By K Raveendran
Foreign hands was a bogey used by Indira Gandhi to denounce anything that was not to her liking. She saw a foreign hand in everything, from changing weather to large populations of India remaining poor, poverty having been a most favourite theme that she used to cling on to power. It is an irony of fate that it was finally the hand that brought her back to power after remaining briefly in political wilderness in the aftermath of Emergency.
That was of course not a foreign hand. It was the hand, the deity of a small temple in Kerala’s Palakkad, that inspired her to opt for hand as the election symbol of her discredited party, which however, proved propitious for her and she came back to power once more, of course, ably aided by the incompetence and imperfections of the setup that replaced her dispensation. The rest is history, as they say.
It is another irony of fate that the foreign hands bogey is now being used by the BJP government as a protective shield against its own failures. Indira Gandhi had described JayaprakashNarain’s JP movement, the forerunner to the emergence of BJP as the Indian ruling party, as a manifestation of the work of foreign hands. Now, in a reversal of role, the beneficiaries have turned the accusers.
Uttar Pradesh’s Yogi Adityanath government is now seeking to put all and the sundry behind bars, alleging their incitement by foreign hands in the wake of the inhuman Hathras gang rape-murder case. One must be thankful that the state government has not blamed foreign hands for the rape of the 19-year old Dalit girl.
The victims include newspersons who dared to go to the village of the crime, one of whom has been slapped with the provisions of UAPA for anti-national activities.
The UP government has also ordered a probe into the alleged international conspiracy hatched by groups and individuals in foreign countries to defame the state government and foment caste violence in the backdrop of Hathras incident. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath blames Opposition parties and ‘anti-national’ elements with foreign funding for trying to destabilise the state.
It is no coincidence that the UP action has been accompanied by another bizarre move by the National Investigations Agency (INA) under which Father Stan Swamy, an 83-year old Jesuit priest, has been jailed for alleged involvement in the Bhima Koregaon case, relating to the 2018 violent incidents on the day of the bicentenary celebrations of the historical Bhima Koregaon battle, considered a legendary landmark for the Dalits.
Stan Swamy is a tribal rights activist based in Jharkhand for over 30 years. He has worked among the adivasi communities to uphold their rights for land, forest and labour issues. He had challenged the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of young tribals with investigating agencies labeling them as Naxalites. NIA claims Swamy has Maoist links, which he has consistently denied.
The arrest of the veteran tribal activist has shocked the civil society. A group of 2,000 signatories, including activists and scholars, condemned the NIA action and appealed to Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren to oppose his arrest. The signatories include leading activist advocate Prashant Bhushan, economist Jean Drèze, Delhi University professor Nandini Sundar, lawyer Rebecca John, author Natasha Badhwar, among others.
Stan Swamy thus joins a long list of activists, including Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde, Hany Babu, Kabir Kala Manch, Sagar Ghoghare, Ramesh Gaichor, and Jagriti Jagtap, against whom a charge sheet has been filed for their alleged role in the Bhima Koregaon incident.
It seems that the BJP government is suspicious of all intellectuals and activists in the country. Any criticism of the government, whether for failure to protect the rights of the vulnerable sections of people, or its arbitrary measures to exploit their helplessness, is interpreted as an act of rebellion against the government and promptly booked under draconian laws enacted for this purpose. When the state behaves like an enemy of the people, there can be no end to the tyranny, which is what is now happening under the present dispensation in India. (IPA Service)