Indian Press on Both Pakistan and Iran Having Crushed Baloch, and Supreme Court Order on Shaheen Bagh Protest: New Age Islam's Selection, 11 December 2020
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
11 December 2020
• Pakistan, Iran Both Crushed Baloch. How Has The
Equation Changed?
By Francesca Marino
• Sc Order On Shaheen Bagh Protest Introduced
Dangerous Constitutional Ideas
By Pratap Bhanu Mehta
• The Contrarian View Of War
By T.C.A. Raghavan
• Us President-Elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet Nominees And
What They Mean For India
The Print Team
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• India's COVID-19 Response Suggests ‘Scientific
Superpower’ Status an Impossible Dream
By Vasudevan Mukunth
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Pakistan, Iran Both Crushed Baloch, How Has The Equation
Changed?
By Francesca Marino
10 Dec 2020
“The Revolutionary Guards, in an extrajudicial action, together
with a special armed unit team, attacked the Siadak-Dezap area and destroyed
many residential houses of Baloch citizens. This action was taken while the
Islamic Republic had previously intended to occupy the lands of the Baloch
people where they lived, under the pretext of national lands. While the
Revolutionary Guards is a military body whose job is to provide security in the
region, it has deprived the people of Balochistan of security, by providing
assistance to other organs and government agencies. The Islamic Republic, under
the pretext of ending the occupation of the national lands, is occupying the
lands of the Baloch people who have lived there for centuries and belonged to
them as heritage and giving them over to non-natives and changing the population
structure in different parts of Balochistan”.
These lines, along with a video, were sent via social media
and encrypted groups by local activists, as usually happens with news from that
part of the world. News is rarely – almost never – carried by official press in
the countries of origin, because journalists, if and when they do it, become
targets themselves. Because, when the part of the world is called Balochistan,
and the countries involved are Iran and Pakistan, the narrative follows more or
less along the same lines. Oppression, harassment, cultural, religious and
physical genocide.
The story of the Iranian region called Sistan-Balochistan is
less known, but no less destructive than the Pakistani one, and Baloch in Iran
has been oppressed for the same reasons: exactly as in Pakistan, in fact, the
land of Baloch is extremely rich in gas, gold, copper, uranium and oil. Despite
this, it has the lowest per capita income in Iran and it is estimated that
about 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Infant mortality is the highest in the country in the
region, with the lowest literacy rate. According to activists, more than fifty
percent of Iranian capital executions take place against the citizens of
Baloch-origin. Exactly like in Pakistan, many permanent military bases have
been installed in the area, and internal immigration has been encouraged to
keep the locals under control, placing the Baloch population among the
minority.
The Baloch in Iran are also a religious minority, being
Sunni Muslims in a Shia majority country, and the advent of the ayatollahs has
only worsened the situation. Shiite missionaries had been sent from Tehran into
the region to ‘convert’ people, and job opportunities or schools have been
denied to those not converting to Sunnism.
The Revolutionary Guards, born more or less forty years ago
to protect the values of revolution and the Shia faith, have become one of the
most powerful political and military organisations of the country.
A ruthless one, very closely resembling the Pakistani Army,
ISI and all the 'special corps' oppressing Baloch on the eastern side of the
border. With a difference: despite some attempts by UK think tanks, the ISI
continues to thrive and flourish, and last year, that is 2019, the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards were declared a terrorist organisation by the US, Saudia
Arabia and Bahrain.
The organisation is estimated to have more than 190,000
active personnel and oversees Iran's strategic weapons. It also controls the
paramilitary Basij Resistance Force, which has helped suppress domestic
dissent, and the powerful bonyads, or charitable foundations, which run a
considerable part of the economy.
According to the US and Saudi Arabia, the Revolutionary
Guards exert influence in the Middle East – providing money, weapons,
technology, training and advice to allied governments and armed groups.
They practically carry out the same terrorist strategies
adopted by Pakistan, and the results in Balochistan, with the passing of the
years, are in fact the same: the birth of guerrilla groups and of a
nationalistic resistance movement. However, while for years, Iran and Pakistan
joined hands in crushing Baloch from both sides of the border, things changed
in the past few years.
In 2019, for the first time, Pakistan openly accused Iran of
supporting Baloch guerrilla in Pakistan, following an attack that killed 14
Pakistani security forces in Ormara.
According to Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood
Qureshi, the guerrilla groups umbrella called BRAS, operates from Iran and
Teheran, and allows the country to be used as a hub for anti-Pakistan
activities, providing support and training facilities to Baloch militants in
order to eliminate and fight anti-Shia groups in Pakistan.
While for Saudis and the US the Revolutionary Guards are a
terrorist organisation, Iran accuses Saudis, Americans and also the Pakistani
ISI of financing Baloch to destabilise Tehran, implementing the same strategy
successfully adopted in Bangladesh and in Pakistan: funding fundamentalist
madrasas that strengthen the Sunni religious identity and serve as outposts for
guerrilla groups.
According to Pakistan, the Saudi strategy of using guerrilla
groups in Sistan-Balochistan as a proxy – given that the terrorist groups used
in Pakistan by ISI to keep Baloch under control also benefit from Riyadh’s
funding – may not be a good idea, and threatens to turn into a lethal boomerang
for Islamabad – but, above all, for Beijing – which sees the concrete chance of
a low-intensity but large-scale ethnic-religious conflict, that would have
disruptive consequences for the CPEC, the OBOR and its expansionist and
imperialistic strategies.
https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/pakistan-iran-revolutionary-guards-saudi-arabia-balochistan-oppression-threat-united-states#read-more
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SC Order on Shaheen Bagh Protest Introduced Dangerous
Constitutional Ideas
By Pratap Bhanu Mehta
11-12-2020
The following is the full text of the Project 39A annual
lecture, delivered by Pratap Bhanu Mehta on December 4, transcribed by The
Wire.
Good evening! It’s a real honour and pleasure to be here.
One, actually, because, of 39A. Project 39A is one of the most interesting,
morally relevant, analytically rigorous projects in criminal justice that we
have seen in India for a long time. I just want to congratulate Anup
Surendranath and all his colleagues for really setting a new benchmark for how
you can do meaningful research and advocacy within the academia. So, it’s a
real privilege to be speaking under the auspices of Project 39A. I am also
little bit intimidated because I am speaking to a group of very accomplished
lawyers who know a great deal more about the subject I’m going to speak about
than I am.
What I had thought I’d do, over the course of the next 45
minutes or so, just so that we leave time for questions, is to offer some
reflections on the paradoxical place of dissent in a society that is supposedly
democratic and supposedly marked by the rule of law, or at least has
institutions that claim to be furthering the rule of law, however imperfectly
that they do so. My motivation for thinking about the subject is obvious. Many
would argue that dissent in all its different varieties that I shall talk about
briefly in a second, has fallen upon hard times in democracies, not just in
India but globally. If you look at the range of laws that have been enacted in
the last 35-40 years, whose spirit is incompatible with the spirit of liberal
democracy – laws around sedition, laws around preventive detention, laws that
prevent protest from taking place, law that allows police to easily arrest
protestors, you know, anti-conversion laws, laws that regulate NGOs – the whole
panoply, in a sense, of legal instruments that are brought into place by
liberal democratic states is actually making dissent much more difficult,
paradoxically, even in liberal democracies.
Some of this is specific to particular ideological
formations. But, one of the claims that I want to make today – and it is the
spirit in which these reflections are offered – is that this contemporary
moment of this suspicion of dissent, this crackdown on dissent, a subterfuge,
in a sense, about managing and crushing dissent, and in particular, dealing
with dissenters almost as if they were criminals. This particular tendency is
not just a characteristic of particular political parties being in power or
particular regimes being in power, even though those regimes might actually,
deeply exacerbate them. I think what this moment throws up fundamentally, and
that’s what I’ll be talking about today, is something about the nature of
liberal democracy itself. Is there something inevitable in the form in which we
have conceived of liberal democracy that it will, more and more, construe the
dissenter as a figure of criminality? That it has no other language in which to
understand the figure of a dissenter. An Anand Teltumbde, a Sudha Bharadwaj –
just to take two obvious examples – of people who are being treated as
criminals, unjustifiably. That it has no other language in which to understand
dissent and protest.
So, that’s the question I’ve set myself. I’ll be talking
theoretically. I dabble in political theory so, that’s my field; that’s my
route into this subject. It’s not going to be the details of the law, which
most of you know better. It’s not even going to be the details of the cases
that are, in a sense, currently being litigated. Partly because it would be inappropriate to
talk about them, partly because, again, you know those details better. But I’ll
just try and lay down a conceptual framework about why is it that again and
again, in contemporary democracy the dissenter is being constructed as figure
of criminality; is being increasingly dealt with through laws that have the
character of criminal laws.
Today’s dissenters may, in turn, also fear other dissenters.
It’s often true of dissenting groups. They fear internal dissent. Or they, in a
sense, turn out to be those people who clampdown on dissent when they
themselves come into power. So, there’s a kind of perpetual anxiety around
dissent. But as I said, this is a self-serving anxiety. It is an understandable
one but a self-serving one. They uncannily see that dissent is about altering
structures of power, let’s make no two bones about it. That’s what is
significant about it. And in some senses, you have to say that those who crush
dissent at least have the decency of taking it seriously! They do understand
what it is about. Unlike, I think, sometimes many liberal defenders of dissent
who actually think dissent is important but it will change nothing.
A different kind of worry about dissent, which is somewhat
less self-serving but it’s also still psychological, is that dissent as a word
almost seems too negative. Dissent is against something. I actually think
George Eliot was right when she said that if you’re looking for the right to
rebellion – rebellion in the broadest sense, dissent – that the right to
rebellion of any kind is the right to seek a higher rule, not wander in
lawlessness. And the word ‘dissent’ or the activity of dissent often conjures
up the spectre of negativity. ‘I know what I am against’ but ‘what is the
higher rule I am invoking’ is actually not clear.
And I think, critics of dissent are right, that dissent
itself is not a freestanding value. To construct dissent as a freestanding
value is to conjure up the image of somebody who simply says, “whatever you are
for, I am against it”. Dissent is not a freestanding value because it is
grounded in moral judgement. It has, as George Elliot said, to speak in the
name of a higher rule; it has to speak in the name of a common good; it has to
be reaching for something better. Otherwise it simply is a disposition to
subvert, where the means become the ends.
In this sense, the Gandhian idea of dissent, which is
grounded in satyagraha – a rebellion grounded in truth – I think, had more
going to it than the mere word dissent does. So, just as a discursive point,
when we say that space for dissent is shrinking, we have to recognise the
ambiguity of that claim. We often mean that the space for seeking something
better; the space for seeking justice; the space for expanding our moral
horizons; the space for imagining an alternative and better future might be
shrinking. Or it can be taken in a different sense, which is often done in
politics, that the space for opposition for opposition’s sake is shrinking.
Now, even opposition for opposition’s sake might be
valuable. There is, sometimes, an inherent value to, you might say combating
docility – just for its own sake. But simply saying ‘I am a dissenter’ or ‘I
have a right to dissent’ or ‘I dissent’, without specifying the normative
context in which that dissent is being articulated – that higher rule that
George Elliot was referring to – can be a double-edged sword. It even allows fascists,
actually, sometimes to claim the mantle of dissent. They are also always
dissenting against something. So, I think we should be careful in acknowledging
that sometimes the discursive rhetoric of dissent forgets that it’s not a
normatively freestanding value. It is in a sense grounded – it has to be
grounded – in some higher truth. So, while we recognise the importance and
value of dissent in a liberal democracy, dissent does have this uneasy place.
What I want to do is reflect on an even deeper paradox. This
stuff that I’ve just outlined is a prolegomena; it’s very familiar. And my
starting point is an observation in this rather troubling judgment that was
passed in the Shaheen Bagh protest case. This was the order that the Supreme
Court passed recently.
The judgement was troubling in more ways, more levels than
one can list. First of all, passing an order when it has…when the matter has
become kind of irrelevant; been shut
down anyway. The order engaged in a kind of needless pontification in the morality
of protest. It introduced novel and, to my mind, dangerous constitutional
ideas, that the exercise of rights – if protesting is a right – is somehow
subject to the performance of duties irrelevant to that right. It’s an order
that completely whitewashed the court’s own role in producing a crisis of
legitimacy.
Why were there protests in the first place? In part because
of the court’s role in producing both, a constitutional doctrine and then in
not actually giving protesters a genuine hearing on the substantive matter at
hand, namely: is the CAA discriminatory? So, for all those reasons it’s a
strange order. But I want to give the court due respect. Take them seriously as
a political theorist and pick up one sentence in that order which said…the claim
was that “erstwhile mood and manner of dissent against colonial rule cannot be
equated with dissent in a self-ruled democracy”, almost suggesting that there
are forms of dissent that might be appropriate to colonial rule, maybe in
authoritarian state, but these forms of dissent are not appropriate in
self-ruled democracy. In fact, you can extend the point further, dissent in the
form that was being enacted in Shaheen Bagh, might have been a mode of activity
more suitable to a colonial and authoritarian regime, not to democracy.
Now, why is this claim important? Maybe it’s just a
throwaway remark. Maybe the justices had not meant anything considered and serious by it. But it is a remark that
captures a lot of common sense views people have about democracy. It’s quite an
intuitive and widespread and appealing idea actually. After all, you might say,
in democracy you might have the freedom of expression. Words and argument,
deliberation and rhetoric is the currency in which we express views and
differences in a democracy.
Now, of course this claim would be helped a great deal if
the courts protected freedom of expression and freedom of expression of all
forms, including expression of contempt, which is also a form of legitimate
criticism. But let’s for a moment grant this point. Look, you have the freedom
of expression in democracy, huge words! Write, petition, make arguments. If
words work, if the logic of arguments work, protest should not be necessary.
Moreover, in a democracy we can supposedly cashier the rulers for misconduct.
We can throw them out in the next election.
So, what more do you want by way of dissent? You can speak
what you want, you can vote what you want. And, in a sense, the bounds of
legitimate activity are, in a sense, governed or enabled by these modes of
expression. Add on to this, a further point, which is often made by invoking
Ambedkar’s speech in the Constituent Assembly on the grammar of anarchy, in
which the problem of dissent in a democracy is compounded even further. On this
view, the problem with the dissenter in a democracy is the dissenter claims
unilateralism. The dissenter sets themselves up as a final judge and arbiter
against the court, against parliament and sometimes even against public
opinion.
So, people are protesting because they are not satisfied
with parliament decision, they are not satisfied with the court’s decision or
rather the court’s non-decision. Sometimes they’re against even protesting
against public opinion. Now, in a democracy, this form of dissent is kind of
hard to understand and explain. Ambedkar was too good a political theorist and
of course, recognises the danger in unilateralism of dissent. After all
Gandhi’s big sun, in his eyes, was not just that Gandhi was patronising about
caste but Gandhi was completely unilateral in the way in which he understood
the rightness of his views. It’s Gandhi, right or wrong.
‘Ekla Chalo Re’ may be a good inspiring call for claims of
conscience. It may be a good inspiring call for protesters standing valiantly
against public opinion. But surely it can’t be the basis for settling
legitimate claims. The dissenters’ seeming unilateralism, their sovereign
pronouncement over the sovereign, as it were – ‘my way or the highway’ – seems
to be part of the problem. And the one thing we do do when we enter civil
society; when we leave the state of nature, as it were – I have a picture of
Hobbes behind me and I think, on this, Hobbes was right, as it were – is we do
see, in part the right of unilateral judgement of what is right. In fact,
political equality demands that we see that. If I can unilaterally decide what
is right, then in a sense, I’m not granting you equal political standing. And
so, this idea of unilateralism also makes the figure of the dissenter a pretty
suspicious figure in a liberal democracy. ‘What are they claiming?’, you know.
So, here is the paradox that the honourable justices might
be hinting at when they say ‘certain forms of protest are not appropriate to
liberal democracy’; when they say, ‘in a democracy you don’t need protest and
dissent in quite the same way’. The thought is in a perfectly functioning
democracy, all relevant moral considerations have been taken into the account.
All discussions have taken place. Respect due to all persons, free and equal, has
been granted. Why would you need dissent?
Now, you might be tempted to respond but that’s exactly the
point! Our democracy is deeply flawed! The representative process is not a
responsive process. The rule of law is intermittent and, by God, the Supreme
Court is making sure it is intermittent. And, at best often our democracy does
little to protect the vulnerable and the marginalised. It’s a perfectly good
response to make to this worry. You
might go further. You might say the court wants us to, in protesting, abide by
our civic obligations. But, you might say, are these civic obligations binding
on people who do not have a fair share in the scheme of cooperation.
If the basic scheme of social cooperation itself does not
respect freedom, equality and dignity of persons, why should the onus of
cooperating on civic obligations fall on
those protesting. Think of innocent adivasis, the group that, in a sense, has
got the worst end of every state – colonial state, democratic state,
authoritarian state. Why should the burden of abiding by these civic
obligations fall only on them in the absence of a framework that grants them
minimal standing and reciprocity. Why are courts and parliament so keen to
remind us of our duties only when there is a protest. What about reminding
those who have the power to draw the larger social contract? Does not protest
serve as an epistemic function of drawing attention to the problems that might
otherwise go unnoticed in a democracy? Do we still have an obligation, civic
obligations, if the social contract does not recognise us as free and equal?
So, this is a pushback you can give against the court. You
are assuming these institutions are working well. What if they are not? This is
a common sense answer and I think, empirically and descriptively, a very, very
powerful answer. Rule of law and democratic process can often be an
abstraction. We throw in, as it were, a fight over relationships of power that
do not describe the existing realities of our institutions. And so we want to say,
look, protest is important. These are people, these are our fellow citizens
protesting in the name of a higher order rule. Allow them to redeem the promise
of democracy by bringing neglected concerns to your attention. This is a
perfectly sensible answer to give. Why won’t we give this answer?
Now, it turns out, the problem is more complicated. It’s not
an easy answer to give. It sounds easy to give, that’s what we always say: “But
ours is not a perfect democracy. It needs a safety valve.” Why is it not an
easy answer? It’s not an easy answer for some, again, basic political reasons.
No settled democratic processes like to admit that they are illegitimate in
this way. No Supreme Court can admit that there is no rule of law in India in
parts. No Parliament can admit that we are not a deeply representative
democracy. So, in a sense, giving this answer – that our formal institutions
are imperfect, it is already in some senses putting a question mark over the
legitimacy, which they cannot accept.
Sometimes you don’t concede to this answer because politics
is a partisan game and you do not want to concede to the other side. Whether we
are right or wrong, whether the protesters are right or wrong is immaterial,
what is important is that they be defeated. So, you see protest only in the
framework of a kind of tactical negotiation. But there is an even deeper
conceptual challenge – why a democracy might look at suspicion and look askance
at protest and dissent. And I’ll be very crude about this, just to concentrate
on our mind; it’s a bit simpleminded but hopefully, heuristically it will work.
So, suppose you protest. The Shaheen Bagh protesters
protested, Punjab farmers are protesting. If the protest and dissent is
expressed before all other formal means of redress – elections maybe, courts of
law maybe, petitioning your MP maybe, using the public sphere in writing maybe
– whatever. If you protest before all other formal means of redressing your
problem have been exhausted, then the court will say,”well, isn’t this protest
unfair?” “Why don’t you use these settled means to convey what you want to
convey”.
https://thewire.in/rights/dissent-protest-democracy-supreme-court
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The Contrarian View of War
By T.C.A. Raghavan
11.12.20,
A retired Pakistani general and one-time director-general of
its Inter-Services Intelligence has recently written a novel, Honour Among
Spies, a thinly-veiled depiction of contemporary Pakistan politics,
civil-military tensions, India-Pakistan relations, the war on terror and so on.
The author, Asad Durrani, had acquired some notoriety in Pakistan when he
co-authored The Spy Chronicles with A.S. Dulat, the former head of India’s
external intelligence. This book was a series of conversations between the two
on India-Pakistan conflicts and on Kashmir. This public act of intellectual
cooperation of a Pakistani general with an Indian spymaster was unusual, as was
a frank discussion on Kashmir with an Indian. The fact that the book was
published in India muddied waters further in Pakistan and in the resulting
dust-up General Asad Durrani was investigated and his pension temporarily
stopped (he had retired in the mid-1990s). General Durrani followed up with a
second book, Pakistan Adrift — in part autobiographical and covering Pakistan’s
political and military history post 1989. His treatment was critical of the
army brass, Pakistan’s political class and of the army’s political role in
general.
The latest foray is in a different genre — being a novel.
Yet, for observers of Pakistan, its central characters are close enough to
real-life figures — Indians and Pakistanis, generals and politicians alike.
While General Durrani’s opinions and motives have been debated, his books,
especially the latest novel, mark him out as a contrarian — although perhaps
one who has come to contrarian positions much after he left the army.
We have a more striking example of another dissident general
from the 1950s. This was the famous ‘General Tariq’ who was responsible for
Pakistan’s failed attempt to nullify the Maharaja of Kashmir’s accession to
India decision by capturing Srinagar. ‘Tariq’, named after a famous Islamic
military hero credited with the conquest of Spain, was the self-styled name of
Akbar Khan, the planner of the strategy of tribal raiders backed by Pakistan
army personnel infiltrating the Kashmir Valley in October 1947. The strategy
failed but enabled Pakistan to gain a toehold in Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, which
it retains. General Akbar Khan’s book, Raiders in Kashmir, was published
originally about half a century ago and was clear proof of the planning and
high-level government involvement that were behind the raids that led to the
first India-Pakistan war.
In the aftermath of the war, Akbar Khan was an embittered
and ambitious man blaming the government for not committing fully to the
Kashmir struggle. In 1951, he along with many others were accused and tried for
mounting a military coup. This was the famous Rawalpindi Conspiracy case, which
included, among the conspirators, the poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Their sentences
for lengthy prison terms were subsequently reduced or pardons given. Akbar Khan
found himself a free man by the mid-50s although he was dismissed from the
army. He was back as a minister post 1971 in Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government.
His Raiders in Kashmir is a bitter diatribe against Pakistan’s government and
the army chief, General Ayub Khan, and others for their failure to pursue the
Kashmir cause with greater vigour. “Ayub Khan”, he wrote, “could give Pakistan
the world’s first Field Marshal without even being in the field.” He went on to
cite Ayub’s successor thus: “Yahya could top it by giving India the world’s
second one!” — referring, no doubt, to General Sam Manekshaw being designated
as Field Marshal for his role in the 1971 operations and military victory.
Akbar Khan’s fanciful claims about Kashmir and his giant-sized ego earned him a
large share of detractors. Ayub Khan was dismissive of him and those of that
ilk, attributing rapid promotions in the new Pakistan army as having raised
unwarranted expectations and created a number of ‘Unhappy Bonapartes’.
The 1965 war also generated, although much after the event,
a few contrarian views. The idea of a glorious victory against a larger army is
jealously preserved in Pakistan. In 2002, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed
published a detailed history of the 1965 war tellingly entitled Illusion of
Victory. This remains possibly the most detailed military history of the 1965
war written in either country. It was, however, never ever distributed or sold
in any significant numbers basically because the Pakistan army bought up all
its copies to prevent its distribution. The author was also a former DG, ISI
and, in fact, held that post when the 9/11 attacks took place in the United
States of America. He was to be replaced soon thereafter because of his
perceived Islamist leanings and Taliban sympathies. His treatment of 1965 was a
realistic, if unwelcome, assessment of Pakistan’s strategic failures: “The
greatest casualty of the 1965 War was perhaps our modesty. We prided ourselves
over achievements which were doctored for public consumption to boost the
national morale. We began to believe what was meant only for the sake of
propaganda... The price of undeserved glory was paid barely six years after the
1965 war [when] the bitter harvest of humiliation was reaped in East Pakistan
in December 1971.”
Relating the 1965 war — to many a high watermark in
Pakistan’s history — with the depths of 1971 was a contrarian perspective and
marks the author as a dissentient. Incidentally, he was one of the ‘Kargil
clique’ — the generals around Pervez Musharraf when that misadventure was
planned and executed. General Mahmud Ahmed went on, post retirement, to become
a preacher consolidating his reputation as an Islamist general.
The 1971 war has been a fertile terrain for literary
activity especially from Pakistani military officers. Over the years, most of
the principal actors have written their accounts. One of the generals who did
so wryly noted, “History, it is often said, ‘is written by victors’. In the
case of East Pakistan, it has been written by the losers.” On the whole,
however, these are not in the nature of dissident views so much as exculpatory.
While there are some others, dissentient narratives from
senior military officers in Pakistan have remained relatively rare. This is
especially so in the context of the vast literature that the study of the
Pakistan army has generated. In large part, this is obviously because the
regimen of the military ensures that public articulation of dissidence is rare
even long after retirement. Yet, each such contrarian view has generated
enormous attention even in the cases when the protagonist is writing a very
long time after he had a substantive role as a participant in events. In some
significant part, this is because the role of the military in politics in
Pakistan and all of its consequences has a timeless quality to it. It is like
an endless loop that repeats its crests and troughs. Each high and each low may
appear momentarily like a beginning or an end but, in fact, is only one more
moment in a rhythmic sequence in some obscure metre. Another well-known
military dissentient, Asghar Khan, not a general but an air marshal, gave a
title to one of his books that summed it up: We’ve Learnt Nothing From History.
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/the-contrarian-view-pakistans-dissentient-generals/cid/1800166
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US President-Elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet Nominees And What
They Mean For India
The Print Team
10 December, 2020
New Delhi: US President-elect Joe Biden has started
nominating members to his new Cabinet and White House team and if approved by
the Senate, many of them will be making history such as the country’s first
Black Secretary of Defense.
In episode 636 of ‘Cut The Clutter’, ThePrint’s
Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta analysed Biden’s choices and also explained why
they were important to India.
According to Gupta, the positions that really matter to
India were Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Intelligence
Director of CIA, head of Homeland Security (which is like India’s Home
Minister) and the Head of Treasury, which was like India’s finance minister.
Gupta said that the nominations were awaiting congressional
approval and are likely to get it — with the possible exception of Neera
Tanden. Tanden has been nominated as the director of the office of management
and budget.
Gupta explained that the most important of these
appointments, from India’s point of view, was the Secretary of State. Antony
Blinken has been nominated for the post and he is someone familiar to India
since he was also part of the Obama administration.
Gupta noted that unlike his predecessor Mike Pompeo, who was
a domestic politician, Blinken is a diplomat and a “genuine internationalist”.
He is expected to be tough on China and also knows India is a vital US ally.
However, he will also not have the same view as the previous
administration on some of India’s internal changes such as the new citizenship
law and the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. According to Gupta, he will also
not be silent on them.
Gupta also said that Blinken would re-engage with Iran,
which would be a positive for India as heavy sanctions against Iran had
resulted in India not buying oil from them.
He noted that Blinken also has a strong liberal streak, as
his stepfather was a survivor of concentration camps, in Auschwitz and Dachau
during Nazi Germany and therefore, will be more forthcoming on issues of human
rights.
Other nominations include Jake Sullivan, former chief of
staff for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state in the Obama
administration, as the new National Security Advisor.
John Kerry has been nominated as Biden’s Ambassador for
Climate Change and it is his job to put the Paris Accord back on track, which
outgoing president Donald Trump had pulled out of.
He noted that Austin was also a surprise appointment as
there is a seven-year cooling period from the armed forces to be Secretary of
Defence in the US. And General Austin retired in 2016 and has only spent four
years in retirement. Therefore, the Biden administration will have to approach
the Congress for a special waiver in this case.
Speaking about the new Secretary of the Treasury — Janet
Yellen — Gupta said that she was a scholar, an economist and a labour wage
economist.
“She will bring about the balance between the Left and the
Right and the Centre,” said Gupta, adding that the markets were happy with her
appointment.
He then turned to Neera Tanden, who has been nominated as
the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. This makes her the
senior-most official of Indian origin in the Biden administration after Vice
President-elect Kamala Harris.
Gupta explained that she was self-made and was brought up by
a single mother on food stamps and rented housing. However, it is believed that
she will have the toughest time passing congressional approval because the
Republicans really dislike her.
https://theprint.in/opinion/us-president-elect-joe-bidens-cabinet-nominees-and-what-they-mean-for-india/564148/
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India's COVID-19 Response Suggests ‘Scientific
Superpower’ Status an Impossible Dream
By Vasudevan Mukunth
10/DEC/2020
The novel coronavirus showed, pretty quickly, that even
though it spreads through people and even though people are often constrained
by borders, it would not be. China’s COVID-19 epidemic quickly became the
world’s COVID-19 pandemic.
In much the same way, there may not be much sense in talking
about the pandemic as an event confined to an arbitrarily defined unit of time,
in this case 2020. The name of the virus’s disease attests to this view:
COVID-19 was discovered in 2019, but it wreaked most of its havoc in 2020, and
will continue for months to come.
However, while the virus effortlessly transcends space and
time, it may be useful to divvy up its effects into pieces of space and pieces
of time. This way, we give ourselves an opportunity to compare the effects
across these pieces and pick up on anomalies. Because to be sure, India was an
anomaly in so many ways.
For example, the first thought in my head when I heard that
a participant of the Serum Institute’s trial of the Covishield COVID-19 vaccine
candidate had sued the company for Rs 5 crore was, “Why can’t just one thing go
as planned in India? Why does everything have to get messed up?”
Journalists have been on their toes, at the edge of their
seats and in various other awkward positions throughout India’s COVID-19
epidemic – and more often than not because they have been brought there by
inept governance. It was very heartening through the last ten months to witness
many reporters and editors rise to the unfortunate occasion, intelligently
covering a panoply of stories that located scientific ideas and decisions in
their right social and political contexts in the face of acrimonious resistance
from the ruling party and its foot-soldiers.
In the face of their work, the government’s attempts to
wield the epidemic as an excuse for its failures quickly came unstuck. However,
many of these stories ought not to have been needed in the first place – in
that they were the result of actions and policies that are easily fixed, but
weren’t, often because government officials had lied. The Serum Institute case
is one of the latest examples of such a fiasco, especially now that other trial
participants are contemplating legal action against the company as well as the
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for not being told of a severe
adverse event that may have been related to the vaccine.
Other examples include the shutting down of the Manipal
Institute of Virology, the initial seroprevalence survey results, the
validation of antibody testing kits, details regarding drug and vaccine
clinical trials, ignoring epidemiologists’ advice, decisions about lockdowns
and containment, various notices issued by the AYUSH ministry, confusion over
‘red’ and ‘orange’ zones, ridiculous statements at press conferences including
a crude attempt at communalising the pandemic, and, unforgettably, the approval
of hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, favipiravir, itolizumab and tocilizumab
without sufficient evidence of their efficacy.
To get to the hearts of these stories, journalists have had
to wade through a swamp of lies and deceit. The Wire wrote in its July 1
editorial: “Today, no one expects ICMR to contradict the Centre’s COVID-19
response strategy on any count, irrespective of the enormity of a
transgression.”
The council has since been joined by the Drug Controller
General of India (DCGI). On December 4, the incumbent DCGI, Dr V.G. Somani,
spoke about India’s drug approval and quality rules during a webinar. He
meticulously went through various provisions of the New Drugs and Clinical
Trials Rules 2019 vis-à-vis vaccine trials. It may have been evident to all
viewers that Dr Somani had been drawn out by the Serum Institute fracas, but at
the end of his talk, he refused to answer any questions about the incident and
the government’s position on it.
He was followed by Dr Sheela Godbole of ICMR, who spoke
about the connections between clinical-trial design and drug safety. Was she
aware that only two days prior, Biocon Ltd.’s researchers had uploaded the
preprint paper corresponding to their controversial itolizumab trial earlier in
2020? And that the paper clearly shows how the trial design didn’t at all
support the conclusion – made by many company members, including MD Kiran
Mazumdar-Shaw, on primetime TV debates – that itolizumab was efficacious?
In the words of Dr Jammi Nagaraj Rao, “The 41-page preprint
paper leaves us precisely where we were back in July with respect to the
evidence – or lack of it – for itolizumab’s efficacy”. Like a loop in the news
cycle opened out of thin air, and now being closed as if it didn’t matter.
It’s baffling as to how a country can be – or even aspire to
be – a ‘scientific superpower’ if its political leadership grossly and perhaps
deliberately misunderstands what ‘science’ is. Nothing bears this out more than
the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s intention to roll out a form of medicine
that the Indian Medical Association calls ‘mixopathy’ – a mix of Ayurvedic and
allopathic ideas, techniques and methods.
The party’s intention here is for Ayurveda – or their idea
of Ayurveda – to piggyback on science’s legitimacy into mainstream medical
practice. But what it really is is a Frankenstein’s monster, an inexplicable
thing sown together and brought to life by right-wing propaganda.
Ayurveda suffering due to the BJP’s reverse-Midas touch is
not unique. Many other things this party’s governments have touched during the
COVID-19 epidemic have turned into a mess. A prominent case is that of Bharat
Biotech, the Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical company making a COVID-19 vaccine
candidate called Covaxin, with ICMR’s help.
In late July, ICMR chief Dr Balram Bhargava announced
shortly before the commencement of Covaxin’s phase 3 clinical trials that the
trials will have to wrap up by Independence Day – or face the government’s
music. ICMR later withdrew the statement, closing the loop on another
unnecessary news cycle – although it opened up a few times more, as recently as
last week.
Haryana home minister Anil Vij announced on Thursday that he
had tested positive for COVID-19, two weeks after he had received either a shot
of the Covaxin candidate or a placebo candidate, as part of its clinical
trials. However, after Vij’s tweet, the Union health ministry shared a strange
note with reporters: “The antibodies against the infection build up only after
a specific number of days pass after the second dose is taken. Since this is a
two-dose vaccine. (sic) [The] minister in question has taken only one dose of
the vaccine.”
G.S. Mudur subsequently wrote in The Telegraph, “A Haryana
minister’s tweet two weeks ago and a Union health ministry message on Saturday
identifying him as a recipient of a candidate Covid-19 vaccine has puzzled
experts who described them as possibly irresponsible statements or breaches in
clinical trial protocols.”
The current Government of India is clearly determined to
constantly be right and constantly on higher ground, nothing less. To realise
these conditions, it lies, evades, deceives and hides when a time comes for it
to say it was wrong. When there is a mistake, or even when something entirely
out of its control happens, it tries to lie the problem away, either to give
the impression that the problem didn’t exist in the first place or that it has
found a solution against all odds. And the government has always been found out.
A rare occasion when it actually apologised was when it acknowledged that it
had made “irresponsible submissions” about Aarogya Setu before the Central
Information Commission.
This year, India’s ‘scientific superpower’ aspirations were
centered on its pharmaceutical and biomedical research sectors. Sadly, based on
what was put on display, the country doesn’t look like it is even on the right
path.
On the other hand, you can have another scenario, where you
have engaged all of these means: you have knocked at the door of the Supreme
Court, you have knocked at the door of Parliament, you have petitioned every
politician, you have got, you know, every useless columnist to write an op-ed –
everything that a democracy allows you under free expression. And yet the
outcome is something that is deeply, deeply detrimental to the principles of
liberal democracy, maybe it’s discriminatory. In which case, if you protest
after the fact the retort is, “But look! You’re engaging in unilateralism”. How
can you set yourself as sovereign over what is right, after parliament has
pronounced, after the court has pronounced.
So, here, in a sense, is the paradox: if you dissent and
protest before all the remedies are exhausted, you are a troublemaker. If you
dissent and protest after all remedies, [you’re engaging in unilateralism].
This is the bare simple logic of how a dissenter is viewed in a democracy. So,
how do you then deal with this figure of a dissenter. What you then have to do,
is…you have to deny them legitimacy. The issue is not whether they are right or
wrong – that’s a second order issue, that already grants them standing. The
issue is to trap them in the catch-22 of dissent. If you prematurely dissent,
you don’t believe in democracy. If you dissent after democracy has pronounced
its verdict, you are this sovereign unilateralist.
So, if you follow this logic, you can see why the
problem…the dissenter is a figure who is a permanent threat to the logic of
democracy. Premature protest is not abiding by the process. Protest after the process, is not abiding by
the decision of the process. Either way, the dissenter is putting a question
mark over the legitimacy of the state. Dissent, therefore on this view – not
serious dissent – cannot have any place in a democracy. This is the sense in
which a democracy can force us to be free. If one of the conditions of freedom
is that we don’t exercise unilateral judgement, democracy can force us to be
free.
But you might say, “hang on, this is a bizarre view. Does
not democracy require tolerating a variety of views. Doesn’t it require
pluralism – of views, interests and so forth?” Of course, yes. But remember,
there is a historical specificity to the idea of dissent. Dissent is not just
about a society having a variety of viewpoints or different points of view. We
often use dissent capaciously, in that sense. Dissent becomes a synonym for
toleration, for pluralism. Tolerate dissenters, tolerate different points of
view etc. This is the sense, for example, we invoke when we say ‘India has a
long tradition of dissent’. What we are saying is ‘India has always had a
variety of views; different world views, ideologies, religions have always
contended’. But you know, pluralism and toleration is not dissent. Because
dissent, in political terms, has a more specific meaning, namely dissent
implies a withdrawal of consent.
So, let me take a very simple example. I may think, the tax
rate, top tax rate should be 45%. The government may think it should be 30%.
It’s a genuine difference of opinion, for whatever reason. We might both think
we have good arguments on our side. The government’s position wins. I still
have the right to express my view; I still hold on to my view that a higher tax
rate would be preferable but I don’t, in some senses, withdraw my consent from
whatever the tax rate that government, in a sense…This is legitimate
disagreement in a democracy. I live another day to have my viewpoint heard,
persuade my fellow citizens and so forth. And still, as it were, within the
logic of arguments and counter-arguments, election cycles, procedural, as it
were, ways of reconciling this dissent.
When I express a difference of opinion. But the act of a
protester, a dissenter, is actually something deeper and rightly so. It is a
refusal of consent or rather, they want to be seen, in a sense, to be refusing
consent. So, when we say a law is discriminatory; it is targeting a group for
who they are, that’s not exactly the same kind of disagreement that you might
have over a tax rate. In protesting against a law of that kind, you are, in
some senses, performing a kind of
refusal of assent to that law. Dissent, in this sense, always carries a taint
of disobedience with it, and rightly so.
So, one way of thinking of dissent is that dissent is,
literally speaking, the opposite of consent. That’s what it is the opposite of.
You might say dissent is to consent what falsehood is to truth, heresy is to
faith. So, just like truth will always find falsehood a threat, faith cannot
tolerate heresy, the logic of consent by itself, cannot tolerate dissent. So,
here’s the paradox: the more a government claims dissent as the basis of its
own legitimacy, the more dissent is a conceptual threat. Who are these people
who are refusing consent? And that’s, I think, what the justices seem to be
referring to. I think they capture the paradox quite rightly. Of course, we’re
in democracy now, why do we even need dissent now, right?
Now, if what I have argued – albeit a little crudely – is
correct, there is a kind of anti-dissent logic that is inherent in democracy.
When democracy mobilises consent as a legitimising principle, because what does
dissent do? It punctures the myth of consent. When people come out to the
streets; when protesters come out, what are they saying, what are they
performing, what are they enacting? They are actually puncturing the myth of
consent. They’re saying ‘this law is not something that we think is
legitimate’. They’re not simply saying ‘we have disagreement’. Disagreement is
easy; that’s within the logic of democratic process. And for a democracy; for a
regime in a democracy, for a ruling party in democracy, it is actually the
preservation of the myth of consent that is itself important. Which is why they
see dissent as always the foundational attack on the very basis of the state.
So, how do you deal with dissent, if dissent has this logic.
And by the way, every single democracy faces this problem. You can’t just deal
with it within the simple logic of disagreement. That’s easy, I can just choose
to ignore you. You can say whatever you want, so long as you’re not being able
to persuade other people it’s perfectly fine. So, when faced with genuine
dissent, in a sense, this prospect of withdrawal of consent or this puncturing
of the myth of consent; this puncturing of the legitimacy that the state is
claiming in respect to that matter, the states option that becomes is you want
to deny those who are dissenting this way, their standing. You want to say that
their seeming performance or threat of a withdrawal of consent; their enacting
a refusal to recognise the legitimacy of a law does not count because they are
violating some basic civic obligations. And the only way in which you can do
this is by de-facto criminalising them.
The attack on dissent is not so much an attack on particular
ideas – often it is, the government just doesn’t like those ideas – but what
makes the attack on the dissenter – why you need to criminalise them – is you
have to, in a sense, deny them standing as citizens. Because only by denying
them that can you say “look, our myth of consent has not been punctured or
questioned”.
Now, this rather obvious truth – that the crushing of
dissent in a democracy; the crushing of that refusal is about preserving the
legitimacy of the myth of consent – explains two things. One, it explains the
logic of laws that actually regulate dissent and convert dissent into criminal
crimes. Think of all the laws through which dissent is criminalised – sedition,
terrorism, public order provisions, regulation of public protest, the ban on
strikes, in a sense, the regulation of speech that expresses contempt of court
sometimes. What is the common thread in all of these laws? In sedition and
suspicion of terrorism charges, the claim is express: that these are groups that
are withdrawing their consent from the state and that is manifest in the fact
that they committed to the violent overthrow of the state. And of course,
sometimes there are groups like that, let’s not underplay that fact. But the
criminalisation – the process of criminalisation of dissent is the idea that
more and more groups should be treated not just as expressing a different
opinion but as different ways of withholding consent. This is exactly the
strategy that is being, for example,
deployed in two of the major protests of our times. The targeting of CAA
protestors – why are they being tried under UAPA, which is a law expressly
designed for those whom you don’t want to give standing as reasonable citizens.
The four tropes that are used in, in a sense, criminalising
these protests – whether it’s the Delhi riots cases or the Bhima Koregaon
cases. The first will be the government’s claim, ‘you know, this protest seems
to be public’ – remember civil disobedience used to say that always carry out
your act publicly because what you are trying to do is you are trying to
justify your acts at the tribunal of public justification. That’s the Gandhian
logic of public satyagraha. But the government will almost always want to show
that these acts actually have a secret conspiracy behind them. By the way,
every single democratic government employs the same logic.
One of the striking things if you look at, for example, the
recently released FBI files on the Occupy Wall Street protest, it’s exactly the
same logic. They seem to be carrying it out in public, they seem to abide by
the Constitution. In India’s case, they seem to be carrying pictures of Gandhi
and Ambedkar and enacting the grammar of higher constitutionalism but at the
heart of this protest is a secret conspiracy. The public avowal of
constitutional values masks the fact that they are secret conspirators. Who
tells us that? A secret intelligence service, like the FBI or the CBI or
something like that.
This is a very controversial right in many constitutional jurisdictions
but it is fair to say that this is a right that has been significantly eroded
in all democratic jurisdictions in the last couple of decades. In part because
the balance of power between labour and capital has shifted, as manufacturing
declined. And India’s new labour laws completely shift this power in favour of
capital. Those laws might as well be meaningless for the most part, at least
the operative ones that deal with the balance of power between the two. Our new
labour laws are designed to accelerate this trend by making strikes almost
impossible. The ratio of strikes to lockout has long been tilted in favour of
lockouts. Unions have generally been weakening in India.
There was a lot of support for these kinds of anti-labour
dissent measures. Particularly those who lived in Mumbai and Kolkata, have long
memories of labour issues in the 1970s and to be fair, often that kind of
labour unrest did have serious consequences. The scholars who have calculated
that Bengal probably lost a tenth of its GDP in a decade due to those hartals
and strikes. But at the core of diminishing the right to strike is not this
empirical fact which is often invoked. That’s a judgement call you can make. It
is a fear. What does the strike do? It explodes the myth of consent. The
legitimacy of the labour contract is founded on the claim that the contract is
made freely and with some reciprocal obligations – both for the employer and
the employee.
The right to strike, in its core, is not just about
maintaining the relative bargaining power between labour and capital. It, in a
sense, is also underwriting the myth of free consent in labour relations. And
the big change in global attitudes to strikes has been about what does the
strike demonstrate – it punctures the myth that an employee-employer
relationship is a free and reciprocal relationship. The fact that you need a
strike, that fact itself is the objectionable fact. Not the moral substance of
the claims there might be advanced.
Intelligence evidence tells you there are secret political
groupings. The thing you want to do is impugn the standing of the protester.
You don’t want to, in a sense, engage with the substance of the moral claims.
But this continuity – that this is about state repression – should not blind us
to what is more problematic about criminalising dissent in modern democracies.
It is the fact that the language of consent in democracy is also being
mobilised in blurring this line. The claim is being made is not so much that it
is a state repressing citizens without rights, as in a colonial setting, but it
is a democracy that is denying standing to those who want to gain democratic
citizenship. The democratic imprimatur behind blurring the lines between the
criminal and the dissenter is also as serious as the imprimatur of the state
and that is what makes it combating harder.
The charge is made that the dissenter is subverting
democracy, not the state, and he or she has to be represented as such. So,
that’s why. In a sense, this criminalisation of dissent has a pattern. These
are not people who are part of democratic discourse, they don’t believe in it.
That’s the only way in which you can respond to dissent – they’re Khalistani,
they’re jhadi, something like that. But what I am suggesting to you that the uncomfortable
thought is that you are pushed into this by the founding myth of consent –
democratic legitimacy as the basis of the state. Of course, there are lots of
other things that have also facilitated this dilution between dissent and
criminality – expansion of terrorism related discourses in law is a very
important facet of that.
The crucial play in laws relating to terrorism UAPA, TADA,
POTA – and by the way, this is true of all jurisdictions in the world, whether
it is United States, Canada, United Kingdom. In normal criminal law, the focus
of criminal law typically is on post-facto punishment. That is supposed to be
the deterrent; that is supposed to be the occasion on which society expresses
its normative disapproval for crime committed against society. But terrorism
involves the idea of preemption and preemption changes the nature of state
power irrevocably. First, it changes the nature of the social contract which
the state is expected to discharge. The state is now dealing with an enemy that
does not fit into the usual logic of post-facto punishment.
We sleep well at night because we know that if somebody
assaults us the state might capture them and punish them. This is the
second-strike capacity that Hobbes talked about. But the logic of dealing with
terrorism is supposedly different – it’s preemption. The state does not say ‘we
have the power to make a criminal feel sorry’, whatever that might be. The
state now wants to say ‘it is better to be safe than sorry’, you know, a very
reasonable sentiment on the face of it. But the state has to preempt the act
and in preemption it can license, in a sense, the most invasive intrusion into
our right imaginable – surveillance, preventive detention, even assessment of
intention.
When you are talking about preemption, the causal connection
between ideology and the act is always necessarily conjectural. ‘I was carrying
Mao’s little red book in my bag’. On the logic of preemption it is
understandable why you might think ‘hey, is he a Maoist?’ It’s not a logic that
would apply to normal criminal law but the shift in the nature of the social
contract towards preemption, again, done with our agreement in our connivance,
in a sense licenses this expansion of invasion into our rights. In the logic of
preemption, by definition a political position becomes a criminal one. Because
the connection is necessarily much more conjectural. But now that is the charge
we have given the state – prevent terrorism at all costs.
The third feature – so, there’s democracy, there’s
preemption – the next feature of contemporary politics that pushes towards the
criminalising of dissent has to do with the mediatised and spectacular nature
of protest and dissent. As I said, part of the fascination of political protest
and dissent; the real, you might say, fun – the real political act in it ≠ is when
it is a refusal of consent. It’s not just about disagreement. Disagreement is a
kind of garden variety, nothing might be at stake in that disagreement. Protest
gets serious when there is a matter of deep principle at stake and the matter
is so deep that, in some sense, you want to express your refusal of consent.
Now, in a social media environment, in a highly mediatised
environment, this refusal of consent can be played out spectacularly and often
decontextualised. The meaning of a protest in India might be something very
different when it’s seen halfway across the world in the US or vice versa. The
problem with a mediatised environment is that you have to enact…you know,
[Ernest] Renan said that the nation is a daily plebiscite. The claim to
legitimacy and the claim to that legitimacy being founded on consent is also
something you have to perform daily. You often perform it through formal
processes – elections and so forth, that’s what make governments legitimate.
But remember, in the act of refusal of dissent, what is being called into
question in part is the legitimacy of the outcome of that very process. We are
in part saying, ‘elections are not enough, the Supreme Court is not enough
sometimes, if the Supreme Court does hear us in the first place’.
So, the fear is that…if the enactment of consent requires a
daily performance, protest by its very nature punctures that very performance.
Like with terrorism, a state may lose its battle of legitimacy if it deals with
protest post-facto, once the crowd has gathered, once the TV cameras have come
in, once, as it were, the poetry of the protest has been written. So, in some
senses, what modern states have realised, to preserve the myth of their own
legitimacy and consent, they have to make sure that protest is not a
spectacular performance. And it is for this reason that all democratic states
are making protest more difficult, denying permissions, not making protest
grounds available, using police power, Section 144.
The ostensible worry is protest might lead to violence,
protest might inconvenience other fellow citizens. But the underlying logic is
deeper. The Supreme Court can says “make the Ramleela Grounds available”. the
fact is the state doesn’t have an interest in making that available because the
thing you don’t want is a spectacular enactment of that refusal to consent. So,
what you want to do is you want to preempt protest, just as in some senses
censorship is often a means of drawing attention, marking the dissenter as a
criminal is a means of drawing attention to the fact that you want to deny them
standing altogether. Which leaves you in this convenient position of not having
to deal with the substance of that moral claim.
Now, there’s another paradox that comes out of this attempt
to pre-empt. And by the way, this is true of all jurisdictions. If you look at
the New York State Supreme Court’s ruling in the Zuccotti Park case, initially
the courts were very supportive – there’s a right to protest, you can occupy
public spaces, et cetera et cetera. But as the protest became more significant,
the courts in a sense, also began to backtrack. And you’re reminded of …you
know, Mark Twain once [apparently] said that they won’t let you vote if it
actually made a difference. They won’t let you dissent if it actually made a
difference.
In this, I think, the court in the Shaheen Bagh case and
India are not, as it were, alone. But here is the added Catch-22 or paradox of
this position – the more rules you have preempting protest, you can’t protest
in the parks, there is section 144 here – the more you are putting the
protester in the position of disobeying the law formally. But that’s exactly what you want because what
you want to show is that this protester is not motivated by George Eliot’s
higher rule, this protester is motivated by simply the refusal to consent and
this is actually how it plays out. Now, this is exactly the logic that plays
out in bail hearings, for example. There’s been a lot of discussion about
discretion in bail hearings and I was actually surprised to find – maybe I
shouldn’t have been surprised to find – that even in other jurisdictions like
the United States, Canada, very significantly, there’s a vast literature on the
political weaponisation of bail as an instrument. Jackie Esmode, for example,
has a classic paper on the use of bail as a political weapon in dealing with
protest in Canada.
Jackie Esmode’s paper actually showed that in part what
determined the grant of bail was not that bail was a right, will leaving a
person be a threat to the community, can they interfere with the course of
justice – all the basic kinds of things you ask when you grant bail. Actually
what was operative under there was this construction of that dissenter as a
particular kind of criminal whose crime is not that they say ‘I am against
globalisation’; whose crime is not that they want to question a trade
agreement; whose crime is not that they want to question a discriminatory law
like the CAA or they want to protest atrocities against Dalits in Bhima
Koregaon – that’s not the crime. The crime is that in the act to protest they
were enacting that refusal to consent on which the legitimacy of the state is
founded. So, this construction…the dissenter, as I’m trying to argue, is like
the person in the informal sector in India; they’re always in the zone of
illegality that is created by the discursive structures of the state itself.
Finally, of course, this line, the pressure to blur the line
between the protester and criminal, the dissenter and criminal is of course, buttressed
greatly by nationalism – the one ideology that requires an undifferentiated
myth of consent and unity. Why is almost always nationalism, let’s say, in
tension with or hostile to civil liberties and the one ideology that justifies
being hostile to civil liberties almost whole scale. Because the raison d’être,
the guiding principle of nationalism is, in a sense, the myth of…the
undifferentiated myth of consent and unity which a protest, a dissent, a
plebiscite…it punctures that plebiscitary claim to legitimacy that nationalism
has.
You might actually think of these ‘love jihad’ legislations
not just as legislations about regulating the freedom of conscience but also,
in a sense, enacting the logic of a particular kind of national…nationalist
plebiscite. Our nationalist imagination is now becoming ethnonational; it is
becoming demographic; this is a Hindu country, in some ways, it’s founded by a
demographic anxiety that Hindus’ political power by sheer weight of their
numbers should always remain hegemonic in every single respect. The love jihad
legislation is actually an enactment of that nationalist unity. The act of
conversion – this is not about religion, that’s an act of civil disobedience.
That’s in a sense refusing consent to this undifferentiated myth of unity that
nationalism requires.
And finally, as I said, no court, no Parliament…they have
such an investment in this myth of consent because otherwise their own
legitimacy comes into question. So, their inclination will always be to say
‘the potential naxal sympathisers’ – so-called Urban Naxals, a figment of their
imagination – ‘is dangerous to the polity because they’re refusing consent’.
What they will never question, what they cannot question is Parliament’s and
the court’s own complicity in bringing about the state of affairs where so many
citizens, in a sense, feel outside of the social contract.
So, what I’ve been suggesting to you is that we have to face
this uncomfortable thought. The state is not treating the dissenter as a state
of exception, as many people like to think. This is not also the dual state
where there’s a normative order for few people and the exercise of prerogative
for others. Actually, the figure of the dissenter is always being construed as
a threat to the logic of democratic legitimation itself. What can change this?
I’m not a big fan of courts, as has been apparent. I think
courts are important but I don’t think courts can be relied upon to do the work
of politics. There are some brave high court judges giving extraordinary
decisions even in these times but mostly the courts have internalised the logic
of the figure of the dissenter as a threat, as, in a sense, a criminal. The
courts also are too invested in their own mythology. We are a republic of the
rule of law and democracy. If you are dissenting, you must be either
prematurely dissenting – in which care you’re wrong, go to the processes – or
if you’re post-facto dissenting, you’re just this unilateral sovereign,
questioning our authority. The courts are too invested in their own mythology
and they will maintain it by evasion, even suspending the habeas corpus,
political reading of bail, you know, all of these things.
The judicialisation of politics is always dangerous, in part
because it always puts you in this corner solution – is dissent a right or not? As I said, you actually can’t answer
this question without looking at the normative content of dissent.
So, if you want to further dissent, protect dissent, you
will have to imagine democracy differently. And that imagination will require
two things: one, it’ll require solidarity because what protects the dissenter
from this charge that the court always foists on them, the state always foists
on them – these are unilateral sovereigns, refusing consent of proper procedure.
That charge of unilateralism can, in a sense, be negotiated only if there is
widespread solidarity with that cause. I’m afraid, I think the CAA movement, as
promising as it was, I think, failed in that sense. Not enough Hindus joined
it, let’s put it bluntly.
And the second thing you need, apart from solidarity, is an
imagination of democracy where democracy is understood to be a process of
negotiation. It’s always a work in progress where you don’t say of a dissenter,
they are, in some ways, subverting the logic of democracy. As Frederick
Douglass once put it – it was a wonderful quotation – “those who profess to
favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without
ploughing the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening, they want
the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one
or it may be a physical one or it may be both but it must be a struggle. Power
never concedes nothing without demand; it never did and it never will.”
https://thewire.in/rights/dissent-protest-democracy-supreme-court
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