In a country where women are raped and occasionally burnt by packs of predators, the most powerful image in the past few days was this. A few young women from Jamia Millia Islamia protecting a cowering young man from police violence.
And the women of Bangalore, forming a protective circle around men to shield them from the police.
And the women of Shaheen Baagh with quiet bravery, continuing to protest through long winter nights. Some with infants in their arms.
This is true power. The kind misogyny belittles and negates but can’t wish away. Because it comes from an unwavering moral compass, from the primal instinct to protect, include rather than exclude. No matter what the cost.
The human cost. Let us discuss that first. At last count, in the ongoing unrest over the issues related to the Citizenship Amendment Act, 23 citizens have died.The dead include a young IAS aspirant and an eight year old child. 1,100 people are under arrest, 5,558 in preventive detention, 200 AMU students have been booked in Aligarh for taking out a ‘candle march’. But trust a Kangana Ranaut to take our focus back to the cost of public property and the sanctity of tax payer’s money. Because of course, life is cheap and citizens disposable. But god forbid that politicians ever be made accountable for their words and actions by their enablers in the media and their circle of loyal cheerleaders.
Just as revolutions need women to succeed, so does the matrix of sexism and toxic political agendas.
Complicit women like Kangana, Kiran Bedi , Madhu Kishwar, Pallavi Joshi, and many others know what damage a transactional brand of nationalism can do to a country. And yet they comply because it does not harm them personally. And therein lies their usefulness.
Kiran Bedi, the product of an education system that worked at some level to encourage inclusion and diverse representation, was once the symbol of inspired policing and the agent of transformative change in Tihar. And yet she recently legitimised with her presence, a Karnataka school’s reenactment of the demolition of a Babri Mazjid. Her political opportunism post her retirement shows how corruptive power can be when it is desired without a context or purpose.
In the pre-internet era when feminism in India had not yet carved a space in every day discourse, we had Manushi, the journal Madhu Kishwar had started with Ruth Vanita. Kishwar now sees everything through a one note, communal and patriarchal nationalism, has rampaged against queer rights, the critics of Sati, thinks dowry and rape laws are loaded against male privilege, peddles fake news so there is no point in discussing her further.
Pallavi Joshi was once the muse of progressive directors, many of whom are now being termed as Urban Naxals. She worked with Govind Nihalani in Rukmavati ki Haveli, in Shyam Benegal’s films like Suraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda, in his reimagining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s Bharat Ek Khoj, in his tribute to Gandhi in the film The Making of the Mahatma. And we did not hear a single murmur from her then about how history had forgotten certain heroes at the expense of others. And there she is now educating us along with her husband about everything from the Rafale deal to the mysterious Tashkent files.
Before, she suddenly reinvented herself as a right-wing upholder of cultural purity, Kangana was brave enough to play on and off screen, a less than perfect rebel. Occasionally broken but a relatable modern woman unwilling to be put into a box .
Senior journalists cheered her on when she took on a leading man she claimed she had been engaged to, when she refused to endorse fairness creams, when she spoke against nepotism. She was celebrated as a feminist icon who stood up for truth. Watch her 2015 conversation with Irrfan Khan in Film Companion’s show The Meeting Ground. She is articulate and logical and seems genuinely affected by the negativity that Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet was greeted with.
She says it was heartbreaking to see the “personal” attacks made on Kashyap’s work and how evil it all was. And how she won’t ever be a part of this negativity. And then of course, from being an outsider taking on entrenched powers in the industry, she went on to align herself to the biggest power matrix in the country. And formally crossed to the other side of the ideological divide. She is no longer an ally of a dissenter like Kashyap who now routinely battles a trolling ecosystem that sometimes abuses him and occasionally sends rape threats to his daughter.
She is in fact today a mirror image of the entitlement she once attacked. And as an impervious bully, calls a senior actor like Shabana Azmi anti-national. And gaslights young protestors at a time when the state machinery is crushing them with stun grenades, tear gas and yes, occasionally even bullets. When universities have been turned into war zones.
Whenever public discontent rises, a handbook of dog whistles is used by influencers like Kangana to communalise discourse. And to occasionally settle personal scores. A perfect example is Kangana’s sister Rangoli Chandel who now uses an incendiary twitter account to dictate just what film makers like Karan Johar can or cannot make, and what exactly represents history or myth (Check out her comments on his under production film, Takht).
She viciously trolls half the industry and for good measure educates the misguided protesting millions about the wisdom behind moves like NRC and CAA.
She recently called the critics of her sister’s prosthetic make up in a forthcoming film, as the ‘samosa gang.’ This term has been often used in tandem with the insult ‘rice bag converts’ to imply that certain people leave their religion for a paltry gain. To bring a communal angle in a conversation about bad prosthetic make up is not accidental. The benefits of spreading this kind of poison, must for sure, outweigh the rice bags and samosas that Team Kangana mocks.
As a freshly minted ideologue, Kangana also uses cleverly formulated trigger words as when after a voting exercise in Mumbai, she said that India was only now finally shaking off its “ghulami.” She now lectures Indians about which version of nationalism they should adopt, especially before the release of a new film.
She recently gave an interview where she habitually hit out at her fraternity. This time for their silence on CAA. It is a long interview. Full of sound and fury and before you rise up to applaud her courage, here comes the real clincher. In a few lines that you can miss if you don’t wade through the entire word salad, she says this, “We are at the threshold of a great possibility… now’s the time where decisive decisions are being taken. And we will finally know what is India what is not India who is an Indian who is not an Indian because that clarity no one has yet, you know the governments before have made sure that we do not know our borders and we do not know our population. That’s why we have so many issues to deal with: we have a population explosion, we have malnutrition, we have rape issue the gender issue, the gender bias. There are so many issues that we need to deal with. Well, there is a time for charity but charity begins at home we need to make sure that people are not dying at home. Then the charity will happen, whereas and when the time comes that the previous governments did not in a way.”
This is evil drivel disguised as common sense. She is endorsing that Bollywood RISE to support NRC and CAA so that this government unlike the ones before it, can DECIDE what India is and WHO Indians are!
The short-sightedness and far reaching danger of this kind of opportunism is immeasurable though it peters out fast once a propaganda machinery fuelling it fails and falls apart. And then the propagandists can never reclaim the identity they discarded. They can never again inspire or uplift those whose oppression they became complicit in.
The young women protesting today know the possible cost of waving a damning finger at brute power. But they also know the value of being on the right side of history. And that is why they will make history while a Kangana Ranaut will just be a footnote.
Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.