By Ashley Tellis for Twocircles.net
It is time that civil society launched a counter-offensive campaign to the nonsense to which the state is subjecting its citizens. Anyone who works with the poor and the marginalised, particularly the adivasis in resource-rich regions in the country, are branded Naxalite. Many are put in jail and rot there as undertrials, acid is thrown on some faces, others are threatened and intimidated. These are mainly tribal. But non-tribal people across the board – academics, activists and researchers – are being attacked.
From Binayak Sen to Arun Ferreira, from G. N. Saibaba to Vara Vara Rao, well-known, middle class people, otherwise beyond the purview of the punitive state have all been criminalised. The state is now after academics too, as with the recent attack on Bela Bhatia and Jean Dreze, though academics and researchers in these resource-rich tribal-dominated regions have been under attack for some time now.
If this is the state of affairs, if people with power and resources can be hounded, jailed and attacked, what of the powerless tribals in jails across these states? Most of these are undertrials with no lawyers.
In Chhattisgarh, the Jagdalpur Legal Aid group which is a group of three women, who did fight cases for them, was intimidated, abused, debarred and harassed. This is the country we live in. We produce thousands of lawyers but not one of them works for tribals. Instead, they intimidate women who do or beat up student leaders in Patiala House in New Delhi as part of Hindu fundamentalist party lawyer groups or make sick, sexist comments about how women are like flowers in a documentary about Jyoti Singh, the rape victim in Delhi on December 16, 2012. With lawyers like these, who needs criminals?
What chance does a tribal have in any of these states to survive? The BJP claims to love India and Indians and yet all they do is trample on the rights of the poorest of Indians if they dare come in the way of their making large amounts of money. They destroy the land which they claim to love and don’t give a damn about the ecological repercussions so long as they can dream all night about rupee notes that will come their way once the MNCs mine the shit out of the earth and leave us all devastated. What they do not realise is that they will be dead and will have to eat all that money once the land produces nothing.
If Gayatri Spivak’s extraordinary essay ‘Can The Subaltern Speak?’ showed us that is is almost impossible to retrieve the voice of the historical subaltern from the archive, the modern Indian state is ensuring us that we cannot hear the subaltern speak even in the present by killing adivasis, throwing them in jail, torturing them, raping them, throwing acid on their faces.
The second thread of the Spivak essay is about the middle class upper caste intellectual/academic and how she must be careful about how she represents the subaltern either historically or in the present. The Indian state is ensuring that that figure, in the form of Bela Bhatia and Jean Dreze at the moment, cannot even attempt to represent the subaltern.
In contemporary India, it is not only the subaltern who cannot speak. No one but the powerful who only spew hatred can speak.
Ashley Tellis is an LGBT rights activist and academician based out of Tamil Nadu.