In Latest Shocker, BJP Election Ad Incites Sikhs Against Muslims; Trust in Poll Process Slips Further; Silencing the Subaltern
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Snapshot of the day
May 24, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
Upset at being stopped by the Calcutta High Court from running derogatory advertisements against its opponents in West Bengal, the Bhartiya Janata Party has come running to the Supreme Court with an urgent petition. There are two phases of the general election left and voting has yet to take place in 17 seats in the state. Earlier this week, the High Court restrained the BJP from publishing derogatory advertisements on a petition by the Trinamool Congress seeking an injunction against the Hindutva party. A day later, the BJP filed an appeal against the High Court’s judgment before a division bench, stating that the single-judge bench did not hear it before passing the order. The division bench on Wednesday refused to interfere with the single-judge bench order.
The latest communal ad published by the BJP on its official Instagram handle is a good indicator of the kind of muck the party wants to inflict on unsuspecting Bengalis. This short video is aimed at voters in Delhi, Punjabh, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, who will vote on May 25 and June 1. It features a ‘surveyor’ from the Congress party taking photographs of people’s assets. He notices the name ‘Shaikh Irfan’ on the door of a flat and moves away without taking any photographs. He then starts taking pictures of the buffalo, tractor and car of the Muslim man’s Sikh neighbour. When he is challenged by the Sikh man, the ‘surveyor’ says, “I am from the Congress and Rahulji has said to scan your property. If he comes to power, all of this will be partitioned.” The Sikh man says, “Wasn’t one partition enough for you?”. ‘Rahulji is doing his partition in order to do justice (nyay)’, the '‘surveyor’ replies. ‘So will you do justice with Irfan mian’s property?’, the Sikh asks. ‘If we take anything from him, there will be no place for me in the Congress’, says the surveyor.
While Modi’s speeches and the BJP’s earlier videos aimed to incite Hindus against Muslims, the latest ad is intended to incite Sikhs against Muslims and perhaps clarify – in a state like Punjab – that Modi’s repeated tirade against ‘minorities’ is aimed at Muslims and not Sikhs. Needless to say, this offensive ad will likely remain ‘live’ for several days before the Election Commission pulls the plug on it.
Talking about the complicity of the Election Commission of India, Former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa says that it is not about some technicalities, it is about the basic trust in the process of electing the government. Knowing how many people voted in a constituency can't be a national secret – it raises doubts about bad intentions. [See more on the craziness of the institutions in Item 1].
Here is another exhibition from the unusual anxiety and absence of trust in the electoral process.
https://x.com/HemantSorenJMM/status/1793629128488292429
Amidst all the hype over India’s rise, Indians are leaving the country like never before. Indians were the largest nationality to immigrate to the United Kingdom last year, as per the British Office of National Statistics. Not only that, Indian people were also the largest recipients of care worker, graduate as well as study visas. Overall, 127,000 Indians moved to the UK to work, 115,000 to study and 9,000 for other reasons. Despite all the hostility towards the net migration statistics, the UK government has also decided to retain graduate visas, which allow students to stay in the country to work or seek work a few years after they finish studying. A government committee recommended against scrapping the visa earlier this week, saying it would cause universities to offer fewer courses. The UK will instead consider tightening requirements for universities and foreign students, though much details remain to be awaited.
Talking about India’s joblessness that is driving citizens to leave the country, Udit Mishra has a terrific explainer on how joblessness in India has hurt all communities over the last 8 years, with none better off in 2023-24.
In the model state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a 40-year-old muslim man, Mishrikhan Baloch, was killed alegedly by a group of cow vigilantes when he was transporting buffaloes to an animal market in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district. As per reports, the police invoked laws relating to murder, wrongful restraint and rioting with deadly weapons against the accused. One of the accused in the case is a man named Akherajsinh Parbatsinh Vaghela, who was also an accused in an incident of cow vigilante-related violence from July last year. They also said the Gujarat high court had quashed Vaghela’s detention in the earlier case. While the local police have apprehended two of the five accused and are searching for the other three, they have denied that Baloch’s alleged killing was an incident of mob lynching – they said that it was instead rooted in an old dispute between the victims and the accused. However, it is worth noting that some say that police in certain states record mob lynching cases as brawls or accidents in order to avoid their responsibilities under the top court’s Tehseen Poonawalla judgement.
After Former Australian captain Ricky Ponting revealed he was approached to be India’s next head coach, the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) secretary seems to have finally woken up from the long sleep. Jay Shah has now said that the governing body had not approached any former Australian cricketer to take up the post of head coach of the Indian men’s team. There are reports also that Justin Langer has also disclosed that they declined offers to coach the Indian men’s cricket team after being approached by individuals within the BCCI. Reports also claimed former India batter and BJP MP Gautam Gambhir and former New Zealand skipper Stephen Fleming had also been sounded out for the job. It is worth pointing out that India have not won a global title since the 2013 Champions Trophy, with the team then being coached by Zimbabwe’s Duncan Fletcher.
The Congress’s push for a caste census is “furthering two charges aimed at [Modi]”: that his government has fostered a Billionaire Raj and that his party favours the upper castes. While the BJP has brought lower castes into its fold over time, Modi’s “response to the charge suggests he is nervous that the label may stick”, write Mujib Mashal and Pragati KB in The New York times.
‘Global compatibility centres’ – facilities that companies use to outsource tasks ranging from data analysis to R&D – have ballooned in India over the last decade and a half, and American MNCs have steadily increased how much they spend on R&D activities here. India is among many countries trying to steal China’s thunder in manufacturing, but given that it has been easier to outsource white-collar work rather than the blue-collar kind to India, as well as its infrastructure and relaxed labour laws, no other country “has as good a shot … at becoming the world’s office”, The Economist says.
Adani Enterprises shares climbed back up to pre-Hindenburg levels today, making it the fourth of the Adani Group’s seven companies to see its shares recover since the short-seller’s explosive accusations early last year, Varunvyas Hebbalalu reports.
Home secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla has asked Uttarakhand’s chief secretary to send his ministry daily reports of the Char Dham pilgrimage in view of the rise in footfall and to rope in the National Disaster Response Force and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police to manage crowds, Ishita Mishra reports. The chief secretary has paused offline registration for the Dham until the end of the month.
According to the Times of India, a comparison of the turnout between this election and the last in 409 seats that have voted so far this time shows that almost two-thirds of seats registered a lower turnout, while over a fifth saw the absolute number of electors go down. The Times said it calculated the number of votes from the percentages the Election Commission has provided – the EC has of course not provided the absolute number of voters.
Fearing that “mob lynching” may take place if a sexual abuse-accused nursing officer of the Rishikesh AIIMS remained admitted to the hospital’s psych ward, local police drove their SUV into the hospital’s fourth floor on Wednesday to arrest him. When the car was pursued by doctors protesting the officer’s conduct, police drove it through the hospital’s emergency triage area, a video of which has gone viral.
Eight people died and 62 suffered injuries when a boiler exploded at a chemical plant in Dombivli, which is located just outside Mumbai. Pradeep Gupta reports that parts of the boiler flew as far as 1.5 km away, and that the blaze spread to adjacent factories as well as a car showroom.
SC refuses to direct ECI to publish booth-wise records of voter-turnout data, matter adjourned
The Supreme Court has refused to pass any interim order on a petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) seeking a direction to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to upload polling station-wise voter turnout data on its website within 48 hours of the conclusion of polling for each phase of the Lok Sabha elections. A vacation bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Satish Chandra Sharma said that since the prayers in the interlocutory application appeared similar to the ‘main petition’ on the issue – pending since 2019 – they were not prepared to adjudicate. “Granting any relief [now] will amount to granting relief in the main petition which is pending,” Justice Datta said. The judge ordered the matter to be listed before the regular Bench after the court vacations in July.
In its counter-affidavit filed ahead of the hearing, the EC had argued that there was no legal mandate for the commission to disclose voter turnout data based on Form 17C, or the record of votes polled in each polling station, and that such disclosure could be susceptible to misuse. The EC had also previously argued in court that publishing form 17C data was time consuming, however the commission’s own handbook states that the data is available instantaneously.
Venkatesh Nayak explains why the court was wrong to send the matter back to cold storage. The citizen has a right to information and there is no logical reason for the ECI to withhold data from the public about the number of voters when the same is collated almost instantaneously and can easily be shared.
Merger talks between NSE, BSE offshore arms at Gift City called off
In a major setback to GIFT City’s ambitions of becoming a global financial hub, the merger between BSE’s unit at GIFT IFSC, India International Exchange (India INX), and NSE’s unit, NSE International Exchange (NSE IX), has been called off, reports Business Standard, despite over a year of discussions. Sources told the business daily that the preliminary talks, which had been ongoing since late 2022, were too prolonged, leading to a decision to focus elsewhere. “Merger discussions were at a preliminary stage. Since it’s taking long with no end in sight, it was decided to focus elsewhere,” a source said. “At Gift City, however, NSE IX dominates the market with its hugely popular Gift Nifty contracts registering a turnover in excess of $82 billion in April. While on most days it sees a turnover in the range of $1-3 billion, there were a few trading sessions when there was a spike in the turnover. On the other hand, the daily average turnover on BSE’s India INX is typically a few hundred million dollars”, people familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol.
The cancellation of the merger comes at a time when the GIFT City unified regulator, International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA), plans measures to facilitate direct listing at the exchanges and boost participation. The international exchanges offer trading for nearly 22 hours to cater to an audience across the globe, as per the report. Late last year, the head of IFSCA, K Rajaraman had said that the merger would be completed by January this year.
Manipur ethnic strife disrupt its sports scene
Ethnic violence in Manipur has driven a wedge between its sport teams, such as the women’s football team Eastern Sporting Union (ESU) and forced some players outside the state, Chiranjit Ojha reports. The team’s coach, a Kuki, was forced to flee to the hills like many others of his ethnicity after mobs burned down his home. Tensions following the eruption of violence undermined the team’s performance, while second line players went back home to become ‘village defnece volunteers’ – or frontline fighters in the ethnic war. ESU can no longer play in the Indian Women’s League because of a dearth of funds from the community, Ojha finds.
The Long Cable
Don’t ask if the subaltern can speak if you will shut him down for ‘improper pronunciation’
Anitya Sanket
Language differentiates us from all the other species. It is not only a facilitator of our social life but also gives meanings and attaches value to human thought. For this reason, control over language has also been a potent tool for ruling elites.
In India, historically, Brahmins used language to position themselves as trustees of God on earth. Consider for instance how Sanskrit for long remained inaccessible for the vast majority of Bahujans. This Brahminical hegemony was maintained not necessarily with brute force, but with the help of an intellectual elite class that opposed the spread of learning – the very act listening to the Vedas was deemed unacceptable – by devising notions of purity and impurity.
Pedantic obsession with language is a peculiar trait of the ruling classes. It helps to guard the 'pure' from the 'impure'. This obsession manifests itself in censoring and scrutinising the everyday lives of the Bahujan. Right from school classrooms to the corridors of elite institutions of higher education, this obsession is on crude display. Trivial pronunciation corrections separate them (the pure) from the impure, who largely are defenceless in this game of linguistics. This separation establishes the authority of one and the submission of the other.
Since the rules of the game—i.e. what is the acceptable usage of language and what is not— are usually dictated by elite gatekeepers, the oppressed often find themselves revolting against their inner true selves. W.E.B Du Bois articulates it thus in The Souls of Black Folk (1903):
”It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
There is an irony in the fact that the crude display of arbitrary diktats which has sparked an ongoing controversy in India has come from none other than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, renowned for her work on the 'subaltern'. In the video that has recently gone viral, Chakravorty is seen correcting a JNU student's pronunciation of 'Du Bois' during the Q&A period which followed the lecture she delivered. The student, Anshul Kumar, visibly appalled at the constant heckling and jarring laughs from the audience, insists Spivak let go of the 'triviality' and allow him to proceed with his question, but to no avail. Since then, Kumar, who described himself as 'founding professor of the Centre for Brahmin Studies’, has gone on a tirade on social media against Chakravorty, decrying the role of caste and language policing in perpetuating inequalities.
This is not an uncommon experience sadly, and is not limited to the use of English . The Brahmins gate keep native Indian languages too. With a laser sharp intervention at even the slightest mistakes in language, they seem ready with condescending remarks about 'proper pronunciation', which more often than not, are in poor taste. Considering the differences in socio-cultural capital, the 'joke' is often at the expense of historically marginalised communities.
By dictating language, the culture of society itself is policed. In seemingly unbreakable chains, many ideas are throttled at inception, in the name of what is defined to be acceptable and ‘pure’ usage by the ruling elite. Nagraj Manjule, the national award winning filmmaker, has recounted the hardship he faced in filming the critically acclaimed Marathi film Fandry in a non-Brahmanical dialect. He says that at every stage of the film making process he was advised to use dialogues in ‘pure’ Marathi, meaning Puneri (Brahmani) Marathi. He asserts that the Marathi language should be freed from the shackles of ‘purity’, which is an excuse to instil humiliation and embarrassment in Bahujans for the language they have spoken for centuries.
Even the boundaries to which one is allowed to deviate from become rebellious yet scholarly only when they initiated or endorsed by the ruling elites. The rulers will reward you for deviating from the convention too, if it suits them and doesn't materially affect the status quo. In a debate that has since ensued on social media, the upper-caste gatekeeping of supposedly inclusive programs like Dalit and Tribal studies at the universities has been noted.
One wonders how we really get to the point where the Brahmin asks if the subaltern can speak, and simultaneously shuts him down for ‘improper pronunciation’, with many students joining this public shaming. Mockery, after all, when used by the ruling classes can be a potent yet non-violent weapon to shut down any conversation. It strips a person of their dignity in that it dismisses them as unworthy of any attention. It reinforces shame within the individual, making her or him less capable of freely formulating and expressing original ideas. The recent Chakravorty incident should make one navigate this nuanced subject with considerable caution. One's speech can have debilitating and discriminative effects on individuals from marginalised sections.
Being mindful and equanimous in our everyday lives goes a long way towards bridging existing gaps and promoting a sense of fraternity. Educational institutions should be the pioneers of this change, not the enablers and perpetuators of inequality. The fact that Indian universities end up doing the latter only highlights the urgency of breaking the Brahminical value system in it.
Anitya Sanket is a Mumbai based lawyer
Reportedly
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has accused the PMO of directing several TV channels not to telecast his interviews. He told India Today on Friday that he had recorded interviews the previous day with several channels but not a single one of them chose to broadcast what he had said.
Deep dive
Not only are economic issues higher on people’s agenda than in the post-Balakot 2019, general election but the ‘mandir effect’ is far more muted than the BJP expected, the stench of electoral bond corruption hangs over the party and the opposition is more united than ever. Radhika Desai and Natalie Braun point to the vulnerabilities that are substantial and strengths that are surplus to requirements point to the difficulty of the BJP adding much to its 2019 tally and the possibility of its losing seats.
Prime number: −10
India slipped by ten ranks in the World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Development Index – which measures how sustainable the development of a country’s travel sector is – over the last five years to #39. It did especially poorly in the ‘tourism services and infrastructure’, ‘human resources and labour market’ and ‘health and hygeine’ components of the index.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Here’s a fascinating explainer by Debasish Roy Chowdhury on how Modi’s third term term – were he to win – will most likely be his final chance to effect the big-bang changes toward dismantling India’s multicultural democracy and establishing a Hindu state.
“Will India be able to persuade the US to be as accommodative this time round” as it has been before on the country’s ties with Iran? Perhaps, given the density of India-US relations currently. India’s implicitly supportive posture towards Israel may also count for something,” writes Shyam Saran.
Ashok Lavasa has a message on the Model Code of Conduct for leaders – from Mahabharata and beyond. “Elections are necessary in a democracy. What is not necessary for the people and our leaders is to lose their moral ballast. That could cause damage that extends beyond the periodic exercise of political choice.”
Under Modi’s Billionaire Raj, inequality levels have reached historical highs. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi make a case for taxing the very, very rich and funding social sectors.
Bharat Bhushan looks at why the RSS cannot sabotage the BJP in elections. “The RSS realises that the unfinished aspects of its agenda for India cannot be pushed forward without Narendra Modi’s bombastic persona at the helm of the Indian state.”
Listen up
While Mumbai hosts the most billionaires of any city in the world after New York and London, half of its inhabitants live in slums. Whose interests are shaping the city’s future? The Economist’s Leo contemplates “how all this construction will change his beloved Bombay, and who the Mumbai of the future is really designed for.” Listen here.
Watch out
Sushant Singh discusses the ongoing standoff between India and China in Ladakh, and why the Modi government’s handling of the issue has let the country down.
Over and out
Election candidates lose their security deposit if they poll less than 16.6% of the vote – but in Haryana’s Assandh assembly constituency, a many-sided electoral battle in 2009 saw to it that the winner himself lost his deposit, having earned just 15.8% of the vote, Congressman Jairam Ramesh recalls while on a drive from Delhi to Chandigarh.
Actor Kani Kusruti’s watermelon bag at Cannes is a symbol of Palestine solidarity. She flaunted the bag while attending the red carpet event for her film ‘All We Imagine As Light’ at the Cannes Film Festival.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.
Loved the piece on Language supremacy and the callousness displayed by many at using it to shutdown the ‘subaltern’. It is a well entrenched social norm which many of us practice without realising the damage it causes. This piece has correctly highlighted the need for change in the ‘minds’ of upper strata of society. Good that a start has been made. Shaming those who correct will start now as a push back and then only this language supremacy will be quelled. I believe it has happened in Tamil post the realisation of the Dravidian theme.