Policing Dissent | Amit Shah's plans risk criminalising protest

The Narendra Modi government's insecurity is evident in its attempt to decode decades of protest as potential subversion.

It is a curious directive that Union Home Minister Amit Shah has given to the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD): to investigate all public agitations since 1974. Although it was discussed at a National Security Strategies Conference in July, it surfaced in the media only two months later, in September.

It appears that Shah is interested in creating a standard operating procedure (SOP) for dealing with public agitations and movements, reflecting perhaps the State’s insecurity where it believes conspiracies are brewing against it.

Shah has asked the BPRD to seek the help of police departments, including their Crime Investigation Departments (CID), and also rope in the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the Financial Intelligence Unit-India (FIU-IND), and the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to examine the ‘financial aspects’ of such agitations.

But there is a clear difference between ‘understanding’ protests and movements, a job best done by social scientists and historians, and ‘dealing’ with them as a security problem.

Sociologists, for example, can explore the structural inequalities, identity politics, and group dynamics of public protests. Political scientists can shed light on institutional failures, democratic deficits, and mobilisation strategies, while economists can analyse material grievances, corruption, youth unemployment, inflation, and fiscal crises that can spark unrest. Historians can contextualise the movements within long-term struggles — land rights, farm prices, caste discrimination, gender bias, regional autonomy, etc.

Such methodologies of investigation see the protests as a reflection of the democratic will of the people. Police investigations, on the other hand, only focus on the protests as a threat to public order, national security, and the governing dispensation.

The home minister’s is clearly a policing approach that does not respect the public protests as reasonable actions. Understanding them is aimed at controlling them rather than for redressing grievances.

In his framework, Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha, the farmers’ protests against the Narendra Modi government’s ill-fated farm laws and the anti-CAA protests could all be termed criminal conspiracies against the State.

Those who used to accuse public protestors of using a ‘tool-kit’ now clearly want to develop a tool-kit of their own — an alternative official playbook, to deal with all future protests.

The components of this tool-kit include tracking ‘financial networks’ of protests by examining the funding trails of past protests (hence the resort to the ED, the FIU-IND, and the CBDT); establishing ideological or organised links of the protests across various locations (hence the language ‘mass agitations by vested interests’), and looking for patterns by studying past protests from 1974 onwards. They are also directed to assess the radicalisation risks of mass mobilisation, by investigating the dynamics of mass gatherings as well as regional extremism, with special emphasis on Khalistan.

The timing of the leak, coming days after the Gen-Z protests in Nepal, suggests that it was a strategic warning to youth activists and social media influencers in India, that the State is watching, analysing their actions, and is prepared for any future protests.

The proposed investigations will create a centralised archive of intelligence about mass protests — a database of all public agitations in the country, the actors involved, and their modes of funding. This will increase surveillance and allow pre-emptive policing — detaining or arresting people before they even step onto the streets to protest. The consequences will be serious for civil liberties and the right to assembly and protest.

The measures recall the ‘Sus Law’, short for suspected person, passed in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, brought by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher under the Vagrancy Act of 1824. It allowed the police to stop, search, and arrest anyone they suspected of loitering with intent to commit an arrestable offence. The home ministry’s new playbook will likely try to deter potential protestors the same way, by pre-emptive arrest.

Most importantly, the ministry’s proposed ‘tool-kit’ will help it to shape the public narrative by which certain protests will be framed as anti-national, seditious, and externally funded or externally manipulated. It will allow the government to delegitimise dissent, and turn public perception against the protestors.

The choice of 1974 as the beginning of the investigations into mass protests is politically significant. This was the year the J P movement against authoritarianism began. It continued into the 19 months of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. At that time itself it was alleged to be the cat’s-paw of a ‘foreign hand’ trying to remove her from power.

Shah’s plan to conduct a forensic scrutiny of mass movements is supposed to help the State anticipate and neutralise protests. But what will such an investigation yield beyond patterns, funding trails, and logistical insights?

It is difficult to predict what the symbolic tipping point or trigger for a public protest will be — it could be a physical incident or even a viral social media message or images. Even the best police investigations cannot interpret these tipping points.

That is why every leaderless demonstration, as most modern protests increasingly are, flummoxes the police because of their unpredictability and rapid emergence. These protests also do not always begin in traditional political spaces, but in social media groups in virtual space with networked and shifting leadership as opposed to a hierarchical and fixed one.

Surveillance ‘tool-kits’ cannot capture the organic and emergent nature of mass dissent. Organic protests arise from peoples’ lived experiences (Rohit Vemula suicide protests against caste discrimination in universities), collective social trauma (Nirbhaya case youth protests) and moral outrage (Burhan Wani’s killing in Kashmir and the use of pellet guns, justice for Priyadarshini Mattoo protests in Delhi). These mass responses are not the result of premeditated plans.

The home ministry’s proposed playbook then, may prove to be quite irrelevant in the face of organic protests. At best, it demonstrates the insecurity of the government, its intolerance of dissent, and its determination to battle future agitations. It will no longer see public protest as a legitimate political agency in a democratic political system.

Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/social-justice-and-the-failure-of-political-will-3735110