Citizen Shambhulal Is the New Face of Hindutva

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Citizen Shambhulal Is the New Face of Hindutva
BY SHIV VISVANATHAN ON 13/12/2017 • 9 COMMENTS
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The only way we can confront him is by rebuilding our democracy into one which protects the likes of Afrazul and Akhlaq.
Shambhulal is the middle-class protagonist of Hindutva who destroys our secular dreams and our plural worlds. Credit: Bharath Joshi/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Shambhulal is the middle-class protagonist of Hindutva who destroys our secular dreams and our plural worlds. Credit: Bharath Joshi/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On December 12, I read Syeda Hameed’s article in the Indian Express on Mohammed Afrazul and my blood ran cold. There was something stark and surreal about the event, a dance macabre dismissed as another banal case. Afrazul was a Bengali worker from Malda, a migrant – and Muslim – working to earn a living in Rajasthan. An ordinary, faceless, nameless man who would have lived anonymously if not for Shambhulal.

Shambhulal is not faceless. He is a middle-class avatar of hate and confusion. Our country today is not a collection of people. We are a collection of symptoms of hate and revenge, much of which is surreal. It is based on a sickness of history where our mind and our memories are still overcoming the Mughals. This generates a series of diseases like love jihad, the lynch squad or people trying to protect the virginity and purity of Padmavati. Our history itself seems to have become a disease because it is no longer historical. It is a narrative of melodrama drawn in thin air where a middle-class man can play Shivaji or Rana Pratap purging the land of alien invaders and infidels, pretending the Muslim worker is a Mughal infidel.

The Muslim is no longer the neighbour we lived with. Islam is no longer the religion which provided the creative syncretism of the Sufi culture and the poems of Kabir. The Muslim is the enemy we want to exterminate. The Hindu in the Hindutva movement virtually feels that unless he has brutalised a Muslim or some member of a minority community, his rites of manhood and citizenship are not complete.

The monster in us is banalised, following predictable social science categories where the victim as a target is already boxed into categories like Muslim, minority, meat eaters, perpetrators of love jihad. Daily violence – normalised as routine – has become as banal as a weather report. The language of description and closure has become common enough to erase the event from memory. The next murder has the same brutality and yet sounds disconnected. There is little sense of memory, or of remembrance. There is no painter, poet or playwright to mark the event. No Picasso with his Guernica, no Wilfred Owen to condemn the brutality of it.

Yet, it is almost as if memory and violence have become acts of consumption. Today, almost every public act of violence is accompanied by a video. So whether it is Akhlaq or Afrazul, the replay of the violent imagery becomes a crucial part of the act itself. As an acute observer suggested, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati was an incomplete film. Padmavati, the historical piece, was the part before the interval. The second part was the modern day reaction, the making of the Karni Singh group, the confrontation between English accented broadcasters and the women fighting for a ban.

Also read: A Man Is Being Killed
What really completes the drama is the emergence of Shambhulal as the new Hindutva Indian. In contrast, what one confronts is the weakness of the liberal-radical critique, and the very effectiveness of the protests. Shambhulal is now the new hit, not Deepika Padukone. His hate does not need explanation. Even a recitation of gibberish is enough. The contemporary response is an inversion and one realises as the full narrative comes out that Citizen Shambhulal is the play, the spectacle we are watching. He does not need a script. Any hurried telegram of words juxtaposed will do. Love jihad, Babri, anything.

As one confronts a closed mind and a closed majority, one realises that a parallel world of categories is being created before which words like democracy and human rights carry little meaning. The great Indian movie is Citizen Shambhulal. He has a solidity, power and presence which push even the great classic Citizen Kane to disappear into the margins.

Citizen Shambhulal is the other face of the BJP era. As long as Shambhulal is in the majority, the Modi regime is intact. The Shambhulals, in fact, exude a piety they call patriotism and project a machismo where a lynch squad confronts a random victim. Citizen Shambhulal has emerged from our unconscious. He is the middle-class protagonist of Hindutva who destroys our secular dreams and our plural worlds. Padmavati, the film, is like those wall paintings. As you erase the surface, a new picture emerges and below Padukone lies Shambhulal. The modern Indian has come of age. He is the custodian of imaginary histories and an ethnic cleanser. He seeks to exorcise history to create a home for his imagined self.

Also read: The Lynching of a Nation
Shambhulal is not new. He comes in many avatars. Last year his hit movie was not Afrazul, it was Akhlaq. Shambhulal lives with impunity in the Ram rajya created by a majoritarian democracy. Neither modern human rights nor modern radical social science has an answer to him. One needs the power of absurd drama, a touch of a Kafka to confront him. He is the common man as the new genocidal self, the new idea India has built for itself.

Citizen Shambhulal is us. He has an epidemic everyday quality. As one stands to protest against him or write about his brutality to Afrazul, one realises his almost mythic, folkloric power. It stems not from him but from the billion hates that we, as a population, have sustained.

How does one confront Shambhulal? The human rights approach of speaking a minoritarian language, seeking compensation, has little appeal in the era of Shambhulals. Gandhians look more irrelevant because Shambhulal like Godse seeks to exorcise Gandhi from history. Shambhulal carries a certain sense of impunity. He is the new patriot who, in destroying or brutalising a helpless Muslim, believes himself to be every man’s Rana Pratap.

Activists have to continue the fight but one needs a new ethical, moral and political imagination to understand how modern society factory farms the Shambhulals. One needs a new kind of storytelling where the artist and the poet lampoon Shambhulal. The storyteller has to begin with Modi because Modi and Amit Shah are who have made Shambhulal possible. In establishing this link and challenging it, the forces of concern might create a new dream of citizenship where the other is sacred and a democracy which is never complete without protecting Akhlaq and Afrazul.

Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at the Jindal Global Law School and director, Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems, O. P. Jindal Global University.


A Man Is Being Killed
BY AMITAVA KUMAR ON 28/09/2017 • 2 COMMENTS
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On the anniversary of Mohammad Akhlaq’s lynching in Dadri, Amitava Kumar presents a brief prose-poem that tries to regain a sense of the human that is increasingly under assault around us.
Mohammad Akhlaq. Credit: Twitter/@AFP
Mohammad Akhlaq. Credit: Twitter/@AFP

A lot of life is left in a man being killed.

He does not at first foresee the end. He knows, of course, that anything can happen. When it begins his only worry is that he will be unable to work. At the very least, he thinks, he will be unable to lift heavy loads. He had himself made the door of his room from which they dragged him out.

Then it settles in as disappointment. There was so much more work to be done in the unfinished house. The iron rods striking him are raising dust from a ground sown with regret.

He knows he can list the names of the men whose voices he recognises in the dark. A few from the dinner in his house only two nights ago. He will repeat the names to the police, he tells himself, before losing consciousness for a minute.

Or more.

He comes back to life when he hears a child’s voice asking if the man is dead. Is he? One man’s voice, and then another’s, sending the child back inside. The child is a stranger but the man being killed would like him to know that he is alive. It has been a long time since he made a sound. He tries to speak without scaring the kid, without crying. It comes out like a moan, and immediately a boot, no, a brick, smashes into his face.

He tries to focus elsewhere. His chest is home to an excruciating pain and he suspects broken ribs. His pain keeps him in the present. Death, or the possibility of his dying, comes to him when he notices that, despite the pain and the wild commotion, he is dreaming.

He remembers being in the classroom when he was ten. They had read a poem. The teacher was newly-wed, he can see her now, a fresh flower every day in her hair. The poem was about a warrior dying, dreaming of his homeland on the alien battlefield. The teacher had liked him. She stopped coming to school when she was going to have a baby.

Unlike the warrior, he is dying in the dark lane outside his house.

A friend of his had died five years ago from dengue. During his final hours, the friend had thought his mother was still alive, sitting with him in the shabby hospital ward. Mother, he called out, I want water.

The reason he thought of his friend just now is because he is thirsty. His uncle used to keep a pot of water under the neem tree. He wants a small drink. As a child, he would look up after taking a sip and see parakeets bursting out from under the canopy of green leaves.

He takes the name of a nephew, dead at 13, killed by a bus when on his way to school. Compared to that poor boy, he has lived a full life. Despite all the fears that parents are prone to, his children grew up into adulthood. If they survive tonight – his daughter was left cowering in the room upstairs, his son left for dead with his head split open – they will be able to fend for themselves even if he is absent from their lives.

They have stopped hitting him, or maybe he can’t feel anything anymore. His eyes are swollen shut. Is it still night? He wants it to end.

He has stopped telling them they are wrong. Now his tongue is like a small animal running in one direction and then another. When he starts babbling, their blows fall. Blood is pooling under his head. But what is he saying? It is garbled speech, a line from a prayer his father used to recite even when he yawned, mixed with words from a Hindi film. He had heard a lawyer, was it Dilip Kumar, speak in court in a black and white film on TV.

A sudden new pain like a million ants crawling up his leg. He thinks they are setting him on fire. No, they are only dragging him up the steps onto a lighted platform so that WhatsApp videos can be made of the dying man.

Out of great weariness comes a new change. He feels he is walking away, able to cover a vast distance, without any real effort of his limbs. In the shadow of a boulder that blots out the hot sun, there is silence.

The man being killed has never seen the sea. But he hears its wide sound now in his ear, and this would be magical if it were not so real. So real that he can taste the salt of the soft waves.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several books of nonfiction and two novels. His latest, The Lovers: A Novel, was published recently by Aleph. 


The Lynching of a Nation
BY MANASH FIRAQ BHATTACHARJEE ON 25/06/2017 • 16 COMMENTS
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Lynching is a modern form of tribalism, where enemies – differentiated by religion, race, caste or ideology – are bracketed for elimination.
Hundreds of people dragged a Bengali man, Syed Sarifuddin Khan, through the streets of Dimapur, Nagaland in 2015 before killing him. Credit: Reuters
Hundreds of people dragged a Bengali man, Syed Sarifuddin Khan, through the streets of Dimapur, Nagaland in 2015 before killing him. Credit: Reuters

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, 22 June, 1953.

Mobs are taking over civic spaces in India. Public lynching, a barbaric form of political expression, seems to have become the new normal in India since the Modi government came to power at the Centre. The latest incident took place in a Mathura-bound train on Thursday, June 22. A 16-year old Muslim boy from Haryana, Hafiz Junaid, was lynched to death and his three brothers attacked, as they were travelling back home from Delhi after shopping for Sunday’s Eid. According to reports, 15 men wanted four young Muslims to vacate their seats. Upon their refusal, the Muslim men were abused with communal slurs, accused of being beef-eaters, attacked and thrown off the train when it pulled into a station.

There can’t be a more dangerous irony when the railways, considered the nation’s lifeline, become life-threatening for minorities. If passengers travelling together turn into violent mobs, the meaning of a journey is destroyed. If religious differences become a norm for hate crimes, the culture of democracy is destroyed. Society turning fascist is a deeper moral crisis than the coming of a fascist state.  A society can resist a fascist state. How to resist a fascist society? One of the survivors told journalists that the police ignored his requests for intervention. If law enforcers are reluctant to save people from mobs, the state fails in its moral duty. Deliberate inaction is the key to a democratic state relapsing into a fascist one.

Barely a week ago, a 55-year-old CPI(M-L) activist from Rajasthan, Zafar Hussein, was beaten to death allegedly by civic officials, after he tried to stop them from photographing women, including his wife and daughter, defecating in the open. The officials are part of the ‘Swachh Bharat’ (Clean India) campaign, whose idea of encouraging women to use public toilets (which in this particular locality were actually unusable) is by shaming them.

Vasundhara Raje, the chief minister of Rajasthan, and the inspector general of police, Udaipur, preferred to use the word “demise” for Khan’s murder in their June 18 tweets. “Scientific evidence doesn’t suggest murder,” the inspector general tweeted. Human evidence, that can’t be manufactured in a laboratory, shows otherwise.

Repeated attacks against Muslims and Dalits

The problem of official evasiveness regarding incidents of lynching goes back to September 2015, when a Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched by a mob in Dadri for allegedly slaughtering a cow. After a gap of several days, Narendra Modi called Akhlaq’s murder, “sad and undesirable.” He was quick to clarify that the Central government had no role in it.  Having no role is one thing, having no responsibility, another. The prime minister added, “The BJP has always opposed pseudo-secularism. Today, when we are faced with such an unfortunate malady, the same debate has resurfaced. This can only be resolved through discussions”. The inconsistencies are glaring. The resolve doesn’t sound as fluent as the show of grief. The malady isn’t simply unfortunate, but politically constructed and not simply a condition, but a crime. There is silence on the question of punishing the guilty. Lynching isn’t occasion just for debate, but providing justice and reassurance. In August 2016, the prime minister did air his opinion about people indulging in “anti-social activities” in the name of cow-protection. But gau rakshaks seem to see themselves as moral vigilantes protecting a sacred order and the state has done little to disabuse them of that delusion.

The prime minister’s mention of “pseudo-secularism” earlier may sound puzzling in this context, but it reveals the heart of the problem. The secular objective of the Indian state is admired for surpassing the doctrine of neutrality, in an effort to safeguard the rights of minorities. But the Hindu Right considers it a “pseudo-secular” policy of “appeasement”. In contrast, the BJP proposes an anti-secular idea of secularism, where the state actively caters to Hindu sentiments. Since coming to power, the BJP government has unleashed the many dangers associated with majoritarian politics.

Students, writers, social activists and others holding dissenting views against the government’s ideology have been branded “anti-national”. In February 2016, the JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, arrested on sedition charges, was beaten up by lawyers while he was being produced at Patiala House court. Exactly a year later, members of the ABVP attacked students and teachers conducting a seminar in a Delhi University college, and later violently disrupted a peaceful protest march, intimidating and beating up professor and student alike. These were clear signs of a lynch-mob syndrome disturbingly spreading into civil spaces. Demonising people as “anti-national” fans paranoia and hate that becomes a trigger for a herd mentality to develop. Lynching is a modern form of tribalism, where enemies – differentiated by religion, race, caste or ideology – are bracketed for elimination. It is a frightening scenario, when people turn into government and law at the same time, deciding for themselves who, why and how to kill. It is the rule of sentiments taking over the rule of law. The lynching of deputy superintendent of police Mohammed Ayub Pandith near the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar on June 23 is yet another spillover of this dangerous symptom where people lose their moral bearings. If a community erases the distinction between sentiments and crime, it quickly degenerates into a self-brutalising society.

No wonder, lynching has turned into a vigilante sport. In March 2016, two Muslim cattle traders were found hanging from a tree in Jharkhand, allegedly by cattle-protection vigilantes. In July the same year, cow vigilantes mercilessly beat up seven Dalit men for skinning a dead cow in Una district, Gujarat. More recently, in April 2017, Pehlu Khan succumbed to his injuries in Rajasthan after a mob attacked him for allegedly transporting cows. The Rajasthan home minister told reporters, “It is illegal to transport cows, but people ignore it and cow protectors are trying to stop such people from trafficking them.” The logic is chilling: Those who are lynched are on the wrong side of the law. Those who lynch are protecting the law. Using violence to protect the law was considered legal. The cow symbolises the sacred body of the nation, and extralegal measures will prevail against anyone even suspected of foul play.

The minister’s verdict puts all premises of law to shame. When people sense the government is willing to provide the alibi for murder, they become emboldened to take law into their hands. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his December 18, 1963 address at Western Michigan University, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me”, so even though “morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated.”

But what explains these repeated attacks against Muslims and Dalits? In Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto, Ambedkar noted that even though “Roman law declared the slave was not a person”, the “religion of Rome refused to accept that principle.” Since “Hindu Law did not regard the Untouchable a person,” he added, “Hinduism refused to regard him as a human being fit for comradeship.” The denial of personhood is a key element to lynching. The body of the victim is denied any moral essence, deprived of rights, easily reduced to the body of a vulnerable animal. The denial of moral agency to the untouchable prevents Hindus from developing a sense of “public” or “social conscience”. That is why crimes like lynching are carried out with an easy absence of guilt. They are done in a spirit, to use Ambedkar’s words, “as though such lawlessness is lawful” (emphasis added). The new untouchables of this lynching nationalism are the Muslims and also those whose lives and ideas contradict and resist the Hindu nationalist project.

In May, this year, a bench in the capital’s high court pulled up the city police for its inaction when a woman dean of Delhi University, Ved Kumari, who was earlier abused and threatened by ABVP activists, was again held hostage in her office by students. The admonition had a Biblical ring to it: “You have thrown her to wolves. You are feeding wolves by not separating them from the sheep.” Lynch mobs, like wolves, prowl and hunt in packs. If nationalism is a Darwinian force that makes the law favour wolves, it will mean the constant fear and death of the sheep. The law and the government cannot sacrifice the nation’s sheep in the name of protecting its cows.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee teaches poetry at Ambedkar University, New Delhi. He is a frequent contributor to The Wire and has written for The Hindu, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Outlook and other publications.

People Collect Rs 3 Lakh in Support of Afrazul’s Killer, Police Freeze Bank Account
BY THE WIRE STAFF ON 14/12/2017 • 4 COMMENTS
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According to the police, 516 people from across the country donated money in the name Shambhulal Regar, accused of murdering a Muslim migrant labourer.

A still from the video that Shambhulal Regar circulated. Credit: Twitter

New Delhi: The police in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand have reportedly frozen a bank account in which people had collected Rs 3 lakh “in the name of” Shambhulal Regar, who hacked and burnt a Muslim migrant labourer to death and circulated a video of the murder.

According to a report in the Indian Express, police officers have said that the money was donated by 516 people from across India and transferred to an account in the name of Regar’s wife, Sita. Two businessmen who posted images of receipts of their donations on social media have also been arrested, the report said. The police say they were made aware of the bank account because of WhatsApp messages that contained details of the account and asked people to make donations.

“We have frozen the bank account in which money was being collected in the name of Regar. Around Rs 3 lakh was deposited before the account was frozen… We will investigate those who deposited the money to check for any links with the accused,” Anand Shrivastava, IG, Udaipur Range, told the newspaper.

Also read: Citizen Shambhulal Is the New Face of Hindutva
Meanwhile, mobile internet services have been suspended for 24 hours in the neighbouring district of Udaipur due to reports that some Hindutva groups were planning public meetings in support of Regar.

Regar killed Mohammad Afrazul on December 6, because he suspected him of having a relationship with a Hindu woman. “This is what will happen to you if you do ‘love jihad’ in our country,” Regar is heard saying in the video of the gruesome incident that went viral.