Free Writing

Who has the right to decide what is 'pro' or 'anti' national?

I want to say something about the sudden, surprising (and yet not surprising) emergence of the youth-driven Cockroach Janta Party in India. When I last checked this new inchoate political entity had amassed 22.8 million followers on Instagram. (So far, 579,568 people have signed a petition for the sacking of India’s Education Minister. That number is only about twenty thousand less than the total number of votes the minister received in the last election.) This emergence, as has been widely noted, is a sign of the disaffection and even anger among the youth and ordinary Indians (at least those Indians with online access). The response that the state and civil society put forth will be indicative of the times we live in.

When Justice Surya Kant called protesting Indian youth and activists “cockroaches” he was participating in a familiar exercise. I have another example to offer. A few years ago, I was asked by an editor at the Times of India to explain a few tweets I had posted with the caption “This is what pest control looks like.” I was responding to a tweet by part-actor-part-right-wing-politician Anupam Kher (I always remember Naseeruddin Shah’s line: “sycophancy is in his blood”) who had lifted a line from one of his own films: “When you do pest control in your homes, cockroaches, insects, spiders come out. The house gets cleaned. These days pest control is taking place in this country.” Kher’s target had been the agitating students at JNU but the language, of course, had a wider relevance. In my own tweets, I was showing the desolate landscape of people turned into refugees in different places in India. Is that what Kher and his followers wanted?

Another example: fifteen years ago or so, on a January morning, I interviewed the writer Arundhati Roy who has often been targeted by right-wing zealots. A few days later, the interview was published by Guernica in the U.S. and then by Caravan magazine in India. Within minutes, “Arundhati Roy” was trending on Twitter and the virulent hate and misogyny were immediately on display. Yes, there were one or two signs of scattered applause but what was more evident was the risible contempt. Here is a sampling of some of what I saved:

For the past nearly three decades, I have been reading Arundhati Roy with great admiration. I admire her language, her storytelling, her politics, and not least, her courage. Her ability to continue to write in the face of illiterate criticism and hypocrisy is remarkable. If you have read her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, you will know that Roy was asked by her mother, even when she was little, to engage in “free writing.” Her mother wanted her to write in her little notebook whatever was on her mind—and as an adult, it is undeniably true that Roy has made it her creed to produce '“free writing” in all senses of the word. There is a paragraph in her memoir (see p. 278) that rebukes all those who gleefully resort to the language of pest control: “The more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming? Where else would I find co-hooligans I so admired? And who among us supposed equals had the right to decide what ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ national?”

Three cheers to all those who ask such questions rather than believe that they (or their great leader) have all the answers. And long live the cockroaches.