I think you might have to just wait for a couple of minutes because it takes a little bit of time to just join in.
Also, our panel two speakers on Kill yet, but perhaps they're going later, you think?
Yeah, I think they'll probably join it. So we give it another minute before we begin.
You have a question from an anonymous attendee, will these panels be recorded and shared?
Yes, there will be. Yes, we should be sort of begin in that case because I think people can keep joining in as we continue.
OK, so hi, welcome everyone to the performance and Bar and daily webinar.
My name is Nadia Maxwell and I'm one of the convenors of this event, along with my colleagues, Dr. Bonnie Gil and Dr. Timo Joju, Kyoto, Oxford.
I'm going to see just a few words to introduce this event. So our overarching interest today is to think about how we can understand the changes
wrought by the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019 to India.
We're interested in understanding politics, powerful forms of political expression and the obstacles to that,
as well as the ways in which the Indian state is currently acting.
We're keen to hear directly from individuals who in very significant ways and with key facets of contemporary India,
from constitutionalism to journalism to civil society, activism to artistic expression and the voicing of dissent.
We chose to send a performance in this early attempt to understand India after the sea by performance, we mean several things all at once.
We take performance quite literally to mean forms of expression such as art, Peter Song,
dance sloganeering and poetry that have been marshalled to express a range of emotions and political thinking.
Furthermore, we study politics itself as a title performance with actors, drama, speeches,
dialogues, costumes, access to different stages and on stage management and publicity.
Finally, we get to consider these various abuses and abuses and abuses of state power as a type of performance.
Now we would, of course, be cognisant of the fact that the sorts of performances we're referring to euro wide spread across India,
but we've chosen to centre Delhi for the submission of the event just in order to
circumscribed the discussion and also to give it some form of an empirical specificity.
I should note that we hope to keep this discussion going over the course of the year, so this is just sort of an early initial conversation on it.
Finally, before hand over to my colleague out to chair the first panel,
I would like to thank the contemporary South Asian Studies Programme at Oxford School of Global In-a-row Studies for generously supporting this event.
So Aubrey Gama for the first panel. Hello.
In the first panel will tackle how the state performs forward and what this reveals about the nature of the state with focus on daily,
and we have a really stellar panel to help us tackle this question.
We'll start with Akash, who has recently completed his Ph.D. at JNU and is a lecturer at the Department of Education at a university.
We will then have Hirschman, then who is an alternative columnist and director of the Centre for Equity Studies.
We're all familiar with his work on hunger and mass violence. We will then go to a chimney who is a lawyer litigating in Delhi courts.
He writes on issues of contemporary politics, and we're all familiar with his writings.
And finally, we have made the truth was an award winning journalist with words in Al Jazeera, the Catalan, the Wired, New York Times, amongst others.
Just a few housekeeping announcements before we get started. The speaking order is the same as I just listed.
Each speaker will speak for about 15 minutes, leaving us with about 30 minutes for question and answers in the end.
I request the to please write down their questions and either the to enable the checkbox in the selection of questions and take it to our panellists.
And so over two hours from our first speaker. Thank you.
Good. I'm Deborah. Yeah.
OK. So as far as the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens is concerned,
there's a lot to talk about with regard to what exactly they are. Broadly, we know what they are about.
But more specifically legally, how it they can shape the Citizenship Amendment Act, the NRC.
What is the story in a sound that it began? How it became an all-India issue, so on and so forth.
Now I'm not going to so much details, but I want to tell you that, you know,
there is a lot of material that is available which describes all these things in great detail.
And if you want, I'm happy to share with you those PowerPoints and the slides which were made in the course of the campaigns over here.
As far as. Yes, as far as my daughter is concerned, I go straight to the topic,
which organises a think to focus on which is the politics of fathers and bureaucracy with regard to S.A.C.,
which immediately takes us beyond Delhi, in fact to Azam and then to the rest of India,
and shows us how this question of bureaucratic violence and others has actually animated the protest very strongly.
So at one level, ideologically, that has been the question of secularism.
The question of democracy has fanned out in multiple forms, and one of them is precisely this question of democratic of violence.
And what is the purpose of this particular act of bureaucratic violence who are at the receiving end of it?
And that is this going to lead us to I want to take you through some of the documents and campaign materials that have been produced.
Some glimpses are that relate to, you know, the C and NRC.
How do they really come together? You know?
The Constitutional Amendment Act is geared towards denying slash giving depends on how you look at it citizenship to people based on religion,
which is not historically been the case in India rather than actually registered of citizens citizens, is get worse.
To quote our great, great politicians, I will not name who the readout infiltrators.
So to see when the question is, who are these infiltrators and how are they to be identified outside these major questions?
What has really been quite glaring is the lack of clarity that the Home Ministry has
consistently maintained with regard to the all-India NRC with regard to the documents,
with regard to the actual statistics of immigration in different parts of the country.
I mean, is the NRC necessary at all, so on and so forth?
There has been an acute lack of clarity, but despite such a huge lack of clarity.
And while we had an overall sense that the CAA and NRC are connected to the overall project of producing a Hindu rushed,
the protest against the NRC really took shape in the rest of the country once stories of ascendancy began to filter out and
would then refine the penguins strap people the most was this issue of bureaucratic violence and the politics of August.
What are the stories of some NRC covered by journalists such as Rohini Mohan,
whose work became very important to make us aware of the NRC in South India?
What the story really told us, first of all, was that the NRC is not something which has the home minister said.
I put him on this. This is April 2019, Amit Shah said first, the Citizenship Amendment Bill will come.
All refugees will get citizenship, then the NRC will come.
This is why refugees should not worry, but infiltrators should.
Understand the chronology that will come and gone in our in our seas, not just for our summer Bengal, it's for the entire country.
So this is his very famous statement on a chronology.
So know this false binary between the infiltrator and the refugee.
How are they to be identified? That takes us directly to the question of the two.
The bureaucratic process of identification and to the actual process of Assad may not know how some of the, of course,
has a longer history connected to questions of migration to that region and how my mission was impacted
by first the partition of India and then the Bangladesh independence vote and the birth of Bangladesh.
And that history, I won't go into great details of the point with them over here is that even then,
important sections of Assamese civil society who feel that their migration problem needs to be resolved and who feel that NRC might have been known,
you know, with the way things are handled, the situation is a bit different. But a lot of people initially thought the NRC was a good idea.
At least also acknowledged that the right wingers could a big role in communal housing the immigration issue in Assam.
By making it less a question of immigrants versus people of Assam and making it more of a Hindu-Muslim question.
So what really struck people in the rest of the country was that really this infiltrator vs. refugee family is a false meaning.
It all comes down to the enumeration process and the question of producing documents.
Now what are these documents that we're talking about before we go to the documents?
Just a glimpse of how some of those historians have been used to create awareness and the rest of the country.
So prediction one, could we have that many? Yeah.
So this one, for instance, the story of application denied the scroll down, please.
Yeah. These are all real stories the live shows don't have to have some 40 years Hindu longer.
Remember, the reason to mention this specifically was that [INAUDIBLE] give the impression that, look, everybody is at risk.
It is not about them infiltrators versus refugees, Hindus versus Muslims.
Everybody is at risk, and white people are said to be a weak document on his united citizenship.
The next one. The exclusion of children from the NRC, or you will have names of four children, Rula Amin Durga.
Yeah, I do not belong to different religions, different languages and all denied place in the NRC because it's called this.
Young delayed birth certificate before more than three months after birth.
Not accepted as a legitimate document for the NRC.
So the letters opposing policy impaired NRC, which puts children at risk of losing their citizenship.
So. Yeah. What exactly is the you know, what exactly has been the document issue as far as the NRC is concerned?
No. On the face of it, the rules are pretty lax.
The rules are pretty lax, as in. I just say briefly what the rules were initially following the Mossadeq on two different lists of documents
have been specified as lineage data for proving one's eligibility for inclusion in our seminars.
There is a list in which includes 14 documents which are issued before the cut-off date of 1971.
And then there is List B list. It seems pretty exhaustive.
1951 NRC electoral rolls up to 24 March Duncan 71 Land and Tenancy Records Citizenship Certificate Refugee Registration Certificate Passport LLC,
any government issued licence, so on and so forth.
And if somebody will produce a document from list in here to prove lineage by a set of linkage documents,
which is then I don't have any of these documents,
but I can show that where parents are from this place by showing them they possess a set of documents given in list,
not least B, those are pretty exhaustive.
On the face of this board certificate, there is one document that is universal the certificates on and so forth.
A range of things, but no read the story gets complicated is I mean the f.
Yeah, this prediction is all things. This prediction is one we'll go to, Linda.
Yeah. Now the story gets complicated at multiple levels.
First of all, there are several articles which come out at that time, which is very nicely articulated.
This point that in this war are basically document war.
With regard to asylum, with its history of floods and immigration, of the many stories of loss of documents and of both of them had this thing.
A range of documents given in those lists have also not been accepted.
So, for instance, something like a delayed birth certificate about certificate issued more than three months after birth.
There has not been accepted. So the range of documents, which I know are in that list have been classified as weak documents.
So all of these on all of these issues have meant that when the NRC came out and
found that a large number of people had been excluded from all across communities,
Prediction two We don't have a very clear indication of who are the ones excluded.
But some work missed, some work done by local activists.
I have provided provided us with a set of tentative yes.
Scroll down, please. Yeah.
So, you know, this is a really interesting and important debate. Assemblies handle 60000 work, cut 85000, gradual 58000 Gloria Maria,
Chicago Tribune and the Shia Muslims and the Assamese Muslims 35000 borrowed to anti-carbon nine rubber and cauldron ignition seven,
so on and so forth. Now these are indigenous tribes, the tribal people of the region.
So diggers such as this and the stories that are filtered in really brought forth the centrality of the question, of course.
You know, you look at the violence. No one saw this.
Thank you. This prediction is for them. No. A couple of things, you know, once this began to filter in about, fears also surfaced.
So, for instance, leading Adivasi intellectuals, particularly from Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, busted open here.
That look, not only randomness is a risk because of the lack of many such documents.
But there could be a surreptitious will of converting articles.
Think to Hinduism over, you know, why is that so for them to look at the Citizenship Amendment Act,
not ask what the Citizenship Amendment Act if you are a refugee fleeing religious persecution from a neighbouring Muslim majority countries,
I'm not even saying Islamic countries, Muslim majority countries eligible for citizenship,
so Muslim but specific religion that also mentioned Hindu Saint Christian.
But this audience of knowing Jharkhand tribal intellectuals,
writers such as a caricature and others have pointed out that look, what it means is that look,
agriculture is going to have some determination because they don't have a document that told that, look,
you can come back into citizenship procedure, but you might have to tell you something like Hindu.
So there's this very clever process of and this is no coincidence it's been a long term project of, you know, who's there, who's involved.
So this fierce battle to stop immediately on what also came out was that the question of bureaucracy was central not only to the NRC,
but also for the city. So the to put community in Bengaluru and most of the refugees from East Bengal and ask about East Pakistan,
then they claim that look, the disenfranchisement had started to see in 2003,
which was the first time specifying that citizenship was to be a lot of the was to be based not only on McCallum,
but also at least one of your parents should not be and should not be an illegal infiltrator.
That at one stroke disenfranchised a range of MOTU refugees from East Bengal that is one of the disenfranchisement started.
So it is not simply in our city that the politics of bureaucracy so central to the taking away of citizenship,
but also the granting of citizenship under came right.
So these are some of the facets of, you know, the politics of covers and bureaucracy, I'm an immigrant.
A couple of points. First, the work of somebody legitimate scholarly has really shown that while the question of problems is very important now,
given the proximity between the National Population Register and the UAP, the unique I can project the card.
It is possible for the state to update the NRC, even if you do not show Congress after the point,
there is enough data to update the NRC to some extent and to actually categorise people as doubtful
voters so that even without really taking a stand against those who can become a doubtful voter.
And then what option do we have got to your brothers and prove that in order?
Doubtful, so that I'm going to come in very strongly through the work of streaming us globally, amongst others.
We have the politics of bureaucracy and the politics of cargo's don't exactly coincide.
Bureaucratic Sutherlands can take forms other than Congress. A couple of other things.
Yeah, I think as far as the bureaucratic balance is concerned, it's important to keep in mind,
first of all, that there is a longer history that stretches beyond any one issue.
And I think that's one of the reasons why some in our 70 minute residents of the
rest of the country for people who have been suffering from bureaucratic violence,
even without questions of any immigration coming up. So that sort of place is this within a long term trajectory of Indian democracy and its failures,
but also specifically, what is the current government planned to do to the CAA, NRC and beyond?
These two questions come up very powerfully. And lastly, I think these these issues are very important to talk about at great length,
especially in the light of this massive media campaign being launched to discredit the protest and
frame the protesters and what all this protest is about the range of issues that have come up,
the range of voices that have come up.
It's really important to highlight that this jihadi Naxalites operate separately, and this is nonsense and how we challenge them.
We have to build up a counter-narrative. You have to build up a counter-narrative running all these stories thing that's really important.
And I learnt it over the. Thank you.
I should be this. And you, you know,
the Union Republic over the past year has uttered from a very long passage of darkness into light suffused with sudden
unexpected hope and then return to an even deeper darkness filled with foreboding and fear and all of this in the past one year.
Preceding this past one year, the last five years saw a very intense.
Project an interesting project.
A project to reduce Indian Muslims into second class citizens in contravention of the core values of our freedom struggle and end of the Constitution,
because at the core of the idea of India itself is the idea that this is a country that belongs equally in every way.
The people of every faith or the absence of faith. Because to every community, every language,
there is no there is no one way of being Indian and and and at the antithesis of this idea for the past 100 years.
And in fact, what we're seeing today, I think,
is the culmination of a battle that actually began 100 years ago when Mahatma Gandhi came to lead the freedom struggle
from South Africa and and in opposition to the idea of an inclusive and green India was the idea of the human.
And the Odyssey's formed India a hundred years ago, which was that India would be a country of Hindus,
a Hindu supremacist country in which religious minorities, particularly Muslims and also Christians, would have to live only as second class citizens.
So the last five years preceding the year that I speak about now was one of continuing the same metaphor, one of of of mounting darkness,
and I saw, you know, the anti-Muslim project actually working out in, you know, there were three stages to this project.
One part of the project was the political project.
A political scientist for long had maintained that because the many constituencies in India are big,
Muslims form a significant part of the population.
The conventional wisdom of political scientists was that on an openly anti-Muslim project,
no party can come to power and and therefore this agenda would always be somewhat diluted and negotiated,
as we saw in the prime ministership of this got to be.
But but what what what the first part of this project, which I call the political project,
was really a project to render the Indian Muslim politically irrelevant,
and the only way that they could accomplish this was really a project in which everybody across caste,
all Hindus across cost and significant sections of the Dalits and the iDevices and even Christians in many parts of the country.
We will put the fuse together against the Indian Muslim and that.
And when that happened, the Indian Muslim increasingly became politically irrelevant.
In fact, was seen almost as a liability,
and even non BJP parties were unwilling to articulate their their concerns in the discrimination that they were facing.
The second was the social project, and I won't talk too much about it.
But this was a social project in which a hatred and bigotry against the Muslims became part of our
social life and our public and personal lives and our intimate spaces in ways that were unprecedented.
The normalisation, the in even the vandalisation of hatred and bigotry through hate speeches and many others.
But but it's mostly the magic in the rise of lynchings and cults would gather in the
name of protecting a goal in the name of love jihad and and beat people to death.
1996 97 per cent of cases of lynching of two going to happen after Mr Modi came to power,
and eighty six per cent of people killed in these incidents were Muslim and eight per cent were done with.
The project was very clear and I, with some colleagues, we mounted finally a response which we call carbon.
But a caravan of love may be dissolved because every home in the country or families that people have
been lynched to see that there are people who can stand with you in solidarity and also an improvement.
And we made about 30 journeys since I've seen and been across the country.
The cruelty of the violence and comes families, which I wish they'd just shot him.
It just knifed him to death. But I didn't torture him and go on to say he's smashed his genitals.
And it was performed utopian performance. It was performative with a video camera.
Every single case was big. You were duped by the perpetrators and and celebrated.
And so this was the second project and and after that, when Mr. Modi came into power made his bid for power last year,
it was a time when when when the when the economy tanked, unemployment was at 45 at a 45 year high.
There was nothing else on offer except this muscular it.
It and and Mr. Modi came back with an even larger mandate of his thirty seven point six votes percentage share in the voters.
Thirty six percent of them were Hindus, and 44 percent of all Hindus voted for him for the role for his openly divisive political agenda,
and even one in three Dalits voted for Mr. Modi.
And therefore, Mr Modi and and his home minister, Amit Shah, interpreted this third term for the third part of the project,
which which I see as one way, not just in the practise of or of social and political relations, but in law itself.
India gets transformed into a Hindu majority, even supremacist nation and and and they saw this this expanded mandate as really a mandate to
accomplish now in law what they've already accomplished substantially in society and in politics.
The moves were swift, with the support of both the Legislature and the judiciary reflecting the long court agenda of
the Otis's criminalising triple talaq reduction of the status of changing the status of Kashmir,
which is the only Muslim majority state and a judgement from the Supreme Court,
allowing the construction of a template for at the site of the demolition of the bucket list.
And it was a judgement only makes sense in a Hindu majority and context, not any be in the context of constitutional values of equal citizenship.
And then came the sea.
And you know, as I describe the building up, the repeated references to chronology of the NRC and period have to be seen together.
And like all of all of what preceded was accepted it was, you know, I think the government expected that here too.
There would be a nationwide consensus, at least of silence, if not of active support.
I had never expected in my, you know, my father's genes the kind of movement of civil disobedience that we saw.
So I recall the day the day this year was being discussed in parliament to be passed.
I had made a call. I wrote that I, you know, this is a time for civil disobedience to learn from Gandhi and my own civil disobedience.
And I struggled with it because civil disobedience to say that I will not present any documents if there
is an inner seat and an impact was not enough because the CAA was designed to actually protect me,
even if I didn't have documents as a as a non-Muslim and therefore in my goal of civil disobedience,
I actually wrote and said that if there is an Nazi and an empire based on it,
I would first declare myself in official records as Muslim and then refuse to provide my documents.
And if that whatever consequences like Muslim sisters and brothers face as a result of not having documents,
I would demand that the same should happen to me.
We've seen what has happened in the.
We saw the bureaucratic nightmare that occurred, the enormous injustice the suffering of people fought for, for for for many years.
Their lives came into a full stop around just collecting documents.
And I know and the people in detention centres in the field of detention centres.
And and and I thought that this again would be, you know, this deepening darkness and suddenly something very different happened.
And we saw India coming together in a way with protests, which are the largest, the most inspiring movement.
And they grew from individual protest into a movement, the largest after independence.
And I was a student during the years of the anti emergency protests, which are the only contribute.
But they were also didn't do nothing like what I saw the nationwide across the country,
the declaiming and the icon ization of of national symbols, the national flag, the national anthem and the Constitution.
And I was going to address and speak in in rallies from the furthest corners of the country.
And in each of them, you know, I would get goosebumps because they would always end with the reading of the preamble of the Constitution.
Often, the young young girl would read out and everybody would solemnly repeat after them.
The ideas of justice, liberty, equality fraternity, the sense of awe, of awe of,
as I said, humane and equal citizenship was was convened and celebrated by people.
The movement, you know, to be. Some of us are being accused of organising the mood.
I wish we had the capacity to open. It was not organised by anyone centrally.
Elizabeth spontaneous movements that arose across the country led in many places by
working class Muslim women and by students across university campuses across the country.
They were the good leaders and we were only followers,
although we were called to speak in these few times and it was it was a time of so much work where we spoke about love.
We spoke about solidarity. We spoke about this country belonging equally to people, regardless of their faith.
And then then came the deadly violence. It started off the first day was in the nature of a drug.
And it quickly transformed into into a programme. This was preceded by a whole month of the deadly elections.
The people, the prime minister, particularly the home minister and a number of other leaders, you know,
articulated hate speech openly and the building an atmosphere of hate which finally leaked into this programme.
A month later, we had to lock down symbolically the first day of the lockdown.
The first act that we saw was, I mean, this is a lockdown in the name of a pandemic.
And you saw the whitewashing of this beautiful graffiti at Jumia University, which protesters had built up as if that was the first.
I mean, somehow the virus would somehow be saved from the virus by whitewashing the graffiti.
And then we saw the criminalisation of the pandemic using that.
The picture mark as Muslims were super spreaders and and and how that idea spread across the country.
But that was only the beginning.
We then saw detentions, arrests and incarceration of student leaders, as well as victims, survivors, Muslim victims, survivors of the violence.
And it was it was horrible because this was a, you know,
we had the most draconian lockdown in the world when lawyers could not come out of you finding people.
And we had a whole group of young lawyers who would have gone.
And in their defence, there was no one in their defence. You could start getting picked up.
They were charged and and then we found the building up of an alternative narrative about the anticipated protests.
And I am also mentioned in a number of charge sheets where it is clean.
In fact, I had made the speech after the students were beaten up in Germany,
and the speech was substantially and almost entirely about how violence would never be responded to with violence.
And we must learn to fight with love rather than hate and and about Muslims equal citizenship in this country.
And that speech is being quoted as in the facade of peace.
Husband instigated it, and that is now invidious chargesheets and you it can eat up to to arrest.
And indeed, I think the message is very clear, and I know that I am opening times.
I'll just say, what was the message? The message is the criminalising of all dissent that in the remaining four years of this government,
no one should dare dissent while we proceed with an agenda in a couple of days,
the prime minister is going to preside over the name of the foundation stone of the emperor.
And as they proceed in converting India into the antithesis of what was promised in the Constitution, no one should dare dissent.
And if you are young, you particularly at risk. If you're young and Muslim, then you're even more at risk.
And if you're young, Muslim and a woman, then you've absolutely added that is the message.
And all countervailing institutions of democracy, whether it is the judiciary, whether it is the media have caved in.
And in this there is an enveloping darkness of foreboding and fear.
I believe we will still overcome, but it'll be a long fight. And I end with what I just said.
We have to keep fighting because we don't fight fascism, because we will win.
We fight fascism because it is fascism. Thank you.
Over to ABC. Yeah, no, audible, no.
So as Mr Munda, who I must say,
is one of the most important figures in contemporary India in terms of his contribution to opposing the kind of authoritarianism we are seeing.
I'd like to take off from where Mr Mander left, where he said that the social adjustment or the social change that the Sangh Parivar
wanted to make is now seeming to gain some kind of legal legitimacy of some kind.
And and it's converting India as a democratic project from a secular idea of India to an idea which largely is premised on on.
A certain majority community, which is the Hindu community being the only symbol of our democratic project now.
I want to share with you a framework through which we'll be able to understand why our legal structures
and legal institutions have failed to protect us from this kind of political authoritarianism.
The framework, which I largely want to bring to your notice, is the view of the Indian Constitution.
I propose we look at the Indian Constitution as a story of two halves.
One half is what I call the individual liberty half, which is characterised by your fundamental rights, which are your rights to life,
speech equality, non-discrimination on religion and birth, which are in the part three of the Constitution.
And your fundamental rights and the legal sanctity of these rights are very, very high,
which is to say that are the makers of our constitution were very clear that you cannot at any time
impede or circumvent these rights unless the situation is created are completely drastic and requires.
So these are rights which cannot at any point be diluted.
Of course, now one doesn't seem to agree with that position because empirically what we are witnessing is completely different.
However, that is the theoretical idea of individual rights in the Constitution.
Now, the second half of the Constitution is largely independent institutions,
which are supposed to run parallel to the parliament and the executive bureaucracy.
So, for instance, you would have the comptroller, auditor general's office,
the governor's office, you would have the Election Commission and most importantly, the courts.
The courts, as we know,
I've been given a lot of power under the Constitution are the final arbiters of any kind of legislation or any kind of dispute between the executive,
the citizen and an institution. So where did the see really fit in within this constitutional framework,
divided between the right chapters and the institutional chapters that are
the first step in our constitution was to provide universal adult franchise,
and universal adult franchise would eventually lead to us electing representatives who would go to parliament and form legislation.
So you, the universal adult franchise, is the primary route, and I argued the first step through a democratic project,
which eventually is represented in Parliament will be made law, which the CAA is now.
Why do I say that the parliament made law is only the first step?
That is, the expansion of Universal adult franchise is only the first step in the Indian Democratic Project.
We must realise that the state today has taken the argument and this is a legal moral argument saying that we have gone through the processes
that the consensus democratic consensus amongst our representatives and they've all come to the conclusion that this act is Mississippi,
and therefore they have somehow ratified Democratic consensus through an act of parliament.
That is, this legislation that would create some kind of democratic consensus and therefore any opposition to this
kind of democratic consensus on law might not necessarily be seen within the constitutional framework.
Now this is where I want to propose that it is a complete opposite and contradictory view to what the Constitution is supposed to be,
because the Constitution and detail creates the rights chapter and the chapter of institutional autonomy
to oppose a situation like this where the parliament fails to achieve some kind of democratic consensus,
as is required through a law. So when the legislative or your representatives or the language of law to legislation itself undermines the rights,
the only way of opposing it is through your fundamental rights approach to the institutional chapter.
Not before I come to the institutional chapter, where I will describe how,
in my view, the courts have completely failed to uphold the idea of a constitution.
It is important to point out the manner in which our fundamental rights are central.
To oppose this year are the two ways in which our fundamental rights have been affected.
The first, the right to equality that is citizens in India today are not being treated equally.
So equals are being treated unequally on the price of religion, as we know, which is the central theme of the citizenship on the basis of religion.
Now, to oppose this, we have seen people have exercised the right to protest, the right to speech,
the right to come together, and this today is been seen as a form of illegality.
Therefore, your right to dissent is gaining aspect of criminal.
And how is this happening? This is happening by bringing in directly the criminal legal regime, which is the Unlawful Protection Act,
the IPC to try and convert this form of dissent into into criminality.
Now, as far as our institutions are concerned, I think the Supreme Court is the most important institution which has suffered in the last few years.
There is no doubt that when the CAA was passed,
there was an incredible amount of opposition against amongst those already pointed out across the country.
The illegalities were glaring. Now, when you petition the Supreme Court,
the Supreme Court always has the power not to take an immediate substantive decision upon the challenge to the act,
but it can, at an interim stage, at least put a step or halt the implementation of a certain act which could be considered unconstitutional.
The court, if had done so if, had said, Well, we have taken cognisance of the matter.
We do not give any prima facie view. But however, for now, we will stay the proceedings.
I think that would have given a lot of hope and the institutional chapter of our constitution would have been seen as a way,
a mechanism of resolving this dispute.
I think once the people of our country saw the institutional chapters not responding to this form of inequality,
the individual liberty chapters had to be dealt with in a more aggressive fashion.
And that is your right to collect your right to communicate the right to protest and does other things with the government is still dealing with.
So the institutional chapter is, in some ways have been circumvented and no longer a problem for the executive bureaucracy.
So what really remains what really remains, is the ability of the likes of students, the Muslim community,
members of civil society who able to voice their opinion through the writings to the speech, et cetera.
Another important point that I'd like to make on why this idea that because the parliament has
passed this bill and the media have repeatedly says that it echoes the will of the people,
is that we must understand the will of the people is not the final say in a constitutional democracy.
As we know, there's a very famous judgement called Kitchen and Barbarity,
which is the judge bench of 13 judges and where they had taken out an ASP proposition called the Basic Structure Doctrine,
where they made clear because these are the times when there was a there was an attempt to amend the
Constitution and the court was approached and petitioned that you cannot amend the Constitution as a whole.
There are certain ideas of the Constitution which must remain, and the court agreed.
The court said that there are certain aspects that even if a government with full majority comes in cannot change
because the idea of the Indian democracy doesn't depend on what the parliament says at a specific time in history.
The idea of India in terms of a constitutional democracy is imbibed within the Constitution itself.
Kitchen and behold, the case upheld a secularism independent judiciary, your fundamental rights, and these are things that can never be diluted,
nor an attempt is being made to the CIA to not only be able to change the way in which we look citizenship,
but it's an attempt to change the entire basic structure of how we view our constitution.
Because see, it not only reflects a kind of inequality in it in all its nakedness,
but it also in effect changes the idea of India in terms of what we view India as as citizens and how we constitute this democracy.
So we must look at this as the manner in which in which the Constitution is being supported.
These are these are very interesting reasons. And so you get rid of the courts.
You use populism as a manner of exercising ultimate democratic control.
Criminal law is brought in where you go, collect and give a speech.
Next thing you know you are in jail and branded as a terrorist.
Let's not forget that the UPA was amended to now brand individuals as terrorists and no longer as groups.
Let us not forget that they have managed to create the situation will be no longer in the right by by,
by increasing the legal threshold under which you could get bin under the UPA.
So this is also attacked on social logically on the liberal middle class of India.
It's no longer a statement to say, well, a middle class Hindu kids will come out and the police will not use for surveillance.
They will go back home. They will put under the UAP. They will put you in jail and they will make you suffer.
So to go back where I started today, more than ever, we have to see the fundamental rights as dissenting rights.
The fundamental rights are synonymous to dissenting rights,
and these are the only rights I feel unless our institutions redeem themselves would help us overcome.
Like Mr. Monday said, these dark times.
So I hope that we are able to redeem the Constitution and redeem ourselves and give back to Indian democracy all that the founders fought for.
And I think this is one of the most difficult journeys that we are facing in post-independence India.
Thank you. And finally, they have.
You need to unmute. Thank you so much.
I think all the participants have already given the the larger picture within which we're operating,
I would like to focus on the impact of all of this on on media and probably touch
upon the kind of sort of situation we are in and in the last five or six years,
the state of media and how finally this year was the last nail in the coffin.
I know it's absolutely becoming impossible to put anything out.
So I want to say that the last since 2013, just just a year before the Modi government came into the law school,
there has been a significant rise in the kind of I mean, we all knew we had a consequence the mixes in the mainstream media.
But this has over time increased and that has helped them boost very well or propaganda model that puts out information of
certain kinds and attacks people and makes the availability of any fact or evidence in the public domain very difficult.
And all that is available is available to opinion and binaries.
So I would like to say that in the last few years, if you look at the mainstream media reliance on reliance on 47 television news channels,
which almost captures 95 percent of the television viewership in India, so that's 900 million.
So apart from that, there are think tanks that are particularly being because the government is not very open to giving out.
For example, we've not had the National Crime Record Bureau data out since 2017, so we don't know the the system.
There was information by the National Sample Survey Organisation,
which is one of the trusted surveys in India that told us that the unemployment rate was
the highest in the last 45 years and then it came out of the government dismissed it.
So when are the government bodies that are supposed to put out data and give it to the media
and the government starts rubbishing it or starts all of holding that this kind of data?
Some think tanks coming into that place and nudging certain kind of information that
gets in this propaganda machine by the mainstream channels or by this political nexus,
and that has been a big problem for a lot of people.
What a journalist and author journalist wanting to put out any kind of investigative report.
So this is this is the scheme within which we're operating.
The other thing that has happened under the Modi government is that all you know, so I mean,
in all democracies, everywhere, journalists are used to getting legal notices for anything that they do.
But apart from that, we still have that colonial of 200 defamation law that is often used against doing this.
Look,
what the new about doing is that this government has also started filing criminal cases against journalists for which which will include which usually
loin orders and making excuses brought against it kind of charges with example you if you or sedition and inciting communicated sometimes to move on.
So there are all these cases that are filed. So what does happen is the bare minimum reporting is similarly.
So I'll give you an example. Two years back, a jaundiced call, Bob.
And yes, while for most of the people in the Northern District,
more than State of the British had done the story in-house in the government's done these foods,
which are supposed to provide free food to the children, but I think this is quite limited in programme.
He reported that all these children were only given to parties in sight.
So that is like the most basic thing and the case against him that the cycles of criminal conspiracy.
Now I want this thing for, though,
that the mainstream media in the last few years in India has is increasingly moving towards gig economy and independent journalism.
So which is why, you know,
because the mainstream media has this opportunity convicts this often a lot of independent journalism is only possible by people outside the system.
Moreover, the mainstream media's model is such that they hire local journalists in various forms instead of opening state states bureaus.
So which is why these journalists are not given salaries, but they are totally dependent of each story that they produce.
Now, in the case of Bob and Jaspal, because he was writing these 40 other publications and he also ran a grocery store.
So each time a criminal case is filed against a journalist, it becomes much about press freedom,
but it becomes about this grocery store or trying to wage conspiracy against the state.
Why I'm giving you this example is because if you look at the last.
Six, at least in 170 cases filed against joining this criminal cases, this has been the fact, you know,
all this kind of of apart from the fact that all 17 ministers have often on the
record used language as destitute and other increasingly dismissive people.
For the first time in history, we've had a prime minister who attends a single press conference the last six years.
So there is this kind of dismissiveness and or after the CIA produced this kind of self-censorship
has increased because of the fact that India has fallen several times down in the ranking.
The best freedom ranking in the last six and a half years of what has also happened is that increasingly,
if you are, if you are critical of the government and in have criminal cases,
most likely you will not be backed by any journalistic organisation or even the organisation
that you are reporting for that is in breach of self-censorship within the media.
What is going to also happened is that within newsrooms that have been standing instructions that nobody is going to write
about the number one and number two in the government structure and be critical of them so that they don't already.
There is already a system where stories are getting killed every day.
There is a lot of self-censorship and there are lots of criminal cases that journalists are battling at their own and at their own expense.
So it's not even that they have any institutional support in this framework.
What is what happened in the beginning to see if this was just within a week of the year being passed in the parliament?
The Information and broadcasting industries issued an advisory to all news television stations
that they should abstain from showing anything that is against the law and order of the state.
So which was clearly clearly indicated it was clearly indicated by this commission
but doesn't stand by becomes very crucial in cases of television channels,
and all because a lot of licencing and regulation regulation authority still lies with the government,
which is why these channels often tend to listen to the kind of sort of antipathy or attention to these kinds of advisories and often do Epstein of.
So. Anyway, the television channels are not showing this.
We've also had a binary with a lot of mainstream news organisations have been actively part of this propaganda model.
And I, like some of the participants mentioned that labels like open nuptial anti-national jihad,
the all of this has been has been, well, actually plugged in to the public accessible public domain.
And these words are used actively for anybody who's critical of the government, including journalists.
So a lot of mainstream news organisations actively fought in this stuff about them or to discredit the CAA protests to actively,
to actively do not not show certain aspects of what's happening in the ground and the journalists who were going out there.
There were several incidents of how they were attacked, and I'll give you quickly give you some examples.
Of this was the first time in many, many years while reporting the CIA focus on the police attacked.
Joining us for simple, it is that for each person in the room, several cell phones were seised by the Delhi Police options,
in spite of the fact that the editors issued a notice to Delhi Police to say that
there are reporters out there covering these protests and please let them do that.
More attention was paid to that. Moreover, just after the like, a hush also mentioned that after the CAA protest and the Delhi elections,
Delhi broke into these riots just towards the last week of February, and we enjoyed this work.
This was the first time in many, many years that journalists were stopped and asked for their religion,
and while the mobs were doing that, the police personnel stood there and watched.
There have been several incidents recounted by journalists who would ask you
to cite and one child yourself who were asked to see what about the future?
They would ask to drop their thanks to show whether they were set up and stay safe zone watch in order to show their religion.
So this has been in many, many years. We haven't seen that one of those, and that increases the kind of self-censorship that exist.
I would just take it one step further because what happened was immediately some 30 second March onwards.
We had this lockdown for almost three and a half months in India.
That time was used by the government against like a big push.
And I've got to mention that, of course, it was used against anybody who was a part of this focus,
but was also used against journalists who were reporting this protest and later the riots.
How they did that was that under the lockdown, legal services was not identified as essential services.
So in the remotest corners, journalists were charged under you with it.
This happened in several places in the opposition.
They were stopped with cases, collecting fees, the force and they got arrested and all these different charges.
And because we so this is the most essential services, they would relate to them,
which meant that they just wouldn't appeal to the higher court or access legal representation in that market.
And because, like I said, that the larger media modern India now is that there are no journalists who to have institutional support,
which meant that reporters in the remotest corners of the country were present for one month in some
communities locked down and had no move in Norway without any information that this is happening to them.
And that is something that is really scary.
I would also add that during the lockdown, just 10 days into the lockdown, Delhi Police Crime Branch received a notice from the Home Ministry,
headed by Amit Shah to say that not stop the arrest in the deadly riots cases no matter what,
for which meant that people in the next one month almost 100 people got arrested.
And because of a lot of mopeds on this again, what have institutional support?
They do not have this.
So there was more there was more reportage around these fourteen hundred arrests and lots of people would actually complainants.
But what other accused would permit accused by the police in the same cases so they will go report out at all?
So what I'm trying to say is that you've seen a kind of self-censorship setting in for for the longest time.
But the CAA protest and the Delhi violence that happened after that was the final nail in the coffin
because it seems such a thousand journalists have been injured in the last four months during the lockdown.
And you say that the other reporters were thinking this information on dealing with some kind of criminal case.
So no, it's very clear that if you do not.
If you want to start following the basic tenets of propaganda model set up by the people in power right now,
then you don't exist and do all you do is keep dealing with these criminal cases.
So there is absolutely no scope, no doubt any information.
All you see in the mainstream media is obedience.
There is no space for any known reportage, any facts, any evidence and the conversations that reading binaries.
And that is what is part of this entire model that of the ownership of the mainstream news organisation.
This kind of sub anti-national ism is almost like a religion for everybody to find some people who are,
but it's critical and in this space know that the media is well to let off so many journalists.
There is absolutely no scope to come up with any kind of authentic, no report.
You have complexities. It's only wants us to talk about.
I'm sure what's happening on the ground to see our protests have actually, you know where they in the last six years.
In a way they have been symbolic and they've given the kind of feeling that the government was hoping to in terms of media representation,
in terms of dissent, in terms of discourse. And now after the lockdown, it just impossible to bring important issues to the public domain.
And I am really hoping that there is some space that can be created.
I would also like to say that while there is conversation about freedom of expression and dissent,
everybody brings in examples of Turkey and Brazil and even us for that matter.
But there is. Unfortunately, I don't see this conversation in the global Oh, I don't see the in the global discourse.
I don't see this conversation. How freedom of press freedom of expression is increasingly being attacked.
And in the last seven years when we to. So I would stop that and maybe take more questions.
Thank you very much for a really powerful panel.
What we have is a very chilling account of the darkness engulfing us, as I've said, but also a deeper sense of how to understand it and combated.
This could be through the fictions of getting a sense of the fictions of criminality, perversions of law and constitutional.
A deep understanding,
complex geology of exclusion through bureaucratic mapping and a sort of hyphenated state corporation led hollowing out of the media.
So thank you very much for the really powerful kind, and we'll open to questions now.
I requested in writing the questions in the Q&A books. We have a question to start with from Pepsi Moshood, who asks me.
Can you give us a better sense of the longer history of the erosion of the basic structure of the Constitution?
Even prior to December 2019? I'm.
So like the basic structure, like a state that came in when under Article 368 of the Constitution,
which is the article which allows you to amend the Constitution,
limits what would be discussed during that period, the judges and the 13 judges who were several opinions.
So they did not come out with an exact list, and it's very difficult to do even lawyers who practised for decades to explain what that list is.
But they highlighted certain essential expressly to secularism fundamental rights and said for now, how have they been diluted?
How have they been diluted?
Well, in some ways we have seen recently judgements have been passed on about the Constitution bench on their land dispute.
Now, several people would have argued do it with the property and property suits are decided mostly
based on facts and evidence and not necessarily any theoretical constitutional concepts.
But an important way in which this land dispute suit could have been seen as a tool.
The theme of secularism. Now that's an interpretation which is very far fetched to making a soup,
but inviting you would have been essential in deciding a property dispute with whose repercussions
are far beyond our idea of private property in the sense that it occupies public imagination.
It occupies public space. And it's a matter which should have been seen within the Constitution.
It seems there is an area where maybe there is some kind of dilution.
Other ways in which it's happened is to say you uphold the idea of an independent court.
But the kind of dilution that we have seen today in exercise of judicial review is again a dilution,
which is not true any kind of legislative measures or any kind of legal executive measures,
but it's a dilution through mere informal coercive processes.
Otherwise, it makes no sense why? Why we would not see judicial review be exercised.
I think our institutional offices have slowly been diluted, and they're largely with the Office of the Speaker, the Office of the Governor.
And if you notice recently how state governments are bought and sold,
a large responsibility of upholding this basic structure is of the judiciary, the guys who gave it.
Now, none of them are being able to uphold the same form of independence.
Today, the governor's office seems to have a sanctity.
The speaker's office seems to have the sanctity so that the periodic running down all state institutions vis-a-vis these forms of dilution.
I think what other families, folks would like to respond. Yeah.
No, I just wanted to add that that there has been a continuous erosion and it's not as if the 19 or even 2014 was the sudden, you know, a sudden.
Abandonment of constitutional principles, I think there has been a weakening of these institutions over a long period of time.
But but what we have witnessed is, I think in the last six years has been a very rapid hastening of this process and also a brazenness with it.
And I'll just give you one example actually not of the judiciary, but of the Election Commission.
So we have won only one of the election commissioners with some sort of objections
about the the conduct of the prime minister and others during the last election,
and he would be the chief election commissioner in a year or so.
Presiding over many important elections, the government tries to harass him in many ways, his family and so on when all of that doesn't work out.
He is. Now we find that he has been given the position of vice president of the Asian Development Bank, which is at almost unprecedented.
No bureaucrat has been offered this position except one, and it can happen only,
you know, as a as a fever at the highest level of government at both levels.
But but I and and that he has accepted it. But I just was struck by how brazen, you know, you're not ashamed at all.
You have one chief election commissioner who showed some degree of independence.
You found a way of getting rid of him and you're doing it openly and and you're not ashamed of it.
I mean, I'm struck by the absence of and so one by one, you're seeing the institution being either coerced or or or or bought by,
you know, you finally make an offer which the person finds it hard to hide to.
The person occupying the office finds it hard to refuse.
But the brazenness with which is being done every institution is of democracy is failing us in a way.
And and I think last six years have seen this. You know what was a long slide?
Don't believe this is going to. Especially if you would also like to maybe speak a little about the charges
against you and how your speech was edited and what legal options you have known,
that's good. We'd like to know if you. Who could so so very briefly, what happened was that on the night of 15 December,
the police and the young men began university and into the library students were very badly beaten up and it was horrifying.
And story started coming in and independently. I think many of us decided to I my daughters, also lawyers.
We decided that we would drop everything and not Muslim students in this regime at night in police stations injured, what would be happening to them.
So we said we must all gather, gather that.
And when I was very pleasantly surprised to find the 40 other people had gathered outside the police station with the same thought,
and it was, I think, you know, to me almost that marks the beginning of the A.K protests.
It really marked an outside the Delhi Police commissioner's office.
More than a thousand people gathered and we forced, are we in?
We made sure that the students were taken care of and and the people who gathered outside protesting said,
we will just not go home until you release all the students unconditionally.
And that was the day when I saw for the first time, just spontaneously the pictures of Mahatma Gandhi in one hand and Dr. Ambedkar in the other.
And they've never come together. And I think the protests brought them together.
And the next day there was huge anguish of the students.
And you know, we went I went home once at four o'clock after the students gathered,
we got a few hours of sleep and then I felt I must be there at the university.
And I went there. About 15 20000 people, I think, were gathered.
The students were very anguished and somebody dragged me and said, You have to say something to the students and completely unprepared.
I was pulled up on and I said, I said a few things.
I said firstly, that this is not a battle about a particular no,
it's about the kind of country that we were given and what country we want to give to our children.
Should be a country that is kind and intrusive and so unequal.
And the second was that Muslims, Indian Muslims, nobody should have the right to question their loyalty to this country,
least of all people who never took part in the freedom struggle and that the rest of us who were non-Muslim had no other country except India.
Your ancestors actually had a choice between Pakistan based on religious identity and and India,
which was based on the idea of equal respect to all religions. And your parents or grandparents chose India, so you are Indian by choice.
We are Indian by chance, and so your love for your country is, if anything, more established.
That was the second, but the last point was that that I said and you know, and this is now come back to me over and over again.
I said that this question is it going to be resolved?
Is it going to be resolved in parliament? And I said Parliament. The opposition shows no moral courage to fight for what it needs to fight.
Is it going to be resolved in the Supreme Court? I said I'm disappointed because the Supreme Court, its judgements on matters like like a Yuja and,
you know, Ishmael and many others, we will go to the Supreme Court.
I said because it is our Supreme Court, but I have I am disappointed that it would be resolved.
I sit by we, the people of India, who gave us the Constitution,
and so we will fight for it and will fight for it with peace and non-violence is done with the tortoise.
But I said there's a fourth place where it will most of all be fought and that place is in your heart, in my heart.
And I said that we allowed him to colonise our heart or have we allow, you know,
how we fought against it and is the love in my heart and yours will ultimately decide this battle.
Now, that is deeply what I said over eight minutes.
Now what they did was so when I win first due to the High Court saying, why haven't you arrested people under hate speech?
And and when the High Court didn't act against it, I went to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court.
Even before I opened my, my lawyers opened their mouth, the said husband, why should we speak to you when you have no respect for the Supreme Court?
And it turned out that it edited the speech and left out love and non-violence and everything else, and they just had.
I have no respect for the Supreme Court. I have no respect for Parliament and we have to fight on the streets.
So it was about one minute out of the eight minutes.
Now that was obviously DR. And and so by. And then there was a who would?
Responds in over two days there, and the speech was widely circulated, and then I went back to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court didn't pass any adverse order, but they left it hanging.
But that then became what they are using over and over again, saying that that the violence in Delhi,
which happened to two months one week after this happened because it started off with the speech that I had made,
which incited people to come onto the streets and in the facade of love facade of peace.
This speech was made. It was such an absurd idea.
They also said that he planned the Leningrad siege. Kind of.
The city had all of this buzz and you know, and all sorts of things have been have been talked about.
Yes, it would have seemed fantastical and absurd,
except that now be finding it tough to judge the story of why people have somebody who's been murdered.
Somebody who's been killed is that husband amid the speech. Yeah.
And so so that's really what the government and so it's obviously part of and younger colleagues are being told over
and over again to give statements and collecting statements before magistrates in the building up of the case.
So the only thing that I find is that my own resolve has been not.
I mean, I have to fight this case. I mean, I I'm not even going to apply for anticipatory bail, which we have the right to separate.
I just don't want to dignify what they're doing.
I will basically say I will continue to work with the most disadvantaged and consumers decode what I feel is unjust and wrong.
And you do what you have to do to me. I think that's I found that, you know, I can't depend on any institution.
That's the only way I think I would like to say, Yeah, yeah.
Thank you very much, sir, for shining light on this issue.
And we have two very interesting questions. One is asking is because the NRC and CAA were brought on legally.
Can we think of reforming India without reforming the structure of bureaucracy?
And why does bureaucracy not get it to do mention in public debates? And we have one more question coming in,
which says that the narrative from the progressive side about saving the Constitution and preserving the basic structure,
which was at the forefront during the process also mentioned by some of the speakers here now how much of the disillusionment with institutions,
particularly the courts, is related to the earlier move in the 70s to invest the hopes of the progressives in the court,
which is an which is essentially an anti-democratic institution.
It's. Do you?
Yes, please go ahead. So I think. I think it is true, I think there was a great amount of debate on the role of our constitutional courts,
and historically, if you look at the last seven decades, the role of our courts have been a mixed bag.
We had basic structure. Then we had a powerful bail regime in the 80s, which sought to give voice to a lot of voiceless people.
We also saw a very strong court with a weaker government in the UPA regime, which took cognisance of corruption issues.
Let's not forget the court struck down, subdividing as as being unconstitutional.
There have been there have been various judgements which have protected that environment and so on.
So I think, personally speaking,
I do think the courts are an essential part of a democratic scheme to say that the courts are not the only way of finding change is true.
In fact, Nehru himself was a lawyer has spoken about the limitations of the court to bring about a real time democratic change of consensus.
I don't think the court's role is to do that.
I think the court's role is to be anti majoritarian institution, which tries to halt any kind of violation of rights.
I think the court's role is limited to be a protector against any kind of aberrations,
the kind of populism is producing today, but it's got an important structure.
Yes. Is it the only structure or is it something we must rely on to bring change in law or society as a whole?
Not really. That's not the role of the court. I think the court's role has to be viewed in a more pragmatic fashion.
But in disturbing times, in times where we are seeing revolutionary change in our country,
I think the court would need to do much more than was thought of or maybe in an earlier period in history.
We have another question from London, Philip, who asks how does the pandemic affect the debates around the NRC?
What kind of rupture has it created and these chilling developments across the Indian political media and legal landscape?
Come in here. Yes, of course. Yes. A few responses to what's been said on hushes blunt about this.
Nobody should have the right to question the loyalty of Muslims to India or their role in the freedom struggle.
You see, a lot of it goes back to the question of partition and this very false binary response to a thing that is the Congress of the league.
Who is to blame for partition? Nero's hunger, quote unquote, Nehru's hunger for power, the Muslim League separatist politics?
No, very important reference.
Here is the work of Aisha Tyler, which I keep referring my students to, who decisively establishes that in course of the 1920s and 30s Hindu,
most of and a range of other English modernist forces are working both within the
Congress and outside to ensure that Muslims are alienated from the national movement.
This is a very important observation, which I think is completely missing from our public discourse,
which allows the internet should be framed as a Congress versus leadership that can warn or shown on this book I want,
but just to point out how important this is. Secondly, on this point about the long term logic to the ending of the structure of the Constitution.
So I think it's very useful to go back to the constituent assembly debates and
what sort of hold the makers of the constitutions had with their constitution.
And because soon after he resigned as law minister, this is a very short interview to give to the BBC.
Was very disillusioned at that point of Kennedy makes an important point. The Constitution will not save the country.
It is about who works the constitution and how it comes down to the people.
And these are the political of Nehru saying that, you know that those policies are pretty much the top heavy approach,
which will which is unlikely to create the sort of mass base required, you know,
through social and economic reforms which can actually make democracy work.
And this has been a lot of emphasis that democracy will not work in India.
It is the father of the Indian Constitution now said the idea is, I think,
important to keep in mind here that while the Constitution is very important,
it's equally important for us to look at histories because of how we react to what the Constitution,
not just to the judiciary, but even, you know, forces outside and that that story, I think, needs to come in.
On that note, questions of bureaucratic violence now they are coming in very strongly as being at a more mass level,
police brutality, you know, but there are there is a long term story to this which this government has again drawn upon.
So my point is it's a question of constitution should cannot be resolved only through the Constitution as it exists the document, but for the courts.
But the question of politics and its relationship to constitutional values, which I think what I was alluding to,
the question of policies and politics is something that we need to keep in mind.
And very briefly, partly so because we're talking about institutions and how they're being hollowed out.
We also need to talk about universities and institutions and what is being done.
I think Nicole mentioned that what is it that we can we can do to tackle the situation?
So things like actually creating public opinion, which is what the universities can do that is being totally,
you know, what's the right word to use because I really like what the market move is.
That role is being really thoughtful, and I'm very glad the now brought on this wonderful think.
So there is a story as to why complaints are being made so far from one of these is to chip away at the power of universities,
know that the policies that the government relationship policy suddenly universities you can easily find the most is to criticise,
you know, so that that that's happening. So we need to also figure it out.
I don't know what you can figure out, but keep this in mind that you talk about the notion of the other institutions.
There is the potential. There's so many other spaces and also there are also the university.
Yeah.
Could you also hear from behind a break about the field of law and media and what possible measures we can take to combat to combat the situation?
Oh, actually, I just wanted to make the point, because what's important and this question about prophecy?
I'll start with a very small example. Recently, due to the lockdown, 87 percent of the relief material was provided by civil society.
So the fact that so many people were starving and they go hungry, that's in spite of that.
The bureaucracy that would have actually the local bureaucracy within disputes within townships, they could have actually stepped up and done things.
They haven't done that simple, bare, minimal, you know, providing relief material and ensuring that people don't die without food.
Even that wasn't taken care of.
And in fact, there have been reports that various parts of North India where civil society had collected relief materials,
the the the on the orders of the district collectors and various other people in the machinery.
They took away the relief material and only gave it to people who were supposed to be supportive of a particular party.
So that also happened on the day. I also wanted to say that the question for you to be with is that we need to look at
how these people see this piece of we thought they or somebody was killed in India.
But from season to season, a lot of extrajudicial killings, for example, in Uttar Pradesh,
for all you had mentioned about lynchings and people being killed on the acquisition of smuggling beef or consuming beef.
But there have been at least 20 cases in the area. I know where people were killed by the police on the suspicion that it was the smuggling.
So similarly, in U.P. in the US since 2017, since obviously not the single militant became the chief minister of the most populated state in India,
there have been over 5000 police encounters.
Police encounters opened up on this issue, but some counties in India and out of these five by over 5000 encounters,
at least one seven people have been killed and 500 people have been shot and injured have produced injuries.
And the fact is that in all, all of these cases, if you see the police is completely criminalised,
people who are working class Muslims overseas street vendors have been picked up on accusations of stealing the gold ring or stealing 8000.
Even with these on just that suspicion, they've been shot dead.
I know from the police locally to the situation where there has to be a bare minimum of magisterial enquiry into these cases.
Even that hasn't happened, and the charge is issued almost 16 17 an to the U.S. government.
In fact, now still that you will not be doing what will the Indian government,
the government saying that there is clear evidence that people see the pre-planned killings and what really chance encounters.
So everybody in the system, the bureaucracy, every single person is deeply scrutinised,
deeply opportunist, and which is why it's time and be bringing these issues.
Of course it is because of the bureaucracy. Of course, every cog in the wheel is completely compromised, which is why.
But wherever we are and in terms of what the media can do,
I just have one point very small point to make, which is that you wouldn't be well-intentioned.
Progressive media in India has actually unfortunately fallen into the trap of white.
It is to even the progressive media is only talking in binaries and responding to that.
You just don't want to be set by the Hindu nationalist government.
And which is why what is happening is all that we increasingly see opinion pieces and opinion journalism
not from the experts are part of this this walk in the ground for so many years and have some experience.
But all we see is everybody political opinion pieces. Instead of jabbing five kilometres and actually bringing the facts and evidence and
few studies from the ground to show the complexities and the nuances that gridlock.
And things cannot be this right wing or left wing or anti-national or national.
So I think we have to stop. Just to conclude, then there's a question from Ila Mehrotra, who is a UK based filmmaker,
was asking if you have any ideas for how the realities, the detailed realities from the ground can be circulated internationally.
I mean, there are enough, you know, reports that have been put out.
I mean, do you think it's just the fact that unfortunately the international, like I said earlier on to the global discourse,
also has to stop falling into a binary conversations and look for what is actually put out.
There are still some proposals lots of journalists from local born Indian languages.
And that is very important, and I think that should be picked up by international documentary filmmakers.
Anybody who has access and speak for. OK, thank you very much.
We're nearly out of time now. Thanks again to all the panellists and our attendees for the wonderful set of comments and questions and answers.
We'll take a 15 minute break now before we move to a second panel chaired by Bonnie,
where we will discuss how performance is also a form of pseudo radical politics.
So we'll go for a break now and thank you once again very much for being here.
Thank you for. We start now, and I don't agree with think of it.
But let's start, I think. Hi everyone and welcome back.
You've had a very powerful session earlier in the day. And now after this short break, it's time for Panopto on performance as politics.
As you all probably know, the anti-Syrian movement saw a huge surge in cultural and artistic expressions of resistance across the country,
from poetry and songs to murals, posters, public libraries.
A wide array of interventions captured the public imagination and infused the visual aural sense,
forged an epic and you cityscape, which on supporting solidarity.
In this final, we want to explore the commissary potential of protest and performances as a form of politics and the links between the two.
So this session will follow a similar format of independent one.
But I will begin with introducing each of the panellists, who then have about 10 to 15 minutes to present, followed by a Q&A session for the audience.
I'd like to say please feel free to use the Q&A function to post questions and comments as speakers present,
even though we don't have a Q&A after the entire session or after the speakers finished presenting.
If there is time after the Q&A to Mangla has also very kindly agreed to sing some of the songs,
and perhaps that's additional incentive to keep questions and comments short and to the point.
I will now introduce speakers in the order in which they would present both types within that.
Two Dan Laddish funding was an actor, director and organiser of the John Too Much, one of India's pre-eminent political theatre groups.
The group was set up in 1973 and soon joined in 1987. He has over 4000 performances, to his credit as an actor.
He works as managing editor at Left What Books and is the author of The Death and Life of Southard Hashmi.
We then have to Mangla Damodaran, Professor of Economics, Development Studies and Popular Music, Ambedkar University, Delhi.
Apart from an academic involvement, she is also a singer and a composer.
An archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People's Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s
has resulted in a book titled The Radical Impulse Music in the tradition of the Chapter and an album titled Songs of Protest.
She has also collaborated with Boyds and musicians from South Africa around a project titled Insurrections.
She is currently engaged in researching the relationship between music and migration,
particularly of women in servitude and slavery across centuries and vast tracts of the globe.
We then have that God bless Naqvi, who's a performative Boyd and founder of Saudi Ragusa Poetry on the Streets.
She's a translator and storyteller, theatre artist and an alternative educator who studied to become a historian.
She's a gender and minority rights activist, and most of her poetry travels around the same issues.
She has been a regular guest and performer on prominent political and cultural platforms.
She's an expert in social and emotional learning and currently works as a campaign strategist.
So, Dunbar, I will now hand over the floor to you. And they pleased to be her.
I think the first point that we must bear in mind when thinking about not just the present moment,
but really to light the long term project of the Odyssey's, which is something that has been a matter of discussion.
In the previous panel as well is that the Odyssey's SELF-IDENTIFIES itself as a cultural organisation,
and this is something that in the political discourse,
we have been in the habit of running down saying, Oh, they're not a cultural organisation, they're actually a political organisation.
In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that they had actually the do not take part in the political process.
In the non-moving, they have created a political fund called the BJP, which has been deputed to take part in the normal political process.
But this is not the artist. The organisation is something that we have underplayed and discounted for too long.
I feel that this is something that we must pay attention to, that the long term project of the Odyssey's is as much political as it is culture.
It is approved in fashion. The whole idea of what India stands for, what India is.
That's point number one. Point number two is that, you know, every protest is performance.
It has to be otherwise. What's the point of protest? If I sit in my room and I do something and nobody knows about it, then what's the point?
The whole point of protesting is to be seen to be protesting.
That's why numbers matter. That's my location matter that there.
Are you protesting in what numbers are you protesting? What forms of protest are you adopting and so on and so forth?
So every protest across the world from from time immemorial has always had a performative aspect of it.
But just as protest is performance. So part part the performance.
And I mean, we saw this, for instance, in the films of Leni Riefenstahl in the 1930s, the way she filmed,
let's say, the 1933 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi Party, the Vichy film, the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
All of these are really a demonstration and not just a demonstration.
It's a performance of power. These these films,
especially the 1933 a Nuremberg rally when it's called a to power this film has been has been described by somebody as a as a film that stars,
that has one superstar and 50000 extras, right?
So there's, you know, it is performance. It is.
The whole thing is orchestrated for the camera. So therefore, just as as protesters performance, so is fovea.
Also, performance and fascism understands this than almost anyone.
Witness all political parties perform their power.
All political tendencies put on their power. But fascism performs its power in a way in which.
Almost nobody else is able to do exactly.
It's very interesting if you look at, for instance, Mr Modi's the pictures, which are all over the place every day.
It's so interesting that, for instance, at these high visibility public events that he goes to to inaugurate the statue or,
you know, some bridge or whatever it is, he's the only one in the frame. And that is so unlike the normal political imagery that we've been used to.
We've been used to imagery of all of the main political leader surrounded by one million people, you know?
And that's what seemed to give power to the political leader here in the iconography that created around himself.
It's all we see in in splendid isolation.
You know, everybody is asking literally Mugabe so that the photographers can photograph this man all by himself.
Right?
And and it does it with very dramatic backdrops like the statue and so on, you know, looking into the far distance at the same angle as the statue.
But it's also interesting, for instance, just as a minor digression,
if you've seen pictures of Mr. Modi conducting at the meetings of the chief ministers, right?
And the picture that you see is Mr. Modi sitting at his desk and he's being photographed from the site from one side, right?
So he's in kind of profile. And on this side, you see the screen, which has the images of all the other chief ministers.
He's not even looking at them. You know, you see the two of them together.
It's as if he's talking to, nobody's talking to himself. That's what the picture tells you, that he doesn't care.
What they're saying this and suggesting is the performance of fascism.
They understand the visual media better than almost anyone else does.
Now coming specifically to the IPCA protests, I think it just before that one more point that I'd like to make is that and so therefore it's
not a it's not a coincidence that almost all of these public lynchings that have taken place,
these attacks on Dalits, on Muslims, etc., etc., many of them,
large numbers of them have been filmed and they have been filmed by the perpetrators themselves.
And they've been filmed not to stand witness to an act that is wrong and criminal, but to boast about what they think.
And then they start circulating on WhatsApp groups and so on and so forth.
Now this is something that you also saw in the 2002 ending a Muslim pogrom in Gujarat.
But then it circulated in a more underground fashion.
One heard about these videotapes that were on a series that was circulating where violence was being filmed, but it was almost underground.
It was like with a degree of embarrassment on it.
Now they're being circulated completely openly now.
What this also points to is that all performance then in today's time,
whether it's the performance of power or whether it's the performance of protest or
performance today has to be has to be carried out with the fact of social media in mind.
You cannot do it if you don't keep that in mind.
You have to think about how is this going to circulate? Because the moment of the protest is one moment.
It's transient, it's going to be seen or experienced by X number of people.
But the positive that is going to be amplified way beyond that or can be potentially amplified beyond that with the power of the social media.
Now, of course, the social media is also very lopsided and they are much more powerful than we are, et cetera, et cetera.
But even the protest that happens from other sites is also you can see how the fact of social media,
the fact of everybody now carrying a camera with it, right?
And in many, many cases, these are very sophisticated, highly efficient definition cameras that we have in our phones.
Now, the fact that these cameras are being carried by all of us to protests is also shaping the nature of the protest in the forms of the protest.
And I don't think this is a bad thing. I think it's a it's it's a fact.
It's neither good nor bad. It's just something that that has to be accounted for.
It's something that has to be taken, you know, in your stride and you've got to learn how to do it.
Which then brings me to my next point, which is that if you can see the protests and the kind of art that came out of these protests,
one, of course, is to look at it in terms of the art that got produced.
And of course, that's important to poetry. You know, and and so on and so forth, but also to think about.
Really, in which these protests were staged and using the word Islam that deliberately the way these protests have been staged across several
locations and the visual iconography that got produced through these protests through the staging of these protests is also a performance,
and it was a it is a performance that's and that's being staged primarily.
With social media in mind,
because the people who protest are aware of the fact that they're not going to get that kind of space in the mainstream media,
and so therefore they do keep in mind, how is this going to look on a phone screen?
You know, it is something that you consciously or unconsciously,
subconsciously you have to keep in mind, and it's important for activists to learn how to use these.
These technologies, it's telling to me, for instance, that settles that,
that almost all the poetry that was produced at this time and some incredible poetry came out that almost all of this poetry came from.
Relatively new and young for many of these points,
for people who are not very well known outside of small circles and and the fact that this poetry and
music that was was produced at this time was produced in in them in a sense in the heat of battle.
But it's also interesting, for instance, if you look at a poem like Tom Gonnabe, you know, now that's the poem that actually predates the CAA.
It's something that, you know, he had taped it. There's a video of it.
That's quite a dramatically staged lake in a dark studio and so on.
But it's only when he performs it at the gateway of India in Bombay with an audience in front of him,
and the audience responds to it in the video that some member of the audience.
That's the one that goes by it. Hey, it's interesting that it's the it's the poetry of protest that's been almost composed during the protest,
even if it is not composed in the protest.
In this particular case, for instance, it's interesting if you see the text of his poem, as it was done previously in the staged video that he saw.
It begins at a different point. When is it when he performs at the gateway of India?
In the protest, he starts with his most dramatic line. Duncan Habib Who the [INAUDIBLE] are you?
Who the [INAUDIBLE] are you to ask me? You know about who I am?
How much of a Hindu am I, etc., etc. Now,
the fact that it begins with this very dramatic statement this is dramatic line is something that that it did for the protest.
That's not how the plan was written. So in that sense, I'm saying that it's a point that has been made by the protest.
It's being created in a sense, you know, it's been created in a sense as part of the protest in the heat of battle,
in the sense, the site itself is performance and has often been said, for instance, as soon as the lockdown began.
One of the first things that the Delhi Police did was to go and and whitewash all those vaults.
That's how anybody now. Now, the fact that the Shaheen Bagh protest site also became an art installation site.
So many artists came to it and and put out their their artworks, and there were many people who were not who are not recognised as artists.
They are not. Then they don't circulate in the public, in public recognition, as I did.
You know, people like you and me, ordinary citizens. They go and do stuff there, etc. alongside artists.
So there's a very wonderful kind of democratisation of the idea of art that takes place in world.
Is this not something unique design, but this is something that has happened historically and all protest sites across the world.
And so once once again, one sees at by a couple of other points I want to make.
One is that I come from basically a theatre tradition of protest street cred.
And it was striking to me how, for instance, at this moment in the anti-Syrian protest,
there was very little theatre of that plane that happened like a plea, you know?
And we also perform like events went out and performed at all of these sites across the city of Delhi.
But what we did was not quite what was not quite what can be called the play.
It's a performance, but notably, you know. There's no story is not locked in any of the regular markers that you had to define.
The play is not something that we did. Now, why does this happen?
Partly, this happens because of of the contingencies of what the protest site itself that you don't know how much things are going to get.
You don't know how it's because you want to get it, etc. So it's got to be flexible.
It's got to be something that you would be able to change things around at any time.
You can make it short, you can make it long, you can do it in so much space, you can move instalment space, etc., etc.
This is not always possible. The play, which is characters, which is a story and so on and so forth.
That's one part of it.
But the other more important part of it is that what happens in in these moments is that the discourse keeps changing all the time, you know,
and there's always a way in which you want to bring in the latest that's happening out there into your performance, and that's not always possible.
It's strictly, you know, you've got to have a performance that's much more flexible,
that's much more amenable to change, to improvisation and so on and so forth.
And so what happens to these protests is whether you see the performances of as a monarch,
as a xenon mark, as a minor or a whole lot of others, in fact, is that the form itself is very malleable.
It's very it's very flexible. It's something that you can change.
You can shape. You can do things with it at that moment.
It's also not something that depends on the on the stage of being, you know, divided between audience and actors, whether it's elevated,
not delegated or the audiences on one side, three sides for side to side, whatever it doesn't matter, you should be able to perform anyway.
And and that I found really, really exciting.
The last point I would make is that for the first time in my life.
And you know, I am over 50 years old. I am 53 years old.
And I remember that the only time that I thought of the preamble of the Constitution was then what?
No open one civics book in school.
And it used to be the first page of a civics book right in school.
And one kind of looked at that and say and boring stuff.
And then one learnt about the directive principles of state policy and based on that and all the rest of it.
And when I found that stuff really boring and not once after that in my life and I lived through, let's say, the entire movement for the Babri Masjid,
the entire movement or the demolition of the body must involve from the moment of the violence and goofed it up and this.
So many of these absolutely terrible, horrible things. 1984 riots in Delhi and so on and so forth, but never before.
Never before has the Constitution come to life on the streets of India in a way in which it did not.
And that, for me, became the most exciting part of the fact that so many,
so many young people took up this constitution, held it up and and fought for it and made it their own.
It came alive. It became a place that once failed. You know, every time one looked at the preamble of constitution, once it's gone.
And that's been something that I've never experienced in my life.
And that really is the one thing that that for me symbolises this moment and gives me great hope.
I hope I'm not always short my time. Thank you. So, Mangla, can I give the floor to you?
Your muted sorry. OK.
Yeah. Thank you, Barney Daddy Omega, four, for inviting us on this panel,
and I'm I'm really, really happy to meet because you know who I've never met before,
but I heard her perform its mandate one late night, one night when when everything was washed out.
And I also happened to be performing that night and I was completely electrified.
And I'm so happy to meet her and be part of this event.
And you know, I took your your.
Concept, not literally OK, in terms of you're not talking about daily and in the sense that you know that this is presumably
for you all the beginning of a series of conversations around protest and performance and,
you know, protest in the state and so on, which is also going to be looking at different parts of the country.
So for me, having lived in Delhi for 38 years now and also having witnessed a large number of different kinds of events in Delhi,
which are political and which also involved a significant degree of performing duty, I thought I'd just take it back a little bit historically.
And maybe that will complement what I have to say and focus a little bit more on music than on on other forms of performance.
So, you know, at the time of the a.c.e protests the day after the violence happened in JNU,
you know when the BPP goons went on a rampage and injured seven people in JNU and so on.
And the next day there was a massive, massive mobilisation that took place against that kind of violence.
One photograph went viral, which was a photograph of a young woman handing a rose to a policeman.
So some of you might have seen it. And that really went viral in terms of a metaphor.
And, you know, an image of the protests. And soon after, she then started of the garbage column and wrote a song, a wonderful song,
which which I heard her sing a few days later, which was called the Gulab Nahin collab here.
Now, I mean, so, you know, to sort of follow up on what I was seeing the metaphor, the idiom, really, you know?
And also, you know, the way in which it got performed,
whether it was the handing over of the rose to the policeman by the young student or the way in which think a highly powerful political singer,
Lexical Saatchi, grabbed the idiom in some sense and converted into a fabulous song really begins symbolic for me of that moment.
Know, and there are thousands of such metaphors and thousands of such moments during
the the whole period from December until March until until the lockdown,
really. But if we actually look at the history, you know, the sort of recent history of daily over the past few decades.
See, peculiarly, Delhi has never been known as a very political city.
It is always been known as a century city and not political in the way in which,
you know, many other parts of the country are considered to be political.
But at the same time, Delhi has always had quite serious mobilisations around specific issues,
and performance has almost invariably been part of protest actions.
And in that sense, you know, and performances of different kinds and very often spontaneous performance, I mean, Sudan.
But as part of general demands and you know, several groups like this war from the late 70s onwards, the early from the, you know,
in the post emergency period, the one can think of any number of instances where performances have been an integral part of protest.
Even though, you know a lot of the mobilisation that took place around several issues never
translated in some sense into a larger see validation of the left in elections,
you know, so that's always been a peculiar conundrum, I think of politics in Delhi.
So I don't want to say anything more about that because, you know, that's not really my belief.
So if you actually look at it in terms of see a cultural movement in the way in which it happened, see in Bengal or in Kerala, you know,
predictably because of the presence of the left, but also see something like, you know, the summer diet theatre movement in Karnataka,
which was in, you know, several hundreds and hundreds of groups across the state or in Maharashtra, you've not had really,
in that sense, an autonomous culture, the movement of the kind that has been seen in many parts of the country.
But they have been very, very powerful groups and people who have articulated.
Politics through art, two different two different forms of art.
So if we, you know, I'm going to be speaking mostly about music, but actually think of it and stand back and correct me if I'm wrong.
But you know, from the 60s onwards, literally large numbers of artists, you know,
many of them who grew up out of the 18 different parts of the country or similar kinds of organisations started gravitating towards them.
And for natural reasons, Delhi was the capital. All India radio headquarters is here to do that and then so on and so forth.
So, so you had people, you know, stalwarts of it, for example, like Ingram Moitra and Benoit Roy, both Bengalis,
but who were also composing a lot of music in other languages and in India in Hindustani, who made Delhi their home for significant numbers of years.
Someone like Jitendra Moitra, for example, was, you know,
from composing large numbers of songs during the Bengal famine or during the Second World War,
was also one of the people who composed the music for the for the bahati collecting dress.
Remind us that I'm Lila performances, which then became iconic.
Similarly, Benoit Roy was a professor in JNU before he went to the Soviet Union.
But then again,
he composed a huge copies of songs without any number of stalwarts of the year who came and said he who spend a significant number of years in Delhi.
We know he spent several years of his extremely productive life in Delhi.
So. So that's that's one aspect, and, you know, really this this I would see the beginnings of this kind of,
you know, that protest goes with performance, perhaps is has has a long history in a place like that.
The other thing that did happen along with this,
that a lot of the music that came out of see that it opposed it on missions actually also got disseminated to schools.
So Delhi had a reasonable number of what we refer to as progressive schools,
and these schools took it upon themselves to actually teach their children many of these songs.
And that is something that perhaps has not been really recognised for its
importance because these are the students who then went into the universities,
you know, a few years later and who also became a very, very important audience.
And over successive generations also became the students who led the protests actually in different parts of the country today.
So, you know, even if there were a small fragments, you know, this actually got disseminated to a large extent to the schools as being the bluebells.
You know, even Sardar Patel began to a limited extent, a large number of these schools used to teach a lot of these songs,
you know, a lot of the songs in their heads in the making good on camera quality.
And you know, Sandusky rapidly now has that and so on.
You know, so all of these songs used to be doctors want children who otherwise have no notion of politics.
So this is the first thing that I wanted to see. The second aspect is, of course, around events and themes.
So whether it was the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that took place the Babri Masjid demolition, Safdar Hashmi's assassination,
the Gujarat pogrom, Jyoti Singh's brutal gang rape, you know, any number of trade union mobilisations that took place.
These were all, you know, sort of periods over which Delhi saw very big mobilisations.
And as I said, I can hardly think of a mobilisation in Delhi that did not involve performance, and many of us have been part of those performances.
You know how we were small? They might have been.
The idea that performance is a part of the formal protest venue was something that was ingrained in some sense into the DNA of politics in Delhi.
However small it might have been, so.
And music was a very, very important as part of those mobilisations and a large part of that music was really appealing to the.
Apolitical nature of the city. OK, so so I remember, you know,
when I was a college student in the university or studying in JNU or later on when I when I became a teacher in the university,
you know, a whole lot of these kinds of artistic interventions would be really trying to appeal to the conscience of the city.
And so you're not appealing to people not to be violent, appealing to people that we do go back to an older history.
You know, there we have enough examples, you know, not just in our history,
but in our present where that that you know, where the city can show its conscience.
So, so for example, even as these things, you know, gang rape and the mobilisations that took place, which were not necessarily led by, you know,
what might be called left organisations, a lot of the, you know,
a lot of music or theatre that came to my arouse powerful piece called walk came out of that, that movement.
So if we actually, you know, put all these events together and make a list, the list will be actually very,
very long in terms of, you know, music and performance that was created on these events.
Now, what were the kinds of issues that we are engaged with and not do?
I don't want to even pretend that I can really talk elaborately about any of this, but but just some, some specific aspects.
One the whole question of encounters with tradition.
What does tradition mean? And this is where what's the nice thing about the artist is being a cultural
organisation and the right-wing agenda of capturing the minds of the people,
you know? But at the same time that I think has been quite effectively threatened by the cultural metaphor that comes from these two days,
and which is why they are so brutally put down as well, despite, you know, being small numbers of people.
So so we know, you know, there are there are enough recordings and.
You know, recordings available of work done by, you know, Madam Globalising show with somebody, you know,
any number of musicians who actually decided to excavate the past going back to the 10th and 11th and 12th century into the Sufi traditions.
And not just that, you know, several other traditions about what the past really means to us in the present.
A lot of that actually happened in Delhi. I mean, it was it was happening over large parts of North India, and in the last few years or so,
it's actually also been taking place in the south in southern India.
But a lot of it got incubated in Delhi, in the U.S.
This was one of these mighty dennings very enticing the usable past, you know?
So these were musicians who were actually asking what the is the usable past in terms of music and not only asking and researching,
but also interpreting it and then going out into into these various performance venues and performing that stuff.
And that I think the very fact that today when you say Sufi or boun or something like that,
it's very much part of popular culture, you know, including it even stands a very high chance of being commercially successful.
You know, that, I think, is testimony to the fact that some of these very critical questions were being asked by musicians and these repertoire
were being excavated and being performed with a certain kind of urgency in informing the present and not just,
as you know, reminiscences and not just as nostalgia, but as engaging with the present.
And we saw that in the in the NTC put this as well in different parts of the country and all the different venues in Delhi.
OK? Musicians who were actually singing those things right over there and it was going across to very, very mixed kind of audiences.
So that's one set of, you know, musical traditions that I wanted to talk about.
The other kind, of course, what? We would call the music of the streets.
You know, the music of the streets, which was which was what might be formerly concert,
not considered protest music and that kind of a tradition, as I said, has existed ever since.
You know, it does. Songs were sung in Delhi, you know, as far as I know, definitely from the 60s onwards that it does.
Tradition of protest music was pretty strong in Delhi.
There are any number of singers, you know, who establish themselves as powerful musicians off the streets as in Delhi.
So. Yeah, so coming back to where I began.
You know, despite the daily not being considered a very political city, music and theatre have been very,
very important comedians to this politics has been articulated and which is perhaps one of the reasons also and I don't think we should ignore
the fact that the city does have this interesting history in understanding how it was possible for all these extremely spontaneous and very,
very new kinds of idioms to suddenly place themselves centre stage, you know,
in a city that was even in a small way used to being confronted in terms of its conscience.
You know, so. So in that sense, you know, communicating the metaphor or communicating the idiom has happened.
For quite some time, but it happened in a really new, refreshing and quite unusual ways in the last few months before the lockdown.
And the fact that it actually communicates across social cost, across religion, across costs as well to a large extent, you know,
most of us who've had experience of performing in the streets or at performing at all kinds of venues,
not formal venues necessarily have actually played with these metaphors.
You know, when you have a mixed audience,
it is always a challenge to see look into the eyes of different parts of your audience to see what is going across.
You know, the very fact that I'm the king, you know, that's how they can begin such a sacrilege and once the power of the metaphor, really?
And it was the power of the metaphor that Fez was working that. And it is the power of that metaphor which had acquired.
You know, very multiple meanings in, you know, the first few months of this year and.
So and it is precisely, I think, this articulation that becomes technical,
so even if it is small, even if it is can be beaten down, even if walls can be whitewashed.
Otherwise, with the with the kind of machinery that that you know, the Odyssey's or the BJP has to be in the country, why should this even be taken?
You know, why should a song be taken, you know?
So in some sense, the power of articulation the power of the articulated deviants is something that needs to be recognised.
There is a fear of the word. There is a fear of the image.
There is a fear. And you know, one of the BJP's women leaders, I forget who it was,
was actually screaming on on a on a television channel at some point when someone asked them the question, I've been supporting you here.
So she said it, she said, But I have a gun. I've got the woo Ghanians or nothing.
Or is that okay? Does it get a lot bigger? So. So, you know, clearly there is a great threat.
I'll just end with one. You know, one thing, which is that I I think it was twenty sixteen.
Yeah, it was twenty sixteen when there was after the whole of twenty seventeen, perhaps when the whole after the big general events had happened.
You know, when you can hear all of that, where were arrested.
But the subsequent set of events that happened, but I'm just collated, organised three or four day, um, you know,
seminar of a conference in which all kinds of events were supposed to happen with everything you were supposed to go there as well.
So was I. And of course, it was all.
Everything was destroyed and people were beaten up. The buildings were destroyed and it had to be cancelled.
So Darwish Kumar actually did the, you know, his his nine o'clock bulletin on.
He invited a lot of people into the NDTV studios to say, What would you have said if you were there?
And he asks whoever had been, and I happen to be one of those people who went into the studio and he said,
Well, what would you have sung or what would you have said? And this question was, is this anti-national?
What she has to say? Is this threatening so and that we invited, you know?
So clearly, there is a great threat from even these tiny pockets, tiny islands of activity that happen in an otherwise.
Less political city like Delhi, and I guess that's what gives all of us a lot of hope.
I I'll end with that. Thank you for Marla Sabeco, could I not invite you on stage?
Hi, about thanks so much for having me.
Grandma Bunny was so nice listening to some of the veggie, and so then I really don't think I have much to add.
But because it just was because you spoke about some jokes, I was actually there and got really brutally badly beaten up that day.
I actually wrote a poem.
So before I go start talking about the things that I have in mind, I'll probably recite that poem because it just it is about the end.
It's called Panopto objects that get you to say, Aha, nickel figure, I'm going to Sasabe, but the key was delivered.
The key here are the keys as the cargo, not the joke.
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Kunlun collar seminar. The same universities drug bazaar carrying the Zilmer Jabber Go bye bye kohanga.
As it is, you lack innovation. Hum there not a job studying human love written off, wrote the guy Joe Humpy.
I realise that he asked the Yeah, who should anarchy as the parish Carnegie as the more meaty,
meaty as the third lakini Vova divorce as a very masculine politically,
as the joke tuna dog as being held harmless, getting as I did to the ball, killing as being our guard,
killing gay as IDI or notch killing as we thought so much going on, getting him up near what?
Demonising this the university. So go and hired your chaplain kid.
No longer waste to energy and stop being so damn creepy.
Lousy, also masculine, nosy. And so you did just the time bad written this poem because I was really, really badly beaten up and by our classmates.
I was doing my masters at the time and our classmates were right there hitting us with
stones and those bundle bottles that you are that were actually throwing that at us.
And we had severe injuries on my head, on our hands and everywhere.
And then the bullies also beat us up anyway.
So I actually I actually started performing on the streets when the cases, all for a mob, lynchings and India kept on increasing.
It was hitting very close home and I used to perform on streets.
And then there were all these panel discussions about South Asian contemporary feminist poetry, what I was invited and I would talk over there,
etc. But I realised that the the people of my community, my cousins, my family members, everyone was so scared.
I mean, I remember returning with my father from Banaras in a train and we were very, very tired and it was a general compartment of the train.
And I just I just think I think I close my eyes for five seconds or five minutes.
But the moment I opened my eyes, my father was not there. And that was the time when the junior,
a lynching had happened in the railway compartment and my father wasn't dead and I got so worried I started frantically calling him.
That was and also there was no Muslim in the Bogie. Oh, the fear was so real.
Then my father picked up the phone and said, You know, I'm just standing at the gate of the train, and it was so scary.
Then I decided that one day can spread hatred in public spaces.
Why can I not talk about resistance? Why can I not question these public spaces through poetry?
And then I started collaborating with a lot of artists,
whether they were not film dancers or sitar players or tabla players or my masters and started performing in the streets.
And they were not just in the metro, I mean, not just in Delhi, which is a metro city, but also in Lucknow or also in Chandigarh.
I did it in Bombay, I did it in villages and little various public spaces and bazaars and markets and the doors everywhere where I could decide bombs.
And I was really scared because before this, whenever I put out my poems online,
the kind of trolling and hatred that I got, the kind of rape threats that I got online was immense.
I was really scared to go out there in the public and perform thinking that, you know, the larger audience.
And I still believe that the larger country still supports fascism, like the reason I am less scared of the Supreme Leader and more scared of.
My neighbour, because especially after what, especially after the deadly pogrom that happened towards February end,
you know that it is your neighbours who ensured that your houses were burned down.
Who pinpointed at your house. It is clear that it is the common people who are full of rage towards you and your community and your people.
So I thought that someone in the eye, someone from the crowd, will come and give you across my face and you know, I won't be able to perform further.
But till now, that hasn't happened.
People do come close to you. The question to ask your agenda is to say that your anti-national, etc. that you are brainwashing people.
But so then nothing has been physically violent.
When does the Nazi protest started? I am from Lucknow.
I wasn't. Delhi is like a walk in Delhi.
I went to see it and I see protests started and the Shaheen Bagh became the stage where, you know, there were murals being put up.
There were like it was aspirational. After a point, it became aspirational for poets and performers and musicians to actually go there and perform.
I mean, it became so aspirational.
People like what heard were out there performing when all kinds of people, I mean, people all were trying to find spaces.
We're trying to find time slots to be there and perform, to register their protest, to register their solidarity.
And there were all kinds of artists who were there.
Of course, in the beginning, it was just a few handful of artists were there.
But once it became like a nationwide phenomenon, giant ball was on everyone's lips.
There were people who were performing and there was not just performance like that.
Initially there was just a mic. People would come and speak on the mic.
But then after the point, it became a whole stage.
There were music systems that were put in place.
I mean, I remember one night before 26 January, we were setting up the stage for the 26th generally function well.
Proper music boxes were put up, you know, and technicians look old and the stage was rented.
Lots of things were put in place for the performance to happen.
So there were murals. There were an all small library is where storytelling was happening and there were poems that were happening.
There was oh, and not just your but like in the Roman gate and other sites as well, but not as much as Shaheen Bagh.
Well, when you move out of Delhi, I mean,
it is very essential and everyone has spoken about China in bulk and how colourful the protests were and so much of you know,
performances that were happening. Well, when you moved out of Shaheen Bagh, when you go to protest sites in Lucknow.
Dissent was difficult to even read out your poetry in contango is difficult because every
day hundreds of fires were done on every performer who was there every day in Lucknow.
And so for us, for a boy to go out there in shining ball, for me,
for any performer or any musician or a mainstream musician who decided to perform and chamber for them to go and try and vote and perform.
It was easier than to do the same in Lucknow. In fact, when we were organising protests, when we we were organising a poetry event in Lucknow,
when we read out the poets, there were only one percent poets who responded and said that they will come to Lucknow.
People were scared to come to Lucknow and reach that point. So also the whole point is for us, I am from Lucknow, so for me to go to God,
it's the people who are sitting out there and protest is just like 500 metres from my house, five metres, 500 metres away from my house.
So for me to go there and perform poetry, it's my people.
I mean, it was, you know, probably easier. But for most people, like even when you were discussing India My Valentine,
a whole performance event that happened on 14 February from 12 to 14 February across the country and all these big sites,
primarily Calcutta of Delhi, Chandigarh and Bombay in my Valentine was one performance event that happened and I was part of it,
but I was part of it because it broke my heart. You all my Valentine.
And it did not happen in other places like Lucknow, so.
What I would like to what I really like about this entire issue was that brought this.
Boy, it's that came into being with so many of them, so many of them are Muslims.
And for them, there was no other method of expressing themselves, but through poetry,
they also got a lot of press coverage, but they also got a lot of trolling.
And in response to the poems, multiple poems were written from the other side as well.
In response to Ahmed Aziz sub Yadira Kadaga, there was one more poem written from the other side.
And and soon as much as our content that you were creating, what about love and resistance?
There was a content that was being created from the other side, which was about hate and questioning on and questioning our content,
which was basically using our poetry, the clock, all of our poems and putting their head in it and making it viral and and for and for poets.
Every day it became difficult to go and also the poetry every day.
And to only talk about fares, I mean, for the longest time, everyone was only talking about Fez and leading fares as poems and saying, I'm the king.
But I think this time completely changed that because we had newer anthems by younger people as much as they can.
Gay was absolutely important, Humpday King, who was being sung and it was echoing with everyone.
But I think the new Muslim boy, it's the new generation of Muslim poets was able to bring forward newer chancel anthems of poetry.
And we have also been discussing the toll. It is time that we do not just write poetry but create our resistance to, you know, some larger resistance,
but also to create a new dream, which is as well as so many of us sports together.
We also have a group and we keep discussing these things.
We have been thinking that how do we create new poems because it is very important to understand that just reciting
poetry leaves a throat so thought just reciting poetry sometimes makes you feel that what is your poetry doing,
especially when the daily pogrom happened? Is my poetry Russian?
Is my poetry relief material. I was there working as hard working with Hirschman, do you?
We were there a week, four nights getting relief, work in place,
rescue work in place and then four days ensuring that relief relief happens and not easily.
And every time we were there on ground, we kept thinking that what is up Audrey actually doing it is nothing.
It is not helping at all. And it took us so much effort and time and discussion and introspection.
Do you even believe that the reason that we are writing poetry is to ensure that the fascists thorn
in the beds at night because our poetry is giving hope because poetry is helping lip fillers?
That is why we need to write every day and every day.
For poets, it has become an entire protest against hopelessness.
Every time you pick up a pen, you are tired, you don't want to write anymore.
You don't want to write about these things anymore as an artist since because as since the time this government is coming to power,
the only teams we are writing about is this or we love our country so much or
we do not want to show our papers anymore and even the poetry by the allies.
I mean, every time that warrant goes out there and your friend writes really well,
goes out there and see some of the kind guy who has a privilege to say, Can you be fired because he is a Hindu man?
We'll call his name the kind of Hindustani money Jahangir homegirls and the Hindu can get on the listening to him on.
In the same way, what the over, of course, the world economy, you can say, because you are no man,
we cannot, because the moment we build them for what they want to be, they are going to pick up.
Odd men are the younger boys and girls and put them behind bars.
So the fact that you write poetry, I think as much as we glorify the intention and the beauty of poetry during protest and the descent we forget,
we forget how exhausting and tiring it yesterday.
We forget how exhausting and titling it is to perform and to be dead out there on the stage every day.
And and when we have events like in My Valentine, an event that was actually.
Put into place so that we can express our last word love towards our country and say, well,
our country is our Valentine without realising the fact that we are tired of showing our loved ones,
and there's a poem that I wrote for and my Valentine, and it goes like this if time allows going at that point.
Sunny. Go for it. It's. No.
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Oh, no. Thank you, sir.
Thank you for the very, very powerful performance. I think we're all kind of stirred up on that, and I really did get goose bumps,
and I think that's the power of poetry and performance and songs and so on.
And thank you to the entire panel for a very, very illuminating session on performances and protests and the links between
the two and how we can consider Oklahomans abroad in the form of politics,
particularly in this difficult time that we are going through.
I will now open the floor to questions and comments that the audience may have.
And while we wait for some questions to come in, I thought I would do a quick kind of round up.
I mean, there were so many great things and themes that were discussed, so it's probably a difficult task for me.
But I think that I started with making some really interesting points about how we should also
take the artists as a cultural organisation and ensure that keep that in mind moving forward.
And then how every protest of the performance, how forward is also an act of performance, something that had some very,
very interesting points to make about the geology of protest music and the peculiar kind of position of many within this larger domain.
What I also really found interesting in your presentation was, you know,
this intergenerational aspect of protest music and how it kind of goes from one generation of people to the
other students who who had access to the music of are growing up in certain schools and learning and so on.
And then, of course, I mean, you really, you know, give us some beautiful renditions of what your poems are extremely powerful.
You also kind of spoke about the politics of intimacy in a way whereby, you know, it's not the Supreme Leader who one is going to threaten by,
but it is your immediate neighbour who lives in the house right next to you that is threatening in many ways.
And I think what came out really strongly in your presentation was the question of identity and the question of conditionality.
Who has the right to protest in what form and where.
And I think these are questions that perhaps the rest of the panellists needed to engage in.
I mean,
one particular thing that I'd like to kind of ask all of you is the role of being out on the streets and how we can reclaim our open public spaces and
how we can do it at performances toward the reclamation of these spaces of open spaces that are kind of being appropriated by the right wing in many,
in many ways. So perhaps you could open up with that and then be able to have another additional or not sort of a big question.
Yes, we do. So we have a question from an anonymous attendee who says,
can you speak a little bit about the origins of the Azadi song and how did the protesters use it to connect with the Kashmiri cause,
particularly in the light of the fact that many Kashmiris tend to use the song in their demand for self-determination?
Either of the speakers can can choose to answer to this. Yes.
So then what would you like to go through this?
I mean, it's about a song so that I feel like either you or I would be better placed to to speak about it.
Yes. Would you like to? So because we can't hear you, your muted stone.
No, no, I maintain it is a bit sketchy. I mean, no, actually this.
Well, all that this is that the Azadi is something that was was actually inspired by the British media that.
Leaders of the separatist movement because of self-determination movement,
and though I actually hold it for the first time by when it was recited by collapsing.
She has been she used this slogan and song during whole focus a lot.
And um oh, this has also been used by a lot of Pakistani feminists as well.
In fact, in there's actually a very nice article on this in HuffPost, where the entire bar.
There's this where the entire details of this slogan has been mentioned that our name Dina.
It was this women's studies where at least this for the first time, which went to Madhubani amongst girls,
added Maybe, but Jumanji as naughty Canada as I, so that is there.
But having said that, one cannot deny the fact that a lot of songs of Lakshmi years or so the domination movement
have been used in Indian thoughts in protest in India many times without giving credit of.
Or even talking about the with the question.
And we have another comment from Jamie Dow, who says I worry about the internationalisation of support for the goals of liberal freedoms in India.
The right wing so quickly presents this as a malign Western influence on breaking up India.
And in. We also have another question by the actual number who says we have spoken about criminalisation of dissent.
But could someone talk about what law, what law does to art when it is deemed criminal?
Is it still art? How does law to an artist into a criminal and art into crime plus love to time work throws you some love sending some love.
So would any of the pundits like to once or take this question about international support and law and aren't going to be gone?
I think I'll take the question about law and order first family because I see art as a timeless,
contextual yet timeless in a way that the legality or the illegality of art does not take away from the nature of life itself.
You can limit legal, you can limit the legal.
Instagram can see that its community standards and policy doesn't think that your art is art or violates their policy,
but your art will still remain art. What kind of art?
That is a different ones altogether. What law will always come heavily down upon anything that is the dissent that shows dissent?
So if a cartoon, if a poem, if appropriate and their ideas, if their art is they remain art irrespective of what law has to say about it in history,
they have gone down as art and they are going to stay there as art.
And the maker of that art remains an artist, irrespective of them being thrown behind the bars and being tested COVID positive.
An 89 year old boy, like whatever are now still behind bars still in office law has made his art a legal law has made his law has made him a criminal,
but he remains an artist and his the work produced by him remains there.
So I don't think that law has Logan do anything it can or it can ban.
It can tell it can, you know, remove from the public realm, but it cannot take away from the art ness of art at all.
So that bowl, I don't think I lawyers and thank you so much for all the love, and I just want to touch upon the internationalisation of support.
What actually happens is that especially if you look at the political prisoners in India right now, I will give you an example of soft skills.
I don't think the food I would have been allowed to work 40 had there not been so much of international pressure.
The fact that it will always be used,
we will it will all kinds of international support will always be used to say that all it is all Western they want to take away from India,
etc., you know, and de-legitimize the Indian source of the protest by saying that, you know,
it is all these other organisations that are supporting the cause and this organisation is supporting the cause.
But honestly, without international support, the Indian government and those in power are not going to look at India at all.
I think Shaheen Bol became a sore point for the government, primarily because of the international outrage it got,
so it is absolutely essential to campaign internationally. They'll get international support for everything that we are doing and all of the protests
that we are having because and international legitimacy to our protest makes it very,
very difficult for the governments to take steps. So I think especially if you are a minority, if you are a minority community,
you need even more international support because within your own country, the solidarities might be less.
So it becomes absolutely essential.
Although I would like to point out certain things will be all that you know, when, like as Muslims, so many times recently online,
there were so many rightwing trolls who lived in the Middle East and were made to go
leave their jobs and their jobs were taken away because they had said Islamophobic stuff.
I are this idea that our international solidarity should not mean that we want to establish
something like so when minority stake international support some spaces like Saudi Arabia,
that is something that we don't want, like the majority of Muslims in India do not want that.
So even when we are looking for solidarity, that is essential for us to see where we are looking for these solidarity.
Are we looking for solidarity in spaces that are already violating human rights and especially I come from a minority Septimus in amongst the Muslims.
So for me to get solidarity from Saudi Arabia would be the worst because my community is treated the worst over there.
So like also, what kind of international solidarity that we are seeking is also an inward looking question that we need to.
Think about. But keeping the voices, yes, getting international solidarity, but have no voice,
but the main stage and the mic is in the hands of the people of India who are suffering the oppression,
then I think no one will be able to take away the validation of our solidarity.
And so people would close to then also like to comment, and there was another.
And just no. So just a follow up question on.
Do you have a view on how we can get international support without delegitimizing the Indian source of the protest to stem the flow of?
I just like to make one quick question about the Lion and Arkansas on, which is to say that historically,
if you look at it, the law has been used to silence artists and and so on.
In British towns and in independent India is well.
But that has gone down the legal route to silence artists or silence art, not artists.
Silence art is no longer the predominant way in which art artists are thought to be silenced today.
How many cases have you heard of something being officially banned, a book being banned or a film being banned and so on?
That doesn't happen anymore.
And to my mind, at least the turning point the whole thing was the 1989 killing of satirise me that really brought the issue of censorship prompt.
It moved it from the realm of the government and the state and the legal machinery out into the streets.
And so what you have today is really censorship of the street.
There's actually threats that are issued to artists. The exhibitions that attacked, you know, the law and order issues are created and so on.
But very rarely do you find in India today that works of art are now officially being banned.
That doesn't really happen anymore or does happen, of course, as Article pointed out,
is that artists are put behind bars, for instance, whatever out today, 81 years old, India's poor.
The conscience, you know, has been to prison so many times.
Not a single charge against that man has been proved ever since 1973 73.
Till now, not a single charge has been proved against that man, and that man continues to languish in jail.
It's a shame it's a slap on our faces today, and we have to internationalise this.
This is not the way it makes my point that that we should treat the dead.
I mean, really, for me, he is the conscience of this country.
You know, of an entire idea of generations of us have grown up and you know, we have come to political consciousness.
We have recognised us as space in society. We have come to do to understand what it means to be a human being.
Reading books. And they would it up. And that man is to be today in prison on on, on the flimsiest of charges.
It's atrocious. It's a travesty. And if we do not internationalise this and what are we going to interact with?
It's OK to protest, have to be internationalised.
Of course, support for the protests has to be internationalised and one should not have any sense.
I feel as an activist, as an artist and as an activist, I feel that one should have no sense of embarrassment about this.
If one is getting into Berkeley protest, great. Let's get more and more of it.
After all, it's one of the selling points of Moby is that he is internationally so famous and he's so popular.
He's made the Indian passports only some magic wand, apparently, and so on.
And so. Is people that it doesn't matter what they do and Julia doesn't matter.
The fact is that we are human beings and that all human beings across the world stand up for each other's rights.
We stand up in support of our sisters and brothers in places far-off in Palestine, etc., etc. And so therefore it's only an accident that all right,
thinking human beings will stand up against injustice and for justice, there's nothing wrong with this.
We should not be apologetic about this, but.
Yeah, I I mean, I'd like to say a little bit about this C one, I think, is that these are these peculiar jobs that I lead, you know,
which is to say that somehow the moment you have international attention, it is as if the local is being legitimised, right?
Why should that happen? So and and it's almost an argument like that to succumb to an argument like that.
It's it's it's something that is a defensive reaction.
So I don't I mean, there's no way in which any international solidarity is going to be coming in for something that's not happening in India, right?
It's only because something is happening in India.
It's because, you know, they're the source of the protest is Indian, and there's nothing that can take away from that.
Or if it's not Indian, they've been put in jail. You know, if nothing is happening in India, it's because people are not there to protest anymore.
And that that's the reason. So this greater legitimacy needing to be established of, you know, an international opinion.
Yes, I would worry if Erdogan today decides to show solidarity with the with the, you know, protesting Indians, that would be a source of worry.
So I said, because it would you take your support from IS is what is important.
And I, you know, one of these some of these things would be sad,
but then we can be fairly sure that either to garner Boris Johnson are not going to be,
you know, extending solidarity to to the to the protests in India.
So it's it's it's it's this is like saying, you know, JNU people,
the students at the public money and everyone starts feeling guilty about it, you know, and there's this great sigh of relief.
We're not going to submit his PhD because, you know, at least he's admitted his Ph.D. despite, you know, going out on the streets, right?
I mean, it's all you know.
So the more we succumb to this argument about the delegitimization we will, you know, we are sort of aiding that delegitimization.
I think so. Yeah, it's something that has to be taken up upfront rather than having to constantly say No, no, no, the is actually by Indians.
The protests actually happening in India, of course there. There's no doubt about that.
Thanks to our cash, would you like to also respond to this? Yeah.
Oh, yeah, thanks, Brazilica Festival for articulating the question of politics, of international solidarity, so clearly.
You know, I think one of the reasons why there is an element of delegitimization is because the
nature of international solidarity that these kind of movements have obtained in the past.
In the sense, there is a sense amongst large sections of the dissenting public that it's very selective.
So when something happens in general, you are going to loads of letters coming across from many other universities in the country all over the world.
Even now, like with John Muir, there has been a fair bit of international attention. The Boston University on it, from Delhi, I mean,
from that particular circuit has got little national attention, even got about international attention.
So I think part of the problem is the fact that protesters here,
as we have also mobilised international support a little too selectively and we are not really
a more concerted strategy of mobilising international support against this particular,
this particular. Plus, there's one key piece of these issues in mind what some consider ending,
but I also felt as a genuine student embarrassed at times that the amount of
affection we received on the affection and attention that many others don't so,
so long as one keeps these things in mind, I'm not sure if it's an issue.
Like someone pointed out, there is no reason to be apologetic and we know make sure that, you know,
in the way we mobilise to support the mic is in the hands of the Indian protesters,
and that's made clear to the finerman as photos as the things to do.
I think there are some good suggestions in the panel, something like you.
I think people actually talk about crisis of democracy. Talkies are an example that people think.
Other countries, people don't talk about India, you know?
So just make it the smaller folks to maybe restructure the international discourse on India and South Asia as it exists.
But in so doing things which are missing, first of all, that in itself, I think, is going to be a big thing.
If it can be done successfully and the rest could, the rest could follow.
Thanks, I'll go through that name, useful kind of suggestions going forward.
We now have sorry, we now have about five minutes left for the panel,
so maybe I could invite some young lad to come on and perhaps sing the song that would really appreciate that.
We. Yeah, I. I don't know what you're see.
This will make sense. I mean, if I had the sense of what the audience is like I would, it would make it easier.
That. OK.
I mean, I think something that I just put out very recently, which is.
Slightly less known for the volume of affairs and the presence,
and it is it's something that he probably wrote, I'm not very sure about the exact exact time equity law did,
but but it's from his last collection of poems and which a large part of which were written when he was in self-imposed exile in Beirut.
And it's also the period when he was when he wrote, Come the king.
And so in fact, it was a time where he was really appealing to internationalism.
So, and you know, he had sort of drawing from the last discussion.
There's a difference between in the national responses and internationalism and internationalism essentially does come out of what I said,
which is that, you know, that we don't believe that a country's borders really differentiate between who one can empathise with and, you know,
have common cause with and it with a very long history of internationalism which didn't necessarily have to conflict with nationalism.
You know, that is really what Faiz was doing when he was sitting in Beirut.
He was editing an absolute Asian magazine called Lotus, which came out of Beirut at that time, and so he probably wrote this poem when he was there.
And to me, what I love best about the poem is that he's not sure.
And and that, you know, it's really a note of caution. It's really a note of caution that don't be so sure about what your what your answers are and.
You know, along with internationalism, it's something that I really, really cherish in this forum, it's up to make out that night.
I guess if her as we fight with them. So this is a poem that I composed some years ago and I would sing it for you.
And he. Oh, yeah, Kerry, nothing.
He who got third in his advocacy party, who died and his mother, Kelsey Barden, who died in.
You jerk with the cookie, Maddy, oh me, Honey G, even queen of the Dolly Tea Queen Bee, Oh me, honey g.
Even Queen of the dolly tea.
Yucky Tanaka's Oh me, love me.
Get any liability. You will get that type of luggage.
Oh, no, oh no, I didn't.
He. Yes, I know who I heard, a tidy me hair salon where her body me could turn the key keep the body to go to my GP.
Well, John Beaufort grew to be a key part.
What did he? Oh.
All of the Julija who signed it,
but all of the Julija who to let go of their job all said that all the young people he had no ill, will he know the people?
He had no choice but to go get it or not?
I'll let me go. Yeah, good enough in.
We, Domenico, who got going in on.
We got see, not a lot, but could see, but we didn't know.
I can do something to those nothing that they weren't doing. Thank you so much.
Amongst that, that was really, really wonderful. Thank you and thank you to the entire panel, actually.
We've now almost one minute overtime, so I just take this opportunity to thank everyone.
So then last amongst last week. Thank you all for this panel. Our gosh, Nina, a bleak and harsh.
Thank you all for joining and thank you also to the audience.
The recording of this event will soon be uploaded so you can kind of forward it to other people who might be interested and so on.
And yes, thank you and have a great week ahead. Thank you so much.
So much, everyone. Thanks. All right. Bye bye.