The protestors in Shaheen Bagh in the national capital are being targeted by police-protected revolver-wielding Hindutva fanatics, and those in other cities across the country are being prevented by the police from demonstrating in the streets. Nevertheless their voices are reverberating from all corners of India to the corridors of the United Nations and the global institutions of Europe. They are a slap on the face of the Modi-led government which is driven by paranoia, and obsessed with the vengeful need to persecute political opponents and civil society dissidents. The demonstrations of popular protest all over India are evidence of the growing distrust among the Indian people in the credibility of the present ruling dispensation. The voters who gave their verdict in favour of the BJP in 2019 bringing an overwhelming number of its MPs in the Lok Sabha, today stand disillusioned and divided. They voted believing in the promise of `Sabke Sath, Sabke Vikash’ – the catchy slogan coined by Narendra Modi. But within a year, now they are thrust into an identity crisis, with the trinity of coercive laws (CAA, NRA, NPR) threatening their citizenship. From a being a messiah in 2019, Modi has turned into a menace for the people in 2020. More than the isolated localized acts of terrorism by a few militant groups, it is the mass civil disobedience from the grassroots that is posing a threat to the government.
Every corner of India today is in turmoil. While the Modi government manages to suppress protests in Kashmir by imprisoning Opposition politicians and imposing curbs on the media, it has not yet replicated that strategy all over India. Fears of further aggravation of mass protests, as well as apprehension of censure by the UN and the global community, may be preventing the Modi government at the present moment from taking such an extreme step of semi-Emergency measures all over India. But given the nefarious mindset of the Modi regime, and its unpredictable sudden measures (like demonetization and GST that wreaked havoc upon the common people, and the latest CAA,NRA,NPR laws that threaten our citizenship rights), we have to be suspicious and cautious about the present government’s future plans.
The challenge
The reverberations from Shaheen Bagh and the campuses of JNU, Jadavpur University, Jamia, Aligarh and other educational institutions have spread all over India. They are awaiting a political direction by a national leadership. The mission of the organic leaders who have emerged from Shaheen Bagh (particularly the assertive women participants) and the current youth movement is to pick up the strings of our freedom struggle (through demonstrations of non-cooperation and civil disobedience, reminiscent of the past), our Constitution’s Preamble, and tie them together in a new fabric of protest against an authoritarian state. They pose a new challenge to the anti-BJP Opposition parties, who till now had been mainly pre-occupied by debates on the floors of the Lok Sabha and striking alliances to win elections in a few state assemblies. They should now incorporate these grass roots voices from Shahbeen Bagh and its counterparts in their agenda, and prepare a new programme of strategy and tactics to defeat the present regime. The Left in particular, has a special responsibility in carrying out this task. It has to plant its politics back in the soil of the peasants and workers, and enjoin their movements that are taking place in the agrarian and industrial sectors with those happening at Shahbeen Bagh and the campuses.
Need for a fresh mandate
Simultaneous with such grass roots movements, there is a need for electoral agitations also. In all fairness to the Indian electorate, a large number of whom have apparently changed their options during the last one year judging by the public demonstrations, shouldn’t they be given a fresh chance to elect new legislators ? Even though the present legislators of the ruling party enjoy another four year term, since they appear to have lost trust of vast sections of the electorate shouldn’t they have the honesty and courage to seek a fresh mandate ?
We should demand a mid-term Lok Sabha poll. There is a precedent for such an electoral experiment. In March 1971, the then prime minister Indira Gandhi called for a mid-term election to the Lok Sabha, a full one year ahead of the schedule. Do Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have the guts to call for a mid-term election now to face the voters to test their credibility ?
Sumanta Banerjee is a political and civil rights activist and social scientist. Email: [email protected]
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