On the Feasibility of Dissent

Courageous fraternity seems to have won an important round of battle in north India’s hilly state of Uttarakhand. “Mohammed” Deepak, the man I wrote about last week, the one who was about to lose the space where he’s been running his gym, has cleared his rental dues, it seems. It appears that more than sufficient support was raised by a YouTube video that journalist Ajit Anjum made on the price Deepak was having to pay for protecting an old and frail Muslim friend from far-right bullies. 

The supportive comments I saw under Ajit Anjum’s video suggested that in many minds revulsion against the drive to persecute India’s Muslims is strong. 

The popularity of Anjum’s channel, and of a dozen or more similar YouTube channels, indicates that ground-level dislike of hate propaganda may be widespread, even if not always openly expressed. While India’s electoral system has at times been “adjusted” in the far-right’s favor, minds and hearts are still reachable via YouTube and other social media platforms. For those following democracy’s declining health in India, this is a positive reality.

*

A dramatic test of India’s democracy is likely to take place on Saturday June 6 or shortly thereafter. On that date, the 30-year-old “cockroach” hero, Abhijeet Dipke, is set to return to India from the US, where he has just obtained a master’s in public relations from Boston University. (After calling him “Abhijit” last week, I’ve learned that Dipke prefers the spelling Abhijeet for his first name.) 

By now the whole world knows how Dipke won millions of internet followers by embracing the insult-phrase “cockroach.” He has moved the Delhi High Court for restoring his X handle taken away by the Indian government. While declining to direct an immediate renewal of the X account of Dipke’s satirical digital collective (the Cockroach Janata Party), the Delhi High Court has asked a governmental review committee to examine the matter and take a decision before July 7.

Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav of this court said that Dipke could appear virtually before the committee, adding that under India’s IT rules such a panel could authorize the restoration of CJP’s X account. Asking both X and the Modi government to provide their responses to Dipke’s petition, which affirms his commitment to democratic principles and defends satire as an essential component of free speech, Justice Kaurav has posted the matter for further hearing on July 7. 

A COMMITTEE ONCE MORE

The judge’s words notwithstanding, no one should expect a governmental committee in India to reverse the decision to deprive the CJP of its X handle, which would have been taken at the highest level. Meanwhile Dipke and the CJP have returned to X with a new name, “Cockroach is back.”

What will Dipke do on his return to India? What will he be allowed to do? Will he start a political organization on the ground? Will he be arrested? He has repeatedly underlined that whatever he does will be peaceful and constitutional. He has also said that those responsible should pay a price for the leaks in recent weeks of examination questions that have forced millions of young students to repeat arduous and expensive exercises of preparation. 

This collapse of the exam system has affected at least four major all-India tests which influence the futures of millions of young Indians across a wide spectrum, including those looking for admission to college after high school, or for entry into medical, dental, or nursing courses, or for courses leading to places in India’s vast paramilitary system. Some suicides may be connected to this collapse.

Reports suggest that Dipke will demand the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, whose department oversees the exams. "My family and friends are afraid that I will be arrested right from the airport and sent to jail," Dipke said in a video message, reports The Telegraph of Kolkata.

PHRASES FOR OUR TIME 

It’s been commencement season in the US. A terse and apt label for our world’s current condition, “Interdependence without trust,” was provided by Indian parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor in his ceremonial talk to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts. 

Prices at petrol pumps across the globe reflect this reality, which is also blared from the Strait of Hormuz by ships under diverse flags that nervously carry oil, fertilizer or something else on which life depends across the globe. The mistrust that is aired hourly on social media -- in English, Persian, Arabic, and a number of other languages – cannot hide the interdependence. 

Another actuality in today’s world is that “Some may do as they please.” On May 31, after forcing a further armed advance in Lebanon, Israel raised its flag over the 900-year-old Beaufort Castle, which commands sweeping views of south Lebanon. Boasted Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz: “Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and my direction, the IDF expanded the operations in Lebanon, crossed the Litani River, and captured the Beaufort Ridge.” 

Although France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, asked for a UN Security Council meeting and said that “nothing can justify the continuation of Israeli military operations in Lebanon and its ever-deeper occupation of Lebanese territory,” most world leaders have kept mum. Israel may indeed do as it pleases beyond its borders -- in Lebanon, in Gaza, and in other parts of Palestine. Laws and norms will not be invoked, and rebukes will not be heard. 

“Don’t let children hear what’s said from the White House” may be a desirable tenet for our immediate times. From that high podium, “obliteration,” “devastation” and “wiping out” bridges, power plants and more have been promised in the recent past. I will concede that unlike heads of some governments who refuse to take questions from the press, the US’s Donald Trump gives reporters their chance, though he can also hurl invectives at them. 

DOES DECORUM MATTER? 

That said, did adolescent language ever before find the favor it presently enjoys in the US? The word “decorum” has become obsolete. Something equally important has also vanished: belief in the truth of what is spoken from a podium of prestige. 

A promise of “a decision tonight after meeting my top security team” is followed by days of silence. A while back bombers were sent even while peace talks were taking place in Geneva. Strong words, harsh words, even frightening threats, may well be part of a leader’s armory, yet priceless assets are lost – assets like respect, dignity, and trust -- when the primary aim of words is not to pass on facts, or inform the public, but to influence the market or a deal, or to fool someone. 

The White House rostrum became special because of history. From time to time, words uttered from there have calmed, or reassured, or stirred, or unified, or inspired. For an unforgettable example, think of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Gold-plating pieces of the White House can fetch very little. It may briefly dazzle the eye but cannot touch the soul. 

Speaking truth to power is indeed critical. At times it might save a few lives, or ease life for many. But let us also recall the power of truth, of humble, simple, or difficult truth, including when it comes from the White House or a similar place. 

*

“In the old days, voters chose the government.  Now the government chooses the voters.” This has been political thinker Yogendra Yadav’s crisp summation of the pruning of voters’ lists by India’s election commission, the EC, a body which, I am obliged to say, has lost the respect of the Indian people. 

In earlier times, officials used to scour remote spaces to ensure that no one, no matter how old, poor, disabled or isolated, was left out of democracy’s greatest festival: voting day in India. Today, under SIR (the Special Intensive Revision they’ve carried out), the EC’s officers have “cleansed” voters’ rolls of hundreds of thousands of “ineligible” names. Most disappointingly, the EC’s heavy-handed and, according to independent observers, partisan exercise has been upheld by India’s Supreme Court. 

Muslim names have drawn the special attention of the EC’s slaying pen. Unsurprisingly, a national security justification is offered. The names being removed, we’re told, may be of possible Bangladeshi infiltrators. The opposition’s demands for proof have been met with silence. No numbers have been provided of alleged infiltrators. If significant infiltration actually took place, what was the government’s border police doing? Though infiltration is largely a bogey, ceaseless propaganda about it has secured for the BJP the votes of a great many Hindus in Assam and West Bengal, states that adjoin Bangladesh. 

Now the Modi government has taken a further step. Home Minister Amit Shah -- Modi’s most trusted associate -- has announced a “high-level committee” which will “conduct a comprehensive assessment of demographic changes occurring across India due to illegal immigration and other unnatural causes” and “analyze the patterns of population changes at the levels of religious and social communities” and “present a well-planned and time-bound solution.” 

WHERE IS EQUALITY? 

We’re told that among other things this HLC will (1) analyze structural population changes at the level of religious or social communities, particularly where they deviate from broader trends, and (2) recommend a permanent operational mechanism for “the time-bound identification, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants already residing in the country.” 

While the second task set out for the HLC is an admission that no governmental action accompanied the years of propaganda about infiltration, the first “task” is a signal for vigilance against “unnatural” growth in the numbers of India’s main religious minorities, i.e. Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. If minorities are to be watched with suspicion, if Muslims must prove with hard-if-not-impossible-to-procure documents that they, their parents and their grandparents were born in India, where is equality, where is dignity, where is fraternity? Where indeed is India? 

Writing on May 30 in the courageous portal The Wire, commentator Harish Khare pointed out that though openly and repeatedly humiliated during the last twelve years, “Muslims across India, whether by individual instinct or collective common sense, have refused to be provoked.” 

This wise restraint is almost astonishing, for a vast number of jobless young men and women are part of the 14 or 15 percent of India’s population that Muslims constitute. 

BETWEEN CHINA & INDIA 

The current four-day visit to India of Myanmar’s president, Min Aung Hlaing, who ruled his country from 2021 as the commander of its armed forces before assuming the presidency in April of this year, is being viewed as a bid to balance to some extent the Myanmar authorities’ dependence on China, which Hlaing is slated to visit before long. 

Over the years, the governments of India and Myanmar have cooperated to counter insurgencies by ethnic groups that inhabit both sides of the India-Myanmar border. Ajit Doval, India’s national security chief from 2014, was among the first to call on Hlaing. Insurgencies in Myanmar appear to be geographically and commercially linked to the rare minerals contained in areas dominated by ethnic rebels, minerals in which India too is interested. 

According to the Indian news agency ANI, President Hlaing assured India on June 1 that Myanmar would do "everything necessary" to clamp down on Indian insurgent groups operating from within its borders.” Briefing the media on Hlaing’s visit, Vikram Misri, the top bureaucrat in India’s external affairs ministry, said that Modi raised the issue of cross-border insurgent activity with Hlaing. The latter is said to have “reiterated his assurance that Myanmar... would do everything necessary to ensure that these groups did not become a cause of threat against the security of India.” 

Decades of history have tried to teach both India and Myanmar that guns and bombs do not eliminate grievances in human hearts. Meanwhile, the people of Myanmar continue their long wait for democratic rule.

A day before Hlaing’s arrival, police in Delhi arrested refugees from Myanmar who were protesting the visit of one who had led a coup against an elected government. A Myanmar activist told The Wire: “We feel entirely abandoned, living under a brutal dictatorship with no one to help us, surrounded by neighbors driven only by selfish, interest-based policies.”