January 26 in our 2020 imagination

A Southern Crossings Collective Statement linking the unfolding politics in India and Australia

As the 26th of January comes upon us, urgent deliberations continue about the Invasion of this land that has been held in custodianship by Indigenous Elders and First Peoples for eons. At the start of this new decade, the questions have become even more pronounced as Australia burns, and we, with the world, watch the devastation of this land brought about by resource extrction through savage capitalism and colonisation. The fires raging across this land are a salutary reminder of the deeply knowledgeable and respectful processes by which Indigenous Peoples managed this land through ‘cool fires’ and mitigated the risk of such scorching summer infernos. At this time, questions also arise about the exclusionary lyrics of the Australian national anthem and what they signify for this modern nation-state.

Eight thousand kilometres away, on the other shores of the Indian Ocean, as another nation burns due to political reasons, we are witnessing the astonishing reclaiming of a national anthem, not for the nationalistic purposes of a resurgent nation-state, but by those seeking the essence of what a ‘nation’ means. This is the reconceptualising of the nation as ‘we the people’ as enshrined in the Constitution of India, and protesting against the divisive mechanisms sought to be brought in by the current ruling government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the Citizenship Amendment Act, and its proposed concomitant handmaiden, the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

In early January 2020, inspired by Neel Bannerjee’s impassioned submission to us, we at Southern Crossings sent out invitations to Indian Australian writers to contribute short responses to the unfolding situation in India regarding the CAA and NRC, and how this links to our positions as Indian Australians and/or the political situation in Australia.

Our responses have been published below as one statement with each response attributed to each author, providing different Indian-Australian perspectives on the issues. This is the online equivalent of a peaceful morcha with a number of voices expressed in solidarity with the communities in India and Australia affected by the fires, both real and metaphorical.

 

Aparna Ananthuni

Artist, Singer and Scholar, Melbourne

For me, the Indian government’s CAA and NRC are not only unconstitutional and discriminatory, but part of an appalling attempt to erase India’s history of religious syncretism, and of the influence of Muslim culture in shaping languages, architecture, literature and visual art across the subcontinent. I was born in the city of Hyderabad, ruled until after Independence by Muslim Nizams, and I was reminded of how that rich history has been marginalised in my last visit, when I went to see the tomb of a heroine of mine, Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. This woman was not only a feted courtesan in late-eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century Hyderabad, but she also rose to the rank of a noble at the Nizam’s court and was one of his political advisors. She was also one of the first women in the world to write a full divan of Urdu poetry. And yet her tomb was neglected, silent, and virtually unmarked – in fact you could almost miss it if you didn’t look in the right direction! Her world had become invisible, despite its survival in decaying pockets of the city.

We see this marginalisation and erasure of histories here in Australia too, whether it’s the silencing or whitewashing of the invasion of this country and the decimation of First Nations peoples and cultures, or the lack of interest in the multiple early histories of non-European migration to the country post-invasion.

We cannot let history fall by the wayside, or be rewritten to suit the agendas of the right-wing, the privileged, the fanatical: it’s far too important, far too revealing, and far too beautiful.

 

 

Dr Arjun Raina 

Independent Artist, Melbourne

‘A jumla gone too far’

A Jumla, a political spin, has the Indian Home Minister reassuring the country that no Indian Muslim Citizen will suffer detention and persecution as a consequence of the CAA or Citizen Amendment Act. However, till the NRC or the National Registration of Citizens is complete, there are no citizens on the register. It is only at the end of the NRC process that citizenship is deemed as valid, and all those that fall off the radar will be at the mercy of the system. In Assam, out of nineteen lakh non-citizens left out of the NRC, fourteen lakh Hindus will potentially get citizenship under the CAA, but five lakh Muslims will have to move to detention centers. Multiply this right across the country and you have lakhs of Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, and other communities for whom paper documentation, either does not exist, is lost or is a bureaucratic nightmare to produce. They will exist at the mercy of a government out to improve a despairing economy by making the poor boost demand. Nobel laureate Abhijeet Banerjee, and other prominent economists, say cash should be deposited directly into the accounts of the poor. Can a Hindu majority government be seen as giving cash to its Muslim citizens? Only, I suspect, if it can demonstrate its toughness by doing all it can to attack its Muslim population. In Australia we have seen unfold the inhuman situation at the Manus Island detention center. Multiplied a thousand-fold, is what is on offer with the NRC and CAA. In both countries we have failing strongmen, Modi (economy) and Morrison (climate change). Here a billion animals have died. There, in India a billion human beings are to be placed on trial. There have to be sought better ways to solve a nation’s problems, and a majority community’s ambitions, other than this bureaucratic and humanistic nightmare.

 

 

Dr Arjun Rajkhowa

Researcher and Writer, Melbourne

India

There are frightening reports of imprisonment and police brutality emerging out of India. What India desperately needs now—as it has always needed—is a compassionate state and citizenry. It is time to end violence and intimidation against citizens. India needs to overcome all forms of extra-judicial torture and persecution of people, and needs to be freed from all forms of institutionalised abuse of power. India needs the police and the state to protect (and not persecute) the citizenry. Indians also desperately need to be able to engage in political debate and disagreement without fear of violence and harassment. By this stage, India could have been—and can somehow still aim to be—an enlightened democracy.

Australia

The devastating bushfires in Australia have reminded us of our precarious relationship with the environment. It has been incredible to witness the tenacity and resilience of the people who are fighting—and have been affected by—calamity. It is difficult to think of anything but the magnitude of the crisis at the moment.

 

 

Professor Devleena Ghosh

Academic, Sydney

What makes a nation? What makes a citizen? In the last few months, Muslims and other minorities have reclaimed the idea of India. In massive numbers, led by women, they have marched in demonstrations, sat in protests, protected their comrades from state violence and occupied peacefully Shaheen Bagh. The poetry of these events defies majoritarian logic: “the nation is not a map drawn on a piece of paper”; “my relationship with my country is private, who the hell are you?”; “this Hindustan doesn’t belong to anyone’s father”; “we won’t show our papers”.

The courage of these protesters is inspirational. So is their use of symbolism and imagery. Who can forget Chandrasekhar Azad of the Bhim army emerging from the Jama Masjid in Delhi after the Friday namaz, holding aloft a copy of the Indian Constitution with a picture of Ambedkar on the cover? Who cannot be moved by the readings of the preamble at various demonstrations or the singing of the national anthem at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve at Shaheen Bagh? Who can fail to be inspired by protest songs to the tunes of global resistance, whether they be ‘Bella Ciao’ or ‘We shall Overcome’? The subcontinent has finally reclaimed Faiz whose ‘Ham Dekhenge’ has been sung at meetings from Kolkata to Mumbai, Delhi to Bangalore, Chicago to Cape Town.

These protesters send a powerful message to the majoritarian ruling class. They are not aliens or foreigners; they belong to that idea of India embodied in the Constitution, which offers them security, equality and liberty. In a country where half the population is functionally illiterate, most of the poor have no birth certificates or identity papers. A Government that has been elected by these sans-papieres now denies them their rights to country. An authoritarian government is up against a movement drawing strength from one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. The constitution must win.

 

 

Professor Farrah Ahmed

Academic, Melbourne

The CAA is patently unconstitutional. It is discriminatory and arbitrary, and breaches constitutional commitments to secularism and equal religious freedom. Even more significantly, it strikes at the foundations of the very idea of India; an idea which has equal and inclusive citizenship at its heart.

For Australia and the world, the events unfolding in India should serve as a warning that the nationalism, bigotry, prejudice and hatred that we see in so much political discourse can quickly unsettle cherished constitutional values.

 

 

Assoc Professor Haripriya Rangan

Academic, Melbourne

Common knowledge

Everyone knows…

Who bears responsibility for the state of climates.

 

Rulers, today, who

Swear by their creeds,

Perform pageantries of prayer and preaching,

Invoke their gods at every opportunity while conniving, dividing, deceiving

to create climates of fear and denial.

 

Rulers, today, who

Should know from their holy books and myths

about pharaohs, emperors, and kings

whose insatiable craving for self-love and glory,

Scorched lands, poisoned waters, polluted air, suffocated life.

 

How long will they cling to their seats

before their venal climates

Turn on them?

 

When the public gathers

In streets and squares – conscious, clear-eyed,

to call for change

Of the state of climates.

 

For a parliament

Constituted by them that

Creates a climate of love and respect,

Compassion and equality for all beings.

 

A climate that

Heals the land, removes poison, clears the air

For conviviality, diversity and freedom for all beings.

A real common weal, a real republic.

 

 

Dr Ian Woolford

Academic, Melbourne

When we think of Hindi literature addressing Partition, we think first of novels: Jootha Sach, Maila Anchal, or the recent novel Gujarat Pakistan se Gujarat Hindustan by Krishna Sobti. Hindi poets have rarely addressed the trauma and scars of Partition. Perhaps this is why Kedarnath Singh, in his poem “Remembering the year 1947,” asks himself “do you even remember?” He writes of a family friend, a Muslim neighbour named Noor Miyan, who featured in the daily life of his village pre-Independence. “Where is he now?” Kedarnath asks. He remembers so much from his childhood. He can still recite the 19 times-table he used to scribble on his school slate. But he cannot use his chalk and slate to calculate why Noor Miyan suddenly vanished: “Why are you silent Kedarnath Singh/Has your math failed you?”

As India grapples with questions of citizenship in the 21st century, I ponder the following. Had Noor Miyan stayed in India, once the NRC came into effect, his family would have less legal protection than Kedarnath’s family. The Citizenship Amendment Act exposes one motive for implementing the NRC. If Noor Miyan lacked documentation and his citizenship were questioned, he could be removed and detained. He is Muslim, so he would not be protected through the CAA. The state could continue to claim that no Indian citizens are affected by the CAA, because they would insist Noor Miyan was never a citizen to begin with.

From Australia, I watch the news in my home country, the USA. Trump demonises immigrants, rounds up refugees, and has made moves to strip Americans of their citizenship. It’s fascism 101, and like the US, India is not immune. We must fight to ensure that future generations will not need to ask Kedarnath’s question, Tum chup kyon ho? Why are you silent?

 

 

Professor Kuntala-Lahiri Dutt

Academic, Canberra

The mountains, plains, the rivers and the hills of India have since ancient times been the meeting grounds of many cultures, peoples and knowledges. Some of them originated outside of these geographical spaces, and some germinated on local soil. But, irrespective of where they came from, it is in India that they all thrived and blossomed together, showing to the world that no one needs to diminish the other to flourish and prosper. The very ‘idea of India’ is founded on this variety of secularism, which is ingrained in the understanding and tolerance of difference, in peaceful co-existence, and in a co-living that allows the individual to further their interests while retaining the collective values. It is this idea that is written into the Indian Constitution. It is this idea that energises India on an everyday basis. It is this idea that allows the ‘unity in diversity’ that the Constitution-makers envisaged.

Today, however, this idea of India is threatened by a populist politics of cheap nationalism that marginalises some peoples in order to uphold majoritarian views, beliefs and sentiments. The India that is emerging is unfamiliar, and the various legal, juridical, policing and political instruments being utilised for this purpose are repulsive to many of us. This India is threatening, uninviting and revolting in its bigotry and partiality. It is not an India where my children and grandchildren can live peacefully, knowing that they are on a soil that has attracted and supported external talent for millennia. I strongly oppose the introduction and implementation of these instruments whose ultimate aim is to create a divided India, where minority communities are made to feel like outsiders, and are subjected to oppression and discrimination in different forms.

 

 

Dr Malini Sur

Academic, Sydney

As a scholar who studies the India-Bangladesh borderlands, the CAA-NRC’s ominous aftereffects are evident. These have led to widespread state violence, fear, and harassment. It is clear that in one stroke of governmental machinery Indian Muslims would be stripped of their citizenship and impoverished Indians including those living in militarised borderlands will be harassed for documents. We have seen the violent implications of Indian legislations in Kashmir and Northeast India, where fundamental rights have been violated for decades. The CAA-NRC will not just disrupt but continue to destroy and divide the lives and livelihoods of ordinary impoverished Indians.

 

 

Dr Meera Ashar

Academic, Canberra

The CAA (previously CAB) and NRC—like so many initiatives by the Hindu right-wing government in recent years—seeks to directly or indirectly marginalise minority communities in India. In their wake, we have seen a systematic chipping away at Indian democracy, secularism and any spirit of oneness that has survived such regular previous onslaughts on the weakest in the nation. To define who can or cannot belong to a nation on the basis of religion or race reeks of fascism. Being born a Hindu I belong, de facto, to the majority in India and as an Indian-Australian woman, I am a minority in Australia. I thus feel ashamed, enraged and empathetic towards those who will in the years to come face the worst consequences of the CAA and NRC.

What has, however, been heartening is the resistance to the CAA and NRC from every part of the country, urban and rural. This protest movement has unleashed a sense of pride and a desire to rejuvenate what it means to be Indian. Led by educational institutions, the anti CAA-NRC movements have quickly taken the form of widespread mass movements. To see students and teachers joined in by the people of India in protesting against an unjust and unfair law renews my hope in the power of the University, both in India and Australia.

 

 

Dr Michele Lobo

Academic, Melbourne

What does race look like and how does it unfold in India? CAA and NRC and ‘eco-casteism’ (Sharma 2017) shows what exclusionary racialised practices of the Indian government underpinned by the ideology of Hindutva/Hindu supremacy looks and feels like. It racialises the most disadvantaged Muslims, who have always struggled for dignity, respect and a good life along with Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other religious minorities since Indian Independence. Protests in India, Australia and elsewhere suggests worldwide support for racialized minorities who might now be called on to prove their loyalty and belonging by providing official documents. My experience as a Christian minority growing up Kolkata, India, was that many Muslim domestic workers, slum dwellers, rural migrants (Dalits/Scheduled Tribes) as well as those who lived in the villages had no official documents – they rarely had a ration card that provided rice, kerosene and wheat flour at lower than market prices. Getting an Aadhar identity card, more recently, was a laborious and anxious experience for the disadvantaged and elderly with limited literacy skills.

CAA and NRC alert us once again to the complex identity as well as border politics in Hindu-majority India that challenges its claims to secularism. It seems similar to Australia, a place of white/Christian privilege, where racialized Indigenous peoples and ethnic-ethno-religious minority migrants are considered to be valuable citizens if they make economic, social and cultural contributions. In both countries ‘outsiders’ seeking refuge must be screened, assessed, considered worthy or else cast side, kept waiting or turned back as ‘illegals’ and ‘potential terrorists’ even though there might be some commitment to the Refugee Convention and social justice.

As Indian Australians of diverse backgrounds we have a responsibility to speak out against racialized institutional practices, but from afar we fail to feel the rawness of these deep cuts – we are privileged Indian Australians even though we might be racialized in Australia! Let’s use our relative privilege to change the political situation in India as well as Australia. I want to be more than an academic flaneur who leaves the ivory tower to roam India/the world, is privileged in the choice of fieldwork sites, works with disadvantaged/racialised peoples publishes papers, wins prestigious awards and talks about justice!

 

 

Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty

Academic, Melbourne

It is clearly Tagore season, when a judge in New Delhi recites from the poem, “Where the mind is without fear” while granting bail to Bhim Army Chief, Chandrashekhar Azad, and upholding the right of citizens to participate in peaceful protest without any curtailment or coercion by the government. Around the same time, Hollywood celebrity, Martin Sheen, arrested 66 times (by his own admission) for political protesting and acts of civil disobedience, recited the same poem while participating in a climate action protest on Capitol Hill, Washington.

Maybe it is essentialising and platitudinous to celebrate the fact that the Additional Sessions Judge of Tees Hazari Court is a woman, Kamini Lau, and that she had the courage to voice what many in the judiciary have not so far. After all, the law is supposed to be blind and impartial, so we should expect that all judges, irrespective of their caste, creed, gender, religion, sexual orientation, bodily capacity, will possess and express such courage at all times. Sheen too upheld women as saviours of the world as he took the stage after Jane Fonda, who confirmed later that veteran actor had been arrested for the Fire Drill Fridays.

From the eastern coast of Australia, Vanessa Cavanaugh, Bundjalung Wonnarua scholar and woman, writes a searing piece on the perpetual grief of Aboriginal people who have seen their homes destroyed and lands decimated by devastating bushfires, not just this year, but through two centuries of colonial dispossession, eradication, assimilation and racism. In Victoria, an all-Indigenous, all-woman Country Fire Association brigade defends the Lake Tyers Peninsula. In the bone-chilling cold of New Delhi, the satyagrahi women of Shaheen Bagh sit vigil for more than a month, with babies and grandmothers, to safeguard the rights of ordinary citizens and marginalised communities with a strength that seems preternatural. Brave girls are leading the charge everywhere, and poets are linking the fires of the hearth to the fires of the heart. In the face of these disparate but connected acts, I too take solace in reciting the words of that nationalism-sceptic, Tagore, yet again:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

(translated by the poet from the Bengali original, “Chitto Jetha Bhoyshunno” 1910)

 

 

Natasha Raghuvanshi

Doctoral Student, Melbourne

On 5th January 2020, a mob of masked people stormed into the campus and attacked the students at one of India’s most iconic universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Armed with iron rods, sticks, baseball bats and stones, they attacked students and teachers, smashed windows and vandalized student dormitories. Students feared for their lives in the university while the police stood by and watched. JNU is one of the world’s renowned centres for teaching and research. The university’s alumni include 2019 Nobel Laureates, former leaders of nation-states, as well as several politicians, diplomats, artists, academics, and scientists. JNU, along with protesting against CAA and NRC, was also in the middle of a protest against fee hike in the university which was announced in October 2019. The fee hike would limit access to education to many students who come from a poor socio-economic background and cannot afford to pay the hefty education fees.

The JNU is infused with an intense political life on campus. Students who leave campus are said to acquire a “permanently changed outlook on life” as a result of the student politics. The politicisation of campus life has led to a refusal to brush under the carpet social issues such as feminism, minority rights, social and economic justice. All such issues are debated fiercely in formal and informal gatherings.

I am an alumna of JNU and I have spent around 6 years on campus. I spent a lot of time near Sabarmati Hostel drinking tea, discussing, debating or sometimes just enjoying my campus. The campus that was so safe in the hustle-bustle of the city. Once I walked inside the JNU gates, the relief it gave me cannot be expressed. I was free to think, free to express, free walk around. I had the freedom of whoever I wanted to be. JNU gave me not only confidence but freedom as well. This air of freedom and safety is what I trying to protect through continuously attending/organizing the solidarity/ protests gathering in Melbourne.

 

 

Neel Banerjee

Creative Director, Nautanki Theatre, Sydney

The situation unfolding in India is a re-confirmation that the ‘common man’ in India can react and respond rightly. The ‘common man’ in India has not forgotten the principles of non-violence, satyagraha and non-cooperation in the quest for truth and freedom. The situation unfolding in India is a sign of unity against a divisive, dishonest and backward-thinking government lead by the current ruling party.

State sponsored atrocities, using the police to attack students, hate speech against minorities and “Muslimphobia” have contributed to this mass eruption of emotion. The people of India have now come out on the streets. The students who are protesting are mostly born on the cusp of the millennium. They may not have seen the demolition of Babri Masjid and their memories of Godhra may be misty. But they have understood the teachings of Kabir, Tagore, and Ambedkar. They have realised what India means to them, the India where they want to live on their own terms, teaching their children to dream of a better world. They are negating the concept of a society prescribed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They are patrolling on the streets, hand in hand, questioning every empty promise made by the government.

I grew up in India and spent two decades there. My education is partially Indian, my theatre practice is largely Indian in style, my reading is mostly in Indian literature, my parents and extended family live in India. Although I have lived in Australia for almost two decades, I have been been carrying a little India within myself. My political commentary and social media posts principally revolves around Indian politics; the politics that I connect to, I react to. So when the whole of India is protesting against the CAA, the NRC and the NPR, I am undoubtedly affected.

The political situation in Australia seems gloomy too. The country is witnessing the fallout of uninspiring political leadership. Mostly the leaders at the frontline are clerical in their approach to running the country. How does one justify Australia’s military action against other countries alongside the USA? Gautam Adani, the prime business sponsor of BJP-RSS, runs his business in Australia.

Protesting on the streets and opposing the provocations of a resurgent Hindu fundamentalist government is a basic human right and the way forward. Artists have a bigger role to play; to remain united with the students and to use our artistic practice to strengthen and amplify this massive social movement. The younger generations of India have shown us the way. The process needs to be nonviolent, conversational and diplomatic. The movement needs to be long lasting and substantial.

 

 

Dr Nisha Thapliyal

Academic, Newcastle

Fires at home and away

Gray skies of ash and smoke have transformed overnight into equally gray skies of storm clouds. Now the smell of smoke mingles with the smell of rain as heavy rains begin in New South Wales. On my television screen, the journos (and polis) are smiling again at the news that rains will stay for almost a week. Perhaps the bushfire crisis is over… for now? The exhausted firies are more cautious – they have learned what Aboriginal peoples have always known –  Fire has many moods and modalities. They say that these fires will end only when there is no fuel left for the fires to consume.

More gray pours off my Twitter screen interspersed with bursts of red. Teargas and blood. In India, the anti-CAA-NRC protests continue undaunted by brutal police violence and psychological attacks by Godi Media. Powering this engine of repression is an apparatus of surveillance – with limitless funds and reach and no apparent ethical limits. I watch  with awe and hope as the calls to non-violent resistance are answered again and again by fearless women and men – in university campuses, cities, towns, and villages.

As I move back and forth between these two worlds on fire, I realise that this historical and ongoing mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of  people receives less coverage in the Australian media than the current India-Australia ODI cricket series. I wonder why the courageous actions of the students at Jamia, JNU and Aligarh university campuses are less newsworthy than protests for democracy and justice in Hongkong, Lebanon, and other places?  Then I remember – Modi was greeted as a Rockstar on his 2014 visit to this country. And ever since, mainstream Australian news media have maintained a studious silence as Hindutva rampages across the nation leaving the bodies of violated children, women and men in its wake.

With or without the support of the media, the dissenters  take back the streets peacefully. The embers that began to glow with the shutdown and carving up of Kashmir in August have finally exploded into flame. They say too that these fires cannot be extinguished. They are fueled by the unquenchable secular principles of the Constitution of India.

 

 

Dr Priya Chacko

Academic, Adelaide

I watched with anguish as the election results rolled in from India. I sat in silent mourning as the government was re-elected in Australia. I despaired as the Indian constitution was mutilated in the name of ‘developing’ Kashmir and under the pretext of saving its women. There will be resistance, I insisted to a sceptical friend. I fumed as I listened to politicians flippantly declare that religion-based citizenship in India was a natural evolution and that India and Australia were destined to be bound together by coal. I fretted as the bushfire season started early in Australia. But as I watched the smoke envelop Melbourne, my gloom was broken. By the women of Shaheen Bagh, the young women of Jamia Millia, the beaten but unbowed young women leading the fight at Jawaharlal Nehru University. By chants of azaadi (freedom) and hum dekhenge (we will see). There is resistance and we will win because we are right.

 

 

Dr Priya Srinivasan

Independent artist, curator, researcher, Melbourne

What’s happening across India has been triggered by the rise of a government that refuses to hear the voices of their minority communities but instead wants to legalize discrimination against them. It is not just discrimination against Muslims, it is also about tribals, adivasis and many who do not practice formal Hinduism, all in the name of a perverse, patriarchal, fundamentalist definition of Hinduism that redefines diaspora in this very process. Ironically, this perverse Hinduism of the twenty first century was forged in anti-colonial struggle in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, used to unite the diverse population many of whom defined Hinduism very differently. That Hinduism which was formed against its colonial oppressors was in itself a hyper masculine Hinduism ridding itself of its plurality, forcing an emphasis on a unitary textual definition rather than embracing the syncretic practices from which it had grown through millennia, using the bodies of women as the site for anti colonial struggle.

We are where we are now because of a media machine that arms this fascist government which stokes fires of hatred through social media; Facebook and WhatsApp being its main tools of propaganda rivaling and far exceeding German propaganda machines in the twentieth century, to incite daily flames from normally passive, educated, kind people through seemingly harmless jokes which hide deep violence. This propaganda brings the diaspora close to the nation state through these insidious networks making them forget their own often marginal precarious state in the many countries they reside in. What would it take for the Indian diaspora to understand its role in this situation both in India and Australia?

In Australia, we are living in a settler colonial society on unceded land despite having been colonized ourselves, we have yet to truly support First Nations calls for justice, treaty and reconciliation. Here too, the right wing government ignores its minorities, creates unimaginable horror for First Nations people, asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants and ignores the earth that is literally burning around us. The smoke that clouds our very streets, appears to be the smoke that also clouds our government’s inability to listen to the wisdom of First Nations people who have the knowledge to be caretakers on this land for over 80,000 years having survived cataclysmic earth events including the ending of the last ice age. Both in India and Australia, it’s the de-escalating economy that both governments want to hide behind the smoke.

Despite overthrowing our colonizers we have not truly decolonized our minds or practices as settler colonials here in Australia. What will it take for change to come in India and Australia? It is the artists, intellectuals and those with practices that can offer leadership through action and hope and by laying bodies on the line. Shaheen Bagh in India has created a mass movement of women protestors across the country with Muslim women leading the charge. Similarly we have First Nations people, The Greens party, women and climate activists with children taking the lead here in Australia to ask for a different engagement with women, land, earth, resources, patriarchy and capitalism itself.

 

 

Dr Rahul K Gairola

Academic, Perth

 

 

Rajni Luthra

Editor, Indian Link

The nature of the discourse in India currently regarding the controversial CAA is deeply concerning. The rise of nationalism in the Government’s agenda is just as alarming as the lack of coherent debate from the Opposition benches. The curtailment of freedom of speech, and the reprehensible use of violence particularly on the university campus, must both be called out.

Closer to home here in the Indian-Australian community, the turmoil in India is being reflected in similar divisions. Highly politically aware as always, the community has witnessed its fair share of protests and demonstration marches in recent days.

Perhaps being physically removed from the situation affords us the capacity for a more perceptive debate (granted social media renders this nigh on impossible). Could we speak up for moderation and maturity – and have a more reasoned discourse by examining all sides of the issue?

It’s time to re-pledge our support for the idea of an inclusive India, an India that has historically welcomed all into its fold, and which in turn has been enriched by each wave of migrants – starting with the Aryans themselves in prehistoric times.

Meanwhile there are overarching goals that are falling by the wayside – in terms of the economy, education, environmental crises, poverty, safety of our women, the engagement of our youth – all of which are crying out for attention.

 

 

Dr Rashida Murphy

Author, Perth, Western Australia

I write this piece watching daily tele-visions of Australia burning while politicians quibble and firefighters collapse in exhaustion; students being attacked by masked hoodlums at an Indian university while police do nothing; women sitting on roads in a Delhi neighbourhood while protests against the CAA and NRC escalate. I am, in the words of L.R. Knost, “dismayed by the brokenness of the world.” Especially my two worlds. As an Australian-Indian, it seems heartbreaking to debate the technicalities of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens in the wake of trials by fire here in Australia, and the brutalisation of young people and women in the protests in India. There is justifiable anger against politicians who seek to further undermine the rights of minorities by proposing laws that will forever change the secular nature of Indian democracy, which has taken such a battering recently. In adding my lone voice to the chorus that erupts daily, all I can offer is a perspective and solidarity with the protesters. I am a woman, from a minority religion and community, and those facts alone would make me vulnerable under modern India’s new laws. We must rage, we must refuse to be moved on, we must name the ideology that divides. The time for passivity is long gone. As history unravels about us, let us remember that Modi in India, Morrison in Australia and Trump in America, use populist slogans and religious fundamentalism to control, mislead and instil fear. We need to counter this with our bodies, our words, our visions, our truths. And where we can, in whatever way we can, support those who are already risking their lives for that fundamental human right – the ability to have their voice heard.

 

 

Dr Roanna Gonsalves

Author, Sydney

A spark is lit. Yet it is not one but two nations burning. In this season of the fire sign, it is not Mercury, but India and Australia that are in retrograde together. We need to change the story we are telling about the environmental tragedies and their social consequences in Australia due to the bush fires, and the social devastation and its consequences in India due to the CAA and NRC. While the geological and cultural connections between India and Australia have a long history, it is our contemporary links that are most toxic. We are increasingly realising how these unfolding situations are not separate, but closely connected, not just because of the same players controlling the purse strings at their helm, but also because of the larger systems of divisive political priorities being enforced by the governments of both countries, the shared appeasement of the same big businesses at the cost of Indigenous communities and the environment in both countries, the shared obsession with exclusionary tactics, and their tragic consequences,  through an insistence on registrations, the shared contempt of the most vulnerable communities.

Yet who are we if not born of ashes and stardust, each of us? If we are to fight fire with fire, then we must fight the toxic connections between India and Australia with transformative connections of our own. We can do this through an understanding, an acceptance, a celebration of the plurality, the diversity within each of us and within our communities. We can do this by continuing to speak out and continuing to be allies to those who are directly affected by the unfolding situations in India and Australia. Let us salute to those who have put their bodies on the line, those who have everything to lose yet raise their voices with courage and conviction. Let us stand with them.

To the women of Shaheen Bagh: We are in solidarity with you

To the Indigenous communities across Australia: We are in solidarity with you.

To the courageous people of India, coming out on the streets to speak up for plurality and diversity, to speak up against the divisive policies of the current Indian government: We are in solidarity with you.

To the courageous people of Australia who rise from the ashes time and time again, who protest on the streets against the current Australian government: We are in solidarity with you

 

 

Ruchira Talukar

Academic, Melbourne

India’s winters and Australia’s summers of discontent are getting longer and deeper

Two unfolding crises rang in the New Year for me—the literal burning of Australia, and the metaphorical one of India. 2020 did not feel like a fresh start, in many ways it felt like a continuum along a long spectrum of struggle that is necessary for the change we need in society.

The countrywide protests in India to the CAA/NRC/NPR, and the consequent state repression, the police brutality, and worse, the extra-constitutional violence by armed and organised goons on students across university campuses cannot be seen in isolation. The stir began with attempts by a newly-elected Modi government to stamp out dissent in 2015 when it cracked down on NGOs and media.

Jawaharlal Nehru University, currently at the centre-stage of the global attention on account of attacks on students by masked goons was also the target of a state-attack on freedom of expression in early 2016. Since then, student, farmers, minorities and rights-based groups’ discontent against the Narendra Modi government has only grown. In the second term, the Modi government has taken a completely gloves-off approach to unleashing a divisive, communal agenda, and consequently, the protests have escalated.

In Australia, the bushfire season has turned more hazardous over the last five to six years, owing to the effects of the Indian Ocean Dipole that has brought further warming and drying effects to the continent on top of the effects of climate change. While this has continued unfolding in the backdrop, Australia has expended a decade in climate futility as Liberal Governments have come in and wrecked climate legislation and policy, and the resource industry has maintained its tight grip on Australian politics. The Adani mine, which at one point of time seemed highly unlikely to go ahead because it does not make sense economically, leave alone environmentally, has been finally approved by the Queensland Government who cancelled the Native Title of Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners as a final act.

I see these two deepening discontents as two ends of the same stick. I am finishing my thesis comparing activism and the politics of environmentalism in India and Australia with a growing sense of the sinister truth as the climate crisis deepens in Australia, and the crisis of democracy and human rights in India. They were but ‘strong possibilities’ when I began four years ago and the cases I compared were symptomatic.

Unless we can restore democracy, we cannot consider meaningful climate action, which people really want. Restoring democracy means ridding us as much from deep vested resource and corporate interests, both India and Australia, as much as from extreme and regressive right-wing agendas, as is evident in full play in India.

 

 

Dr Ruth De Souza

Academic, Victoria

Australia and India are magnificent, beautiful, complicated countries that have powerfully shaped me. Goa in India is my ancestral homeland and I live as an uninvited guest on Boonwurrung country in Victoria, Australia. Although distant geographically, both countries share in the escalation of ethnonationalism and border securitisation in response to imagined threats to the culture of the nation.

Australia is a British settler-colonial society that 250 years ago invaded Indigenous lands. It has relied on migration for building its nation, yet it invented and imposes the particularly cruel policy of indefinite, mandatory offshore detention. It also perpetrates colonial practices against First Nations peoples while it “celebrates” multiculturalism, and increasingly militarises its police.

India suspended Article 370 of the constitution in August 2019, erasing the autonomy of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, brutally suppressing a population of eight million people. More recently the Citizen’s Amendment Act (CAA) passed on December 12, 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) have instituted Hindu supremacy into the legislature.

That two politically and militarily powerful nation states who pride themselves on secularism and the capacity to be inclusive, multicultural and multifaith are so paranoid about identity and security, and anxious about “outsiders” such as “maritime arrivals” and Muslims is breathtaking.

As we approach celebrations of Australia Day and Indian Independence day, I believe that international pressure must be put on the Indian government for its violent treatment of citizens in Kashmir; its brutality against peacefully protesting students and communities exercising their democratic right to dissent; and its discrimination against Muslims and other minority groups. I also believe that non-Indigenous Australians and the Australian government must give pause on this purportedly “national day” to consider the damage and harm to First Nations people from the violence of continuing settler colonialism, and to close the camps and resolve claims for asylum speedily in accordance with our international obligations.

Here in Australia, amidst the smoke haze and a burning continent, there does not seem much to celebrate.

 

 

Dr Shalmalee Palekar

Academic, Western Australia

In India today, there is a blatant political instrumentalisation of violence against minorities and anyone who critiques the current PM or government. Hatred between communities is infinitely stoked and recycled, remaining a threat for as long as it is actively perpetuated by the State, as we see with the CAA/NRC. Meanwhile, Australia is burning, and still the “quiet Australians”, climate-change deniers and wealthy fossil fuel Party donors are ubiquitously loud in the Murdoch owned media.

In both places, “champagne Greenie, commie, urban naxal, libtard, presstitute, sickular, anti-national” are accusations, along with rape and death threats, flung by vicious cyber troll armies mobilised to intimidate. And real-world murders silence the voices that seek to support pro-humanity and anti-discriminatory measures.

Social media behemoths prioritise profits over facts, allowing politicians and other vested interests to disseminate organised campaigns of misinformation. Elections are bought and won on lies and spin. Accountability is an empty word. The fault lines and deep divisions in both nations – always present – are even more starkly under-scored today. As Bertolt Brecht said: “Would it not be easier for the government[s] to dissolve the people and elect another?” In the face of the despair many of us feel, what is to be done?

Ours may be a post-truth world, but our actions must continue to shake up the complacency and corruption with which we are faced. If we want an account of political and economic power and whose interests are being served – reiterating revisionist histories unmoored from evidence, will not do. We need Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect” – to see how truly bad things are, but with “optimism of the will” – to find a way forward with courage, hope, and solidarity. As the massive protests ongoing across India and Australia show, change can only happen when people see others as fellow human beings – the indispensable prerequisite of the freedom of all people.

 

 

Sandeep Sidhu

Writer, Melbourne

आवाज़ें हैं, सुनाई तो देंगी।

जब तुझ तक पहुँचेंगे, जब मुझ तक पहुँचेंगे
ये बड़े बड़े फ़ैसलों के बे-ईमान इरादे
वो झूठ मूठ के वादे
ये सोच जब पहुँचेगी हम तक, कि वो कुछ नहीं कर पाएँगे
तो करके तो हम भी कुछ दिखाएँगे।

जब फ़ैज़ की नज़म देश के कोने कोने में गाई जाएगी
‘हम देखेंगे’ की वो ही धुन, फ़िर यहाँ भी बजाई जाएगी
जब ‘जामीया की लड़कियाँ’ यह दाद देगा अज़ीज़ इक
तो जामीया की आयतें यहाँ भी सुनाई जाएँगी
और जो नहीं पढ़ाया था, सिखाया था स्कूल की किताबों में,
वो ‘जन गण मन’ की पद-पंक्ति, हाथों में थमा दी जाएगी, बताई जाएगी, समझाई जाएगी, सिखाई जाएगी, और बड़े जोश से गाई जाएगी

मेरे देश, हम दूर सही, साथ तो अब भी हैं
तेरी आवाज़ तो अब भी हैं
और जब दो से चार हो जाती हैं
आवाज़ें ललकार हो जाती हैं
मेरे देश! तिरंगा तो यहाँ भी लहराएँगे
तेरे सुर से सुर हम भी मिलाएँगे।

और जब उठेंगी आवाज़ें, ज़ोर से, रोष से
तो क्यों नहीं पहुँचेंगी, क्यों नहीं बदलेंगी जो बदलना है
अपनो से अपनो को बचाना है
आख़िर हमें अपनो को ही समझाना है
जब तब से गाते आए हैं ‘अनेकता में एकता’
तो कैसे भूल जाएँ हम ये ‘धर्म निरपेक्षता’
जब वो आज़ादी पाई थी, तो यह आज़ादी भी पाएँगे

अब इस धर्म के अधर्म से मेरे देश को बचाएँगे।

और जो साथ में उठेंगी, गूंजेंगी, गरजेंगी,
आवाज़ें हैं, सुनाई तो देंगी।

 

 

Dr Shameem Black

Academic, Canberra

Something In the Air

As a new decade has begun, Canberra and New Delhi have been vying for a dubious honour: the worst air quality in the world. As my daughter played the recorder on a Canberra hill at her school’s end of year concert, parents watched billows of bushfire smoke roll in to cover the sun. I imagine parents in New Delhi on that day also peered through haze, trying their best to glimpse their children in a world where clarity of any kind seems increasingly rare.

We are all citizens of this foul air. Microscopic PM2.5 particles in Canberra or New Delhi do not check immigration status, nationality, religion, or wealth before they lodge themselves deep in our lungs. It is a sad day when the most non-discriminatory, equal opportunity actors on the horizon may not be countries powered by inclusive ideals, but destructive pollutants who simply do not care.

It is more vital than ever for both Australia and India to consider the urgency of challenges that push us to think beyond limited views of what a nation can be. As India makes a new, suffocating push to offer paths to citizenship based on religion, the state backs away from its commitment to openness, diversity and generosity. As Australia digs ever deeper for coal while its land, dried by climate change, goes up in flames, the country ignores that it cannot export the consequences of a fossil fuel-dependent world.

To solve the problems in the air, we need expansive political inspiration and cosmopolitan collaboration. Toxic air is bad enough when it’s literal. Australia and India shouldn’t also make it their governing political metaphor.

 

 

Dr Subhash Jaireth

Writer, Canberra

In September 2019 I was asked to write a poem for a tree in one of the public parks in Canberra. The tree I was given to shake hands with was Cedrus Deodara (Devdar). The tree is not ‘native’ to Australia but introduced by British colonisers. In it I see a shadow of many migrants who have made a home in Australia. However, in my poem, Panahandegi (Refuge) it became a symbol for Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish journalist, writer and poet who languished for many years in one of the notorious offshore detention centres where the Australian government with the covert and overt support of a majority of Australians detains indefinitely people who journey to Australia in boats seeking refuge.

The poem I am told will stand next to the tree and I hope, perhaps naively, that it will remind visitors to the park of what people even in enlightened democracies can often do to those who are perceived as aliens.

As I read about demonstrations and rallies in India against the Citizenship Amendment Bill, I feel that in today’s India, so utterly unrecognisable from the one from which I migrated to Australia in 1986, there won’t be any place, park or tree for my poem. I am more than certain that if installed, the poem along with the tree will be uprooted and I’ll be declared an alien hostile to India. It distresses me to see that slowly, and CAB is one of the several recent steps taken by the current government, conditions will be created in India where in order to be an Indian one would have to be a Hindu. The vision of an Independent India, which to use Pandit Nehru’s words is home to millions of ‘separate individual men and women, each differing from the other and each living in a private universe of thought and feeling,’ will be shattered for ever. It will be worthwhile to remind the Hindu majority agitating to mould India guided by the idea of Hindutva, the words of Gurudev Tagore who warned that ‘unity cannot be brought about by enacting law that all shall be one.’

Democracies in Australia and India if they are seen to be enlightened have to care for the rights and well-being of minorities (religious, linguistic, cultural, social and gender) otherwise they will turn into dictatorship of majority, as cruel and, morally and ethically, as corrupt as any totalitarian dictatorship.

Panahandegi (Refuge)

dono hoshi no / shita ga waga ya zo / aki no kaze

under which star

is my home?

Autumn wind

Kobayashi Issa (translated by David. G. Lanoue)

On which boat did they bring you Devdaru my friend? The gods who sit in your shade must have blessed you to escape the islands of misery, despair and death. It may sound strange, but I see in you the presence of Behrouz, the solitary eagle flying high over the mountains where your forebears stand tall humming with the chestnuts, beeches and cherries. No friend but the mountains, he wrote for us. Sadly, he is right, but we’ll wait for him with open arms ready for a friendly embrace. Al-salamu alaykum brother, we’ll say. Wa alaykum al-salam, he’ll reply brushing aside his long dark hair and grace us with a smile of his lapis-lazuli eyes. There will be smoke of peppermint and cauliflower bush in the air, and a chant embellished by restless cockatoos. We’ll walk behind Archie, the Ngunnawal man, barefoot hearing the land whisper: you are here now, you are here.

 

 

Dr Sukhmani Khorana

Academic and writer, Sydney

In 2018, Home Minister Peter Dutton singled out white South African farmers for special treatment as humanitarian visa applicants in Australia. Most of us in refugee advocacy communities were appalled at the overt discrimination implied by such a call, with many comparing it to the days of the White Australia policy. Who is preferred or included in the frame is usually indicative of who is left out. For instance, after the public outcry in Australia and elsewhere when the photograph of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi when viral, the federal government here decided to increase their humanitarian intake. What became clear in far less-publicised media coverage thereafter was that Australia was favouring Syrian Christians in the screening process, even though they constitute a minority of those being persecuted. Condemning this ‘immoral preference’, A. Odysseus Patrick wrote in The New York Times, ‘When Muslims are demonized, state-directed prejudice is more likely’.

The provisions embedded in the ‘Citizenship Amendment Act’ (CAA) in the Indian context, especially when combined with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise imply a similar singling out and demonising of Islam by the state. This should make our diverse Indian-Australian community reflect on why they would reject policies that hark back to White Australia in their adopted homes, but may not think of the CAA-NRC combination as equally lethal. Moreover, there is no constitutional reference point in the Indian case for such a regressive measure. What is the state trying to resurrect – the idea of a Hindu nation; the myth of a golden age that may have been shiny, but was never the attribute of a homogenous entity?

 

 

Suneeta Peres da Costa

Award-winning writer, Sydney

I returned on New Year’s Eve 2020 from the incendiary environment of India’s CAA and NRC protests to the environmental conflagrations here in Australia. Each situation has created a crisis of democracy and revealed the extraordinary courage of ordinary citizens to resist social and ecological injustice. Since the passing of the CAA and NRC by the Indian Parliament on 12 December, the ideals of India as a secular democracy where people of all faiths can equally enjoy the rights and protections of citizenship – a place where, for millennia, refugee and migrant groups of diverse faiths and cultures have made a home – have been harmed. I think it is important to remember how many people died in the name of these ideals during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and in the long battle of satyagraha and ahimsa towards Independence.

It is also salutary to recall that Gandhi was killed by Nathuram Godse – a member of the RSS – because of such unifying aspirations. In the streets of Goa and Mumbai, I saw citizens displaying portraits of Dr Ambedkar, the visionary architect of the Indian Constitution, who, like Ashoka before him, sought to include, not divide, all Indians. Perhaps new visionaries and leaders will emerge from this crucible of civil disobedience? But meanwhile I reflect particularly on the fate of India’s 200 million Muslims, some of them descendants of those who chose to stay during Partition, and who may be rendered stateless non-citizens because of the  CAA and NRC. Indian Muslims are reported to have suffered appalling brutality, especially in Uttar Pradesh, where Friday December 20 and December 21 has been described as “Kristallnacht for Muslims”.  The Miya poem, “Mother”, by Rehna Sultana, encapsulates the irony of their displacement:

Ma, ami tumar kachchey aamar porisoi diti diti biakul oya dzai/ Mother, I’m so tired, tired of introducing myself to you

As a person of Goan origin, Hindutva ideology is anathema to my experience of interfaith, interbeing and citizenship of India; it insults my feeling of being a person of Indian origin who is connected to other Indians of many different faiths, linguistic and regional identifications, including in the diaspora. The richly syncretic, inextricably interdependent nature of Goan religious history, culture and language, is just one facet of India’s plurality and secular spirit, which cannot be partitioned along religious lines without destroying India itself.

 

 

Dr Surjeet Dhanji

Researcher, Melbourne

Australia and India battle a ‘change’ of climate

Amidst ravaging bushfires and haze that made breathing difficult, Australians ushered in 2020, sombrely. Communities rallied together to combat disaster, the loss of human, animal and birdlife, and environmental degradation. Protesters marched peacefully, demanding action on the climate crisis. In solidarity, school children abandoned classes to petition policymakers and politicians, to listen to their voice as their future was at stake. The colossal losses and protest voices have initiated a conversation for change in climate policy.

Across the ocean, India grapples with a different climate of change than just the winter smog. The CAA-NRC laws have polarised the nation. In nine states, in cities and towns, and in university campuses protests against the laws have erupted. Curfews and shutdown of internet services have been imposed to clampdown opposition.1  Even JNU students and staff holding an administrative meeting were brutally attacked leaving several injured. Oxford, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia and Stanford students and scholars have demonstrated against police crackdowns on students from Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. International UN bodies, human rights groups and Indian Think Tanks have expressed concern too.

In liberal democracies, universities play a central role in disseminating knowledge. Students learn to separate the chaff from the wheat and academics conduct research without fear and rancour. As universities become more diverse, a diversity of opinions and controversies proliferates. Should dissenting opinions be stifled? In 1921, Gandhi stated in a speech at Ahmedabad, that freedom of speech and association are the two lungs of man; that it was absolutely necessary for a man to breathe the oxygen of liberty. Should the two lungs be deprived of oxygen?

The CAA-NRC laws have divided the Indian diaspora. They are eroding existing trust among Indians via targeted social media, sometimes to debunk myths, sometimes to proliferate lies. Democratic nations espouse egalitarian policies: freedom of speech, freedom of association and equality for all. Can Indian-Australians support the status quo in India and demand egalitarian values in Australia? How will Indians working in Muslim countries fare?

 

 

Dr Shweta Kishore

Academic, Melbourne

I moved to Australia in 2000 with a Master’s from Jamia Millia Islamia University, whose diverse and progressive faculty included amongst others, members of India’s first feminist media collective. Today Jamia University, together with numerous arts and humanities departments and other universities, is spearheading the resistance against a Parliamentary Act that abets the transformation of India into a Hindu nation. As I write this, news of violence against students flashes. The public University has morphed into a battleground between competing ideas of India; one, secular, inclusive, progressive and the other, fundamentalist, exclusionary, hegemonic. How do we understand this moment and what does it mean for Australian- Indians like me who are translocal and feel multiple perceptions of belonging, home and (dis)connection?

Objections against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) invoke the secular heart of the Indian Constitution, under attack from a government who categorises refugees on the basis of religion to determine eligibility for Indian citizenship. In its objections, the pro-constitutionalists question not the granting of citizenship to Hindu refugees from Muslim dominated neighbour nations but the statutory exclusion of persecuted Muslim groups including Rohingya, Uzbek, Ahmediya, from these very nations. Together with NRC, which assesses historical migration data to delegitimize the citizenship of current citizens, fears grow of divisive Hindutva consolidation of a nation where histories of migration stitch a patchwork of languages, cultures and religions.

Women are at the forefront of the struggle. At New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh all women’s civil protest, a 24/7 sit in continues since 16 Dec 2019. ‘No man or leader leads us’, they say. Religion, gender, class, caste, language intersect, accept the relationality of identity. Men run arts-based childcare for the children of the women while the local community donates all necessities. What the resistance will achieve finally is uncertain but, in this moment, it performs the idea of India; the diverse spaces, visions and expressions that allow us to inhabit in our own ways.

 

 

Dr Vikrant Kishore

Academic, Melbourne

I am deeply disturbed by the violent suppression and police brutality in Jamia Millia Islamia on  15 December2019, followed by suppression of the student protesters at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and elsewhere. The protest has spread all over India, with very highhanded responses from the Indian government, including cutting off phone and internet in some areas.

I highly condemn this act of the inept handling of peaceful protest by the students by the government of India. The news and videos of violent suppression of protesters by the Delhi Police and the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force is extremely shameful; baton/lathi charge, physical assault, tear gas (including allegations of use of bullets) were used on these protesting students, many ended with broken bones, one losing his eye and hundreds left with deep trauma and despair; the subsequent spreading of this protest has also witnessed the killing of at least seven protesters. This totally goes against the spirit of democracy and human rights and I am deeply anguished by all this and can only term this action by the government as barbaric.

India being a democratic country provides its citizens the right to protest peacefully, then why this brutal assault of peaceful protesters? Why an assault on the democratic fabric of the country? This needs to be answered and the Indian government must take every action to safeguard its students and provide them with the opportunity to engage politically, which certainly is an important feature of any democratic country and process. I resolutely consider that dissent and protest are an important aspect of democracy and are central to the basic conception of citizenship. University students should be provided with a safe and conducive atmosphere to discuss, debate, embark on dialogues and have the ability to assent and dissent on the issues that concern them, the society, the country, the world, and humanity!

 

 

Yashdeep Srivastava

Architect and Independent scholar, Alice Springs 

I just got back from India last week, and what is happening there with regards to CAA-NRC is unconscionable. The act itself purportedly infringes on the constitution of India and is being challenged in court. Worse, the government’s use of brute force to crackdown on dissent against this amendment is nothing short of authoritarian and a challenge to the very fundamentals of democracy and the universal right to protest peacefully. Is 2020 going to be the 1968 for India? In 1968, students successfully and spontaneously protested against political repression across many parts of the world. If political winter is here, can the Indian Spring be too far behind?

The current Indian government has a penchant for labelling any dissent as anti-national. So it was good to hear protesting students in several states across India singing the Indian national anthem, re-asserting their patriotism whilst simultaneously resisting the CAA and the NRC.

While the Indian government has fanned the flames of religious disharmony  through its divisive Citizen Amendment Bill, as an Indian Australian, I am equally dismayed at the Australian Government’s inept response to the devastating bushfires that have swept/are sweeping  across Australia. In both instances, the populist Indian and Australian governments are clearly out of touch with the ground sentiment of their constituents despite thumping wins at the last elections. Furthermore, the current Australian government’s discriminatory attitudes and policies towards Aboriginal people, people of colour, immigrants and refugees, is tarnished by the same dark brush of prejudice that is playing itself out in India..

As fellow  NRI Atul Paralkar summed up the inherent irony faced by  Indian immigrants outside India arising from the current situation –  When your birth country appears to be propagating religious bias back home while you are looking for equal treatment in the rest of  the world!

 

 

Yask Desai

Freelance writer and visual artist, Melbourne

As a person of Australian-Indian origin who is currently observing potentially nation defining events in both of my homelands, I find striking parallels between the actions of the political class in both nations. The relative catastrophes that are, at present, dominating the socio-political landscapes in India and Australia, seem largely disparate. However, the proposed introduction of the discriminatory combination of the CAA-NRC bills in India and the deadly bush fires in Australia remain inseparably linked.

It is no small irony that, with the political miscalculation of holidaying in Hawaii while fires ravaged large tracts of land in Australia still fresh, the Australian Prime Minister has cancelled his planned January trip to India. At the forefront of the proposed meeting between PMs, Morrison and Modi, would be the continued sale of Australian coal to India, and, undoubtedly, a reassurance of Australia’s commitment to the Adani coal mine in Queensland. Globally, Australia is now considered the country most effected by immediate climate change in the Western world, not least due to its continued dependence upon coal, both for domestic energy generation and as a trade commodity.

Concurrently, lurking at the root of the BJP’s CAA-NRC threat is an urgent political need on the part of the Indian government to propel the country’s annual GDP to above 5 percent. The Modi government realises that a falling GDP is a far greater threat to its long term ability to hold power and implement its ongoing neo-liberal economic policies. The CAA-NRC remains essentially a strategy to consolidate the pan-India Hindu vote bank and thus ensure the ruling BJP a continuing and long term mandate to redistribute India’s wealth even more starkly to its ruling elite. The purchase of Australian coal by India, and in return Australia’s own silence on the discriminatory nature and basic inhumanity of India’s proposed NRC-CAA bills, remain a cornerstone of the two country’s economic and diplomatic transactions.

 

 

Dr Zahid Shahab Ahmed 

Academic, Melbourne  

Through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the BJP government is working on its nationalist agenda to promote Hindutva. The nationwide implementation of NRC or the Act is likely to lead to the persecution of whoever is deemed an illegal immigrant. There are already reports of the Indian government building detention centers from where deportations will follow. While New Delhi claims that it is an internal matter, the implementation of this Act through deportations cannot solely be a domestic issue as it will involve other countries from South and Southeast Asia. The CAA will affect all religious minorities, especially millions of Muslims, in India. For this reason, it is seen globally, for example by the Human Rights Watch, as a clear sign of discrimination against Muslims. At home, these legal reforms have triggered nationwide protests that the authorities have handled violently. In terms of non-violent protests against the CAA, it is clear that it has united people from all walks of life and different faiths who are against undemocratic transformations in India. The rise of Hindu nationalism has given rise to Hindu extremism with an increasing number of violent attacks on religious minorities and secular institutions like the JNU in New Delhi. This situation is very concerning and will have long-term impacts on not just India’s stability but also security in South Asia, therefore, I strongly condemn these developments and urge the government of India to reverse such undemocratic moves. I also demand the international community to pressurize the government of India to stop such large scale human rights violations.

 

 

About the image above:

*Usama Zakir is a research scholar and lecturer at the Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia University, where the first attacks were made on anti-CAA protestors on 15th December 2019. At this time, Ladeeda Farzana, Ayesha Renna and two other women became national symbols of courage. When Shaheen Abdulla, their male friend and co-student at Jamia was dragged out on the road and beaten by foul-mouthed policemen, the women threw themselves upon Abdulla, shielding him from the brutal attack. The hijab-clad young women were simply defending their friend but for Usama Zakir, they were creating history.

On 1st January 2020, Usama started a “Read for Revolution” project with the aim of paying practical tribute to the women who have been holding vigil in Shaheen Bagh. “Under this project, a mini library has been set up on a narrow pavement outside a shop in Shaheen Bagh. There are mats spread along the perimeter of this small passage for the children to sit. They can pick a book to read or use blank sheets and crayons being provided to make posters, drawings or simply write messages….The children are given a theme every day – for instance, JNU violence or bushfires in Australia – following which, they paint and reflect on the issue.”

*Yask Desai is an independent visual artist. In 2018 he was a finalist in the National Portrait Prize, CLIP award (Perth Centre for Contemporary Photography), Aussie Street Award (HeadON Photography Festival, Sydney) and was awarded the Australian Centre for Photography’s Most Critically Engaged Work award at the CCP summer Salon. His latest work ‘Shirni’ focuses on the stories of the men who came from undivided India and worked as hawkers in regional Australia prior to the introduction of the ‘White Australia’ policy in 1901.