Explained : From ‘Sátántangó’ to JNU: How the Indian State Is Normalising Moral Paralysis and Its Impact

Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr passed away this week, but you don’t have to watch his bleak films that convey endless despair (some of which are based on Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai’s densely written books) to experience moral paralysis and the erosion of human agency. It’s happening in real time, in the world around us. In fact, sitting through the seven-hour Sátántangó might be less depressing than sitting through an Indian TV news broadcast, for at least Tarr’s film has artistic merit and profound insight.

Wednesday (January 7), for instance, brought news that the authorities at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) sought a First Information Report (FIR) by the police against nine students, including four student union office-bearers, who apparently rallied and shouted slogans provoked by the Supreme Court’s denial of bail to former JNU student-activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. They will stay in jail for at least another year, while five other accused in the 2020 Delhi riots were released on bail (though with strict conditionalities).

The four office-bearers were elected just a little over two months ago, each contesting from the “Left Unity” alliance. They have a popular mandate, representing campus opinion, to protest or advocate for what they must. It is in student politics where a society can expect to find leadership in societal ideas; we can all agree that post-campus high politics is a morass of corruption, ineptitude, and an absence of ideas. The current regime is no exception.

The JNU administration that asked for the FIR is unelected; since 2014, the Vice Chancellor (VC) has been hand-picked by the regime to control the campus, which has been known as the most progressive campus in India. It is anathema for the right wing, which prefers obedience, religiosity, and the worship of uniform and uniformity over all else. It prefers the collective, majoritarian will; it disdains the individualism and humanism that Karl Marx espoused as a theory of human emancipation in his Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844.

No wonder, then, that JNU’s leftist tradition has been targeted by the regime—to the extent that in 2017 its regime-appointed VC proposed putting a tank on campus to “inspire nationalism”. It is appropriate here to quote Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore from his 1917 lectures, against “opportunistic nationalism”.

“Nationalism is a great menace,” he said. “It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles.” Further, he added: “I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”

Neither JNU nor the Supreme Court appear to understand or imbibe the profound moral principle Rabindranath conveyed. Instead, JNU has gone ballistic, alleging that the students raised slogans against the Prime Minister and his Home Minister. Big deal. I raise slogans against Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum while watching TV. Will the Orwellian Big Brother come after me next?

Supreme Court’s lapse

The students were justified in protesting the court’s judgement. Most of our major national newspapers have also questioned the Supreme Court’s application of mind in denying Umar Khalid or Sharjeel Imam their bail applications. The order’s phrase, “hierarchy of participation”, was unique and bizarre. Not just because the whole case is a flimsy attempt to paint a conspiracy to destroy the nation or provoke regime change—this flimsiness seems evidenced by the fact that after five years it still has not gone to trial, signaling a lack of confidence in the case’s merits—but also because the phrase undermined our cherished values of personal liberty, due process, and judicial reasoning.

One newspaper pointed out that the judgement contravened the court’s “own dictum that bail is the rule and jail is the exception”, while another newspaper expressed chagrin that in this case, the “process is punishment”. And most criticised the “hierarchy of participation”, which followed the prosecution’s narrative (even though bail hearings are not supposed to assign degrees of guilt), in which Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam were the “masterminds/ideological leaders”, above the “organisers/mobilisers”, who are above the “participants/foot soldiers”.

The five persons granted bail—Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Mohd. Saleem Khan, and Shadab Ahmed—were placed in the bottom category, but even bail was granted with 12 Kafkaesque conditions, including a surety of Rs 2 lakh; restricted to Delhi during trial; no posting on social media; good behaviour; reporting to the police station twice a week; surrender of passport; and no rallies, protests or slogans.

All seven accused are Muslims, not surprising since they were, in 2019-20, protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which, unprecedentedly, introduced religion as a criterion for citizenship. To stop the protest, hordes of regime supporters went on the rampage on the Muslims, and of the 53 ensuing deaths, 40 were of Muslims. And yet, these activists, who planned a peaceful protest on WhatsApp, have been thrown in jail.

Everything that the regime has done since it achieved power has been done with an eye to slowly stripping away the citizenship, and therefore the rights, of Muslims. This is not breaking news. And in this stripping away of rights of Muslims comes such legal chicanery as “hierarchy of participation”, or such open-ended conditionality as “good behaviour”.

The case, and the identity of the accused, are merely a political signal by the regime: that no one, especially not Muslims or students, etc., is allowed to protest what our rulers want to force down our throats. Once again, this column reiterates that if consultative democracy is dead, then democracy itself is dead.

Hence, to return to our Hungarian auteur, we can agree with him that current history in India is a lived catastrophe. For Tarr, bleakness is ontological, and power is opaque and unaccountable. Individuals are trapped inside the system, as is evident in India. The regime tries to make this bleakness a permanent psychic condition. And the regime wants us to inhabit Tarr’s cinematic world, where “entropy, exhaustion, and repetition are the natural state of the world”.

Except that his films look beautiful. Truth, in that case, is decidedly uglier than fiction.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living in the outskirts of Delhi.

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