software sweatshop witnessed three incidents that went nearly unnoticed, and almost unreported, by mainstream media.
On Christmas, a college bus carrying a group of Hindu, Muslim and Christian students on an excursion to Mysore was attacked on National Highway 48 by over a dozen Bajrang Dal foot-soldiers (yes, the same Bajrang Dal). Tipped off by one of the Hindu students on the bus that "several Hindu girls were travelling in the bus which also had Muslim and Christian boys,” the Bajrang Dal activists -- armed with swords, rods and clubs -- forced their way into the bus and beat the crap out of everyone in sight. The president of their city unit, Sharan Pumpwell (that really is his name) said “it is a natural reaction from us against those who dare to commit moral violations.”
Elsewhere in the BJP-ruled state, a telco salesman was attacked on the same day by the Bajrang Dal as, in the words of Mr. Pumpwell (no, that really is his name) "he had dared to gain the affection of a Hindu girl." The salesman is badly hurt but out of danger. Therefore, no case has been registered. On condition of anonymity, sources close to Arthur Miller inform that he will not be coming up with a sequel titled "The Near-Death Of A Salesman" since the author's already long since dead, having dared to gain the affection of some Christian girl named Marilyn.
Driving While Speaking Urdu
Bus-driver Mushtaq Ahmed worked his knuckles to the bone to put his teenage son through Bangalore's prestigious Baldwin College. What he didn't figure, sitting behind the wheel all those years, was that with the unfortunate name of Mohammad Mukarram, his son wouldn't go far in this time and space.
Known to his mates as "Wheeler", Mohammad was a star of Bangalore's legendary and illegal midnight drag races. He was shot dead shortly after he ditched his bike and took refuge on the terrace of some military-industrial-complex cunt's gated-community house. His crime? He was calling home on his cellphone, frantically explaining he was stuck on a roof while ducking the police, speaking in Urdu.
Bidari, the unrepentant motherfucker that heads Bangalore's police force, had this to say: "they spotted a man on the terrace talking on his mobile in Urdu. They told him to surrender but he did not listen. Anyone in the situation would assume he was a terrorist.”
Right.
All of this goes unquestioned by our free press. And for as long as all of this goes unquestioned, I'm shitting myself every time I walk on to my terrace to speak on the cell in Urdu. Either my fucking telco better improve its reception in my toilet, or my eighty-year-old grandma's gonna havta learn another language to converse in.
Long story for a short point, but we've got a serious problem with terrorism in this country, and we need serious laws to sort the shit out. But while we're about it, it might just be useful to look at what it is we're doing all wrong as a nation. Why is it that young people are getting pissed off enough to blow themselves and others up? What are we doing to drive them to such a point?
We could ask those questions and hope to solve some of our problems, or we could do what Bush, Modi, Advani and the rest of them do: ask no questions, get no answers.
It's all up to us, really.
