Who is listening?

As the day dawns to the ninety-seventh day of the protests at Shaheenbagh, there has been no respite whatsoever to the demands of the protesters. We all have become mute spectators to the indifference towards these people who have braved the chilly temperatures of Delhi since 14th Dec 2019 and are now vulnerable to the infection of Coronavirus which has already killed over eleven thousand people around the world.

How long can one be motivated to continue this agitation without having the final outcome? The government has turned a blind eye and the only thing they work on is to get these protestors out of the area and be shunned out of sight and out of mind. They sent interlocutors as the representatives from the Supreme Court not to discuss their concerns but to know when they will clear out the blockade for normal traffic to run. There has been no initiation from the government body or the Supreme Court to chart out any plan to discuss on their dissents. The protestors have been cooperating in every sense with the interlocutors. In fact, they also helped the police to remove the barricades from one of the areas connecting Noida to Faridabad. These protestors are peaceful beings and all they want is the secular life they have lived so far in India. There is nothing new they are asking from the government. They are chanting national anthems and national songs not to showcase anything. In fact, the recent hate speeches during the Delhi election campaigning had categorised them as people dividing India and creating terror. For God’s sake, these protestors are human beings like all of us are. There are young children and women dominating and steering these protests. What on earth makes them terrorists? In my view, this poisonous outlook from the right-wing has forced the protestors to prove that they are not anti-nationals or terrorists.

I had the opportunity to visit Shaheenbagh last month. There were numerous police forces surrounding the area with barricades at least two-three kilometres far from the protest area. There were numerous Indian flags around the tents where the protestors were sitting and they were all so peaceful that we couldn’t hear any hate slogans or see any kind of violence. The police force had increased in number because the previous day an unknown man had fired a few rounds through a pistol to oppose the protests. 

There has been no learning by the government even after the Delhi election debacle. Why can’t they be bold enough to have a constructive dialogue with these protestors? Why can’t they for once shed their selective empathy towards one religion and treat these individuals solely on humanitarian grounds. If not, then the other option would be to be bold enough to declare that NPR (National Population Register) would be the subset of NRC ( National Register of Citizens) and NRC shall be in place very soon as the detention centres are already being constructed across India. They should come out clean on their hidden agenda. 

We seem to be racing towards the darkest time where our constitution fabric is in the deepest trouble. The government’s silence on these sensitive issues is making it worse. They need to answer a lot of questions. For starters, what was the urgent need to formalise CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act)? Aren’t we having enough unemployed workforce and overpopulation to restrict migration from other countries? There are no guidelines or paperwork required to prove religious persecution by the migrants. If so, then why restrict the Muslims? Are they not human beings? Never has India since independence discriminated the citizenship bill on communal lines. It is interesting to see that the NDA government has selectively chosen ‘religious persecution’ from 1951 United Nations Convention for Refugees which also had other persecution criteria on the basis of race, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion without being selective or excluding any community. India has not been a signatory of the 1951 UN Convention for Refugees all these years for the basic reason that our country needs to maintain a fine balance between it’s growing employment demand internally and the overall health of the economy.

The central government has chosen to advocate the forcible implementation of a rule which does not blend with any logic. The strong political powers have given freehand on the whims and fancies to aim at the hidden agenda of discrimination on religious lines. It appears all so suspicious as to why only people from Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Jain and Parsi communities are getting an easy entry into India and with NRC and NPR on the horizon, it is a deep dent on our age-old secular belief. This definitely will keep leading to incessant protests unless the government actually lends a compassionate attitude to hear them out. These voices will not and should not be silenced.