The Congress government in Karnataka is, to put it mildly, known for its efficiency. Just about the only positive thing that can be said for Siddaramaiah's government is that it is not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that came before it - which combined massive corruption with overt, and frequently violent, saffronisation.
What to make, then, of the decision by the Bengaluru police, under the control of the Congress government in Karnataka, to register a First Information Report for sedition against Amnesty for the heinous crime of organising an event that discussed the numerous human rights violations that have been committed in Jammu and Kashmir?
This is what happened. On August 13, Amnesty International India organised, at the United Theological College in Bengaluru, an event it called "Broken Families". The purpose of the event was, as the name suggests, to allow those who had lost family members in the decades of violence in India's northernmost state to share their stories. One credible eyewitness, the photojournalist Hari Adivareka, told the website Scroll, "The venue was packed and the wailing [of Kashmiri families inside the venue] seemed to have a greater impact than the videos, because it connected us to the grief of not just those on screen, but also those who were right there, in the same room." Video interviews with those who had lost families were followed by speeches from some in the audience, a skit, and finally a panel discussion.
It was at that point that disagreements began to be heard. A Kashmiri Pandit on stage praised the Indian Army for being the most disciplined in the world; other Kashmiris in the audience disagreed vociferously. But, according to Adivareka, the programme managed to get past this, ending with a performance by the rapper MC Kash. During this performance, apparently, the police entered and shut the programme down. The youth wing of the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), had gathered outside. Adivareka says that people were only allowed to leave in batches, that shouts of "azadi" were raised, but that "nothing untoward" happened.
So why, precisely, have cases been registered against Amnesty? Why did the Bengaluru police - again, under the control of the supposedly liberal Congress - shut down a function that seemed to pose no great threat to law and order or to the Indian state? Why, acting on a complaint from the thuggish ABVP, did they register cases not only under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code - sedition - but also Sections 142, 143, 147, 149 and 153A? Section 153A, which criminalises "promoting enmity between groups" can hardly apply to an event that brings Pandits and Muslims together to talk about broken families. And Section 149A criminalises "unlawful assembly and rioting" - which again, seems a ridiculous section to apply in this case. Was it applied, incidentally, against the ABVP crowd outside?
The Karnataka government and the national Congress have only made matters worse since. The state government has persisted with the fiction that there is something to investigate, and the national Congress has tied itself in knots pretending to be both liberal and hyper-nationalist at the same time.
Take the state government first. The Karnataka police has declared that videos of the event will be analysed and verified by the Forensic Sciences Laboratory. I'm sure you don't need videos to know that someone at the event shouted pro-azadi slogans. But does anyone think that it is azadi shouters inside a Bengaluru college who pose a seditious threat to the Indian state? And why, in any event, is Amnesty on the hook for something members of the audience may have shouted? Why is the home ministry or the chief minister's office not taking one look at this farrago of nonsense, throwing the case out, and apologising to Amnesty?
Perhaps the answer for the state's idiocy lies in the sad behaviour of the national Congress, struggling to differentiate between slogan-shouting in a Bengaluru college (Bad) and in Jawaharlal Nehru University (Good). Of course, JNU slogan-shouting would also have been bad if not for the fact that Rahul Gandhi suffered an attack of conscience and turned up - against the advice of these same illiberal "smart" Congressmen - to support the students' right to express themselves. Consider, for example, Jairam Ramesh, when asked about the contradiction by the Economic Times: "It is not proper to compare the Bangalore incident with the JNU incident. JNU is a centre of excellence, a larger university." Because, you know, for the Congress, your rights always depend on how good the university you went to is. Ramesh went to IIT, so he should be OK. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, it has also been reported that this FIR will be used by the Union home ministry to make it tougher for Amnesty -which, remember, does good work that few else in India have time for, and is an organisation which helps keep us free - to receive foreign contributions. This attempt to squeeze NGOs has been a sad feature of the Modi government. But, typically, the Congress can't exactly speak up against it. After all, it was their government that first tried to crack down on foreign contributions to NGOs including Amnesty, some years ago. If only they behaved like a liberal party, they would look less hypocritical all the time.
m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma
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