Lip service to Gandhi while Govt dubs peaceful protestors rioters and terrorists

Passive resistance or Satyagraha carry the hallmark of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Barak Obama. Peaceful and non-violent protest is the core of this essentially democratic right of citizens. One can go on endlessly about the conditions that justify civil disobedience but the principle is too clear to be questioned. Sadly though, the present government has done exactly that.

This is apparent from the arguments marshalled on behalf of the State in the student protests in Jamia and now in the charge sheet filed in FIR 59/2020 pertaining to the alleged conspiracy to incite communal riots in north east Delhi in February 2020.

It is important to disclose one’s conflict of interest in the debate, particularly since the government side has miserably failed to do so. My name figures in the disclosure statements of accused in the charge sheet. Having said so, I can go on to claim a legitimate right to argue a brief against the government for that very reason.

I addressed the protest gatherings at several places including Jamia, Shaheen Bagh and Khureji. They were all peaceful then and furthermore before and after my visit. When asked if the police were right in claiming that the speeches were ‘provocative and mobilising’ my retort is that I had gone there not to sing lullabies and dissuade the gathering from protesting.

Mahatma Gandhi would have said it was my right and indeed my duty to support the protest and encourage the protestors. He was also clear that departure from the tenets and principles of non-violence called for penance and reparation as evident from his reaction to Chauri Chaura. The entire edifice of Satyagraha rested on a moral position and therefore could not be departed from without a breach of high morality. The CAA-NRC protests too were moral in character and failure to support them would be moral cowardice.

The government’s stubborn failure to concede moral space to the protests undermines their further steps to make violence accountable even if the protestors’ own assessment leads them to draw a line between legitimate protest and unwarranted, even reprehensible violence.

The charge sheet makes little distinction between protests and riots, purportedly linking them through the plans for Chakka Jam in the city to drive home a point to the visiting US President. When the Nirbhaya agitation in the heart of Delhi made it difficult for the then UPA government to entertain President Putin at the Hyderabad House, they quietly shifted the venue to the PM’s residence.

There was no curfew or crack down or provocative speeches by supporters of the Congress flanked by officials in uniform. There are times when responsible governments have to take public opposition on the chin as part of democracy. Looking for alibis like urban naxalism and anti-nationalism is less demeaning of the citizens than it is for the government of the day.

A government unable to face criticism would be seen as being afraid of its own people. Converting acts of defiance, even civil unrest, into terrorism or its companion offence is an admission of a colossal failure to manage dissent and disagreement in a democracy.

Fortunately, Gandhiji has not been forsaken by the incumbent government as it has Jawaharlal Nehru. What it cannot forsake it tries to appropriate but the ambiguity on the Mahatma is perplexing.

The Shaheen Bagh and Jamia protests by public admission adhered to Gandhian principles and methods. In a protest that lasted for a hundred days there was no cause for complaint beyond the fact that inconvenience was being caused to ordinary road users (and that too because the police closed the alternative routes).

Even the two days on which Jamia students came to clash with the police was in the course of their march to central destinations in Delhi to register their protest. They would have marched in an orderly fashion as permitted by the police. But declaring them an unlawful assembly and cracking down on them surely was more ‘provocative and mobilising’ than the police complaints against several of the speakers who are mentioned in the charge sheets. The police thus have no choice but to paint an ugly picture of the students and justifying entry onto the campus without permission of the university authorities.

Gandhiji unfolded his vision of passive resistance against an unelected foreign government and it might be argued that the same is not available against an elected government. Yet when an elected government violates the principles of constitutional morality and undermines political propriety, Gandhian principles become imperative.

Perhaps it is time for a fresh look at Mahatma Gandhi’s thoughts to address unprecedented challenges of an elected dictatorship and circumstances that lend to undermining of institutions that ensure critical checks and balances. Therefore, the democratic mobilisation that is imperative in these testing times must go hand in hand with revisiting Gandhian philosophy.

One important aspect of passive resistance and Gandhian approach is to be prepared to suffer the sanction that resistance to law entails. But that would apply where a citizen refuses to cooperate and comply with an immoral law. But where a law is distorted and illegitimately used to crush constitutional rights, the duty to use access to courts of law for seeking justice is that much greater.

One hopes that courts too will recall the scene in the film ‘Gandhi’ where the magistrate rises from his chair in respect of the prisoner and then proceeds to sentence him but adding that if the government were to choose to waive the sentence there would be no one happier than him! Surely, we are no more divided today than the country was then.

Gandhi is not for the citizen alone but equally for the government, the courts and the police. Whatever be the conviction that the government feels for the law that many citizens questioned in a remarkable people’s movement and the understandable angst about the violence, is it not the time to reaffirm our faith in Mahatma Gandhi to repair the damage done to our society?

(The author is a former Union Minister for External Affairs)