Iceberg democracy: How the BJP has tried to use JNU to undermine the Rohith Vemula protests

Several Dalit students have committed suicide before Rohith Vemula’s act of self-annihilation. However, Vemula’s articulate suicide note, combined with the fact that he was an aspiring scientist, brought a sickening realisation to its readers that the talented young person could have been anything he chose to be. As he said in more evocative words, he just happened to have been born and would not be allowed to be anything but a Dalit in India. The resulting solidarity extended beyond Dalit rights groups, not because of a sudden transformation in the Indian public, but because by being self-avowedly Dalit and a distinctive voice, Vemula forced readers to recognise that their universities are often places where hope comes to die.

The support for Vemula and the desire for justice is therefore, not a sign of very radical politics. It is a simple recognition that bright students like him deserve their due, and that Dalit students among others, are denied that routinely. Despite the unseemly attempts to challenge his official caste status after his death, forcing his mother to narrate her story publicly, and the justifications of suicide by ministers, the demand for justice remained and was taken up by students around India.

It is disconcerting for groups like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, to countenance the growing solidarity around Vemula’s death. After all, the BJP has inherited a burgeoning middle class that it thought had agreed to limit their definition of democracy for the security of a lifestyle shift. The newly minted middle class agreed to look away while some intended violence was carried out, as in Chhattisgarh where mineral-rich land is wrested from its inhabitants, and some seemingly unintended, as with farmer suicides prompted by their debt burden, for the sake of “development”.

In the spotlight

Vemula’s individuality, however, articulated in English, momentarily lifted the phenomenon of Dalit deaths out of their usual representation as an anonymous and dreary inevitability. It didn’t help the ABVP’s case that both the Hyderabad police and the National Commission for Scheduled Castes challenged its allegation that Vemula and his associates had attacked the members of the right-wing students organisation. That allegation had led to the suspension of the Dalit scholars since August 3, 2015, implicating the organisation and its supporters in the chain of events that led to Vemula’s suicide.

The only way to challenge this was to put the liberal response from the Indian public to the test to see if the support to Dalits evaporated when the rights of Kashmiris are added to the mix. The strategy is quite clear – students beaten in Delhi for protesting Vemula’s death may evoke solidarity, but turning a protest over the hanging of Afzal Guru, who was executed for his role in the 2001 Parliament attack, into a witch-hunt could dissipate that. Dalits as exceptional students may stray into the national fold, but Kashmiris represent the outer limit of what a generalised notion of human rights will tolerate. The combined strategy of physical assault by “unknown people”on students and journalists at the Patiala House court on Monday, and, not least, verbal assaults on students in the newsroom by a few channels have provided a feast of violence over the last few days.

In this dramatic staging of violence, what is at stake evidently is citizenship. As the heady pact between the BJP and its voters begins to lose its shine, the party predictably needs to escalate violence to polarise Indian voters. This pact to reshape citizenship by sharpening the divide repeatedly between citizens and others through violence is not often spelt out. We owe much therefore, to the honest judgment in the Afzal Guru sentencing that said that “the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender”, linking Guru’s hanging forever to the conditions of our citizenship. The pact we forged over the last 50 or 60 years keeps our regular walks relatively free of violence, and in turn we don’t inquire too closely into what happens on the militarised edges of our iceberg democracy, and we won’t ask too much about those who sink below the line where bodily sustenance and political rights begin to dissolve.

The new Indian middle class may want to seize back its intellectual faculties from the tele-bludgeoning it gets daily, to recognise that a government that has adopted a modified fascism as its central ideology will not always need its support and will not secure its privileges forever. While deliverables in the form of goods may still arrive, even the rights that secure our aspirations and daily comforts, which are all that we currently desire, are not usually on the agenda of fascist governments. Sections of the media may parrot the party line that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a fringe element, but the political confidence enjoyed by lynch mobs in the heart of middle-class neighbourhoods is making middle-class India less of a cosy haven than it once was.

We are complicit

The shrinking of democratic rights even at the tip of the iceberg is of our making. If we imagine that the rape, torture and killing of Kashmiris is permissible damage to sustain some abstract jingoistic narrative about India, or that the denial of basic dignities to the Dalit-Bahujan is of their making, those trade-offs can also be applied at will to those we imagine are on the blameless upper slopes of our political class.

The daily enactment of the lynch mob in certain television newsrooms helps prepare a public to tolerate and enjoy higher and higher levels of violence if the victims are portrayed as falling outside its stifling and self-congratulatory moral and political codes.

It is worth recalling that much of the protest over the hanging of Afzal Guru and Mumbai bomb blast convict Yakub Memon emphasized the disregard of points of procedure and rights that are written into the law. Once public opinion has decided that “anti-nationals” do not deserve the regular working of the law, there is not a lot else in place to protect anyone identified as a public enemy. The logic of the witch-hunt and mob justice has allowed for the arrest of the president of the JNU Students Union Kanhaiya Kumar, not even for shouting slogans, but for being present at an event where they were shouted; the arrest of Delhi University professor SAR Geelani (already arrested in the Parliament attack case, tortured, acquitted, shot at after acquittal, and now rearrested) for booking a hall and being an organiser of a similar event at the Press Club in Delhi; the charge of contempt against Arundhati Roy for an article she wrote criticising the Afzal Guru judgment while defending the disabled Delhi University professor, GN Saibaba; and the incarceration of Saibaba himself who is losing basic mobility and functions as his rights as a disabled prisoner are denied to him. The list, as we know, extends far back, to before the election of this government into power, for various governments in varying proportions have adopted authoritarian practices and modes of thinking. Having fascism as a central ideology of governance, however, is, predictably enough, turning everyday life into a high-speed action film.

While students and teachers in Delhi are probably assembling support to deal with the slew of cases being filed against them, a generation has received a speedy political education,and this one did not come free either. From the time a large student body moved into the streets to protest the 2012 Delhi gang-rape, they have found themselves colliding with the police and the state over basic rights. As students carry posters of Vemula in the campaign to free the JNU student union president, and assert their right to speak of Kashmir, they have refused to sustain the lies of those at the top of the iceberg.