This is the difference between India and America

Here’s The Thing

Cities and citizens, Black and White, across America, its politicians – from congressmen and senators in Washington DC to mayors and governors in America’s cities and states – and even its police forces, all woke up to the reality of police brutality and anti-Black bias. All because one White policeman killed one Black man in Minneapolis. Police forces in the cities and counties kneeled, apologised to the Black Lives Matter protesters, and in some cases joined them. All despite President Donald Trump and his White Supremacist support base raging against the protesters and calling them some of the same epithets that protesters and dissenters against Narendra Modi are called in India – Left extremists, anti-nationals, terrorists, etc.

In India, police atrocities are par for the course, especially during communal riots, but Indians are happy when the police, instead of maintaining the rule of law, side with ‘them’ against the ‘other’ – as they did during the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, and the most recent Delhi pogrom. In the Modi-era, they have become the ‘new normal’ during peaceful protests, too. Such is the India, such is the policing we desire for ourselves today.

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by the White policeman, the City Council voted to disband the police force itself. In New York, Los Angeles, etc., mayors have decided to ‘defund’ police forces and instead channel money to youth and other social programmes.

In Seattle, people, Black and White, laid siege to a police station and the police had to yield and vacate the station and streets in the city’s Capitol Hill area. The protesters called it the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” and declared that “This area is now the property of the people.” The area has been converted into a Shaheen Bagh-type place of protest and celebration, with speeches, music and readings of poetry on racial justice – because one White policeman killed one Black man. Americans know their rights. Americans know and respect their Constitution.

In India, the Shaheen Bagh protesters were called anti-nationals and terrorists, a Union minister wanted to “goli maro gaddaron ko.” Another BJP leader started off a pogrom against the anti-CAA/NRC protesters, and our middle class cheered on. On Twitter and WhatsApp, messages with pictures of burning houses were “Burn some more of them, teach them a lesson.” What kind of nation and society and individuals have we become? What then is the meaning and value of our freedom struggle and our Constitution and their ideals?

In America, there was one powerful voice against the Seattle protesters, that of President Trump himself, who called them “domestic terrorists”. Not even the Seattle police agreed with him. When Trump ordered Mayor Jenny Durkan to “take back your city. If you don’t do it, I will”, she replied to the President, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker”. The Seattle fire chief, instead, came out to chat with the protesters and set up portable toilets for them. One city police chief elsewhere told the President of the United States on television to “keep your mouth shut.” Here in India, would one dare to say that to even Anurag Thakur, let alone to the Great Leader and his deputy, when they spew and spread falsity and hatred?

When Americans saw in the initial days of the Black Lives Matter protests that the police were reacting brutally against the protesters, they came out and joined the protests in greater numbers, braving the coronavirus pandemic, and they turned the tide.

Indians, on the other hand, watched the plight of the migrant workers walking and dying along the highways, and the Indian rich and middle classes hid in the safety of their homes, exchanging recipes and dutifully banging plates and lighting diyas when their god commanded, and left the migrant workers to their fate.

This, then, is the difference between India and America: The latter is the world’s greatest democracy, because the people of America keep it that way – for the most part. India, for its part, is now effectively a one-man rule, with the institutions of democracy bent to his will, because the people of India don’t know what a democracy is, or its value to their own lives.

In India, police brutality is a daily constant – from the forcible collection of hafta from poor street vendors to beating up or harassment of the minorities and the poor to staging fake encounter killings and murdering the father of a rape victim inside a police station in UP. The Delhi police have used the lockdown period to make arrests to suit the government’s convenience, including that of a seven-month pregnant lady, but our middle class – the most influential electoral constituency – has nothing to say about any of it. Most Indians are just not bothered about what’s happening to the idea of rule of law, the very basis of democracy. But then, they don’t even care anymore for democracy. Modi-cracy is enough for them.