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The Screamers and The Black List
Kalam Nishan Singh
 Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh did not blink once when he said India will
continue to maintain black lists of Sikhs who have gone abroad to
escape state terrorism, and has quoted some recent incidents of
terror to underline the fact that the threat of terrorism still
exists and that these Sikhs were funded from foreign shores. The
Prime Minister, a Sikh himself, made these comments in writing in a
communication to the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee.
In a seemingly unrelated development, the Supreme Court of
India said it disapproved of the comments made by lawyer and
activist Teesta Setalvad in which she said that inordinate delays in
dispensing justice, even in hearings of trial cases, amounted to
judicial indifference and injustice.
In the Parliament, of course in another seemingly unrelated
development, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, who has made a decades-long
career out of terming budgets of all governments ‘anti-people’ and
‘pro-rich’, declared that Indian MPs were working overtime to finish
democracy simply because they were raising too much of a ruckus in
the House during the budget session.
Unrelated developments?
Seemingly unrelated developments?
Once again look at these three developments. In each one, an
authority is castigating the activist, the victim, the whistle
blower, the dissenter or the person who refuses to stick to
classroom discipline or drawing room etiquette because he or she
simply cannot lump what is happening before his or her eyes and does
not care about questions of propriety or displaying a lack of
patience.
So when state instruments refuse even negotiating space, what
does one do? A cry is the least one can indulge in, a scream the
least that one can holler out. The Indian state is increasingly
giving a bad name to this form of behaviour.
How will India be less secure if its own citizens return to
the country in the full knowledge of the authorities, and how will
it be more secure if they remain outside India, and the country
keeps sending signals that no matter how much time has elapsed and
no matter what were the circumstances that forced them to leave the
country, it will not accept them back, will not let a son attend his
mother’s funeral, will not let a father weep over his son’s body.
Not even after 20 years of exile!
The Prime Minister said that his government “has, and is,
adopting a very enlightened policy in this regard.” We stand
enlightened now. In times of liberalization and globalization, this
is what the premier of a democratic country calls “enlightenment”.
Such ‘enlightenment’ is a product of a society which thinks
of the dissenter as a problem. Obviously, the Prime Minister, the
Lok Sabha Speaker, the worthy judges of the Supreme Court want the
dissenters, the activists, the screamers to be better behaved, not
be obsessive about their beliefs, not go on dharnas and
hunger strikes, not to threaten jal samadhis in villages next
to the Narmada and not sit at Jantar Mantar exposing the government,
but act in more refined ways.
 Maybe Teesta can open a consultancy group, have a local
Gujarat
extension counter going for the Amnesty Indian chapter. Maybe Medha
Patkar can have repeated meetings in media glare with Al Gore. Maybe
Sikh youth living overseas can seek time from a visiting junior Home
Ministry official, or better still, from the likes of Tarlochan
Singh or Kuldeep Nayar to put forward their viewpoint at a meeting
arranged specially by Indian embassy officials.
How nice will that be? Adopt activism as a career, prefer
negotiation to a scream. Take your cue from the PM, the Speaker, the
top Judges. Why get screechy, loud, and hysterical?
Oh, how nice!
Thank you, Indian Official Establishment. Thank you very
much, but NO. No, thank you.
The Sikh community, as everyone else with a conscience and a
mind, must be wary of those who push you to adopt activism as a
career, a consultancy. The establishment is making it difficult for
you to be a difficult person. It is trying to dewash the system of
those few men and women who are forever in the perpetual act of
washing. These men and women rankle, because they will stand up in
any seminar, meeting or debate and state what is unpalatable. They
refuse to be conformists and they refuse to join the banality by
uttering more inanities.
They are the people who for years spoke about the
Jodhpur detainees
when Akalis were fighting to get back to power. They continued to
speak about Jodhpur detainees when Akalis were in power. They backed
the People's Commission when the Badal Government went back on its
written promise of setting up an inquiry into the militancy era
violence. They continued to speak about that promise all through
Badal’s years in opposition.
 They are the people who will not forget the Bhopal Gas
disaster. You can have a seminar on human rights and they will raise
the issue of human rights of the Bhopal Gas disaster victims. You
can discuss the issue of liberalization and they will raise the
issue of Union Carbide. Remember the 1970s in
Punjab when you
could not have a seminar on Gandhi or the Green Revolution without
someone jumping up and asking: “What about the class factor?”
These jumpers are the conscience keepers. They don’t let you
forget the literacy gulf. They don’t miss the gap between two per
cent agriculture domain growth and the 11 per cent targets of
Planning Commission. They just do not forget Operation Bluestar,
1984, Godhra,
Gujarat. They keep
asking why so many were detained for so long in
Jodhpur
jails without trials. They keep the question alive about what
factors were taken into account before sending armed forces inside
Golden
Temple,
before deciding the date for such an action. They keep asking
whether men and women were shot with their hands tied behind. They
will raise questions about whether the Government ever tried, as it
is doing in case of NSCN(IM), to open a negotiating space, they will
seek answers to acts of state terrorism that many of us would even
have forgotten. They are a serious thorn in the side. They don’t
even forget what Nehru said, what Gandhi did, why Maulana Azad was
sidelined. They are simple plain difficult people. They distract.
They irritate. They simply do not go away.
They keep ending up on one or the other black list.
 They are the conscience. They will rankle. They will whisper
in seminars, they will murmur at human rights workshops, they will
rant on the roads, they will rave on university campuses, they will
be the official bad behaviour people, distributing xerox copies of
quotes from Arundhati Roy’s lectures, these will be the men and
women distributing leaflets in Trafalgar Square during the Vaisakhi
procession, the children who will dress in black robes and put on
shackles to tell the world during the Surrey parade about the state
of the Sikh community.
The PM will find it shrill, the Speaker will think of them
as rowdy children out to spoil his image of a headmaster in an
orderly classroom, Judges will tick them off as characters incapable
of playing in a symphony.
They will all be happier if the dissenters only limited
themselves to writing letters to the editor.
What the Prime Minister should have remembered before
penning his “I will stick to my Black List” response is that out
there, there will always be some people who don’t waste a lifetime
because they have hopes of winning a Magsaysay. They spend a
lifetime on the periphery because that is how they are made. A
dollop of conscience thrown in. They just refuse to seek admission
into the finishing school run by the Official Indian Establishment.
They will always be the screamers in the system.
12
March 2008
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