We are here once again. A year has gone by. It seems it was only yesterday that we were grappling with the issues of peace, justice and democracy, especially in the context of our country. We can only think in terms of or in the context of our country. All examples and evidence that we cite are from the geographical location we are situated in. We were discussing democracy last year. And we know that democracies cannot exist without justice. Democracies claim that they are better than other systems because they are just societies. Democratic societies promise to give justice to all. Justice is not a privilege for some sections.
So how do those democracies become just societies? The struggle to become a just society is to become a society which remembers, which is to say, it needs to have a sense of time. Time is constituted by memory but also infused with a sense of possibility—possibility to move from point A to point B. Without this movement, we cannot have a sense of time. As the date of this year’s meet drew closer, I started wondering if we had moved even an inch forward from where we were last year. If we had something new to talk about or to add. And it made me realize that the questions remain the same. Our sense of dilemma and helplessness has only grown. This is a strange feeling. The feeling of time collapsing. We humans live with the sense of the trinity: yesterday, today and tomorrow—past, present and future. There are certain things from the past that we want to carry to the present and the future. But there are things we do not want to have reappear. For them or to them we say, ‘Never again!’
Let us also stay with the question of sense of time. Is it shared equally by all? Who is not allowed to move on and who can declare in a carefree manner that they can and need to move on? Can we ask for example, Zakia Jafri, who lost her husband Ehsan Jafri in 2002 in a violent attack on Gulberg Society—he was cut to pieces and then burned—to move on? Can we ask Bilkis Bano—now a national name, for reasons no woman would like—to move on? When they refuse to move on, it angers the nation and they are punished. The response of the Supreme Court to the refusal of Zakia Jafri to let bygones be bygones and move on with the passage of time is remarkable. We have not discussed it enough. Zakia Jafri’s insistence to secure justice for herself smelt of a sinister conspiracy in the eyes of the Supreme Court. How can one persist with the demand for justice for 20 years? This is what the Supreme Court asked. So her quest for justice is not a national endeavour, it’s a lonely quest.
When we say ‘never again,’ we make a call and promise to ourselves and others. In this community of educators, we need to recall Theodor W. Adorno. He said that the primary task of education after Auschwitz was to ensure that Auschwitz never happened again, which meant that it was our duty to take the time forward to make Auschwitz a thing of the past.[1] We had also promised after Gujarat 2002: never again. It was a way of looking for justice. Be it the Holocaust or Gujarat, these are instances of supreme forms of injustice. But was it a resolve for all or was it a partial commitment, made by only one section of India? The call of Adorno was not only for Europe or the West; Auschwitz can happen anywhere in the world. Professor Spivak said that justice for her was not revenge, but Israel seems to have forgotten that. Justice for Israel is revenge on the Arab Palestinians, simply revenge.
We also know that it was not an event which should have taken the people of Europe by surprise. There was a process unfolding before their eyes which they allowed, which then culminated in Auschwitz. Adorno expected the world to learn from Auschwitz; learn its lessons from the result of its earlier apathy to the processes which led to the gas chambers. What did his call imply? What could be done to not let Auschwitz happen again? In Germany, the Germans feigned ignorance about it. But were they not aware of the hatred that they nursed and expressed towards Jews. There has been a lot of scrutiny of their denial, their involvement in the genocide but they were very much complicit. Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who has studied this denial, says that one cannot ignore the fact that this could not have happened if the German populace had not gone along with it.[2] They had hundreds of thousands of people taking part in this effort—whether it was a bureaucrat sitting in an office somewhere in Germany, figuring out a train schedule or how much Zyklon B had to be shipped to Auschwitz. This person never physically killed anyone, but did it with a pen and a pencil. We must also remember that, if we think that this is only about Germans, we are wrong.
It is a fact that the rest of the world didn’t want to know what was happening in Germany. Scholars have pointed out that there were reporters sending out stories, but many of which were received with ‘This cannot be quite true. You are exaggerating.’ ‘Why are you writing this?’ Or the editors put the news on the back pages as tiny articles. An article in June 1942 in the Chicago Tribune reported that a million Jews have been murdered. Can you guess which page featured this news? A million Jews murdered? It was on page 6, 13 lines at the bottom of a page and next to an advertisement for Lava Soap. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was reported a few days after it began. The news of the revolt was on the front page of the New York Times. But it was ironic that even though the New York Times had three or four subsequent stories on the uprising, they appeared deeper and deeper into the paper. The New York Times bent over backwards not to be thought of as a Jewish newspaper.
The New York Times did acknowledge the problem but it refused to intervene. This total divide in one nation leads one to wonder about the basis of solidarity without which a nation cannot stand. What is it that binds us together and makes us one people? Do we belong to this land? To each other? And how can it be done? We have to accept that it is impossible. Not that efforts have not been made or should not be made. Schools do try. But now, all such efforts are being criminalized. Last year, we had talked about it. This year, we need to talk about it again because it’s happening all over India. A school which held a sarva-dharma prarthana (prayer meeting for all religions) had cases filed against it. The principal was fired or suspended. You cannot celebrate Eid or Christmas in schools. You cannot even tell your students that rapists do not belong only to one religion—they can belong to any religion. Dr Tejaswini Desai of Kolhapur paid a very heavy price for telling her students that if they thought that Muslims were rapists, they were wrong, because rapists can be from any community. She was sent on forced leave and continues to remain so to this day. She had to face such a consequence for what appears to be a completely innocuous statement.
We are told that we must belong to this nation and to each other. But there’s something very deeply perverse about this demand. We make a distinction between nationalism and patriotism, and claim that the latter is a positive thing while the former breeds divisiveness. Patriotism is supposed to be about a sense of belonging, but who is allowed to have this sense? So this perverse notion of ‘true belonging’, which is the beginning of nationalism, could ultimately lead us to some version of fascism. The notion of patriotism which is pitted against nationalism doesn’t help much because it ultimately demands that people be defined. Jacob Levy says that we often think of justice as tightly linked to membership in the state. [3]It is the state which delivers justice to all citizens with equal rights. This is our expectation from the state. But we know that, in reality, the state does nothing of the sort. Levy argues that we need to examine the idea of justice which is so linked to state membership. It is all too compatible with treating non-members outside its borders as outside the ambit of justice. My friend and colleague Nivedita Menon often criticizes the very idea of citizenship, because citizenship, as we know, as Hannah Arendt has told us, is the right to have rights.[4] But Nivedita asks and many people get offended by her asking: Who gives you citizenship? Is citizenship available to all? When we say ‘we the people’, what is the difference between people and citizen? Are all resources, which the state controls and then delivers, available to all people? Or do they have to be citizens who can provide proof of citizenship, such as Aadhaar and PAN and so on. Now, you have to connect your Aadhaar with your PAN so that you can be deemed a citizen.
The rituals of citizenship mostly create non-members. Levy says that Guantanamo Bay may be a grave example of injustice associated with the policing of borders against immigrants in order to maintain a political community’s sense of belonging. In order to ensure the just and peaceful coexistence of the members of the state, the poor from elsewhere need to be turned away. Or, if they succeed on penetrating the borders, they are made to live vulnerable, extra-legal lives. There is something perverse about preserving the sense of belonging and solidarity unilaterally. We say ‘No, we are not Hindus, we are not Muslims, we are Indians’ but this sense of solidarity in itself creates outsiders. Hence, Bangladeshis should not enter India.
This simple demand was made in Manipur about having barbed wire on the border of Myanmar and India. Why not create a wall? Why not stop illegal infiltrators from the side of Myanmar? So who accepts outsiders and who doesn’t? Mizoram accepts a certain kind of outsider. Recently, the Kuki Zo people fled from Manipur to Mizoram as refugees. The Mizo leader said: they‘re our brothers and sisters. It was not for the sake of humanity but a sense of belonging. The Kuki Zo people were privileged because the Mizo leader considered them brothers and sisters. But the same hospitality is not shown to Chakmas, for example, in Mizoram. So we should not think that Mizos are large-hearted people. It is a false sense of belonging when they declare that they are one of them and have a duty to look after them. We need to think about how we can justify the rights of the state to promote a sense of belonging and determining shared membership. Do we justify the rights of the state to unilaterally limit immigration? This is what Levy asks. And he also asks: Are those who are considered outsiders exempt from the moral category of those who are owed just treatment?
Those who promote bounded solidarities often react to a crisis within a democratic state about their own self-perception as citizens. But the braver moral crisis is how those inside the borders of a state treat those outside it. These borders can be created anywhere. For example, in an election campaign in Bengal, some politician might declare that they are here to defend Bengali culture from outsiders. They are creating the same outsider–insider rift that another party constructs on a much larger scale. It says that there are certain communities who, by being what they are, are permanently outsiders. They can never earn the certificate of being insiders. So what is the basis of shared membership or solidarity that makes us a nation? Is it culture? Scholars have argued that culture is the frame or reference point which helps us define who we are, make meaning of ourselves. Culture is the way we eat, dress, celebrate, mourn. It is about symbols, rituals and shared memories. Culture is supposed to be the basis of solidarity. But it is highly divisive and can be quite exclusionary. You pass through the long corridor of Delhi airport and look at the cultural imagery that welcomes you. This time, when I was moving towards the exit gate of the Kolkata airport, I felt as if I was being initiated into a cultural world. I could see the exclusions. You see the statues that line the airport. So which Kolkata are we entering? Which Bengali culture was I going to encounter? Unless we address this problem of the nation’s insistence on projecting a shared culture, we cannot talk about justice.
Even though justice is essentially related to the sense of fairness and equality, it primarily concerns the distribution or ownership of resources. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Assamese nationalists insist that there is only one Assamese culture and the Miyas are not part of it. At the same time, they say that the Miyas are stealing their land, their jobs. The two are intrinsically related. The crisis in Manipur is presented as the saving of Manipuri culture from the infiltrators. But it is about the land of the hills, which the Meiteis didn’t have access to and want to now own. Similarly, the whole claim of integrating Kashmir to India is linked to the promise that Indians will be able to buy land in Kashmir and marry Kashmiri girls. The call to save the culture of Uttarakhand is essentially a call to disallow Muslims to purchase or own land in the state. Who feels they belong, and who is allowed to belong? The answer to this question will help us answer the question about how justice should be meted out and to whom. A Muslim living in Gurugram told a reporter four months ago that Hindus, even if they have come recently, are treated as insiders, while Muslims who have been living there for generations remain outsiders, thus filling them with a sense of injustice. Professor Krishna Kumar talked about the loneliness of Rohith Vemula or the little girl in a bangle factory of Firozabad. It was a very poignant moment. When she was asked: If you met God, what would you ask him? And she said that she would ask him ‘Why did you make me poor?’ and tears fell from her eyes. I remember that passage well.
Three days ago I had a conversation with a friend from Ambikapur that I want to share with you. He said his daughter goes to an upmarket school. She came home one day and told him that her friends were being told by their friends—all of them girls—not to be friends with her. She was very upset and depressed. The school had done nothing. The authorities were not responsible. Neither the principal nor the teachers. The teachers were good and competent. They taught their subjects well. But the daughter of my friend found the school, after that day, an alien place and did not want to go back. She felt she was not allowed to belong. My friend asked me ‘What should be done? What can be done? What is the solution?’ What should he do? He’s a young man. He’s established a small organization in the memory of his mother. It’s called the Rehana Foundation. When I went to Ambikapur, it made me very happy to see that the Rehana Foundation had four or five very active members. Only the son of Rehana who was my friend was a Muslim, but the others were Sikhs and Hindus and people from several other communities. I asked him: What happened to that group? He said they continued to work but didn’t identify themselves with the Rehana Foundation any more. Then he asked me another question: ‘Should I change the name of my organization? What should I do? What should I do to make it a welcoming place for them?’ I was perplexed. I had to tell him that he should not change the name, because that wouldn’t solve the problem. He was asking for a sense of belonging that was not available to him. It is not available to his daughter either. So I told him, ‘Your daughter is asking for friendship. But friendship is voluntary. You don’t demand it. It cannot be compelled.’
How to earn it? How do I say that I deserve your friendship? Why is the daughter of my friend not qualified for friendship?’ I leave you with this question.
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, 'Education After Auschwitz' in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 191-204.
[2] Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993).
[3] Jacob T. Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[4] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest, 1976) p. 296.
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