BY BADRI RAINA
I have before me a national English daily that is much
given to spreading the word about the beauties of
"reform" and modern "development" in India. Never a day passes when it
does not remind us and the world how India is just about to breast the
tape to superpowerdom. As in the case of other English dailies (bar one),
if and when it reports on farmer’s suicides, atrocities on Dalits, the
wretched state of superstition in India’s vast hinterland or other such
unpleasant details of national life, it does so with a quality of
impatience very reminiscent of that dismissive gesture of Podsnaps’
forearm in Dickens’ Little Dorrit (a novel that Bernard Shaw
recommended over Marx for an understanding of the workings of finance
capital) which says ‘do not bring such things to spoil my appetite’.
Be that as it may, the November 17 issue of this
avant-garde daily announces that the government of the day is all set now
to inaugurate a "Look East" policy. We are informed that a two-day North
Eastern Council meet has determined to plough the ‘seven sisters’ (Arunachal
Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura) for
purposes of exploiting their potential for "export".
Be it noted that some six decades after India’s
independence from colonial rule, these states remain largely bereft of
roads, electricity, educational institutions, hospitals, not to speak of
industry or other sources of steady employment, regional variations
notwithstanding. Now, however, "access corridors" from these regions to
neighbouring countries are proposed to be opened, as well as "air
connectivity" within the region. Such are the charms of "reform". If you
have no bread, eat cake. The question as to what percentage of
North-easterners might be equipped to participate in the bounties of
"access corridors" and "air connectivity" hardly needs to be asked. The
observation seems warranted that while our post-Washington Consensus
ruling elites remain mortally opposed to pampering the "creamy layer"
among the downtrodden social groups of India, everywhere else it is the
creamy layer for which now the Indian state opens its purse strings and,
one might add, its system of justice.
Reading this "Look East" news report, it just struck me
that, after all, we do see only what we wish to see. Looking east, not one
worthy in that two-day conference seemed to see Irom Sharmila of Manipur
who continues to be on her soul-wrenching satyagraha since October 2000,
refusing food and water, against the draconian Armed Forces (Special
Powers) Act 1958 (AFSPA).
Through this six-year long odyssey, unparalleled since the
days of Gandhi – and in some respects more heroic than any of the many
fasts he undertook – this "iron lady" has either been in one jail after
another or one hospital after another where she continues to be force-fed
through nasal drips. It is doubtful that the British colonialists would
have waited through a six-year long saga of self-mortification to address
a public issue. Indeed, even Cindy Sheehan (anti-Iraq war activist) seems
to have pulled greater punch with the American media and public than our
own Irom Sharmila Chanu. Such is our self-absorption in project
superpowerdom. Soon this hero of substance might actually die, and Manipur
go up in flames. What will that matter? After all we do have the AFSPA in
place, an Act that allows all manner of control.
Now this Act empowers not just any commissioned officer
but any warrant or non-commissioned officer operating in a "disturbed
area" to:
Ø "fire even to the extent of causing death" if in "the
opinion" of such "it is necessary for the maintenance of public order";
Ø "destroy any shelter from which armed attacks are…
likely to be made";
Ø "arrest without warrant any person… likely to commit a
cognisable offence or against whom a reasonable suspicion exists";
Ø "enter and search without warrant any premises to make
an arrest. …"
Thus wherever the AFSPA is in force, the right to protest
and the right to legal redress remain rescinded. Many activists who have
simply wanted to document excesses committed by the army have been "picked
up, tortured and killed"1.
Since all appeals to that package of assurances we call
the Constitution of India seem to have fallen on the deaf ears of a state
that has vowed to keep such noises out of hearing range, Irom Sharmila’s
heroism may find resonance from a throwback to an unforgettably decisive
chapter of India’s struggle for freedom. There is, of course, only the
hope that such recall might melt the wax in the ruling metropolitan
eardrum but no guarantee whatsoever, since Podsnappery now seems the
endorsed religion of the state. Ergo, let the wretched of the land be made
invisible and the protesting voice be quelled so that Washington is saved
embarrassment and our burgeoning breed of CEOs allowed to carry on without
guilt or hindrance. After all, if Singapore is our ideal, why need the
absence of civil liberties be factored into our enterprises?
As the infamous Defence of India Act lapsed with the end
of the first world war, the British, wishing to carry on keeping tabs on
civil liberties in place, notified the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes
Act (more popularly the Rowlatt Act) in early March of 1919.
This "black act" provided
Ø for the trial of seditious crimes by benches of three
judges without the right of preliminary commitment or of appeal;
Ø for relaxation of the rules of evidence;
Ø for detention without charges;
Ø for searches without warrants;
and it stipulated that "punishment or acquittal should be
speedy".
Now the parallels with our own AFSPA must seem uncanny –
with one exception: as far as I have been able to determine, the Rowlatt
Act fell rather short of our current day AFSPA in failing to authorise any
rummy sergeant major to "fire even to the extent of causing death". That
the niceties of the law did not inhibit an O’Dwyer from causing the
massacre at Jallianwala is, of course, another matter. After all, he was
not murdering his own people!
Yet this "black act" seemed to Gandhi the last straw that
broke the obliging back: "the idea of leading a campaign against the
Rowlatt Act… possessed me," he wrote in his autobiography (p. 201). The
call to an all-India hartal followed, inaugurating the moment from whence
the struggle for complete independence was never really to be turned back,
notwithstanding prevarications and internal dissentions. In April, the
non-cooperation movement – the first truly massive all-India mass uprising
– was unleashed, involving the boycott of offices, courts, educational
institutions, and the burning of foreign cloth.
As Gandhi was arrested, this is how he spoke of the
Rowlatt Act in his trial: "a law designated to rob the people of all
freedom. I felt called upon to lead an intensive agitation against it."
Thus, Irom Sharmila’s six-year long satyagraha which,
recalling Jallianwala, began precisely on the day the Malom massacre took
place wherein, on October 2, 2000, the Assam Rifles shot dead 10 unarmed
Manipuris at a bus stop in Imphal on suspicion of being insurgents,
invites us not only to revisit the history of March/April 1919 (which we
proudly teach our school children as preciously unique heritage), but also
to ponder the thickness of skin and soul that our rulers seem to have
acquired since independence, especially since the beginning of the
Washington Consensus and the era of "reform".
Indeed, in recent years who is to say that the brutalities
of our own state apparatus, vented on protesting Adivasis, workers, Dalits,
displaced oustees, have in any measure fallen short of those that the
colonisers reserved for us? It has been made clear time and again that the
chief function that our policing mechanisms now reserve for themselves is
to secure from any form of public discontent the operations of our ruling
economic bosses and, additionally, to facilitate the exertions of
majoritarian goons who, now in Ayodhya, now in Gujarat, congregate in
menacing intention on behalf of "cultural nationalism" and "national
security".
The fact remains that having obtained freedom from
colonial rule in 1947 and subsequently promising to all Indian citizens
the equitable fruits of a democratic social order, our indigenous rulers
set about ensuring that those fruits were confined to a "creamy"
metropolitan minority that is increasingly unwilling to "look" beyond what
fattens it further, insatiably. No wonder then that when they "look east"
they do not see Irom Sharmila or the AFSPA, but only an opportunity to now
plough its resources for "export" promotion.
Every government that serves a class-based state must
necessarily, from time to time, resort to tactics that help to keep in
place its democratic legitimation. Thus, in the aftermath of the protests
in Manipur (which included the shockingly desperate and bold stripping by
women in front of army personnel, inviting the latter to rape them), the
prime minister set up the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee to report on the
AFSPA.
This committee submitted its report in June 2005. To this
day the report has neither been made public nor been placed in Parliament.
Reason? Among other things, the committee opines that the AFSPA has
"become a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of
discrimination and high-handedness".
Irom Sharmila never put it that strongly.
There is another rather deeply ironic aspect to the
situation to which attention ought to be drawn.
When Gandhi proposed the hartal against the Rowlatt Act in
March 1919, most moderates were askance (as luck would have it, Tilak was
in London at the time). Gandhi, sensing the moment to capture leadership
of the Congress, wrote as follows to Dinshaw Wacha (letter dated February
25, 1919, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, p. 188): "Satyagraha is
the only way, it seems to me, to stop terrorism."
Gandhi had in mind what he saw as a dangerously
undesirable development taking place among sections of the intelligentsia,
namely, the willingness to engage in armed resistance to colonial rule
(something that had begun to happen since the partition of Bengal in
1905). Given that such impulses were largely inspired by the Bolshevik
revolution of 1917, Gandhi and the bulk of the Congress, given their class
character, were understandably alarmed. Satyagraha was then in no small
measure conceived as an alternate praxis.
Keeping in mind the continuing armed insurgencies in the
North-east, one would then have thought that the course adopted by Irom
Sharmila should have received more than a cold shoulder by the government
of the day. The treatment received by her, however, raises doubts that the
state seriously wishes to see the end of insurgency. Just as the British
saw in the Gandhian methods of mobilisation a menace more intractable than
the then armed challenge it was receiving, it does seem that Irom Sharmila
spells a threat which the state wishes to quell, preferring to deal
militarily with the insurgents rather than face a people’s democratic
revolt.
And as a statement put out by the Human Rights Features
Organisation succinctly states, "it is precisely this contemptuous
attitude in the face of suffering which demeans the world’s largest
democracy"2.
Nor is it a surprise that India’s prime media channels,
which have lately been hotly pleading the cases of some notable victims in
instances of murder, should have evinced rather negligible interest in the
six-year long satyagraha of Irom Sharmila. Is it not perhaps time that
these influential channels gave to the North-east the same quality of
sustained attention that they have laudably given to Kashmir in recent
years? Why is it that we either never seem to "look" towards the east or,
if and when we do, we "look" but do not "see"?
I may be pardoned for recalling what I had written in an
article titled "Sangma Treads Dangerous Ground"(Mainstream, April
14, 2001). The article was occasioned by PA Sangma’s campaign to dub Sonia
Gandhi a "foreigner" who had to be prevented from becoming prime minister
even if the Constitution recognised her rights as a "citizen of India". I
had pointed out to Sangma that if the right to ascribe citizenship was
left to the subjective whims of all and sundry, people of his countenance
would have a hard battle on hand, since, knowing from experience as a
teacher in Delhi University, I knew that students who came from the
North-east were hardly ever treated as Indians by "mainstreamers".
Is it possible that Irom Sharmila suffers such disgusting
neglect on account of subliminal impulses from which not even the
government of the day is free? A truly disturbing thought, that. n
(Badri Raina writes on cultural and political issues; [email protected].
This article first appeared on www.Znet.)