A Regime Addicted to Compulsive Falsehood

On Tuesday, Sharjeel Imam, a student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested in Bihar on a number of charges, including sedition, for making two inflammatory speeches in December 2019 and January this year. In one of those, he is alleged to have said that if people agitated and 5,00,000 people could be organised, Assam and the North-east could be cut off from the rest of India; in another he is supposed to have said that Muslims and others should block roads across the country, possibly with the intention of paralysing daily life.

On the same day, the police filed a first information report on the basis of a complaint made on 26 January, charging Allama Iqbal Educational Society with sedition and other offences, including ‘promoting enmity’ among communities. The trust runs a school in Bidar, Karnataka, in which, the complainant claims, Class IV students staged a play against the Citizenship Amendment act (CAA), 2019, and a girl shouted a slogan against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Before moving on, let us note for the moment that neither staging a play against the CAA nor shouting slogans criticising Modi amounts to sedition or ‘promoting enmity’. Neither constitutes a crime at all. As for asking people to block roads to protest egregious state actions, much the same can be said. In fact, it is doubtful whether asking people to agitate to cut Assam and the North-east off from the rest of India or expressing the conditional opinion, in a grammatical sense, that if 5,00,000 people could be mobilised, this outcome could be achieved is seditious or in any manner criminal. The problem is that this regime works like a fascist state, which is why it takes recourse to the law on sedition arbitrarily and very often.

Contrast these two cases with three others that have happened recently. First, on 12 December 2019, Kapil Mishra, a candidate in the impending Delhi elections led a crowd which was chanting ‘shoot the traitors to the country’. No cognizance was taken of this criminal act of instigation. Mishra was later banned by the Election Commission (EC) from campaigning for 48 hours for saying some time later that the Delhi elections were like an India-Pakistan contest. A very gentle rap on the knuckles.

Second, on 27 January, Union Minister of State for Finance Anurag Singh Thakur led a crowd in chanting the same slogan. No cognizance has been taken by the police. On the same day, West Delhi BJP MLA Parvesh Verma told a news agency in an interview that what ‘happened in Kashmir with Kashmiri pandits could happen in Delhi also. Lakhs of people gather at Shaheen Bagh, they could enter houses (and) rape and kill your sisters and daughters’. Apart from the sheer vacuity of this statement, given that an overwhelming majority at the Shaheen Bagh protest are women and children, if this maligning of a peaceful protest is not construed as being an attempt to ’promote enmity’ among communities, nothing can be. Certainly not an anti-CAA play and slogans against Modi, however much he may be inclined to declaim like Louis XIV: ‘The state, it is I’.

The police obviously has not taken cognizance of these criminal acts and statements. And the EC, which comes more and more to resemble a servile department of the government acting on the BJP’s orders with every passing day, didn’t even slap them on the wrist. All it did was to strip the two men of their ‘star campaigner’ status, which means they will be freed to continue campaigning, only the bill for their efforts will have to be footed by the candidate who they are campaigning for. Individual candidates have limits placed on their election expenses. Big deal. The party can still pay for others to campaign.

Finally, let’s go to Lucknow to see the brazen, in-your-face discrimination practised by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments. On 25 January, the police arrested Samajwadi Party student leader Pooja Shukla and two other women protesting against the CAA and National Register of Citizens (NRC) at Ghanta Ghar in the Uttar Pradesh capital on charges of incitement to violence and disturbing the peace. Up until the last weekend, the Uttar Pradesh police had filed charges against almost a thousand women for violating Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) or rioting. The agitation at Ghanta Ghar has been peaceful despite the attempts by the police and agents provocateurs paid by the state government to provoke the protestors, again mostly women and children.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah addressed a rally on 21 January in the self-same Lucknow, which was thronged by thousands of people, violating the provisions of Section 144 of the IPC. Not only has Shah not been booked for this violation, he was provided full security by the central and state governments, in a blatant case of the ‘guardians’ conniving at breaking the law. Quite apart from the fact that Mishra, Thakur, Verma and Shah should all be jailed for breaking the law, we have now seen the unedifying spectacle of the Union home minister breaking a law that the current regime at the Centre, the BJP and the state governments it runs vociferously champion as being crucial to the maintenance of national security and deploy whenever they can. Can Shah at the very least be sacked from the Union cabinet?

Assassins belonging to the Hindu rightwing conspired and killed Mohandas Gandhi 72 years ago on 30 January 1948. The same Hindu Rightwing, now organised somewhat along different lines, is in power at the Centre and in 16 states in the guise of the BJP. And the BJP and the governments it runs have been making redoubled efforts at symbolically appropriating Gandhi and his legacy since 2014. In 2019, for instance, which marked Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, the central government declared India free of open defecation on 2 October in a supposed bow to Gandhi’s strictures on cleanliness and hygiene. Never mind that the claim is a complete falsehood. Lying is something that the BJP and its governments, perhaps inspired by the prime minister, do pathologically. And, of course, the historical record tells us that the incessant recourse to untruth has always been the stock-in-trade of fascist regimes.

The problem is that the attempts at appropriation are symbolic and rest on a propaganda project that is based on complete falsehood, which is ironical considering the fact that ‘satyagraha’ – literally, holding firmly to the truth—was the touchstone of Gandhi’s life, the movement he led and the Indian nation he conceived of. Without deifying Gandhi, or being in any political sense a Gandhian, all you need is a passing familiarity with the history of colonial India and the three-decades-odd mass movement against it inaugurated by Gandhi, to see clearly that nothing Modi and his government or the BJP and its governments have done qualify as following his principles.

There is nothing to suggest that the BJP and its governments, for instance, attach any value to the principle of non-violence, even allowing for the fact that governments/states, by their very nature, have to resort to coercive violence and the Gandhian idea of decentralised autarchy tantamount to political anarchy is not really an option in the contemporary world. But the BJP’s addiction to violence, arising from an ideology that places muscular Hinduism at its core, goes far beyond the ineluctable. It is part of the Sangh parivar political culture. The BJP’s version of Hinduism bears no relation to the one practised and espoused by Gandhi.

Gandhi’s deployment of the metaphor of ‘Ramrajya’ was unfortunate, but it’s obvious that it was not meant to signify a theocratic Hindu state in which the minorities would have to admit to being culturally Hindu in exchange for second-class citizenship or membership of the putative national ‘community’.

It is truly to be hoped that a regime based on recourse to compulsive falsehood will not be able to fool, to rework a cliché, enough people enough of the time to remain in power beyond 2024. Whatever damage they might wreak on the Indian economy, polity and society by then, could still be repaired.

The author is an independent journalist and researcher. The views are personal.