Alekhander Ikhide’s Collages ii. Othering Weaponized Protests in India

othering weaponized

Image 1 source_Hindustan Times Image 2 source_BBC World News

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With a rise in nationalism globally, studying forced displacement and its intent to estrange personhood from belonging becomes necessary. This is a case study of this othering in India, perpetuated by a right-wing Hindu nationalist government in charge, acting like an internal neocolonial power against marginalized identities.

The first image shows a group of police officers, in riot gear, standing in front of a wall that has posters torn down and discarded on the floor. One poster remains, and it reads “Save India Together.” The image is taken in Shaheen Bagh, a locality in Delhi that held a sit-in protest for over a hundred days and is now abandoned due to a COVID-19 lockdown. The women- and minority-led protest was an outcry against recently passed bills—Citizenship Amendment Act that allows fast-tracked citizenship to people of all religions, except Islam, facing religious persecution in neighboring countries, and the National Register of Citizens, which requires documents from all Indians to prove their citizenship through the migration details of their ancestors. 32 Together, these two bills make Indian Muslims second class citizens and puts lower caste folx at risk for the same. The second image focuses on one man, holding a gun, looking angry, and pointing it off the camera. There is a group of police officers standing off in the distance looking at the man nonchalantly. One of the officers is seen standing with his arms crossed as if witnessing an everyday event. The gun is pointed towards protestors rallying against the CAA and NRC bills on the streets of Delhi. Both the images are taken about a month or so apart, around the same area.

The poster still visible that the police officer is attempting to remove in image 1 says “Save India Together from Communal Ideology.” This poster was used in protests in the last few months, along with an amalgamation of poetry, graffiti, performance art and music as arsenal in dissent. But using COVID-19 as a cover, ruling party, BJP, is painting over all the graffiti on the walls of educational institutes around the country. 33 The question arises: why, in a pandemic, are resources being used to paint over walls? The answer is not a surprise—the ruling party has been silencing minority and all dissenting voices ever since it came to power in 2014. The most recent example of this silencing has been the arrests of student activists of Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi where, in February the police broke in and harassed students and shot at them for participating in political protests against the Islamophobic bills. 34 These students, along with journalists have been charged under the Unlawful Actions Prevention Act—which was passed in 2019, a few days before the Indian Government put Kashmir under a lockdown and eradicated its autonomous status. 35 Since then, journalists have been banned from entering Kashmir, but the news that manages to sneak out paints a bleak picture: the army burning houses, raping, murdering and the rest of India calling the action a heroic feat by Prime Minister Modi. The UAPA gives the government and the police force the power to render an individual as a “terrorist.” If the person poses a “threat” to the well-being of the nation, they could be charged. While never explicitly spoken, the timing of the UAPA coinciding with the Kashmir lockdown insinuates a silencing—it renders voicing dissent an act of terrorism, instantly creating a stranger that poses a threat to the well-being of the nation. The stranger is produced through the fear of the word “terrorist” which creates an image based on pre-conceived notions, and more often than not, that image is of a Muslim.

Sara Ahmed, in her paper Strange Encounters talks about the projection of danger on those who are already rendered as strangers by prevalent notions. She mentions “The discourse of stranger danger not only allows the abdication of any social and political responsibility for the violence that takes place within legitimated spaces, and which is sanctioned through Law, but also becomes a mechanism for the justification of acts of violence against those who are already recognized as strangers.” 36

32. Maria Abi-habib and Sameer Yasir, “As Modi Pushes Hindu Agenda, a Secular India Fights Back,” The New York Times (The New York Times, December 20, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/world/asia/india-muslims-citizenship.html 33. Fatima Khan, “Art Installations at Shaheen Bagh, Jamia Removed by Delhi Police, Graffiti Painted White,” ThePrint, March 24, 2020, https://theprint.in/india/ art-installations-at-shaheen-bagh- jamia-removed-by-delhi-police-graffiti-painted-white/387086/. 34. “Jamia Millia: Indian Student Injured as Man Fires at University Protest.” BBC News. BBC, January 30, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asiaindia-51308376. 35. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51308376. 36. Sara Ahmed, “Recognizing Strangers,” in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2009). 36.

The UAPA in this sense is, therefore, considered a legitimate and justifiable law, and the arrests made under this law are what Ahmed says “a mechanism for the enforcement of boundary lines that almost secure the home nation as safe haven” 37 While Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims have been living in tension ever since the Partition of India and Pakistan, the communal violence and the narrative of us versus them has become more prevalent since 2014—when BJP came into power with a nationalist agenda. This right-wing movement to establish a Hindu nation suddenly made Indian Muslims “unrecognizable” in the vision of an India with religious homogeneity and that stranger-ness justified the lockdown on Kashmir, the CAA, the NRC and the arrests of all those voicing concerns about the nationalist actions.

This projection of danger becomes evident in the images. The police casually stands behind the Hindu man brandishing a gun and subsequently firing it at protestors, because his Hindu privilege renders him familiar and his actions are considered patriotic—he is just protecting his home from those who pose a danger to it. On the other hand, the first image insinuates fear—the police officers are wearing riot gear, and there is a hoard of them, just for the simple action of tearing down posters. The fear emerges from what the posters represent. The poster reads “Save India Together.” But the understanding of the word “together” is read very differently by those who put it up and by those who are tearing it down. This difference is acknowledged by the police and this strangeness instills fear. They are not able to process dissent because they believe in the nationalist discourse that they are surrounded by. They believe in the dream it promises because their privilege would allow them to benefit from that dream. But the posters pose a threat to that dream, and therefore, with whatever force necessary, it needs to be silenced. One of the students arrested on April 13, 2020 was Safoora Zargar, a 27 year old research scholar pursuing an M.Phil from Jamia Milia Islamia University—a predominantly Muslim University in Delhi. 38 She organized and protested in multiple rallies in the months leading up to the COVID-19 lockdown. She was arrested from her home and charged with a non-bailable offence under UAPA for inciting violence during the Muslim pogrom (which was repeatedly called a communal riot to place blame) that took place in Delhi in February. A few weeks in, she fell ill and during a check-up it was revealed that she was pregnant and in her second trimester. 39 In the last month, an online smear campaign has emerged, with people slut-shaming her and calling her “morality” into question. Their slut-shaming is based on the presumption that she is not married and photoshopped images and videos of her have been circulating the internet. Twitter and Instagram are filled with people mocking her role at the protests and belittling her efforts by claiming that she was “busy getting pregnant at Shaheen Bagh.” While Safoora is indeed married, and her family released pictures of her wedding day to appease the cruelty of the online trolls, the point to note her is the relationship drawn to her sexuality with her right to dissent. Her voice is being silenced by maligning her sexuality because she poses a threat to the idea of a “pure” India that is promised by Modi. Siobhan B. Sommerville, in the book Queer Migrations, discussed the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, and while noting the introduction of homosexuality and adultery as categories to determine naturalization, discusses the use of these categories as a bar to “finding of ‘good moral character’ necessary to qualify for naturalization.” 40 In the case of the 1952 INA, these categorizations were made because there was an established normative view of what a family could be-dictated by patriarchal, heteronormative social conditions.

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37. Ahmed, 37. 38. Mustafa. “Jamia: Rampant Student Arrests, But No Action Over Police Brutality?” Live Wire, May 1, 2020. https://livewire.thewire.in/campus/jamiarampant-student-arrests-but-no-action-against-police/. 39. Mustafa, 2020. 40. Siobhan B. Sommerville, “Sexualized Aliens and the Racialized State: A Queer Reading of the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act,” in Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007). 76.

Strange-ness was projected onto those who posed a disruption into those norms and since this established notion of “family” was considered “moral,” those falling outside of it were rendered “immoral” and not fit to be a part of their society. Safoora Zargar faces this projected “immorality” on two fronts— her identity as a Muslim, and her pregnancy out of wedlock (which, again, is not true). Even though her family released her wedding photos, it becomes easier for nationalists to label her an outsider if they are able to attack one part of her identity, her faith, through another, her “morality.”

This intersectional analysis is important, because it paints a larger and more comprehensive picture of othering that is occurring in India right now.

If we go back to the images, keeping Safoora in mind, we begin to see distinct lines, or boundaries visible in them. In the first image, the police officers form one end, the wall becomes the boundary, and the people who put up those posters and painted all the graffiti become the other side. The police and BJP, along with their supporters, tried to paint the revolution as inherently Muslim, and they were proven wrong because Indians of all ages, religions, castes and social classes came together against them. It made it difficult to make it us versus them, when some of those they considered us, saw through the fascism. The Modi government tried to get other religions on their side by naming Sikhs, Christians, Jains, and other major religions in the Citizenship Amendment Act, but they still showed up to protest in solidarity. They tried to launch Women Empowerment schemes, but women led the protests against the government. So their tactic to project a threat to the nation onto individuals changed. They rendered dissent as anti-national and everyone who dissented had to be silenced. So that wall of posters represents a population that came together to fight fascism, and their efforts were silenced simply by ripping the posters during a lockdown. If no one could see dissent visibly, they would continue believing in the dream.

In the second image, the police again form one line, the man with the gun forms the boundary and everything off camera becomes the other. The situation is uncanny because the police is meant to protect, and their position should be between the shooter and those off camera, but this image shows that only some identities are protected and the others are made to stare at the barrel of the gun that “protects” the “morality” and “law” of the nation.

The irony of what is danger becomes apparent from these images and displays the power of belief in a promised dream. Things that are inherently dangerous, like a hate-filled man shooting a gun at peaceful protestors, is rendered a hero and a saviour of “homeland,” while a pregnant woman practicing her right to dissent is in prison, charged as a “terrorist.” Danger as a concept is convoluted and changes from person to person. But privilege is able to distinguish what is really dangerous, compared to what is rendered to be perceived as dangerous as a tool of oppression. The shooter, whose identity has been protected by the Delhi police posed an actual threat—he shot a person. The Delhi police poses an actual threat— they participated in the pogrom against Muslims in North-East Delhi and none of those participating officers have been named or suspended. 41 Safoora Zargar, on the other hand has real and photoshopped images and fabricated porn clips circulating across the country. So, the next time anyone in the country has to imagine what a terrorist looks like, they are going to have a name and image associated with— it was fed to them by those who are hiding behind their privilege, and doing the work of terrorizing.

41. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51308376.