Every conflict contains within itself the seeds of its own resolution. To see those affirmative signs, one may only need to amend the framing narrative, and enable it to fulfil its own potential. In this case, it’s about the Republic of India and what it says to itself through symbols and metaphors. India is a country that overthrew the most systematic form of oppressive power known to history—colonialism—without war. By doing so, it took power away from an illegitimate holder and restored it to the people. People are not illegitimate. They are the cells and nerves of this body politic. They are the republic. Once we grant that, we will not be detained by saboteurs, by conspiracy theorists, by centrists or rightists or leftists, by media parakeets or sensation-mongers.
Did the Sikh flag known as Nishan Sahib go up at Red Fort on January 26? Yes. Who put it up? There are stories and stories. Whoever did, it came to have a meaning. Did they displace the Indian flag? No. Is it okay for a religious symbol to be fluttering at a site that has come to be adopted by the Indian state as a metaphor for nationhood, despite a complicated and disputed history? Not necessarily. Did India’s new Parliament building project get inaugurated with religious symbolism? Yes, just the other day. A debate over which was more legitimate (or not) is not what India needs. There are more vital issues at stake, to do with livelihood.
The tractor rally on Republic Day came at the end of a two-month-long farmers’ movement—a strikingly durable and cohesive affair, judging by the numerous and disparate actors who are part of it. An ‘actor’ called Deep Sidhu does not describe them. But he took the lead role in producing a situation that became an inflection point for the movement—indeed, for India’s democracy itself. At the end of the day, the Nishan Sahib, the religious flag of Sikhs, was fluttering alongside the Tricolor at Red Fort. The streets of Delhi saw some violence as the police and protesters—children of the same social universe—encountered each other in a drama over the formal procedures of permission or its absence. Unprecedented scenes were witnessed as tractors—the very symbol of India’s green revolution—moved past barricades, attacking police personnel who came in their way, as they moved towards the symbolic heart of New Delhi. Under strict orders not to open fire, over 300 policemen sustained injuries. Many of them got multiple fractures, jumping into the moat from the Red Fort ramparts to escape violent agitators. They put themselves at risk to maintain law and order—vulnerable, and visible, in a way they were not when violence raged in the Capital a year ago. Or visible only in less than flattering ways. That was at the end of the anti-CAA agitation, a remarkably similar episode of India’s citizenry speaking to its government. Being Muslim-led, that was more vulnerable to popular characterisations of ‘anti-nationalism’. An allegation slightly more difficult to sustain when protesters come from the heartland of western UP, Haryana and Punjab.
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