Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in the Indian Express.
Delhi’s Police’s investigation against students and activists in connection with the Delhi riots is pushing the Indian state into a long dark night of tyranny.
The Delhi Police, which initially took a battering during the riots, needs to burnish its image and regain salience. Otherwise it will be disintermediated by local politician/gangsters in working class areas. The question is, does it have the political nous to assert itself? Will the Union Home Ministry back it up?
Mehta's 'students' and 'activists' are a tiny minority of paranoid nutters whom the BJP have managed to pass off as Congress proxies. They have served their purpose by burying Congress & the Left.
The sad truth is, nutters of this sort will be killed by the majority if they continue to make a nuisance of themselves. Mehta & Co. are ruining the life-chances of their students by lying to them about 'tyranny' and how to fight it. The fact is, the anti-CAA agitation was useful to the Ruling Party which got a few more seats in Delhi. The big question is whether the Delhi Police can assert itself or whether power will slip away to local politicians. It is probable that the Home Ministry will back the police- as will the Courts, initially- because of Delhi's significance as the National Capital. On the other hand, riots in Delhi harm Kejriwal and make Yogi Adityanath look good by comparison. Thus, long term, this initiative will backfire.
Still, this is 'silly season' journalism. The country is facing an unprecedented crisis. The BJP has to be left on to get on with the dirty work of pushing through long overdue reforms.
The riots are a serious matter. All perpetrators must be credibly identified and subject to the law.
Not in this instance. The Police lost control. They have to tread carefully to regain credibility. Mehta & Co. can help them a little by painting them in diabolical colors. But only if they write in Hindi or other vernacular languages.
But instead, we are witnessing a project designed to crush civil society.
Mehta's type of civil society- i.e. paying 20 per cent commission to advocates for the poor rather than just transferring cash to them and cutting out the middle-man- turned out to be a noisome luxury. Crush it by all means. India needs a genuine opposition party at the Center. Virtue signalling cretins have accomplished nothing. Ten years ago, some may have thought India would be safely 'middle income' and so the tax base would be big enough to support a Welfare State with all the trimmings. Sadly, that turned out to be a pipe dream. But then, America and Britain and the EU now look very different. Majority appeasement is necessary to keep the wheels from falling off Democracy.
If our freedom is to be saved, we need to understand what is at stake in what is happening in Delhi.
I think senile academics will be free to go on recycling nonsense. But the State will cut back on subsidies to their students. 'Activists' will disappear from campuses where caste based politics of the provincial type will entrench itself.
Normally, in a society constituted by the rule of law, we should let the investigation run its course before pronouncing judgment.
No society is 'constituted by the rule of law'. Mehta has been living in a fool's paradise. That was cool twenty years ago when India was pretending it would soon be rich and property rights and contract enforcement and so forth would be world class. But why bother keeping up that pretence now? One might as well speak of the inevitable victory of the Proletariat.
But we are living in a world where the state, in partnership with the media, does not subscribe to this restraint.
India is a very poor country where the State can't do much and the Media scarcely matters. Still, both can survive by going with the flow or retreating to an ivory tower when that flow becomes too turbulent.
In case after case, it runs nightly media trials, destroying people’s lives and reputations.
Modi too was given a media trial and pronounced guilty. The trouble was that voters like the type of crime he was accused of.
The state uses investigations, leaked evidence, chargesheets as pretexts for establishing narrative dominance and to intimidate.
Indeed. The problem is that people the Government locks up become popular provided they are accused of things the voters want. Digvijay Singh, a veteran politician, was beaten on his home turf in the last election by a Hindu nun accused of anti-Islamic terrorism.
A young politician- like Hardik Patel- should be delighted to be locked up on charges which appeal to a particular vote block.
It is not interested in guilt or innocence. It is interested in demonstrating that it can destroy your life with impunity.
The one lesson Indian politics of the Twentieth Century taught politicians was that a spell of porridge is the best thing you can have on your CV.
It can declare you a terrorist, it can declare you a drug lord, and it can charge you under UAPA.
Having a number of murder and rape charges hanging over your head is a great qualification for getting elected. Jayalaitha was jailed for corruption. She would still be CM of Tamil Nadu if she hadn't passed away for medical reasons.
In the Delhi chargesheets, dozens and dozens of students and distinguished academics are facing exactly this prospect.
The cases will either be dismissed or drag on for decades. If these guys are serious about electoral politics, it boosts their credibility. On the other hand, because they are stupid, they will be used to split caste vote-banks in the manner of Kanhaiya Kumar in Begusarai. Interestingly, he is keeping his distance from Umar Khalid because Bihari Assembly elections are in the offing.
“The law will take its own course”, the state wants to say. But, in the meanwhile, let us show you what we can do to you.
This is better done by beating people to death.
How we can make an example of you so other intellectuals dare not speak.
This is silly. Plenty of intellectuals are NRIs. Okay, the small fry may not want the nuisance of attending Court, but for serious players the thing is a godsend.
The law should take its own course when the state is interested in law.
No. The opposite is the case. The Judiciary is supposed to be a check on the Executive.
But when the state is using law as an instrument of ideological and physical intimidation,
The State is supposed to physically intimidate criminals and would be criminals. It is perfectly proper for the Executive to have a political ideology.
Mehta's stupidity causes him to put forward a wholly paranoid thesis-
the phrase “let the law take its own course” becomes a cover to subvert our constitutional values.
Paranoia of this type subverts not just constitutional but also fundamental epistemic values. Mehta is unfit to teach even in a kindergarten.
What does the pattern of filing chargesheets suggest?
It suggests that the Police believe- or want the Court to believe- that there was a conspiracy to instigate riots in which policemen were killed.
It is following a script.
Mehta is following a script- but it is a paranoid one. It features abstractions- 'tyranny'- and is based on a false view of reality- 'Society is constituted by the Law'- whereas the police have a narrative involving actual human beings who may or may not have been in touch with each other. Thus the thing is justiciable. Paranoid nonsense, however, is not justiciable. It is useless.
The whole purpose is to argue that there is a liberal, left, Islamist conspiracy to embarrass and subvert the Indian state.
and kill police-men and innocent non-Muslims- that is why this case is important. Either the police get back in the driving seat or, the next time there is trouble in some working class area, the police will be disintermediated. The minority may take the initiative but, soon enough, the force of numbers will prevail.
The political class repeats this, the media parrots this and the police, as if on cue, frames the issues this way.
Which planet is Mehta living on? Politicians compete with each other. So do media parrots. Even Law Enforcement professionals compete with each other.
Tenured Professors, it is true, may go on repeating each others' paranoid lies. This is because they is less competition in their line of work.
Mehta & Co pretended that India wasn't a very poor country with an utterly shite intelligentsia. The spoke darkly of 'tyranny'. Students and Activists were supposed to run around shouting silly slogans to prevent Fascism from taking route.
The truth is India's economic future looks dire. Either Modi pushes through the needed reforms now or the thing will happen by default. 'Civil Society' will be fractionalised. The Administrative State will be disintermediated. Courts will be ignored.
The idea is not just to deflect attention from violence and discrimination, it is to declare any critic of the government a potential subversive.
Mehta & Co mistook anti-nationalism for a democratic protest.
It is to invent an enemy of the people, in students and intellectuals.
They are a nuisance certainly. The bigger problem is that they have shit for brains. India is very poor. It needs to raise productivity. But intellectuals like Mehta and their equally gormless students reduce productivity. Moreover, they harm the causes they espouse.
The state has diabolically shifted the emphasis away from investigation of the riots to delegitimising the anti-CAA protest.
Those protests were not legitimate. They were based on stupid lies. They helped the BJP and hurt Congress and the Left. Woke activism diabolically delegitimized the police. Then police men were killed. The majority showed it would slaughter the minority if it ran amok. Either the State can put the fear of God into the woke nutters or it gets disintermediated. The sort of ethnic cleansing which occurred when Nehru came to power in Delhi might recur. In 1992, what killed off the riots was the police opening fire. Either the State takes the lead in killing nutters or it will become irrelevant.
The Indian police has, in the past, a patchy record in riot investigations.
Fuck 'investigation'. Its job is to stop them happening. This is best done by shooting people and locking up the nutters preemptively.
Just think of 1984.
Do. Guess who won the biggest Lok Sabha majority in history? Killing aggressive minorities is what the vast majority of voters approves of. Extra-judicial slaughter in the Punjab is what contained the separatist threat. Civil Society and impartial 'Investigations' played zero part in restoring the status quo.
But there is something distinctive about the current conjuncture.
The Police have to re-establish their own credibility. That means credibility with the majority- not the minority. The problem it faces is that it may once again get a pusillanimous Police Chief who lets lawyers beat policemen with impunity. The next step is thugs shooting them. Then the majority slaughters the minority and chases it away. Local people can always be found to enter the University campuses and beat 'students' and 'intellectuals'. Chairman Mao brought the workers in from the factories to chase the University students into the countryside.
Usually, the police botch up investigations to protect powerful perpetrators.
The investigation does not matter. The thing will drag through the Courts for decades. Witnesses will turn hostile. If 'powerful perpetrators' kill police-men, however, they may themselves be shot while grabbing a gun from a policemen as is by law required.
This was often the pattern during Congress times.
The Courts are shite. The police have to choose sides. The convention is that it is the gangster who got elected who is supported against the one who didn't get as many votes.
Sometimes there is pressure to produce results. In the process, the police can sometimes round up some usual suspects. But what is happening in Delhi is of a different order.
Indeed it is. The police saw that they had been turned into an Aunt Sally by a cowardly Police Chief who was scared of the Media and was thinking of his post-retirement sinecures with Human Rights NGOs or whatever. Thus the police are going after both the local hoodlums as well as the high profile cunts who instigated the thing. Will they succeed? No. The Courts will ensure that nothing happens for the next three decades. So the police need to shoot a few people who supposedly grab guns off police-officers as is required by the law.
It is the use of police to round up or send signals to critics of the government.
Both the Ruling Party and Kejriwal benefit from these woke nutters running amok. The question is whether the Delhi Police can reassert itself. It is acting in a self-interested manner.
It is an ideological witch hunt.
It is the Police reasserting themselves against nutters who tried to use them as a punching bag.
This is being done by erasing the distinction between ideological positions and conspirators.
It is being done by fucking up those who fucked with the Police. That's how the coppers work. They may not prevail. After all, everyone hates them for good reason.
The general trend now seems to be that mere thought, or a speech advocating a position, can make you part of a conspiracy to incite.
This nutter has been denouncing anyone who is pro-Hindu, pro-India or even pro-good Governance. He is a worthless pile of shit. But he is not part of a conspiracy. I'm not saying that beating him viciously might not be satisfying. But it would be illegal. Also, why bother? His function is to show that Professors of useless subjects are useless.
This modus operandi was perfected in the Bhima Koregaon cases. There also the focus became not on the event, but targeting alleged ideological foes like Anand Teltumbde or Sudha Bharadwaj.
This silly man does not understand that the Maharashtrian Police is pro-Maratha. They can't be overtly anti-Mahar so they shift the focus onto senile Reds. They found a good way to curry favor with the majority community but, ultimately, will jump whichever way the State Government tells them. The Delhi Police, under the Union Home Minister, are politically orphaned. Can they assert themselves without IPS leadership? Or will they keep getting beaten up by lawyers- and then shot by the clients of those lawyers while their Commanders stand idly by? My guess is that the Courts will do what Indian Courts normally do- fuck things up for everybody.
The second is to erase the distinction between legitimate protest and conspiracy against the state.
This stupid cunt is pretending that things like the farmer's protests has been equated with sedition or terrorism. Mehta & Co have done a great job fucking up the electoral prospects of Congress & the Left. But this means no one- not even Kanhaiya Kumar- will speak up for the 'urban naxal' or 'anti-national' now. In other words, these 'useful idiots' are now considered useless by even the most cretinous of dynastic politicians or casteist parties. NGO funding too is drying up. Campuses are no longer safe spaces.
Any democratic society allows for peaceful protest.
But cracks down on nuisances.
You can also, at the margins, disagree about particular tactics. But the act of organising and coordinating a protest does not amount to subversion of the state.
Till policemen get killed. Once the majority is targeted, the minority is slaughtered in retaliation.
In the Delhi case, democratic protest is being deliberately confused with riots and subversion of the state.
Because policemen were killed. Non-Muslims were attacked but then retaliated massively. When a minority protests against the majority being more numerous, they get fucked up. That's how democracy works. It may pretend to be under the Rule of Law or it may denounce Judges as incompetent, corrupt, cretins. In India, we know that periodic ethnic cleansing and industrial scale extra-judicial killing is what keeps the show on the road.
Organising a protest is being confused with organising a riot.
Says a nutter who can't organize shit. What the Police are doing is self-interested. They were humiliated and killed. Either they get some measure of revenge or they lose salience- i.e. rents.
Third, there is a novel theory of instigation at work.
No there isn't. The Police- who aren't geniuses- see a link between the anti-Police atmosphere created by the woke nutters and the thugs who killed policemen. Since voters want to see the woke nutters get a bumboo up their butt, the police are on to a good thing. But they know they have to choose sides- which means smaller rents.
If you strongly argue that a particular policy was a subversion of constitutional values,
which is what Mehta is doing here
and some incident carried out by someone else follows, you are responsible.
So Mehta is responsible... for what? The fucker is completely useless yet is responsible for something or the other.
But if ministers and politicians instigate a chorus of “goli maaro saalon ko” it is some kind of allegorical defence of the rule of law. The definition of incitement is partisan beyond belief.
Beyond Mehta's belief, sure. But then the guy is a cretin. The fact is India spends money killing those who attack the Indian nation. 'Shoot the fuckers' is not 'an allegorical defence', it is what soldiers and cops get paid to do.
If you read the alleged confessions of students and unidentified witnesses, it will remind you more of Mao’s China than a democratic republic.
What about Xi's China? That's a good role model for India- at least for those of the majority community.
There is pressure on students to name and denounce their supposed ideological inspiration so that it can be presented to the world that the violence was the product of an ideological cabal.
Mehta thought India's hate-speech laws would only be used against those he disliked. But that's not how the Law works. Where there is violence, there is a prima facie case against instigators named by the guilty.
It is to deflect attention from the direct incitement provided by several BJP politicians.
No. It is in the interest of the BJP to highlight the direct role of its politicians in promoting a spirit of self-defence and resistance to an evil, murderous, anti-national minority. That's how politics work. Your side eulogises as inspirational those the other side castigates as instigators.
Think of the appalling human costs. Dozens of young people, whose politics you may not agree with, but whose only crime was to believe that this country could be better and risk something for that belief, will now be charged as if they were terrorists.
That's good for them if they are serious about electoral politics. It shows they put 'skin in the game'. Like Sadhvi Pragya, they may end up in Parliament.
It does not matter whether it is Sharjeel Imam or Umar Khalid or Devangana Kalita.
Yes it does. Imam and Khalid could get a career out of this more splendid by far than that enjoyed by either's father. Kalita was part of 'Pinjra Tod'- break the cage- and, obviously, the Laws of Comedy prescribe a jail cell as the funniest place for that parrot.
It is a trap to think about the differences between them at this point,
For genuine thinkers, thinking about empirical differences is not a 'trap'. It is the high road to utility.
when the state has declared that thought is a crime, protest is subversion.
and the year is 1984 and your TV screen is watching you.
The point is to send every young person a message: Choose between democratic protest, thinking or your life. The message is chilling.
But no such message exists. Young Indians know that jail time- or at least a half dozen murder or other such criminal cases- is a good thing for politicians. Look at Hardik Patel!
I happened to be reading Professor Apoorvanand’s incandescently brilliant forthcoming book on Prem Chand, a deep meditation on the meaning of being human, when I heard he has been named in the chargesheet. He is one of India’s finest scholars of literature. He has been associated with the Left, but is a deeply Gandhian figure. His politics has been devoted to the pacification of violence. He also has a kind of absolute unconditional concern for others that Gandhi demonstrated. In a climate where even decent liberals run away from Muslim political figures, contortedly trying to find the right kind of Muslim to assuage their conscience, he openly embraced Umar Khalid as someone who was like his son. His concern for students is exemplary.
The guy is a Bihari Hindi speaker. These charges could be the making of him. On the other hand, if he'd killed or raped a few people of a different caste, he'd already be a Minister. Like Yogendra Yadav, Apoorvanand needs to be built up a little to split AAP votes in select Delhi wards. The Delhi Police aren't geniuses but they aren't completely stupid.
The idea that he can be interrogated by Delhi Police, named in a riots chargesheet and the shadow of UAPA hangs over him (like many others) should disconcert you.
No it shouldn't- unless you are in the same line of work, in which case you need to distribute bottles of whiskey to SHOs till you can figure out a way to get charge-sheeted yourself.
It should disconcert you that Kapil Mishra can tweet “In Delhi Umar Khalid, Tahir Hussain, Khalid Saifi, Safoora Zargar, Apoorvanand type people planned and murdered. They engaged in a 26/11 type terrorist attack. These terrorists, killers, should be hanged. Congratulations to Delhi Police.”
Mishra, a typical professional agitator of the 'Civil Society' type, was with AAP. He joined the BJP after falling out with Kejriwal. He probably has inherited beef, from his Mum- Dr. Annapurna Mishra- with Apoorvanand. The caste-region dynamics in North East Delhi is pretty complicated.
Whose script is being followed? And congratulations indeed, Delhi police. Those who really incite roam free. But all of us who saw the Constitution as a site of hope are potential terrorists now.
Will Mehta be charge-sheeted? No. He must up his game. Start tweeting in Hindi. Maybe come out with a cop-killer rap video. That would be cool.
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