End Of Innocence

The plant that we so diligently watered and cared for has grown into a big banyan; full of flowers and fruits. Own it now.

53 people have lost their lives in the Delhi riots. You have heard this already. But do you see the problem here? Riot? Was it really a riot? Is it a riot if the state machinery and police take sides; forget keeping silent while mobs went on a rampage but Delhi police took stones in their own hands and threw them at the other side, they directed and aided one side of the mob (as if there was another side anyway), they climbed and destroyed CCTV cameras. Yes, police did all this. It’s all on record. There are videos after videos that prove all this. How then can we call it a riot? It was a pogrom. As Rana Ayyub called, state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom. Let’s call it what it was. Now that we have settled on the calling business, let’s get on to our language. The 53 dead bodies, actually in some cases, there were no bodies, only a limb which police would not give permission to even DNA test, had both Hindu and Muslim names. And because there were dead bodies from both the sides, we are told it was both-sided violence. Like a cricket match where you fix a date and then come prepared on the scheduled date to hit fours and sixes? An equal opportunity contest is how one person put it to me. But really? Then why are dead bodies so disproportionate? Is it because Hindu men are disproportionately stronger than Muslim men? If so, what is “Hindu Khatre mein hain” all about? A cleverly masterminded political strategy to make the majority feel threatened by the minority? Why only Muslim places of worship were torched and desecrated? Why only the Quran has been burnt and its pages are torn down? Why was it that only Hindu mob got to climb a pillar of a mosque and place a saffron flag (considered Hindu flag) on it? What problem did Muslim men have in climbing a pillar of a temple? Is it that their legs are weak, unlike Hindu men who could so easily climb atop the minaret of a mosque? Or is it that Muslims did not come prepared with their own flags? Did no one inform them that there’s going to be a match on a certain date? Are you getting what I’m saying? Actually, I don’t care what you get and what you don’t. I want to say it because what is being said on TV, on online by influential faces makes no sense. For weeks unless Coronavirus happened on tv, we were busy showing Tahir Hussain and Shahrukh, and family of Ankit who was killed in this pogrom, so much so that, it was feeling as if it was not Hindu men but Muslim men colluded with Delhi police and not slogans of “Jai Shri Ram” but “Allah Hu Akbar” that echoed in Delhi for three days. WhatsApp and social media were then flooded with pictures of Tahir Hussain’s terrace. In all this, nobody cared to question Delhi police on its disastrous flip-flop.

The Delhi Police on Tuesday confirmed that they had rescued suspended Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain from his home in North East Delhi on February 24, when the region was hit by violence due to communal clashes between supporters and opponents of the Citizenship Act.

Additional Commissioner of Police Ajit Kumar Singla confirmed this to media personnel on Tuesday. “On February 24, around 11 pm to midnight, some people told us that a councillor is stuck and feeling insecure. He was then rescued,” Singla said.

However, about an hour later, news agency ANI put out a clarification, citing Delhi Police officials, that Hussain “did not require rescuing” that night. “News of the councillor being stuck was received by police, upon investigation, it was found the councillor was safe in his house,” ANI cited unidentified officials as saying.

In hours, a man was turned from victim to perpetrator. We sure love swift justice, don’t we?

While videos of rioters and Delhi police were making rounds, a set of people were also urging everyone to maintain peace. Suspiciously though, they wanted people like Rana Ayyub to not speak and disturb the peace. She was on channels after channels (mostly international media as our media was too feared to give her airtime) calling out our use of words among other things. What is this request for peace anyway? We are told Prime Minister has tweeted and asked to maintain peace. What does that mean? While Delhi burnt for two days, the same Prime Minister was giggling, waving hands and bear-hugging Donald Trump. I know problems of whataboutery but why did he not tweet then? Did he not have the time? Or did he not wanted to? And even if he had tweeted, what difference would it have made? The people who comprised the mob, do you think they would have stopped? You and I might fall for Modi’s odd-and-even statesmanship but they know him rather too well. They know what he means when he says something and what he means not, they know exactly what he wants from them. We are fools not to see it through. It has been there before our eyes all this time. We have just been choosing to ignore it. We have been choosing to look the other way. We have forgotten Gujarat 2002, they have not. They know who Modi is. If the man indeed wanted peace, why did he not act on Anurag Thakur for his hate speech that resulted in a shooter who walked in front of Delhi police and shot a bullet at the anti-CAA crowd? If Prime Minister of India wanted peace and not riots and deaths, why did he not immediately sack and act against Kapil Mishra who threatened the peaceful protesters? Why was Delhi police standing behind him when he was giving this threat? Why did Prime Minister not act against his Home Minister under whom comes Delhi police? We are too feared to answer these questions. Some of us, especially TV channels, look at them, they won’t even dare to ask these questions. The answer is, he did not want to stop this. Mr Modi wanted this. Look at his politics. It is full of hate and spreading fear. How did you (or I) expect him to behave any differently? We created him. He is a product of our own making. We told ourselves what he was not. We told he was this progressive statesmanlike figure. Was he though? And where did that idea came from? It came from his PR exercise.

…the media should have been alert to the doublespeak of, and the division of labour in, Hindutva forces. A speech in the hinterland might demonise Muslims; one at a media summit in Delhi might focus on inclusive growth and democracy. A speech made by Modi is not binding on Adityanath, then a member of parliament from Gorakhpur and today the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, whose repugnantly communal comments in the Lok Sabha, just a few weeks after the speech, did not ruffle the prime minister’s feathers.
Following 2002, Modi could not catch a break from the stigma of the anti-Muslim pogrom he had overseen as chief minister of Gujarat. Yet by April 2014, the academician Ashutosh Varshney was writing that “Anti-Muslim rhetoric has been missing in Modi’s campaign. Instead, he has concentrated on governance and development.” That simply was not true. Varshney must have missed Modi’s attempt to whip up communal passions with speeches about the “pink revolution,” a reference to cattle slaughter; missed Adityanath on the dais where a BJP man recommended exhuming Muslim women’s corpses in order to rape them; missed Amit Shah exhorting Jats to “take revenge” on Muslims in Muzaffarnagar, where the two communities had clashed violently in 2013.
Modi’s smash-hit 2014 election campaign, led by advertising stars from Ogilvy & Mather and McCann Worldgroup, was so successful at this kind of erasure that Business Today ran a case study of it in June 2014. “Marketing gurus cite the examples of Cadbury, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola that battled problems relating to brand-taint,” the article said. “Cadbury had fought its way out of a controversy related to worms in its chocolates while the two beverages giants faced allegations of pesticides in their colas … Not so long so, the words that could have been used to describe Modi were authoritarian, megalomaniac and communal.” By the time of the election, the words imprinted in the public imagination were “strong” and “decisive.”
Repeated cattle- and caste-related lynchings, beginning early in his first term, failed to evoke any comment from Modi. Since the mandate had vapourised his communal record and recast him as an economic messiah, many liberal commentators deflected blame to what they insisted were “fringe elements.” Meanwhile, the union minister Mahesh Sharma draped the coffin of a beef-related murder accused in the national flag, and his cabinet colleague Jayant Sinha met another set of Hindutva criminals with garlands.
Modi eventually issued a late, half-hearted censure of cow vigilantes. He followed it up by appointing Adityanath — a communal leader with a private militia at his disposal, who faced scores of cases for things including rioting and attempt to murder — as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. It took wilful naïveté to say, as an India Today news anchor tweeted, “Give him a chance.”
Few liberals disagree with the view that the BJP has enslaved and destroyed every institution, from the Reserve Bank of India to the Central Bureau of Investigation to the judiciary to the press to our universities. We have watched it coddle rioters who demand a film ban and marchers who support rapists, but crack down on Kashmiris. We have seen it call college kids “anti-nationals,” and put a target on dissenters’ backs. We have had five years of regressive anti-intellectualism, fake news and fudged data; of crony capitalism and poor economic management; of relentless chipping away at Gandhian and Nehruvian legacies; and of increasing Hindutva aggression. As recently as the 2019 campaign, Modi was making divisive remarks, flouting the Election Commission’s code of conduct and seeking votes in the name of the armed forces. On the one hand he whipped up fear about “terrorism,” on the other he gave a ticket to Pragya Thakur, who is an accused in the Malegaon bomb blast and a champion of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. There is no discernible distance between the centre and the so-called fringe.
It is nothing short of horrifying that Amit Shah is now the country’s home minister, responsible for maintaining domestic peace. Besides the fake encounters, Shah has been accused of using the state machinery to spy on a woman for Modi, in a scandal known as Snoopgate; he has called Muslim immigrants “termites”; and has referred to journalists and writers as “breaking India forces” and “the tukde tukde gang.” But on the website of the Observer Research Foundation, a Reliance-funded think tank, Sushant Sareen wrote: “The team comprising of Home Minister Amit Shah, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and the NSA Ajit Doval is something of a security dream-team.”
It is equally horrifying that Pragya Thakur sits in parliament, as does her fellow MP Pratap Sarangi, who was the Odisha convenor of the Bajrang Dal when the missionary Graham Staines and his children were burned alive, and who faces several serious criminal charges. The Indian Express, however, chose to fete him for his — wait for it — simple lifestyle.
– Mitali Saran, “Worms in the Chocolate”

PRs can achieve wonders. One must read Noam Chomsky on how to manufacture consent. That’s another thing Modi has done. In his “We value hard work not Harvard” way, he and his minions have pushed India into anti-intellectualism. Science has got sidetracked, reading is no more fashionable. And why would it be? If more and more people read Arundhati Roy, Chomsky, Orwell or Snowden, less and less are their chances of supporting this government and RSS’s grand old Nazi project. If you, for instance, read Orwell’s Animal Farm, you would understand most of the games this government is playing with its citizens. If you read Roy’s My Seditious Heart, you’ll see through the maze of power and corporate greed that is sucking this nation and world at large. Nothing that Modi and his minions are doing is new and not that it is hidden from everyone. It is just that those who see through his plan are immediately branded anti-national and worse so you don’t read or listen to them. They want you to close your minds and you have without much of their efforts obliged. That is precisely why you believe and approve of Telangana police’s action on rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinary doctor and refuse to entertain any divergent thought. You have closed the part of your brain that indulged in logic. They have simplified things for you. They tell you what is right and wrong, and you believe them. They tell you what to do and you act accordingly. Why else did you stand in demonetization queue without a question?

It is not just obeisance that we have normalised ourselves in but rape too. Ask anyone on the street if they support the rape of women. I’m certain everyone would say they do not, even the Modi supporters. But Mr Modi, their god, follows more than a dozen people on twitter who everyday tweet rape threats and abuses to women. You might say, he follows so many and might not be aware of these minions everyday tweeting hate. Probably yes, I mean yes, if he was any other person which he is not. He replies to tweets, he wishes people on birthdays and does crazy things on social media. In one RTI, it was even revealed that the two accounts are operated by Mr Modi personally. Oh wait, forget social media. These men, who tweet rape threats, they aren’t just normal people. Modi met these people in person. Some of them have pictures of Prime Minister shaking hands with them. Yes, the same prime minister who was busy not to be able to meet farmers from Tamilnadu who were in Delhi protesting for weeks met twitter trolls. You should read Swati Chaturvedi’s wonderful book on these trolls to understand how organized this trolling business is, how they are paid to abuse and give rape threats. Yes, the rape threats that land into mentions of popular female Indian voices are paid for by the ruling party of the largest democracy. We all know it and yet we support this party and the two men at the helm of its affairs. We despise rape or so we say and yet we support men who have institutionalized rape threats; in a way, on online at least, rape has been normalised, thanks to one party and its supporters. Yes, you might not like this, but you are part of this progress. You have helped this country develop to this stage. If we are discussing citizenship of millions of people today, of their future as citizens of this republic and not becoming a superpower, which was our dream just some years ago and honestly it didn’t felt impossible back then, it is all because of you dear supporter of this bigoted government.

Modi was first elected in May 2014. Do you remember your TV screens some months before that mammoth victory then? Do you remember Anna agitation that swept our imagination thanks to 24*7 coverage of it on our tv screens and mobile solidarity protests across the nation? It gave an impression that if there was one thing Indians despised a lot then that was corruption but is it though? We have seen Rafale scam (similar scam took down Rajiv Gandhi govt), Yes Bank is fresh in memory while PNB is forgotten by everyone except their depositors. There is Maharashtra scholarship scam, Adani, Essar, Reliance are accused of Rs 290 billion scam in one coal-related matter, Reliance Jio scectrum rigging case to name a few. TMC even released A to Z of NDA scams. And yet we think Modi is incorruptible. Even though his government has not acted on any of the scams by his own party and its partners, we don’t attach the word corrupt to Modi govt. Or even if we know they are, we don’t care, which makes one think that the crowds that despised corruption around 2014 were not really worried about corruption but rather were motivated to bring Modi and takedown Congress. It was a political gambit and not a fight to rid the nation of corruption. Let’s not say what it was not.

We have seen institution after institution failing us. RBI under Raghuram Rajan opposed demonetization making Modi government to not extend his tenure and instead have a new governor who agreed for the Tughlaqi act that destroyed Indian Economy as nothing else had in recent memory. It achieved none of the stated objectives, not one. Almost, the entire currency in the market came back. Now if secret objectives were dead bodies, destroyed rural economy, staggering profits for Paytm, etc., then they were achieved. Also, while many had difficulty exchanging their currency, Rs 3,118.51 crore was deposited into 11 Gujarat banks linked to Amit Shah, all within five days of demonic exercise. Now try to imagine what were you doing in those first five days after that fateful night when god Modi came onto TV screens. But you will still find his supporters counting demonetization as one of the successes of Modi government. Ask how and they will not stand for the dialogue.

Courts until a few years ago had a semblance of justice written over them. If not justice, they at least seemed rational and logical. You could expect how their judgements would go. After all, what’s justice if not logical and humane? Ayodhya Judgement proved just how wrong we were. And now, the same Chief Justice who gave a clean chit to Modi in Rafale without hearing, delivered absurd Ayodhya judgement that said Hindus did wrong by placing idols and desecrating mosque but hey, take the land and build the temple for which you destroyed the mosque, and of course who can forget his interventions with regards to Kashmir and horse-trading of MLAs/MPs, that same man has been gifted Rajya Sabha seat. Parliament and Courts should maintain distance from each other, have separation of concerns because it is court’s job to watch over parliament but former CJI wants to bring ‘coherence’, he wants to bring them closer, which is exactly how founding fathers wanted them not to function as. Police can’t make friendships with the criminals and say it wants to bring the two closer and have coherence — for what?

We have almost forgotten the murders of Kalburgi, Pansare, Dabholkar and Lankesh by right-wing fundamentalists. Their deaths have been successfully washed out from public memory. How was this achieved? And who does this achievement benefit? You know as much as myself how far investigations into their murders have reached. We have seen media houses being silenced, editors being sacked, reporters hounded for their reports and if that wasn’t enough, this government has also instituted a 200 member team to watch how media reports on Modi and Shah, and then they call you in case they don’t like your work. People are not realizing how damaging this is for the health of their democracy. If you are not informed of your government’s wrongdoing then you would think it is doing no wrong and government will continue to do what has become everyday slaughter of this republic which just years ago was dreaming about being a superpower, the world looked up to it in awe over the success of its democracy, and citizens hoped we were moving onto becoming a beacon of hope and something beautiful. What have we come to doing now? Thanks to channels like Zee News, majority Hindus now hate Muslims more than ever. That channel has shown doctored videos to demean individuals, to gather public opinion against a public university and help you-know-who. People still watch it. Why? Is it because whatever hate that channel peddles provides a mark of approval for your own inbuilt hate? Constantly manufactured lies and fake news serves the purpose of reassuring people again and again how the hate they harbour in them is justified. Just at the moment when you start to harbour doubt in the regime, they send you one more video or post that injects some more drug to keep you hating for some more time. The stock isn’t going empty any time soon. It is, after all, powered by Sensodyne, Polycab, Super Shakti, Amity University, Century Ply, Maruti Suzuki, Wonder Cement and Somany tiles. As long as you watch the tv, support these brands and they support these channels, the hate industry will continue to flourish.

This can go on and on. There is no end to things that we have normalised to support Modi and his men. There is no end to things that we say we have issues with and yet despite this government and its supporters doing exactly that, we continue to support them. This government and party that you support has men who have been accused of rape and also murder of victim’s relatives, people who have looted public money, those who garlanded men that lynched, ministers who attended rallies in support of the rapists, those that follow trolls that give rape threats (not just Modi but even his ministers follow these trolls), Ajay Singh Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath not only gave hate speech but when a case was filed against him, he gave orders to withdraw case against himself, Modi and his partner from Gujarat, Home Minister Shah revel in hate speech. How can one say he is against rape, murders, hate speech, bigotry, lawlessness when they support Modi and his men? It cannot be both ways. You either support rape or you don’t.

Forget Rs. 3000 crore wasted on a statue when that could have been spent on hospitals and education institutes and tribals that have to give up their land for the same project, Modi government has decided to launch a Rs 12,000-crore project to improve road connectivity to the four revered Hindu pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the construction of the Char Dham Mahamarg on December 27, 2016, as a tribute to those who died in the 2013 Kedarnath disaster. As of January 2019, as many as 25,300 trees have been cut and 373 hectares of forestland diverted for Char Dham Mahamarg. This does not involve trees lost in landslides caused due to road widening exercise which have become common in fragile hilly tracks as this exercise progresses. This also involves huge human cost but I will ignore that since that’s what I have learnt from demonetization. Development of a nation requires dead bodies. I get it. Now if you say you care about the environment and people’s livelihoods and yet support this government, who are you trying to fool here?

The latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. Data hiding and number fudging have become a national sport now. This helps in creating chaos with unofficial data release and leaks which are later discarded by one set of panellists on tv creating confusion in minds of citizens over what to believe and what not to. That is how we have forgotten lynching cases which according to The Quint since 2015 stands at 115 deaths now. The thing with numbers is, they no more excite us. Numbers wipe out the faces and families of the dead, their life, livelihood and sorrows. And our inhumane, dastardly involvement in these deaths. Here, let Arundhati Roy describe you one such murder which, one must remember, happened in daylight, was captured on camera and had voyeur crowd looking at the scene of a crime. It stood there, in awe and jubilation.

The lynching of Tabrez Ansari illustrates just how broken the ship is, and how deep the rot. Lynching is a public performance of ritualised murder, in which a man or woman is killed to remind their community that it lives at the mercy of the mob. And that the police, the law, the government, as well as the good people in their homes, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who go to work and take care of their families, are friends of the mob. Tabrez was lynched this June. He was an orphan, raised by his uncles in the state of Jharkhand. As a teenager, he went away to the city of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned 22, he returned home to get married. Soon after his wedding to eighteen-year-old Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours and forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Lord Ram! The police eventually took Tabrez into custody, but refused to allow his distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead they accused him of being a thief, and produced him before a magistrate, who sent him back to custody. He died four days later.

How did we let all this pass? When did we get ourselves normalised with such open hate and daylight murders? And then we shout Pakistan is killing Hindus? Which Hindus and where? We are speculating Pakistan is killing Hindus while we are here, openly killing Muslims — on the street and in our trains. We are not even hiding their dead bodies. Some of these bigoted murders and violence was shot on camera for public viewing. Did that agitate us? No. In fact, we reelected the same people who sat on these murders. People, who did not act on the perpetrators. How should anyone believe that Indians are peaceful or that Indians abhor killings? On the contrary, it appears we very much enjoy public floggings. What did we do about Dalit floggings from Una? Nothing. We successfully forgot. We succeeded in erasing these violent images from public memory. That is us. The sick, demented, contagious disease of the human race.

It is important how and what information is served to us. For instance, the ‘Howdy Modi’ event in America was attended by fifty thousand people including President Trump but what our news channels did not show were thousands of people protesting outside the stadium. In absence of such information you tend to think there is no opposition to Mr Modi and it also makes you hide your own doubt or inconvenience with the regime. We are herd animals. Many of us don’t express ourselves when we see or in this case perceive (thanks to our media) how everyone else is thinking otherwise.

Last five years have made us go through tragedy after tragedy. We have seen and done unimaginable things. For instance, do you think we would have stood in line without questions if Manmohan Singh had announced demonetization? I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t have done such a horrible thing but in case he had, would we stand in line like sheep and pay our obeisance? Were people not on streets when gas prices were above Rs. 400 and Rupee was at 64 per dollar? A gas cylinder today costs well above Rs. 800 and dollar to rupee is well above 75. Economically and socially, we are looking only downwards and yet this government enjoys huge support. How does one explain that except saying that Modi was elected for his divisive agenda? This government was elected to pursue the Nazi project of RSS. There is no other explanation. So let’s be clear of who we are and who we are supporting and what our unquestioned support means. Let’s not tell ourselves otherwise. Stop lying and deceiving others and yourself. We are infected. As Arundhati Roy said, this is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick

Coronavirus can be kept at a distance by drinking cow piss (gaumutra for the initiated) but try it at your own risk for one BJP worker who had it at a gaumutra drinking party got sick and needed to be admitted into a hospital. News channels are saying, good news, Coronavirus infected have been cured in Jaipur hospital — Modi’s India has shown the world the way. But wait, didn’t first cure case from India come from Kerala? Also, as of 21 March, 91,133 have been recovered from COVID-19 worldwide. Home Minister Shah in Parliament says Delhi riots were stopped in 36 hours so let’s thank Delhi police. That is, of course, a lie, for gunshots and fire were still seen after 36 hours. What to do? Home Minister is allowed to lie in Parliament all the while our state symbol, Ashoka emblem continues to have Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs) engraved under it. Also, the Delhi police participated in the pogrom (oops! Riots). They, if wanted, could have stopped the riots before they had even begun. They simply did not want them to stop. It’s like appreciating a murderer, who killed eleven people, for stopping his count at eleven and not moving to the twelfth body. “I stopped my gun from shooting the twelfth man”
**Slow claps**

We are indeed sick. Our language, our hearts, our minds, our politics, the way we perceive things, the way we look at people, the way we think, the things we read, the things that we watch, our sources of information, people who are to safeguard us, our avenues to seek justice, everything and everyone has been infected. We have become sick. And unless we see ourselves, we acknowledge the virus residing in us, the thing that has made a home in our body-politic, we won’t get out of this puddle. We have run too far for patches and band-aids to work now. Just look at our conversations, our language and our attitude; Nothing that we do, the way we talk and the way we listen right now is inspiring any confidence. We might find momentary solace through patches but the real cure will need far greater strength. And nothing that we are doing right now suggests we are ready for it.