The year of the virus and absurdity

 

The year 2020 in history will always be synonymous with the pandemic that engulfed the entire world. From its humble beginnings in a market in Wuhan, the sub-microscopic virus ended up humbling the mighty of the world. It exposed the troughs and crests of human race. Scientific ingenuity to tackle the virus contrasted with basic destructive obscurantist instincts of the same human species. The virus did not drop out of a vacuum; a thoughtful few had been warning of impending catastrophes from viruses and bacteria. They did not worry about a nuclear holocaust or a meteor hurtling down from the sky. The disasters visiting humanity through plagues are more regular than those rare if not improbable events; the virus took over the world and defined everything in it.

Despite the virus or rather in many ways because of it, the voters in the United States rejected one of vilest person ever to occupy the presidential office. The election of Donald Trump as the US president will be a stain for that country to carry forever leaving it with weaker foundations than before that manipulative narcissist managed a hostile takeover to hollow out the hallowed institutions of the government. It was his response or rather non-response to the pandemic that he willfully allowed to ravage the entire country finally undid him. At least some consolation. Another four years of that racist charlatan would have certainly catastrophized the world. Good riddance for now.

On the other side of the globe, the virus besides creating havoc might have actually slowed another narcissistic from carrying out to culmination the process of Muslim disenfranchisement in India. Modi was all set to send undocumented Muslims in India to detention centers until the virus intervened. Nevertheless, he made up for that by having, cruelty and inhumanity visit the most vulnerable poor wretches of India as a way to dealing with the coronavirus in a complete disconnect with the reality. Then such people would not be megalomaniacs otherwise. The true absurdity was the manner Indians responded to his comic stupidity that now has crept into his appearance.

Americans did get rid to Trump in 2020, if Indians could perform a similar feat in 2050 that would still merit a commendation.

Until then a Happy 2021. The 2020 was for stoics.

A house for a god

On December 6, 1992, a horde went and demolished a historical edifice of Babri Masjid. Top echelons of BJP/RSS led the horde. In that melee on that infamous day hoodlums participating in the demolition molested women reporters. When one of the reporters complained to Vajpayee and Advani, they both laughed, offered her sweets and asked her to enjoy the day.

That day was not just of pulling down of the Babri Masjid, it sent the whole country into an infamy from which it never recovered. It created a class of hoodlums, who could not engage in living through any normal means and down the road, they became scaffolds of heinous structure of the Modi machinery. Godhra and the brutality unleashed in its aftermath in Gujarat had its origin to that infamous day. For Modi that was an opportunity to put the country on the road to bring further ruin. 

Those, who abetted and instigated the demolition of Babri Masjid never, faced a reckoning and instead their support among Hindus of India, transformed by hefty doses of mythology on national television, grew exponentially. The god instead of being a concept became a person, who needed to be sheltered in a temple at the exact spot where a heritage building had stood for centuries.

Even after pulling down the structure, they would not let go of the land because their god needed a magnificent structure on the stolen ground. The Allahabad High Court in its sanguineness indulged in a generosity and gave a part of the land to Muslims. Nevertheless, they wanted whole of it with Muslims conveniently shoved away. The Supreme Court of India agreed with them. Only those judges might be able to tell the applied jurisprudence, if any. With the aggressors and usurpers rewarded and the aggrieved party, the Muslims humored with a promise of a land somewhere far off, so as not to offend the god in the proposed grandeur temple. 

In addition, that original architect of the strife, Lal Advani still reports to the court investigating the demolition. Probably that court did not get a memo; the rule of law is no more the law of the land in India. These days it is easy to fall prey to sympathetic emotions towards Advani if one did not remember his cynical politics that changed India from a plural society to an openly parochial land and the trail of bloodshed he had left in the trail. 

That now all has become academic which despised scholars can use for their future theses and papers. Modi is all set to lay a foundation stone of the temple that would house their god. The Nepalese prime minister might have doused them by a claim that their god was actually a Nepalese. Given their current predicament with neighbors, in lieu of Modi's friendship with Trump, India might not be in a position to launch an attack on Nepal anytime soon. 

The day chosen for the foundation stone ceremony for the temple coincides with the day when India deprived Kashmiris the remnants of the autonomy and dismembered the state itself in 2019. That most certainly is not a coincidence rather an out loud message of Hindu hegemony.

India straddling hubristic abyss

On August 5, it will be exactly one year since India brazenly foisted a legal heist on the state of Jammu and Kashmir and its people to take away remnants of constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and the state itself broken into two inferior appendages. The Indian government played a legal sleight of hand, which without a judiciary rendered subservient by the Modi regime, would not stand a legal scrutiny in any land with a functional system. The article 370 of the Indian constitution had manifested the only link between the state and the union and had guaranteed autonomy to the state through restrictions on the powers of the union government. Modi government used article 367 to narrowly reinterpret the constitution to do away the requirement of the consent of the state constituent assembly, which did not exist, to make article 370 inoperative through the subsection (3) using the governor as the state authority for consent, despite being an appointee and representative of the union government and not of the state. The human made laws unlike laws that govern the nature can and are subject to capricious violations. History is fraught with lawless persons using power to subvert the rule law, flout norms, and established conventions.

Indian government rode roughshod to dismantle the state on the strength of its brute majority and brutal use of its security forces. Fearing popular revolt and reprisals, Indian government, in the preceding days, had surreptitiously reinforced its forces in Kashmir, which already had the dubious distinction of being the most militarized region in the world. One day prior to that fateful morning, they enforced an unprecedented clamp down with incarceration of the entire seven million inhabitants of Kashmir, who for next five months were deprived basic amenities and means of communications. People could not mourn the deaths of their loved ones nor could they pray in the traditional mosques. The arrest of 20 to 30 thousand people without any legal grounds compounded the forced endurance of dark winter months in complete isolation. Those arrested included the politicians who for decades had been running the charade for India. They even kept the former chief minister of the state, Farooq Abdullah incarcerated under an archaic public security act for over eight month and the highest court in India denied basic habeas corpus petition moved on his behalf. Even a year later, the outside communication in Kashmir remains at the mercy of the Indian authorities. Whether Kashmiris can travel outside India, depends at the whims of security control personnel at the Indian airports. 

The initial act of doing away the autonomy and dismemberment of the state was only a part of asserting Indian hegemony over the state; the real goal had always been turning Kashmir into a settlers’ colony. That operation began in earnest with appointment an inferior officer to preside over the new rudimentary union territory and exclusion of locals from policy making at all levels. Ever since, a spate of consequential executive orders without a semblance of legislative approval to temper the existing laws with impunity have become a norm with singular and ultimate goal of demographic engineering of the region.  

One of the most consequential rules included alterations in the requirements for being a permanent resident of the state, a law in place since the Dogra rule in the state-ironically, introduced at upon the pleadings of Kashmiri Hindus at that time fearing an influx from neighboring province of Punjab. With those alterations in place, the unrepresentative authorities started generous issuance of domicile certificates to anyone claiming to have lived in the place for 15 years and as per media reports that has minted over 30,000 new residents including many retired army personal. Barring a few restrictions, most of the jobs in Kashmir are now open for everyone from India with devastating economic consequences down the road. Coupled with those developments, plundering of the resources of the valley remains high on the agenda of the virtual colonial administration in Kashmir in the form of opening mining operations that could also bring in the ecological ruin to the pristine valley. That was always high on the Indian agenda where people of Kashmir do not figure much but a visible demonstration of Indian dominance does.

That could not be clearer than before with Indian government being hell bent on sending potentially COVID-19 infested pilgrims and laborers to Kashmir. The pilgrimage was conveniently cancelled and non-locals taken out of the state last year prior to removal of the state autonomy and start of incarceration of Kashmiris. With the pandemic enveloping the entire world and the conditions in India itself bordering on dire, the hubristic insistence on going ahead with pilgrimage and sending laborers to the valley can be only conceived as an act of bioterrorism being unleashed on Kashmir. That would mark an addition to the catalogue of atrocities that the population in the valley has endured under occupation. 

India might be running high after having dismembered and dominated Kashmir for now, the unfolding events portend unraveling of the shortsightedness of the Modi regime in the end. Besides its ludicrous response to the pandemic where projections indicate infected cases in India toping 3.5 million by October, the relations with countries in the immediate neighborhood are in total shambles. Indian parliamentarians might have jumped over one another to support the government in changing the status of the Jammu and Kashmir state, the changed status of Ladakh region and reclamation of Aksai Chin did stir the Chinese giant from its slumber. It declared its earlier agreements with India on un-demarcated border in the region as void and pushed its army further into the territory held by India. If the history of Sino-India war were any guide, India would be pricking China at its own peril. Then, acts carried under hubris and deceit come with an expiry date beyond which those only lead to ruin both nationally and internationally. Only if the Modi government had someone to understand the abyss that it straddling but some analyst pointed that India never had a government like this completely bereft of intellectual power.