Comment

Dissent and democracy

DISSENT can broadly be defined as saying something antipathetic to the powers that be. It is often said – to the point of cliché – that toleration of dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. What is less often noted is that the right to dissent must be periodically fought for and reclaimed even in the most liberal of democracies. In this, it is not unlike that metaphorical tree of liberty which played such a large part in 19th century republican thought, and needed, or so its defenders thought, to be periodically watered with their own blood. For there is nothing that the establishment dislikes more than dissent on fundamental questions, which it seeks to suppress while maintaining the mechanisms of democracy, either through ‘extraordinary’ laws or enforced conformity.

Even that paradigm of the libertarian tradition, the United States, has been singularly intolerant of dissent at regular intervals. At the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunt of the ’50s, as the senator from Wisconsin and the House Committee on Un-American Activities wreaked havoc in tandem, any number of people were hounded out of their jobs, and sometimes into exile, on suspicion of being communists or ‘commie sympathizers’. It was illegal for a black American to dissent from the conditions of his or her life until the 1960s. More recently, there has been the Patriot Act; while to swear allegiance to the flag on every conceivable and not so conceivable occasion remains a fetish of American life.

India is not a very liberal democracy as democracies go – certainly since the 1980s when the shenanigans of the Hindu right and an expanding national security apparatus began curtailing the citizen’s right to speak out in a variety of ways. Between the self-appointed defenders of Indian (read Hindu, but there is the Islamic variety as well) culture, busy proscribing books, paintings, styles of dress and behaviour; the energetic guardians of chauvinism, busy ransacking libraries; the readiness of the courts to summon those deemed to have offended the religious sensibilities of this or that group; and laws like the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act which allow the police to lock people up more or less as they please under the guise of combating Maoism (or terrorism), the citizen resembles a cornered rat caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Now the public space for dissent is shrinking even more alarmingly thanks to our very own version of what Gore Vidal called the national security state. Recent pieces of legislation go some distance beyond TADA: a believer in the ideology of Maoism, who has never been a member of the CPI (Maoist), has never propagandized for a banned organization, or taken part in any acts of violence against the state, could, quite conceivably, for his beliefs alone, attract punishment under laws like the CPSA. The definition of ‘giving aid’ to a banned organization gets looser by the day. Meanwhile, the very possession of material criticizing the state for its treatment of dalits and adivasis is regarded as reason enough to invoke the anti-sedition law. So hazy and contradictory is our jurisprudence on this issue, and so marked is the judicial system’s tendency to echo the state’s views on what is treasonable, that hundreds of prisoners, mostly poor adivasis, languish in jail charged with waging war against the state on little or no evidence, without anybody being exercised in the least about the matter.

A small crumb of comfort comes from a recent ruling by the Supreme Court which holds that membership of a banned organization cannot, in itself, be a reason for conviction under TADA: challenged immediately by the government (with the support of the BJP), it has since been reiterated. However, there is no guarantee that it will not be contradicted in the future. Certainly lower courts tend to hold the contrary view, witness the judgment set aside by the Supreme Court as well as the denial of bail to Binayak Sen (and Piyush Guha) by the Chhattisgarh High Court a few days later. This decision flatly contradicted the central principle of the Supreme Court’s judgment; for Binayak Sen’s conviction is based essentially on his assumed association with the CPI(Maoist), no proof of complicity in violent acts having ever been adduced.¹

Meanwhile the sheer vindictiveness of the police establishment, encouraged by its masters in government, now constitutes the chief danger to our liberties. There is no reason on earth why dalit activists should be charged with sedition, or someone distributing pamphlets against operation Green Hunt be viewed as a threat to the nation: none, except the fact that the police are willing to pick up almost anyone and charge them with almost anything, either to settle old scores, show results, or discourage any kind of dissent.² It is unlikely that the police in Chhattisgarh really think that Binayak Sen is a Maoist (specially if it was police officers who planted what evidence exists against him, which is not much). The point is to silence every voice that speaks against the acts of the state in adivasi regions, and the carte blanche under which security forces operate, killing and raping with impunity. To every account of every atrocity, the Chhattisgarh government’s invariable response is denial, or a promise of investigation that is patently meant to lead nowhere. The consensus is a cross-party one, embracing not only the Congress and the BJP but also the organized left (remarkably selective in the issues it chooses to raise) and regional parties.

What but vindictiveness of a particularly brazen order explains the charge laid against Professor Ilina Sen, Binayak Sen’s wife, at the end of a conference organized by the Indian Association of Women’s Studies in Wardha for failing to provide details of foreign delegates to the local police? The infirmity of bringing charges against her, or the organizers of the IAWS, for what is a technical infraction, are laid bare in a piece in The Hindu.³ Just as interesting is the fact that it was an anti-terrorism unit of the Maharashtra police that investigated the affair. One might ask how an infraction of registration rules at a women’s studies conference becomes a matter of concern for an anti-terrorism squad (which presumably has better things to do with its time). The reasons are as clear as they are squalid. Many of the delegates took part in a demonstration organized to press for the release of Binayak Sen, reason enough for the police to regard the whole affair as subversive and harass whoever they can, never mind that dozens of similar demonstrations with identical demands have been, and are being organized in different parts of the country, and indeed in different countries.

It is – or should be – a well-known fact that anti-terror legislation is most commonly used against the poor in order to stamp out dissent against the state’s development or social policies – as the record of those arrested under TADA in states like Jharkhand so eloquently shows. In the same way, a number of supposed terrorists arrested for exploding bombs in Hyderabad and Malegaon now prove, after Aseemanand’s confession, to be innocent after all. How many of those arrested by the police on criminal charges of a political nature are actually guilty? Not many, if the record is anything to go by: our police force is positively encouraged to eschew investigation in favour of arbitrary arrests to show results – and put away suspected troublemakers.

The commonly trotted out defence that it is doing the best job it can, given the circumstances, is entirely misplaced: the police are making a terrible mess of their actual job, which is to prevent crime and catch criminals. That this is not entirely their fault is incontestable: the degree of political interference in the force, its chronic understaffing, the lack of training and accountability, and conditions of work and housing for ordinary policemen inevitably have a dehumanizing effect. But it is not the fault of the ordinary citizen either, forced to bear the brunt of their wrath (and inefficiency). In another sense, of course, the police are doing their job, which is to crush dissent with a hammer: that is why peaceful movements protesting displacement in the name of ‘development’ are labelled Maoist so that they can more conveniently be suppressed. Middle class opinion tends to go along; until an episode comes along that is too brutal to be ignored. Meanwhile the public space for protest is whittled away under the pretext of maintaining order and avoiding inconvenience to the middle class. Demonstrations are limited to fewer and fewer sites in each major city; while in states like Tamil Nadu it is impossible to organize any kind of political protest without applying for police permission, which is frequently withheld (except, of course, when political parties are involved): an undeclared state of emergency reigns.

The case against Ilina Sen illustrates the state’s paranoia – and exposes the mockery of the Congress’s ‘liberal’ line, compared to the BJP. This heavy-handed attempt at intimidation took place in Maharashtra, a state ruled – no, governed – by the Congress. Quite apart from the complicity of its state unit in Chhattisgarh with the Salwa Judum (led by the leader of the loyal opposition, Mahendra Karma), the appointment of P. Chidambaram as home minister, and his performance of his duties, blows this particular argument to smithereens. This, after all, is the minister who implied that civil liberties organizations were aiding Maoists. In much the same way Joseph McCarthy once accused the American Civil Liberties Union of being a front for Communists – where that particular path led is well-known.

Unfortunately Chidambaram, like most technicians (Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia are other distinguished examples), seems to be almost wholly destitute of history. As the Congress joyously shoots itself in the foot, repeatedly and in full public view, the likelihood of the UPA losing the next general election becomes more entrenched. The poster boys of neo-liberalization have never been able to conceive of a single reform designed to help the poor rather than the rich. Together they cost the party the election of 1996: it seems altogether fitting that they should, in partnership with Sharad Pawar and Murli Deora, repeat the feat. (The credit for the Congress victory of 2009 goes, in no particular order, to the political instincts of its president, the NREGA, pushed through in the teeth of opposition from the neo-liberalizers, and the organized left which kept them on a tight leash for most of the government’s term. Once the party no longer had the left to reckon with, the pragmatic politicos ceded control to the neo-liberalizers, relying on the disarray of the BJP, and a watered down NREGA, to cover up the assault of economic orthodoxy on the poor.)

The more things change, the more they remain the same: this elegant French proverb is splendidly illustrated by the prime beneficiary of the Congress’s death wish. The BJP does all the things that the grand old party does – not to mention those it would like to do – even more egregiously. Thus if the inhabitants of an adivasi village declare their opposition to a thermal plant, the Chhattisgarh government promptly reclassifies their settlement as urban, as an act of salutary retaliation, so that the provisions of PESA no longer apply to it.⁴ Most of the time acquiescence is obtained by fraud, wholesale intimidation, or organizing meetings from which most of the villagers in question are carefully kept away. The collector or official in charge presides over the process and voila! the forms of procedure are triumphantly complied with. No wonder Maoism flourishes when the state tramples peaceful protest with such contempt.

Meanwhile the Congress’s propensity to put foot firmly in mouth is illustrated by Abhishek Manu Singhvi’s statement that criticism of the trial court’s judgment on Binayak Sen was tantamount to suggesting that India is a banana republic. Perhaps he just forgot to notice what the Radia tapes (but not only the Radia tapes) reveal: that India is already a banana republic in certain fundamental respects. Where else but in a banana republic would the state give away millions of rupees to corporations in tax concessions (corporate tax exemptions between 2007-09 totalled 1,31,000 crore rupees) while refusing to pay the minimum wage for those working under the NREGA?⁵ Where else would spending 30,000 crore rupees on the Commonwealth games be regarded as reasonable while the cost of the state’s flagship employment programme (39,000 crore a year) is attacked within the government as wasteful and unnecessary?

Compare the cost of the NREGA with the estimate of 125 billion dollars (5.7 lakh crore) spirited illegally out of the country between 2000-08 by wealthy individuals and private companies, and the subservience of the state to the interests of the wealthy could scarcely be clearer.⁶ Where else would the mounting toll of farmers’ suicides be so cheerfully disregarded? Meanwhile approximately 836 million human beings live on less than 20 rupees a day in a country where the number of dollar billionaires steadily increases – an irony too profound to be properly appreciated.

The skeletons of the judicial system, long considered the infallible guardian of the republic’s integrity, are tumbling out of the closet. The revelations indicating corrupt behaviour by a number of chief justices of the Supreme Court in recent years, including K.G. Balakrishnan, mark only one aspect of its failure.⁷ Another is the incoherence, lack of logic, and plain prejudice that have marked altogether too many judicial pronouncements of late, the most recent example being the unmodified judgment on Dara Singh’s appeal (against his conviction in the Graham Staines case). This suggested that the judges in question believed that conversion itself is illegal; thus implicitly negating the fundamental right of the citizen to change his or her religion. Since conversion is predicated on the belief that one religion is better than another, at least for the individual in question, the characterization of this as ‘a flawed premise’ was tendentious at best.⁸ Even after expunging the observation implying that Dara Singh’s crime was somehow mitigated by the fact that he was attempting to stop conversions, the judgment continues to state, in effect, that any attempt to convert is in itself unjustified. Meanwhile, relatives of police officers who died in Maoist attacks are allowed to intervene in the case against Binayak Sen in the Chhattisgarh High Court as though they had the right to protest against the appeals process of every prisoner suspected, or convicted, of being a Maoist.

It is entirely fitting that one of the worst prime ministers we’ve had in terms of the gap – no, abyss – between public professions and the acts of his government should preside over the morass the republic is sinking into. For corruption takes many forms: the taking (and giving) of money to secure preferential treatment or illegal favours is only one of them. So is the systematic denial of the ideal of justice. A state whose institutions remain resolutely unaccountable to the ordinary citizen, and a society where social and economic inequality act reciprocally upon each other, can scarcely be other than corrupt. This is the reason why protective legislation for the poor has always been honoured more in the breach than the observance; while the essential structure of social services ostensibly provided by the state – education, health care, the public distribution system – remains entirely dysfunctional, and such small matters as a statutory minimum wage and land reforms languish in the statue books with no attempt at enforcement.

The true roots of the corruption that the middle class so deplores lie in the structure of economic and social injustice that it scarcely acknowledges. If India is to become less corrupt, its institutions must be made accountable to the poor they claim to serve. A comprehensive template for elementary reform – of education and health care, the police and administrative apparatus, the judicial system, the forest department – already exists, or has been suggested, sometimes by state appointed committees, only to be consigned to dusty limbo by a combination of self-interest and inertia. For this state of affairs to change – for the process of political reform to begin – the state, and the middle class that controls the state, must listen to dissent instead of trying to crush it. The prospects, needless to say, appear bleak.

Shashank Kela

 

Footnotes:

1. See the reports by J. Venkatesan in The Hindu, 5 February 2011 and 11 February 2011; and the statement of the public prosecutor in Binayak Sen’s case in Aman Sethi’s report in The Hindu, 11 February 2011.

2. See, for example, the curious case of Sudhir Dhawale. Piyush Sethia was arrested in Salem, Tamil Nadu, by the local police for distributing leaflets against Operation Green Hunt on 26 January 2010, and charged with sedition: the case is still being fought in court.

3. See the article by S. Arun Mohan and Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu, 26 January 2011.

4. See Aman Sethi’s report in the The Hindu, 17 January 2011. Meanwhile the plant has been relocated – for now, at least.

5. Vidya Subrahmaniam in The Hindu, 3 February 2011.

6. See P. Sainath’s article in The Hindu, 18 November 2010. The figures are from a study by Global Financial Integrity, unambiguously neo-liberal in orientation (despite the admission that illegal financial outflows have increased enormously since 1991). If the explanation is a joke, the figures are not.

7. See Jeemon Jacob and V.K. Shashikumar, ‘The Father, the Sons-in-Law and the Holy Properties’, Tehelka 8(2), 15 January 2011, for an expose on the assets of Balakrishnan’s relatives.

8. See the report on the judgment by J. Venkatesan in The Hindu, 22 January 2011.