The Free Voice

by Ravish Kumar

  Now once again there is a move to drag history-writing back to the chronicles of kings and queens. It is reckless myth-making, fuelled by the idea of retribution—the ‘faithful’, the ‘true Hindus’, will avenge the deeds, real and imagined, of those who are no longer in our midst. The idea of vengeance persists even though those who exist in the present have nothing to do with that history and are not responsible for any of it.

  Through these narratives of the new national curriculum, young hearts are being filled with the flames of hatred; they are being transformed into human bombs walking in our midst. Communalism turns human beings into bombs—we will see this change not just in our neighbour’s child but also in our own. When a youth filled with pure hatred chances upon an ordinary quarrel between two individuals who happen to be from different faiths, he can only see the incident with a communal eye and explode, human bomb that he is. He becomes a participant in the act of killing; part of the crowd that kills a Pehlu Khan or Muhammad Akhlaq or Junaid Khan, knowing he will never be punished by the powers that be. This is the kind of human bomb we have in our midst today. We are no longer a weak-hearted people; now that 1,200 years of slavery and sixty years of sickularism and bad governance are behind us, we have produced our own Jihadi John, who hacks and burns a man to death and releases the video on the internet.

  As these human bombs increase in numbers in any society or nation, it is not the state that stands to lose but all of us—our status and power as citizens will correspondingly shrink. When we watch television images of a person beaten to pulp by a crowd—he may be of any religion—the moment at which the victim is overpowered by the crowd leaves us shaken and afraid even though we are watching the news in the safety of our home. We are wary of sharing our feelings on Facebook and hesitate to step out of the house at certain times. We feel intimidated and our civil rights as citizens get eroded.

  Our minds are being filled with hatred not only for the sole purpose of perpetuating the hold of a particular party or ideology on power but to ensure the complete decimation of the power that comes with being the citizens of a democracy. I earnestly urge you to keep your child safe from the ill-effects of the new national curriculum on social media and prime-time television, and keep yourself out of its reach as well. The national curriculum is virulent in its theme, and unrelenting. It has a predictable pattern—wherever there is an election, it makes its presence felt. All of us need to have the self-confidence that is part of the consciousness of being the people of a strong civilization, a rich and diverse culture. Just as justice and injustice are part of our present, so it was in the past. We need to learn to deal with it. We should know how to negotiate history. But these debates are pushing us to the farthest extremes; consequently, we are moving inexorably towards communalization—an ever-widening gulf of mistrust with regard to a particular community.

  In schools all over Germany, children are educated on how to deal with the blot on their past because of Hitler and his Nazi regime, one of the most evil in all history. This is a stigma that cannot be removed either by tearing out or burning those pages of history, or by running away and hiding from it. I once asked a German journalist if they were overcome by a sense of guilt. Mentioning that politicians in my country didn’t think twice about casually branding anybody as Hitler, I asked her if that were so in Germany as well. She replied, ‘We are very careful about how we bring Hitler’s name into any debate; only an individual who loses the ability to offer a reasoned and human argument is thought to possess a Hitlerian streak.’

  She recalled that around the time the film Schindler’s List, set in Nazi Germany, was released, their teacher spoke to them. This is what the teacher said: ‘The film dwells on the darkest chapter in the history of our nation. Yes, it did happen, but we are not to blame—neither your father nor mine. We ought to be ashamed of this dark chapter of our history and we are, but when we watch the film we shall not be wracked by guilt or anger. Rather, we shall experience a sense of self-confidence that we are no longer trapped in that time; we have come a long way from that juncture and are living in a new age.’

  We in India have not educated our citizens on ways to negotiate history. On the contrary, the narrative that is being created as a ‘tradition’, especially through our television channels, is one of inhumanity. Perhaps many will dismiss these words of caution, calling me alarmist. But there will come a time when we will recall these words in distress—if not for ourselves, then for our children, for no one among us wants to see our child pick up a sword to kill a neighbour. Our child may well be saved by the party he owes allegiance to, but we will not get a moment’s sleep knowing that our child is a murderer.

  When Pehlu Khan was lynched in Alwar, there was little reaction on the part of society and none from the government. When Junaid Khan was killed on a crowded railway platform, no one came to his aid, and later there were no witnesses, everyone claimed to have been somewhere else, or busy with something so consuming that the cries of a man being butchered and his brothers did not reach them. Examine the damage that was done: two men died, in terror and unimaginable pain. If that does not matter to us, do we think of those who killed and will not be punished? How many were they? Eight? Ten? Twenty? We don’t know, we make no effort to know. Those men, they must have gone home after they killed. What food did they eat that evening? Who cooked it for them? How many greeted them in their mohallas the next morning? There are eight, ten, twenty murderers roaming freely in our society. In another year there may be eight hundred, or twenty thousand. Murder will be normal then. It will be like any other job—like weaving a beautiful carpet or sari, driving a car, tending a garden, writing software or nursing the sick. Killers will emerge among us, kill and come back home after a day’s work. They might be our children, our siblings, our husbands or wives. Have we agreed to this? When we cast our vote, was this the world we chose?

  Let us not turn away from what is happening. The future is grim. Due to the ongoing poisonous Hindu-Muslim discourse, human bombs are being prepared in large numbers, out of hatred among the Hindus and out of sheer fear among the Muslims. Our society is poised to reach its nadir. In places with dense populations, communalism will incubate more human bombs.

  There are many ways to falsify history. During the West Bengal elections of 2016, we saw new wonders of the national curriculum unfold. In no time at all the ‘Netaji files’ were exhumed from the central government archives and aired, and an impression was created that one of the icons of our freedom movement, Subhas Chandra Bose, had been denied his place in history until now and that he would now be given his due. It did not matter that almost every child in India knows of him, that he has found a prominent place in the national narrative and in textbooks across the country for decades, and his pictures have adorned millions of homes and offices. For days we heard of Netaji from his new champions—many of whom had never bothered with him before. Sometimes he was pitted against Nehru and at other times in opposition to other leaders. There was a chorus of concern for Netaji. but once the BJP lost the state election, he was consigned to oblivion.

  This kind of misuse of history must be avoided at all cost. By all means, visit a library to know more about the ups and downs in the relationship between Nehru and Bose. However, if you look towards a television studio debate to learn more about their equation, be warned that numerous pitfalls await you—prime among them being an anchor who doesn’t have the time to read two newspapers a day or a single book in an entire year but becomes a historian by night, destroying your mind on a daily basis.

  This is not an issue that is limited to our times but concerns future generations as well. We have managed to come this far without much mishap. But how many will now fall into the many pits being dug all around in front of our eyes, I cannot say. What I can say is that it is not you and I alone who will fall into these traps; we will be condemned to seeing our children being ensnared and injured—the children we dandle on our laps, wishing them a bright f
uture.

  There are many new heroes who emerge these days, fully formed, with entire mythologies of physical bravery and success, and make a grand entry into politics, dressed to kill. They want to wipe out the past, rewrite it in their own image. They think they are creating history in the present, whereas history has scripted the present of the likes of them a long time ago. Try as they might, they cannot change it. They will be exposed, we only need to keep our eyes and ears open.

  If we learn to negotiate the past, we will no longer be perplexed or fooled by the present. For instance, there was no need to invoke the name of Sardar Patel during the Gujarat elections of late 2017; his name had already been used during the Lok Sabha elections of 2014. Except that this time around his name was being used liberally to placate the disgruntled Patel community of the state. Did it work? We don’t know. But I humbly submit to the Patel community: Sardar is too big a statesman to belong to one group, or to be dragged into the arena of cynical politics.

  A narrative has been built about the animosity between Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, the latter being the villain. But if the new heroes of our nation would care to listen, I would tell them: If you read the correspondence between Nehru and Sardar, and dispassionate records of their relationship, your eyes will well up. If such friends, such co-travellers were to become a part of your life, you would be blessed indeed. If you can be Nehru to someone and that person can be Patel to you, know that you have earned the world’s most precious riches. But, if by your deeds you have repudiated the legacy of the very person you hail as Sardar, if you have appropriated him and reduced him to a 182-metre statue, you have lost everything.

  Some forty-fifty years after Sardar Patel, we saw one more ‘Sardar’ come and go in Indian politics. In between, he rode a rath. He too was called ‘lauh purush’ (iron man), he too set out to control and transform India, but is not to be seen opening his mouth these days. History can be like that, too.

  To come back to Nehru and Patel, the immense respect they had for each other and their friendship ought to be compulsory reading for those studying politics. How, in spite of differing viewpoints, they continued to respect each other, is what should be taught in classrooms, not that Nehru and Patel destroyed each other’s lives and aspirations. No, it was not so. In Indian politics there cannot be a bigger example of two statesmen, two individuals, forging a path of accord in the midst of differences.

  An attempt is being made to erase that history. But the attempt will not succeed for the simple reason that someone has lived that history. How can that which has been lived be obliterated?

  The above-mentioned instances are not mere tactics of one-upmanship in the battle between two political parties. They are part of a careful strategy to exert control over us—to seize and occupy our minds. For, when we start looking at the present and the past with their gaze, we will no longer be ourselves. Slowly but surely we are being moulded into a people who can be easily controlled by means of routine mechanisms of authority—a lapdog media, biased text books, IT cells, the Aadhar number...

  Organizations based on caste, religion and intolerant politics are increasing their stranglehold on history. Tearing down a few posters, ransacking libraries and cinema halls suffices for leaders of these organizations to become historians. Burning history books presents a way of becoming a part of history, as does the act of filing an FIR against a writer. Most of all, if you know the way to the neighbourhood of the person you have been taught to see as the ‘other’, and if you walk there with flashing eyes and even a stick in your hand, you are a part of history and a historian.

  This wonder of wonders can only be accomplished in India, not in other places. In other countries, you have to spend five to ten years of your life researching one tiny part of one particular subject before you earn the right to be called a historian. In this new and restless India, however, anyone who shreds a few posters at the crossroads becomes a historian.

  One is always a little anxious these days—anyone with the desire to become a historian bubbling inside him can take offence. The rich and the powerful, politicians and industrialists alike, have even thinner skins. Many well-wishers advise me to be careful with my words. I often forget their advice. But I haven’t yet said anything that would prompt an advocate or attorney general to take a day off to file a case, feeling the urgent need to get a gag order against me. I’m certainly not going to speak about those who grow their revenue 16,000-fold in a single year—who knows, I might end up losing 16,000 times the amount I’m likely to earn in this lifetime! So I usually try to ensure no big fish suffers a loss of reputation by what I say, and I do not suffer a loss of such wealth as I shall never own.

  If any of the big fish still want to file a defamation suit against me, I have a small request to make: please do not slap a lawsuit of Rs 100 crore on me. By all means file a suit, but let it be in the range of sawa rupaya—one and a quarter rupee—after all, an offering of sawa rupaya is enough to please our gods. I am imagining an India where nobody will suffer a loss of reputation worth more than sawa rupaya. Even if the oceanic gap between the poor and the rich becomes wider, like the chasm between two rotis and twenty cakes, let there be no disparity in the matter of measuring loss of reputation. May there be one measure of defamation for everybody, namely sawa rupaya. The work of lawyers will become much easier and the law minister too will get an opportunity to attend to some other work.

  In the interest of democracy and freedom, I have coined a slogan:

  One reputation, one loss

  One nation, one reputation

  Sawa rupaya respect for all!

  It is very feudal, this law of defamation. The powerful and the rich have begun to make liberal use of this law. Have you ever heard of the poor claim that their reputation has been damaged? Have you heard any poor man say, ‘You have not given me the minimum support price. You have brought me to a point where, out of sheer remorse that I have not been able to pay off my loans, I can only commit suicide. So I am going to hang myself. You are responsible for the great shame of reneging on my loan and not being able to look after my family. I will file a suit against you for causing a loss of reputation’? But the rich and the powerful use the law of defamation without compunction to intimidate us, the citizens. It is a law which reduces the status of the people in a democracy.

  First the powerful lot intimidate us through their use of history. Then they use the law of defamation to do the same. This latter tactic has a particular advantage—no revealing light will ever reach those dark corners which hide secrets, because how many have the strength to withstand the threat of a Rs 100 crore defamation suit?

  As it is, big corporates use this law to keep themselves out of the media’s reach. Practically no one speaks out against them. If you email them detailing the charges levelled against them and ask them for a response, there is none forthcoming. What does come your way is a legal notice from them.

  It is exactly this immunity from any legitimate questions that political parties are now seeking for themselves. The hurt caused to the reputation and prestige of those in power seems to be so severe that they feel the need to file defamation suits on any and every little matter. And they call themselves the guiding lights of democracy! This is nothing but a design to wear the people out so that they remain powerless against the cozy relationship building up between the mainstream media, big corporate houses and politicians.

  Recently, Rajasthan came perilously close to enacting a law—the proposed Criminal Laws (Rajasthan Amendment) Bill, 2017—to stop anyone from reporting on corruption charges against public servants, magistrates and judges. Fortunately, the citizens and journalists of the state rose in protest—had they not spoken out now, they would never have been able to speak. The Rajasthan Patrika, especially, took a courageous stand, with the editor Gulab Kothari saying his piece immediately in a front-page editorial that minced no words—his paper would boycott the chief minister until she revoked the ordinance. Some
days later, Gulab Kothari left the editorial column blank. It was a powerful symbolic act, for it carried echoes of the Emergency. The reason we should be vigilant on hearing these echoes anywhere is simple: the Emergency was a dark phase in our history and should never be repeated. If that period were to be repeated, as sometimes seems likely, then this time around our essence and consciousness of being the people will be completely erased.

  The power of the people is being eroded not just in India but around the world. Hundreds of journalists have been sent to prison—not just in countries like China and Saudi Arabia which have a long history of persecuting journalists, but also in Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Philippines, Argentina, Ukraine, Mexico, the United States, as governments are increasingly establishing their control over the world of communication. That was exactly what the Rajasthan government tried to do. Had the law been enacted, journalists would have virtually become bonded labour. It is the age of the lapdog media in any case; most media organizations have jumped happily into the lap of power. However, the system is ruthless; it can choke the eager-to-please child without missing a beat.

  In our democracy today, the political system overwhelmingly dominates the citizen; our power is weakening. Consequently, while leaders are being elevated to the position of veritable avatars, the people are being relegated to the category of criminals. If you pose a question, you are branded an anti-national and taken to task—how dare you question the avatar-purush, the incarnation of the mightiest god? Campaigns are unleashed against you on social media and you are virtually encircled and trolled. In the process, you start becoming fearful, telling your children they are far too visible on Facebook, that they should be less vocal. So, bit by bit, we surrender the little space we occupy as citizens. The more we cede that space, the more we enfeeble ourselves. It is not desirable for everybody to support one political party or ideology. It is important to have a plurality of parties and ideologies and we as the people should have the confidence that we can deal with it.