Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: An FIR’s tall stories, the Opposition’s caste card

Delhi Police’s Special Cell raided multiple locations and premises, questioned several journalists, and arrested two, linked to the news portal NewsClick, after invoking UAPA, the terror law. The FIR against arrested NewsClick founder-editor Prabir Purkayastha makes for instructive — and chilling — reading.

It is a fear-monger’s delight. It is sprinkled with upstanding terms of self-evident virtue like “national unity”, “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity”, which figure repeatedly and in each iteration are painted as being under siege, against a host of shadowy spectres and forces — “false narratives” backed by “foreign funds” “infused illegally” by those “inimical to India”. It mentions hot spots at the border, Arunachal Pradesh and Kashmir, a pandemic that respects no borders, Covid 19, and lumps them all with the ubiquitous evil of “paid news” and the farmers’ protest against the Centre’s three farm laws. It brings into the mix a general election — of 2019 — which the shadowy forces also allegedly attempted to sabotage, ostensibly through the same “web of illegal transactions” using “circuitous and camouflaged” routes mentioned in the beginning.

Running through the FIR seems to be a binding argument: That there is a sprawling conspiracy against “policies and development initiatives of the democratically elected Indian government”. There is a binding conflation: That criticism of the Indian government is criticism of India, it is “anti-national” and undermines “national unity”. And a binding equivalence: “foreign funding” plus “false narrative” plus “paid news” equals terror. The FIR suggests that “false narratives”, on farmers’ protests or to “discredit the efforts of Indian government to contain Covid-19 pandemic”, are disruptive — in the same manner as an act of terror, defined by the anti-terror law, is.

As a report in this paper points out today, the FIR borrows the phrase “disruption of supplies and services” from Section 15(1)(a)(iii) of the UAPA which defines “disruption” as caused by “using bombs, dynamite or other explosive substances or inflammable substances or firearms…”

This guilt by very loose association implicit in the NewsClick FIR, these several leaps of language and meaning, raise disturbing questions.

They also point to the political strategy of the BJP-led Centre, to which Delhi Police reports: A brutal take-no-prisoners approach towards those who oppose or criticise, those who ask questions or those who protest, and a conviction that this hard-eyed excess will not be held against it by the people electorally.

This calculation by the Modi government may well turn out to be well-founded. There is little evidence yet, from the ground, that the government’s targeting of the media or its weaponising of ED-CBI against political opponents — AAP MP Sanjay Singh was also arrested by the ED this week, in the excise policy case in which former senior minister and party No 2, Manish Sisodia has also been jailed — is working against it.

Of course, the Arvind Kejriwal government’s excise policy was controversial and arguably that is also why it had to roll it back. But the ED-CBI over-drive in Opposition-ruled states contrasts with its see-no-evil demeanour in states governed by the BJP. Yet, for now, it seems that any build-up of popular indignation against the BJP government on this count is averted by an everyone-is-corrupt cynicism combined with its opposite, a despite-it-all optimism about the Indian justice system’s checks-and-balances that will kick in eventually.

Also this week, the Bihar government made public the data from a caste survey it had carried out — it is being seen as Nitish Kumar’s big move ahead of 2024, as well as a strike by the Opposition alliance INDIA against the BJP.

There is no doubt that you need to count caste and measure its effects in order to address caste-based inequalities. It is also true that the survey drives home a message that needs to be absorbed and acknowledged more widely: That the “general” category, considered as the norm, at only 15 per cent, is actually the exception and the minority. In Bihar, the survey also does well to cast the spotlight on the small and scattered and therefore invisibilised EBC groups that together, at 36 per cent, make up the largest category.

And yet, things may not all go according to the Opposition’s plan, post survey, politically.

This is because while the BJP looks visibly awkward right now at the prospect of other states following Bihar, bringing on more caste counts nationally, attempts to resurrect the Mandal vs Kamandal confrontation of an older time underestimate its agility. They also discount the fact that its rise and spread from being a Brahmin-Bania party of north India to its current dominance has been on the back of the support it has gathered among the OBCs, especially the non-dominant castes among them or the EBCs.

But there is a more fundamental note of caution for the Opposition after the Bihar survey.

While the first part of the survey that puts numbers to different castes and caste groups has been made public, the second part is still to be released — which will give information on education, occupation, land ownership.

It is crucial that the bare population numbers in Part 1 of the survey are read and layered with the socio-economic data in Part 2. Because while numbers are important, without contexts, without connecting the dots to social justice, they can lead to bare-knuckled majoritarian arguments on caste of the kind that the BJP’s Hindutva makes for religion, and that cannot be a good thing.

Till next week,

Vandita

Must Read Opinions From The Week:

*Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Unpredictability of Putin”, October 6

*Gopal Sankaranarayan, “I will watch India and Pakistan play”, October 6

*Sanjaya Baru, “A fraught border crossing”, October 5

*Pulapre Balakrishnan, “Caged parrots and universities”, October 5

*Editorial, “The morning knock”, October 5