by Bilal Ahmad Tantray 26 October 2020
India and the US are two of the most significant powers in the world today. Naturally, parallels have always been drawn between the two, most commonly on account of being the largest and the oldest democracies in the world respectively. In the contemporary global scenario, the Indian state considers America a natural ally and the Indian people consider America as the land of their dreams. The former aspires to be the latter in so many ways, in terms of power, in terms of wealth, and definitely in terms of its stature as the global leader. Many Indians like to believe that India is an America in the making- the superpower of the future, the to-be leader of the free world. The largest democracy has always looked up to the oldest. After all, American democracy has evolved and matured for almost two and half centuries now while the Indian democracy at a humble 73 is still in its adolescence.
The political developments in recent years have also been similar. The turn of the century marked the beginning of the revival of the right-wing in both countries which culminated in the election of Narendra Modi in India in 2014 and shockingly, that of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016. The recipe for political power in both cases was a mix of conservatism and corporatism.
So, it is only natural that parallels are also drawn between the social movements in the two countries. When the nature of social movements, which form an essential part of democratic expression changed in the 1960s in the western world, and the campaigns shifted from the purely material outlook of the industrial social movements to predominantly human rights issues and environmentalism, India soon followed suit. The New Social Movements in both countries have had a complimentary trajectory since then. Cut to 2020 when the latest chapters in NSM history of the two countries manifested themselves as the Anti-CAA movement in India and George Floyd protests in the United States.
The George Floyd protests erupted on the 25th of May after a video of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a 46-year-old African American named George Floyd went viral on social media. He died later that day. In the eight-minute video, George can be seen to be drifting into unconsciousness while repeating the words, “I can’t breathe”. “I can’t breathe“- the three words that should haunt all believers and sellers of the American dream, the three words that we were all too familiar with. The same three words that reverberated in the streets of the US after the death of Eric Garner, who was choke held by the white policeman in New York in 2014. And then again in 2015 after the death of a 25-year-old African American- Freddy Gray at the hands of 6 police officers.
The Anti-CAA movement on the other hand started when students of two minority Central Universities took to the streets after passing a controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) which went on to become the Citizenship Amendment Act on the 12th of December 2019 in the Indian Parliament. The Bill coupled with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) threatened disenfranchisement of the already vulnerable Muslim Community in India.
While both these movements arose in the light of two very specific events, they soon grew into larger campaigns against religious and racial discrimination and for equality, democracy, and human rights. The George Floyd movement became the defining segment of the seven-year-old ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement which was a ‘nonviolent civil disobedience movement against racially motivated violence and police brutality against the Black people’ started in the year 2013.
In terms of longevity, the anti CAA protests continued 24×7 for almost a hundred days while the George Floyd protests, although they were part of a continuous seven yearlong BLM struggle, lasted only a few weeks. Both campaigns ran high with passion but the anti CAA movement comparatively saw much less violence from the protestor’s side. There were a few incidents of stone-pelting and a damaging of a couple of buses but compared to the American protests following Floyd’s death, these were minor. The United States witnessed incidents of looting, arson, and even those of setting fire to Police stations. In Minneapolis, the damage to the city’s small businesses not covered by insurance was estimated at 200 million dollars. The response from the state however was of violation of all meanings of the word ‘proportionate’. The United States suffered the death of 19 civilians in police action against protestors in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. In India, at least 27 people were killed in Police action during the anti-CAA protests. Gruesome images of police entering university campuses did rounds on social media. In Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi Police stormed into the campus following a protest march, fired tear gas shells and stun grenades inside the campus, and even vandalised the library while smashing the students inside with batons. Hundreds of students were injured while one was permanently blinded. Similar scenes were witnessed in Aligarh Muslim University in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
The George Floyd uprising cooled down as organically as it fired up after the American citizens expressed their anger and disappointment continuously for weeks. The anti CAA movement was, on the other hand, forced into a halt in the garb of enforcing the CoVid 19 protocols. The first step that was taken by the state administrations after announcing a brutally misprogrammed lockdown, which was meant to control the spread of the virus, was the clearing of the protests sites which had cropped up at hundreds of places across the country. The haste which was shown in the dismantling of these sites clearly exposed the shrewdly misplaced priorities of the state.
The George Floyd campaign erupted slam-bang in the middle of the CoVid 19 crisis after more than a hundred thousand people had died because of the virus. A pandemic was not strong enough a reason for a human rights issue to be pushed on the backburner. In India however, the Pandemic became an excuse to crack down on the activists and dismantle the protest sites and vandalise all the beautiful pieces of art that the protestors had created over the months. The political rhetoric of the governments around the protests in both countries was disgraceful and illogical. The movements were needlessly securitised and ‘anti-national’ references were attached to innocent activism
Another interesting development and a ‘New’ potential feature of these New Social Movements was the surfacing of counter social movements as a response to these campaigns. While this may seem like a healthy expression of democratic rights, it reeked of majoritarian insecurity on the minority’s show of potential political strength. These counter movements were more about restraining the other groups’ right to expression rather than exercising one’s own. The “All Lives Matter’’ program resurfaced in the United States, very conveniently overlooking the systemic nature of racism in America. Similarly, in India, right-wing groups organised logically redundant pro-CAA rallies which featured controversial and hateful speeches and sloganeering some of which even called for the shooting of the dissident ‘’traitors’’. The opposing groups were kept at a mindful distance in the US where the administration successfully managed to avoid any untoward mob clash. India on the other hand presented a very sorry picture. Delhi which was at the heart of the anti-CAA campaign saw violent clashes between the pro and anti- CAA groups. Armed mobs supported by right-wing organisations attacked Muslim localities and evidently were even aided and abetted by the local police in what turned out to be one of the worst religion-based pogroms in the country’s recent history.
In both movements, art played an exceedingly significant role. People came up with innovative ways to register their protest and to increase the shelf life of the movements. The protests sites in both cases became centres of phenomenal artwork. There were painting and poetry, there were dance and music, and there were passionate speeches and the occasional deafeningly loud silences. This sort of artist activism which many called ‘artivism’ became an essential feature of these movements. So much so that they started attracting tourists from near and far. Protest tourism was another ‘New’ feature of this movement in Delhi where visitors would go on a tour of all the important protest sites which had a continuous flow of people 24 hours a day.
The parallels are drawn between the two movements oxymoronically diverge when it comes to the impacts and achievements of the two campaigns. Although the demands of the George Floyd protests like de-funding of the police and revocation of the qualified immunity to the policemen were not met, the campaign still managed to have an immense impact. Global support for this movement was reminiscent of the international solidarity witnessed in the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa. The officers responsible for killing Floyd have been arrested and are being tried on charges of murder, something that was not seen in the countless similar incidents before when the police officers were at most suspended or dismissed from their jobs. The states brought in legislations and orders to bring about a change in policing. Minneapolis city council banned chokeholds. No knock warrants were scrapped in Louisville. Street names were changed. The statues of slave owners were removed. In a more academic development, Merriam-Webster was forced to revise its definition of racism to take into account the power structure and its relevance to racism. Babynames.com, a website that suggests names for new-borns added the names of the slain victims of racism on their website with the message, “Each of these names was somebody’s baby”. However, the greatest impact was the debate that was stirred around the problem of racism. How it is unacceptable in the 21st century. How the pain of the past needs not only to be addressed but also to be healed. Streets were reclaimed and hopefully, a process of dismantling systemic racism and oppression was started.
India on the other hand, presented a much sorrier picture. No such changes were seen. Instead, a witch-hunt was launched against the dissenters, and preventive detention laws, the likes of which are constitutionally recognised only in one democracy in the world have been used to thwart the dissent. Hate against Muslims is on the rise, so much so that at one point they were fallaciously accused of deliberately spreading the Coronavirus in India. International solidarity to the anti- CAA movement although not absent, painfully sparse, inactive, and short lived.
Nevertheless, there were certain positive social changes that occurred. Anti-CAA movements were predominantly led by Muslim women. And hence the stereotype against Indian Muslims being women oppressors and inherently patriarchal was not only challenged but spine busted to the ground. A social alliance between religious minorities and lower-caste Hindus was witnessed which was an important development in view of growing threats of fascism in the country. Muslims hit the streets to unapologetically assert their identity probably for the first time since independence. They asserted their Indian-ness and their Muslim-ness and they also the fact that the two do not have to be exclusive of each other.
All in all, the American movement was representative of a much-evolved democracy while Indian democracy presented itself to be in a much more underdeveloped stage. Longevity is usually a defining feature of the social movement. It serves the comparison by showing that Americans needed to demonstrate for far lesser a time period to get something out of the system. Indians protested for longer and with more discipline but still achieved almost nothing in terms of structural changes. Maybe, India has not evolved into a liberal democracy yet and there are years of struggle ahead that will take it to that stage. India aspires to be America but it clearly isn’t America yet and it won’t be unless all people are free to express themselves. Maybe the Indian democracy which we considered to be in its adolescence hasn’t even hit its puberty yet. On the timeline of liberalism, the evolution of Indian democracy has not only slowed down but may also have retracted a notch. The same may be temporarily true about the US. The US State’s response to a people’s movement was also far from ideal. But a political change is right around the corner and beyond that corner, is the hope of recovery. On this timeline, the two are epochs apart but both have growing up to do. Old or new, no democracy can afford to leave its minorities and deprived groups at the mercy of the majority. No systemic oppression should be acceptable. Whether it is the knee of Hindutva supremacist on the neck of a minority in India or that of caste chauvinist on the neck of a Dalit, or the knee of the white officer on the neck of a black American, any knee which has unaccounted power to press on any neck needs to be denuded of that power and that has to be done with utmost urgency.