Ruchika Joshi on what India can learn from America

Ruchika Joshi is a young 'development professional' working in Delhi. Her recent article in Scroll.In gives us an insight into how the younger generation of 'Civil Society activists' see India. What is worrying is that they think India is a very rich country like America not a poor country like Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Ms Joshi writes-

Over the past week, two visuals have dominated US headlines. The first was a video showing a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black American man named George Floyd as he repeatedly pleads, “I can’t breathe.” He died shortly after. The second is of police in riot gear aggressively confronting protesters who took to the streets across the US in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.

Joshi does not add that looters took the opportunity to run amok burning down buildings and attacking police men. This will benefit Donald Trump and hurt Democratic politicians like New York's De Blasio. Furthermore, these riots show Obama in a bad light. Why did he do nothing for 8 years as President? What became of the 'Task Force' he set up? Why did he fritter away his political capital on things like the Iran deal- which has been completely reversed- rather than enact the sort of measures Biden is now talking about? 

For Indians who witnessed the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens this past winter, the similarities between the events in the two countries are striking – as are the differences.

There are no 'similarities'. It is a fact that the police disproportionately kill African Americans. It is not a fact that the CAA bill stripped any Indian of citizenship.
We had thought that the anti-CAA agitation would morph into a broad based 'Janata Morcha'  which would include farmers and trade unions and tribals and Dalits and so forth. But, it was either wholly Muslim or else merely a tool of the ruling party in the State. The net effect of the Shaheen Bagh protests was that Congress and the Left was wiped out in the Delhi Assembly elections. The BJP made some gains and would have made more had the riots happened before polling day.

To begin with, there is a notable semblance in the repression facing Muslims in a Hindu-majority India with that experienced by black people in the predominantly white US.

This is nonsense. Muslims have ethnically cleansed Hindus wherever they are in the majority. Hindus have not done anything similar since 1948. Unlike America, where Blacks were slaves, Muslims were the rulers at one time in India. There is a history of Muslim persecution of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians. There is no history of African Americans repressing White Americans. 

The protests in the US over the week have been fuelled by anger over a growing list of black Americans who have died from police brutality – among them, Eric Garner as he was breaking up a fight, Tamir Rice as he was playing in a park, Philando Castile as he was returning home from dinner and Breonna Taylor as she was asleep in her bed.

Garner was not 'breaking up a fight'.  Castile had a gun in his car. Tamir Rice had a toy gun. Taylor was killed when her boyfriend opened fire on police officers. These were wrongful deaths. But why didn't Obama changed the laws so as to force the police to adopt safer tactics?

In December 2019, as the protests against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens were gaining momentum in India, the police brutally lathi-charged a group of Muslim university students and tear-gassed libraries and study halls in New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia.

Why? Because that University was a hot-bed of anti-national activity. There was no popular discontent with this outcome. The majority of people in Delhi hate Muslim terrorists and seditionists for very good reason. 

The nationwide protests against the current government’s citizenship initiatives erupted against the backdrop of growing violence against Indian Muslims in recent years, sometimes directly by the police, at other times enabled by the silence of the authorities.

This is not true. The protests were based on a lie- viz. that Muslims were being stripped of citizenship by the CAA bill. No mention was made of police violence against Indian Muslims. 

Along with the shared recognition of police brutality in India

There is no such 'recognition'. There is only the lie that the CAA bill strips Muslims of citizenship.

and the US, there is also a shared sense of collective resistance

This is wholly untrue. There may be Muslim 'collective resistance' but when Muslims attack the police and their non-Muslim neighbors, they get disproportionately slaughtered- unless they are the majority in which case non-Muslims run away. 

The protest imagery coming in from the US, of crowds surrounding police vehicles and powerful graffiti on the walls, is being posted on social media platforms in India with the slogans “Jai Bhim” and “Hum Dekhenge” – rallying cries of the anti-caste and anti-Hindutva movements.

But this has the effect of consolidating the Hindu vote- including that of most Dalits- behind the BJP.

In both countries, there is an undeniable affirmation of the possibilities of collective resistance against a violent and discriminatory state.

In India, the BJP benefits from such shenanigans. In America, it may be that Trump will benefit. However, Biden may be offering a comprehensive 'New Deal' package attractive to working class voters. Reform of policing may be part of that package. If so, we can only hope that he wins.

However, there are three striking differences in the social contexts of India and the US.

There is only one striking difference between India and the US. India is poor and similar to its poor South Asian neighbors. America is rich. 

First, unlike in the US, where the considerable majority of white Americans oppose the injustices experienced by black Americans, a much smaller proportion of India’s Hindu majority recognise and take issue with the discrimination faced by the Muslim minority.

This is nonsense. Americans don't want their tax dollars to be spent on trigger happy cops. Hindus don't believe Muslims are discriminated against. They don't want to have them as neighbors because of a well founded fear that Muslims may run amok, because of something which happened hundreds or thousands of miles away, till they are slaughtered. 

Even members of the marginalised Hindu castes who perceive themselves to be the absolute minority have sided with the Hindu elite in order to be included in the Hindutva-driven growth agenda.

Dalits hate Muslims for good reason. They have been slaughtered by them often enough.  Look what happened to J.N Mandal and his Namasudra caste-fellow  after they foolishly decided to back the creation of Pakistan! They were robbed, killed, and chased out of the country.

This was made clear from the manner in which the Bharatiya Janata Party was able to consolidate its Hindu vote bank by alienating India’s Muslim community – a decisive strategy that helped it win the past two national elections.

Nonsense! Muslims don't matter. Hindus vote for the party they think will deliver better governance. This includes cracking down on crazy anti-nationals and terrorists of all descriptions.

As new caste identities and alliances are forged, the question of who is discriminated against and by how much is continuously contested in India – a marked contrast to the relatively more consolidated social view of the marginalised status of black Americans in the US.

There is competition to secure affirmative action, but Muslims too get some crumbs in this respect. In America, the experience of the Obama Presidency confirms that African American leaders see their community as having to reform itself and rise up by its own efforts. They are suspicious, for good reason, of sops offered by 'White Liberals'. Under Obama, discriminatory sentencing did go down and there was a 'Task Force' to improve policing. But Obama's message emphasized the need for introspection and internal reform rather than some big structural change to be brought about by the Federal Government.

Second, the deep-rootedness of discrimination against Indian Muslims in social norms, abetted and normalised by the majority, means that the active role played by the state in maintaining the repressive status quo in India is of a different nature than in the US.

India is poor. The State can extract only ten percent of GDP. It can't do much repression. When push comes to shove, the majority can and does kill and chase away refractory minorities. 

While there has been an undeniable doubling down on anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions by the present government, historically the need for such explicit state-ordered violence has been lower.

In other words, you can trust the majority to slaughter the minority if it runs amok. 

Instead, Muslim oppression – including physical violence – is maintained by Hindutva perpetrators bolstered by a silent state.

You don't have to be 'Hindutva' to kill Muslims if they run amok. It is a matter of self-preservation. The biggest ethnic cleansing of Muslims occurred when Nehru was Prime Minister.

The US, on the other hand, has a rich history stemming from the civil rights movement in the 1960s that identifies and codifies discriminatory acts, not just in law but in social norms.

Why does the US have this? The answer is because it is rich. The Federal Government has enormous resources. When the President decides to tackle a problem- like Jim Crow laws- he has the money power and the armed might to ensure the thing happens. If Obama chose not to go down this road it must be because he didn't think the problem of bad policing was important enough. After all, it is African Americans who are at the receiving end of most African American violence. They prefer it, if a few of the bad guys are shot by the police or put away for life.  Similarly Indian Muslims prefer to see terrorists and anti-national nutters killed or locked up. This makes them safer.

This, paradoxically, necessitates a greater degree of state force to preserve white privilege.

Nonsense! Rich countries have more 'state force'. In a poor country, where less than one percent pay income tax, 'state force' is thin on the ground. Kashimiri Muslims ethnically cleansed Hindus from the Valley. The State could not change this outcome. On the other hand, when crazy terrorists run amok, there are plenty of people available to carry out extra judicial killing till the problem is solved.

Black Americans are often isolated through false or petty accusations, to create a space that allows prosecution under the garb of law and order, and then attacked violently.

But there is also a lot of 'black on black' crime. The 'privileged' move to gated communities and can keep themselves safe. The ghettos are left to stew in their own juices.

The past week’s protest cries of “stop police brutality” are an echo of systemic discrimination maintained by unchecked access of white Americans to the tools of state violence.

Such 'tools' don't matter if you can hire private security guards and, in any case, have plenty of guns and ammo. 

This was evident in another video that went viral around the same time as George Floyd’s murder, featuring a white woman in New York named Amy Cooper. In the clip, she can be seen calling up the police and claiming that she was being threatened by an “African-American” man in Central Park, when all he had done was ask her to put her dog on a leash as the rules required.

So what? The woman was a nutter. She has since been sacked from her job with a Merchant Bank. There are plenty of such people every where. Dom Moraes called the police because his Muslim neighbor had a lot of people praying on his lawn. The police provided Moraes, a senior journalist, with a security detail. But they didn't stop the prayers because Indians consider prayer to be a good thing- not a public nuisance. Finally, Moraes got tired of the police guards hanging around and sent them packing. He was a deeply silly man.

Third, there is also a difference in the degree of how much police force is considered acceptable.

Considered acceptable by whom? People like Ms Joshi? But she represents a vanishingly small proportion of even the educated class in India. Who gives a toss what she finds 'acceptable'? The crazy woman thinks India is comparable to America! 

India remains entrenched in feudal, caste and religion-based identities that exist alongside a tenuous set of fundamental rights guaranteed to the individual by the Constitution.

India remains a very very poor country much of which is caught in a Malthusian trap. The Constitution is mere window dressing. It can be, and is, interpreted any which way by the Bench.

Society at large doesn’t give prominence to the value of individual liberty in India in the same way as it does in the US.

Society at large is as poor as shit. It gives prominence to getting a little food and clean drinking water and being kept safe from terrorists and criminal gangs.

The space for negotiating civil rights for individuals is more constrained and therefore violence deployed to curtail individual liberty is considered more acceptable.

There is some small pretence in New Delhi that some 'negotiation' is going on. But it is just a pretence. If people don't believe the police will beat criminals, they do it themselves.

Given the weak civil rights framework and deeply entrenched discriminatory social norms, what can Indians do to create the space for resistance against repressive majoritarian politics?

Get rich. Raise productivity. Stop pretending there is someone with whom you can negotiate Pie in the Sky and Castles in Spain for marginalized communities. 

To begin with, we need a new imagination of political organisation – one that is comfortable with constituting and re-constituting unorthodox alliances of social groups and contradictory aspirations in the service of achieving higher ideals.

The old imagination gave us the fiasco of Pinjra Tod and Shaheen Bagh. The new imagination will be equally foolish if it begins by saying 'look, Americans are doing x. We too should do x though we are as poor as shit.'

It can be argued that the significant scale of the protests against the citizenship initiatives in India was also a reaction to some Hindus perceiving a threat to their own freedoms: if citizenship could be threatened for Muslims in India, why couldn’t the voice of the Hindu middle class in the matters of governance and privilege be curbed down the line?

This is utterly mad. CAA did not take citizenship away from anybody. It gave it to some refugees fleeing Islamic persecution. No doubt, some stupid people, like Ms Joshi, may have worried that the Government would confiscate her nice American teddy bear and force it into an arranged marriage with a Hindu stuffed animal. 

Already, Hindutva groups associated with the ruling party, vocal about violence against Muslims, have been increasingly vociferous about curbing women’s rights.

Nonsense! Joshi is making this shit up.

The visuals of the police firing tear gas in a university library in the national capital, served to further diminish trust in the government’s ability to maintain law and order by at least a faction of the majority.

Rubbish! Attacking a Muslim University which is busy spawning a new generation of Islamic State nutters is considered a good thing. It improves the Law and Order situation. 

These self-regarding motives do not have to be detrimental to the bigger project of building a more just society.

To build things you need resources. That means raising productivity. But to raise productivity you have to disintermediate stupid 'activists' who think India is as rich as America. Sack worthless 'development executives'. Get girls from the countryside into big factory dormitories so their productivity can go up. Don't send them to Amdekar University so as to become jhollawallah gobshites. 

If anything, they provide a political space to leverage different, often antithetical, identities towards equitable policy.

What 'political space' is Joshi talking about? One in which India is as rich as America and stupid people like her can 'negotiate' things with a Government whose coffers are overflowing with hard currency? 

Since the end of the Cold War, political entities around the world have offered a vision of a better society based on unbridled economic growth that is in harmony with humanitarian ideals.

No. What has happened is that China has risen up by getting rural girls into big factory dormitories in the same manner that Japan and South Korea did. Humanitarian ideals can go hang. 

But for the majority, this political rhetoric of liberal democracy has not been perceived to have brought an actual improvement in their material and social lives.

But it has always been the case that 'money talks, bullshit walks'. There may have been a time when some young people thought it was a good idea to saddle themselves with student debt to get advanced degrees in bullshitting. But they now know this was a terrible mistake. Indians too must learn that a subsidized MA in some worthless shite makes both its holder and the nation poorer not richer. 

Instead, it has paved the way for right-wing governments in the US, in India, and in many other countries, to come to power promising that they would not be “held back” by abstract values and would deliver real gains for the majority.

Nonsense! The Left-Liberals were just a 'circular firing squad' to which nobody paid any attention whatsoever. Their 'long march through the Institutions' ended in utter irrelevance. 

Against this backdrop, any emancipatory politics will need to look for pragmatic compromises.

But 'emancipatory politics' is just bullshit. It can't look for anything because shit does not have eyes. It can merely lie prone stinking up the place. 

It must construct alliances based on lived realities and practical aspirations of people in service of egalitarian goals.

So bullshit must make an alliance with dog turds. That will ensure egalitarian outcomes.

By contrast, if people like Ms Joshi wanted poor Indian girls to have a better life they should be looking at how to raise their productivity. Indeed, they themselves could make money out of it. The thing would be self-financing. 

It is important to recognise that in addition to the support by some Hindus for the protests against the citizenship initiatives led by the Muslim community, the other front of opposition came from the people in Assam and Tripura who viewed those moves as a threat to their livelihoods and identity.

The North East wants to send migrants from the plains packing. But they also like killing each other. So the place will remain troubled. 

While the Shaheen Bagh-style protests across India were characterised by liberal ideals,

If by 'liberal ideals' you mean 'stupid lies like 'Muslims will be stripped of citizenship by CAA' then sure. 

the protests in the North East were driven by suspicion of purported Bangladeshi immigrants.

Actually, the indigenous people want all migrants gone so they can concentrate on killing each other in time honored fashion.

Protestors argued that indigenous communities would be undermined and public resources would be burdened if so-called illegal immigrants were allowed to gain Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act.

But a deal could be done with them by gerrymandering constituencies so their leaders could monopolize the spoils of office.

Despite their incongruent motivations, a pragmatic alliance forged between the two groups of protestors could provide the political opportunity to subvert the anti-Muslim design of the government’s citizenship initiatives.

This situation was created by the Guwahati High Court and the Supreme Court's Nationality Register. Modi and Shah very cleverly split the opposition to it with an eye to challenging Mamta in West Bengal. The Left-Liberals rose to the bait and some poor Muslim women swallowed their lies. But Shaheen Bagh was a failure. It helped the BJP get a few more seats in the Delhi Assembly. Congress lost its deposit in most cases.

But such an approach to uphold minority rights must also be prepared for a kind of tenuousness that comes with flexible group identities and potentially contradictory motivations.

Such an approach to 'uphold minority rights' is mere virtue signalling which has a negative, not positive, effect on desired political outcomes. 
'Flexible group identities' means pretending you are something you are not.

The North East and Hindu groups that opposed the citizenship initiatives along with India’s Muslims may be at odds on other issues, sometimes even to the detriment of emancipatory goals.

There are no Hindu groups which oppose giving citizenship to non Muslims fleeing Islamic oppression. This has been the settled policy of the GoI since 1948.

But that is an outcome that needs to be anticipated and addressed by seeking new alliances.

With whom? Let me guess- disabled transgender people with recovered memories of anal probes administered by Space Aliens in Flying Saucers.

The BJP effected this kind of social engineering to change the course of Indian politics.

No. The BJP provided better governance than any other constituent of the 'Janata Morcha' and thus became the default National Party after Rahul Baba refused to step up to the plate. 

So can others.

Even the Communist party can endure if it is meritocratic and gets things done. Look at Shailaja- Kerala's Health Minister. She was a High School Science teacher before entering politics and rising through the ranks. Today, people all over the world have heard of her. Why? Because she is good at her job. Screw 'social engineering'. All we ask for is competent administration. 

In the past few days, many Americans on the right side of history have taken the knee to protest George Floyd’s killing;

and to signal their virtue and 'wokeness'

reclaiming the very imagery of his death. That is the need of the hour: to take tools of oppression and turn them into resistance.

If you believe India is actually a rich country like America, sure, take a knee, wear a cowboy hat, drive your chevvy to the levy where good ol' boys are drinking whiskey and rye. 

The opportunity to build a better, more equitable India, lies in leveraging the numerous fluid identities of its people,

e.g Ms Joshi's own secret identity as Batman

resolving any discrepancies in group aspirations as they emerge on the way to achieving higher ideals.

Very true! The Justice League of America must resolve discrepancies in group aspirations with Marvel's Avengers so that they can jointly achieve the high ideals of Truth, Justice and the American Way.