Being liberal in #NewIndia

Don’t let the right wing yank your chain.

(Published on July 15, 2017 in Business Standard)

There was a moment, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Amarnath yatris in Jammu & Kashmir, when it seemed as if social harmony in India might be in serious trouble. But of course, it was just one more piece of kindling tucked into what is already a raging conflagration.

On Twitter the next day, the right was aquiver with rage—but over liberals, not over the attack. It spent its time accusing people of not condemning the incident, as if individuals have the same duties as political spokespeople. Political PR channels thought the most trenchant question was: Where is the award wapsi gang?

You’d think that liberals would recognise this kind of baiting as designed to distract, and ignore it. But liberals are widely painted as hypocrites, and the charge of hypocrisy sparks a reflexive indignation in those good liberals who hold to principle, not party. It makes people who don’t need to prove a thing, spend their time proving things.

So liberals lined up for inspection by denouncing the attack not just from the heart, but scrupulously, as if lives lost are not clearly saddening. The heartfelt #NotInMyName campaign against lynch mobs, which attracted significant crowds, coverage, and right wing ire at their spontaneous protest in June, came out again to protest the attack in J&K. Good for them, but I would like to think that they didn’t do so under pressure to stave off the charge of hypocrisy. A terrorist attack is not in anyone’s name.

Amid the rubble and smoke on social media, too few people focused on the only consequential issue: investigating and questioning the security failure.

Well, dear liberals, that’s a mug’s game. Why are we allowing ourselves to become entirely reactive, squashed into tiny-minded terms set by people whose first and last recourse is whataboutery?

The liberal heart—by and large, let me not presume to speak for all—sticks up for things like non-violence, peace, diversity, freedom, and inclusiveness. It’s kind of a given that we don’t want anybody to be beaten up, murdered, or exiled, to be terrified, to live as second-class citizens, to perpetrate or be subjected to violence, to be discriminated against, to be oppressed by poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and illness. It’s a given that we see freedom, rationality, and constitutional rights as a good.

Why, then, are we constantly giving in to the pressure to display these beliefs constantly in any way other than living them by refraining from violence and hate? There is no need to jump when some anonymous troll snaps his or her fingers. We should feel free to engage out of choice, or to not engage at all. We should stop worrying that our beliefs will be worth less if we stop polishing them up for people who spit on them anyway. Liberal politics is live and let live, though comment is free. How you live serves as a much better track record than your timeline.

It is Hindutva, by definition, that seeks to exclude, dominate, censor, and interfere in private citizens’ lives. It is Hindutva that demands homogeneity, conservatism, obedience, deference to authority, censorship, and patriotic one-upmanship, in the name of aggressive nationalism. It is Hindutva that wants to drag us into the public square, and place on us the burden of proving that we belong. That politics—which bows to the state without respecting the Constitution—is too busy tending to its psychic wounds by justifying violence, to feel compelled to condemn violence. Hindutva’s political leaders, who do have a public duty to be seen and heard, say nothing, or make hateful statements—yet somehow, it is liberals who feel pushed on to the back foot.

Time spent being defensive about what we do not do, rather than on simply doing what we do, is time straight down the cosmic toilet. A healthy liberal society spends its waking time working, playing, keeping house, loving, innovating, expressing itself, learning, staying healthy, respecting rights and the law, holding power accountable, and meeting its friends. It does not spend its time trying to persuade heckling strangers that it isn’t murdering Hindus, or getting paid by Italians, or working for ISIS. It just lives and lets live. 

That doesn’t mean ceding vocal public space. It just means that it’s time to step back from the toxic paranoia, gas-lighting and straight up lies on social media, stop being manipulated and provoked. It’s time to take a breath, and refocus on the issues nobody wants us to focus on: unemployment, economic and agricultural crises, the destruction of our institutions, the death spiral in education, the shredding of our social fabric, the slow choking of diversity, and the rapid sacralisation of the state. 

I’m not saying we can’t get online to poke a few bears, just for fun. But we should choose to.

A response to Swapan Dasgupta's Times of India blog

(Published on July 2, 2017 in NDTV Opinion)


Swapan Dasgupta has an extraordinary blog piece in this morning's The Times Of India. In it, he lists the philosophical and temperamental sins of liberals who, to use his word, "flaunted" Not In My Name placards at the protests organised across India on Thursday against the recent cluster of lynchings that have sickened India and the world. The violence has mostly been in the context of people transporting cattle, or people suspected of eating beef, neither of which is illegal. The victims have been mostly Dalit or Muslim.

Dasgupta frames this anti-lynching protest as an expression of aesthetic more than moral outrage. This is presumably because "aesthetic" can be dismissed as a slighter, more frivolous philosophical obsession, confined to those few rich enough to have time and space for such minor preoccupations. 

After spending half his time quite reasonably agreeing that in addition to political violence, there is, in fact, much ugliness and violence in Indian civic society, Dasgupta presents two major arguments for why protesting this ugly lawlessness, and the Prime Minister's silence, is self-defeating. 

His first argument is that the protest displayed politically-coloured "selective indignation". Dasgupta cites the protesters' silence on the lynching of Kashmiri police officer Ayub Pandith in Srinagar just a few days earlier, the inference being that liberals don't mind murderous mobs as long as they are Muslim. This is just factually incorrect. Either Dasgupta wasn't there, or he wasn't listening, because Ayub Pandith was mentioned several times on stage. And there were certainly politics there, but they were entirely personal. I'm pretty sure it's normal for people to have political opinions. It's very helpful at the ballot box.

More broadly, Dasgupta accuses the protesters of repeatedly invoking "the beef controversy", as if this constitutes needless overreach in a protest against killing people for eating or being associated with beef. He says the murder of a teenaged Muslim boy on a train in Haryana is a reflection of popular mentality, not of politics - as though no BJP leader has ever enabled and encouraged this mentality by demonising Muslims as aliens to India, as Hindu-murderers, and as a community Hindus can never live with (Exhibit A: Chief Minister of UP Adityanath, appointed by PM Modi); as though no BJP political figure has ever legitimised the murder of an innocent Muslim by draping the corpse of his murderer in the tricolour (Exhibit B: Union Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma); as though no BJP leaders have ever attended meetings where people were exhorted to kill Muslims (Exhibit C: A Sangh meeting in Agra in 2016 attended by several BJP leaders); as though there is no such thing as Hindutva-affiliated groups in Uttar Pradesh running camps to arm and train children to hate and kill Muslims.

But citizens join the dots for themselves, whether or not they are particularly political animals, and many of us don't like what we see. Politically-obligated entities like Dasgupta much prefer the fiction that all dots are isolated incidents that do not amount to a pattern. This is his political task, as an ardent supporter of the BJP, and that too is perfectly transparent to citizens.

His second argument is the "generous measure of social condescension" he witnessed - not at the protest, but on social media chatter - which indicates, to him, that liberals are more concerned about lunching than lynching (I paraphrase). He says that the protesters represent a "rootless cosmopolitanism" which attempts to use the Constitution to sanction beef-eating in the face of common decency, since "the prohibition on beef carries a large measure of social sanction." To make this argument, he has to brush aside the BJP's brazen doublespeak on beef in the Northeast and Kerala with a low-volume "some states apart", and completely ignore the inconvenient fact that if social sanction were sacrosanct, we would not have laws against sati, gender violence, rape, and child labour.

Somehow he determines that all of this anti-murder protesting is aimed at fostering Hindu self-flagellation. This beats me, though not in the Hindu self-flagellating way. Stripped to the bone, his argument is that a confident Hindu would be radiant with understanding about the mob's feelings, rather than whining about murder. That if liberals weren't so culturally out of it, and had a "more evolved sense of rootedness", they wouldn't think the lynchings displayed a lack of humanity.

Dasgupta's piece would be inane, but unremarkable, if it stayed in this region, limiting itself to right wing cant and the journalistic equivalent of poking snails with a stick to see if he can hassle them into retreating into their shells. 

But he goes further, bookending his piece with an attempt to frame the anti-lynching protest as treachery. His opening quote about aesthetics is from a Le Carré novel, spoken by a British intelligence officer turned Soviet mole, explaining why he betrayed his country: '"It was," Haydon replied unhesitatingly, "an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. The West has become so ugly."' Dasgupta's ending sentence is: "India may be imperfect, but it isn't so ugly as to warrant emotional treachery."

This is such a wonderfully whacked-out thing to say that, in another social climate, it would get a big laugh, but in today's climate of unthinking hyper-nationalism and political pseudo-nationalism, it is far more pernicious. For a Rajya Sabha member to gently, gently draw a link between liberals and treason, is nothing short of gentle, gentle incitement. It's disappointing at best, and wilfully irresponsible at worst. Swapan Dasgupta knows very well that the greatest fight in India today is the fight over who does and does not belong in India, and under what conditions, and that those who do not enjoy what he calls "social sanction" are  vulnerable to the mob.

There are many such isolated instances of the Indian right wing painting liberals as traitors, either directly or by insinuation. All of us, right, left, and centre, can join the dots.

Walk the talk on cow terrorism, Mr Modi

Lynchings do not defame India, they shame it.

(Published on July 1, 2017 in Business Standard) 

On Wednesday evening, thousands of ordinary Indians put on their shoes, maybe grabbed an umbrella against monsoon rains, and walked out of their houses, carrying placards and wearing black armbands. In a dozen cities and towns across the country, they peacefully protested against murderous mob hate, and the government’s silence.

On Thursday morning the Prime Minister finally found it in him to comment on cow terrorists, after nearly a year and two dozen lynchings. He said that the violence saddened him, and that killing people in the name of gau bhakti is unacceptable.

Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. But while the perceived causal link might gratify #NotInMyName protesters, we would do well to put the PM’s reaction in perspective.

First, Mr Modi’s single past admonition to gau rakshaks had no discernible impact. Either he doesn’t have the clout everyone thinks he has, or he hasn’t really meant it. Talk is cheap, meaningful action quite another thing. Second, Mr Modi is more likely to be eyeing Dalit voters in the upcoming Gujarat elections, than a few thousand marginal libtards. Third, his popularity has largely withstood domestic criticism, so the protests may not have moved him—though the government is tetchy about international press, so it could be that merciless coverage of his silence in the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, The Economist, the Washington Post have stung him into speaking.

And what did he actually say? I am unconvinced by what many are calling a firm, sincere speech. He said that the Mahatma wouldn’t approve, and also that nobody talked more about cow protection than the Mahatma, which strikes me as conveniently fork-tongued. He didn’t mention the lynching victims, not even 16-year-old Junaid whose recent murder galvanised the protests. He wondered what we have become, but let the question hang. (The answer is: a society where hate and violence can proceed with impunity, because it is constantly excused and justified in the fraudulent name of public sentiment.)

He played the angsty philosopher, not the steely administrator. It was deja vu all over again—and there was, of course, the supreme irony of beholding the ideology that backslaps Nathuram Godse, shoot from Mahatma Gandhi’s shoulder. As various Twitter wags have pointed out, the Mahatma might have shot back, Not in my name.

Unless the BJP seriously follows up on law enforcement—no small task—and on a rhetorical makeover, this will just be an instance of making the right noises to pacify critics while winking at the hate-mongers.

I hope for, but don’t expect, any change in BJP politics. Just hours before Mr Modi’s speech another man was lynched near Ranchi, and there will no doubt be more killings because, as The Telegraph’s Friday front page so eloquently showed, we aren’t supposed to kill in Gandhi’s India, but then we live in Modi’s India. We have to hope that the PM means business this time, but until we see a serious systemic effort to curb violence, Mr Modi is not walking the talk.

What is important, and heartening, about the #NotInMyName protests, is that finally citizens stepped up to fill a shameful moral vacuum. They found their moral compass and stuck to it, despite a truly stupid effort—predictably from the Right, but also from many others—to scorn and discredit the protest. What’s to scorn—the assertion that lynching is horrifying and must stop? The refusal to accept or ignore tides of blood? Does the fact that only a few thousand people protested make the protest ridiculous, or is it an ugly comment on our society? What does it say about India that a protest against murder is controversial?

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologue Rakesh Sinha, whose repeated nightly appearances on various news channels is one of the abiding mysteries of our times, claimed that the protests were a Pakistani ISI-created effort to defame India; Rajya Sabha member Swapan Dasgupta suggested that it was a case of sour grapes because the protestors no longer enjoy the fruits of Congress power. I know I’m supposed to use words, but I think an eye-roll each will do.

A Huffington Post editor wrote that focusing on beef and Muslims only helps Hindutva, to which I’d respond that it is possible to be so over-clever and over-tactical that you can lose sight of certain simple truths. In this case: Killing people and terrorising minorities is illegal, anti-Constitutional, and morally maggoty, and this country’s government has been complicit in its silence, its inaction, and its rhetoric.

I hope that there will be many more such citizen protests, most of all by rejecting hate and sticking up for each others’ constitutional rights in our daily lives. It matters, when constitutional values face marginalisation, not to let volume and numbers make you second-guess your true North. Because that is how a country loses itself.

Where are India's TV comedy shows?

We will, we will mock you

(Published on June 17, 2017 in Buiness Standard)

I’ve wondered for years why we don’t, in India, have a thriving equivalent of the American late night comedy shows, like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (a worthy replacement for the magnificent Jon Stewart), The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Real Time with Bill Maher, or Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. These people tear into the powers that be with a savagery that takes your breath away, but only because you’re laughing so hard. They serve takedown, send up, and unvarnished insult, on a bed of truth, garnished with profanity. They are whip-smart, merciless, and hilarious. And they do it all on mainstream television, protected by the First Amendment. Before the American news media stopped pandering to Trump, got its act together and renewed its commitment to the job, it was the comedy shows that held fast to the single most important function of journalism: to speak truth to power. They always have.

And they do it with a wit as entertaining as it is flaying. A good satirist will skip around poking you with a stick, then pull down your pants, slip a knife between your ribs, and skip away, leaving you filled with admiration and the desire to buy him or her a beer. How do American politicians respond? They appear on the shows. There’s no better way to earn public respect than to take an ego-walloping on the chin.

India is bursting at the seams with comedy gold. It’s so pervasive that, often, a straight-up news report is ridicule enough and needs no further comment. But there’s plenty of material waiting to be mined by a good satirical show. The Internet, bless its soul, performs the same function at individual peril. Newslaundry.com does scathing critique with the kind of damning before-and-after audiovisual clips that work so well to demonstrate contradictions and lies, and goes after not just politicians but media itself. 

But it would never find a slot on television. Mainstream media companies stay far, far away from anything but the gentlest poke in the ribs. Cyrus Broacha, who hosts The Week That Wasn’t, is the first to list all the things he can’t talk about. Acts like Aisi Taisi Democracy and All India Bakchod, as well as individual comedians, provide scathing takes, but they don’t enjoy the brand reach of television, and are perpetually in the crosshairs of offended sentiment.

I’m dying to see some aggressive, no-holds-barred comedy shows on Indian television, instead of the multiple tragedies unfolding every night in the name of news debates. I’d much rather watch Mr Modi submit to a chat with Varun Grover or Aditi Mittal. But our politicians’ egos are too fragile. They respond to mockery—and sometimes to regular news reports—by unleashing court cases, sackings, censorship, and financial penalties upon their tormentors. The enemy, today, is truth—truth that hurts electoral prospects, truth that debunks propaganda, and truth that adjusts projected image to reflect reality. And among truths, there is no greater enemy than irreverent truth.

Democracies deliberately place the seat of power in the white-hot light of public scrutiny, subject to relentless public opinion, feedback, and resistance. The idea is transparency, accountability, and responsiveness, not opacity, insulation, and stonewalling. Not all forms of power submit to critical review; autocracy and totalitarianism famously disapprove of it. But in a democracy, the powerful are raised up high not to be worshipped, but to be better examined and judged publicly. Yet, India treats power like a throne, not as an administration of peers, by peers, for peers.

People will never, and must never, stop sticking pins in overinflated egos. Everyone does it privately, many people do it publicly. Secure politicians appreciate satire, and the clever ones might even give it back in good humour. Average politicians ignore it. Only those baring their fangs and looking over their shoulders are provoked by mockery, and the more they are, the stupider, more insecure, and less legitimate they look. By the same token, media houses have to develop an irreverent backbone and be willing to sign up the funny talent. And the courts have to back freedom of expression and stop admitting frivolous cases.

The Indian internet and stand-up spaces will continue to serve the nation in their own ways. My dream is that one day India will have not just excellent mainstream television comedy shows, but also institutions modeled on the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, at which the press roasts the administration, and the Administration roasts the press right back.

But then I remember that we live in a country where television censors words like ‘bra’ and ‘beef’ (shame on you, Indian television, you slavish arm of the nanny state). So for now, the wealth of untapped comedy all around us is either an opportunity tragically wasted, or one that is going to be a very long while coming.