When the French philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre was to be arrested for civil disobedience, President Charles de Gaulle vetoed the move with the comment ''you don't arrest Voltaire.''
I am not sure if our authorities have heard of any of the names mentioned above, but they ought to know Ramachandra Guha, conscience-keeper of our times, and like Voltaire a supporter of civil rights and freedom of speech. The television visual of Guha being dragged away by the police was both depressing and inspiring. Depressing for what power can do to stifle dissent, and inspiring for the fact that unlike academics in their ivory towers, here was one who was willing to put his life and limb where his mouth is.
Will Bengaluru, the city he loves and lives in ever get over the shame of manhandling Guha with a police officer nearly punching him? Will the country?
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. ... the law of non-violence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by non-violence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment,” wrote Mahatma Gandhi, whose 150th birth anniversary this is.
Guha didn’t break any law, just or unjust. He stood by himself, carrying a poster of Ambedkar, and when a journalist came up, he answered questions. Suddenly, he was dragged away – and the rest of us are getting messages from around the world asking versions of “What is happening in our country?”
Guha, who has written a two-volume biography of the Father of the Nation, merely did what Gandhi would have done in the same circumstances. He, like millions of compatriots across the country, recognised the unjust laws – Citizenship Amendment Act taken in conjunction with the National Register of Citizens – that go against the grain of Indianness and the Constitution of the country.
Guha is 61, a world-renowned figure and could have been forgiven for restricting his protest to writing and speaking against the tyranny he sees. At a talk he gave the day before, he had said that people should protest peacefully and restore the pluralistic values on which the country was built. “Patriotism,” he said “is not voting in five years and then keeping silent.”
If this is how a well-known academic is treated, what hope do the ordinary citizens have that they will be listened to? Or that they matter at all?
Guha, of course, is not alone. Thousands around the country have protested, some of them creatively, like the students of the Indian Institute of Management who came out of their campus one by one (thus not breaking Section 144), carried blank placards (no rule broken here) and leaving their shoes out to show solidarity.
Yet Guha’s is probably the defining image of the protest. Things may or may not change. But when the grandchildren of the protesters ask, “What did you do to oppose tyranny, grandpa (or grandma)”, they can stand upright and answer with pride.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
