Book: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India
Author: Suchitra Vijayan
Publisher: Context
inam ul rehman
God made men, and what did men do? Men made borders, divided humans in mine and thine country, created a humanitarian crisis in which humans are at each other's throat all in the sham faith of protecting the country at the expense of human lives.
Suchitra’s seven-year research brings her to the same conclusion that man-made borders have wreaked havoc on the earth and created a rift between humans in which a human being is judged from the place s/he comes from.
“No human being is illegal. Existing is not illegal.” These two sentences sum up the author’s motive for writing this book. The book is a drift from the normal readings we generally like to have. It is about the borderlands of India with Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Pakistan to a lesser extent. These disfranchised people are living on Indian borderlands for many many decades but don’t possess a sheet of paper that will claim them as lawful citizens of India. It is the story of these people who are real but do not exist on the bureaucratic papers. Their existence is not worth it unless a lowly government official approves their human existence officially.
“Words are powerful,” writes the author about disfranchised people who face hate every day, “and they have the capacity to normalise hate. To call a human being illegal is not only racist and inaccurate, but also dehumanising.” Her seven-year foray to the parts of India where even brave men would think twice to venture brings out an India of 150 million people living in 111 border districts with many not having any form of identity card, “and often face harassment on account of not being able to prove their identity.” It is a dark hole with its own rules.
Among the places, she takes her readers one place is Nagaland, a Christian majority land where people openly challenge the might of the Indian state. The Indian state has wrested back some semblance by reportedly “burning villages again and again unless villagers finally surrendered” but has not been able to remove memorials built by the defiant population. The writing on the plaque of Khrisanisa Seyie, the first president of the federal government of Nagaland, states: “Nagas are not Indians, their territory is not part of the Indian union. We shall uphold and defend this unique truth at all costs and always.” In fact, the author writes that in most Naga villages “gravestones bear the name of their war dead, how they were killed and which Indian regiment killed them.”
Suchitra does not let readers forget that communal riots, and massacres of the minority are not only the BJP’s prerogative, even the secular Congress party abetted it. She cites one of the worst and forgotten massacre of Muslims in Neile, Assam of 1983. When the then Prime Minister of India, Indra Gandhi, was questioned about it she notoriously said, “One has to let such events take their own course before stepping in.” Being a humanist the author is worried that in 1951 under the Congress party rule the national register of citizens (NRC) was employed but was not maintained until now which she fears will result “largest crisis of statelessness in human history.”
We are also introduced to people who are building their own prisons where the state would put them, and possibly let them rot to die without anyone bothering.
Of course, if the author takes us to borderlands Kashmir cannot escape, a place “where my grammar of dissent found political and moral clarity.”
The book is filled with quotes that will reverberate for many years. Here I put a few of them:
· “The borders have made our minds smaller, our languages to die without care and our people petty.”
· “The military occupation makes weapons of the people they seek to control, turning them into agents of their oppression.”
· “When you are powerless, time will acquit every crime committed against you.”
Drawbacks
For her the oppression of Kashmir started with the Mughal army marching toward the Valley in 1586. It is historically wrong, because if you look at the history of rulers virtually no one from Kashmir ruled the Valley, and the Mughal army was invited by the revered saints of the Valley to stop the persecution of Muslims at the hands of Shia rulers of the Chak dynasty. Secondly, if her argument is taken then the RSS and Hindu nationals are right in saying that Muslims occupied India and oppressed Hindus from the 13th century to the 19th century.
Her sources in Kashmir tell her that no execution of police and army collaborators being filmed took place in Kashmir. If she only had googled she would have got many such videos of police and army “informers” being executed, or even grotesquely beheaded. She also ignores that the two teenage girls killed in 2011 by militants at Sopore were later declared by a Kerala evangelist as part of a Christian group (https://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/sopore-girls-part-of-christian-group-says-kerala-evangelist/). Her resource persons didn’t tell her that a strike call was issued by the then head of the Hurriyat Conference (G) chief against this killing ((https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/hurriyat-hardliners-call-for-a-shutdown-in-sopore-on-friday-127853-2011-02-03).
It also feels strange to read when the author states that since August 04, 2019, she has been calling her friend’s landline number but always hears the same automated voice “that the number is unreachable”. But after August 15, 2019, at a few places of Kashmir landlines were restored and by October most landlines were reactivated by the state. Her sources also led her to believe that there are only two groups of political leaders: pro-Independence, and pro-India. That a significant group of pro-Pakistan is active in Kashmir has been brushed aside.
She also quotes her sources that tanks rolled out in the Srinagar city post “abrogation” of Art 370! It is a surprising and astounding claim. No one reported it, and importantly no photojournalists, who risked sedition charges, clicked any pic. The absence of evidence does not mean that it didn’t happen, so I called a few of my friends to check its veracity but everyone denied having any knowledge of it. Why should lies be told to an empathetic voice? What is a lie going to serve to any Tehreek anywhere in the world?
Apart from these factual inaccuracies the pictures, barring a few, in the book are bland and do not add up anything to the story she is narrating.
Do these howlers on Kashmir make her book less credible? No. Because post the August 05, 2019, events when the Valley was shut down for everyone she had to rely on her sources. They have let her down, but it does not colour her work as she has herself been to all places and reported from the ground.
The author is among the rarest of human beings who does not want borders to define human beings. She wants to break borders “to reclaim what was denied to us, so as to not pass this loss on to our children.” It is a topic which states do not like people to take up, and only a minuscule authors voice their concern toward this man-made barrier.
Image courtesy: From the author's website.
