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No means of protest

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Since the political defenders of secularism have neither organisation nor uncompromised authority, even our sincere protests are like so many free floating gestures; straws in the wind blown away by the next political current.

AS GUJARAT continues to burn, the challenge of finding the appropriate forms of protest against the Government in the State is becoming increasingly more complex. There is no doubt that within Gujarat itself the atmosphere is so intimidating that any protest runs the risk of provoking violence. It is extraordinary that groups that have the patronage of the state broke up even peace meetings like at the IIM, Ahmedabad, or at the Sabarmati Ashram. Even during the worst excesses of colonialism, I doubt whether there were instances where the British would disallow meetings for communal harmony. The state within Gujarat has reached a level of arbitrariness and partisanship, and the civil administration has become so incapable of protecting the rights of ordinary citizens, that normal democratic protest becomes almost impossible. Civil disobedience, when the state falls to such extraordinary depths of incivility, seems like a bad joke.

Then there is the drama in Parliament, with the Opposition stalling proceedings to precipitate a vote on the Gujarat carnage under Article 184. The BJP wants to avoid a formal censure of the State Government, the Opposition is not in a position to bring the Government at the Centre down, and some NDA allies want to censure, but not pull down the Government of which they are, for all practical purposes, a part. The result is an enduring stalemate. But the consistent adjournment of parliamentary proceedings, contrary to the intentions of the Opposition, does not show the depth of distaste against the BJP. It shows rather that the politics of opportunism has far greater weight than a protest on principle. If a Legislature does not possess the basic moral consensus that there are certain actions, such as the killing of innocent citizens, that are morally reprehensible, any attempts to register protests in that institution will become an occasion for invective and unruliness.

Arguably, Gujarat calls for assertive parliamentary tactics. But the simple fact is that the adjournment of Parliament is a downgraded currency of protest. This is because adjournments for no rhyme or reason have become so routine that even when a situation calls for the stalling of the proceedings it has very little symbolic purchase. What ought to appear like an extraordinary event in the course of our legislative proceedings becomes simply another familiar gesture. It is good drama, but I doubt if it sends any important message. So we cannot use the normal means of representation to register our protest effectively, because even Parliament is too compromised in sordid politics for it to be able to bear the moral weight of protest.

In some parts of the country, there have been marches and rallies but these have been unable to produce the numbers that make a dramatic impact. This is so for a complex set of reasons. The challenge of overcoming collective action problems is immense, especially when none of the political parties has the imagination and commitment to use organisational resources to overcome collective action problems. The Congress and other Opposition parties seem too afraid to launch a show of people power on this issue. But it is difficult to fathom this hesitation. Is it because the Congress is now governed by a series of armchair politicians, good at backdoor intrigue and parliamentary conspiracies, but incapable of energising even their supporters on any issue? Is it because they fear a backlash in the form of either violence or electoral consequences? Or is it simply because they care only for the comfortable drama of parliamentary adjournment and not the hard work of politics on which this party was built? Or it may be that the Congress has accepted the disquieting thought that there is not really enough outrage on the Gujarat issue to risk a show of mass politics. Whatever the case, political parties, even those in the Opposition, are now irrelevant, as conduits of expressing mass protest. We wait for elections to register our disgust, but quite what we were disgusted about will have been forgotten by the time we cast our votes.

One can, of course, look to other institutions to not only register moral protest, but also to bring some justice and order to Gujarat. Commissions and lawsuits might shame the Government, but if our own recent history is any guide, they will not be too effective. Commissions of Inquiry, even when they submit credible evidence of wrongdoing, are ineffectual without the full cooperation of the Executive. Most reports are not even tabled in legislatures and fewer still lead to actionable results. The Judiciary may pass strictures but it is notoriously slow. But the nature of our law-enforcing bodies suggests that significant prosecutions are unlikely to be the result of judicial proceedings. Many have suggested the use of international organisations, such as international courts, to bring the perpetrators to justice. This strategy seems too distant and untried for it to yield any immediate results. Besides, the political impact of all these measures is very uncertain. While they are all institutional strategies that ought to be pursued, there is no reason to think they can act as a substitute for political outrage.

There are, of course, various citizens' groups organising small-scale protests: a petition here, a relief drive there. The press still remains a forum where outrage can be expressed. But these forms of protest are largely ineffectual, as we have seen during the last month. This is in part because characters such as Narendra Modi and his ideological ilk thrive on a sense of adversarial victimhood. The more you criticise them the more it confirms their belief that secularism is simply another stick with which to beat Hindus. The tragedy of our situation is that the only organisations that seem capable of producing mobilisation on the streets are the VHP and the RSS. It may feel good, but the sad fact is that the normal mechanisms of public opinion such as the press and signing petitions are ineffectual means of protecting the victims of violence when the Executive is willing to connive or look the other way. Most of our protests therefore, are more virtual than real, floating in a self-contained universe of words with no organisations, no political party, no social bases attached to them.

Symbolic protests, we of all people know, can shake empires; but they require two things to be effective: organisation and moral authority. Since the political defenders of secularism have neither organisation nor uncompromised authority, even our sincere protests are like so many free floating gestures; straws in the wind blown away by the next political current.

Inventing new organisations or reforming old ones to make them effective on the streets, creating a new grammar of protest that has not been debased by overuse, will not be easy. But unless we discover new forms of protest that are organisationally credible and symbolically potent, our politics will continue to be characterised by the description Yeats gave of the Irish predicament almost a century ago: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. In this vacuum, protestations carry neither the imprimatur of conviction nor the probability of being effective.

(The writer is Professor of Philosophy and Law and Governance, JNU.)

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