The year 2019 is—soon we will say ‘was’—no ordinary year. Every year brings a share of extraordinary, life-altering elements for us. Hidden somewhere in that 365-day personal almanac… a diary of our own little rotations, which we took with Mother Earth. Or maybe it comes with a new collective history inscribed brashly on the forehead of time itself, as a former prime minister once promised. What makes 2019 stand out is the way it reached towards that latter promise. For this year will be marked in the life of the nation not only in an aggregation of individual markers. It’s the year we tossed and turned, but could not settle down.
A year that’s ending without reaching the finishing line. One of a national searching, of rediscovering who we are as a collective, in response to new definitions in the air. And it’s—yes, the Apostrophe Society just shut down, but we won’t be finished with apostrophes, or other strophes—not limited to that one question: Are you an Indian? The prime minister has told us his government has not asked any such question to the billion-plus citizenry.
That it’s a canard, a conspiracy of the naysayers. That should bring us to a neat, reassuring year-end. But does it? Does that question vanish from the swirling air? The winter carnival of protests may ebb, leaving in its wake some heart-wrenching stories, some lifeblood spilt. In the list of properties destroyed, a few things we all collectively owned. But will either side go back—retreat—convinced? Or only bide for time? End of the year, end of the tether, but nowhere near the finishing line.
The year 2019 will be marked in history not because for the first time India re-elected a non-Congress dispensation with an absolute majority. But because, as a collective, India in a way revisited all the crossroads years—1947, 1950, 1975, 1991, 1992—in one. As if we were in a hurry to go over our basic script with a marker pen. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the Union home minister reminded us in Parliament, is part of the “unfinished business” of Partition. “Had the Congress then not agreed to a division on religious grounds”, he went on, he would not have to bring a Bill categorising citizenship in terms of religion. In response, everyone pulled out 1950.
Never before was the Preamble of India’s Constitution read so many times, in public places. Taken down from the pulpit, the glass cage, and spoken out as a performative utterance. “We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved…” It is rare for common people to quote the Law to the lawmakers. But in this winter carnival, articles of the Constitution were quoted as commonly as the night temperature in Delhi, and onion prices. Section 144 got good airplay too. Should this colonial law have an unaltered life, without caveats, in a democracy? Particularly when the police don’t seem to know where to draw the line between ‘protest’ and ‘riot’, and when peaceful protests can get infiltrated by wilful disruptors.
Memories of the Emergency too were invoked in these last few months, as we swam in the sticky alphabet soup of CAA, NRC, NPR, confronted with questions on self, nativity and antiquity. (An old lady told me, why should I have to prove my citizenship at this age, when I was citizen enough to elect governments since 1952, and elected Mr Modi too!) “Those infamous 18 months… could they be back?” they asked. Look at Kashmir, at Assam. A state falls off the map, another redraws its inner maps.
The world would like to believe we are a nice country, with democracy, film songs, Rajinikanth, festivity and food. Not the kind that would incarcerate politicians or dissenters or immigrants. And what about the economy in the time of choleric passions? Ah, the adamant boy that refuses to drink milk and Complan!
There is now a duality in power, and the economy perhaps does not know which way to gravitate.
Narendra Modi at one end, with his ambitions of being seen as a statesman intact. With his social welfarism of gas connections, toilets, housing, banks accounts and yoga for all. Amit Shah, with his unvarnished style, is a different pole. Which will have more gravitational pull?
A Muslim gentleman with plans of starting a (well) start-up explains to me how the government should be revisiting the unfinished agenda of 1991, not 1947. Not spend scarce funds on a citizenship register. Unleash the animal spirits in the business sector, not on the streets.
Certainly not via rubber-coated bullets, fibreglass lathis and FIRs on campuses. No wonder 1973-75 is being recalled… especially Gujarat’s own student-led Navnirman Andolan. Once again, a dispirited opposition space was filled by students. Would the anti-CAA agitation have exploded thus had the police not gone overboard that night at Jamia? Would IITs and IIMs—no long-haired hippies there—have signed on the dissent note?
The answers came from a young girl on a video gone viral—girls are speaking back like never before. Her bodily integrity under threat, now her citizenship too, she is talking back to those who would inscribe history on her forehead. India is a woman, they say.