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ABSTRACT
Protests in Hong Kong have seen a significant evolution – from the Queen’s Pier campaign of 2007 to the Occupy movement of 2014, and then to the summer of 2019 – in the concepts of both leadership and space. Conventional political agitations are territory, demand- and leadership-driven, typically mounted against the presumption of an orthodox democratic state apparatus. This basic presumption may however need to be revised both in the light of the new character of the ‘tactically extended’ state, as well as the ensuing populisms that allow a narrow and often culturally gated civil society to arrogate to itself the right to speak for the ‘people’ as a whole. In response to transformations in the very apparatus of governmentality, political protests have queried the concept of citizenship itself (and thus also queried its most visible representations, including those of leadership and authorship), and have turned their tactics instead to amorphous, even invisible, modes of leadership alongside post-Occupy definitions of amorphous and undefined space. This essay is in part a personal account, taking from conversations and texts produced in Hong Kong and India between 2015 and 2020, and it draws substantially on how Hong Kong’s ‘be water’ tactic was viewed in India in late 2019. As the protests began in Delhi against the Citizenship Amendment Act, India saw its own experiments, historical discoveries and transborder similarities, around anonymous subjects and invisible speech, meme-forms and other meanings produced entirely through circulation. It also saw the return of the radical analogue in the context of punitive internet shutdowns.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 This text is part of a series of conversations mainly with several members of the faculty and students of the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, and in Delhi with faculty of the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), and is thus a part of a cycle of texts emerging from these locations and conversations. See ‘Hong Kong at a Crossroads’, special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies v 16, n 3, the author’s afterword ‘Hong Kong from the Outside: Four Keywords’, ‘The Great Transition: Our Battles over history’ (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies v 21 n 1, 2020) and responses by Stephen C.K. Chan, Ackbar Abbas, Itty Abraham and Faisal Devji, and ‘Ambivalences of ‘Creep’’ (The India Forum, October 2, 2020).
2 The recent history of JNU begins in February 2016, when police entered the campus and arrested students on the charge of sedition. The campus has since then been in near-continuous ferment, with both students and faculty in a pitched battle with its Vice Chancellor.
3 This refers to the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University roughly between November 17–30, 2019. It appears that the history of this astonishing episode has to still be written. In brief, it was students who made the campus their base after they were attacked at the Chinese University a few days earlier, which also included their blockage of the Cross-Harbour tunnel. It was a contentious moment that sometimes pitted students against the citizenry, but its key failure arguably was the way students allowed themselves to be trapped in a siege, from which the students could not escape.
4 On January 5, 2020, over fifty masked men and women attacked student hostels at the JNU campus, when the anti-CAA protests were at their height, injuring forty students and several faculty. Nobody was arrested, although several were identified as belonging to the right-wing pro-Hindutva student union the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, All India Students’ Forum).
5 In December 2019, India’s Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended for the second time in two decades. Its Section 2 (1)(b), saying that ‘any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014 … shall not be treated as illegal migrant’ – effectively identifying Muslims through exclusion – led to agitations that convulsed the nation, leading to sustained legal scrutiny of not only the amended CAA itself but also to the link between this Amendment, its earlier 2004 amendment, and the National Population Register, an amendment of the Indian Census including a social audit of ‘usual residents’.
6 Velivada: term referring to a low-caste (Dalit) slum settlement, used to designate a part of the campus of the Hyderabad Central University, following the suicide of a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, in January 2016.
7 Freedom Square: space outside the administrative building of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, designated as the space where public lectures would be conducted, including several by India’s best known academics through the 2016 boycott of classes. The space was later barricaded by the University to solve a crisis of space for car parking, and was made inaccessible for protests by the Delhi High Court in 2017. See Janaki Nair, ‘Introduction: A Teach-In for a JNU Spring’, in Azad et al (eds) What the Nation Really Needs to Know: the JNU Nationalism Lectures (Citation2017).
8 All of the arrests have taken place when the pandemic led to an Order issued on March 24th invoking the National Disaster Management Act (2005). The Ministry of Home Affairs decided that it was ‘satisfied that the country is threatened’, and that ‘effective measures’ were needed, whatever such measures might be. Every extension thereafter became an excuse to add ever greater authority to the Home Ministry. ‘It can be tempting in these circumstances to argue that the executive’s powers are limitless’, warned legal theorist Gautam Bhatia (Citation2020), ‘that, if the government so chooses, fundamental rights can be suspended at will … the pandemic (is) an existential threat and the paramount need to save lives takes precedence over all other interests’. However, ‘any temporary measures they impose have a disturbing habit of entrenching themselves into the landscape … well after the crisis has passed’.
9 Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage): collective of women students and alumni of colleges mostly from Delhi, wanting to make regulations for hostel and paying guest (PG) accommodation less restrictive for women students. They aim to counter a perceived official narrative that women need to be protected, and challenge what they consider to be the CCTV-driven police-security complex. Several women leaders of the movement were arrested for allegedly participating in the riots of North East Delhi in February 2020, and are at present in jail.
10 UAPA: the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act: a variation of the colonial sedition law, this Act was originally passed in 1967, at the time targeting ‘terrorist organizations’. It was amended in 2004 and again in 2019, and has become the instrument of choice for arresting students mainly because it permits the police to keep them imprisoned without the right of habeas corpus or bail.
11 In the most perceptive comment on Hong Kong’s ethnicity, Ip Iam-chong (Citation2020, p 64) speaks of it as a condition of desire, even of existential worry. Nativists, says Ip, ‘are not as radical as they appear to be’. Although the language sounds racist, it is more an expression of an impossibility, a desire for governance, one translates into an economic, rather than directly political terms, that he names ‘Ethnocracy’.
12 Right to soil, or jus soli, was the principle that defined India’s first citizenship Act of 1955. However, in 2004 and now in 2019, this has been explicitly abandoned in favour of blood-based descent (jus sanguinis).
13 This refers to the controversial Supreme Court judgment on the dispute around the Mughal mosque that was believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The judgment (M Siddiq (D) Thr Lrs v. Mahant Suresh Das & Ors, Citation2019), contended that the god was to be attributed the status of a ‘legal person’.
14 ‘Meaning and Kind of Person’, Legal Service India: http://www.legalservicesindia.com/article/2316/Meaning-and-Kind-of-Person.html.
15 Although certain kinds of unsourced speech have been legally recognized – such as rumour or fake news, and dealt with by holding the carriers of such speech responsible (such as newspapers or after the 2011 Rules that defined digital ‘intermediaries’, email, hosting and blogging services), as well as certain modes of sourced but not conscious or responsible speech, as for example in 2010 when the Supreme Court banned Deception Detection Tests like polygraph, narco-analysis and brain-mapping procedures – these did not exhaust the problems posed to law by the phenomenon of diffuse speech.
16 See Information Technology Act, 2000, and its various subsequent variations here: https://www.meity.gov.in/content/information-technology-act-2000-0.
17 See Paul Bischoff, ‘Which government censors the tech giants the most?’ (Oct 1, 2019), https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-censorship/
18 Best known of a small series of incidents leading to the Supreme Court challenge. In November 2012, following the death of Bal Thackeray, supreme leader of the right-wing Shiv Sena party of Bombay, when the Sena organised its ritual bandh (a public lockdown) a young woman from the town of Palghar named Shaheen Dhadha wrote a Facebook post, wondering whether it was right to close down the city like this, and whether Thackeray was a martyr of same stature as India’s nationalist leaders such as Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev. Another young woman also from Palghar, Rinu Srinivasan, clicked ‘like’ on Shaheen's Facebook post. Both were arrested by the Mumbai police under 66A. Some months earlier, a Chemistry Professor from Calcutta's well-known Jadavpur University named Ambikesh Mahapatra had been arrested for forwarding to friends, and for uploading on his Facebook account, some cartoons of Bengal's Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee that had apparently referenced Satyajit Ray’s film, Sonar Kella. In his case the charge wasn’t clear, and he was quickly released and awarded compensation by the West Bengal Human Rights Commission. The problem was once again the source of the speech – they weren’t his cartoons, he was simply forwarding them, he said – and it would lead to much debate in Parliament on forwards, morphed images, memes and other post-authorial work. A somewhat more serious and more significant incident occurred in December 2014, when another man was arrested, also under 66A: a man who was only known by his Twitter handle, Shami Witness, because he apparently had pro-ISIS views but – and this was his main crime – also because he had 17,000 followers to whom he was ‘aggregating information’, in the words of Karnataka's Director General of Police. The police came to know of this man only when Britain's Channel-4 interviewed him, and although they withheld his identity and blurred his voice and image, they revealed that he lived in Bangalore, had the first name of Mehdi and worked in a leading IT company. He could hardly have done a better job of giving himself away. The next morning, Shami Witness tweeted that he expected to be arrested any moment, and when the police finally arrived, apparently asked them why they took so long. There were two curious facts about his situation. One, his spectacular voluntary ‘coming out’. And two: an argument that applies as much to Rinu’s ‘Like’ as to Mahapatra’s forward: that whatever his personal views, he had not expressed any of them on Twitter, but had only confined himself to aggregating and retweeting information that was already on the Internet and thus already in the public domain. In the Channel-4 interview, Shami Witness vehemently asserted his position: ‘I haven't harmed anybody. I haven't broken any law … I haven't raised any war or any violence against the public of India. I haven't waged war against any allies of India’ (https://www.channel4.com/news/isis-shami-witness-medhi-masroor-biswas-charged). Also see Prakash (Citation2012).
19 Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (Writ Petition: Criminal No 167 of 2012), decided on March 24, Citation2015.
20 Supreme Court of India: M. Siddiq (D) Thr Lrs v. Mahant Suresh Das & Ors, Citation2019 (Ayodhya judgment).
21 Article 370 of the Indian constitution, viewed historically by many as a condition for Kashmir’s accession to the Indian state, conferred upon it the power to have a separate constitution, a state flag and autonomy over its internal administration and, with Article 35A, allowed residents have their own laws including those of citizenship, ownership of property etc. On 5 August 2019, the Government of India issued a constitutional order superseding the 1954 order, and making all the provisions of the Indian constitution applicable to the state.
22 There are of course similarities between takedown requests and shutdowns – in that both deny access rights – but there are some crucial differences. In the instance of takedown requests, it has been easier to apply the freedom of speech doctrine as has been asserted in at least two judgments so far in India.
23 In India, it is the combination of the Constitutional right to speech, Article 19(1)(a), coming alongside the Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allowing public gatherings.
24 Recommendation of the Hong Kong UPR Coalition Committee’ that the HKSAR ‘bring the Public Order Ordinance in line with the ICCPR by fully implementing recommendations on Freedom of Expression and Assembly made by the United Nations Human Rights Committee within two years’. See https://www.justicecentre.org.hk/framework/uploads/2018/11/HKUPR-Coalition-Fact-Sheet-Freedom-of-Assembly-Rights-and-Public-Order-Ordinance.pdf.
25 ‘Inner Line’: dividing lines inside the North Eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur that are declared as ‘protected’, which require outsiders to have special permits. This is an extremely sensitive political issue in the region.
26 See Esha Roy, ‘As nine bodies await burial, Manipur trenched in politics of dead and living’. Indian Express, August 29, 2016. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/manipur-violence-protests-in-churachandpur-manipur-deaths-2999507/.
27 Divya Trivedi, ‘Anuradha Bhasin: Impossible for journalists to function’, Frontline, September 27, 2019. https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article29382196.ece.
28 Supreme Court of India: Anuradha Bhasin vs Union Of India on 10 January, Citation2020 (internet shutdowns in Kashmir judgment).
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Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and an occasional art curator. He is the author of Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) and editor of Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen) (1994/1999). He is also an interested and engaged commentator on digital governance and political movements: and his texts here include the book The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011) and the 2020 essays ‘The Great Transition: Our Battles over History’ and ‘Ambivalences of ‘Creep’: Citizenship, Personhood and the Second Digital Turn’.