Images That Will Haunt India

Sarosh Bana

A

s 2020 exits in an inglorious haze, not least because of the immobilising pandemic that emerged out of the blue early in the year, India particularly will be haunted by some of the most piteous images that will remain testaments to a year of shame and anguish.

Much of this still and moving imagery, as also news related to it, showed up exclusively on social media, as mainstream media houses largely remained supine before a nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, the workings of which brought the nation to its knees in the year gone by.

Divisive rhetoric, politics of hate and fear, and insensitive laws gutted just about every segment of the 1.4 billion population, disembowelling society and devastating lives and livelihoods. 

Some of the agonising images that will linger in Indian consciousness will surely be of the most savage police assaults on daily wagers and contract labourers, who constitute the informal sector and comprise 93 per cent of the country’s 540-million workforce.

These visuals framed lives broken by the harshest, most punitive lockdown imposed within four hours of its announcement on 24 March that especially bludgeoned India’s teeming poor, two-thirds of the population who live on less than Rs150 a day.

As they lost their jobs with the lockdown shuttering all activity and transport, these men and women, who have no written job contracts, no paid leave and no social security, decided to walk back home that, in many instances, was 500, 600 or even 800 km away. However, as they were deemed to be violating quarantine rules, the police set upon them, with a group of 16 labourers even getting crushed under a freight train as they slept on railway tracks to escape persecution on the roads.

Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

India’s Supreme Court dismissed a plea seeking a direction to the government to provide shelter and food to the stranded migrant workers, saying the court cannot intervene in such matters.

 Added to the ranks of these tormented masses were the numberless others whose well-being was supported by Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) funding through NGOs that educated children, empowered women, skilled the jobless and generally spelt hope for the downtrodden. This was because a massive portion of that CSR capital from both the private and public sectors was diverted to the Prime Minister’s PM Cares Fund. 

While the mishandled COVID-19 outbreak shattered society, broke businesses and doomed the economy, ill-timed enactments bulldozed through Parliament by the government scripted anarchy for various sections of the population. Widespread protests greeted the communally discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), while the working class was again undermined by three “labour reform” bills that inter alia facilitate the hire and fire of employees, and the entire Kashmir valley in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) was brought under curfew and communications severed following the abrupt repeal of Articles 370 and 35a of the Constitution that pertain to this sensitive frontier state. 

Currently, three new farm legislations have brought farmers out in hordes across India to protest against what they see are mandates to corporatise agriculture and cartelise big business for fixing prices that will squeeze the farmers, while disallowing cultivators their constitutional right to legal recourse against these patently anti-farmer statutes.   

A particularly disturbing picture that epitomised the government’s stridency against the farmers – whom it branded as ‘separatists’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘anti-nationals’ – was of a constable raising his cane to strike an elderly Sikh farmworker. Twenty-two farmers are estimated to have died protesting in the first fortnight of their agitation, some due to hypothermia caused by cold weather, with temperatures in Delhi plunging to less than 4Celsius. Other visuals showed police beating back farmers with tear gas and water cannons.

The anti-CAA agitations threw up extremely unsettling visuals: of police brutalising peaceful protestors, many of them girl students and housewives accompanied by children, egging on vigilantes to run amok against the agitators, storming a university and ruthlessly caning students at study, after taking care to smash CCTV cameras to conceal their act, firing into crowds of fleeing protestors, ransacking people’s homes as “reparations” for the damage caused in the riots, and providing protection to government and ruling party leaders as they made inflammatory speeches that incited mob rule and lynchings. 

Similarly saddening pictures were those of Kashmiris confined behind razor wire, bundled away from public view after their state was brought under Central rule. 

Most deplorable was the footage of the body of a 19-year-old backward caste girl being furtively cremated in an open field by policemen in the dead of night as they held her family at bay. The girl was gang-raped, tortured and mutilated by four upper class youths from her village, Hathras, in Uttar Pradesh. The entire administration sought to safeguard the politically influential criminals, blamed the girl as having seduced them, threatened and put her family under house arrest, and prevented anyone from the media or from social service organisations to meet them.  

People were also appalled by images of Indian soldiers being manhandled by Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops at the high altitude border in eastern Ladakh. Twenty Indian troops were also ambushed and killed in a series of moves by the PLA, which shamed India by overrunning and occupying around 1,000 sq km of its territory.

It was felt that a concerned government would set aside all else and not rest until it succeeded in wresting back the lost land. People were, however, alarmed by the completely contrarian moves where there was no mention of the attacking country by name and indeed by the stance taken that there had been no intrusion whatsoever and not an inch of the country had been lost. 

This alarm naturally grew when people found that instead of acting against the occupying forces, the leadership was acting against its own people through inflammatory laws and skewed policies. The alarm grew to disbelief when it was found that while the UN Development Programme and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative had projected 260 million newcomers to poverty in India, the nation spends Rs592.5 crore a year, or Rs1.62 crore a day, on the upkeep of the elite 3,000-strong Special Protection Group (SPG) deployed exclusively for the personal security of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This represented a doubling of the budget from Rs289 crore in 2014 when the Modi government came to power and when this allocation covered previous Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as also his family and other select politicians.

There are also growing concerns that while the government has been wanting in rebuilding the tattered economy, it has found all the funding for the grandiose Rs20,000 crore Central Vista Redevelopment Project that entails construction of a new Parliament House, 10 new government office buildings, and a grand new residence for the Prime Minister. The Rs1.08 lakh crore bullet train project connecting Ahmedabad and Mumbai was also being assiduously pursued, even though the Tejas Express connecting these two cities was suspended in November because of dwindling occupancy. 

The public disbelief was wearing off by the time the two new Boeing 777-300ER planes that cost Rs8,458 crore arrived in India for exclusive use by the Prime Minister, President and Vice President. 

There is not much else that will surprise the citizens anymore. 

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Sarosh Bana is Executive Editor of Business India magazine and lives in Mumbai, India,