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Democracy’s oxygen: Protests are an opportunity to create dialogue between citizen and state
December 2, 2020, 2:25 AM IST Sagarika Ghose in Bloody Mary | Edit Page, India | TOI
Thousands of farmers from Punjab have converged on New Delhi to voice protests against new farm laws. Initially the police response to them was excessively harsh: Farmers were tear gassed and water cannoned before being allowed to enter. As police clamped down, a campaign began on social media: There were Khalistanis or Sikh separatists among the farmers. It was alleged that protests are being ‘sponsored’, that there’s a political agenda.
With Punjab elections due in little over a year, farmers’ protests might be mingled with the hurly-burly of politics, there may be some motley agenda-driven elements in the crowd as exist in every political movement which in India tend to be like a ‘Shivji ki baraat’. But does this make the entire protest somehow illegitimate?
Painting protesting Sikh farmers as ‘Khalistanis’ is an all too familiar pattern of insidiously attempting to discredit and delegitimise protesters as ‘anti-national’. Protesting students have been called ‘tukde tukde gang’, those calling for liberal freedoms have been dubbed ‘Khan Market gang’, Left-leaning academics have been called ‘urban Maoists’, activist-dissenters against government policies have been described as ‘urban Naxals’, and protesting women at Shaheen Bagh were dubbed ‘Pakistani agents’.
Are protesters anti-nationals? Protesters don’t weaken India’s democracy, instead they strengthen it. Those exercising the freedom to protest are demonstrating their faith in India’s institutions to provide redress and relief. However, a crucial caveat: To enjoy legitimacy, protests must remain non-violent, as the farmers’ agitation currently is. Farmers have shared meals with police and offered prayers on Gurpurab.
Yet the prevailing politics of labelling is obstructing vitally needed dialogue between state and citizen. 83-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy is being held in Mumbai’s Taloja jail charged under the harsh anti-terror law, UAPA. The police allege that he was responsible for inciting violence in the Bhima Koregaon case. Many have labelled him an ‘urban Naxal’. Ideologically, the veteran campaigner for adivasi rights is opposed to the ruling party at the Centre. But it is also true he has spent many years working in academic institutions like the Indian Social Institute, Bengaluru, and Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren has publicly supported Swamy as a campaigner for the rights of the marginalised. Should Stan Swamy, who may hold Marxist views, but against whom there is not yet any evidence that he ever wielded weapons, be charged under non bailable anti-terror laws?
Outlawing all dissent erases the fundamental difference between non-violent civil liberties’ activists and hardcore cadres who wield guns. In fact the recent successes of the CPI(ML) in Bihar polls show how peaceful democratic activism can lure hotheads away from the violent path. If the safety valve of dissent is not allowed, the Supreme Court once observed, the pressure cooker may burst.
Dissent is essential for citizens to hold the powerful to account. Marxist intellectuals or those championing adivasi or caste movements may be ideological opposites of the government. But unless there is incontrovertible proof that they resorted to armed action, they can’t really be seen to fall within the definition of ‘terrorism’.
Liberty-quashing UAPA was designed to strike at armed cross-border militants. Today UAPA has been invoked against civil rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj and academic Anand Teltumbde (both currently in jail), showing that authorities are intensely confused between those who are ideological adversaries of the ruling dispensation and those who are enemies of the state. In fact, there’s an urgent need for a review of how the state sees those who criticise it when such criticism is verbal, bookish, intellectual and peacefully agitational without arms and ammunition.
The Delhi police’s chargesheet against student activist Umar Khalid in the Delhi riots case reveals a similar confused obsession with ideology. Khalid is described as a “veteran of sedition”, who was the “convergence point of twin lines of Pan Islamica and Ultra-Left anarchism”. If Khalid holds Leftist ideas or owns Leftist books, he’s not guilty of any crime. He’s only guilty if there is factual evidence that he participated in or incited violent rioting.
The right to protest is of crucial importance in a democracy because protests are important negative feedback from the people to the government. Elections take place every five years which is when voters can speak. But issue-based protests highlight key problems on which state and citizen need to negotiate – whether those protests are anti-Emergency, India Against Corruption, anti-CAA or anti-farm laws. In fact today when political parties are ranged implacably against each other, protests are an opportunity for interactions beyond polarised lines. Protests usually break down party polarities, often attract strange bedfellows across the ideological and intellectual spectrum, and reflect diverse shades of opinion. Varied banners and posters are all part of the colour and tumult of protests.
For example during the anti-Emergency movement, Sikh leaders and Hindu nationalists marched together and many senior Akali and Jana Sangh leaders were jailed together, an experience which created lifelong bonds of solidarity. Today farmers’ protests are being supported by Leftists, by those who may identify with radical Sikh groups, but also by several who represent grassroots farm organisations.
It is thus essential for governments to recognise and respect a people’s movement and move to dialogue and negotiate with protesters instead of falling prey to dismissive mistrust. Farm laws may well be aimed at much needed liberalisation of the farm sector, yet negotiation with stakeholders is urgent when transformative laws are enacted. Without serious efforts at persuasion and reconciliation, slogans like ‘Jai Kisan’ will begin to sound hollow.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author’s own.
AUTHOR
Sagarika Ghose
Sagarika Ghose has been a journalist for over three decades, starting her career with The Times of India, subsequently moving to Outlook magazine and The In. . .
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