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Right or Left, violence is a ‘black hole’ that swallows up everything in its vicinity

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Why have the victims of the largest (the number could be 3 lakhs) communally-driven migration in independent India’s history, Kashmiri Pandits been the target of barely-concealed animus from leftists?
 

Remember your humanity and rebel! – Slogan on the walls of Paris, May 1968
 
Indignation is a bad counselor – Leo Strauss, 1953
 
What you run away from runs after you – Rumanian proverb
 
This comment engages with the issues raised in the current debate about justice and nationalism. The agitation was sparked off by an event in JNU highlighting the plight of the Kashmiri people. I will begin with two names and a question which (to my mind) are as significant as the grievances of Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris about the Indian justice system. The two names are Mohammad Maqbool Sherwani (aged 19, died 1947); and Ravindra Mhatre (aged 48, died 1984).
The question concerns the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from their homes in the Valley. Why are they not a part of left-wing concerns about Kashmir? Sympathizers of Maoist revolutionary politics may consider four names – Francis Induwar (died 2009), Kenduka Arjun, (died 2010), Lucas Tete (died 2010) and Niyamat Ansari (died 2011). What happened to them and why did they die? These names and the question signify an experience of injustice. For that reason alone, they deserve the attention of the defenders of democracy. Now let us take a look at what is happening in Delhi
 
Police protection, Delhi version
 
The most striking image of the times we inhabit is the photograph of a young accused person being brutally assaulted in the premises of a prominent court in New Delhi. He was in the custody of the police, hence under the indirect protection of the court. His assailants were lawyers, who have bragged about their deeds, and are known for their proximity to senior leaders of the BJP. Most of them have not been charged for what is a clear offence under the IPC Sec 325.
 
Spokespersons of the ruling party routinely deploy the platitude that the law will take its course. Typical of its behaviour in matters such as the murder of Professor Kalburgi, they make a perfunctory disapproval of hooliganism, and then produce belligerent justifications for their violence. None of them show the slightest remorse or compunction for what even a village constable would recognise as a criminal offence.
 
We are being intimidated in broad daylight by persons who do not care a whit for reasoned speech – let alone the law. All we hear these days is a reminder of the heavy price we shall pay for opposing Modi, the Sangh and their ‘development agenda’. The Delhi police operate under the Union government, and was responsible for the raids on the JNU campus as well as the acts in the court premises. Some of its decisions have now been shown to have been taken on doctored evidence. The National Human Rights Commission has declared the assault on Kanhaiya to have been planned. The home minister’s utterances were akin to those of a con artist, so we need not be surprised by those of his followers. We may also assume that these acts have the approval of the Union Cabinet, and that we are now under the grip of a government that has no respect for the rule of law.

The situation will worsen, because the private army that controls the government is bent upon revising the foundational statutes of the Indian Republic. It also adheres to an ideology that justifies violence in the name of patriotism. Violent attacks, disruptions and dire threats by Hindutva-oriented vigilantes and legislators are occurring on a daily basis across India.
 
The situation will worsen, because the private army that controls the government is bent upon revising the foundational statutes of the Indian Republic. It also adheres to an ideology that justifies violence in the name of patriotism. Violent attacks, disruptions and dire threats by Hindutva-oriented vigilantes and legislators are occurring on a daily basis across India. The ruling party has shown itself to be no different from the Maoists whom it routinely condemns. But whereas the Maoists have proven incapable of capturing state power, the Hindutva ideologues believe they have done so. Let us see if the Indian public will endorse this belief.
 
This is serious enough to bear repeating: the government of India is enabling, condoning and encouraging vigilante violence and hooliganism. Controlled mobs now operate under state protection.
 
‘Anti -nationalism’ etc
 
Most of the slogans heard on the JNU campus expressed unobjectionable left-wing and feminist demands. However there were some that spoke of a long war for the break-up of the country. There were other calls that could be confusing to anyone not familiar with the term “oppressed nationalities” which has been part of communist vocabulary since 1917. So the current political agitation marks the intersection of many controversial themes, ranging from definitions of the nation to constitutional and legal matters.
 
Some bare facts need recapitulation. Some students attracted to Maoism and including those who believe in ‘self-determination’ for Kashmir, and were agitated over the execution of Afzal Guru, held an event to commemorate the latter. Denied permission due to objections from one student group, they used the good offices of the union, whose president belongs to the AISF, student wing of the moderate wing of the communist movement, the CPI. This is the party of the late Satyapal Dang, one of India’s staunchest secularists and fighters against terrorism in Punjab in the 1980’s and 90’s. (I wonder if our Home Minister has heard of him).
 
As the event unfolded some began shouting belligerent slogans – let us leave aside the question of who started it. As often happens, when ideologues wish to hurt each other by methods short of physical assault, they say things designed to cause maximum emotional pain. Both sides – the ultra-nationalists and those rooting for ‘self-determination’ proceeded to do this.  Some persons alleged to be outsiders also shouted the objectionable slogans referred to above.
 
The ultra-nationalists used their contacts in the central government to facilitate police intervention. Some of them now regret the consequences of what has ballooned into a nasty confrontation. I appreciate the fact that the three ABVP office-bearers who resigned from their posts disagreed with the habit of painting all left-wing students with the same brush. Similarly all people who object to slogans calling for the break-up of India also cannot be painted with the same brush. I too object to such a slogan – although I don’t think it calls for police action unless there is a direct incitement to violence. We know many people calling for and indulging in violence who seem to have no fear of police action.
 
Something similar took place at the Press Club, where persons who stand for Kashmiri self-determination used the good offices of a lecturer who booked the venue for them, but who does not share their political vision. He is now been targeted – along with three other retired teachers from DU – for collusion with so-called anti-national elements.
 
In both cases, persons of democratic persuasion were used to facilitate expressions of extreme beliefs. As far as I can tell, they had no idea of what was about to transpire, and their own statements at these gatherings were attempts at lowering the pitch and calming the atmosphere. A kind of verbal ‘guerilla action’ was undertaken by some radical activists who – it would appear – were unconcerned with the repercussions. They did not care that people who do not support their politics, but helped them because of their commitment to free expression, would be paying the price.

The slogan that Kashmiris have a right to self-determination implies that the identity of Kashmiris is self-evident. The moment the identity of Kashmiri Pandits and Sikhs, Ladakh’s Buddhists and Jammu’s Dogras, Gujars and Bakerwals, is brought into the argument, the presumptive nature of unilateral definitions becomes evident. Who is included in, and who is excluded from the ‘self’, and why? Is it all very clear to us, or does it deserve a discussion?
 
To use well-meaning people for your purposes via subterfuge can bear terrible consequences. It is unfair to those well-meaning people, and typifies the belief that the end justifies the means. Some of us are so consumed by anger that we feel justified in doing this, but it is not an ethical course of action, and brings your politics into disrepute. It is similar to what happened in Kandhamal in 2008, when the Maoist party murdered the VHP’s Swami Laxmanananda and left the common people to face the communal violence unleashed by the Sanghis, who blamed ‘the Christians’ for the murder.
 
In the spiral of violence unfolding in so-called insurgent districts, the state utilises the opportunity provided it by extremists to suppress opposition from all quarters. It targets all democratic protest for being anti-national, seditious, etc.  This is what is happening now in India’s capital. Unscrupulous TV anchors are adding fuel to the fires of ‘patriotic’ indignation – some of them behaving as flag-bearers for a hysterical version of nationalism. As an SC bench said recently, ‘moderation is a forgotten word today in all spheres of life’.  
 
Self-determination and violence
 
There is also the tangled issue of ‘self-determination’, a term many people use as if it were an axiom. It is not. The idea of democracy is linked to the concept of identity. ‘Demos’ is the term for ‘the people’ in ‘the rule of the people’. The slogan of ‘self-determination’ carries the implicit presupposition that we know who “the people” are before we speak of their right to ‘self-determination’.
 
Ideologically defined boundaries of the ‘self’ are presupposed in the practice of democracy. This issue is related to the birth of the nation-state and the notion of sovereignty. Let me add here that the multiplication of sovereignties is not a solution to the violation of human rights, nor should it be conflated unquestioningly with the concept of democracy. In some cases it might worsen the situation.
 
Identity is a matter of power, interest and definition. For example, the slogan that Kashmiris have a right to self-determination implies that the identity of Kashmiris is self-evident. The moment the identity of Kashmiri Pandits and Sikhs, Ladakh’s Buddhists and Jammu’s Dogras, Gujars and Bakerwals, is brought into the argument, the presumptive nature of unilateral definitions becomes evident.  Who is included in, and who is excluded from the ‘self’, and why? Is it all very clear to us, or does it deserve a discussion?
 
Given that this agitation has highlighted the plight of the Kashmiri people, let us examine some facts that tend to get left of out leftist concerns. Some amongst us remain aggrieved by the execution of Maqbool Butt on February 11, 1984. They need to remember the kidnapping and murder of the Indian consular official Ravindra Mhatre, in Birmingham, on February 6 the same year. It does not behoove a state to make vengeful decisions, but it does not help matters if we forget significant facts. We may also mention in passing the names of BJP politician Tikka Lal Taploo, Judge NK Ganjoo (who had tried Maqbool Butt); and journalist, PN Bhat – all three murdered in late 1989 by warriors of Kashmiri self-determination.
 
I have often reiterated my belief that the question of violence is – or should be – the crux of political debate. Militarism has emerged as the ground shared by enemies. The militarist appropriation of martyrdom is a deeply patriarchal gesture. Violence is a never-ending spiral. The best metaphor for violence is a black hole – the place that swallows up everything in its vicinity.
 
Once again, therefore, I will remind all ardent supporters of political causes that violence feeds on itself. Apart from their other numerous ‘actions’, the Maoists murdered two policemen who were in their custody, both of them tribals – Francis Induwar (beheaded in 2009) and Lucas Tete (shot in 2010). Kenduka Arjun, secretary of the Chasi Muliya Adivasi Sangh in Orissa, was murdered by Maoists in 2010. They also beat to death Niyamat Ansari, a NREGA activist, in front of his family in 2011. I will not go into the implications of the derailment of the Jnaneswari Express in 2010, which cost 148 lives.
 
On communal issues, let us remember Taslima Nasrin, the author who defended religious minorities in Bangladesh, and was hounded out of Kolkata in 2007 by fanatics who browbeat the Left Front government. Perpetually under threat, she finally had to leave India. On the price paid for dissent, let us remember TP Chandrashekharan, a dissident CPI (M) leader in Kerala murdered in 2012 for setting up an alternative left group. A week ago, on February 15, an RSS cadre named Sujith was murdered inside his house in front of his parents. The accused in both these cases belong to the CPI (M).  There are many more examples, cutting across party lines. Whatever we might think of our political opponents, do not such actions undermine democracy? Do they not indicate that we live in a dangerously authoritarian culture?
 
As regards Afzal Guru, like many others, I too felt that the trial process and submission of evidence raised several disturbing questions; that life imprisonment would have been a fairer sentence, and that he should not have been executed. I was severely perturbed by the phrase ‘collective conscience of the nation’ appearing in a court judgment sentencing a man to death. I wrote about this well before the execution, and about the death sentence, which I oppose in principle, whether it is handed out by judges or revolutionaries, sanghis or jehadis. People have every right to criticise judgments without being accused of contempt – have not the ultra-nationalists also criticised judgments they did not like? Such criticism should be couched in temperate language, but we remain within our rights to make it.
 
The Pandit issue
 
Going on from this, doesn’t the plight of Kashmir’s Pandits also deserve consideration in a debate about Kashmir? At the time of their enforced exodus from the Valley, concerns were expressed by some human rights activists and leftists. On the whole however, the so-named ‘left and democratic’ bloc has remained silent about that enormity.  I do not believe the ‘Jagmohan did it' theory on this although I am aware of Jagmohan’s role in Sanjay Gandhi’s slum-clearing activism during the Emergency. A great deal of evidence has been supplied by those who experienced the exodus – evidence that needs serious debate, not outright rejection.
 
All Kashmiri Muslims cannot be blamed for the plight of the Pandits, or for desiring their exodus. But neither are all Hindus supporters of Hindutva. Acknowledgement of injustice is the first and essential step towards reconciliation – this is as true for the Valley’s Pandit population as it is for its Muslims. Activists for human rights should also note the presence of a large number of migrant labourers in the Valley – numbers of whom have been victims of terrorist acts.

I will remind all ardent supporters of political causes that violence feeds on itself. Apart from their other numerous ‘actions’, the Maoists murdered two policemen who were in their custody, both of them tribals – Francis Induwar (beheaded in 2009) and Lucas Tete (shot in 2010)… On the price paid for dissent, let us remember TP Chandrashekharan, a dissident CPI (M) leader in Kerala murdered in 2012 for setting up an alternative left group. The accused… belong to the CPI (M). 
 
Be that as it may, conflicting views on what caused the Pandits to depart need an airing, not silence. Why have the victims of the largest (the number could be 3 lakhs) communally-driven migration in independent India’s history been the target of barely-concealed animus from leftists? Kashmiri’s have undergone terrible suffering ever since militancy began, and they include Pandits as well as Muslims, residents of the Jammu region as well as those of the Valley; Kashmiri speaking people as well as others.
 
Apologists for the status quo ask us to stop talking about caste-based discrimination – as if it will go away by pretending it does not exist. The same attitude has been exhibited by many of us with regard to Kashmiri Pandits – as if we can get rid of a mountain of pain and injustice by looking the other way. If we stand for giving voice to suffering humanity, we must stand for all the victims of oppression in the Valley, regardless of their faith. If we stand for free expression and dissent we must ask why the Pandits have been treated with indifference and worse, by leftists (given some honourable exceptions). Failure to conjoin the plight of the Pandits with all other victims of insurgency and state repression is a betrayal of our humanity and weakens our political integrity. Furthermore, it drives victims to other kinds of extremism, or to cynicism and despair. Why should we abandon good causes to bad politicians?
 
Defending democracy and the constitution
 
Indian politics has entered a phase of extreme danger – from the standpoint of the laboring citizens who need democracy the most. It is disturbing to see a section of India’s ruling class seeking to bypass and undermine constitutional rule by validating a politics of hatred and intimidation. Hindu Rashtra and Akhand Hindustan are mutually contradictory ideals: if you want one you will automatically rule out the other. The relentless tirade against Muslims, Christians and Communists by the Sangh Parivar will produce the contrary of what they wish for (or say they do). The theories of Savarkar, Hedgewar and Golwalkar are recipes for India’s disintegration. Extremism feeds on itself by appearing in different forms.
 
Whatever be its flaws, the Indian Constitution is the best consensual statute upon which to base a defence of democracy. Revolutionaries should consider the possibility that a section of the Indian ruling class is already bent upon doing away with democracy. So rather than a violent revolution to overthrow the constitution, we need a non-violent mass awakening to defend and implement it. But that will require serious re-thinking on socialist politics. Since the ongoing student movement is committed to defending the freedom of thought, there should be no problem with this.
 
The current student movement in JNU has received welcome support from students and academics all over India and the world, in addition to the support of many political parties. It can make a difference to Indian politics, but politics is too important to be left to specialists of revolution. Authoritarianism and hatred of dissent may be witnessed across the political spectrum – right, left and ‘marketist’. It would be best if students made up their own minds about political issues, and inaugurated an open dialogue with society. Incidentally, the term ‘revolution’ means the completion of a circle. If you want transformation, close the circle and get out of it. The only answer to extremism is moderation, truthful speech and non-violence. Jai Ho.
 
The above article was first published by labour historian and public intellectual Dilip Simeon and posted on his Blog. [Dilip Simeon’s Blog]
 

Afzal Guru’s execution has made him a martyr

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The Indian state refuses to accept that there is popular support for the movement for self-determination in Kashmir

Afzal Guru, convicted of conspiracy to wage war against India and murder in December 2001, was hanged on February 9, 2013, has re-emerged as a martyr. The Democratic Students Union (DSU) had decided to hold a cultural meeting inside the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to protest against what they called “the judicial killing of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat” and in solidarity with “the struggle of Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination.” The University having given permission for the event earlier, decided to withdraw it about 20 minutes before the meeting was to be held. This was done apparently, under pressure of the ABVP, the students’ body of the BJP.

What happened next is well known. The police arrested the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of “sedition”.  Several others have also been taken into custody and the police are still looking for more students. The prompt police action against ‘anti-national’ students and its deliberate inaction in the case of assault on JNU students, teachers and journalists inside the Patiala House court and the statements by the home minister and other members of the government and ruling party alleging links between JNU students and Pakistani Jihadi organisations, clearly shows that the government believes that the students of the JNU were indulging in activities aimed at destroying the integrity and sovereignty of the country.

Clearly, in this atmosphere of heightened indignation of the self-righteous nationalists, some of whom have said they would not hesitate to kill people who raised anti-national slogans, the JNU students have little chance of escaping being sacrificed at the altar of nationalism.

Let me move away from what is happening and the debate about whether the JNU students should be charged with sedition. Let me get back to the issue of the protest against the execution of Afzal Guru. More critically, why is the execution of Afzal Guru still seen as unjust by so many people of this country, and not just only Kashmiris. The slogan, "Tum kitne Afzal maaroge, har ghar se Afzal niklega!" (How many Afzals can you kill, Afzal will be born in every home) is significant as it shows that in the eyes of several people Afzal become a martyr.

Afzal was convicted by the highest court of the land. His mercy petition filed by his wife, Tabassum was rejected by the President of India. The information about the rejection of the clemency petition was not communicated to Tabassum in time, denying Afzal the opportunity to appeal for a review of his case, a right granted to convicted persons by the judiciary of India. The government executed Afzal without informing his family and his lawyers. The clandestine execution of Afzal violating all procedures and even the law as laid down by the Supreme Court of the land has been seen by many as desperate attempts of ruling parties like the Congress and the BJP to pander to the frenzy of jingoism and appeal for votes.

Afzal was too poor to be able to afford a lawyer, and had asked for legal aid from the state and the court. The Supreme Court has held in 1956 that the every accused has an inalienable right to be defended by a lawyer of his choice, and such representation and defence must be ‘effective’  (Hansraj and Ors vs State, AIR, 1956, p. 641). Afzal never got a lawyer of his choice. The court appointed lawyers, Seema Gulati and then Niraj Bansal.

In anthropological theory, “sacrifice” is ritualised violence concerned with marking and safeguarding social boundaries. The sacrifice is also of course a scapegoat. It is the ideal cultural spectacle for the disposal of bodies which threatens the edifice of the community itself. In modern times the community has been substituted by the “nation state”

At the very beginning of the trail, Seema Gulati conceded that the prosecution had prima facie evidence to frame charges. She admitted all the crucial documents and recovered items presented by the prosecution without demanding any formal proof.  Later, all these were used as the basis for Afzal’s conviction. After Gulati’s departure midway through the trial, the court appointed Niraj Bansal, Gulati’s junior as Afzal’s lawyer.

Afzal’s repeated plea to the court that he did not have confidence in Bansal was ignored. It is evident that Niraj Bansal made virtually no effort to oppose the prosecution’s case either on question of facts or law. The importance of the right to effective counsel was underlined by the Supreme Court when it said “judicial justice with procedural intricacies, legal submissions and critical examination of evidence leans upon professional expertise; and a failure of equal justice under the law is on the cards where such supportive skill is absent for one side” (Madhav Hayawadanrao Hoskot vs State of Maharashtra, AIR 1978, SC 1548, para 3).

The manner in which the court-appointed lawyers had defended Afzal, leaves little doubt it was a case of failure of equal justice. As Afzal had said, “I am Afzal for Kashmiris, and I am Afzal for Indians as well, but the two groups have an entirely conflicting perception of my being”. He was a Kashmiri Muslim in Delhi, liable at any point of time to be confronted, attacked, tortured and imprisoned.

Death penalty has little to do with guilt or deterrence.  Prosecution of conspiracy cases which involve allegations of attempts to overthrow the government by waging war against the state is essentially a political trial. Justice in such political trials is not always guided by criminal procedure or substantive law, it is often influenced by majoritarian political considerations dressed in the garb of “democratic values”.

The Supreme Court of India while ruling in Afzal Guru’s case confirmed this when it decided that a life had to be sacrificed to satisfy the “collective conscience of the people”. After the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament the nation needed a sacrifice for safeguarding itself against its enemies, particularly after the Operation Parakram, India’s first attempt at using military coercion against Pakistan, achieved only limited success.

Afzal Guru embodied the perfect enemy. And the media, the military, the intelligence establishment and the politicians – all were agreed. He was a Kashmiri Muslim, a self-confessed failed militant, who had refused to become an informer for the security agencies. A lonely figure who was trying to make a living out of small business and feed his family – a virtual nobody. The court dispensed with its own rules and convicted him on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

In anthropological theory, “sacrifice” is ritualised violence concerned with marking and safeguarding social boundaries. The sacrifice is also of course a scapegoat. It is the ideal cultural spectacle for the disposal of bodies which threatens the edifice of the community itself. In modern times the community has been substituted by the “nation state”. As if in recognition of the importance of rites of sacrifice, the Supreme Court in 2006 had declared that Afzal Guru was to be executed on the day of the Hindu festival of Diwali, when the Hindus in north India celebrate the triumph of Ram over Ravana by burning his effigies.

Annoyed by the appeals that were filed against the execution order and its stay, Swapan Dasgupta, an ideologue of the Hindu nationalists, wrote, “this is the time of the year when India celebrates the triumph of good over evil… it is ironic that this should be the time when the country was confronted with disagreeable demand aimed at puncturing our sense of Dharma”.

All popular struggles for freedom have a deep moral core. In these movements there is a strong tradition of self-sacrifice for the cause of freedom. Through his execution, Afzal Guru, the failed freedom fighter has returned as a martyr. We are witnessing the unfolding of the story of his martyrdom. It is the martyrdom of Afzal that has given birth to the slogan, "Tum kitne Afzal maaroge, har ghar se Afzal niklega!"

Execution of the evil is necessary to uphold Dharma. Already a line has been drawn between the people who are for upholding the Dharma and those who are against the Dharma. The death penalty has become the quintessential expression of the power of the nation and destruction of its enemy. In this scheme of things, the judicial system and the media have taken on the role of identifying the terrorists, who threaten the sovereignty and integrity of India.

The Indian state sees the movement in Kashmir as Pakistan’s proxy war. It refuses to accept that there is popular support for the movement for self-determination in Kashmir. Yet it has tied down nearly half a million members of its armed forces in crushing the movement in the valley for more than two and a half decades.

All popular struggles for freedom have a deep moral core. In these movements there is a strong tradition of self-sacrifice for the cause of freedom. Through his execution, Afzal Guru, the failed freedom fighter has returned as a martyr. We are witnessing the unfolding of the story of his martyrdom. It is the martyrdom of Afzal that has given birth to the slogan, "Tum kitne Afzal maaroge, har ghar se Afzal niklega!" (How many Afzals can you kill, Afzal will be born in every home).

(The writer is a documentary filmmaker and a human rights defender)
 

Turkey: Mind numbing violence in a country where even “insulting President” is a crime

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Photo: Courtesy Human Rights Watch

The violence unleashed against political opponents and civilians, and the crackdown on every form of dissent by Turkey’s ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) in the last 18 months is thought shattering

[This article is the introduction to a special supplement of Theory & Event, entitled Something Is Rotten in the State, devoted to the contemporary political context in Turkey. The table of contents and complete issue can be accessed here.]

The political everyday never ceases to be eventful for those who live in Turkey or who follow it closely: the consolation of a smooth veneer disguising the wretched operations of structural violence is a luxury rarely exported to the global south. But what has been unfolding in Turkey since the early summer of 2015 has gone far beyond the usual state of agitation. The violence that has been unleashed onto the political scene after the general elections of June 2015 in which the governing AKP (Justice and Development Party) lost its absolute majority has been immense beyond conception.

One sentence that had been uttered by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before the June elections takes on a particularly sinister significance in retrospect. Addressing a crowd in the southeast Anatolian town of Gaziantep in March 2015, Erdoğan had said: “Give us four hundred deputies and let this issue be resolved peacefully,” referring to the low-intensity war between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish state that has lasted for almost forty years and taken more than forty thousand lives.

When the June elections only yielded 261 seats for the AKP, Erdoğan’s threat materialised in the form of a new bloody episode of the war against the PKK, as well as two potentially state-sponsored massacres — Suruç in July and Ankara in October. In the repeat elections of November 2015, the AKP increased its seats to 317. Yet the flood of violence they cynically unleashed is seemingly unstoppable: the war against the PKK rages on, subjecting civilian populations in various Kurdish towns and districts to open-ended and round-the-clock curfews for days, sometimes weeks on end, enforced by threat of summary execution by snipers: as of 5 February 2016, the civilian death toll of these curfews was at least 224, including forty-two children.

This intensification of violence has been complemented by the increasingly fierce crackdown on any form of dissent. Attacks against freedom of assembly have been partially formalized through a new security act passed in April 2015, which broadens police powers to use firearms against, search, and detain protesters, and stipulates lengthy prison terms for various protest related offences.[1] Attacks on freedom of expression take myriad forms: for example, ordinary citizens posting on social media about the president are hounded by a law that criminalizes “insulting” the president (more than 1300 have been prosecuted under this law during Erdoğan’s one-and-a-half-year term as president); and media workers unwilling or unable to toe the line risk losing their livelihood or liberty.[2]

No one is exactly exempt from this crackdown. As this special supplement of Theory & Event was being prepared, our contributor Haydar Darıcı, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, was detained by the police in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır for participating in a protest that called for the lifting of the curfew in the city’s Sur district. Although eventually released, he is currently subject to a travel ban and awaiting trial on charges of membership of a terrorist organization, doing propaganda on behalf of a terrorist organization, and breaching the law of assembly. His academic work has been used to build the charges against him.

Further, several of the contributors to this issue are, at the time of writing, under a criminal investigation for having signed a “not in my name” petition concerning the war, potentially facing terrorism related charges, as well as charges of “insulting Turkishness.” Colleagues based in Turkish institutions who are among the signatories of this petition are particularly vulnerable. In addition to criminal charges, they are threatened with fascist hate campaigns and formal action by their institutions, including disciplinary proceedings, suspension, and dismissal.

While the petition affair has had a global profile, generating widespread outrage and numerous international petitions and statements of support,[3] its repercussions for individual signatories are likely to be long-lasting in a context where appointments and promotions are already highly politicised.

Thought inevitably attaches to what it already knows. A common trope in much of the oppositional political commentary in Turkey today is that of a “return.” The current regime of repressive authoritarianism is often discussed in terms of a return to, or the return of, the 1980s—the era of the coup d’état. On the other hand, the current state of extreme violence in Turkey’s Kurdistan is often cast in terms of a return to, or the return of, the 1990s—the most brutal years of the war against the PKK before the current episode. Figured as regression—“return to”—the trope indicates its origins in a linear conception of time, whereas “the return of” functions more like a revenant, signaling a cyclical understanding.

A more accurate figuration has been proposed by Zaytung, Turkey’s satirical news outlet, much like The Onion in the US. A recent headline in Zaytung reads: “AKP: Coming to terms with the coup era is best achieved by reliving it.”[4] The party spokespersons are “quoted” as saying: “If we learn by reliving those days, we won’t have to relive those days again.” Here, the ironic commentary implicitly refigures return as reenactment, playing havoc with the linear while reinserting agency into the cyclical. 

Indeed, one of the great ironies of the current moment is that the AKP government, which once promised a departure from Turkey’s entrenched state tradition, now seems to comfortably inhabit that very tradition, albeit with some new furniture. The old regime of military tutelage loyal to the interests of global capital has been replaced by a toxic combination of repressive majoritarianism and the police state, still serving similar interests. The specter of the “deep state” is back on the scene of everyday politics, and with some of the same old faces, despite having been purported to be “eliminated” in highly visible legal spectacles such as the Ergenekon trial.

One notable difference vis-à-vis the extrajudicial today is that the law itself has been rendered more accommodating to its own supersession, and here Turkey is no exception, as states have been empowered by the spectral threat of “terrorism” to reconsolidate raison d’état within the rule of law. President Erdoğan and other government spokespersons’ rhetoric around the current war has made it obvious that they have no qualms about stoking nationalist fervor to fascist effect, another essential resource for the old state tradition.

The one major update that the AKP introduced to this inherited and refortified tradition can be identified as the elimination of the old aggressive secularism that effectively excluded whole segments of the population, especially non-Kemalist devout Muslims, from access to political and economic power. But as Aslı Bâli discusses in her contribution to this issue, the current government has also to some extent seized the traditional articulation of secularism in Turkey, namely state control and regulation of religion, to impose its own vision of religious orthodoxy.

The recognition of such historical continuities does not always alleviate, and sometimes even aggravates, the despair of the moment. It is perhaps necessary to begin from the acknowledgement that the cumulative effect of the events of the past several months have been, literally, thought-shattering. The all too swift resumption of war rhetoric after years of peace talk, the particular intensities of the violence that we have been witnessing (carefully detailed in the contributions of Banu Bargu, Evren Savcı, and Haydar Darıcı in this issue), and the mere fact that the strategy of widespread blackmail between the two elections seems to have worked despite its blatant desperation, have not been easy to assimilate.

This supplementary issue of Theory & Event is in one sense an attempt to begin to pick up the pieces in the midst of these tumultuous times, to think again, to edge our way, collectively and individually, toward making sense from the senseless. It is also an effort to combine an historically informed understanding of this moment with the stray thoughts and affects it has engendered, seeking new horizons amidst the wreckage, while avoiding the commonplaces of the machinery of opinion-production vis-à-vis Turkey.

These reflections are offered in English and hosted by Theory & Event due to a felt necessity not only to rekindle international solidarity, but also to rethink the terms of solidarity. Insofar as the Turkish state continues to play up to international norms of national comportment, holding regular elections, decrying terrorism, speaking of law and order, and selling its gatekeeping services to Fortress Europe, it is critical to identify the wider transnational structures and processes of complicity, as well as the common grounds and horizons of resistance.

The first essay in this collection, Aslı Bâli’s “Shifting into Reverse: Turkish Constitutionalism Under the AKP,” provides a sober account of the AKP’s renegotiation of the Turkish state tradition during its thirteen years in government. Focusing on the trajectory of the party’s constitutional reform efforts allows Bâli both to acknowledge the potential if accidental promise of a more pluralistic agenda initially held out by the AKP, and to carefully trace the party’s gradual reconciliation with the legacy of Turkey’s statist tradition for the sake of consolidating its own power. Importantly, Bâli ends her account with a proposal for strategies of opposition in forthcoming processes of constitutional reform.

In “Another Necropolitics,” Banu Bargu trains her gaze on the spectacularised infliction of violence on dead bodies to make sense of the way that the Turkish state has come to resemble the very violence that it projects onto various enemies and “terrorists.” Bargu proposes that state violence against those who are already dead (for example by refusing them burial, leaving them naked and bloody on the street) indicates a particular form of necropolitics, an attempt to supplement ordinary state violence with a spectacular and calculated form of violence that extends beyond the realm of the living. Reconsidering the powers of mourning “in a political context whose contours are delineated by the politicisation of death, where mourning is already deeply implicated within the lines of demarcation already drawn by necropolitics,” Bargu instead calls for a political imaginary that seeks the basis for a common life in an affirmative conviviality.

In “Revolting Grief,” Evren Savcı also probes the limits and potentials of mourning as political practice. She shows that mourning can be reduced to a personal and apolitical response to state violence but it can also be used as a way to interrogate and interrupt the bases of such violence. The condition of possibility for such intervention is an attunement not only to collective precariousness, but also to forms of precarity and “structures that produce insecurity as a condition of life.” Only then can mourning serve to deeply challenge, rather than simply grieve the situation in contemporary Turkey.

In both Zerrin Özlem Biner and Eray Çaylı’s contributions, we see a less obvious aspect of statecraft: the techniques by which the state dissociates itself from its own violence, through inheritance law in Biner’s essay, and through new genres of official propaganda in Çaylı’s essay.

In “Haunted by Debt: Calculating the Cost of Loss and Violence in Turkey,” Zerrin Özlem Biner details a baffling legal instrument deployed by the government to “redress” the damages caused by the conflict between the PKK and the state. Her account allows insight into how the state recasts itself as arbiter of damages, while perpetuating its vengeance through producing schemes of unpayable debt for its enemies. Biner’s contribution serves as a crystallised account of the nexus between neo-liberalism and state violence.

In "Bear Witness: Embedded Coverage of Turkey's Urban Warfare and the Demarcation of Sovereignty against a Dynamic Exterior," Eray Çaylı analyses a recent vehicle of state propaganda, the TV series Şahit Olun [Bear Witness],which depicts the current conflict in Kurdish towns through a stylised mixing of the genres of embedded war reporting, true crime, citizen journalism, and drone videography. He traces the techniques through which the agency of the state and state agents are represented, with particular attention to the spatial dynamics that are produced as a result of visual representation. In Çaylı’s account, a cinematography of intimacy and identification reconfigures and reconsolidates sovereignty by interiorising the threat while exteriorising state violence.

The final two essays by Haydar Darıcı and Ali B. explore the struggle for stateless spaces and stateless politics in Kurdistan on two sides of the Turkish-Syrian border. In “Of Kurdish Youth and Ditches,” Darıcı draws on his ethnographic research on Kurdish youth politics in Cizre to trace the emergence of a new militant movement that has become the central actor in the current conflict with the Turkish state. Shunning the more traditional Kurdish politics of waiting (i.e. for the Turkish state to negotiate peace with) and victimhood (i.e. as articulated through the language of human rights), the Kurdish youth redefine “the space of politics as well as the meaning of the political” in their struggle for emancipation in the now. They do so not by seeking an alternative form of sovereignty but rather engaging in street politics of self-defense and democratic autonomy.

In “Eroding the State in Rojava,” Ali B details the work in Rojava in seeking to create alternative political forms in light of the patent failures of states and markets in the region (and the world). Rojava is a centre of experimentation with democratic autonomy. New political and economic forms are being produced here even as the communities involved face violence both from Turkey and from the Islamic State, which is literally at their door. As Ali B shows, Rojava is not a utopia by any means and the attempt to stave off state forms is not always successful; nevertheless, a remarkable experiment is underway.

That something is rotten in the state as a form of political organisation becomes particularly conspicuous in a context of unsustainably ruinous violence that is nevertheless sustained by the law, the market, the elections, the geopolitical, the diplomatic, the transnational, and so on. But such a situation also produces practices of resistance and critique that can inform beyond its own context.

This collection of essays draws on these practices of resistance and the work of critique not so much in the way of easy hope and reassurance, but rather as a way of facilitating judgments about what succeeds and what fails. In that sense, they can be read as a collective effort to begin to re-equip ourselves in the face of ruin. The equipment on offer ranges from strategies for negotiating the state in its current guises, to understanding its more insidious articulations and operations, and looking beyond the state to alternative political forms and imaginaries. All this so that we may begin again.

NOTES
[1] Including, for example, two-and-a-half to four years for concealing one’s face partially or fully with a mask or a piece of cloth. Polis Vazife ve Salâhiyet Kanunu, Jandarma Teşkilat, Görev ve Yetkileri Kanunu ile Bazı Kanunlarda Değişiklik Yapılmasına dair Kanun, Kanun no. 6638, Resmi Gazete, 4 April 2015.

[2] The very high profile case of prominent journalist Can Dündar provides an indication of the threats under which all media workers operate: Can Dündar, “I Revealed the Truth About President Erdoğan and Syria. For That, He Had Me Jailed,” Guardian, 28 December 2015. 

[3] For a fraction of these, see, for example, the letter of concern issued by Scholars at Risk Network and endorsed by close to thirty international higher education networks and associations; the statement by the Modern Language Association; and the letter by the American Sociological Association.    

[4] We translate the headline loosely to better capture its effect: “12 Eylül’le Yüzleşmek Üzere Yola Çıkan Ak Parti: “Önce o dönemi bi’ tekrar yaşamamız gerekiyor…’”, Zaytung, 15 January 2016. 

(Courtesy: Jadaliyya)
 

Between Freedom and Fascism: Speech is really free only when it hurts

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Amidst Hindutva’s escalating hysterical-nationalism, raising the question of Kashmir’s right to self-determination was at the same time the most radical and the most blasphemous thing to do


 
“We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country”. Quoting Jefferson in his speech on the eve of adoption of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar went on to say that Jefferson’s observation was not “merely true, but is absolutely true”.

“I feel, however good a Constitution may be,” he argued in the same speech, “it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot.” Today Ambedkar, far more agnostic about the sacralisation of the Constitution that we are witnessing and conscious of the possibility of its abuse, would have been a disappointed man.

Any engagement with the Constitution that is critical of its nature, scope and applicability that does not conform to the standard Statist position has been turned into a taboo and a crime. That a new generation may envision a distinct nation scares those whose interests lie entrenched in the old order of things. It is not necessary that every act of dissent be progressive, but it is precisely the process and exercise of fearless dissent that creates and ensures the existence of robust democratic societies.

Today’s India is afraid of undertaking this unending, painful and arduous task of constant renegotiation and redefinition which Jefferson alluded to and Ambedkar had seconded quite passionately, which, however, is nonetheless vital for any democracy to exist.That Kashmir has once again exposed the frail and sensitive faultlines of the Indian State is not surprising at all. Quite tellingly, it was Ambedkar’s disaffection with the government’s policy on Kashmir that he cited as one of the reasons for resigning from Nehru’s Cabinet. It is pertinent to recall what he had to say.
 

The real issue to my mind is not who is right but what is right. Taking that to be the main question, my view has always been that the right solution is to partition Kashmir.  Give the Hindu and Buddhist part to India and the Muslim part to Pakistan as we did in the case of India. We are really not concerned with the Muslim part of Kashmir. It is a matter between the Muslims of Kashmir and Pakistan. They may decide the issue as they like. Or if you like, divide into three parts; the Cease fire zone, the Valley and the Jammu-Ladhak Region and have a plebiscite only in the Valley.  What I am afraid of is that in the proposed plebiscite, which is to be an overall plebiscite, the Hindus and Buddhists of Kashmir are likely to be dragged into Pakistan against their wishes and we may have to face same problems as we are facing today in East Bengal. 

The point here is not to go into the merits or demerits of Ambedkar’s position, quite clearly seditious today, by the standards of what is perhaps best termed as the nations’ “collective conscience”, but to insist that we have a right to have a view, on Kashmir, on the Constitution, on the idea of a nation, on everything under the sun. And that we have the right to dissent. The crime Umar Khalid and others are truly guilty of committing is to have dared to think beyond the consensus of the society they live in. As Khalid put it, quite succinctly, they are afraid of young critical minds.

The blotted argument that Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian Union, which the Left, expectedly, is also repeating ad nauseaum on our television screens, requires the erasure of memory, of facts, of history. It requires a quiet forgetting of massacres, rapes, torture and enforced disappearances. It requires the forgetting of the UN resolutions, the massive militarisation of the state as well as that of the unrelenting struggle of Kashmiris for Aazadi.

It requires the erasure of Kashmiris as a living, breathing people with a voice, with an agency, capable of making a choice. When it comes to Kashmir, precious little separates the Left from the Right. Everyone is on the same boat, everyone is a nationalist, everyone is more nationalist than the other. The vastly different approach taken by the Left on the question of Palestine, from that of Kashmir, betrays its hypocrisy and is explainable only by the colonial logic of mother country being above reproach.

The blotted argument that Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian Union, which the Left, expectedly, is also repeating ad nauseaum on our television screens, requires the erasure of memory, of facts, of history

What we must demand, nonetheless, despite its blatant betrayal of its professed universal principles, is that the Left not abandon its own conscientious dissenters at this moment. The Left, along with the progressive sections of the society, must at the very least show the political commitment to stand by those who disagree with their stated positions and uphold the right to dissent.

Vajpayee went to the extent of calling for Kashmir’s resolution, involving all the stakeholders including Pakistan, under the ‘ambit of humanity’. Would it be seditious to suggest that the ambit of humanity extend beyond the limitations of the Constitution? If the State can politically engage with the separatists, even allow them to hold dialog with Pakistan – the much maligned ‘Other’ – why should the students have no right to engage with the issue, be opinionated about it and express that opinion?

Today, Khalid and the other organisers of the Cultural Event at JNU are the face of that dissent. So far no proof has emerged that any of them raised the condemnable slogans calling for India’s destruction. Their only fault is to have raised the question of Kashmir’s right to self-determination. But if speaking on, arguing for and debating this question is seditious than the state should perhaps look into its own closets as well.

Nehru himself not only debated this question in Parliament, but publicly promised to hold the plebiscite. The present government may wish to dump the likes of Nehru and Ambedkar in the dustbin of history, but we must ask on what grounds then can the government of India, under Vajpayee or Manmohan Singh’s rule sit across the table with the Hurriyat and JKLF who openly call for Kashmir’s freedom from the Indian State, instead of booking them for sedition. That should have been more straightforward, given that both these parties, the Hurriyat and the JKLF, are not merely debating this question but are active political entities whose programmes revolve solely around this central axis.

Vajpayee went to the extent of calling for Kashmir’s resolution, involving all the stakeholders including Pakistan, under the ‘ambit of humanity’. Would it be seditious to suggest that the ambit of humanity extend beyond the limitations of the Constitution? If the State can politically engage with the separatists, even allow them to hold dialog with Pakistan – the much maligned ‘Other’ – why should the students have no right to engage with the issue, be opinionated about it and express that opinion? By cracking down on the students the government has sent the message that in India, Kashmir must not be spoken of.

Kashmir, however, is not the endgame here; it has only provided the government with the easiest way with which to break the backbone of an increasingly assertive students’ movement that has been spreading across the country. From IIT Madras to FTII, from OccupyUGC to UoH the students have consistently resisted the government’s cocktail of neoliberal-Hindutvavadi fascism.

Repeatedly, the dissenting students have been labelled as ‘anti-national’ by the members of the ruling BJP and its students’ wing, the ABVP. Action against these ‘anti-national’ student groups has been initiated directly under orders from the central government, violating the autonomous space of the university in the process. The same hysteria of being labelled ‘anti-national’ which contributed to Rohith’s suicide has been raised many decibels in the case of Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid, mostly through a pliant media.

In such a scenario as this, where protesting beef bans and forming Ambedkar study groups, where protesting fund-cuts and even conducting movie-screenings has repeatedly been branded as anti-national activities by the apparatchiks of the ruling class, raising the question of Kashmir’s right to self-determination was at the same time the most radical and the most blasphemous thing to do.

The response it has elicited from the government on the one hand betrays the State’s vulnerability over its claim to Kashmir being an integral part of the Union, has also on the other hand opened a wider battlefront between the fascist regime and its opponents. Kashmir, having seen and suffered the worse at the hands of the Indian State, has now exposed the worse face of the fascist regime yet.

At this crucial juncture it is the minimal necessary political obligation of the students and the Left to stand by the organisers of the event and safeguard the right to freedom of expression and dissent. But that’s only half the task. The true political transformation lies elsewhere. The choice between fascism and freedom that we face today couldn’t be starker. As the counter-movement against fascism grows, by ignoring the question of Kashmir, it will only retain the aporia at the heart of Indian democracy. The struggle for democracy has to be twin with the struggle for independence.

In redefining India’s relation with Kashmir, the counter-movement has to re-imagine India, moving away from the discourses of nationalism; community must take precedence over territory and people over country. Not so long ago Perry Anderson had criticised the Indian intellectual class for placing Kashmir in footnotes, ‘between delicate parentheses, to be discussed elsewhere’. Given the state of affairs, it might take the parliamentary Left a bare few centuries more in coming to terms with its intellectual dishonesty and criminal complicity when it comes to Kashmir, yet the turn of events has produced the fervent in which the possibility of freeing Kashmir from those delicate parenthesis and footnotes comes to fore, yet again.

Fidelity at this time is not to ask the question, ‘what is nationalism?’, but to radically invert the gaze and ask instead, ‘what is it to be independent?’ Fidelity at this point is not to ask ‘what is the idea of India?’ but to ask ‘what is Kashmir’s call on that idea?’ To do so would be to truly stand in solidarity with the organisers of the event, and the oppressed people of Kashmir. To free Kashmir from the footnotes and the parenthesis is to foreground it, is to speak more and more about it, and to speak freely. To free Kashmir is to listen to the disappeared and to talk to the dead. In India, Kashmir must echo.
 

A Solidarity Poem for JNU from the Incarcerated Community of Philadelphia

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A solidarity poem for Kanhaiya and the JNU protestors from the Center for Carceral Communities (a collective of current and previously incarcerated people and advocates in Philadelphia, housed at the University of Pennsylvania, USA).
 

we are with you kanhaiya
reaching out from our barred windows
all 2.5 million of US
we cross borders and seas
to smuggle in
wirecutters and metalfiles
and circuitbreakers
hidden deep
in these words and
outraged tears
we are with you
as you dance on this
multiheaded serpent
this global picture-in-picture-in-picture
of progress-in-democracy-in-prison-in-silence-in-fear
with you
shoulder to shoulder
as you scream over and over
abvpISobamaISbushISmodi
hand-in-hand with you
dear kanhaiya
as you christen
this revolution
with blood and urine
spilt in these corridors
of power
slick with the froth
of hindutva
with you always
as you stare down
this justice
turned
slippery and slick
and cold
until it is just / ice
 

Signed:
 
mouth
Alison Neff (Director, CCC)
Toorjo Ghose (Associate Professor, SP2, UPenn)
35 members of the CCC collective (who need to remain anonymous)
on behalf of
2.5 million who are currently incarcerated in the U.S. (who are forced to remain anonymous)
 

Bangalore Research Network’s Letter of Solidarity with JNU

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We, the undersigned members of the Bangalore Research Network and a consortium of academics and researchers from Bangalore, declare our solidarity with the students and faculty of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi protesting the illegal police arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition. We unequivocally stand by them in affirming that universities are autonomous spaces for the free expression of a plurality of beliefs and cannot become military spaces of thought control that go against the very grain of a democratic society.  With them, we condemn the blatantly authoritarian attempt by the police and the central government to witch hunt students on the basis of their political beliefs. We also condemn the unethical media trial of JNU students such as Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid.

In a speech that is now widely available on the internet, Kanhaiya Kumar spoke critically of the BJP government policies at a peaceful student meeting held at JNU which was well within his rights by the laws of the land.  This occurred a day after a group of unidentified students shouted slogans at an event that he had no part in organizing.  Legal luminaries have opined that those slogans about the rights of Kashmiris to independence from Indian military oppression over the last few decades, whether one might agree with them or not, do not amount to sedition.  Kanhaiya Kumar was, however, arrested by the police for ‘anti-national’ behaviour and for violating sedition laws against incitement of violence.  With no proof to substantiate the charge of sedition, his arrest can only be read as a reflection of the authoritarian nature of the current Indian government and its intolerance to any dissent. JNU is but the latest example of attempts to stifle dissenting student voices in university campuses across India, including others at FTII, BHU and University of Hyderabad. This is reflective of the current climate where higher education is being viewed as purely instrumental, captured by the logics of the neoliberal state and capital.

As researchers, scholars, and academics, we are extremely concerned with the manner in which the ruling government has so blatantly set aside India’s longstanding commitment to plurality in belief. The space and freedom to express diverse and divergent beliefs and opinions are the foundations for critical thought and expression that university spaces cultivate. We urge the Vice Chancellor of JNU, who gave the police permission to wrongfully detain and arrest JNU students, to recognize the momentum of support building up for them and to immediately step in to safeguard their rights.
Dated: February 22, 2016

Signatures in alphabetical order

  1. Abeer Kapoor, Alumnus, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  2. Abhishek Hazra, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
  3. Aditi Arur, Consultant, J-PAL South Asia, Bangalore
  4. Amman Madan, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru
  5. Andrea Wright, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
  6. Anjali Shivanand, Centre for Child and the Law, National Law School of India University, Bangalore
  7. Aparna Sundar, Visiting Faculty, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  8. Andaleeb Rahman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore
  9. Anwesa Bhattacharya, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
  10. Archit Guha, Centre for Public History, Bangalore
  11. Asha Verma, Alumnus, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  12. Ashwin, Independent Researcher, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  13. Atreyee Majumder, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  14. Avishek Ray, NIT Silchar
  15. Bitasta Das, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
  16. Debjani Banerjee, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
  17. Devaki, L., Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  18. Dhruva Desai, Alumnus, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  19. Elizabeth Thomas, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
  20. Gayatri Menon, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  21. Garima Jain, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore
  22. Girija K P, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
  23. Gowri Vijayakumar, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
  24. Hemangini Gupta, Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Colby College, Maine
  25. Issac Arul Selva, Human Rights Activist, Bangalore
  26. Jasmeen Patheja , Blank Noise.
  27. Jyothsna Belliappa, Bengaluru
  28. Kanthi Krishnamurthy, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
  29. Kavya Murthy, Bangalore
  30. Kinnari Pandya, Azim Premji University, Benguluru
  31. K Ravichandran, Student, Azim Premji University , Bangalore
  32. Lakshmi Arya, Independent scholar and writer, Bangalore
  33. Lata Mani, Independent Researcher, Bengaluru
  34. Lindsay Vogt, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara
  35. Madhu Bhushan, Independent (re)searcher-activist, Bangalore
  36. Manisha Anantharaman, Justice Community and Leadership, Saint Mary’s College of California
  37. Maia Barkaia,(JNU, 2010), Tbilisi State University (Tbilisi) and University of Oxford, Oxford.
  38. Manu V. Mathai, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  39. Muthatha Ramanathan, Bangalore
  40. Navdeep Mathur, IIM Ahmedabad
  41. Narendra Raghunath, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
  42. Neenu Suresh, National Law School of India University, Bangalore
  43. Nikunja S. Bhuyan, Student, Azim Premji University, Bangalore.
  44. Nimisha Agarwal, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
  45. Nitya V, Bengaluru
  46. Padma Baliga, St. Joseph’s College, Bengaluru
  47. Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
  48. Pallavi Gaur, Student, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  49. Pooja Sagar, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
  50. P. P. Sneha, Bangalore
  51. Prakriti Prajapati, Researcher, ATREE, Bengaluru
  52. Pranesh Prakash, Bangalore
  53. Preeti Kharb, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore
  54. Rajeev Kumaramkandath, Christ University, Bengaluru
  55. Rameshwara Nand Jha, Alumnus, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  56. Rashmi Sawhney, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
  57. Renny Thomas (JNU 2015), Department of Sociology, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi
  58. Riddhi Pandey, Student, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  59. Robert M Geraci, Manhattan College (former Visiting Scholar at IISc), New York
  60. Rolla Das, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
  61. Sanam Roohi, NIAS, Bangalore and AISSR, University of Amsterdam
  62. Sarah Jacobson, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  63. Savitha Suresh Babu, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
  64. Sahil Sasidharan, Associate – Academics & Research, IIHS, Bangalore/Bengaluru
  65. Sazana Jayadeva, The German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg
  66. Scott Sorrell, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, New York
  67. Sharad Sure, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  68. Sharmadip Basu, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  69. Shoibal Chakravarty, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
  70. Shreyas Sreenath, Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta
  71. Shreyas Srivatsa, Urban Planner & Architect, Bangalore
  72. Shrishtee Bajpai, Alumnus, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  73. Shruti Ajit, Researcher, Kalpavriksh, Pune
  74. Simy Joy, Independent Researcher, Ely, England
  75. Smriti Srinivas, NAGARA, Bangalore
  76. Soundarya Iyer, Student, NIAS, Bangalore
  77. Sreechand Tavva, Post Graduate Student, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  78. Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  79. Subadra Panchanadeswaran, Adelphi University, New York
  80. Subir Rana, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
  81. Sufaid V, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  82. Sunandan, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  83. Sunayana Ganguly, Independent researcher and entrepreneur, Bangalore
  84. Suraj Jacob, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  85. Tarang Singh, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  86. Tathagata Biswas. Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  87. Vasanthi Mariadass, Srishti Institute for Art Design and Technology, Bangalore
  88. V R Vachana, Alumna, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  89. Vidhya Raveendranathan, Centre For Modern Indian Studies, Georg- August- University, Gottingen, Germany
  90. Vikas Maniar, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  91. Vinay K Sreenivasa, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
  92. Vineeta, Alumnus, Azim Premji University, Bangalore
  93. Vineeth Krishna E, Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bangalore
  94. Vivek Mishra, Alumnus, Azim Premji Univerisity, Bangalore
  95. Vrashali Khandelwal, Student, Azim Premji University, Bangalore

University of Texas Students and Faculty stand with JNU

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We, the undersigned, students, scholars, and faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, stand in solidarity with the students, faculty, and staff at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi against the illegal and unconscionable crackdown by police. We demand an immediate end to all police action on campus, a withdrawal of all frivolous charges against the President of JNU Students’ Union, Kanhaiya Kumar, and other students, as well as an end to the campaign of harassment and intimidation against students at the university. With them, we affirm the autonomy of the university as a non-militarized space for freedom of thought and expression. Accordingly, we condemn police presence on campus and the harassment of students on the basis of their political beliefs. 

We believe that these actions by the Indian state and its associated groups and institutions are part of a larger campaign to stifle dissenting voices in the country, especially on university campuses which have persistently resisted the capitalist, Brahmanical hegemony of the current government. This was clearly evident in the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) last month. The similarity of the modus operandi in Hyderabad and Delhi is striking: Rohith and his comrades had been accused of ‘anti-national’ activities for their condemnation of the hanging of Yakub Memon, and suspended from their academic positions on these undemocratic grounds. Similar charges have been framed against the students of JNU for organizing an event in solidarity with the struggle of Kashmiri people for their right to self-determination. To make matters murkier, it is now certain that at the event, which also marked the third anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru, the ABVP was involved in raising the controversial slogans that are being cited to justify the sedition charge. We are of the firm opinion that protesting against state violence is a fundamental right that must not become vulnerable to arbitrary violation by governments, police and university administrations.

We believe that the colonial-era laws of sedition — already diluted and read down by the Supreme Court — are an embarrassment to India’s democratic principles. The criminalization of dissent in this case reveals how India’s current political leadership has been unable to respect diversity and guarantee the full legal rights of its people. Its political program imagines the citizen as upper caste, heterosexual, male, Hindu; its economic program necessitates a blind faith in neoliberalism; and its social program continually imagines an enemy – the Muslim, the Dalit, the Left. It is not surprising that a government so debilitated and blinkered by its ideological narrowness has invoked the charge of sedition and sent police forces into the JNU campus, an action reminiscent of the worst years of Emergency.

We are also distressed by views expressed in certain sections of the Indian media regarding the legitimacy of political activism in public universities. This argument claims that since central and state governments subsidize education in public institutions, it is the responsibility of beneficiaries to refrain from critiquing state policies and to solely prioritize their studies. We firmly reject this cost-benefit understanding of education as shallow, apolitical, and deeply reactionary. As the saying goes, ‘education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire’. The current administration and sections of the media would prefer students to remain uncritical of the violence of Brahmanism, communalism, and neoliberal capitalism. But the Rohiths of the world will keep lighting a fire and keep burning down bigotry. We believe that both public education and free speech are fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution, rights that have been earned through long struggle and rights that we will keep fighting for in India and elsewhere as we face systematic neoliberal onslaughts on dissent and education.

To our friends, colleagues and comrades in JNU, HCU, FTII and elsewhere, we stand with you in your resistance against state sponsored violence, which curbs any form of dissent on the one hand, and on the other, condones hate speech by Hindu nationalists. We believe that scholarship and the concomitant development of our critical faculties should be used in dreaming of and implementing a better, pluralistic and just society.
 

  1. Charlotte Giles, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies
  2. Snehal Shingavi, Associate Professor, Department of English
  3. Ramna Walia, PhD Student, Department of Radio-Television-Film
  4. Adolfo R Mora, PhD Student, Department of Radio-Television-Film
  5. Madiha Haque, MA Student, Department of Asian Studies
  6. Saif Shahin, PhD Candidate, School of Journalism
  7. Saleha Parvaiz, MA Student, Department of Asian Studies
  8. Rupali Warke, Phd Student, History Department
  9. Kathleen Longwaters, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies
  10. Rubi Sanchez, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies
  11. Claire Cooley, PhD Student, Department of Middle Eastern Studies
  12. Justin Ben-Hain, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies
  13. Afsar Mohammad, Senior Lecturer, Department of Asian studies
  14. Aniruddhan Vasudevan, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology
  15. JhuCin Jhang, PhD Student, Department of Communication Studies
  16. Julia Dehm, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Law
  17. Charlotte Nunes, UT English Graduate, Postdoctoral Fellow, Southwestern University
  18. Zack Shlachter, PhD Student, Department of History
  19. Seth Uzman, Undergraduate, Department of Mathematics, Department of Economics
  20. Abikal Borah, PhD Student, Department of History
  21. Charalampos Minasidis, PhD Student, Department of History
  22. Sam Lauber, Undergraduate, Department of Computer Science
  23. Heather Houser, Associate Professor, Department of English
  24. Robert Oppenheim, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies
  25. Barbara Harlow, Professor, Department of English
  26. Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera, PhD Student, Institute of Latin American Studies
  27. Tathagatan Ravindran, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology
  28. Prisca Gayles, PhD Student, Institute of Latin American Studies
  29. Jack Loveridge, PhD Candidate, Department of History
  30. Chloe L. Ireton, Department of History
  31. Luis Cataldo, undergraduate, Department of English
  32. Swapnil Rai, PhD Candidate, School of Communication
  33. Heather Hindman, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies
  34. Magdalena Saldaña, PhD Student, School of Journalism
  35. Danielle Kilgo, PhD Candidate, School of Journalism
  36. Kristen Hogan, Education Coordinator, Gender & Sexuality Center
  37. Robert Jensen, Professor, School of Journalism
  38. Ryan Sharp, PhD Student, Department of English
  39. Elizabeth Picherit, PhD Student, Department of English
  40. Regina Mills, PhD Student, Department of English
  41. Isaac McQuistion, Masters Student, Department of Asian Studies
  42. Hannah V. Harrison, PhD Student, Department of English
  43. Kristie Flannery, PhD Candidate, Department of History
  44. Omer Ozcan, PhD Candidate,Department of Anthropology
  45. Nikola Rajic, PhD Candidate, Department of Asian Studies
  46. Mohammed Nabulsi, JD Candidate, School of Law
  47. Jason Brownlee, Professor, Department of Government
  48. Noah De Lissovoy, Associate Professor, College of Education
  49. Martha Ann Selby, Professor and Chair, Department of Asian Studies
  50. Amrita Mishra, PhD Student, Department of English
  51. Morgan C. O’Brien, Ph.D candidate, Department of Radio-Television- Film
  52. Tupur Chatterjee, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Radio-Television-Film
  53. John Morán González, Associate Professor, Department of English
  54. Colleen Montgomery, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Radio-Television-Film
  55. Caitlin McClune, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Radio-Television-Film
  56. Shilpa Parnami, PhD Candidate, Department of Curriculum and Instruction
  57. Jinsook Kim, PhD Student, Department of Radio-Television-Film
  58. Abdul Haque Chang, PhD alum, Department of Anthropology
  59. Pete Kunze, PhD Student, Department of Radio-Television-Film

Citizens Committee for the Defense of Democracy on the JNU Situtation

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Guest Post by Citizens Committee for the Defense of Democracy

The Citizens Committee for the Defense of Democracy strongly condemns the clampdown in Jawaharlal Nehru University. We deplore the targeting of students and teachers and condemn the culture of authoritarian menace that the Central Government has unleashed.  We strongly believe that dissent is not sedition and invoking sedition laws against students, ordering the police to enter the campus and unlawfully arresting a student leader, issuing warrants against many others on charges of inciting violence, attacking students, teachers and arrested student in the court premises, are serious assault on the fundamental rights of the citizens of this country.  The right to dissent is fundamental to maintaining democracy and the recent developments have shaken the foundations of democracy. We condemn the indiscriminate use of the colonial law of sedition on dissenting voices.

The attack on JNU is an attack on our diversity, on public funding of universities and access to higher education for the common people. The vicious campaign of ‘tax-payers’ monies funding the anti-nationals’ is highly regressive and malicious.   It is only through public funding and reservation policies that access to higher education has been expanded for students from all backgrounds, especially girl students from poorer backgrounds. It is public funding which makes higher education accessible to many.

We are pained and angry that a public institution of higher learning has been attacked with such viciousness, systematically and calculatedly.  JNU offers a vibrant space for learning, questioning, debating and developing a political understanding of structural injustices.

We are extremely concerned that the police is completely turned into a silent spectator as students, teachers and activists are publicly assaulted and abused, and hate and violence is incited against agitating students.  The police is openly issuing such loaded statements, which law abiding citizens perceive as threatening. To disagree and question is every citizen’s right and the JNU students are only exercising their right, peacefully and with utmost restraint and civility.

We are particularly concerned about the safety of our young women and men students who are being intimidated by the University administration, police and the marauding mobs which have been unleashed on the students in the vicinity of JNU and in and around the Court where cases against accused student is being heard.

We deplore the labeling of “anti-national” of those who are exercising their democratic right of challenging the majoritarian orthodoxy.  We believe that this will render this country intellectually poorer if critical thinking is pushed to a space which is reserved for the enemy.

We condemn sections of the visual and print media for their open partisanship, irresponsible coverage, misreporting, and blacking out news and views of the striking students.

We feel it is time for all thinking people of this city to come together and raise our collective voices in defense of academic freedom, right to dissent and defend the spaces for democratic dissent.

We unequivocally demand that

All cases and charges should be withdrawn against all JNU students immediately and unconditionally. The matter should have been handled by a responsible committee internal to JNU, with a fair representation of teachers, rather than calling in the police.

The administration of JNU should be held accountable for dereliction of duty, collaborating with the Police in falsely charging the students, enabling the police to search university premises and hostels and arrest students at the expense of internal processes and without consulting the university faculty and office bearers. The University administration’s bowing to the government pressure compromised University autonomy with serious implications for the careers of students and prospects of pursuing degrees.
No police should be allowed to enter the campus and all plainclothes police be removed from the campus immediately.

No University premises including the hostels should be checked by anyone other than the university administration and only in the presence of the wardens.

Delhi police should restrain the menacing gangs roaming about in the vicinity of JNU intimidating the students, teachers and solidarity groups. We demand that rather than unleashing these mobs on the University community with a malicious intent, effective steps should be taken to prevent such mobs from indulging in mischief.

Police should act responsibly, performs its duty and ensures safety of the students, teachers and solidarity groups in courts and in public spaces and allow them to exercise their lawful rights of voicing their concerns.

Romila Thapar, Krishna Sobti, Harbans Mukhia, Harsh Mander, Navsharan Singh, Nalini Taneja, Asad Zaidi, Mangalesh Dabral, Subhash Gatade, Uma Chakravarty, Syeda Hameed; Sukumar Muralidharan, Prabir Purkayastha, Puneet Bedi, Rahul Roy, Saba Dewan, Urvashi Butalia, Tapan Bose, Nandita Narain, Peggy Mohan, Farah Naqvi, Neeraj Malik, Javed Malik, Jawrimal Parakh, Devaki Jain, Dinesh Mohan, Prabhat Patnaik, Bharat Bhushan, Dunu Roy, Jean Dreze, Tanika Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Warisha Farasat, Seema Mustafa, Farida Khan, Salil Mishra,

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