On a cold January evening, a gang of masked intruders armed with sticks and iron rods entered the ruggedly beautiful and usually well-guarded campus of one of India's best-known educational institutions, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
They proceeded towards a venue where faculty members and students were peacefully discussing a rise in hostel accommodation charges and attacked those gathered there.
The mob, who JNY students have alleged were members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a student organisation linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), then proceeded to vandalise student residences, apparently also targeting Dalit, Muslim and Kashmiri students.
Remarkably, Delhi's police, already amassed outside the campus, did not answer the victims' calls for help as they were waiting for Vice-Chancellor, M Jagadesh Kumar, to give them permission to enter the campus.
Close to 30 people were wounded, including Aishe Ghosh, the head of the JNU Students Union, who sustained a head wound.
The incident elicited international media attention, including stinging editorials, and widespread condemnation from academics across the world, a testimony to JNU's profile rather than to the violence itself. For the fact is that violent attacks upon university campuses have become routine in India today.
Before the JNU incident, two historically Muslim universities, the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi and Aligarch Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, had both been targeted, not by mobs, but by police, who beat student protesters. In a context where religious minorities are being singled out for discrimination and violence, the targeting of JNU, a public relations disaster, has puzzled some India watchers.
What happened has to be understood as the opening of one more battlefront in what is fast becoming an ideological civil war. This is an India where not just minorities but any person or institution pushing back against the onslaught of state-sponsored bigotry faces the threat of punitive violence, whether directly from the state or from mobs it apparently protects.
As of this date, in a Kafkaesque move that appears to be the new normal in India, charges hae been filed against the victims of the JNU violence, including Ghosh, rather than those right-wing activists caught on camera perpetrating it.
This civil war, which has been quietly in the making for several years, has come to a flashpoint around the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which has been pithily but accurately described by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as "fundamentally discriminatory in nature" in making religion a criterion for offering refuge and citizenship.
Combined with the planned National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR), it will render several communities, most prominently and significantly, Muslims - long demonised by the governing party - vulnerable to the removal of citizenship followed by detention and possible deportation.
In this context, the growing protests against the CAA, in which university students have been playing a major role, are significant and heartening. Many who have kept quiet for a long time are now standing up and refusing to be part of a fundamentally discriminatory national entity.
In the protests over the past few weeks there have been repeated invocations of the Indian constitution's spirit of plurality and collective recitations of its famous Preamble. People from different religious backgrounds have benn recommitting themselves to a vision of a nation that aspires to be just, equal and plural. Indian Muslims have been standing up in large numbers to lay claim to the nation, to their rights under the constitution and to their religious and cultural identities simultaneously.
There is no doubt that these protests are tremendously heartening to those many of Indians whose hearts have been growing heavier with each passing day over the last six years in which Narendra Modi's hardline Hindutva version of nationalism has made significant strides towards the achievement of an exclusionary and extremist "Hindu nation".
Equally, what has become clear in the violence exercised on campuses and upon protesters and other dissidents is that this is a regime that is prepared to unleash not just the full force of the law and security forces but also to enable vigilante groups such as the mob that attacked JNU. Peaceful protesters against the CAA have been subjected to colonial-era legislation preventing large gatherings and detained in their hundreds when they have persisted in protesting.
Some, like former civil service officer Kannan Gopinathan and activist Sadaf Jafar, have been detained. Jafar has said she was beaten while in police custody in Uttar Pradesh.
The Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad was also detained for several days after protesting against the CAA. Dissent in India today is a risky activity.
The JNU attacks were above all a message that the current government is happy for the battle to no longer be simply ideological but to escalate into street violence. This is why it was important to break up a peaceful meeting of academics and students: discussion and debate are off the table in favour of the language of iron rods, stones and tear gas.
While state violence has been endured by the people of Kashmir for an unconscionably long time, the message now being conveyed across India, six months after the unilateral abrogation of Article 370 which gave that region a historically necessary special status, is that no form of dissent will be tolerated in India either.
JNU has been in the sights of this government before, not least because the question of Kashmir was up for debate and discussion - as it must be in any accountable democracy - on that campus. This brought colonial-era legislation against "sedition" upon the heads of JNU students.
In the past few days, New Delhi's police commissioner has been given emergency powers under the draconian National Security Act, for the next three months. As one dissident journalist noted, the message that is now being signalled loud and clear is that Indian democracy may not have much time left.
Those currently in power are part of a political dispensation that may not be planning, in the long term, to put itself to a democratic mandate in the first place, still less accountability.
The world must worry. What happens in India happens to nearly one-fifth of the world's population. And particularly in the context of the global rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism, the undermining and eventual abrogation of democracy in India will not be contained within the borders of that nation-state.
With a few exceptions, Western and other governments have been shamefully silent on the ongoing assault on democracy and constitutional rights in India. It may suit them to keep quiet but across the world, we must now form people's alliances to resist what will almost certainly become a global assault on the very idea of democracy itself. Speak up for India, for you speak up for yourself.
In December 2019, Pakistan's government charged hundreds of people with sedition for taking part in the countrywide Students Solidarity March, which called for the restoration of student unions among other demands. One of the participants in the march, Alamgir Wazir, was arrested on December 2, and has since been languishing in jail for allegedly "conspiring to overthrow the government".
On January 27, Manzoor Pashteen, the leader of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), was also arrested on charges of sedition in a late-night raid on his residence in Peshawar. A day later, police arrested and charged with sedition 23 other people, including several young activists from the left-wing Awami Workers Party (AWP), for attending a protest in Islamabad against Pashteen's arrest.
The PTM is an ethnic Pashtun rights movement that has been calling for accountability for alleged rights abuses committed by Pakistan's military in its war against the Pakistan Taliban. The peaceful rights movement has been the target of a sustained campaign of intimidation and arrests since its formation.
Activists from AWP and many of PTM's supporters have been released, but scores of activists remain incarcerated, including Pashteen himself. These individuals face the risk of spending years behind bars merely for daring to criticise the actions of their government. Their ordeal demonstrates the Pakistani state's eagerness to use the sedition law to silence anyone it perceives as a threat to its authority.
Across the border in India, the sedition law was notoriously invoked against Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student leaders Kanaiyha Kumar and Umar Khalid (among others) in 2016, for allegedly shouting "anti-India" slogans during a protest. JNU has a reputation for being a hotbed of left-wing dissent. As a result, India's Hindu-nationalist BJP government believes the institution presents an obstacle to its authoritarian agenda and continuously harasses its faculty and students with frivolous lawsuits.
Earlier this month, a researcher at JNU, Sharjeel Imam, was charged with sedition for participating in the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendement Act. In recent years, the sedition law has been used against a host of other people, including trade unionists, environmentalists and professors across the country.
What is particularly remarkable about all this is that these unfounded accusations are being hurled through a law which was created and widely used by the British Raj against the insurgent anti-colonial movement in India.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most prominent nationalist leaders of colonial India before Gandhi's emergence on the national stage, was tried several times under the sedition law for "inciting the public" through his writings. In his 1916 trial, he was defended by the young barrister, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who would later go on to become a major proponent of the partition of India and a founding father of the state of Pakistan.
From the 1920s to the 1940s, scores of Indians were tried under the sedition law, including Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Mohammad Ai Jauhar, Bhagat Singh and M N Roy, among others. Prior to independence, the sedition law was synonymous with the absurdity of colonial rule as British officials used this law to accuse locals of being "foreign agents" in their own lands.
Independence activists across the subcontinent who were imprisoned for "sedition" carried the charge as a badge of honour. They were viewed by the general public as heroes, because back then being patriotic meant dissenting from those in power.
Yet, at their birth, the nation-states of India and Pakistan were confronted with the paradox of acquiring the twin inheritance of anti-colonial politics premised on popular sovereignty and a colonial state apparatus that was geared towards silencing and terrorising the population. The gap between these two legacies continues to haunt both countries to this day. The sedition law is a reminder that the colonial logic, which sees the state not as a body that is designed to serve the people but a weapon to subdue them, is alive and well today.
One of the most remarkable features of this latest round of repression has been the emphasis on "seditious speech". Today, in neither Pakistan nor India is it necessary to prove that there was in place a plan of action to undermine national sovereignty to charge someone with sedition. Instead, speeches and slogans alone are considered "proof" of some deeper conspiracy against the nation-state.
The states are using sedition laws to violently patrol the boundaries of acceptable speech and thought in the public sphere, exposing the vulnerability they feel in the face of righteous and peaceful criticisms of their exclusionary, divisive and dangerous policies.
This sense of insecurity stems from the growing inability of these states to fulfil their responsibilities towards the public. In Pakistan, the Imran Khan-led government has signed one of the most punishing deals with the IMF, resulting in unprecedented austerity. The education budget has been cut by 40 percent and the health sector is being privatised. Meanwhile, wheat shortages have marred the food market and inflation has reached an unprecedented 14 percent.
In India, the economy has also taken a sharp downturn. The economic growth has tumbled from an annual expansion rate of 8.1 percent in the first quarter of 2018 to just 4.5 per cent in the third quarter of last year. Rising unemployment coupled with an agrarian crisis left many poor families with no other option but to cut back their food consumption, shattering Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promise of delivering "Acche Din" (Good Days) for the country's impoverished majority.
Moreover, the growing economic uncertainty has accelerated the need for the region's ruling classes to produce fake enemies to distract the public from their persistent inability to provide them with a decent standard of living.
This is why an unprecedented number of people across the political spectrum in Pakistan are facing the accusation of being "an Indian agent", while in India, opponents of the government are being branded "ISI agents", in reference to Pakistan's intelligence agency. And this is why so many people are facing charges for allegedly serving the enemy in both countries today.
Yet, there is growing resistance in both India and Pakistan against the authoritarianism engulfing the region. Two features stand out as salient in these burgeoning movements.
First, they are being led by young citizens who are increasingly wary of the fear and hate-mongering methods that are being used by the ruling elites to convince the public to give up on their most basic rights to safety, employment and free speech. Thousands of students, for example, joined the campaign in India against the discriminatory CAA, posing perhaps the greatest challenge to the Modi government in India.
Similarly, in Pakistan, the Students Solidarity March and the PTM emerged as youth-led movements and managed to unite the public behind a common cause at a time when mainstream political parties appear unable to build an opposition to a faltering political and economic system.
The second striking feature of these movements is that they base their legitimacy on the constitution. In India, the anti-CAA protestors are claiming that such discriminatory laws undermine the basic architecture of the constitution and facilitate India's drift towards communal majoritarianism. In Pakistan, activists are defending freedom of speech and unionisation as basic elements of the constitution without which democracy becomes meaningless.
In both cases, the state has responded by hurling allegations of treason and imposing sedition charges on the protesters. This led to the bizarre situation where the state's foremost legal document is transformed into subversive literature, signifying the crisis of legitimacy that haunts authoritarian governments in South Asia.
Activists in both India and Pakistan have recently become more vocal in their demand for the repeal of sedition laws. Indeed, they are asking the pertinent question: who are the people being seditious against if they, themselves are the rulers? An honest resolution of this question will not only allow the sub-continent to overcome one of the darkest legacies of colonial rule, but it will also aid us in figuring out what it means to be patriotic in a region where nationalism is becoming increasingly insular and punishing.
PALESTINA
BRASIL
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