Witch-Hunt in the Saffron State ~ Why Jignesh Mevani Must be Released

I have finally garnered the courage to listen to the interview I had a chance to conduct with Jignesh in December, 2020. It was supposed to be a telephonic interview, and I was impatiently walking around the drawing room in the apartment in South Kolkata I used to live in back then. Jignesh had agreed to speak in context of class, caste, cultural activism and the state of India's politics (in decay) back then to help with the process of writing an article on how one could palpate the cruder images of the class-caste dialectic through the lens of protest theatre and cinema. The conversation was fluid, humourous and I remember distinctly how it had later become a trend to joke about being witch-hunted by the Modi regime in the coming months. But that was what it was back then: a joke. I remember asking a question about Gauri, knowing how the two had been very fond of each other from another interview I had conducted with Kavitha Lankesh after Gauri's assassination in 2017. Jignesh would joke about how Gauri was his "imposed mother" having imposed herself as the guardian figure who would enjoy commanding him and Kanhaiya (Kumar), and driving him herself right from the airport if he every visited Bangalore. At this point, all I feel is a sharp sense of pain when I am compelled to recall the details about Gauri's assassination, how Umar had to finish writing his PhD thesis in prison, and has been incarcerated for the last five years, and how the Assam police just arrested Jignesh this week. None of it strikes me as particularly surprising. The only trouble that memories exude is associativity. I have grave trouble making sense of the terror of this regime at a very personal level. And who does not know how political the personal is? 

I grew up in what Nabarun Bhattacharya called "a valley of death" and "a carnival of joy for the butchers". As a woman born in a country torn apart by war, by genocide, by riots, by violence, I have known from much too early on how I had no country, and would never have one - as long as it was not embodied in a body of resistance of what now appears to be an authoritarian network of corporate fascists. It made me realise, in flesh and blood, how the apolitics of deafening silence is complicit of a war crime. It takes little intervention to find out how you cannot debate fascists intellectually while they oust Amnesty International out of the country and continue to lynch people to death and bulldoze homes and rape and slaughter and wreck everyone they identify to be an otherised entity. It is the choices we make in such times that puts us trivial creatures into historical context. And it isn't unknown to mankind how "history throws its empty bottles out of the window" and how "we do not remember; we rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten", but it only highlights how even entities like historicity that apparently sound anonymous and impersonal and passive are only comprised of people. It is the activity in passive portrayal of semantic order that we forget the idea and the vulnerability of meaning. It is this meaning now that we must chase, in times like this, times struck by war, bloodshed and witch hunts. 

As much as I do believe that a good many of us have been blessed with a fairly resilient network of neurons, this once, I am struggling to make myself believe that the fascist police state, an abomination of a government and a psychotic circus in the name of a democracy has managed to do this, after all: managed to, as Anand (Patwardhan) puts it, "kidnap" a member of the legislative assembly in the middle of the night, fly him to a different state, deny bail and once bail has been granted, re-arrest him on a basis of a plethora of what we all know is a bunch of false charges. To whoever is reading this post, I must admit it is not an academic, jargon-loaded, reflexive critique of the saffron regime: I have at least the next couple of decades of the lease of my academic life to work on that front. This, right here, is a personal piece - it is sleepless nights, nauseatingly worrying, struggling with a real life horror show and trying to outdo our joke about the regime and dealing with a solid case of cognitive dissonance piece. It is a let us hope Jignesh does not suffer the same fate as Umar Khalid piece. 

Jignesh's politics might appear to some as an array of contradictions. But that should not come across as a surprise since the neoliberal capitalist interior that the saffron regime is built around is an array of contradictions in itself. That when coupled with the complexities of class, caste, ethnicity, linguistic differentiation and intersectional, misunderstood, misdriven analysis of social history, impositions inculcated within the fabric of the collective memory of the subcontinent and vehement propaganda, calls out for measures. These measures might not be refined in the divine flames of academic integrity, and in effect are designated to bring to fruition certain aspects of social life that have been wasted away because of the politics of non-action over the years. I remember vigorously debating the issue of supporting the Indian National Congress (INC) with him months before he joined the INC and it reminds me of my own deficiency of judgement at points in terms of organisational politics, politics that bends and wields on the field, politics that I have never quite been able to become a part of. Revisionism was hence what kept echoing through the ethos of what I could interpret amidst such an ordeal, opposed to the kernel of idealism that young dreamers in their adolescent years look for like birds bred in a land of perennial winter dream of a relatively antonymous character of spring. But that is where Jignesh had never compromised himself, even as a politician, in speaking of and fighting for a season of spring at a time of devastation and war. The INC reminded me of Safdar Hashmi, the hapless lives of the indigenous communities in the Bastar belt and of Kashmir. The INC reminded me of the many truths about the character of soft Hindutva my own academic research was having me find out, the INC reminded of the thousands of students who were assassinated in Bengal in the '70s and '80s. The INC reminded me of Siddhartha Shankar Ray, and a stream of mutilated corpses, and gunshots, and the eternal rot in the heart of the Ganges in those years. But that is me, like many others, stuck in an enormous debt of idealism, somewhat attached to the issue of preserving memories that history is bent on throwing out of its window like empty bottles. Jignesh possibly wanted an emancipatory future, a need of the hour, one that attempts to efficiently oust the fascists from holding elective, "democratic" power. As it turns out, it is rather important for the new left, the old left, every tenet, facet, fragment of the left left in the godforsaken subcontinent to unite at least on grounds of driving the Hindu fundamentalists out before it gets worse because it will. For the last decade, it has only gotten worse with every passing day and if we pertain to the cause of academically debating fascism and the terror of the saffron conglomerate, it would be a mistake - a regrettable one, to say the very least. 

The political, organisational left in the third world (and I refuse to call it the "global south" in the course of paying due tribute to our staggering, fading idea of historicity) has an advantage over the left in western Europe (excluding France in certain contexts, perhaps), or parts of the United States. The political, organisational left in South America, Asia and Africa have a language of their own - and this is not limited to the fierce connection that languages in their etymological evolution tend to share with the land they evolved from. Like an intestinal, abysmal, gravitative force, there is rhythm and resonance in the centrifugality of how social movements connect to those who are invested in grassroot level politics, in the verses, in poetry, in tune, in the sloganeering crowds, in blood, in fire and in the unkempt reality of grief. It is grief that unites a people who have suffered so much..."a people of nothing, a vertical people". While I still continue to cater to my reservations about Kanhaiya Kumar who I have neither known personally, nor have heard speaking of Umar Khalid following his incarceration five years ago, Jignesh happens to be a political persona who shares distinct differences as compared to Kumar, Hardik Patel or Shehla Rashid Shora. To begin with, he kept writing about and contesting for the cause of justice that ought to be brought to Umar Khalid. Both Jignesh and Umar had been previously booked for having been "significantly" involved with the Elgar Parishad case. 

Jignesh was a theatre artist in his early days, reading and translating the work of eminent Gujarati poet Mareez. He later began working as a journalist. It was only following the Una flogging incident that he rose to fame and proclaimed his space gradually as an activist, later taking up the role of a political leader. This is an intriguing development as opposed to the way most of the political left happens to function in the west now: attempting to penetrate mass psyche in a manner that is institutional and follows an authoritative code that it is centrally built around. It is needless to repeat how the political left is dependent on its poetry for escalating, expanding itself into greater depths. As someone who has been trained to critique, I see oligarchy where there might be hope for an united struggle. As one of those people who have been trained rigorously to understand systems so well, we tend to forget if we are now helping sustain those systems or tokenistically opposing their existence in a meek, delusional manner in a state of emotive catatonia. Jignesh Mevani was good at putting these pieces together rather simply. I remember him addressing the issue of the class-caste dialectic whilst quoting D.D. Kosambi. He did not have to claim he was a Marxist except for during a few of those public lectures wherein he would end the talk saying, "Lal Salaam" (Red salute). He defined fundamental Ambedkaritism wherein representation had gotten so far ahead of anything else that identity metamorphosed into the end-all and be-all of politics as another face of Brahminism itself. Jignesh Mevani wouldn't have apologised about his comments on Modi even if Rahul Gandhi had personally requested him. Jignesh Mevani was one of the last of the dissenters who could remark in public, "Ye desh Modi ke baap ka thodi na hain!" (And this country is barely owned by Modi's father!). Jignesh is a Dalit leader who is neither Chandrashekhar Azad, nor one of the contenders of the Dalit panthers movement who would advocate the legitimacy of Dalit capitalism. He was one of the last leaders of our times speaking about the injustice done towards Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha repeatedly. Anand, who himself was one of the few intellectuals to have understood the complicated role the British colonialists had played in co-opting Dalit support, was ironically arrested in the Elgar Parishad case two years ago and remains incarcerated. Gautam Navlakha was apparently being denied a pair of spectacles while in custody, and it takes little intervention to understand what part of his research surrounding the Kashmir issue scared the living hell out of the BJP government. Navlakha remains incarcerated and was denied bail yesterday. 

This brings me back from the discourse of scholarship, critique and activism to the part of the story concerned very personally with emotive associativity, anxiety and a generic sense of horror. It reminds me, in the span of a single moment, the sleepless nights spent in writing about Baba Lal Das, the court appointed priest of the Ram Mandir that was "ressurected" within the Babri Mashjid. It reminds me of the Mashjid, of 1992, of the Godhra incident, of the 2002 Gujarat riots, of the VHP, of Sadhvi Pragya, of the Malegaon bombings, of Gauri (Lankesh), of Dabholkar, Kalburgi, Pansare and of Navlakha, of Anand Teltumbde, of honour killing, of the rape capital, of Yogi Adityanath, of the Delhi riots, of the Muzaffarnagar riots, of how they lynched elderly Muslim men on the streets, of Gaza strip, of Kashmir, of Kashmir and of pellet guns, of Israel, of police states, of Nazi Germany, of human shields, of Konan-Poshpora, of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, of Manipur, of Asifa Bano, of how an entire sanyasi samaj was wiped out by the Sangh Parivar in an attempt to communalise the poor in Ayodhya, of the great indispensable unholy Ram, his misogyny and vulgarity and audacity and the uncanny degree of cruelty Hinduism has subjected women to. It reminds me of how I would sit in a corner of my room in my final year of schooling, listening to gunshots (or heaven knows what other kind of firearms used) at a distance while on a phone call with a Kashmiri friend and I would shiver, and he would make jokes about Modi and I would giggle before feeling that awkward chill down my spine all over again. It reminds me of the witch-hunt jokes my comrades would come up with, and I would always silently picture women being burned at the altar, for real - something that still unfortunately happens to be a pragmatic reality in parts of India. In retrospect, all of this reminds me how spirited people can truly be - and it reminds me of the farmer's movement, the immense courage it takes to truly stand up and stay devoted to a cause, it reminds me of our own deficiency, frailty and the pretense of sophisticated wisdom and diplomacy. It reminds me of that particular joke Jignesh was fond of, and how at the moment it truly isn't a joke anymore. Jignesh Mevani might now be a part of the INC, but Jignesh would never be Congress enough to not be tried before the circus of whatever is left of a joke of a democracy in decay. That happens to be reason enough to keep voicing against this heinous act. This is also a collective plea to support academics, scholars, students, activists who have been tried unlawfully and are incarcerated because the fascist regime is too insecure, too narcissistic, too embedded in its phallic impotency to rise up to power in the crude form it wants to indulge itself in a prolonged attempt to exert control on whatever it is able to lay its eyes upon. It is a regime that is tethered to its own death and can see it through the fragments of the looking glass it is so afraid of. But this "it" is a horror all too relative; and since "horror has a name and a face", horror must be tried beyond the court. Horror must be questioned, horror must be questioned of its own sanity. Our comrades must be released.