In praise of the Citizen

I began writing this blog two days before I left my hometown Calcutta for New Delhi. I was on the last leg of my two and half months stay in India. The day before I left for Delhi (on 24 February) we heard of disturbances taking place in the north-eastern corner of the capital. The disturbances became a full-fledged conflagration that resulted in deaths and destruction. It was happening at a time that Trump was visiting India and having a love-in with his Indian counterpart and brother-in-arms the Indian Prime Minister Modi.  Trump had been whisked off to a make-belief Indian pageant in Ahmedabad away from the ‘troublesome’ anti CAA demonstrations and rallies, which has become a feature of Delhi. In the meantime murder and mayhem caused by the goons of the ruling party, preying on minority communities, ruled the streets under the eyes of the police and in many places was aided by them! The government busy entertaining Trump looked the other way. But that was not the only reason that they looked away. The Hindu nationalists gain from lighting these fires and letting people burn (mainly minorities) because they can then hope to get what they count on as the majority vote i.e. of Hindus. The sense of impending doom that something dreadful was going to happen, a foreboding that we shared even as we celebrated and participated in the powerful and peaceful demonstrations that have continued since December 2019, had happened.

I wanted to change the script from what it was about before. But at a time when hate has taken centre stage and what they have done to people in Delhi the main topic of conversation, a personal blog for my friends has to take a stand. So this blog is still going to be in praise of citizens, citizens who are defending the constitution and human rights in the face of all odds including unspeakable violence; citizens who stood by and protected each other in the neighborhoods of Delhi attacked by the goons; and citizens who are organising relief, undertaking fact finding missions, putting up legal challenges and trying to heal the psychological, physical and social wounds that are the inevitable result.

So back to the beginning.

February end is the time of year when many of us Indians who come in the winter months back to our homeland, travel back to our adopted homelands in Europe and the Americas. And so it's time for me to go back to another life in Europe. I have in the last three years, since I retired, made the transition quite smoothly often longing to go back to my sedate life in Europe where the news headlines don’t scream at me and I don’t get upset by the troubled politics in the same way as I do here. But not this time because this time I am sorry to leave. There are many reasons but the most compelling is that ordinary Indian citizens, ordinary women citizens organised in sit-ins in the major metropolises of the country, and young people all over are showing us how to keep alive the idea of India that is diverse, secular and founded on principles of justice and equality. So this time I write in praise of ordinary Indian women citizens but particularly in praise of the Indian Muslim woman citizen because it is her emergence in this movement against the injustice of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and every other government policy associated with it that has been the most remarkable change that we have witnessed.

January 10^th,  2020, yet another march organised in our city and we, my friends and I, were on it for the relief and hope that walking together with concerned citizens has brought us. As the march ended and the huge demonstration snaked its way to the end and waited for the speeches that would come next, a number of small groups formed raising slogans. As we went from group to group a young woman in a hijab with her face uncovered at the centre of one of these groups pulled us in requesting us to join her. One could see that she was from a lower middle class Muslim family in the city, a face and a voice that in other circumstances would not be out there in the public. In direct contrast to her were a few of us, definitely middle class, older and even though we did not want to be we could by default be identified as Hindu, Bengali middle class. We were also the secular, liberal gang that the Hindu right wing nationalists love to hate. But in this situation nothing else mattered except that we were in this together. She included us by addressing us as didi (elder sister) and raised the ‘azadi’ call. Azadi means liberty and freedom (in Persian originally) but for us it was the clarion call of the independence movement. It has been popularised by a young upcoming politician and has become the signature chant of the present movements for equality. As she called out we answered ‘azadi’ in unison making for a mesmerising atmosphere. She changed her tone with the meaning of the calls outs she made: ‘freedom is our birth right’ and ‘we will wrest our rights’ said in a confident tone and ‘sweet, sweet freedom’ in a caressing, loving tone, as we answered azadi.

And so it is with ‘azadi’, wresting the meaning of the constitution and of citizenship from what the ruling party has made it to be. It has liberated the Indian Muslim woman from her minority status and ambivalent belonging and turned her into the citizen. This movement has its own lexicon; mention Shaheen Bag and everybody more or less knows what it signifies. Because Shaheen Bagh is an otherwise nondescript, mainly Muslim poor locality in Delhi, the capital of India, where the women have shown what courage is about. They have been sitting on the road for close to two and a half months with a simple appeal: repeal this discriminatory act that betrays the constitution. They have faced the cold (freezing temperatures in winter); they have withstood provocations, threats by the government and politicians of the ruling party but they are not giving up. They have also become the pilgrimage for those in this country who also believe that the constitution is being undermined but don’t know what to do about it. They are being protected and helped by well-wishers of every kind: rich, poor, and everything in between. Songs, poetry, art and other forms of cultural expression have grown up and flourished here. Artists of all hues and persuasions visit; there are performances and exhibitions. A whole system has grown up to help the women; food, water, toilets, and child care. And while they sit with the nation’s eyes on them, everyday and every moment we worry that this unaccountable government will do something unspeakable to hurt them.

Shaheen Bagh has spawned many a shaheen bagh in other big cities of India – in my city in Kolkata, and others too that those who are not from India will not have heard about. But the one I truly fear for are the Muslim women citizens sitting in the centre of Lucknow the capital of the most populous state of India, which has become infamous for the extraordinary brutality with which the government and police handled the peaceful protests last December. It was a pogrom to drive Muslim residents into oblivion. An unspeakable reign of terror has been initiated in this state so much so that democracy and human rights have become a farce. Suddenly one day the women appeared from nowhere in ones and twos and sat under the central clock tower. They must be the bravest women in all of India. I keep my fingers crossed for them everyday.

As I turned westwards I was excited but anxious; excited to see my friends again and anxious as to how I would explain what we were experiencing to them. Having now lived in the west for many decades I have now learned to read the western gaze. Having many dear friends in Europe I have learned to not ‘explain’ India to them. India may be the largest secular democracy but it is ‘imaged’ as traditional and backward; its people slavishly attached to their religion and to primordial ties. There is a lurking suspicion that people like my friends and me are not ‘authentic’ Indian in our espousal of secularism and democracy.  We in our democratic aspirations are not like them. And so it was. The coverage in the progressive papers, English and German, while referring to the damage that Modi and his party were causing to the project of democracy nevertheless talked about the Delhi violence as religious wars between Hindus and Muslims (as if this was the natural order of things). It was a pogrom against the minorities, I wanted to scream, by fascists of the Indian kind. Covering India is not a transparent narrative as Edward Said reminded us when talking about Covering Islam (I981).  It’s a narrative that has also been ingested and reflected by the Hindu nationalists and extremists of all kinds because these divisions help their cynical cause.

But the citizens’ protests from Lebanon to Chile (more about this in my next blog) are reimagining democracy, recreating the public voice and space in ways that go far beyond the limited exercise of parliamentary democracy. As Kanhaiya Kumar our young politician who popularized the ‘Azadi’ slogan said in his mammoth rally in Patna the capital of Bihar, a state in India on 27 February ‘ The Dadas ( meaning big guys/ don/ patriarch or in plain speak respected elder) of the BJP are now afraid of the Dadis (grandmothers) of Shaheen Bagh’.

March 2, 2020