Who will chowkidar the chowkidars?
Editorial: The Anti-CAA/NRC protests have opened up larger wounds of India’s discontent with its government
Anyone who has driven around Delhi over the last few years would have seen the words graffitied across the city’s walls: outside college campuses, in the underpasses, opposite shopping malls.
The words, originally from the poet Juvenal’s Latin phrase ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ were popularised later by Plato, and then a host of others in the course of history, until Alan Moore co-opted them for his graphic novel The Watchmen in the 80s. They have been embraced by anyone brave enough to question the authority of their custodians, to demand protection from those chosen to protect them.
On the night of December 15, they broke in, unprovoked, and in large numbers. They attacked the innocents. They damaged people and property. They seized more victims. They left behind a scene of chaos.
And if the students of Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi were to plea for help during this time of trauma, who would they call? Standing behind the police helpline number 1-1-2 would eventually be the same voices perpetrating the crime that night, the same faces attacking innocent students, vandalising property. The city’s watchmen—the Delhi Police—working under the heavy hand of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The watchmen, unwatched, unsympathetic, unleashed.
In the last month of the decade, India’s disillusioned, frustrated, and secular masses have found a uniting cause against a populist government: the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Narendra Modi, in his five-and-a-half-year reign as Prime Minister—a period during which he rode waves of nationalist promises to huge popularity, suppressed voices of dissent and criticism from mass media, and won a re-election—faces the loudest, most united voice he has heard against his agenda. With continuing disappointments in the state elections, a once infallible government seems shaken.
In early December, The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins wrote a long feature on Modi’s Hindu Nationalist government casting Muslims as internal enemies. For those who had closely followed Modi’s political career in India, the story offered few new revelations, but it did dent the international reputation of the man—along with the famous ‘Divider-In-Chief’ TIME cover story by Aatish Taseer earlier this year—a reputation carefully cultivated and protected back home.
The desperate attempts to quash dissent may have been seen as a frightening warning of things to come, of the lengths that the government are willing to go to silence citizens in a democracy. The youth are fighting back. The government, in imposing curfews and encouraging police militarisation, has inadvertently turned more citizens—especially the young—into revolutionaries.
A day after Delhi Police’s attack at Jamia, Filkins wrote about India’s embattled Prime Minister in The New Yorker again, this time questioning in the title, ‘Has Narendra Modi Finally Gone Too Far?’. It’s perhaps a valid question from a distanced, international perspective, but many of us have been arguing that Modi has been ‘going too far’ for decades. The Gujarat pogrom against Muslims took place in 2002 under Modi’s chief-ministership. He spent much of his political career inflaming the passions of the state and the country’s Hindus majority against the minorities.
Modi was echoing the undercurrent of dormant fascism in the country, bringing into the mainstream the tenets of organisations like the RSS, the Hindu Nationalist NGO that reared his own political and social views in his youth, and have continued to be his backbone. While the majority of independent India in the constitution accepted a country based on secular values of integration, the RSS—and Modi’s BJP by extension—have strived to segregate, to change India’s constitutional character, to turn the country into a Hindu nation, like Pakistan is for Muslims.
Riding the wave of corruption scandals and anti-incumbency against the Congress government, Modi and the BJP won a majority in 2014. Running on platforms of development, economic improvement, a ‘strongman’ image, and a lot of personal visibility, Modi was able to convince a majority of ‘moderate’ voters to ignore the extremist views of his past and embrace the hype of his future. The “acche din”—good days—they promised, were, apparently, on their way.
Instead, the days since have, at best, been like the days of incompetence and corruption as before with the Congress; and at worse, been the days where sectarian violence in the country has grown worse than ever. Under Modi, India has faced drastic economic lows, rising prices for household goods, and an unemployment crisis, all further triggered by disastrous implementations of Demonitisation and the new Goods Sales Tax.
But for every failure in governance, the government has called out to nationalist emotions of the public for distraction, favouring their instincts of dictatorship and fascism over the original promises of development and unity. Even before the CAA bill, Modi’s government allowed for a toxic rise in mob violence in the country, hounding and lynching anyone of a different religion, a lower caste, a different political sensibility, or with a critical voice. Anything could be an excuse for violence: eating beef, inter-religion marriage, alleged disrespect to the national anthem, or alleged disrespect to the Prime Minister. When all else failed, there were always the eternal, omnipresent obsession of the nationalists: our step-brothers in Pakistan. The obsession extended to the situation in Kashmir, the land both nations have continued to find ingenious new ways to tussle over.
Modi’s rise gave rise to other associates with similar, and often, even more extremist views. Like his close confidant and the current architect of many of the national discontents, the Home Minister Amit Shah. Or the man described as a “militant monk” by the Washington Post, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Or terror-accused MP and active member of the RSS, Pragya Singh Thakur. And on and on.
Since Modi’s re-election in May 2019, the government has gone into overdrive to push its right-leaning agenda while paying only lip-service to the bigger issues of economy, poverty, education, and environment. In August, Kashmir was sent into disarray with the abolishment of Article 370; the region continues to be in lockdown without internet access, the longest such blackout that any democratic nation has ever imposed. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Ayodhya Babri/Ram Janambhoomi dispute was another sign of right-wing appeasement.
But none of these events truly shook up the conscious of the Indian ‘mainstream’ population: the government’s supporters celebrated the rulings, and most of its critics—after some grumblings—were eventually lulled into fatigue, distracted by something new every day.
When anti-CAA protests began to flare up in early December, mostly in Assam and Meghalaya in the northeast, it felt like another issue that would eventually whimper away, becoming a problem of the ‘others’ and the marginalised in India, another case where Modi and Shah would survive past the rumblings of discontent.
But then, Jamia happened.
The images, videos, and first-hand narratives of police brutality at Jamia went viral overnight. This wasn’t a tragedy of only the geographically marginalised: these were scenes unfolding in the nation’s capital, a half-hour drive (on good traffic days!) from the seat of the government. This was the capital’s police, serving under the central home ministry (helmed by Shah) attacking innocent students.
This was a turning point.
This wasn’t, of course, the only incident happening that night. In the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Aligarh, UP, stories leaked of even worse behaviour by the ‘watchmen’. Protests continued in the Northeast, and of course, in Kashmir, too. But because of internet shutdowns in the other regions, the scenes in Delhi became the brightest spark in the fire.
The fire spread across the country. Protests began all over Delhi, and then in every metropolitan city in the country, from Mumbai to Bengaluru to Chennai to Hyderabad. College campuses even in BJP-bastions like Ahmedabad and Varanasi united against the CAA/NRC. Wherever they had allied political leadership, the government attempted desperate measures to douse this fire, to cut the connective threads. They imposed more internet shutdowns and recalled the archaic Section 144 code to curb assembly of any group of protestors. In BJP or allied states, the police came down hard on protestors and the media focused on property damage rather than damage to people.
Back in the 2019 summer, in a post-poll survey published by The Hindu after the elections in May, one of the trends that emerged was the heavy support of youth voters (ages 18-22) for the BJP and the Modi ‘brand’. These were mostly college-aged students, many of whom found a pan-India strength in Modi that other parties/leaders couldn’t deliver.
But over the past month, there has been a noticeable shift. The desperate attempts to quash dissent may have been seen as a frightening warning of things to come, of the lengths that the government are willing to go to silence citizens in a democracy. The youth are fighting back. The government, in imposing curfews and encouraging police militarisation, has inadvertently turned more citizens—especially the young—into revolutionaries.
Each new case of state violence is shrugged off with ‘whataboutery’ of the past, as if public torment was a competitive sport, as if every BJP error and scandal can be excused by past errors and scandals of the Congress. It is a vicious snowball, gathering more viciousness as it tumbles into the future.
Yes, the CAA/NRC are the binding cause behind the current protests, but the frustration in the public have much deeper roots. The protests are against the country’s lean towards fascism, of the authoritative and undemocratic ways that the centre has used to silence its own citizens, of the RSS’s agendas seeping into living-room conversations of ‘moderates’, of WhatsApp forwards filled with fake news and aggravated hate, of economic failures, the failures to lift India’s farmers, of large-scale corruption, of Kashmir, of the North-Eastern states, of the brutal cases of rape and the fear felt by women around the nation, of the beef-eaters, of Adivasis, of deforestation, of those outside the Hindi-language hegemony, of Muslims and Christians and Sikhs and other religions made to feel ‘othered’, of Hindus hoping to save the legacy of their own religion from Hindutva, of the desperate need to preserve India’s secular spirit.
The fulcrum of brutality has shifted predominately to my home state, Uttar Pradesh. BJP came to power here two years ago, and Modi handed the reigns of the nation’s most-populated region—accustomed to Hindu-Muslim riots in the past—to the firebrand Yogi Adityanath. On the pretence of property damage and anti-India slogans, Adityanath directed the UP Police to wreak havoc on the state’s Muslim population and on social activists of all religions. Behind the veil of more internet shutdowns and curfews, stories have emerged of the police thrashing, detaining, robbing, and killing. According to The Hindu, the death toll from December 10 till December 27 in the violence following the protests had reached 19, with over a thousand arrests and nearly 6,000 detentions. These numbers were provided by the UP Police themselves.
Adityanath’s ‘reign of terror’ has even extended to Varanasi, Modi’s own constituency and the supposed bastion of his kingdom. Modi has long promised to turn the ancient pilgrimage town into a ‘smart city’, with fantasies of transforming into its Sister City in Japan, Kyoto. But even here, internet cuts and curfews hit business and the daily life of citizens. Social activists were arrested for peaceful sit-ins in mass numbers, as were staff and students from the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). A nine-year-old child in the old gullies died following a stampede.
India’s independent history is littered with authoritative leadership using the police to exert extreme force to silence dissent and spread fear among the innocent. Multiple political parties are to blame, which is why, each new case of state violence is shrugged off with ‘whataboutery’ of the past, as if public torment was a competitive sport, as if every BJP error and scandal can be excused by past errors and scandals of the Congress. It is a vicious snowball, gathering more viciousness as it tumbles into the future.
Fortunately, as much as our leaders have tried to curb it, India still remains—for most of us privileged ones—a democracy, giving us the right to choose our next leaders. After the first few years of riding Modi’s popularity to electoral success, the ruling party has been losing ground fast in the state elections, and shades of saffron are fading away from many pockets of the Indian map.
While the government attempted to minimise the spirit of the dissent, blaming only the Muslim community, the reality on the streets was that Indian of every religion, region, and language were finding a common fight to preserve the spirit of the Indian constitution. This, if anything, has been one of great silver linings of the past few weeks.
As we begin a new year, a new decade, it’s likely that the challenges facing those that oppose the government will become worse before they get better. But it’s been heartening to see Indians stand up for a just cause, and do so without the outside influence of political persuasion.
Back in the summer of the 2019 elections, Modi, Shah, and most members and followers of the BJP added the prefix “Chowkidar” to their social media names. Watchman. It was their way of assuming the position of the country’s security guard, it’s gate-keeper, it’s protector.
But what happens when the same Chowkidars turn rogue, when they don’t let us into our own country, when they rob the same house they’re supposed to protect?
We, the people, have to hold our leaders—the watchmen—accountable, whether they be left, right, or centre. We have to keep the same energy found in these protests through all the distractions that will inevitability be presented in the long run before the next general elections. We mustn’t forget.
The rampaging police have been those Watchmen, in Delhi, in UP, Karnataka, and elsewhere in the country. Yogi Adityanath has been a Watchmen. Shah, Modi, and the RSS have been the Watchmen, shrouding the nation in the curfew of their own narrative. The governments of the past, guilty of their own atrocities, have been Watchmen, too. All of our elected leaders, and security forces acting under the behest of the leaders, have been the Watchmen.
Who else will watch them, but us?
The year ended in New Delhi in style at Shaheen Bagh, a short walk from the Jamia campus with the spirit of dissent, unity, and accountability. Continuing on from mid-December, the women-led dharna and protest here ‘celebrated’ the New Year in style, attracting hundreds outdoors, braving one of the coldest night in the city in over a century, braving the hazardous air pollution, and braving the ire of the authorities, to join together against the CAA/NRC. To sing the national anthem. To wave the Indian flag.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
