A Malayalee Hindu’s Confession on Citizenship Bill

The Citizenship Amendment Bill is now law. Many of my colleagues on twitter say they feel sad, scared, angry, disappointed. I feel no such emotion.

And why should I? It doesn’t affect me. I am a Hindu. I don't know why Muslims are upset. They are not losing citizenship or anything.

And these protests in the Northeast! To be honest, where is the Northeast? It seems somewhere back of the beyond. I have never been there. I don’t see the region becoming a job hub in the foreseeable future. If and when I go, it will be as a tourist. I will click a few photos to keep at home, a reminder of a good trip.

To be honest I don’t know how many states are there in the Northeast. That would be an exaggeration, there are Seven Sisters. Is Sikkim one of the sisters or a distant cousin or neither? I don’t know.

I learnt the capitals of the seven states to score marks in GK. That done, I readily forgot them the moment I passed out.   

I mean who cares about the Northeast? If it wasn’t for the blank cheque, err passport, for illegal Hindu immigrants and a babaji ka thullu, isn’t that what Kapil Sharma says, for illegal Muslim immigrants, we wouldn’t be wasting any airtime or ink on the Northeast.
You don’t believe me?

Manipur was blockaded for nearly 5 months - that is almost half the year - a couple of years ago. Did anyone notice it? Did anyone cover the news?

Irom Sharmila, a resident of Manipur, was on a hunger strike for 16 years demanding removal of AFSPA. Hardly anyone noticed. AFSPA is still in force in Manipur. Irom just gave up her fight and got married. Her wedding made more headlines than the fast. BTW, she also lost an election somewhere in between. It would be wrong to say nothing fruitful came out of Irom’s hunger strike. A few people wrote her biographies and she got the title ‘Iron Lady’.

This is how much we Indians care for the Northeast.

I don’t know much about CAB, but what I know is it was in the BJP’s manifesto and the party swept the Northeast. It means the people of the region want the law, right? I may be wrong, but I have already admitted I give a damn about the place.

That is not to say I am a heartless soul. I have deep affection for people and things Northeastern. Just like I relish Hyderabadi biryani and mutton kababs, I like momos and red chutney. They are good touchings for rum. Not to speak of the people. They make for wonderful drinking buddies.

Now you know why I don’t feel sad, scared, angry or disappointed over the citizenship bill.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has mastered one trick. Us versus them. And this ‘us’ is always a lot more significant in numbers than the ‘them’.

At some point, the party’s gaze will turn to Kerala. It fits the bill. Small state. Sizeable Muslim population. Just 20 Lok Sabha seats which the party anyway doesn’t win. It could come in the form of a countrywide beef ban for example. Us versus them.

That is when I will feel sad, scared, angry, disappointed.

Mission Kashmir: Modi Finishes What Nehru Started

Many years ago one of my distant relatives went in search of his father who had abandoned the family. He met him, but his father wasn’t willing to return. The young man kept travelling till he reached Nagaland, where he married a tribal woman and settled down. He returned to Kerala decades later, after his wife died. 

Such heart-warming stories are rare when it comes to Kashmir.

When the Narendra Modi govt scraps Article 370, the romantic in me who values democracy, liberalism, fairplay, virtue of fulfilling promises, etc gets edgy. But remove the romanticism, then as an average Indian, I feel nothing. No joy, no thrill, no excitement, no sadness, no grief. Nothing. Jammu and Kashmir seems so far away and distant.

There is a reason for that. Kashmiris never mingled with the mainstream. There is no dil ka ‘connection’ with Kashmir for the ordinary Indian. But he does hear stories of horror from the jawans who come back from the state, stories of how they are targeted by the locals in the Valley, how the Kashmiris abuse the rest of India. And of course those terrorist attacks.

No struggle for autonomy or freedom can be successful unless you earn people’s sympathy, especially the outside people. You cannot take arms and money from Pakistan and hope for sympathy from the rest of India.

Jammu and Kashmir is in India only because of Jawahar Lal Nehru. Sardar Patel would have let it go, Nehru hung on as it was the land of his forefathers. The wily politician that he was, India’s first PM sugarcoated the accession as people’s will, by enlisting the support of popular leader Sheikh Abdullah. The same Nehru later jailed Sheikh Abdullah.

Mission Kashmir was started by Nehru, but is being completed by Narendra Modi.

Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi or Narasimha Rao too would have been tempted to revoke Article 370 if they were PM today. That’s because geopolitics has changed. Today a bankrupt Pakistan will hesitate to bankroll a full-fledged terror campaign in India. In any case, after the WTC attack, terrorism is seen for what it is, not as a guerrilla warfare for freedom.

Today’s India is one of the World’s biggest markets. A market everyone from the US to China needs. To that extent, Modi government’s decision will not meet the kind of resistance Nehru would have faced in 1947.

Yes, there might be turmoil in Jammu and Kashmir, with a serious threat of it spilling over to other parts of the state.

The Modi would have factored in that risk and is ready to pay the cost. The BJP will certainly profit politically from the decision to scrap Article 370. The question is can India bear the cost? We have to wait and watch.