Author: Monobina Gupta

Monobina Gupta is Managing Editor at The Wire. She has worked in several news organisations including the Telegraph and the Times of India. She is also the author of Left Politics in Bengal and Didi: A Political Biography.

BJP, Kaali and the Lingering Malaise of Bengal’s Hindu Nationalism

The ongoing contestation over which representation of Kaali is authentic is puerile at one end and points to deep roots of Hindu nationalism in Bengali culture on the other.

As the row over representation of goddess Kaali continues to simmer, addressing the centenary celebrations of Swami Atmasthananda, 15th president of the Ramakrishna Math, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said:

“Swami Ramakrishna Paramhansa was one such saint who had a vision of Maa Kaali and had surrendered his whole being at the feet of Maa Kaali. He used to say this whole world, everything is pervaded by the consciousness of Goddess Kaali. This consciousness is visible in the Kaali Puja of Bengal. This consciousness is visible in the faith of Bengal and the country.”

He further added that the “blessings of Maa Kaali are always with the country, which is moving ahead with a spiritual energy for the welfare of the world”.

One, if not the most, cited of Ramakrishna Paramahansa’s principles – “joto mot toto poth” (there are as many paths as there are opinions) – unequivocally underlining the equality of all religions carries special significance in today’s fractious environment. A household saying in Bengal, Ramakrishna’s widely circulated quote bears testimony to the mystic’s devotion to religious pluralism and eclecticism. This is also borne out by his complex spiritual reflections, practice of different faiths (including Islam and christianity), and relationship with goddess Kaali.

In an earlier article on The Wire, scholar Pralaya Kanungo cited the mystic’s vision as presented by Ramakrishna Mission: “A lake has several ghats [bathing places]. At one, the Hindus take water in pitchers and call it “jal”; at another, the Mussalmans take water in leather bags and call it “pani”. At a third the Christians call it “water”.

Also read: ‘Ephemeral vs Eternal’: Modi’s Comments Cross the Belur Math’s Laxman Rekha

Can we imagine that it is not “jal”, but only “pani” or “water”? How ridiculous! The substance is one under different names, and everyone is seeking the same substance; only climate, temperament, and name create differences. Let each man follow his own path. If he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God, peace be unto him! He will surely realise Him!”

Multiple representations

Like Ramakrishna, the goddess Kaali’s place in Bengali culture and society has to be appreciated in its context. Consider Kaali’s unusual iconography.

The most common of her many representations depicts the goddess, bare-bodied, her long and wild hair flowing around her. Around her neck hangs a necklace made of skulls, a skirt of limbs falls from her waist. Two of her arms carry a severed human head and a sword, while the other two gesture fearlessness and blessing.

Kaali represented by an artist. Photo: Public domain

In some representations, one of her arms cradles a cup into which flows the blood of the evil demons Kaali has slain. The goddess’s foot rests on the prostrated body of her consort Shiva, her tongue out, seemingly in surprise at stepping on her husband. Or so goes one popular interpretation.

However varied such representations, in her version of feminine power, Kaali conveys an imagination of shakti distinct from that embodied by Parvati and Durga.

Growing up in Bengal, I remember the aura around the midnight Kaali puja to be somewhat at variance from the ambiance surrounding Durga or Lokkhi Pujo. There was a certain subversive quality to Kaali worship. A certain thrill of worshipping a deity embodying the fearlessness that many, if not all, aspired to.

Until recently, animal sacrifice was a routine practice at Kaali Pujo. Even when that practice ended at many sites of worship, people still eagerly waited for a spicy dish of mutton. Far from frowning upon alcohol consumption, the mood of revelry on the occasion keenly anticipated its exuberant headiness.

Also read: Kali Faces the Wrath of a Hindi Colonialism Out to Destroy the Traditions of Her Followers

Like most myths built around deities, those around Kaali – who symbolises time, destruction and creation – are rooted in the idea of destroying evil and protecting the vulnerable. Arguably, the portrayal of an enraged goddess manifesting rage has, over decades, drawn to her a large number of Bengalis cutting across classes and castes. Feminists, too, have embraced Kaali as a symbol of agency and power. Kaali, therefore, represents (among other things) an image of shakti militating against safe, orthodox cultural mores.

The ongoing row and deeper issues

Given these well-established traditions around Kaali Pujo, the row which has erupted over Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra’s comments does indeed feel childish. True to character, and driven by its political and ideological agenda, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gone all out to impose the party’s will on religious practices that sit uneasily with the idea of a homogenised Hindu culture and religion. However, rather than back their own leader, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), too, has condemned Moitra’s comments.

Such condemnation runs against the party’s feted approach to Bangla nationalism, which it successfully leveraged against the BJP in the 2021 assembly elections. The BJP was then projected as an organic party of the Hindi heartland, indifferent to, if not oblivious of, Bangla language and culture. The TMC argued that the BJP’s homogenous vision of cultural nationalism was antithetical to Bengal’s cultural and religious practices.

Mamata Banerjee herself popularised the slogans of “Jai Durga” to counter BJP’s “Jai Shri Ram.” If anything fatally hurt the BJP in Bengal, it was the politics of Bangla nationalism. The top BJP leadership could not dent its well-constructed cultural armour. Now, the consequences of echoing the BJP in matters of cultural nationalism may blow back on the TMC. 

But equally importantly, the row over Kaali draws attention to a deeper malaise. As the number of those whose “sentiments” are “hurt” and “offended” grows by leaps and bounds, any hint of complexity and heterogeneity is expunged from religious practice under the threat of first information reports (FIRs).

Many of Bengal’s most cherished icons – Ramakrishna, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, and, of course, Kaali herself – bear testimony to the fact that recent shifts in the state’s politics cannot be understood without acknowledging the deep roots of Hindu nationalism in Bengali culture.

While this history gives important clues to the BJP’s rise in the state, and the TMC’s recourse to cultural nationalism in response, it goes without saying that turning to this aspect of Bengal’s past to determine its future is a deeply fraught affair.

‘If You Try to Be Safe and in the Middle, You Will Never Succeed’

Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, the organisation Sudha Bharadwaj has worked with for decades, built a unique model of trade unionism combining class struggle with welfarism.

Note: This article was originally published on July 18, 2018 and was republished on November 1, 2021, Sudha Bharadwaj’s 60th birthday.

New Delhi: Sudha Bharadwaj has spent nearly three decades working with the most marginalised sections of people in the conflict-ridden state of Chhattisgarh. Away from the media glare, her ear firmly to the ground, the trade union activist and lawyer has been up against powerful corporates and state administrations headed both by the present BJP dispensation and before that, the Congress party.

Earlier this month, the publicity-shy activist suddenly found herself in the midst of a noisy and slanderous campaign run by a television channel. On July 4, Republic TV alleged that the trade unionist had written a letter identifying herself as “Comrade Advocate Sudha Bharadwaj” to a Maoist called “Comrade Prakash,” stating that a “Kashmir like situation” has to be created. The Republic TV further accused the trade union leader of having received money from the Maoists.

Bharadwaj told The Wire “I am also said to have confirmed that various advocates, some of whom I know as excellent human rights lawyers and others whom I do not know at all, had some sort of Maoist link.”

She has now instructed her lawyer to file a defamation suit against the television channel.

Two days after the row, I met Bharadwaj at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I remember meeting her as a reporter back in 1992, when she was an activist of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), a labour organisation founded by the legendary trade union leader Shankar Guha Niyogi. Just a year prior, Niyogi, leading a powerful mine workers’ struggle, had been murdered in his sleep by Paltan Mallah, a hired assassin. Bharadwaj, an integral part of CMM at that time, would frequently come to Delhi from Bhilai, where she lived and worked. She met reporters, talked to them about Niyogi’s murder, and the struggles of Bhilai workers against corporate mine owners.

It was a moment when India was at a crossroads, on the verge of embracing a new economic and political order. The onset of economic liberalisation followed by the demolition of the Babri masjid, the proliferation of television channels and a new media culture would radically transform the nation.  In 1991, the P.V. Narasimha Rao-led Congress government liberalised the Indian economy, drastically restructured work places and changed the terms of employment. The rapid proliferation of contract work made unionisation a near impossibility.

Sitting on the lawns outside the Constitution Club, not yet caught in the sweep of gentrification, Bharadwaj would chat about the old and new challenges facing the working class, the CMM’s hard-fought struggles in Bhilai and the threats Niyogi faced from a range of corporates, who were entering the mineral rich area in fairly rapid succession.

Fourteen years later, in 2005, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Paltan Mallah but acquitted the two industrialists – Moolchand Shah, owner of Simplex industries, and Chandrakant Shah of Oswal Iron and Steel Private Ltd – who had been implicated in Niyogi’s murder. Bharadwaj was still living and working in Bhilai at the time. But her organisation was coming apart at the seams. Niyogi’s death threw the CMM into turmoil and it eventually splintered, with each of three of its factions choosing a different way to practice politics and trade unionism.

“Confronted with the conflicting trends of the three factions, the CMM karyakartas mobilised. They questioned the leadership. These mazdoor karyakartas (worker activists) were in fact very poor, those who would come out as retrenched workers and they were being barely supported by a sack of rice per month. Even the union was in no position to do more. This lot started getting together,” says Bharadwaj. She herself became part of the karyakartas’ organisation. “It’s interesting that the top leadership actually got together and expelled the whole union. Karyakartas of Bhilai got together and formed their own group, Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha Bhilai Mazdoor Karyakarta Committee.”

She launched herself on a new journey, diversifying her work. Today, Bharadwaj wears multiple hats – trade union activist, lawyer, visiting professor at the National Law University, Delhi and national secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. Notwithstanding the different areas of her work, the common thread is her empathy with marginalised communities of workers and adivasis dispossessed of their land.

Growing up in JNU

We met again last week at JNU on a hot and humid day, the sun beating down on the lawns outside the house where she is living these days. The years seem to sit lightly on the 57-year-old activist, with her trademark large bindi. Her hair, now streaked with strands of grey, was pulled back into a bun.

JNU is where Bharadwaj spent her childhood years, where her political consciousness first took roots. Her mother, the economist Krishna Bharadwaj, founded JNU’s Centre for Economic Studies and Planning. “I came here in 1972, I think it was. My primary education was in England, when my mother was at Cambridge University, and then she came back. We used to live in Alipur Road and then in 1972, she established the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning. Then, only the first quadrangle in the campus existed. We literally had jackals howling out there towards Qutub Minar.”

At a time when JNU teachers and students, their backs to the wall, are trying to beat back the central government’s attempts to change the fundamental academic and political identity of the institution, Bharadwaj talks of a different era in the campus’s history. One that shaped her political consciousness. “One of my early memories of JNU in my childhood was when Vietnam won the war against the US. I remember a lot of singing and celebration in the first quadrangle. That was the kind of atmosphere in which I grew up.”

If left-wing politics set her apart from conventional middle-class youth, her status as the child of a single parent, too, seems to have socially radicalised her. Bharadwaj herself is a single parent and is raising a daughter she and her former husband adopted in Chhattisgarh. “My mother was the youngest of 6 children of a school master. So, if she had not gotten scholarship, there would have been little chance of her being educated. She financed her own PhD in Bombay University. That is where she met my father. It was a love marriage. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last very long. My parents separated when I was about four.”

Bharadwaj talked with refreshing candour about her not-so-conventional family, setting her apart from the puritanical orthodox social culture so often associated with communist and ultra-left parties. The kind of social conservatism that stands in stark contrast to their radical politics. She recently met her father after many years. “I had gone to Bangalore to deliver a talk at the Azim Premji University. Someone told me my father lived there, so I met him after a long gap. He had remarried and I also discovered I had a step-sister, a talented dancer. My daughter too was happy to meet her grandfather,” says Bharadwaj.

Growing up on the JNU campus, her initiation into subaltern politics began early. The JNU campus was an alive and free space where intellectual debates were thrashed out without fear of physical or administrative reprisal. The students actively fought Emergency in 1975. “I remember professor Amit Bhaduri and my mother visiting a student in jail. The campus used to throb with debates. It was also a very safe space,” she recalls.

It was not just campus politics and academic discourse that influenced Bharadwaj in the political and activist life she later chose to embrace. Her mother too was instrumental in moulding her initial thought process. I asked Bharadwaj if her mother would have described herself as a Marxist.  “Well, I think so yes. Though she never joined any parties. She used to teach classical political economy. So, she actually saw a continuity between Marx and his predecessors. She would not take orthodox positions. But I think she prided herself for looking at the economy through a Marxist perspective.”

The IIT Kanpur experience

After finishing school, Bharadwaj studied Mathematics at IIT Kanpur. In the five years she spent at IIT, she encountered an academic world riddled with sexism and elitism. “That place was like a mini-America. You have 32nd street and 11th avenue. So, when I went there, it was a highly competitive atmosphere.” In her very first semester, she attended a Dalit student’s funeral. The year was 1979. “But it is only now that we are recognising that these things are happening,” she stressed.

Sexism was rampant on campus. In her class of 200 students, there were just eight girls. “It was a highly patriarchal place where men thought women had no brains,” scoffed Bharadwaj. On the other hand, if women did well academically, then the boys attributed their performance to their gender and said they were favoured because of that! Sexual harassment was rampant. Unless the women were paired up with someone, they were at the receiving end of love notes stuck on their bicycles, or having their tires deflated. The culture at the women’s hostel, situated at the farthest end of the administrative building, however was convivial. Seniors were ready to help juniors out. “They would give us a shoulder to cry on, acting as our mentors,” she said.

The one incident Bharadwaj vividly remembers is the time when the eight women students went to watch a film in the campus auditorium. “All the boys were there and just eight of us. Every time there were any romantic scenes, the boys would start hooting and have the projector play the scene over and over. We just walked out in the middle.”

There was another time she recalls when two women students went to the badminton court inside the complex of a boys’ hostel. “As they sat and watched their friends play, a couple of boys came out on the balcony, parading in their underwear. The girls were shocked. When they told us what happened, all the girls marched to the boys’ hostel and demanded an apology. Rather than insist on the apology, the hostel warden locked those boys in the rooms. The warden, the students and the dean of student welfare behaved as if we had attacked the boys’ hostel.” Finally, an inquiry was instituted. The girls were summoned to give their statements. The committee told the girls things like, “Come on, you have to learn. You will go abroad and do your PhD, you have to get used to all this.”

It was a different era. Gender was on the very margins if not outside news coverage entirely. “What we faced then can never be ignored now. That’s the good thing about social media, you can actually photograph such incidents. If we had social media then, our experiences would have gone viral and we would have been known as the ‘IIT girls’,” she chuckled.

Bharadwaj’s experience in IIT Kanpur was not entirely negative. In fact, it was during these years that she cut her teeth in grassroots activism. “I had my first encounter with caste there. I used to teach children in the nearby Kalyanpur village.” In a way, it was also in IIT that her first brush with trade unionism began. Bharadwaj began to work with the campus mess workers, addressing their problems. Interestingly, grassroots activism and cultural activism went hand-in-hand on the campus. Alongside her work in the village and with mess workers, she became an active member of a cultural group too.

Sudha Bharadwaj giving a talk in Hyderabad. Credit: YouTube

The 1980s: a turning point

This was the decade when the direction that Bharadwaj’s life was going to take began taking shape. The crisis in Delhi’s textile mills, the Asiad games bringing with it a huge influx of migrant workers into the city, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the Bhopal gas tragedy, each one of these was a significant milestone in pushing Bharadwaj towards the life she chose to live. “For many of us, the 1984 Sikh massacre and the Bhopal gas tragedy that very same year politicised us, hammering home the message that ‘something is seriously wrong.’”

On October 31, 1984 as she was travelling from Kanpur to Delhi, to be with her family on her birthday, the train was abuzz with rumours. “There was was talk that trains full of dead bodies were arriving (an iconic image of violence associated with the partition), that sardars were killing people, attacking hostels and poisoning the water.”

Through the 1980s, her idea of the work she wanted had begun to crystallise in her mind. In Delhi, students of JNU and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) came together, deciding to take up students’ and workers’ issues. Two developments accelerated their intervention. Delhi’s textile mill workers had been wrestling with a severe crisis. Workers in the famous Birla Textile Mills had been on strike since the early 1980s. And as preparations for the 1982 Asiad Games got underway, “lots of migrant workers came to the city. Sprawling camps of workers from Orissa and Chhattisgarh, Bilaspur and other states came up next to JNU, where the Priya cinema stands. So, our small team started going to the camps, working among the migrant labourers.”

While AIIMS doctors helped with medical and health issues, others taught the children of construction workers. “In the course of this work, I resolved that either I will teach or do social work. The migrant workers from Orissa were bonded labourers who didn’t have the money or freedom to go back home. The workers were rotting while flyovers and 5-star hotels were coming up in the city.”

In 1982, Shankar Guha Niyogi was arrested under the National Security Act (NSA) in Chattisgarh’s mining town of Dalli Rajhara. “A signature campaign for Niyogi’s release had kicked off. I remember my mother had also signed the petition. We went around the JNU campus, mobilising signatures,” Bharadwaj said.

After his release, Niyogi wished to meet the students who worked so hard to get him released. “He was a charismatic, warm and friendly person. He invited us to Dalli Rajhara.” Bharadwaj made the first trip in 1984. Two years later, she shifted to the town and started working with Niyogi and his organisation.

What drove her to take such a momentous decision? How did her mother respond to her choosing a hard life rather than continue on the trajectory of a comfortable teaching job and a life of privilege?

“My mother was very worried. She herself was totally a self-made person. She knew what it meant to struggle, especially as a woman. She wanted me to improve my formal qualifications. I had done quite well academically. So initially, just to please her, I did join an MPhil course. But I gave it up.”

When Bharadwaj told her mother that she was determined to work with the trade union in Chhattisgarh, Krishna Bharadwaj cautioned her that as a woman, she must develop her own identity and not be subsumed by the collective. “I was ready to do whatever the union asked of me. In later years, many of the things my mother said came back to me,” she said.

She says it was their innate conviction in a certain kind of idealism that saw her through these years. Interestingly, Bharadwaj says in the absence of a proliferating NGO culture at that time, people like her had two options – either build a career or join the movement. “In that sense, this option of maintaining your lifestyle and doing progressive work did not exist at that time. In some ways, it was good because we chose the other path and survived.”

The novel trade unionism of Niyogi

The concrete economic situation in India towards the late 1980s and ushering in of economic liberalisation in the early 1990s needed trade unions to come up with a different imagination to address workers’ needs. Industries were opting for modernisation, spurring retrenchment drives. Unionising contract workers was becoming more and more challenging.

Mainstream trade unions showed no signs of grappling with the changing context or moving beyond economism. “Niyogi’s novel trade unionism came as a breath of fresh air because that entailed not just taking up economic demands but touching every aspect of the worker’s life.”

Shankar Guha Niyogi. Credit: tnlabour.in

Niyogi had conceptualised and built a unique model of trade unionism of combining class struggle with welfarism. The CMM was running schools, a hospital and heading an anti-alcoholism programme. Niyogi didn’t want the trade union to be restricted to factories. He wanted the union to be integrated in the life of the worker. And that happened.

“If someone came to visit them, the workers would take them to the union office, ‘this is our office, this is our hospital,’” they would proudly say. The union was running schools because there were no schools for the workers’ children in Dalli Rajhara. The union ran 11 schools, 9 of which were eventually handed over to the government. The union still runs the remaining schools.

Bharadwaj recalled how in 1984, the workers observed the martyrdom day of Chhattisgarh’s Veer Narayan Singh, an Adivasi hero of the 1857 war of independence. Niyogi reclaimed his history and made it a symbol of Chhattisgarh. That year, workers took out processions around Dalli Rajhara. Cultural programmes were organised. Films were screened. The workers enjoyed watching Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times, finding in it resonance with their own fight against mechanisation.

Niyogi’s vision of workers was not of a class who would just be making economic demands. He perceived the workers as leaders of a larger inclusive society, including the rural dispossessed sections. As he envisioned it, a working class area would also be the centre of rural areas. This happened eventually. When the union became well established, people from across the region sought the union’s help.

The CMM worked with the most vulnerable among workers – construction labourers. The permanent workers had already been unionised and now it was construction workers who needed the union to improve their life. They still had very deep rural roots. Niyogi’s trade union with its worker/peasant/society emphasis extended its links to the larger community, looking after them.

Entering the legal profession

In 1991, Niyogi was assassinated. The following year, police fired on workers in Bhillai, killing at least 15. “I was one of the few people who knew English. I remember at that time assisting lawyers like Kamini Jaiswal, Vrinda Grover. I was keenly following the proceedings. The government prosecutor told me to become a lawyer,” said Bharadwaj.

She enrolled herself in the Durg College in 1997 to study law. “After I became a lawyer, the first cases I fought were cases of my own trade union. In 2006, I fought the case of regularisation of contract workers. I know I could only fight that case because I was so close to it. You need a close connection with the clients to be able to understand them and listen to their stories. Only then they are confident to bring out other kinds of evidence. So, we won that in 2006, but of course it was not implemented. They went to the high court where it was diluted in 2007. Finally, in 2015, we had a settlement. So that was a very long battle.”

Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha activists in Bhilai paying homage to workers slain in the police firing in 1992. Credit: Mahtab Alam.

She worked in the lower courts from 2000-2006. As the cases moved up to the high court, Bharadwaj also began to practice there. “That is when people from vulnerable communities at large, fighting for their rights, started to approach me.” Against this background, a group of lawyers formed a legal organisation called Janhit. “We felt giving individual legal aid doesn’t really help, but let’s give group legal aid to movements. It might be a village community fighting land acquisition or an Adivasi group struggling for forest rights, environmental issues – whatever it is, Janhit decided to help communities and groups not covered by the usual legal aid system. The tragedy with lawyers like us is that the people who need us the most can pay the least. How do you sustain yourself? Your clients are the weakest and they’re fighting the mightiest, so you need a really strong legal team and strategy.”

For instance, Janhit provides legal advice to the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan, a platform for anti-displacement movements, to the people in Sarguja fighting a violation of Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) rules and the peasants in Raigarh resisting preventive arrests.

Has her work become more difficult and she herself more vulnerable to attacks after 2014, when the Modi government came to power? “Well, the corporates have always been powerful. We faced serious challenges even during the United Progressive Alliance-led government’s tenure. But yes, tensions have now increased,” she admits.

However, she says the increase in attacks on minorities has been “enormous” since 2014. “In Chhattisgarh, mostly Christians are being attacked. Such incidents are not really reported in media. We have a big Catholic church and then there are many small, cottage churches. Many of those belong to poorer, vulnerable communities. Many churches have been ransacked and also a lot of lynchings. This has increased post-2014.”

Attacks on Dalits over land related conflict have also increased. Bharadwaj talks about the Adivasi-led Pathalgadi movement which is spreading to Chhattisgarh as well. “Interestingly, in Chhattisgarh, Nand Kumar Sai, a BJP leader, started the Pathalgadi movement, with the support of BJP workers.” Sai is also chairperson of the National Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Commission.

As we wind up our conversation, I ask Bharadwaj whether she could have chosen a different, less risky and tough life. She replied, “If you try to be safe and be in the middle, you will never succeed. I think physically, those of us who took the plunge learn to swim. Many people did that, we weren’t the only ones.”

Bengal Is Paying the Price for BJP’s Failure to ‘Conquer’ the State

The party’s failure to win Bengal should have prompted a review of its poll strategy. Instead, the BJP has chosen to mount a retributive backlash against the party that clearly won the elections.

Known to be sore losers, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has virtually declared war on Bengal’s thrice-elected Trinamool Congress (TMC) government. Barely two days after arresting three high profile TMC leaders, Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee and Madan Mitra, along with former Kolkata mayor Sovan Chatterjee, the CBI, on Wednesday, made chief minister Mamata Banerjee, her law minister Moloy Ghatak, and party leader Kalyan Banerjee party to the Narada bribery case.

Though implicated in the same case, two former TMC leaders, Suvendu Adhikari and Mukul Roy, prominent faces in the BJP today, have not been arrested. The CBI application for the prosecution of Adhikari and Roy, who were Lok Sabha members at the time of the Narada sting operation, is pending before speaker Om Birla. According to a report in the Indian Express on Thursday, following the arrest of four TMC leaders on May 17, the CBI filed a chargesheet seeking permission for “conducting further investigation against the remaining accused persons”. The other accused named in the chargesheet include Suvendu Adhikari and Mukul Roy.

The rush of events in the aftermath of poll results on May 2, raises disquieting questions about the BJP’s intent and motive. The party’s failure to win Bengal, the state it hoped to ‘conquer’ with a flourish, perhaps should have prompted a review of its poll strategy. But far from venturing in that direction, the party has chosen to mount a retributive backlash against the party that clearly won the elections.

The aim is simply to destabilise the reelected TMC dispensation. Never mind that such a risky and unsavoury bid tramples upon the foundational principles of electoral democracy and the popular will of the people of Bengal.

My use of the word “conquer,’ is deliberate in this context. The BJP treated Bengal as a trophy it had to win to secure ideological validation in a state where, in recent years, the party has rapidly ramped up its influence. In the course of its aggressive campaign, top BJP leaders signalled that the poll outcome would impact the country’s overall security concerns. “Bengal is the gateway to the North East and the country’s borders are stretched along the state. If we don’t form a government in Bengal that can stop infiltration, it will be a huge threat to the country’s national security,” Union home minister Amit Shah said in an interview.

Also read: Bengal Elections and Beyond: The BJP Can Be Defeated but the RSS Project Remains

Indeed, few would disagree that a BJP win in Bengal would have handed the party yet another expedient tool of political and ideological leverage. Such calculations spurred the BJP leadership to massively invest in its campaign, pour in significant resources, and last but not least, cheer on huge crowds at rallies even as Covid stalked the land. It is indeed disconcerting that even now, rather than allow the Bengal government to contain the virus, the BJP appears to be showing greater interest in teaching the winning side a lesson.

It would be naive if not foolish to consider the CBI’s recent actions as evidence of “law taking its course.” To understand the BJP’s post-poll actions in Bengal, it is important to keep in mind the chronology of events as they unfolded after May 2. One could take a leaf out of the Union home minister’s book in this context to recall that it is in the chronology of events that the government reveals its mind. And the chronology of the Narada case suggests deeper political motives on the part of the BJP government at the centre. Motives aimed at escalating the ongoing row, on keeping the TMC on its toes.

Representative image of BJP members at work ahead of a campaign rally in West Bengal. Photo: PTI.

The Narada sting tapes, where some TMC ministers and leaders were seen accepting bribes, came to light on the eve of the 2016 assembly elections. The TMC won the polls in a landslide. In 2017, the Calcutta high court ordered an investigation into the sting. Three years have since passed. Interestingly, it was exactly a week after the poll results that governor Jagdeep Dhankar, gave the go-ahead to prosecute the TMC leaders. Meanwhile, the BJP had also whipped up a campaign around the post-poll violence, describing it as “unimaginable”.

What adds to the BJP’s sore loser image is the fact that the party did make substantial gains in the assembly polls. Within five years, the BJP notched up its seats from a mere three to a sizable 77. And not just that, the decimation of the CPI-M and Congress opened up the entire opposition’s space to the BJP. Today it is the only opposition party in the Bengal assembly. The party could have taken stock of its gains and opted for the role of a responsible and not irresponsible opposition. Yet such was the BJP’s confidence in turning Bengal that the party was unwilling to accept anything short of victory. Nor are these manoeuvres new to the party’s electoral playbook.

The BJP’s plans could trigger turbulence in a state that has emerged from a bruising eight-phase election (in itself a political ploy to engineer favourable results.) The fact of the matter is even as the BJP speaks out against Bengal’s culture of violence, one knows only too well where the party actually stands on political violence. The spree of CBI arrests dragging none other than the chief minister herself into the case points towards a sinister design.

Also read: Is This the End of the Road for the CPI(M) in Bengal?

Speculation is growing about the Centre’s plans. Is the ruling BJP weighing the option of President’s Rule in the state? Does it plan to keep the pot boiling in volatile Bengal? The state is no stranger to President’s rule, or to resisting an adversarial Centre. A look at the history of the state in the 1960s and 1970s should caution the BJP against moving in this direction. Bengal has a history of meeting the challenges posed by an adversarial Centre. If anything, adversarial relations between state and central governments, ruled by rival political parties, have strengthened the regional ruling party of the day.

Across the spectrum, people have expressed confidence in the decade-old administration headed by Mamata Banerjee. The average winning margin of all the candidates in the recent assembly polls is pegged at 26,964 votes. For the TMC, that margin stands at a higher 31,760 votes. “This is a highest-ever average winning margin clocked by any party, in any assembly election in India,” observe Vikas Jamoriya and Rasheed Kidwai in an opinion piece. They further remind us that the TMC’s average winning margin was 20,495 votes in 2011, and 22,226 votes in 2016.

How will the people of Bengal react to the BJP’s unsavoury moves? That this is a question we can even ask at this time, and that the ruling party at the Centre chooses to spend its time picking political fights while thousands perish in a pandemic running out of control reveals the depths of the BJP’s cynical disinterest in anything other than the pursuit of absolute power.

We Cannot Ignore the Left’s Role in Fostering Soft Hinduisation in Bengal

In blithely placing the blame for religious polarisation on Mamata Banerjee, CPI-M has refused to consider its own failure in fighting Hindu Right tendencies that have long existed in Bengal.

Whatever the outcome less than two months from now, Bengal’s keenly contested assembly elections – one of a kind in recent political history – forces a rethink on issues once believed to have been done and dusted in the state. Many perhaps came to believe that the endemic conflicts roiling politics in other parts of the country (particularly, in the Hindi heartland) would be dealt with in a fitting manner in Bengal. Many, quite likely, took comfort in the attractive notion of Bengali exceptionalism.

Of course, one can argue that that belief did indeed hold out on some levels till 2014. Further, one can also argue that even when the equilibrium snapped a decade ago, with Mamata Banerjee ending the Left Front government’s 34-years long tenure, the basic political and social contract, warts and all, held together.

The change of guard at the top did not jeopardise the safety and security of Bengal’s over 27% of Muslim population, which shifted its loyalty from the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) to the Trinamool Congress (TMC). Even if the CPI-M’s political existence was in crisis, the Left vocabulary did not altogether disappear. Coming to power on the back of peasants’ movements triggered by the CPI-M’s forcible land acquisition drive in Singur and Nandigram, Mamata started to project herself as the ‘real’ Left.

However, since then, the sharp rightward turn and the rapid revival of the Hindu Right has exposed the fragility of what once was considered Bengal’s well-entrenched political equilibrium. True to form, the CPI-M blithely put all of the blame for religious polarisation at the door of Mamata Banerjee’s dispensation. It refused to consider its own failure in fighting Hindu Right tendencies that have long existed in Bengal; tendencies that have given a subtext of communalism (not to mention casteism) even to so much Leftist and progressive politics in the state.

Also read: At Nandigram, Site of Historic Land Movement, a Battle to See Who the ‘Real’ Brahmin Is

My conversations with a range of people in Bengal from 2018 to 2020 showed that sliding from Left to Right with an eye on the seat of power, is not as absurd as one might think. A section of CPI-M supporters, even while singing praises of Promode Dasgupta and Jyoti Basu, told me they would support the idea of a ‘Hindu rashtra’. They saw no contradiction in lending support to the CPI-M while expressing an attraction toward the idea of a Hindu nation, or supporting the BJP because it espoused the “interest” of Hindus. Nor was this sentiment confined to the Bengali bhadralok, percolating down the class and caste hierarchy.

A BJP rally in the Hooghly Lok Sabha constituency. Photo: Twitter/BJP Bengal

This is where Bengal’s past and present narratives impinge on each other. The Hindu Right’s recent assertion has, in many ways, bound different threads of history. In projecting it as a Left-leaning state, it is forgotten that Bengali consciousness has also been shaped by Hindu majoritarianism. Its imprint can be seen in the works of thinkers and writers going back to the 19th century, who advocated the supremacy of Hinduism, sometimes in opposition to the West,  and at others against Muslims.

Scholarly work on this period has shown the deep penetration of Hindu organisations among lower caste populations in the state. Apprehensive of the lower castes breaking away and asserting their own politics, ideologues of Hindutva have worked hard to keep some idea of ‘the Hindu community’ intact. Sections of Dalits, for example, perceive themselves as members of this larger community, despite being victims – and being aware – of the state’s structured casteism.

Recently, Dipankar Bhattacharya, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML), made a significant observation in an interview. His words reflected the microcosm of present-day Bengal politics. The Bengal assembly elections, Bhattacharya said, should not be solely seen through the prism of anti-incumbency. “The growth of the BJP also should not be attributed to this factor alone,” he emphasised. In doing so, we conveniently forget or erase the Left’s role in fostering the politics playing out today. The soft Hinduisation of the cadres of ‘secular’ parties across the political spectrum cannot be sidestepped in assessing the ascendancy of the Hindu Right in the state, and the Left’s tacit support of it.

Also read: Left Trusts Young Turks to Take on Political Heavyweights in Bengal

The BJP ran a highly charged communal campaign in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The dividends came in the form of 18 out of 42 seats the party won in the state. The shrill offensive against Bangladeshi infiltrators and Mamata’s “appeasement politics” seemed to strike a chord with the people. The BJP’s key agenda remains ideological. Bengal is a hunting ground, critical to expanding the party’s ambitious project. The 2021 polls are perhaps the most crucial election the BJP has fought since the Narendra Modi government came to power.

As Bhattacharya observed, these elections cannot be seen as a contest around issues of governance. The real stakes are ideological, as the BJP has already made amply clear. Why is accepting this fact so difficult for many on the Left? The chatter around Abhishek Banerjee, the steady stream of defections from the TMC to the BJP, is a fig leaf for the party’s ideological push. Equally, there has been a popular consolidation of Hindu consciousness coming out in the open against Muslims and Bangladeshis. Contrary to popular perception, over the last decade, Mamata has delivered on the ground – even if shakily. She has launched a slew of welfare schemes, benefitting the day-to-day life of the people. Will that be enough to see her through to a third consecutive term?

Ironically, the CPI-M, which rails against Mamata Banerjee’s “appeasement politics,” has allied with Abbas Siddiqui’s Indian Secular Front. The name is a misnomer in itself. Siddiqui is known for espousing hardened and regressive religious views which he has publicly aired in the past. That the CPI-M has joined hands with his party, throws up questions about the real reasons behind their alliance. Does this bizarre alliance, in any way, represent the CPI-M’s concern for Bengal’s Muslims?

Abbas Siddiqui, an influential cleric of Hooghly’s Furfura Sharif, launches his new party Indian Secular Front, ahead of West Bengal elections, in Kolkata, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021. Photo: PTI/Ashok Bhaumik

The damning observations of the 2006 report by the Sachar Committee report are well-known. Placing Bengal among the states in the “worst-performer category,” the report drew attention to the abysmal share Muslims have in government jobs and the judiciary. At the time, Anwar Ubaidulla Chowdhury of the Jamiat Ulema, a Muslim organisation responded by saying, “The Sachar committee report has been an eye-opener for the Muslims who had steadfastly stood with the Left Front government (in Bengal).”

Also read: As Political Drama Unfolds in West Bengal, Here Are the Factors at Play

We must also remembered that the Jyoti Basu government banned Taslima Nasreen’s novel Dwikhondito, while his successor, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s administration, bundled the Bangladeshi author out of the state in the dead of night following protests by some Muslim organisations. Could these actions attract the label of “appeasement” politics? Does the alliance with Siddiqui suddenly become “secular” simply because of the CPI-M’s presence?

At least some of the central leaders of the party have claimed that their alliance with the Congress and Siddiqui will help Mamata Banerjee by drawing chunks of anti-incumbency votes towards the alliance and away from the BJP. In other words, unlike in 2019, CPI-M party workers will not vote for the BJP in this election. But if the party is indeed that keen to defeat the BJP, why not back Mamata in the first place?

Why the Internment of Chinese Indians Is a Story That Must Be Told

When citizens become enemies, such an episode cannot be cannot be pushed to the recesses of public memory.

It’s in the nature of history that some stories are seldom told, if at all. The story of the Chinese community in this country, summarily packed off to internment camps after India was defeated by China in the 1962 war, is one such episode pushed to the recesses of public memory. There has been little discourse around the subject, and no official acknowledgement of the injustice done to the Chinese Indian community.

Rita Chowdhury rescues that slice of history from oblivion in her historical novel, Chinatown Days. First published in Assamese in 2010 with the title Makam (named after the main Chinese settlement in the region), the book brings those fraught years to light. Overnight, Chinese Indian families were yanked out of their homes, split up, and herded onto trains to spend an unknown number of days, months, or even years in a prison camp in Deoli, a town in Rajasthan. A bewildered and anguished community tried, in vain, to make sense of its sudden degraded status as prisoners.

Chinatown Days reveals how wars scapegoat people who have nothing to do with lighting or stoking the fire. People who simply happen to be on the wrong side of history at a juncture – like that one – when passions are riled up, and governments are locked in war. The stigma of internment, along with the absence of social and political conversation around the injustice, drove survivors of the Deoli camps into silence for nearly five decades.

As a fresh conflict between India and China surfaces with scenes of politicians and ordinary citizens calling for boycotting Chinese goods and trade, we may recall the plight of the Chinese community that suddenly found itself hemmed in from all sides because of a war that was not of their making.

Earlier this year, in their book, The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment, authors Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza used interviews to capture the voices of the Chinese community, spanning generations, now dispersed across India and the rest of the world.

Born in Deoli, in her section of the preface, Ma writes: “The Camp is something I lived with from the earliest moment … For us, the survivors of the interment … the stigma and effects have lasted a lifetime, made deeper by the lack of information about the incident. And the experience remains hard to forget no matter how far we have come.” She now lives in the US.

Survivors speak of their experiences in the documentary, Beyond Barbed Wires: A Distant Dawn, saying that even a word of apology from the Indian government would go some way in helping them negotiate the past and heal its wounds. “The total population of Kolkata’s Chinatown was around 30,000, After 1962, there are hardly 2000 Chinese living in India,” Ming-Tung Hsieh, a former detainee, says in the film.

If and when they see the light of day, such narratives show the fragility of existence in a country that you may not have been born in, but one you have embraced as your own, and have been living in for generations.

The genesis of the Chinese community in India dates back to at least the 19th century, when the British East India Company hired workers from China to launch the tea industry in India. Citing Kolkata’s National Library records, Jaideep Mazumdar, in an essay, identifies Yong Atchew as the first Chinese person to settle in Calcutta in 1780. Atchew launched a sugar mill around which grew one of India’s first Chinese communities. By the middle of the 19th century, there was a sizable Chinese population living in India. And at the time of Indian independence, descendants of the early Chinese workers – some of whom were transported to the country as slaves – had become integrated with local cultures, considering themselves citizens of India.

Chinatown in Kolkata wears a deserted look on June 19, 2020. Photo: PTI/Swapan Mahapatra

A group of Chinese workers brought to Assam by the East India Company in the 1830s, many of them indentured or trafficked, form the Chinese community in Chowdhury’s novel. At a time when the ‘outsider’ vs ‘insider’ debate in our public and private conversations has become layered with such corrosiveness, Chowdhury portrays a seamless assimilation of the Chinese community within Assamese society. Assamese and Chinese women and men get married into each other’s communities, the Chinese speak fluent Assamese, while the Assamese eagerly wait for the celebrations of the Chinese New Year. Chowdhury’s novel closely follows the reality of the times. In today’s acidic atmosphere of suspicion, one wonders if this is what utopia looks like.

The India-China war, and particularly India’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese, in one swoop destroyed that equilibrium. The Indian government, then headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, chose to treat the Chinese community as ‘enemies’ for their association with the enemy country, even though China was not just geographically but culturally distant to the Chinese community in India. Overnight, Chinese Indians across India, particularly in the Northeastern regions and Kolkata, became suspects in the eyes of the government and society. Chowdhury presents a vivid portrayal of the police suddenly appearing on the doorsteps of unsuspecting people, giving them barely ten minutes to leave for an unknown destination, ordering them to leave behind their belongings.

The parallel with Japanese Americans

The story of the wartime incarcerated Chinese prisoners finds a parallel with the internment of over 1000,000 Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbour during the Second World War in 1942. In reaction, then US president, Franklin Roosevelt, signed an executive order forcing Americans of Japanese ancestry to be removed to concentration camps for five years. Almost two-thirds of the detainees were Japanese Americans, born in the US. They had never visited Japan. In 1988, Ronald Reagan signed the ‘Civil Liberties Act of 1988,’ formally apologising for the internment of American citizens. This happened, in no small measure, because ordinary Americans protested and spoke out against the incarceration of fellow citizens.

“The Chinese Indians did not have any civil liberties group supporting them. Not one group – not one person objected to internment of Chinese Indians. Deoli camp was done like a playbook from Japanese internment … but for the lack of representation in India … there is very little support from groups…” said Joy Ma in a conversation around the book.

The former Chinese detainees still await an acknowledgement of the injustice done to their community. There are still questions hanging in the air: Who accepts you as a citizen? Who will stand by you in a time of crisis? What happens to a community if the country they believe to be their own enters into war with the country of their ancestors?

I scarcely need to point out that these questions have not gone away, for those who suffered that injustice, or those who suffer injustices that are still ongoing.

In Bengal, Colourism Hides Behind the Veneer of Bhadralok Culture

The famous sense of “enlightened Bengali exceptionalism” did not quite extend to people with darker skin complexion.

Growing up in Kolkata, I remember hearing the words “gayer rong-ta ektu moyla” (her skin is grimy/dirty) to describe women with dark-complexions. Men, though not entirely unscathed by such prevalent aversion to darkness, got away somewhat easily. The famous sense of “enlightened Bengali exceptionalism” did not quite extend to these matters. In fact, in celebrating fair skin and scouring matrimonial advertisements for ‘fair, educated, homely brides,’ Bengalis were – and continue to be – as colourist as the rest of the country.

Dark-skinned women, often forced to ‘settle’ for arranged marriages, were given the short shrift for their moyla gayer rong. Rejections based on skin colour were a normal thing, accepted without much of a demur. Dark-skinned parents giving birth to light-skinned children and vice-versa were a matter of wonder – something to be commented upon with amused derision. As with casteism, colourism then and as now, hides behind the veneer of bhadralok culture. Unspoken and unchallenged in any meaningful way, such discrimination has continued to thrive.

The West Indian cricket player Daren Sammy recently drew attention to this ‘casual’ everyday racism in India. He wanted a response from fellow Indian cricketers who called him ‘Kalu’ – apparently, a term of endearment, according to some of his colleagues. India’s celebrity cricketers, unlike celebrity sportsmen in the US, who are presently in the eye of a storm for taking a knee and rooting for Black Lives Matter, kept mum. And, of course, for cricketers and celebrities alike, silence is a habit when it comes to contentious matters that affect the lives of their millions of fans.

Also Read: Darren Sammy’s Revelations Show Indian Cricketers Are Glaringly Ignorant on Race, Colour

Racism is common across the class divide in India. If elites look down upon darker-skinned people, subalterns are not above reproach. The large consumer base for products like the by-now infamous ‘Fair and Lovely’ cream shows racism to be a gender-neutral affliction that has the power to seduce all classes. I remember buying a facewash from a local departmental store in Delhi, back in the days when we could still move around without fear of viruses and ailing health systems. The genial shopkeeper handed me a Fair and Lovely, free with the facewash. When I said I didn’t want it, he reminded me I wouldn’t have to pay for it. After my repeated refusals, he took the cream back. But it was clear from his expression that he didn’t understand the logic by which a dark-skinned woman would refuse a product that could ‘set her appearance right’.

Nowhere is racist prejudice more evident than in ways Indian society responds to people from African nations. An educated relative in Kolkata, pointing towards an African man on the street once said to me, “Ora ektu beshi kaalo (they are a bit too dark).” I remember, during my years as a reporter, spending time with a Nigerian journalist who was doing an internship with an English daily in Delhi. As we stepped out of the Press Trust of India building at lunchtime, with babus milling around the place, we found ourselves under intense scrutiny; many people bunched together in groups, openly gawking at us. I commented on how uncomfortable it must have been for my colleague to navigate a city where reactions of this kind are all too common. He smiled and said he had gotten used to the stares and sniggers.

At a classical music performance by Rashid Khan at Kolkata’s Birla Mandir earlier this year, two upper-middle class women sitting next to me made disparaging comments about the dark young woman usher. “Or mukhta dekho, dekhe mone hoi classical music bojhe? (Look at her face, does she look like she has any understanding of classical music?)”

Earlier this week, the Bengal government suspended two teachers in East Burdwan district for giving alphabet lessons from a book with racist prejudices against darker people. In a lesson aimed at familiarising alphabets through words corresponding to them, the book used the word ‘Ugly’ for ‘U,’ and pictured a dark-skinned boy for visual representation. The incident shows how ‘casual’ and ‘normal’ it has become to draw equivalences between fair skin and attractiveness on the one hand, and darkness and ugliness on the other.

“I was a dark baby, born to a mother and two grandmothers with pearly, translucent skin. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my skin tone was the centre point of all conversations in my growing up years,” writes Tia Basu. “We could begin talking about rohu, but it would end up at my skin. We could be discussing Didi and still it would somehow turn to my skin. Relatives flowing in and out of my life thought nothing of repeatedly remarking, ‘Or rong ta ektu moyla’ (Her colour is rather dirty),” she adds, returning us to the phrase I began with – a phrase millions have grown up hearing and imbibing.

African students in India demonstrate against racist violence. Credit: PTI/Files

African students in India demonstrate against racism. Photo: PTI/Files

Just skimming the surface

All this is just skimming the surface of deep-seated tendencies in Indian society. Further, racist bias against darker skin is not the only prejudice actively at work in everyday life. There are other competing kinds of discrimination, each equally unacceptable. In recent years, especially, caste, religion and colour have all been used to ratchet up a divisive politics that exploits social fault-lines with expertise.

Also Read: For How Long Will Indians Hold on to Their Obsession With Fair Skin?

Some analysts explain racism as one of the unfortunate consequences of colonial rule, which they argue, could be one way to understand our continued enchantment with white-skin. But does Bengal’s long tryst with the British Raj cogently explain the continuance and strengthening of racism, the passion with which we still embrace whiteness while rejecting darkness? Of course, colonial history played a part – a significant part – in fuelling these feelings and tendencies. But it would be disingenuous to rest easy, thinking that we can pin all the blame for our continued fear and disgust of those who don’t look like us on colonialism.

Racism – like classism, casteism, masculinism (the list is disturbingly long) – is a structural malaise. We continue to feed these discriminatory practices, either openly or in hushed tones during private conversations. It’s too easy to think our capacity for hatred is entirely a product of someone else’s actions. Until we take responsibility for our complicity in dehumanising others, no paeans to tolerance or hospitality will count for much.

Safoora Zargar Case Lays Bare How Superficial India’s Respect for Motherhood Is

The refusal to grant bail to Zargar has yet again reminded us that not all motherhoods are equal. Not in the eyes of the state, the political classes, or society.

Most societies place a high premium on motherhood. India is no exception.

Motherhood is represented as that saintly obligation pressed into the service of preserving the institution of family and celebrating marketed national values. We are reminded repeatedly – often in facile ways – of motherhood’s exalted status. Under such conditions, not belonging to the pantheon of Mothers is considered a dereliction of civic and national duty. But then again, the compulsion to not fail the duty of being a mother is hardly surprising in a culture not known for respecting individual choices, a culture known for stigmatising women who push boundaries of social and political conservatism.

More often than not, ideals of motherhood are woven into political messaging. Across the aisle, India’s misogynist politicians, while delivering crass sermons, habitually address women as ‘mothers and sisters’. Rather than being treated as individual human beings or citizens, women find their visibility and significance becomes contingent on the roles assigned to them within conventional families.

Such empty eulogies notwithstanding, ‘mothers and sisters’ in everyday India spend their lives as second-grade citizens in most, if not all, spheres of life. History bears testimony to the fact that mothers, and women on the threshold of motherhood,  are not spared sexual violence in any form of conflict. In fact, they become cherished victims of war for men to fight over.

The continued imprisonment of 27-year-old Safoora Zargar, an expectant mother, has once more laid bare the hypocrisy of the official as well as popular narrative built around motherhood. The refusal to grant bail to Zargar has yet again reminded us that not all motherhoods are equal. Not in the eyes of the state, the political classes, or society. Lest we forget, we must remember that like most celebratory and politically expedient euphemisms, motherhood too is selectively used to reward the obedient and punish the deviant.

Last week, Zargar, 21 weeks into her pregnancy, was refused bail, despite her lawyers telling the court she was suffering from Polycystic Ovarian Disorder. The lawyers also reminded the court of Zargar’s enhanced vulnerability in the midst of COVID-19, especially given that inmates in all three of Delhi’s jails have tested positive for the virus.

Watch: Why is Indian Society Silent Over the Jailing of Safoora Zargar?

Implicated in the violence that gripped Northeast Delhi in February, and charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA,) Zargar, a research scholar from Jamia Millia Islamia, was arrested by the police on April 10. Granted bail on April 13, she was arrested again the same day on the basis of a separate FIR.

Dismissing her bail plea, a Delhi court observed: “When you choose to play with embers, you cannot blame the wind to have carried the spark a bit too far and spread the fire.” Commenting on the court’s observation, legal scholar Gautam Bhatia wrote that “when a court needs to rely upon metaphor instead of law to justify keeping an individual in prison, it is perhaps time for the justice system to take a long, hard look at itself”.

But the hypocrisy around the narrative of motherhood goes beyond any one institution. Today, more than at any time in recent memory, the lack of compassion evident in denying Zargar bail has become a prominent marker of Indian politics and society. Zargar’s case suggests religion has trumped concerns about her pregnancy, regardless of the paeans sung to mothers.

Right after the arrest, right-wing trolls went to town about Zargar being an unwed, expectant mother. With social media toxicity spiralling, Zargar’s husband told Alt News  that they were married in 2018. That Zargar’s marital status, which has no bearing on the case at hand, should be a matter of speculation, in itself is unacceptable. The choice of becoming a single mother or being a mother in relationships outside the institution of marriage is not the business of the state, or the public at large.

But, of course, the trolls were acting out a political script. They were well aware of what they were doing. The posts were an attempt to turn public opinion against Zargar. Their aim was to nudge a judgemental society to respond to its regressive instincts.

Around the same time the court refused Zargar bail, a pregnant elephant died a torturous death, standing in the middle of a river. Initial reports suggested the elephant was deliberately fed a firecracker-filled pineapple. People from all walks of life – from politicians to Bollywood celebrities – took to social media calling the perpetrators out, some even using the tragedy to attack political opponents. “Post after post lashed out at the supposed perpetrators, angrily wondering how human beings can be so cruel towards an innocent elephant, that too a pregnant one,” wrote Debabrata Pain in this space.

Also read: Human Cruelty and a Tale of Two Pregnancies

These contradictions in public and political response to the pregnancies of two different species of mothers are too stark to escape notice. Similar things can be said of the recent case when Hindu right-wingers  took up cudgels on behalf of protesters in the ongoing Black Lives Matter upsurge in the United States. Many among them, chafing at US police brutality, either supported or remained mum about Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders like Kapil Mishra, who delivered inflammatory speeches against protesters critical of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019.

It may be pertinent to remind such people, excited by the US’s anti-racism movement, of India’s own racism, and their own persistent failure to take note of it. Why not let this also be the moment to talk about homegrown racism? Why not use social media to condemn attacks on Nigerians in Delhi and the ritual hounding of people from the Northeast of India? Not to mention the blatant communalisation of COVID-19 in this country.

Refusing Zargar bail is part of the same retributive political culture – mothers be damned – that allowed human rights activist Sudha Bharadwaj’s daughter to visit her mother for barely five minutes in Pune’s Yerwada jail. “The conversation, on an intercom across a glass window, was chaotic and interrupted by a dozen other undertrials also trying to catch up with their families simultaneously,” said a report in The Wire.

It’s time to square up to a bald truth: we don’t really care about our ‘mothers and sisters’. After all, most common, popular references to mothers and sisters in the Hindi heartland don’t idealise and elevate women so much as denigrate them using words I am sure you are already recalling in your mind as you read this.

Mamata Banerjee Is Following the BJP’s Path on Media Intimidation

Kolkata police’s decision to summon the ABP’s editor for a story smacks of government high-handedness.

The Kolkata police’s decision to summon the editor of Anandabazar Patrika (ABP), Anirban Chattopadhyay, to the police station for interrogation, bears on it the imprint of political intimidation. Chattopadhyay, who was served a notice on May 25 that summoned him to the Hare Street police station, later quit the post of editor on Sunday. Though his resignation is being explained as a ‘personal’ decision on Chattopadhyay’s part, and his wife has since issued a statement to reaffirm that, the summons he received tells us all we need to know about the attitude of the state government to media freedom.

Rather than visit the Hare police station, Chattopadhyay wrote to the officer-in-charge, informing him he that he has moved court for anticipatory bail. Chattopadhyay also cited medical advice against a senior citizen – he is 62 years old – visiting public spaces in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sources point out that recently another journalist in Kolkata was summoned to the police station and made to wait there for six hours.

There are different versions doing the rounds to explain the reasons behind the police’s desire to interrogate the editor. According to some sources, it was ABP’s reporting on the lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to hospital staff treating COVID-19 patients that triggered the retaliation. Others attribute the action to the newspaper’s critical reportage of Kolkata’s unpreparedness in facing the recent onslaught from Cyclone Amphan.

Either way, there can be little doubt that the very act of summoning a journalist to the police station smacks of government retaliation. Governments, regardless of political and ideological affiliation, are known to use politicised police departments to browbeat critics. Journalists in Kolkata point out that the Trinamool Congress (TMC) dispensation has been known to weaponise government advertisements against newspapers critical of the regime. According to sources, the government has, in the past, even adopted the tactic of withdrawing advertisements and turning the financial squeeze on ‘errant’ media.

Also read: Punjab Police Beat Senior Journalist, Reporter Booked for Astrology Story on Minister

Ironically, the BJP, whose own track record of intimidating and persecuting journalists is nothing short of appalling, has jumped into the controversy. Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar, who is known to behave more like a party functionary than constitutional head, tweeted saying he has sought a clarification from the home secretary on summoning Chattopadhyay to the police station: “Press freedom is non-negotiable. It is spine of democracy and guaranteed by Constitution.”

Communist Party of India (Marxist) state unit secretary Surya Kanta Mishra, on the other hand, held the Modi government responsible for the police summons to Chattopadhyay. “Is it true that Anirban Chattopadhyay, Editor ABP, the highest circulated Bangla daily is sought to be arrested under certain fictitious but non-bailable charges? Is it dedicated to Modi’s first year 2nd term, meant to settle the score because of ABP upholding the secular values?” Mishra asked in a tweet on Saturday.

Anirban Chattopadhyay. Photo: By arrangement

The ruling TMC has refused to comment on the matter. The party’s silence in the midst of the controversy raises disturbing questions about the state government’s role in dragging a journalist to the police station. The politicisation of institutions is not a new phenomenon in Bengal. Since coming to power in 2011 and retaining a second term in 2016, the TMC has perpetuated that culture, which it should have broken if it truly wanted to transform the state.

The Mamata Banerjee government, which will seek a fresh mandate to govern Bengal next year, has hurt its reputation by going after its critics. In April 2012, the TMC was instrumental in getting Ambikesh Mahapatra, a chemistry professor at Jadavpur University, arrested for circulating an email with a caricature of Banerjee. Last year, Priyanka Sharma, the Howrah convenor of the BJP’s youth wing, was arrested for circulating on social media a morphed image of the Bengal chief minister. The meme had Banerjee’s face on actor Priyanka Chopra’s body.

Also read: Telangana: Home Demolished for Reporting on MLA’s Birthday Party, Alleges Journalist

Such punitive actions hurt Mamata Banerjee’s political fight against the BJP, which is now the TMC’s primary opposition in Bengal. Banerjee is one of the leading faces of a national opposition today. By treading the BJP’s path of intimidating critics in the media, Banerjee weakens her politics. Dhankar’s tweets on media autonomy, facile as they are, can only boomerang on the BJP if Banerjee learns to deal with media criticism. But this latest episode doesn’t show promising signs of any such development.

Note: This article has been updated to include a reference to the Ananda Bazaar Patrika editor’s wife affirming that his decision to resign was for personal reasons

Rahul Gandhi’s Conversations With Rajan, Banerjee Are Hardly ‘Dramebaazi’

The COVID-19 crisis has utterly exposed the lack of a cohesive agenda of governance, and the absence of a broader political and social vision to steer India forward beyond lockdowns.

The process of wearing political conversation down to a reductive and competitive exercise has been firmly in place for a while. But never before has the hollowness of customary politician-speak and broken governmental systems been more pronounced than during this pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has utterly exposed the lack of a cohesive agenda of governance, and the absence of a broader political and social vision to steer India forward beyond lockdowns.

Even some semblance of proper planning, for instance, could have protected migrant workers and spared them the unimaginable hardships they are having to endure. Trying to escape locked down cities on their way home, more than 130 migrant workers have died in separate accidents on highways, and on railway tracks. As disturbing images play out on our screens, top Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders deliver empty, bombastic speeches. And the opposition, as it has for much of the last six years, fritters away valuable time, almost abdicating its political role.

Against this bleak backdrop, paying some attention to former Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s recent conversations with two economists, Raghuram Rajan and Abhijit Banerjee, may be useful. The conversations break away from politician-speak, opening up space for deeper, reflective musings between representatives of two groups – politicians and academics – who have not been seen within the same frame, engaged in substantive dialogue, for a fair few years in India.

There may, of course, be a tendency to dismiss such exchanges as being of little productive value, which bring meagre returns to real politics. A tendency that may have to do, in some measure, with our frayed imagination of politicians or mass leaders; not to mention academics. Given the tit-for-tat political exchanges that define so much of political conversation, it may only be a natural reflex to situate politicians as incapable of reflective thinking. Such scepticism can only be higher in the case of Rahul Gandhi, who, for a long while now, has seemed to fit the bill of a ‘failed politician.’

Also Read: What Will Politics Look Like in the Post-Pandemic World?

Since the BJP’s ascension to power in 2014, Rahul has faltered many times, dashing hopes of the Congress reviving itself as a credible opposition party. The main opposition’s dwindling political fortunes, though, have not prevented either Prime Minister Narendra Modi or his senior colleagues from training their guns on members of the Gandhi family, and particularly, Rahul Gandhi. The Congress’s inability to strike at the BJP’s divisive, communal politics with its own distinctive and cohesive counter, coupled by its internecine tensions have, many a time in the recent past, threatened to push Rahul into political irrelevance. Indeed, whether we think of the reaction to scrapping Article 370, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), or the upswell of unrest across the country, we would be hard pressed to identify any role the Congress has had in leading the charge against the government. Matters are not helped, of course, by the party’s own history of complicity in all manner of nefarious activities — from corruption to presiding over communal violence and riots.

A protest against the CAA at Shaheen Bagh. Photo: PTI

Chinks in a seemingly impregnable armour

But times change. Sometimes in the blink of an eye, events drill chinks in a seemingly impregnable political armour. Could the disturbing events of the past four months dent the BJP’s shield? Could the terrifying spectacles of death and devastation in public spaces across India create an extraordinary moment an otherwise inept, unreliable, and almost extinct political opposition could seize?

This is not an ordinary profit and loss moment in the political life of a ruling or opposition party. COVID-19 has posed serious health, economic and social challenges in its wake. The severe odds facing migrant workers, the economic downturn, and the not yet fully unravelled nature of the virus itself, all call for thinking and caring leadership. Conversations beyond the usual party pale, with a range of experts and grassroots activists, could help this difficult process of meeting the many challenges. We must redefine the meaning and the image of decisive leadership. And in that process, widen the circle of political discourse and those who participate in it.

Gandhi’s conversations with Rajan and Banerjee, besides reflecting on many current challenges, draw attention to certain fundamental questions about economic policies that have often been uncritically embraced. Would it be fair to say that the global economic system, which has clearly “gone wrong,” was not working, Rahul asked. Rajan responded that it would indeed be fair to say that the economic system was not working for a lot of people:

“The growing inequality of wealth and income in developed countries is certainly a source of concern. The precariousness of jobs, the so-called precariat is another source of concern. You have these gig jobs without knowing if you’ll have any income tomorrow.”

It goes without saying that the groundwork for the system in question was done by the P.V. Narasimha Rao-led Congress government in 1991, which under the stewardship of then finance minister Manmohan Singh, opened up the Indian economy, paving the way for global economic integration. So, Rahul’s question on this count casts a critical eye on the party’s own history, whether he means to or not.

UPA’s welfare policies

What about the efficacy of poverty alleviation programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in providing relief to increasing numbers of pauperised people? Banerjee replied to this query by pointing out there are a “bunch of people for whom there isn’t really a system. They aren’t eligible for MGNREGA, because there is no MGNREGA in Bombay … Part of the problem in the very short run is that the conceptualisation of the welfare structure was based on the idea that anybody who is really not in where they are supposed to be is actually working and therefore is earning an income and you don’t have to worry about them. And that’s what has collapsed.”

Recalling Narendra Modi’s stringent criticism of the United Progressive Alliance-sponsored MGNREGA in the past may provide useful insight into the dynamics playing out at present. The BJP’s regular jibes at the policy led to large-scale apprehension that Modi would scrap the scheme after he became the prime minister in 2014. A group of 250 eminent people, including 90 MPs, even wrote a letter asking him to “make the strengthening of MGNREGA an urgent priority.”

In February 2015, ending speculations, Modi mockingly told the opposition in parliament: “My political instincts tell me that MNREGA should not be discontinued because it is a living memorial to your failures. After so many years in power, all you were able to deliver is for a poor man to dig ditches a few days a month.”

Labourers at an MGNREGA construction site in Navsari on Monday. Photo: PTI

Five years on, confronting a full-blown health crisis that crippled an already flailing economy overnight, the Modi government has fallen back on the very scheme it’s leaders routinely disparaged. Last Sunday, the Central government allocated an additional Rs 40,000 crore for the MGNREGA. “It will help generate nearly 300 crore person days in total, addressing the need for more work including returning migrant workers in the monsoon season as well,” said finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

In this context, one could ask why pro-poor infrastructures like the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) that the BJP claimed would transform the face of India, have been of such little or no help to destitute, penniless workers in their moment of need. It is indeed ironic that schemes like MGNREGA – piloted by a National Advisory Council (NAC) that the BJP relentlessly criticised as a “supporting ground for Naxalites” till as recently as two years ago – should now be what this government turns to in a moment of crisis.

The PMJDY, launched as the “biggest financial inclusion initiative” on August 28, 2014, aimed, according to the government’s website, to liberate people from a “vicious cycle” of poverty. Some of the scheme’s benefits included interest on deposit, accidental insurance coverage of Rs 1 lakh, easy transfer of money across India, and Rs 30,000 in life insurance coverage.

Also Read: Will the COVID-19 Crisis Compel Us to Reject Faith in the Notion of ‘Strongmen’?

Four years on, in its 2018 Global Findex Database report, the World Bank said while 80% of adult Indians have bank accounts, nearly half of those accounts have remained inactive in the past year. “100 million adults with an inactive account have a debit card, while nearly 2.5 times as many — 240 million — have an inactive account plus a mobile phone,” the World Bank said. Many of the account holders have not yet used their new account. “In India, the share (of inactive account) is 48% — the highest in the world and about twice the average of 25% for developing economies,” the report claimed.

In his 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign, Modi highlighted the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a scheme launched in 2016 to provide free cooking gas connections to women in families below the poverty line, as a key achievement. However, the situation on the ground, as noted by a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India report this January, showed a declining trend in annual average refill consumption. 

PM Narendra Modi distributes the free LPG connections to beneficiaries under the PM Ujjwala Yojana in Ballia . Photo: PTI/File

The point here is not that the Congress got it right. It did not. But it is indicative that the basic, often inadequate, welfare systems the UPA put in place are all the present dispensation has at its disposal to alleviate the distress of thousands of people. That basic fact tells a story about Indian democracy that we would do well to focus on, away from the partisan bickering over right and left.

Hit the streets

If serious about building a support base among the rural and urban poor, Rahul will need to hit the streets. His conversations with experts provide a new layer to politics, departing from the high pitch intense animosity of discourse in recent years. Politics cannot be conducted through intermittent interventions, or catchy one-line slogans. Such desultoriness will not break the present status quo. The void produced by the present crisis gives Rahul Gandhi an opportunity — despite his party’s inertia and lack of commitment — to stay on the ground in a sustained manner, and show a different face of politics.

Hours after 24 migrant workers were killed in a road collision on an Uttar Pradesh highway, the BJP, last Saturday, released an audiovisual clip celebrating six years of the Narendra Modi government and its “unprecedented” achievements. The same day, Rahul met a group of 20 migrant workers in Delhi. While the BJP has, predictably, dismissed the act as “drama,” there is something to be said for compassionate leadership in these times.

None of this is to suggest that the Congress will bring salvation, or that Rahul Gandhi should be celebrated for acting thoughtfully in a crisis. But if conducting public discussions with academics and meeting those worst affected by the pandemic is “dramebaazi,” then a little more drama and a little less 30-minute-long primetime theatrics could be just what the doctor ordered.

Today, We Need Satyajit Ray’s Vision of Politics More Than Ever

In each of Ray’s works we discover the difficulties and pleasures of life, portrayed through tangled human relationships, capturing shifts in politics and society.

For diehard Satyajit Ray fans, watching Ray films is an uplifting experience. Never mind how many times you see them. What make his films so special are their subtleties and nuances, qualities often sacrificed, in less mainstream cinema, at the altar of rhetorical political and social messaging.

The tension between the two forms of filmmaking is an old one. Not surprisingly, during the 1970s and ’80s, Kolkata’s dyed-in-the-wool leftists sparred with skeptics, drawing sharp boundaries between bourgeois and radical filmmakers, bourgeois and radical writers and poets. These ideological binaries set off animated – even acrimonious – debates often.

Many on the Left wished art would feed into a larger political or ideological project. What use was art unless it carried larger political and social insights? They would chant the verses of ‘He Mahajibon‘ (‘Oh Great Life’) penned by the radical 20th-century poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, who died at the age of 21. Outraged by the depths of poverty and hunger, Sukanta said the times were meant for hard prose and not poetry. One of the poem’s lines that came to acquire iconic status in Bengal’s radical circles was the poet’s invocation of the hungry and the poor. In the face of stark poverty, Bhattacharya wrote, “Purnima chand jaano jhalshano rooti (The full moon appears like burnt flat bread).”

Ray, on the other hand, often found himself berthed alongside Tagore. Both stalwarts bound by their shared commitment to humanism and a seeming lack thereof to political, more specifically leftist, ideology of one kind or another. Then as now, humanism was considered a ‘faith’ bereft of political inflection, let alone commitment to revolutionary values.

“In India, Ray was something of a heroic figure, but he did face significant criticism from sections of the left; this criticism, however, did not really analyze his ideological affiliations but, rather, accused him incessantly of lacking ‘commitment’ to the critics’ favoured ideology—one variety or another of Marxism. For East as well as West, Ray was the apolitical artist par excellence,” writes Chandak Sengoopta.

Also read: Satyajit Ray: When the Filmmaker Dons His Critic Hat

Unlike Ritwik Ghatak or Mrinal Sen, Ray did not make films with a direct message about changing the system or the world. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Ray’s films were apolitical, or empty of politics. Not if we consider politics to be an interplay and negotiation of power relations defining most aspects of our life – from our engagement with everyday familial, educational and social institutions to our life lived in private.

As we watch religion, power and politics combine with gibberish claims dismissive of science and scientific thought in the midst of a pandemic, Ganashatru, one of Ray’s later films, makes for interesting viewing. Based on Henrik Isben’s play, An Enemy of the People, and released in 1989, Ganashatru reflects many shades of political and social life that continue to be relevant in India today. The film is significant in its resonance of majoritarian bigotry currently sweeping through the country. The narrative also nudges the viewer to reflect on deeper tensions within Bengali society, many of which contributed to the stunning rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state in recent years.

Ganashatru centres around a doctor, Ashoke Gupta, a resident of Chandipur, a small town in Bengal, who tries to warn villagers about people falling ill after drinking the infected holy water (charanamrita) of the Tripureswari temple. In attempting to mount a public campaign around an imminent medical crisis, Gupta finds himself pitted against powerful interest groups – Chandipur’s municipal administrator (Nishith, the doctor’s own brother), editors of powerful local papers, and those who have economic reasons for not allowing the temple to temporarily shut down, even for critical health reasons. The popular doctor becomes an enemy of religion, and by extension, an enemy of the people.

Ray reveals the depths of religious bigotry and its endorsement by the town’s “progressive” sections. The Tripureswari temple is not only Chandipur’s most sought after holy site, it’s the town’s biggest revenue earner. After the newspapers scuttle publication of his views, Gupta is heckled and interrogated by motivated sections of the audience at a public meeting where he was hoping, finally, to explain the crisis to the people.

“Does the doctor consider himself a Hindu? If so, why does he not visit the temple?” asks Nishith. His arguments are endorsed by the editor of the local paper, by now working in league with the municipal administrator. Power brokers running the town make it amply clear that regardless of the gravity of the medical situation, no shadow of doubt can be allowed to fall on the temple.

Also read: The Unintended Emancipation of Women in Satyajit Ray’s Two Iconic Films

Ganashatru is among Ray’s most directly political films, and by no means his best. Watching it now is enlightening, when religious bigotry and pandemic politics is playing out in Bengal as all over the country. The Hindu Right has spread its sway over much of India, to emerge, almost overnight, as a major electoral force in Bengal. In Ganashatru, Ray probes the tensions pulling apart Bengal’s progressive front. Some of these contrary pulls are visible on the ground today.

The film ends on a note different from Isben’s play, which, according to Chandak Sengoopta, signs off with a “radical individualist note—’the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.’” And here Ray perhaps made a break with his own skirting around politics in the narrow sense. The last scenes of the film are one of hope, where the dejected doctor hears groups of young people raising slogans of support and marching towards his residence.

Confined at home, as we watch terrifying dimensions of urban poverty unfold – exhausted migrant workers mowed down by trains on railway tracks, dying in the streets – we may recall Pather Panchali, the first film in Ray’s landmark Apu trilogy. That 1955 classic represented stark rural poverty stalking an obscure Bengali village set amidst a hauntingly beautiful landscape. The much talked about scene of the arrival of a train rushing through a field of kaash flowers, suggested an onward march of development, the advent of modernity and industrialisation.

However, as we have seen over time (and very acutely of late), the movement of the poor from villages to cities – or the transition from agrarian and feudal culture to modernity more generally – has been a jagged progression, leaving in its wake massive, dysfunctional infrastructures breeding urban poverty, glaring economic inequalities and yawning cultural gaps.

As Nehruvian aspirations began to fade in the 1960s, in films like Pratidwandi and Jana Aranya, Ray manifested the restlessness and alienation of the urban youth. Seemabaddha gestured towards a broken ethical and moral order.

Also read: Fifty Years of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’

The prime minister’s call, this Tuesday, that India should embrace economic nationalism – swadeshi – as a response to COVID-19, reminds one of Ghare Baire (The Home and The World), Ray’s film based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novel. A well-known critic of boycotting foreign goods, the novel is set against Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal. Its narrative revolves around Bimala, married to Nikhilesh Chowdhury, an educated and cultured aristocrat. When Nikhilesh’s friend, Sandip Mukherjee – an aggressive nationalist battling the British through the Swadeshi movement – enters their life, he ruptures and, eventually, destroys Bimala and Nikhilesh’s domestic life.

Although these other films may not have been as upfront about their politics as Ganashatru, in each of Ray’s works we discover the difficulties and pleasures of life, portrayed through tangled human relationships, capturing shifts in politics and society – sometimes tangentially, sometimes head-on. In an essay on Ray in this space, Sharmila Tagore wrote that it is regrettable that some charged Ray with marketing poverty to achieve international acclaim:

“The implication seems to be that to be a true nationalist one must sweep truths about India under the carpet. This is precisely what Ray’s cinema stood against and this indeed is the ideological difference between Sandeep and Nikhilesh in Ghare Baire. For Nikhilesh, as for Tagore and Ray, the people and their predicament came first and not love for one’s country in the abstract.”

Such a vision of politics could be what we most need at a time when it seems farthest from our reach.