An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, part 2, final part
Repressive measures are counter-productive and only exacerbate the problem
If you refuse to prosecute criminals, then eventually criminals will run your country. Narendra Modi is known to have helped stir up the Gujarat riots of 2002, in which 1,044 people were killed. He is a thug who stirs up hatred towards the Muslims who live in India. But he has never faced punishment for his crimes, and so now he is the Prime Minister of India, and he is able to carry out his bigoted agenda on a terrifying scale.
Citizens of the USA should consider this a precedent as they consider how to deal with Donald Trump, and everyone who played a role in possibly sabotaging the election in 2020.
This essay from Arundhati Roy is from 2004 and yet she seems to know exactly what is coming. By looking with open, sober eyes at the decay of democracy in India, she was able to exactly compute where Indian democracy would be 17 years later.
All of us have the power to do this. We can look at the USA with honest eyes and see the erosion of those habits and customs and institutions that keep the political process at least somewhat accountable to the public.
Especially worrisome is when a government goes to war against its own people. This problem is worse in India than its been in the USA, at least in the sense that the USA has not declared an entire state rebellious since the 1860s, and in the 1860s it had good reasons for the declaration, and the agreement of the state government, which openly declared itself rebellious.
Still, it's also obvious, to anyone with sober eyes, that most of the police forces in the USA enforce one system of justice for whites and another system of justice for everyone else. And the basic unfairness of the two systems of justice helps enable further systems of unfairness, it helps the unfairness spread like a cancer to other social organs, to the job market and the housing market and the educational system.
And so it is true that fighting for the rights of everyone is the best way to protect our own rights. Fighting to ensure the system is fair for non-whites is the best way to ensure the system also works for whites. Because the alternative is a system unfair law enforcement, where arbitrary declarations can be used to attack anyone, even the whites. If a label such as "terrorist" is easy to give out, does not need to be proven, and can immediately rob a person of the right to defend themselves, then the government gains the power to neutralize any of its enemies, at which point the hope of an accountable political system is overthrown.
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire
By Arundhati Roy
©2004 by Arundhati Roy
Page 95-101
How Deep Shall We Dig?
Recently, a young Kashmiri friend was talking to me about life in Kashmir. Of the morass of political venality and opportunism, the callous brutality of the security forces, of the osmotic, inchoate edges of society saturated in violence, where militants, police, intelligence officers, government servants, businessmen, and even journalists encounter each other, and gradually, over time, become each other. He spoke of having to live with the endless killings, the mounting “disappearances,” the whispering, the fear, the unresolved rumors, the insane disconnection between what is actually happening, what Kashmiris know is happening, and what the rest of us are told is happening in Kashmir. He said, “Kashmir used to be a business. Now it’s a mental asylum.”
The more I think about that remark, the more apposite a description it seems for all of India. Admittedly, Kashmir and the Northeast are separate wings that house the more perilous wards in the asylum. But in the heartland, too, the schism between knowledge and information, between what we know and what we’re told, between what is unknown and what is assetted, between what is concealed and what is revealed, between fact and conjecture, between the “real” world and the virtual world, has become a place of endless speculation and potential insanity. It’s a poisonous brew which is stirred and simmered and put to the most ugly, destructive, political purpose.
...Over the last decade, the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces runs into the thousands. Recently several Bombay policemen spoke openly to the press about how many “gangsters” they had eliminated on “order” from the senior officers. Andhra Pradesh chalks up an average of about two hundred “extremists” in “encounter” deaths a year. In Kashmir in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated eighty thousand people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply “disappeared.” According to the records of the Association of Parents of Disappeared People (APDP), more than three thousand people were killed in 2003, of which four hundred and sixty-three were soldiers. Since the Mufti Mohammed Sayeed government came to power in October 2002 on the promise of bringing a “healing touch,” the APDP says, there have been fifty-four custodial deaths. In this age of hypernationalism, as long as the people who are killed are labeled gangsters, terrorists, insurgents, or extremists, their killers can strut around as crusaders in the national interest and are answerable to no one. Even if it were true (which it most certainly isn’t) that ever person who has been killed was in fact a gangster, terrorist, insurgent, or extremist - it only tells us there is something terribly wrong with a society that drives so many people to take such desperate measures.
The Indian state’s proclivity to harass and terrorize people has been institutionalized, consecrated, by the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which has been promulgated in ten states. A cursory reading of POTA will tell you that it is draconian and ubiquitous. It’s a versatile, hold-all law that could apply to anyone - from an Al-Qaeda operative caught with a cache of explosives to an Adivasi playing his flute under a neem tree, to you or me. The genius of POTA is that it can be anything the government wants it to be. We live on the sufferance of those who govern us. In Tamil Nadu, it has been used to stifle criticism of the state government. In Jharkhand thirty-two hundred people, mostly poor Adivasis accused of being Maoists have been indicted under POTA. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, the act is used to clamp down on those who dare to protest about the alienation of their land and livelihood rights. In Gujarat and Mumbai, it is used almost exclusively against Muslims. In Gujarat after the 2002 state-assisted pogrom in which an estimated two thousand Muslims were killed and one hundred and fifty thousand driven from their homes, two hundred eighty-seven people have been accused unto POTA. Of these, two hundred and eighty-six are Muslim and one is a Sikh! POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as judicial evidence. In effect, under the POTA regime, police torture tends to replace police investigation. It’s quicker, cheaper, and ensures results. Talk of cutting back on public spending.
In March 2004, I was a member of a peoples’ tribunal on POTA. Over a period of two days we listened to harrowing testimonies of what goes on in our wonderful democracy. Let me assure you that in our police stations it’s everything from people being forced to drink urine to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses to being beaten and kicked to death.
...It would be naïve to imagine that POTA is being “misused.” On the contrary. It is being used for precisely the reasons it was enacted. Of course, if the recommendations of the Malimath Committee are implemented, POTA will soon become redundant. The Malimath Committee recommends that in certain respects normal criminal law should be brought in line with the provision of POTA. There’ll be no more criminals then. Only terrorists. It’s kind of neat.
Today in Jammu and Kashmir and many northeastern states of India, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers but even junior commissioned officers and noncommissioned officers of the army to use force (and even kill) any person on suspicion of disturbing public order or carrying a weapon. On suspicion of! Nobody who lives in India can harbor any illusions about what that leads to. The documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape, and gangrape (by security forces) is enough to make your blood run cold. The fact that, despite all this, India retains its reputation as a legitimate democracy in the international community and among its own middle class is a triumph.
The Armed Forces Special Powers Act is a harsher version of the ordinance that Lord Linlithgow passed in August 15, 1942, to handle the Quit India Movement. In 1958, it was clamped on parts of Manipur, which were declared “disturbed areas.” In 1965, the whole of Mizoram, then still part of Assam, was declared “disturbed.” In 1972, the act was extended to Tripura. By 1980, the whole of Manipur had been declared “disturbed.” What more evidence does anybody need to realize that repressive measures are counter-productive and only exacerbate the problem?
Juxtaposed against this unseemly eagerness to repress and eliminate people is the Indian state’s barely hidden reluctance to investigate and bring to trial cases in which there is plenty of evidence: the massacre of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and the massacres of Muslims in Bombay in 1993 and in Gujarat in 2002 (not one conviction to date); the murder a few years ago of Chandrashekhar Prasad, former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University student union; and the murder twelve years ago of Shankar Guha Niyogi of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha are just a few examples. Eyewitness accounts and masses of incriminating evidence are not enough when all of the state machinery is stacked against you.