It’s been one year of brutal and painful injustice to Sharjeel Imam.
The times we are living in is historic. This uprising is the largest that this country and subcontinent has seen and this is not to reduce an agitation to what happened yesterday or the farmer protest. People have been connected via the internet in ways that has changed the dynamics of how social movements and revolutions happen.
A friend I was talking to had a question for me few weeks ago, when the farmer protests had begun. He hasn’t witnessed any movement at this scale in his life, owing also to the privileges that his community provides. He asked, ‘what is going to happen with this protest? Where is this going?’. I didn’t have to search for words that could explain where this would lead, as we have just begun, but I said, “Mr. D, you cannot even imagine the solidarities that we have been able to make in these past few months and years. Friends and folks are steadily looking beyond all the barriers they have been raised with and listening to what other people have to say. We are learning to step back and for the first time in our lives, hear what historical oppression is from the people who are suffering.” An acquaintance which is turning into a friendship told me yesterday, “the State and society has cornered my community to the extent that every day I wake up with the anxiety of not knowing what will happen that day. I can no longer breathe at ease without this anxiety. Community is vilified, men are picked up on random and arrested not because they have done something but because of the identity they come from. Social interactions from all sides are forced to be ceased. My body and mind is tired. With what is happening, I see myself going back to my roots to understand my existence, role of my community in building this country – conomically, sociologically and politically. My history is embodied and is asserting itself, loudly. ” Which is why, an individual can never be secular in its existence.
If we are to say that caste, religion and gender walk together as an entity, that complexity is spilled over every day – from the language they speak to the articulation of bottled up anger of betrayal and discrimination. It is like saying that sexuality can or will spill over only during a pride. Our identities shed and mark their lives every day/every moment we take a new breath.
If a community is vilified for what they practice and killed, the identities will brim. From La Illa Illala to Nishan Sahib, if these are making your liberal sweet spots uncomfortable, that is the purpose of a protest. A revolution was and will never be to make the privileged feel cushiony. To deterritorialise at important points, claiming new spaces in whatever way, is a step to make their voices heard. Which is why what happened yesterday was historic. A persecuted minority community’s (persecuted by the Brahmanical-Baniya structure) assertion is what the nation witnessed. A Ram temple in a tax payed tableaux on Republic Day while money is being collected from places where the 2020 pogrom happened (on the same day) is a war cry. Guru Tej Bahadur on a tableaux is an assertion of a religion that came out of Hinduism and its slave system called caste which is the foundation of the majority religion. Guru Tej Bahadur in New Delhi on a Republic Day also stands as a symbol reminding the rest of the country of an explanation it owes to the bloodshed and systemic socio-economic and political violence meted on the entire community. Disjunct understanding of relativity to symbols is privilege, nudging the many wounds is violence.
The promulgation of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance 2020 on November 27, 2020 has sent deep jitters amongst people of the Indian subcontinent. The ordinance makes religious conversion a cognizable and non-bailable offence. It also penalises the accused of up to 10 years of imprisonment and fine. Along with carceral punishment, the accused is bound by law to pay the victim 5 lac INR. The Ordinance recognises an act as conversion as illegal, if there is misrepresentation, force, influence, coercion, allurement or by marriage. An individual who has decided to convert a religion has to apply for the same in front of the District Magistrate and their details (name, address, etc) will be declared to the public for 3 weeks.
The Ordinance further declares that the burden to prove that a conversion was not done through misrepresentation, force, influence, coercion, allurement or by marriage etc would be on the person who caused the conversion or the person who facilitated it. Considering that Muslims form only about 14% of India’s total population, it is in fact delirious and laughable if the brutality of the carceral nature of the intent to target a minority community who are already persecuted by zealots and vigilantes was overlooked. The Ordinance lays out the terms and conditions of who would be considered guilty. Much like the language of POCSO, any person who is said to abet the act will be considered guilty and thus penalized (in few cases double penalized with no exemptions on forms of penalties).
The condemned body which relates to the disciplinary power is a body which is marked by a form of civility. Here perhaps it isn’t the brute force which is essentially physical but a production of docile population of female that does as it is told, unquestioning any societal or familial directives. The State is of course involved in nullifying the agency of an adult woman but any family member (recognised by blood) can legally question the legitimacy of the marriage. It must be noted, again, that the burden of proof to justify the legality rests on the man which prima facie strikes out the consent of the woman. The Ordinance (read alongside similar laws like CAA and UAPA) violates the right of an individual to be deemed innocent (until proves otherwise). This biopolitical scheme of governance makes it easier to persecute Muslim men and alongside that pushes women under parental and community control. This trafficking of women from one custody to another is deeply unsettling and disturbing for, it elicits a deep sense of indignity to practice a constitutional right. Institution of marriage in South Asia is a contractual embodiment of caste lineage. A communal ordinance which criminalises acts does little to free women from oppressive structures and adds more to their curtailment of social interactions, freedom of choice and mobility. The anticonversion law through its ambiguities provides the State enough opportunities to practice institutional and systemic apartheid. This apartheid includes State abortion, but one mustn’t be surprised by it and buy into the liberality of the emotion. In continuance to what is mentioned above, fabric of India rests on marital rape. The moment women seek pleasure of any form, they are kidnapped and beaten, fetuses aborted. The Acts have gotten impunity.
One must of course be cautious while writing about this Ordinance in order to avoid stepping over the fear and anxiety of Muslim men/community. A period which is marked by the presence of a genocidal citizenship Act and the socialities the resistance it was able to create – this biopolitique of subjugation and movement to freedom has complex manifestations on Muslim men and their anxieties. The response to these inconsequentially yet ordered and planned move by a majority community requires a deeper understanding of lives, lived experiences and most of all owning up to one’s complicity.
Let me remind you that it is only form of secularism which has changed in the last 7 years. It is only a State in its functioning which can act secular and for the record Indian State has hardly been secular in the past 71 years. 1947 partition, massacres of Nellie, Bhiwandi, Bombay, Hashimpura, Muzzafarnagar, fake encounters in Batla House, genocides in Gujarat, Delhi (1984 and 2020), and every lynching and hate crime has been about Indian State and its direct involvement in them. To deny the fear communities feel is to take away that portion of their lives and place a hegemonic narrative. If this isn’t violence, then one wonders what else is. This also pushes family, family-child complex as a State machinery into the background as though identity creation is an external phenomenon divorced from various forms of capital(s). Family is the smallest yet the most powerful pedagogical apparatus and throughout acts as an agent. I wonder if one should even respond to the flimsiness of the liberal argument of, “Red Fort is a national monument and placing religious symbol is turning the movement nonsecular.” Little did they know that The Fort has been adopted by the Dalmia groups, a corporate entity. The Fort in one sense does not belong to the State. So, whose sovereignty has been destabilised with a Nishan Sahib flag on a post in the Fort? The placing of a religious flag then isn’t an attack on a nation and its integrity but on your idea of a nation. Your idea of a nation in saffron which is why you had to cry hoarse when the protest route changed. A rehearsed parade wouldn’t unsettle your gaze, a deroute would. The unsettling you see is caste. This is what nationalism does to a country – reduce emotions to symbols and make lives abstract.
Sarah Ather Kashmiri writes – Any criticism of the current political scenario lacking a critique of the neo-liberal structure that enables it, amounts to nothing more than liberal cancel culture. You might think you are well intentioned but even your anger is being commodified and getting recycled into the system as clickbait articles, social media content, woke stand-up comedy and a pop culture that again only serves to expand the hegemonic ideas of the ruling class. Do not reject philosophers and political thinkers on account of your experience with people who came off as elitist or snobbish to you. Political theory and philosophy is for our own emancipation.
It is imperative (while difficult) to have these important conversations and not forget that the farmer agitation has managed to foreground Brahmin-Baniya-State nexus in its barest form. People and martyrs of Thoothukudi, Mollem & hinterlands of this country for years have been trying to talk about this and it is about time we see this uprising as a continuum. What is happening now is only the beginning. All rots are bare open. As a post-colonial country having a past of governance dictated by feudalism and a present that carries the baggage of its remnants, India as a country has had little to do with revolutions. Bhima Koregaon, Telangana Armed Struggle, Naxalbari struggle and every people’s movement were instances. One can take inspiration but to imagine them as cultural revolution would be too far-fetched a claim to make. It is overwhelming to see young people break, critique and build new ideas of what peace and justice would mean with clarity and thus it is our responsibility to not only keep up the momentum but move milestones to ensure that this revolution is here to stay. It is this lucidity of young people like Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid, Devangna Kalita, Natasha Narwal, Gulfisha Fathima, Meeran Haider, Khalid Saifi, and hundreds of people behind bars (our collective that lives are reduced to numbers) that the State fears. Sharjeel Imam paved way for an entire community to rethink its form and place of protest. From Shaheen Bagh which is outside of a museum-ised place like Jantar Mantar to the birth of Bagh(s) should be, as intended, unsettling for the privileged. Keeping all the experiences and knowledge as a postcolonial nation, it is imperative that we reimagine how we will redefine Constitution for our movement to liberation – to engage, dissent, amend so that power to the people is maintained. This is not the time for someone to feel apologetic to speak up. Make our voices heard – on dinner tables, classrooms, bedrooms, streets. Destabilise the status-quo and eventually overturn it.
You are entering history and this shall be televised.
