Seattle raises its voice against religious discrimination

Former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

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New norms of public behaviour are being imposed by overzealous ‘patriotic vigilantes’, including Uber drivers, on anti-CAA protesters. Additionally, they are also fighting creeping ‘urban Maoism’ (tukde tukde), considered by the BJP leadership as our foremost security threat. The police, instead of checking this audacious overreach and infringement of individual liberties, is counselling victims not to cause offence to the majority. That this happened in Mumbai, the cradle of liberal expression, and not in any insular BJP-ruled state, is a cause for alarm.

On February 6, Bappadittya Sarkar, a Jaipur-based poet-activist-singer who had performed at the Kala Ghoda festival was taken to the Santa Cruz police station instead of being driven to his destination at night by Rohit Singh, an Uber cab driver he had hired. Sarkar had also performed regularly at the ‘non-stop anti-CAA Mumbai Bagh sit-in’ with his trademark daphili (percussion instrument). Singh, who seemed to have been soaked in by the BJP’s ‘nationalist’ propaganda on anti-nationals, told the police officer: “Sir, aap isko andar lo. Yeh desh jalaane ki baat kar raha tha. Mere paas pura recording hai.” (Sir, arrest him. He was talking of setting the country on fire. I have recorded the entire conversation).

Instead of admonishing the taxi driver for illegally recording Sarkar’s telephone conversation, the police questioned Sarkar for nearly two hours on his ideology and political views. They also examined his WhatsApp chats, address book and his political activities and released him only after a lawyer intervened. Before releasing him, they advised him to avoid wearing his red scarf around his neck and also “don’t carry your daphili everywhere.” It is anybody’s guess what would have happened had Maharashtra been a BJP-ruled state.

That is not how the faraway Seattle, the birthplace of Bill Gates, felt on this subject. Our ‘nationalists’, frozen in the self-prescribed nationalist norms of the last century, would react with horror that the Seattle City Council, one of the most progressive and inclusive cities in America, became the first US metropolis to pass a resolution on February 4 denouncing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

The initiative for the Seattle City Council resolution was taken by software engineer-turned-economist Kshama Sawant, who was born in Pune and elected to the Seattle City Council in 2014 on a ‘Socialist Alternative’ platform. She grew up in Mumbai, studied in Mumbai University and was the first elected ‘Socialist’ member in the Seattle House after 1916. She took on the powerful Amazon, which, it is said, had spent $1.5 million to get Socialist candidates like her defeated. On January 8, 2020, she made a public announcement that she would initiate a new law to tax Seattle big businesses. She was quoted as saying: “We don’t want small businesses to be taxed, we don’t want working people to be taxed, only the large corporations who don’t pay their fair share should be taxed.”

Sawant said the CAA and NRC were fundamentally discriminatory and against India’s Constitution. Seattle, as a ‘welcoming city’, had a responsibility to express solidarity with her South Asian community: “By approving this resolution, the city council will go on record opposing religious persecution and Islamophobia, the discrimination, scapegoating and oppression of Muslims, poor people and marginalised communities by the Hindu fundamentalist regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

Her proposal was supported by Tammy J Morales, who added a poignant note: “As a Jew, it was not lost on me that that resolution was passed on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It is important that we stand up for human dignity, for the right of people to find refuge from violence, regardless of their religion.” Although the Auschwitz 75th anniversary was on January 27, 2020, her intervention was by far the strongest to appeal to those westerners oppressed by extreme rightist policies.

The Alliance for Justice and Accountability (AJA), an umbrella organisation of progressive South Asian groups across the United States in coordination with the local Seattle community, on February 4 “lauded the City Council of Seattle for having unanimously passed Resolution 31926 denouncing India’s draconian measures.”

Indica News, a widely circulated news portal in California, reported that hundreds from the South Asian community and allied organisations had spoken out in Seattle against the CAA and NRC, including over 400 people who rallied in Bellevue on January 26.

Local organisations like the API Chaya, Tasveer, Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Washington, Seattle South Asians Building Accountability and Healing (SABAH), Khalsa Gurmat Center Federal Way, Gurudwara of Renton, Gurudwara of Auburn, Gurudwara of Kent, Gurudwara of Bothell, and the Seattle LGBTQ Commission had joined Amnesty International USA and Ambedkar King Study Circle to support the passage of the resolution.

Javed Sikander, spokesperson for the Seattle chapter of the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Ahsan Khan, President of Indian American Muslim Council, and Thenmozhi Soundarajan, Executive Director of Equality Labs, highlighted the importance of international condemnation and said that “Seattle is leading the moral consensus in the global outcry against the CAA.”

Suddenly, we find that India is eons away from the liberal thinking of the rest of the genuinely democratic world on what constitutes patriotism and nationalism. We are hamstrung by constant badgering through the media and public life that we should accept only the definitions coined by our right-wing preachers who hold monopoly over patriotism. These pressures make us forget what is happening around the world, even in the Donald Trump land. We believe that the rest of the world has accepted our version of governance in which individual liberties are sacrificed at the altar of the right wing definition of national security. Small diplomatic victories are magnified as huge propaganda successes.

It would appear that our diplomats, especially in the US, have an onerous responsibility in trying to stem the cascade of criticism from overseas Indians about which we seldom find any mention in our media.