Let’s Celebrate Prashant Bhushan’s Punishment

It is 20 August 2020 today.

A few days ago, the highest court of India decided that Mr. Prashant Bhushan has, in fewer than 280 letters of the English alphabet, humiliated the august institution so much that the honourable judges cannot carry out their work of dispensing justice with dignity. How sad!

The court has also decided that Bhushan be punished; the quantum of punishment will be announced today.

Mercifully, the law of the land doesn’t allow cutting off the tongue that lashes out against honourable judges. Or giving the owner of the tongue 50 lashes in a public square. So, the disturbed judges will have to be content with imposing a fine or sending the man to jail. They may even show him forgiveness perhaps, cowed down by the deluge of protests from all over the world. Who knows?

Personally, I believe Mr. Prashant Bhushan, who has spent his life as a brilliant civil rights lawyer and exposing corruption in high places (including the 2G and the coal block allotment scams during UPA-2) will be sent to jail today. I will be pleasantly surprised if he isn’t.

If it actually happens, I would feel sorry for him and his family, but I will also be extremely happy. Why?

Because it will tell us, with a sense of finality, that India today is in a situation that in many ways, is similar to our colonial past. That our hard-earned freedom has been usurped by a bunch of uneducated, cunning, ruthless people (mostly men) whose sole political capital is spreading hatred towards Muslims and Christians and creating a false fear among 82% of the population that the remaining 18% will somehow finish them off. Clearly, a lot of people have started believing in this bizarre proposition. In 1857, the British began colonising our land. Since 2014, the Sangh-BJP combine has been colonising our minds with their ideology of hate. They have sucked life out of our democratic institutions. They are extremely incompetent too. In just six years, they managed to destroy our economy even before the COVID-19 struck.

We have two options before us.

We can sheepishly accept a Hindu Pakistan, with its denial of democratic rights, muscular suppression of all dissent, bidding farewell to science and scientific approach to education, and ascendance of Hindu mullahs, all of which have been happening already.

Or we can choose to wage a new freedom struggle to reinvent our democracy and regain the values enshrined in the Constitution of India.

On which side will you be?

Maybe, unknown to you and me, a new freedom struggle has already begun to redeem the soul of our Constitution. Already, a large number of our finest men and women are in jail: from the 80-year-old poet Varavara Rao to the civil rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, who gave up her American citizenship and many privileges and gave her life to help poor Adivasis in their legal battles against a repressive state in Chhattisgarh, to the young Pinjra Tod activists, who began their journey to obtain equal rights for girls in Delhi hostels, and went on to protest against the regressive Citizenship Amendment Act.

Just as India could not have become independent without Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose going to jail again and again, I don’t believe India will ever achieve freedom from these internal colonialists without Prashant Bhushan and many others going to jail.

In this new freedom struggle. 20 August 2020 might prove to be a watershed moment in our journey towards a new 15 August 1947.

Sometimes, gigantic historical events are foretold in one man's tale. Do you recall how the First World War began? Let us celebrate Prashant Bhushan's punishment!

An Ode to Death

 Here is my translation of the Bangla poem: মৃত্যু, তুমি Followed by the original >>>

Birendra Chattopadhyay

 (For my friend, Dr. Bhumen Guharoy)

It’s not true that Death doesn’t wait for anyone. Often          

 He is made to wait. He knows, ultimately, he’s going to win.                                  

But he has to accept minor defeats 

At the hands of the unbending willpower of human beings.

He has to concede. Humans know they aren’t immortal–

            yet, they pen poems, paint pictures, create music.

At times like these, waiting behind them, 

            Death slowly becomes impatient; loses his self-confidence.

 

Death! You must learn to be patient, give us time to prepare!

Give us time to learn – that your cold hands                           

Are no horror stories.

And then, keeping you ahead of us, we’ll begin our journey without a direction,

So that we can confidently tell our near ones,

‘Death is insurmountable, but neither did we lose the mach.’

 

(Translated on 24 August 2020)

 

মৃত্যু, তুমি

বীরেন্দ্র চট্টোপাধ্যায়

(ডঃ ভূমেন গুহরায় সুহৃদবরেষু) 

 

মৃত্যু কারও জন্য বসে থাকে না, কথাটা ঠিক নয়। মাঝেমাঝেই তাকে অপেক্ষা করতে হয়।

সে জানে, শেষ পর্যন্ত, তারই জিৎ। কিন্তু ছোটখাটো হার, মানুষের অদম্য ইচ্ছার কাছে,

তাকে মেনে নিতে হয়। মানুষ জানে–সে অমর নয়, তবু সে কবিতা লেখে, গান গায়, ছবি আঁকে।

মৃত্যু তখন তার শিয়রের কাছে বসে ক্রমেই নিজের ধৈর্য আর সাহস হারিয়ে ফেলে।

 

মৃত্যু তুমি সহিষ্ণুতা হেখো, আমাদের প্রস্তুত হতে দাও!

আমাদের অনুভব করতে দাও – তোমার শীতল হাতের স্পর্শ কোন ভয়ের গল্প নয়।

সেদিন তোমাকে সামনে রেখে শুরু হবে আমাদের অনির্দেশ যাত্রা

যেন আমরা মুক্ত কন্ঠে আমাদের আপনজনেদের কাছে বলতে পারি

‘উনি অনতিক্রম্য, কিন্তু আমরাও খেলায় হারিনি।‘

Politics, TINA, and our future

I have held definite political views since I was sixteen and never missed an opportunity to vote. I would have voted in around 15 parliament, assembly, and local body elections in Bengal and Kerala. I believe my political positions were consistently correct because 14 times out of 15, my candidate lost. 😊

In my childhood, particularly after 1962, when Jawaharlal Nehru was clearly a broken man, people often asked, “After Jawaharlal who?” Many believed there would be a great void after Jawaharlal’s passing.

Jawaharlal perished, but India didn’t. All India Radio played a pathetic violin for days, but trains ran, buses plied, life went on. In fact, India got one of her finest prime ministers in a simple and unassuming man: Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Continuing the trend of emotional blackmail by the leader of the day, for most of my adult life, a consistent theme of every election has been “There Is No Alternative” to the ruling party. On a national scale, TINA was a mistress of Congress for long. Over the last few years, she’s been with BJP.

There are good reasons why people may believe there is no alternative to BJP, particularly at the centre, including the party’s many strengths like organisational discipline and its bulldog bite.

But more importantly, most post-Congress political leaders, from the two discredited Yadav families in UP and Bihar to Mayawati to Mamta to Jayalalitha have shown that while their ability to govern varied, every one of them is / has been / was corrupt to the hilt. They have also been quick to shift their political allegiance to suit their personal interests. I believe people will never trust Mayawati again because they know she would support BJP whenever it suited her. Why vote for a potential BJP alley when you can vote for BJP directly?

Navin Patnaik is an exception. This silent elderly man has offered an administration without major scams, which is great by the current Indian standards. On COVID too, Odisha did much better than most other states. But Patnaik hasn’t taken a principled stand ever. He hasn’t uttered a word against the many grotesque misdeeds of BJP. No wonder last time, the people of the state voted for him for the assembly while they went for BJP at the centre. Again, why vote a proxy when you can go for the real one?

Moving on to Congress, to paraphrase Ramchandra Guha, Congress has to die if a meaningful opposition is to be born. Clearly, Congress has ceased to be a political party; it’s more like family business. To perpetuate its proprietorial nature, the family relentlessly tries to mythify the Nehru-Gandhi brand. To date, it has not named one policy, programme, or infrastructure project, whether it’s an airport or a urinal, after a non-Nehru-Gandhi, except the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA scheme. Their complete silence during the beginning of Narsimha Rao’s centenary year this June is baffling. The message seems to be, unless you have a particular surname, you would remain an underling in Congress.

However, surprisingly, if there are any senior politicians who have proven record of honesty and competence, you’ll find them in Congress: Manmohan Singh, Anand Sharma, Jairam Ramesh, Sashi Tharoor, Bhupesh Baghel, or at a lower level, Gourav Vallabh. Even in Rajasthan, the Gehlot government proved its mettle during the COVID pandemic, despite internal bickering. I don’t know why these decent people cannot get together, leave Congress, and offer an alternative. For example, why does Sashi Tharoor have to compromise with soft-Hindutwa and get himself weighed in a temple to win an election in Kerala (and injure his head in the process) where BJP is not a factor?

Finally, I think we the people are to blame because we just cannot look beyond established political parties, however discredited they might be. Desperate situations require desperate solutions. Why don’t we at least begin to think of Harsh Mander and Yogendra Yadav as our new Gandhi and Nehru? I don’t think Gandhi did anything different or better during his initial years in South Africa than what Harsh Mander has been doing in India. On the other hand, Gandhi did a lot of stupid things like examining his shit, which Mander wouldn’t care to do. Or in what way is Yogendra Yadav intellectually or emotionally deficient than Nehru?

If these two emerge as the core of our new politics and if decent politicians chuck Congress and join them, we may have an alternative that would capture the imagination of the people. It is possible, as Arvind Kejriwal has shown on a smaller scale. That he has proved himself to be a mini autocrat ready to lick the boots of bigger autocrats is another issue.

Let’s not give up hope. Let’s find a solution.

Wednesday, 05 August 2020