Implicit Self

Just when I almost gave up. Although, that’s a terribly arrogant statement to make, who was I to give up anyway. What did I ever do. I grew up thinking the country belonged to everyone, people who didn’t think so were in a minority and could be ignored, we were secular, progressive without trying to open my eyes to reality. I didn’t know about the state sponsored atrocities on the indigenous (POSCO etc), the AFSPA of the northeast, the ratio of armed forces to civilians in Kashmir. OK, I may have known the last, but that was justified, and aren’t armed forces nice? We lived around military officials living in the same complex as us and in general they seemed strong and capable.

The only thing I ever did that made me a real Indian was moving to the US. Unless one can count going through every Indian girl’s issues of traveling by public transport or even existing. I do count that towards a huge part of the reason (or a small part, depending on the day) I no longer have an Indian passport.

Hey, if papers were going to tell me who I am, I would be a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master of Science and I actually worked hard for those papers. So…. (shrugs) But now, papers are going to tell Indians if they are Indians, and since their life, already filled with struggles that still accommodates real pride in being Indian has been brought to the dot beneath the question mark, I want to claim my Indian heritage. I want to be speaking out for them, as the Modi -Shah led government announced Citizenship Amendment Act, CAA,(that breezed through the parliament and sang through the President) that ‘everyone’ was welcome in India. As long as everyone was a persecuted non- Muslim from one of three Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh), our close neighbors, but definitely not our only neighbors. Persecuted? Its one of those terms that mean nothing and everything in India, because one would be hard-pressed to find anyone not persecuted by someone there, whether or not they are fully aware of that fact. And this and the NRC would be just another set of laws that persecuted the poor, the adivasis, the people without power and papers.

So, NOW I am working hard to earn the Indian heritage I just gathered up in the little incubator they put me after birth. Holy Family hospital, somewhere close to Jamia Islamia University, where the Delhi police- under union minister Amit Shah spread tear gas indoors, inside the library when students were inside, beat up and terrorized unarmed students protesting outside. Because this muslim majority university was protesting against the CAA, as is their right in our constitution. Oh, on that, I should mention I was aware of the constitution, who wrote it, what it was supposed to do (give everyone equal rights and protect the real minorities who were ignored by everyone unless their land had minerals). I was not aware that the constitution made us the republic and the secular country we are, I instead, assumed, that we made the constitution so that it reflected who we are. haha!!! What a travesty. Naïveté should be banned.

However, in the US I learned people like to throw around the constitution at each other, all the time, while everyone says they believe in it. And freedom of expression is in between a tumultuous right and a double-edged sword. Sticks and stones….. except words matter. (Even if they are just tweets. )And I get completely insane when the wrong ones like “jihadi” or “anti-national” are used against students in India. I was a student in India. That was the one time in my life I was clearly, categorically SOMEONE. But so was everyone else around me who I do not recognize anymore. So, I suppose as opposed to my peer ex-students who think HINDUISM is our heritage, my real heritage is: not the history (belongs to the world), not the culture (belongs to everyone and is ever changing), it is having been a student in India. A student with dreams and hope. When I thought science had no boundaries, I had a stable family and government that let me think acquiring knowledge was a good thing and using it would be my privilege and contribution to society. Adding to the knowledge, has been my life’s goal. And in the US, for the first time being really on my own, where my assumptions no longer had a pre-existing framework I could hang them on, I realized people really cannot comprehend the sum of human knowledge. They don’t even want to know (which, I have to say, was the most shocking thing I had learned in my entire student life, yes, I was and am from that India where everyone appreciates knowledge). Yes, sure, I thought everyone who went to JNU was a poet with a jhola, but never did I doubt they were good. Because, wasn’t I, good?

So anyone who attacks even a single student in India is attacking me, the quest for knowledge, the hope of this world and the very existence of human civilization. Because, without the knowledge of our history in every possible topic, we are animals (yes, borrowed from Game of Thrones, but really from Anathem by Neal Stephenson). If we do not perpetuate the accumulated human knowledge, and try to expand it, we are like sheep. So, what’s to KNOW about CAA: it is discriminatory towards Muslims, non muslims from other nations without proper papers that show their Indian ancestry (Indian parents) or birth (born between 1950-1987, again with papers) will be granted citizenship, Muslims will not. However, the catch is that when National Registry for Citizenship (NRC) was implemented in Assam (NE India) people had to PROVE they were Indian. Doubtful citizenship is actually enough for incarceration ( i got that information from a post by the dependable Gautam Bhan, activist and researcher, on FB, so my faith in the uses of social media is restored). When people are expected to keep papers one imagines rooms in houses with shelves or drawers. People don’t have them in India. Some of them have trunks for papers, but you know, daughters often leave their homes and papers behind. We have had floods, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes. People have been sent to detention centers in Assam for years before it could be proven they were indeed Indians. I would be remiss to mention here that the Indians of Assam have been worried about their cultural dilution because of “infiltrators” from other countries and have supported NRC, and removal of foreigners of all religions. So, they are actually not interested in the religion of the foreigners. They have been opposing the CAA (mostly) because the government plans to grant citizenship to non-Muslims and that does not solve their issues against illegal foreigners. But they are not the student protestors I am supporting.

The students on the other hand have been protesting nation-wide (god bless them, or Doctor who can too!) against the CAA because it is unconstitutional, discriminatory and a carte blanche to the HINDU right to deprive muslims from their rights, and their country and once NRC is implemented, people will be sent to detention centers (and I don’t even want to say like Nazi Germany, because it is so obvious, but just in case someone missed that), and await trial or deportation. Deportation to where though? Is it likely that someone living in India has kept their papers from some other country? There are scores of examples of exclusion of citizens in the NRC because of religion .

When it looks like, smells like and tastes like it.. It is oppression of minorities and dissent. If you cannot see the swastika flashes, boy, naïveté should be a crime!

So, I am no longer Indian by right. I never earned it to begin with. But, I did earn a logical brain and it works. I did earn humanity and that also works. And I am with every student protester and everyone who supports them. I am with Sadaf Jafar who was arrested by the UP police, UP where there is an internet blackout (like Kashmir), where protesters have died and police claim they didn’t shoot anyone, she was live on Facebook. People saw her reporting.. The police tackled Ramachandra Guha.. a historian (what did I say we were without history?) and my cousin in law who is never going to read this, said proudly she was with the saffron gang. She uses things like pseudo-secularism and pseudo-muslims.. That is when I realized why I support students from Jamia and JNU, they know education is a privilege, not something that can simply be paid for. The country has been busy producing engineers and mbas and doctors and forgot about the liberal arts and you know, humanity a global perspective and the kind (I wanted to say right, but you know, I don’t know what the heck is right or how to define it without sounding like a pompous ass) way to put it in context.

IF all the current government has to show for itself is 1) oppressing kashmiris, well, we have been doing it for many decades, they have only made it totally inhuman now. 2) some railroad in the NE 3) Making a temple in Ayodhya.. Is the Hindu rashtra agenda really what India wants? I had a feeling it does, and that is the primary reason my papers are from elsewhere. I had hopes to be a world citizen. A hope that India nurtured unknowingly. A hope I still carry. Who knows where I will be next. But I will never stop being an Indian Student who wants to learn and has the right to do so no matter what their parents believe, no matter where they pray. The right to dissent is much more of a right than freedom of speech, in my opinion. I don’t particularly think giving a platform to nazis to talk without corroboration by facts helps anyone even if it is freedom of speech: however I believe in that freedom too. Just that dissent can be curbed and purged and then the people fighting FOR freedom of speech will no longer be there.