Shafeeq R. Mahajir
Gang. Mob, clique, band, ring. Unmasking. Exposing, revealing, debunking. Those are the meanings.
Meanings. Connotations, significances, implications.
The gangsters’ names are known. Kanhaiya… Shehla… Umar… hundreds who have been beaten, brutalised, some killed… the list is long.
The Establishment describes them as the Tukde-Tukde Gang. The Establishment that reigns, rules. The Establishment has great sources of intelligence, human experts advising it, and electronic surveillance facilitating search and research. It must know what it is talking about. So we shall believe the Establishment. After all, we are ruled by it. Ruled. Different from governed.
Labels. Stickers, markers, identifiers. Fables. Tales, stories. Labels and fables. Markers and stories. Identifying people with made-up narratives. Truth. Fact, reality, actuality.
Take the Tukde-Tukde Gang. Unmask it. Test the veracity of the labels. Eliminate the fables. Arrive at the truth. For, the truth shall set you free. And, Satyameva Jayathe.
See the videos of the police assaulting students, youngsters, even children. Sorry, as a lawyer: assault is raising your hand (to hit) or issuing a threat. No contact. Actual contact aggravates it to battery. Police attacking students, youngsters, even children. Not chasing them away. Not hitting them to disperse. Grabbing them, holding them, then others with long thick batons brutally hitting them again and again and again… Policemen don’t do that. That action is unconstitutional, illegal, criminal. We had not seen this sort of “policing” till the ruling ideology tasted power. “Disciplined forces” stay disciplined, do not degenerate into rogues. They ensure observance of law, not participate in, indulge in, its negation, its destruction. They stop brutality, not revel in it. No, wait a minute. They don’t, unless of course they get the green signal. Or saffron signal. Paraphrasing Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet, “Ö what’s in a name? A thorn by any other name would prick as hard.”
Police forces, paramilitary forces, armed forces, are accountable. To the political establishment. Unless it plans to rig future elections, a political establishment is accountable to the electorate. Police forces, paramilitary forces, armed forces, cannot believe they are no longer accountable. There is only one possibility that allows them to discard their discipline, indulge in brutal criminality, disgrace their uniforms. That is the certain knowledge that there is to be no accounting. That certainty can come from one and only one source: the political establishment. The police have disgraced itself, repeatedly. May we therefore safely assume they have the guarantee of freedom from accounting, a priori pardon in hand, with instructions to go to war against our own people, attack youngsters the age of our own children, brutalise them, break their spirits? We may.
The political establishment cannot afford to allow lawless conduct of armed forces, destructive of the very discipline that informs, or ought to inform, all actions of every such force. It cannot, or ought not to, risk political oblivion. There is only one possibility that allows them to discard their Constitutional duty, indulge in unconstitutionality, disgrace their office, commit breach of the sacred trust reposed in them in their fiduciary capacity by the people. That too is the conviction either that the result is a foregone conclusion, and they will come back to power, which raises disturbing questions about the electoral process itself, or that they couldn’t care less. That certainty can come from one and only one possibility: and you know what that could be.
By allowing the police and the paramilitary forces to do what they have been and are doing, the political establishment has disgraced itself as well. It has abandoned its jurisdiction to seek accountability from those under its command, and thereby delegitimised its continuance in office. May we therefore safely assume that, betraying its constitutional trust, abandoning its role of governance for which it was elected, preferring to allow those under its command to go berserk against the children of the very people who elected them, attack youngsters the age of their own children, brutalise them, break their spirits, it has concluded either that they will come back to power regardless, or that they couldn’t care less? We may. We may also ask, if they couldn’t care less, about a matter which is so crucial, being the very source of the power they so blatantly abused, ought they to be where they are?
These are sensitive times, where sentiments of ossified minds are easily hurt and legal proceedings launched on the flimsiest of pretexts, to stultify dissent. Paradoxically, these are also insensitive times, where the police and paramilitary forces are both insensitive to the demands of their respective manuals, their calling, and even to the dictates of their conscience. These are times when the political establishment no longer governs, it rules. Correction, suppresses, represses, oppresses.
Falling standards, incessantly lowering expectations, have seen our country not just face the most indescribable assaults on civil rights, but see what can only be described as effective legitimisation of these terrible atrocities by the persistently noticeable inaction of the one great institution which stands, in such times of great stress, as a repository of the people’s trust, a beacon of hope, the master of the temples of justice and hence that powerful shaper of every nation’s destiny: an independent judiciary.
If and when a nation’s judiciary elects not to exercise the jurisdiction vested in itself, abdicate its responsibility preferring to allow official versions to be the sole correct version, blinds itself to the horrendous videos all others seem to see and be alarmed by, it ceases to merely exercise restraint. It permits entrenching of all those attitudes destructive of everything our Constitution stands for.
Which brings me to the Tukde-Tukde Gang. The Kanhaiyas, the Shehlas, the Umars, and all those countless young people who today have at great personal sacrifice assumed the holy mantles of Bhagat Singh, Ashfaqullah Khan and Ram Prasad Bismil, who have risked their lives and their futures for the future of our great nation and its continued governance consistent with Constitutional values… are these members of some gang that seeks to break the nation into pieces, or are they those who are picking up the broken pieces of Constitutional propriety, scattered tatters of those noble ideals that inspired the members of the Constituent Assembly who fashioned the best Constitution in the world humankind has ever been able to craft… breaking their country, or picking up and stitching together with their young inexperienced hands the tukde-tukde of Constitutional values?
Discarding the labels, seeing through the fables, unmasking the Tukde-Tukde Gang, we find they stand for the spirits of Bhagat Singh, Ashfaqullah Khan and Ram Prasad Bismil, whom the nation rightly salutes.
Time now for our own surgical strike.
Discarding the labels, seeing through the fables, unmasking the Tukde-Tukde Gang, do we find a dark nefarious force, some anti-national gang that seeks to break the nation into pieces, or do we find bright young sparks of hope for our future, illuminating attempts to uphold and ensure Constitutional propriety and political accountability, powerful reaffirmation of those noble ideals that inspired the best Constitution in the world?
What then is the real Tukde-Tukde Gang? Your answer says nothing about others. It defines you. Live with that.
Error at one place towards the end, “…to merely exercise restraint. It permit entrenching of all those attitudes destructive of everything our Constitution stands for.” should read “…to merely exercise restraint.
It permit entrenching of all those attitudes destructive of everything our Constitution stands for.”
Shafeeq R. Mahajir is a well-known lawyer based in Hyderabad