Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians

This was meant to be a short statement to unequivocally condemn the recent ruling from the Supreme Court of India denying bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam after five years in prison without charge and no timeline set for a trial.

But it has turned into a blog post.

Because the formation of Aotearoa Alliance Of Progressive Indians was a response to the activism and leadership of Umar Khalid and many other members of a people’s resistance movement against Hindu fascism.

Because we must remember and never forget what happened, name those who sacrificed, those who stand tall, those who fought for justice, for the soul of India.

A progressive, prosperous, inclusive, peace-generating India benefits not just the subcontinent but South Asia and the world.

                      UMAR KHALID         

                                                                                   SHARJEEL IMAM  

Umar was first arrested in 2016 on sedition charges for shouting ‘anti-national’ slogans at a student rally organised on the third anniversary to protest the hanging of Afzal Guru at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Three students-Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, were alleged to have shouted anti-India slogans (disproved later) and were labelled the ‘tukde-tukde gang’, those seeking to break up India, by right-wing media. A label is now used freely then to stop any critique on democracy, government, politics, ideology…by anybody.

This post is not about Afzal Guru but you can read who he was and what he was alleged to have done in this article by Arundhati Roy instead. The hanging of Afzal Guru is a stain on India's democracy.

Or you can read her book Hanging of Afzal Guru: And the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament

Looking back now though, both, Afzal’s story, the unknown bombers, the allegations of anti-India sloganeering, the slander of tukde-tukde gang, mocking intellectual discussions were all a precursor of the misinformation and mass hysteria Hindutva would generate over a sustained period until such time people are numbly obeisant. A prototype for the intentioned Hindu fascist dystopian India. A trial, if you will.

In August 2018, two Hindus, Naveen Dalal and Darwesh Shahpur, attempted to assassinate Umar for being an ‘anti-national’. They were arrested and immediately granted bail.

Umar by then was a PhD student at JNU with ongoing involvement in student unions and resistance movements. Always on the radar of the government of India and media.

ProtestingThe Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Narendra Modi’s government introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill in 2016 offering Indian citizenship to ‘illegal migrants’ who were religious minorities (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian) from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. This Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha (lower house) in January 2019 but lapsed with the dissolution of the 16^th Lok Sabha.

The bill was re-introduced as the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019 and was passed in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha (upper house) the same month. It led to widespread protests across India and in the diaspora.

This Act essentially makes way for Indian Muslims to be made stateless through various mechanisms as well as harming other minorities. (See image of CAA, NRC, NPR handout from AAPI below.)

They first started in the North-Eastern border state of Assam and spread to Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi. Hundreds of police forcibly entered the campus and beat the students hunting them from libraries and toilets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Jamia_Millia_Islamia_attack

This led to more student protests across universities in India even as police brutality continued.

https://cjp.org.in/anti-caa-protests-continue-regimes-excesses-exacerbate/

It was an important moment in India where a people were standing up against the suppression of political dissent, an important part of any democracy.

However, it was when local Muslim women came together for a sit-in protest at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh against the Jamia attack that the world noticed. Shaheen Bagh stands out as the most critical protest against CAA. Indian women have always been at the forefront of the freedom struggle, organising and agitating. But Indians have forgotten the sacrifices made by their ancestors and Shaheen Bagh showed us that even in an independent India we must never take democracy for granted; that having an elected government is not a sign of freedom; that how we treat our minorities and marginalised is a true indicator of the state of a nation. Shaheen Bagh was an intergenerational, non-violent road barricade that grew spontaneously, attracting people from everywhere with crowds growing up to 150,00 in number on some days. Bilkis Dadi (Grandmother Bilkis), the then 82-year-old matriarch who was there daily from day 1 was listed in the Times 100 for 2020 and by the BBC in their 100 inspiring and influential women the same year. Bilkis Dadi turned up at the farmers’ protest in December 2020 but was removed by the police.

BILKIS DADI

                                               SHAHEEN BAGH ANTI-CAA SIT-IN PROTEST             

The Shaheen Bagh protestors stayed put even through the riots in February 2020 despite multiple efforts to forcibly remove them by the government of India and its proxies. Until Covid-19 arrived in 2020.

Read Mapping Assertion and Belonging: Reflections on the Life of the Anti-CAA Movement in New Delhi, India to understand the significance of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in against CAA.

Delhi Riots February 2020.

On 23 February 2020, BJP ‘leader’ Kapil Mishra demanded the Delhi government forcibly remove a sit-in at Jaffrabad or he would take things in his hand. Violence erupted the same day in the North East Delhi where Shaheen Bagh is. Hindu mobs entered Muslim homes and establishments bearing saffron flags (Hindutva insignia), carrying weapons and shouting Jai Shri Ram (that David Seymour also chanted in January 2024 while attending a Hindu extremist event in Auckland). The violence continued over the next few days with destruction, gas bombing and setting fire to property. A mosque was vandalised. Delhi Police, controlled by the central government, was either hands-off or made weak attempts to control the violence. 53 people died, most of them Muslim. Meanwhile Narendra Modi hosted Donal Trump and tweeted once asking people to maintain peace.

Political prisoners.

By April 2020 the government of India started arresting Muslims charged with conspiring to or inciting the February riots under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). A law from 1908 British era Raj that was formalised by the Indira Gandhi government in 1967 to prevent secessionist activities and subsequently tweaked over decades until it became the UAPA we know today. The current version allows the government of India to label individuals as terrorists.

As any such law anywhere, it is full of vague terminology and can be interpreted as convenient for the oppressors of the day.

• Gulfisha Fatima was the first person arrested under UAPA in April 2020.
• Then Safoora Zargar, who was 3 months pregnant at that time, in April 2020
• Meeran Haider and Shifa Ur-Rehman in April 2020.
• Sharjeel Imam in August 2020.
• Umar Khalid in September 2020.

Kapil Mishra freely continues to preach his Hindutva ideology as a BJP leader and is now a minister in the Delhi government.

Contemporary resistance movement in the Indian diaspora of Aotearoa.

On 15 December 2019 a group of Indians in Auckland organised a protest against CAA followed by a march from Jean Batten Place to Myers Park in January 2020.

We came together again in February 2020 to highlight the riots in North East Delhi.

It is here we want to point out how long-standing Hindu patriarchs have shaped the Indian community here for the Pākeha gaze and how mainstream media in Aotearoa continues to disregard the vastness and depth of the Indian community, indulging in easy, superficial, transactional connections without reflecting on their ignorance.

And hence why resistance from our people here matters.

It was in February 2020 that Shane Jones said, to paraphrase, there were too many people from New Delhi who had immigrated to New Zealand and Indian students had ruined the country.

John Campbell interviewed Venkat Raman, editor of Indian Newslink in March 2020 about Shane Jones’s comments but not a word about the riots in Delhi and neither does the duplicitous Venkat mention CAA or the riots because Indian minorities do not matter to him unless they can be weaponised for his own benefit.

https://www.1news.co.nz/2020/03/11/shane-jones-doubles-down-on-indian-students-comment

The anti-CAA protests in India started a movement across the Indian diaspora through which we all connected with each other.

Umar and Sharjeel’s continued incarceration and refusing them bail harms all Indians. It is an indictment of the Indian judiciary, their supplication to Hindu fascists.

This decision:

(a) Not only sends a signal to Indian minorities, especially Muslims, that there is no place for them in the Hindu fascist imagining of India. That they must never stake a claim, seek ownership of or participate in progressing the nation. That they must always ‘obey’ the government.

(b) But it has wider implications for ALL Indians who question the government, who demand their democratic rights and resist oppression.

A nation that was slowly usurped by the British since they established the East Indian Company in 1600 and left it divided by drawing a random line on a map, is not only being further divided while also dismantling democratic institutions and practices. Where an opiated Hindu upper caste and socio-economic class, conservative or liberal, turns a blind eye to injustices, while weaponizing representation and anti-racism in the diaspora, or is fearful of repercussions, it normalises subjugations. One day it will be their turn.

In the words of the immortal Rahat Indori sahab (sir)

‘लगेगी आग तो आएंगे घर कई जद में, यहां पे सिर्फ हमारा मकान थोड़ी है' Many houses will burn when there is a fire, not just mine alone.

He also wrote:

We conclude with a few words from Aamir Aziz's poem सब याद रखा जाएगा We will remember everything.