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On 22 January 2020, a motion was tabled in the European Parliament … It detailed what the CAA [Citizenship Amendment Act] was about… The resolution said, ‘The indivisibility of human rights, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, is one of the main objectives of the European Union in its relations with India.’ From here it laid out the case against the Indian government in such harsh terms as have not been seen by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).…
This sort of public hiding on human rights was not something the Indian government has received before. The MEA diplomat abroad is not trained to defend the country against such direct attacks, especially from institutions which it wants to be on the right side of, such as the organs of the European Union… It made the government squirm enough for it to try and block the resolution. What it succeeded in doing was to get the MEPs to table the motion but agree to a delay on the vote, which Modi feared, correctly, would be in favour of the resolution. This, the Members of European Parliament agreed to, putting off the vote for a session a few weeks down the road, which was then delayed by the COVID-19 epidemic. It remains dormant because the actions have ceased at the Indian end ….
[In India] Shaheen Bagh was the most prominent site of the protests but it was not the only one. The strength of the movement came from its spread and its numbers and the resolve…. In the face of what was by then a nationwide movement, the Modi government deprioritised the NRC from January… The threats to rid India of Muslims through the NRC went away and the termites and chronology phrasing was never repeated… The government simply stopped talking about the citizenship laws, and Hindutva instead turned to what it usually does when it is angered: violence against other Indians ….
An anti-CAA protest march near India Gate, New Delhi, December 2019.
The RSS is the civil society of majoritarianism…. Its affiliates, the ABVP, the Bajrang Dal, the Durga Vahini are also civil society groups. They do at the campus and neighbourhood level the same lumpen mischief that the BJP does in national politics…. The agenda is limited though the damage is immense.
The opposition to them must come from a civil society that pushes back not against them alone, but in favour of a general secular pluralism that our Constitution stands for. It must stand not just against the majoritarianism alone but for the wider liberal constitutional values. This is what must be strengthened. How? To illustrate this let us look at a recent example that touches our lives directly.
On 12 August 2020, the Indian Express reported (‘Asha workers protest at Jantar Mantar demanding better pay, face FIR’) on the protest of India’s six lakh Accredited Social Health workers. Paid ₹2,000 a month, this group of all-female workers are the ones doing contact tracing of COVID-19, while not been given protective clothing. They had gone on strike to demand better conditions for work… The report… said that they had been booked for unlawful assembly and an FIR filed....
Whom does it benefit that these women are given their rights? All of the nation. We cannot win over COVID-19 if those actually fighting it are saying they are handicapped in their fight. It is undeniable that their cause is just, and their demand is correct. But they are alone, and for asking for their rights they are persecuted by the Indian State.
This is a group that is standing up for its rights on its own. In another democracy such a large number of women in such a vital role at a time of a pandemic would generate public and media interest of a very high level. Why did this not happen in India? Even when our individual interest is aligned with a group’s, we did not extend it support. Why did we not? What might have happened if a large number of middle-class people had? This is something we have to ask ourselves and answer honestly….
We must try and take an action daily in favour of expanding our civil society. It doesn’t matter if the action is online, offline, a donation, attending a talk or even just learning about the new environment law and how it will affect India. Our actions mean something. Participation expands civil society.
It is through mass individual participation in everyday activism, through raising of voices, through funding just causes and funding organised civil society groups, through supporting progressive calls for engagement and supporting those who need that the Western democracies have become the open societies they are. It is our dream as well to be there, and most of us agree that we want an India that is prosperous and resembles those nations whose people have the most freedoms.
We are not alone in wanting this. The world also wants to see a secular and plural India and especially, that part of the world that the Indian State cares about. Civil society can use this global interest in our progress as a lever. The opportunities will continue to come, as Hindutva majoritarianism pushes ahead with its agenda.
Majoritarian intolerance in India was first flagged by the United States government officially in 2004. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) looked at the post-Godhra riots situation in Gujarat and recommended to the George W. Bush administration that Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government be classified as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ (CPC)… The following year, the Vajpayee government fell and the report, noting that Manmohan Singh had taken over, dropped India from the list. However, the issues raised in the report remained.
In March 2005, the Commission issued a statement encouraging the US State Department to prevent Modi’s planned visit to the United States, citing evidence presented by India’s National Human Rights Commission and numerous domestic and international human rights investigators of the complicity of Gujarat state officials in the mob attacks on Muslims. This was, of course, the famous visa ban on Modi, and he did not visit the US from then on, till he won the 2014 election.
On 28 April 2020, India was again marked as a country of particular concern, with five dozen references in the report (the highest in the 22-year history of the bipartisan body) …
It said the Modi government’s prejudice against India’s Muslims was showing through India’s actions on citizenship, cow slaughter, Kashmir and conversions. The report notes the Ayodhya ruling, and the conduct of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath. It recommended to US President Donald Trump that he designate India as CPC, ‘for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act’.
It wanted Trump to ‘impose targeted sanctions on Indian government agencies and officials responsible for severe violation of religious freedom by freezing those individuals’ assets and/ or barring their entry into the US’….
India’s official response to the report was quite breezy and brisk. It read: ‘We reject the observations on India in the USCIRF Annual Report. Its biased and tendentious comments against India are not new. But on this occasion, its misrepresentation has reached new levels. It has not been able to carry its own Commissioners in its endeavour. We regard it as an organisation of particular concern and will treat it accordingly.’…
Of course, this is interference in our internal affairs, but we have to accept that we brought it on. The Trump administration has little interest in human rights in India, and as such Modi should have had an easy pass. But even the USCIRF chair, Tony Perkins, who was nominated by the Republicans, weighed in against India. What has transpired in the USCIRF will not end with the releasing of the report recommending action against India.
Police try to stop protesting ASHA health workers in Visakhapatnam.
Unless the Modi administration shows great change of direction, India will figure again in next year’s report… This will give leverage to the activists and Indian civil society over a government that has thus far been dismissive and contemptuous of them and their work. It opens up for them the space to try and pressure the Modi government in a way that is not possible purely through politics locally or through the compromised justice system…
The stronger the pressure there is on the structure, the more likely it is to fragment in its opinion and the less likely it is for the government to push something through that is extreme. Civil society can and must mobilise so that this pressure on the government is kept up when it abandons secularism and pluralism.
The State in India has little interest in constitutionalism. No awards are given for it, and on the other hand, the judiciary and the system does not punish errant and often even criminal behaviour. The State can, for example, harass activists with bogus cases and there will be no punitive action against those who did the framing. Such things as wrongful detention, excessive use of force, harassment and malicious action by the State are not penalised.
Civil society must get the State to be more invested in constitutionalism. We have to ensure that where the State and its agents bend or break the law or the values of the Constitution, they are held to account and called out. These attempts may fail, and that is fine. Structural change requires construction at the foundation. Effort is the critical investment. Results will follow.
Constitutional space has been given to us. Even if it has been severely restricted over time, it exists. The space needs to be appropriated in a way that it has not been, and especially not been by the urban middle class. And it has to be expanded. We have to fray the ‘reasonable restrictions’, we have to unravel them, and we have to let the true meaning of the fundamental rights shine through.
Progress on rights is inevitable. History is with the progressives: the future is also with us. Conservatives seek to conserve a past that is not possible to hold on to. Change is inevitable and constant, and the arc of the moral universe is headed in the direction of progress on individual rights and dignity. Our task is to hasten the arc along on its path towards justice.
Extracted from Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here by Aakar Patel (Westland, December 2020).
