by Ravish Kumar
2.
A Death in Delhi*
A boy has died, killed on a busy road by the family of the girl he loved. In a society that lurks in the bushes to catch lovers kissing, Ankit Saxena’s death is certainly not the last.
I silently look at photographs of him in happier times. He was just twenty-three. A life that had had so many hues to it has been extinguished. What must be the depth of despondency in a country where those who love are cut down by swords and knives?
Those who are waiting for someone to write on the incident in this time of all-pervading despair are already consumed with bloodlust. They are determined to clock every writing effort of a certain kind of person whom they watch closely, alarm in their hands—now what will he do, will he write now, about this? In a society of vultures, the act of writing increasingly feels like answering a roll-call.
How one wishes one could have seen Ankit’s love blossom. Even before he died, the lovers knew they were exchanging vows of love in the shadow of death. Why, Ankit’s beloved had made up her mind to run away forever, even locked up her own parents in their house—is it not possible to love without rebelling in India? Even today young women find themselves having to flee their homes to be true to their love. They are chased down by parents brandishing sharpened swords of caste and religion.
What must be going through the mind of Ankit’s beloved, whose desire to be with him made her leave home with a resolve never to return? There she was running towards the metro rail station, which resonates with the sound of modern India’s approaching footsteps. On the other end were heartrending images of Ankit’s mother screaming out her grief in her home in Raghubir Nagar. On both ends it is daughters who are suffering. The son, both lover and beloved, has been put to death.
Ankit was also rushing in the direction of the metro rail station where she was waiting for him. How one wishes he had reached the appointed spot that day. They would have boarded a bus together and disappeared from a world soaked in hatred, sloughing off every marker of their existing identities. But his wretched car, it had to go and collide with her mother’s scooty, of all things. The newspaper reports said her mother collided with him on purpose—Ankit was surrounded. He was fatally stabbed in the neck.
Ankit Saxena was Hindu. His love is Muslim. And to make things very clear, her mother is Muslim, her brother is Muslim, her father is Muslim, her uncle is Muslim. I have no qualms mentioning someone’s religious affiliation. Even if I were to refrain from mentioning this fact, it would make no difference to a society of trolls addicted to fomenting hatred—it will see what it chooses to see, namely a Hindu and a Muslim, of whom the Hindu was killed.
What would have happened had the story been inverted—if she had been Hindu, he had been Muslim and parents on both sides had been willing? Those very groups that are now trying to make political capital out of Ankit’s death would have been creating a disturbance outside their doors, no question. The way the trolls are going on at the moment, it is as if they would have led the wedding procession of the star-crossed lovers. We need to ask ourselves, always—who exactly are the people spreading venom against such inter-faith marriages?
This brings to mind the immense courage shown by the father of a girl in Ghaziabad in December 2016, when those who were complete strangers to the Hindu girl and the Muslim boy came determined to cause a commotion on the day of their marriage. Undeterred, the girl’s father made sure the marriage went off without any hitch, and in that very city. What happened was that the district head of a certain political party gathered a crowd outside the girl’s house to disrupt the wedding proceedings. Not only did he not succeed, his party had to strip him of his position as well.
Who are the powerful people setting rules regarding who shall love whom? What are these rules doing to our society? Who is being pumped up with hatred and who is planning a kill? You can figure these things out for yourself. We’ll let it be if you can’t. It isn’t simple, after all. Within you, too, there are layers of violence that you almost descend to before you stop yourself.
The prevailing atmosphere has enfeebled everybody. There are very few who are able to defy their weakness as the father of the girl in Ghaziabad did. Some, like the Muslim parents from Khayala, give up and become killers. How one wishes that the parents of Ankit’s beloved had not treated their daughter, the brother had not treated his sister, as their commodity. Not theirs, not of any religion. Hatred has raised so many walls around us, laid so many layers of violence inside us that it is a constant struggle to overcome them. We can win the battle—or lose and become killers.
Think about the couple from Coimbatore, Kausalya and Sankar. Both were Hindus, after all. Then why was Sankar hacked with the sharp edge of a weapon in broad daylight? Why did Kausalya’s parents hatch a conspiracy to kill her love? He was a Dalit and she was from an ‘upper caste’. They fell in love, got married. It was when they were returning home from the market that goondas hired by Kausalya’s parents put an end to Sankar’s life. This happened in 2016. The video of the incident is terrifying.
From day one, Kausalya maintained that her parents were responsible for Sankar’s murder. The investigation took a year and the case resulted in a conviction. This must be one of the few cases of honour killing to be wrapped up so soon. It would be instructive to read the details of the case, available online, for there is a great deal to learn from it. May god give Ankit’s beloved the courage to do what Kausalya did. She has certainly given a statement that her parents killed Ankit.
Add the tag of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ to every name as many times as you want, but it will not suffice to explain away the reality of the violence entrenched in our society. Just the other day, those wanting to reap the bitter harvest of communalism were collecting donations for Shambhulal Regar, the man who hacked and burnt Mohammad Afrazul in Rajasthan and got his nephew to record the murder on his phone. These are people who want a constant supply of firewood to keep society perpetually flared up.
Honour killing is a cocktail made of prejudice, hate and misogyny to which the colour red is contributed by religion, caste, father or brother as the occasion may demand. It is not just the act of falling in love that invites honour killing. When daughters are foetuses in their mothers’ wombs, they are killed in the name of family and honour. This is the truth of a community, a religion—are we prepared to accept which one? It is the truth of a country and its society. In such a country, what can the rousing slogan ‘Beti bachao, beti padhao’ mean? Save the daughter, educate the daughter. From whom exactly should we protect our daughters? Our daughters have so many killers facing them—first and foremost, their own mothers and fathers.
Religion and caste have always condemned us to a lifetime of fear. In a customary moment of love we may sing a note or two about taking wing like birds, but the truth is we continue to be trapped in the cage of religion and caste. The way things are in India, couples invariably find little love and far more hatred in the course of their love. That they still dare to love is worthy of our salutations.
In a society with an entire arsenal of arguments against love, there will be no real grief over the killing of Ankit; it is already looking for some benefit in the tragedy. How great, then, the words that Ankit’s father has spoken—he does not want any tension in the neighbourhood. He wants justice for his son, but he won’t make it about religion.
However, tension will remain. Things will not be allowed to quieten down. Anti-Romeo ‘squads’ set up against ‘love jihad’ will roam the streets, holding our daughters captive. Every killing whets the appetite for more killings. Those who are killers themselves will keep trolling you to ask when you will write about ‘Hindu killings’ to prove that you aren’t a ‘Muslim lover’.
I was trolled after Ankit’s death. I was watched: Would I? Did I care? But it is they who do not care, for anyone’s life or love.
This is what I have to say to them: ‘Look within yourself and think about what you are doing. Aren’t y
ou among those who get couples attacked in parks and thrashed within an inch of their lives? You do not care about a boy who died. He loved. But your aim is to kill love, isn’t it? You go hunting in parks to perform acts of honour killing. You should not talk of justice.
‘By adding the prefix of maulana or mullah to my name, what do you think you are doing? You are mirroring that against which you want something to be written. Your politics of hate, and the very idea of snuffing out the love that exists in every home, is proving to be fatal. The frenzy is rising. It will consume you, too. Why don’t you let the country breathe a little free, give flight to its youthful dreams?’
Love can save us. But we never really let it bloom in our society. Now we’ve raised an army to police love and to kill it. Youngsters who do not know what it is to be in love and marry the person of their choice remain cowards forever, timid for life. Living in a society of crores of unsuccessful and timid lovers, we have become killers. First we extinguish any possibility of love that we may have—we kill our love. Then we target someone else’s love.
*This essay is adapted from a blog I wrote on 5 February 2018, four days after twenty-three-year-old Ankit Saxena was killed in west Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar.
The Fundamental Right to Privacy
Think back to what happened on 22 August 2017: there was a rush in government circles to take credit for the Supreme Court’s judgement striking down the validity of instant triple talaq. In contrast, when a nine-judge Constitution bench of the Court delivered an even more historic verdict just two days later, ruling that privacy is a fundamental right, there wasn’t exactly a scramble for the bouquets pouring in. The government was in a bind, and it did an awkward dance around the truth.
Since 2014, when the NDA government came to power, its attorneys general had maintained that privacy is not a fundamental right. However, at a press conference after the 24 August judgement, Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad tried to present the defeat handed down by the Supreme Court judgement as a victory. ‘Government welcomes [the] judgement,’ he said. ‘Government has been of the view, particularly with regard to Aadhaar, that the right to privacy should be [a] fundamental right. The Supreme Court has affirmed what the government had said in Parliament while moving the Aadhaar Bill.’
He was referring to a statement made by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the Rajya Sabha on 16 March 2016, during the debate on the Aadhaar Bill, that ‘probably, privacy is a Fundamental Right; it is too late in the day to say it is not’. Since Jaitley’s somewhat equivocal statement was in tune with the ruling of the Constitution bench, why had the attorney general never made this declaration in court? Why had the government’s legal counsel argued forcefully and consistently that the right to privacy cannot be a fundamental right? As the law minister was now claiming victory for the government in the Supreme Court’s verdict, he should at least have told us exactly which arguments of his attorney general had been accepted by the Court and reflected in its verdict.
From the tenor of Ravi Shankar Prasad’s press conference, it was clear that the enormous significance of 24 August 2017 was weighing heavily on the government. The ruling was on privacy, not Aadhaar, on which a five-judge bench would rule separately; but Prasad was holding up his Aadhaar card and reminding us of an arguably pro-privacy statement made by his fellow minister. It should have occurred to some journalist to ask this question: If what Jaitley had said during the debate on the Aadhaar Bill back in March 2016 was indeed the government’s position, why was it that in a matter pertaining to Aadhaar in this very Supreme Court the then attorney general, Mukul Rohatgi, had declared that arguments which saw the indiscriminate collection of biometric data as bodily intrusion were ‘bogus’—and that a citizen had no absolute right over his or her body? After that chilling submission by Rohatgi, the Government of India had an opportunity to revise its stand on privacy before the Constitution bench, but it chose not do so. Then why was Jaitley’s Rajya Sabha statement being used as a smokescreen to mask the resounding defeat of the government’s stand in the Supreme Court? An official statement welcoming the judgement is mere formality, a compulsion, when there is no acknowledgement of the fact that the government was in the wrong. For the people of India, it was a historic verdict, but it did not appear to be so for the Government of India.
At that hastily organized press conference a journalist did say to the law minister that he was prevaricating and misrepresenting facts, at which a look of tension spread over the minister’s face. Another journalist wanted to know what the government would do about a recent bill it had introduced to prevent same-sex couples from having children through surrogacy, now that sexual choice was a fundamental right in the light of the Supreme Court ruling. Without batting an eyelid, the minister said the question was not germane to the subject of the press conference. In a manner that was far more suave, Arun Jaitley, too, attempted to put a positive spin on the matter. They were both trying to fool people, so that the government did not lose face. It is for this reason that every vigilant and reflective citizen should make it a point to read the judgment several times.
This ruling of India’s apex court will be an example for the whole world. It is a judgment that will give India a new identity. Addressing the Constitution bench, the attorney general K.K. Venugopal had given the following argument: The issue of privacy concerns only the well-to-do sections of Indian society. It is completely removed from the needs and aspirations of the majority of the population. For the proper delivery of facilities that the state provides to the poor under various social welfare schemes, the right to privacy can be cast aside. The right to life is paramount, not the right to privacy. He was saying what the government and its supporters had maintained all along—that the arguments for privacy were nothing but an instance of the rich and the elite making a storm in a teacup as a pastime. But the apex court made it very clear that the government’s argument did not hold water. The Court went further, observing that such a stand was a betrayal of the spirit of the Constitution. Our Constitution puts the individual ahead of everything else. To hold that the poor are in need of economic progress alone and not civil and political rights is both wrong and dangerous.
The question is this: considering that the Government of India is elected by the people of India and represents them all, what is the intention behind this government’s stand—in the Supreme Court of India, no less—that civil and political rights are fine for the well-to-do but are not pressing needs for the poor? The government is not doling out charity to the poor in the name of subsidies. It provides subsidies because it is answerable to the people, and is responsible for their welfare. In return it cannot take away other rights from them. Regardless of whether the people are starving or have full stomachs, they can form an adverse opinion of the government, mobilize against it, or come out on the streets to protest against it. The nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court has enunciated this fact so clearly that even those who stubbornly turn a deaf ear must now hear it. This is what the main judgement says: ‘The refrain that the poor need no civil and political rights and are concerned only with economic well-being has been utilized though history to wreak the most egregious violations of human rights. Above all, it must be realized that it is the right to question, the right to scrutinize and the right to dissent which enables an informed citizenry to scrutinize the actions of government. Those who are governed are entitled to question those who govern about the discharge of their constitutional duties[.]’
The verdict on the right to privacy makes the citizen conscious of the entire gamut of his or her rights. These are rights that are crucial for keeping democracy alive in letter and spirit. The Supreme Court has said the right to review the government’s actions, question them and disagree with them is also protected; it is what empowers citizens in a democracy, enabling them to exercise their political choice effectively. The Constitution bench cited Professor Amartya Sen’s research to illustrate what can happen when a governm
ent goes unchecked—it becomes irresponsible even in circumstances of scarcity and famine. The great famine of Bengal during British rule was barely reported because of restrictions imposed on the Indian press. There was no pressure on the government to be accountable, and lakhs of people died of starvation.
This is the reason why the privacy judgement has enormous significance for each one of us. The right to privacy is the right to life itself: the right to live without fear; the right to demand justice, respect and security from governments; the right to be regarded not as subjects but as citizens. Since 2014 the prevailing political atmosphere has been such that any criticism of the government is frowned upon. If you disagree with the powers that be, you are against the leader, against the government, against the country, and against development. The Constitution bench of the Supreme Court has a clear message for the citizens: you are entirely within your rights to question and criticize the government; in fact, by making a continuous practice of it, you strengthen Indian democracy. The way I see it, not only has the Supreme Court defined privacy, it has explained to the citizen what his or her democratic obligations are and how the Constitution safeguards them.
By this ruling, the Supreme Court has not only dismissed the government’s anti-people argument but also removed the contradictions and blots of its earlier judgments. It overruled two of its previous verdicts—given in the M.P. Sharma case of 1958 and the Kharak Singh case of 1961—which had said the right to privacy was not protected under the Indian Constitution. And it has done so in powerful and memorable words—Justice Chelameswar says, ‘The right to privacy consists of repose, sanctuary and intimate decisions’; Justice Chandrachud writes that ‘development consists of the expansion of people’s freedom’ and that ‘to live is to live with dignity’; Justice Nariman defines privacy as ‘an inalienable human right which inheres in every person by virtue of the fact that he or she is a human being’. The manner in which the nine judges have unanimously interpreted privacy stands out like an exquisite poem in a prosaic law book.
