The contradictions in Indian politics
The writer is a public policy analyst based in Lahore. She tweets @durdananajam
In the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), India’s Minister for External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar put forth the five objectives India hoped to achieve to become a truly independent country. One of the objectives was to “liberate” India from the ‘colonial mindset’. The audience expected from Jaishankar an internal analysis of the situation and steps India had taken to come out of the colonial mindset. Instead, he demanded external reforms in the contemporary multilateral global governance system to enable India to shed the colonial shackles. In due course, India’s reforms in this respect were as superficial as Jaishankar’s resolve in the UNGA. On January 2023, he tweeted about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to rename 21 islands in Andaman and Nicobar after the recipients of Param Vir Chakra, India’s highest military award. In a similar move, India had also taken out the history of the Mughal era from textbooks and replaced the names of cities and streets named after Muslim personalities with those of Hindus. How this fit in with the colonial mindset alteration agenda is anybody’s guess.
Simply put, colonialism was a system of governance designed to subjugate the native population of countries ruled by the British or other Western entities. Two interventions were essential to tilt the system in one’s favour. First, by bringing their footprints into the education system, the colonists weakened the natives’ identity and strengthen the overpowering stature of the colonists as the ultimate providers. Second, they tweaked with the legal system to bring in laws that superimposed the larger-than-life image of the colonists; hence a dissent of the slightest nature was an offence reciprocated with severe punishment. We find blasphemy, defamation and sedition laws given unreasonable fixtures to deny the right to freedom of liberty, opinion, expression, assembly and religion to the Indians.
In contradiction to India’s desire to relieve itself from the colonial mindset, the Indian legal system is grounded in the colonial era. Changing the names of streets or meddling with facts that formed the building blocks of a nation’s cultural and social history from the textbook can best be described as a cosmetic and intellectually deceptive move.
For example, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) was passed on December 30, 1967 to tackle unlawful activities relating to secession and disruption of sovereignty or causing disaffection against India. According to the legal fraternity and India’s leading human rights organisation, the Coordination of Democratic Rights Organisations, this law can be traced back to the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLA)1908, which was designed to define “unlawful association’ while attempting to suppress the Indian independence movement by banning several organisations. Since independence, India has been using the same powers used by the so-called British colonists to curb dissent, especially in Kashmir. These and other laws under the colonial-era Indian Penal Code have allowed abuse of power by the state and erected structural inequalities in the justice system, leading to disparities in Indian society. The ignominious news of the lynching of Muslims for eating cow meat, or refusing to glorify Hindu deities; the denial to Muslims to assemble for Friday prayers in the open; the hue and cry over women wearing a scarf in education institutions; the torching of churches and forcibly converting Christians to Hindus on the unfounded ground of bringing them back into the folds of their ancestral religion i.e. Hindu; and the false-flag operation such as the Pulwama attack emanates from the CLA.
India has used UAPA blatantly in Kashmir to disintegrate the Kashmiris in their rank and file. For instance, on March 20, 2023, a freelance journalist, Irfan Mehraj, was arrested in Srinagar under the UAPA on the charges that Mehraj was a close “associate” of Khurrum Parvez and was working in his organisation, the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Societies. The police conceded to the fact-finding committee of the Press Council of India in March 2022 that “as many as 49 journalists have been arrested and charged since 2016 under UAPA”. What else could be the purpose of rounding up such a large number of journalists, considering that Jammu and Kashmir has a very small press corps, then harassing and intimidating journalists to fall in with the government’s narrative?
In another display of contradiction, India’s taxation department hounded the BBC office in Delhi when the former aired a documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’ on Modi’s atrocities in Gujarat as its Chief Minister. BBC was accused of taking to colonial approach by airing the documentary that killed 1,044 people, of which 790 were Muslims, on the instruction of Modi’s government.
Labeling a documentary that brought to the fore the plight of Muslims in India as a colonial attempt rather than taking it as a fact-finding mission that uncovered an important milestone in the religio-political life of the Indian Muslim diaspora in Britain and elsewhere is akin to using colonial-era legal instruments for redressal.
The contradictions do not stop at that. To mention a few, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the abolition of Article 370 were contradictory to the constitution of India and a reflection of authoritarianism. A similar inroad is seen in managing judiciary. At one point, the Modi government refused to appoint judges on the recommendation of the Supreme Court of India until it gave in and allowed Modi to fill the slots — the hounding resulted in a complacent judiciary that either validated the law or refused to take a stand.
Christophe Jaffrelot, a senior research fellow at Sciences Po, a professor of Indian politics and sociology at King’s College, London and the author of Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, calls India an ethnic democracy, where the minorities — the non-Hindus, the Muslims, but also the Christians — are taken as second-class citizens in their own country and who are attacked by the vigilante groups supported by the government to make the lives of minorities difficult.
The contradiction in Indian politics is a bad omen for the minorities, especially the Kashmiris, who are forced to play puppet during the election season to garner the rightwing BJP vote.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 7th, 2023.
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