Kejriwal Bests ED in Bail Bout, to Fight BJP in Polls Now; How Hate is Normalised in Modi's India; PM Says 'African' is a 'Gaali'
(Not) the PM's first press conference, Trinamool eyes mellower saffron to counter BJP in West Bengal, Another ‘donkey flight’ scrapped as Jamaica sends back planeload of 250 Indians
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
Snapshot of the day
May 10, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
Despite a 44 page affidavit from the Modi government arguing why Arvind Kejriwal needs to stay in jail, the Supreme Court on Friday granted Interim bail to the Aam Aadmi Party leader and Delhi Chief Minister till June 1. By nightfall, Kejriwal emerged from Tihar, where he spent the past 50 days. “Our country is more than 4,000 years old,” he told a crowd of supporters gathered outside. “It’s a great country but whenever anyone has tried to be dictatorial in the country, people haven’t let them win. Today, the country is going through this dictatorial rule and is fighting against it but 140 crore will have to come together to fight it. I appeal to everyone to fight this together.” Ashutosh Bharadwaj recalls the feisty challenge Kejriwal posed to Modi in Varanasi in 2014 and expects to see “sudden fervour in the AAP’s ranks as well as on the streets of Delhi, which goes to polls just a fortnight from now.”
Earlier in court, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for Kejriwal, argued that the results for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections would be declared on June 4 so the bail period should be extended, but the bench said that since campaigning would end 48 hours before the last date of polling, June 1 was a fair date. Advocate Shadan Farasat, also representing Kejriwal, said, “The order is operable till June 2. There are no restrictions on what he can say or not say in his election campaigning.”
During the hearing, the Enforcement Directorate’s counsel argued that one of the conditions for bail must be that Kejriwal be barred from electioneering. And we thought the ED was an investigative agency and not a political body.
Today, the Supreme Court also disposed of Hemant Soren’s plea challenging his arrest by the ED but the former Jharkhand chief minister got no relief. The bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta, which coincidentally heard Kejriwal’s case as well, said that Soren’s petition was infructuous as the Jharkhand high court had dismissed his plea seeking the same relief. The bench said that Soren would have to raise contentions in a second petition next week. LiveLaw notes that senior advocate Kapil Sibal argued that the ED will doubtless seek further time for its response to the new petition, causing an additional delay. Voting in Jharkhand will be held in four phases from May 13 to June 1. In the unlikely event that Soren makes interim bail, he can at best hope to campaign for only half the state’s 14 seats.
A Delhi court has formally levelled criminal charges against BJPMP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the discredited former head of the Wrestling Federation of India, for sexual harassment, stalking and criminal intimidation of 5 women wrestlers.
Telangana chief minister A Revanth Reddy has said, “With regard to Adani and Ambani, there is a feeling that they are the double engine sarkar that BJP talks about. People also feel Adani and Pradhani are the ‘Twin Engine’ government at the national level.”
Meanwhile, two whole days have gone by since his ‘Adani-Ambani’ bombshell without Modi mentioning the two businessmen. Does this mean he realises he scored an own-goal by bringing them up in the first place? The Congress says it is ‘ominous’ that Modi has not bothered to order a probe into Messrs A and A.
Modi may have dropped Adani and Ambani but he is not letting go of Sam Pitroda. His manufactured outrage over the Congress leader’s goofy and poorly phrased comment on racial diversity in India is only exposing his own deeply held racism. “By saying Indians who are black skinned look African,” Modi told an election rally in Warangal, Telangana, the Congress has “gravely insulted so many of my country’s people (unhone itni badi gali di)”. His statement is expected to do wonders for India’s soft power in Africa. Modi also made the astonishing claim that the Congress opposed the election of Droupadi Murmu as President of India “because she is black skinned and they thought she is also African.”
The forced return of 77 Myanmar refugees this week from India “violates the principle of non-refoulment, and any further plans to forcibly return more Myanmar refugees must be immediately halted,” said the International Committee of Jurists.
In the latest travesty of justice, eleven years after rationalist Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead, a Pune court has convicted two shooters but acquitted the others. All in all, the prosecution has been unable to prove the involvement of anyone except the ones who actually shot Dabholkar. Sessions judge P.P. Jadhav convicted Sachin Andure and Sharad Kalaskar and sentenced them to life imprisonment, along with a penalty of Rs 5 lakh. Dr Virendrasingh Tawade, Vikram Bhave and Sanjeev Punalekar were acquitted. The accused were all linked to the Sanatan Sanstha organisation.
It has been reported earlier that Sharad Kalaskar is the common thread in the murders of Dabholkar, activist Govind Pansare and journalist Gauri Lankesh. Sanjeev Punalekar, who has been acquitted, was their lawyer and was later arrested after having been charged with disappearance of evidence. Interesting times for the judiciary, indeed.
“India is starting to resemble a Central Asian dictatorship”. Democratic erosion is already alarmingly far along. India is no longer the model free-market democracy that Westerners spent years imagining, encouraging, and touting. In fact, the vote now underway has all the hallmarks of a despotic election, writes Debasish Roy Chowdhury.
“We need to talk more about the psychological impact of BJP's ugly anti-Muslim campaign on ordinary Muslim citizens,” reporter Alishan Jafri said in a tweet in which he posted a gut-wrenching video of a Muslim man in north-east Delhi speaking about the ‘go to Pakistan’ taunt which the right-wing loves.
Omar Abdullah has written to the Election Commission to complain that campaign permissions for his party, the National Conference, in Baramulla were ‘unjustly’ cancelled ahead of the polls there on May 20. Sapore's superintendent of police had written to Baramulla’s additional district magistrate – without specifying any reasons – asking for poll activities in a part of the constituency to be rescheduled, and for all National Conference rallies in one segment to be rescheduled to the last day of campaigning. Three of the four permissions in the letter concerned the National Conference’s events while one concerned the People’s Conference Party.
Talking about the elephant in the room, the Election Commission’s CVIGIL app faces scrutiny over security lapses, finds Boomlive. Designed to empower voters in reporting poll violations, cybersecurity experts have unearthed vulnerabilities compromising user data and electoral integrity. Despite acknowledging the issues, the EC faces mounting pressure to bolster the app’s security swiftly.
Readers may be interested to know there is a ‘get a spine’ campaign against EC. See here. The abdication of responsibilities is manifest but if you want evidence, here is some:
Banjot Kaur has a useful fact check on the PM-EAC’s blatant effort to communalise demographics in the midst of the election. Apart from being shills for the BJP’s dodgy Islamophobic campaign, which is bad enough, the economists on Modi’s advisory council are also incompetent. They struggle with basic arithmetic, treating simple ratios and proportions as if they were advanced rocket science. Every successive Census has given us data on the religious distribution of the population and how the proportion of Hindus has fallen by some five percentage points while that of Muslims has risen. No great research effort was needed to collate this data. Similar time series data can be assembled, for example, on the rising share of Hindi speakers and declining share of speakers of south Indian languages. In both cases, the religion and language data reflect the same underlying phenomenon: fertility rates as a function of the socio-economic status of demographic cohorts
This Reporter’s Notebook by Purnima Shah tells us about an India that has been invisibilised. A tribal tells her: “What if the government strikes off my name from their document if I do not vote? My family has to suffer then.”
The National Commission for Women claimed yesterday that a woman approached it saying she was under pressure to file a ‘fake case’ against Prajwal Revanna. The News Minute reports that this woman is not among the three other complainants in the sexual abuse case. The Karnataka special investigation team in charge of probing the allegations said it is trying to find who may have pressured the woman involved.
Meanwhile, BCCI Secretary Jay Shah outlined the roadmap for appointing a full-time India head coach, setting sights on the 2027 T20 World Cup. Does this signal the end of Rahul Dravid’s tenure as India’s coach post-June? A lot remains unsaid to see it through.
Moosa Zameer, the Maldives’ foreign minister, visited India yesterday for the first high-level bilateral visit between the two countries since the pro-China Mohamed Muizzu became the Maldives’ president. Amidst the visit, India has withdrawn all its soldiers from the Maldives, ahead of the May 10 deadline set by President Mohamed Muizzu for the complete withdrawal of Indian military personnel from his country.
Lower turnout so far in the elections is weighing down Indian markets, with the Sensex suffering its largest one-day drop in four years yesterday over concerns regarding Modi’s re-election, Dan Strumpf and Sudhi Ranjan Sen cite investors as saying.
Amidst chaos in Afghanistan’s diplomatic missions in India, following the resignation of its senior diplomat over smuggling reports, loyalists to the previous democratic regime caution that the Taliban is pushing to install its nominee, says the Afghan UN Ambassador to Suhasini Haider.
Bustards vs renewables: The Great Indian Bustard, a “gravely endangered bird is facing a renewed threat to its habitat as clean energy groups look to develop a sun-soaked expanse of desert to respond to India’s rising need for green power”, reports The Financial Times.
Vinay Shukla’s While We Watched, which follows Ravish Kumar as he battles a shrinking newsroom at NDTV, has won the Peabody award for the documentary category. It is only the second Indian film to win a Peabody.
BBC Hindi has investigated the Modi government’s task force for an economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Editor Jugal Purohit has the report.
Modi, Rahul invited for public debate; concerns on ‘presidentialisation’ raised
Saying that the BJP and Congress have so far only hurled allegations and challenges at each other and not provided any meaningful responses, former Supreme Court judge Justice Madan Lokur, former Delhi High Court judge Justice Ajit P Shah and former editor-in-chief of The Hindu N Ram have invited PM Modi and Rahul Gandhi for a public debate on the election’s key issues on a “non-partisan and non-commerical platform”. The three said such a debate would “set a great precedent not just by educating the public but also in projecting the true image of a healthy and vibrant democracy”. On the other hand, some have warned that such a debate would only accelerate the presidentialisation of India’s elections – something the BJP has already strove for.
Another ‘donkey flight’? Jamaica sends back plane of 250 Indians
A chartered flight from Dubai with several Indian passengers, including around 75 from Gujarat, was sent back from Jamaica capital Kingston, marking the second instance within six months of a chartered flight filled with Indian passengers departing from a West Asian city being denied entry upon arrival as local authorities were not satisfied with passengers’ documents. A report in Jamaica Observer said the flight had 253 foreigners and they were refused entry by immigration officials in view of security concerns. Jamaica’s Ministry of National Security stated that local authorities routinely screen passenger flights for security threats, and possible breaches of law and/or regulations, the media outlet reported. Some of the Indian nationals told immigration authorities that they travelled to Jamaica for a five-day tour, but their itineraries revealed coverage for only one day. Additionally, the newspaper reported that some of the travellers were en route to Nicaragua, while others intended to journey to Canada.
The incident was similar to the interception of a chartered flight from Dubai at Vatry airport in France in December 2023. The final destination of the flight was Nicaragua, which is usually the first stop for people to attempt to cross the border illegally into the United States. Out of the 303 passengers, around 27 opted for political asylum, while the rest were repatriated to India.
Tribal rights under threat due to expansion of Tiger reserves
Last year, India celebrated fifty years of its tiger conservation plan. However, the fate of over 110,000 people residing in and around tiger reserves hangs in the balance, facing the looming threat of eviction, finds India Spend. Tadoba and Mudumalai tiger reserves reveal discrepancies in relocation efforts, exacerbating tensions. Despite these challenges, development projects continue to receive approval, raising concerns about the prioritisation of conservation over indigenous rights. Activists decry the marginalisation of tribal communities, urging for a more equitable approach to wildlife protection.
Trinamool eyes mellower saffron to counter BJP in West Bengal
In recent years, the Trinamool Congress has sported a lighter shade of saffron in the hope of curbing the BJP’s rise in West Bengal, Romita Datta reports. She documents how Mamata’s government has increased allowances for Hindu priests and Durga Puja celebrations, declared a holiday on the occasion of Ram Navami (though Banerjee herself did not explicitly acknowledge it), constructed new temples, renovated old ones and – towards the Ayodhya pran pratishtha ceremony – ensured that the public knew about it, after stiff competition from the BJP in 2019 and in 2021. Prasanta Ray of Presidency University said Modi “has succeeded in engaging her [Banerjee] in the narrative on religion” and that she “cannot afford to simply ignore Hindus”.
The Long Cable
Hate Has Been Normalised, Behaviourally and Institutionally, in Modi's India
Raheel Dhattiwala
Prime Minister Modi’s most recent anti-Muslim bombast is an ominous signal. That it may fuel violence worries many, and quite rightly. But it is also the ease with which Modi and his party raise anti-Muslim rhetoric which is equally troubling.
The troublesome normality of scapegoating Muslims for every small and big problem is slowly permeating everyday life. The very mention of the word ‘Muslim’ in a political or social context generates a certain frisson in many parts of India today. Yet –until the last five years – I never felt the same everyday aversion towards Muslims in other parts of India that I came across growing up in Ahmedabad, a city casually comfortable with its implicit apartheid and deep prejudice against Muslims since the 1970s.
In an interview to Tehelka in 2006, Ganesh Devy called the anti-Muslim hatred in many cities of Gujarat “not conscious or learnt. It is just somehow normal, as nature would have meant it to be.” For many who have closely observed Gujarat, the horrific violence of 2002, and Modi’s subsequent rise was a consequence of the normalised bigotry of a large section of Gujarati society.
What makes such normality worrying?
Political hate speech emboldens people who already hold prejudice towards certain groups, especially when such speech is tacitly condoned by other political leaders and intellectuals. In the US, this came to be called the “Trump Effect”– people with existing prejudice towards Mexicans and Muslims began to voice their prejudice explicitly and aggressively. Bigotry became casual under Trump.
I recently saw the brilliant Oscar-winner The Zone of Interest. The sense of doom does not come from actual visuals of violence against the Jews – there aren’t any – but from the excellent depiction of the nonchalance of murder. For many “ordinary Germans”, gassing and shooting Jews was a nine-to-five job and it helped to live close to your ‘workplace’, the extermination camp.
While watching the movie, a similarly excellent Gujarati play came to my mind. Written by the noted playwright Saumya Joshi in the middle of the violence in 2002, it was called Dost, chokkas ahinya ek nagar vastun hatun (Friend, I’m certain a city stood here once). An archaeological dig reveals a once-thriving city – Ahmedabad – long lost and forgotten, largely because of the apathy of its citizens. One scene sticks with me: as one part of the city reels under sustained killing, the other, oblivious or uncaring, savours street food.
Comparing the Holocaust and other global genocides with anti-minority violence in India is unjustified – if the scale of killing is the only measure of consideration. If what also matters are the conditions that make violence easy and ordinary, then the analogy works well.
Hannah Arendt became part of our intellectual dictionary when she used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the notorious and “terrifyingly normal” Nazi officer, Adolf Eichhmann, who led some of the worst Jewish massacres under the Third Reich. There was nothing banal (normal) about what Eichhmann did, Arendt argued; the banality lay in the complete casualness in going about his deeds. Repulsion for Jews had been normalised to such an extent that they were “rendered superfluous”. The Kantian principle of ends – that being a human has value in itself – means nothing if you are no longer even seen as human.
So how does bigotry become normalised? Or what makes people to be rendered superfluous? Arendt reasoned that the concentration camp was worse than the extermination camp – the latter merely killed, but the concentration camp eradicated human individuality and human morality. Violence is easier if the victim is not human or – in the modern nation-state – a citizen of a country, Arendt had said.
While the universality of human rights is the ideal, nationalism has redefined human rights. The “right to have rights”, as she famously said, is, sadly, meaningful only if an individual belongs to a political community; human rights are no longer enough. As someone who remained stateless for 18 years of her life, fleeing the antisemitism of the 1930s and finding no refuge elsewhere, Arendt would doubtless have smirked at the purported virtue of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” she wrote about the apathy towards stateless human beings, including herself.
India, of course, has no Russian gulags or Jewish concentration camps but the normalisation of hate has taken root, behaviourally and institutionally. In terms of behaviour, while Arendt may have dissociated Eichhmann from ideology, anthropologists find a close connection between the two. An ideology that redefines what it means to be human defines, in essence, what it means to be subhuman or non-human. Images of dehumanisation played a significant role in Nazi ideology and helped to normalise the Holocaust.
Dehumanising a group of people has historically often been a precursor to 'morally righteous' war and genocide. One of the themes covered by the Third Reich during the winter of 1943 was ‘The Jew as universal parasite’; the Rwandan state termed Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ to morally legitimise the genocide and, now, Hindu nationalists speak of 'infiltrators' – code for Muslms – as ‘termites’ – each group of people a biological danger that deserves exclusion and, at its worst, elimination.
In her analysis of the anti-Sikh violence in 1984, anthropologist Veena Das observes how an all-encompassing “Sikh character” was attributed to the entire community – that a Sikh does not believe in loyalty; is like a snake that will bite the hand that feeds him; is naturally aggressive and attracted to violence, etc. The subject of the “character” changes depending on who is targeted as the aggressor at a given time.
Once prejudice is codified into law, individual bigotry gains legal legitimacy; repression gains sanctity. Under the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, the degradation of black citizens and the restoration of white honour went together. Systemic bias permeates the judiciary, the media, the education system, housing, employment, the criminal justice system etc. But it is subtle and, therefore, more treacherous— rewritten history textbooks or redefined citizenship principles get internalized over time and are not as palpable as hate speech. In India, whether the Citizenship Amendment Act is implemented or not, a message has been sent: the Muslim is oppressive, and an outsider.
Whether Modi gets re-elected for a third term, the language of bigotry normalised during his rule is likely to linger.
Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist. She is the author of the 2019 book, Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 .
Reportedly
The Election Commission of India today aggressively rejected charges of mismanagement and delay in the release of the actual number of votes polled that the opposition has been demanding. In a statement marked by uncharacteristically harsh, even vituperative language, the EC says the opposition’s misgivings are unwarranted, without facts and are “reflective of a biassed and deliberate attempt to spread confusion.” [PDF]
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge earlier this week wrote to other INDIA partners asking “whether the Election Commission’s refusal to publish actual voting data, delay in releasing poll turnout data and non-publication of final voters’ list for next phases are an “attempt to doctor” the Lok Sabha election results.” The EC denies there was any big jump in voter turnout, insisting that the higher tallies were reflected in its Voter Turnout App which the public has access to. It also says the actual number of votes polled (as opposed to the percentage of votes in a constituency) is made available to all candidates and parties via Form 17C at the end of polling day.
Why this data cannot be made public via the ECI’s website is not clear since every citizen is a stakeholder in the election, not just contesting candidates.
Meanwhile, election watchdog, ADR has gone to the Supreme Court over the same matter, demanding there be greater transparency. Will the EC muster enough nerve to meet the press on Monday after the fourth phase of this lengthy seven-phase poll?
Deep dive
“As Bollywood has increased its propaganda production, like Nazi cinema, hunting enemies inside the country,” writes Tanul Thakur, “it’s also manufactured heroes whose prime identities have changed from Indians to Hindus to Hindutvavadis… Hindi cinema’s current tryst with history and bloodthirst has reached its logical conclusion: for every bit of gandh—or dirt—in Gandhi, it sees a God in Godse.”
Thakur decodes the century-old history of propaganda cinema in India.
Prime number: 18 months
India finally has a China ambassador after 18 long months. Xu Feihong is in. He spoke to China’s CGTN about his priorities.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Parakala Prabhakar writes on the eerie silence of civil societies but is a formidable challenger to the Modi government in the 2024 Elections.
With its narratives on development and nationalism failing, the BJP has reverted to abusing Muslims and excluding them from the national narrative. It presents a stark choice to the Indian voter, writes Shashi Tharoor.
Read this important intervention from Ravish Kumar and Kunal Purohit on what journalists moving to YouTube means for India. And what are its limitations and pitfalls? As Kumar says, institutions build journalists. But what kind of journalistic institutions do we have in India now?
Emerging fault lines between various armed groups in Myanmar’s Chin State are creating conditions for further cross-border forced displacement. Angshuman Choudhury on what this reveals about the new internal fault lines in the region.
Listen up
On Grand Tamasha, listen to Samanth Subramanian discussing his time on the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Uttar Pradesh with Rahul Gandhi, Gandhi’s vision, the tensions within the Congress, and the party’s struggles to counter the BJP. Tune in here.
Watch out
Comedian Shyam Rangeela mimics Narendra Modi and is going to contest the Lok Sabha election against him from Varanasi. Since Modi has not held a press conference in the 10 years he’s been PM, Rangeela decided to hold one instead.
Over and out
Indian playback singer Abhijeet Bhattacharya – known for singing some of the iconic Bollywood songs of the 90s – has become a viral sensation in Egypt and the Middle East due to his TV appearance of a Mubarak doppelgänger striking resemblance to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The singer has been getting invitations from travel companies to facilitate his trip to Egypt. “Someone even invited me to inaugurate their new restaurant,” says Bhattacharya in an interview with Surbhi Gupta.
Urvi Desai writes on women writing in the 1950s, on marriage, divorce, and intimacy in mid-century Bombay. It provides a snapshot of the debates raging in India at a time when Hindu personal law was being reformed.
“Standup has enjoyed a rapid rise in India over the last decade, and now its leading lights are conquering the Edinburgh fringe and packing out the Royal Albert Hall. Where better to take aim at the legacy of Empire,” writes Rachel Aroesti in the Guardian.
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.