Backstory: Searching for the Words of 2023 Amidst the Rubble of Gaza

The year 2023 will go down in history as one soaked in the blood of the people of Gaza, the babies of Gaza, the journalists and medical personnel of Gaza. It was a year when the world threw its weighty tome of International Humanitarian Law under an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank. This war was far more brutal than anything the present century had seen and possibly anything witnessed during 20th century, with its legacy stained by the poppy fields of Flanders and the rice paddies of Vietnam; the aerial bombardments of Dresden and the Balkan wars.

Since October 7, when Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 of its citizens, more than 25,000 tons of explosives have been dropped by the IDF on the Gaza Strip, the equivalent of the two nuclear bombs. It left whole neighbourhoods reduced to rubble and a death toll of over 20,000 and mounting. It is difficult to get away from the feeling that this was some simulated AI creation. But the blood was real and splattered on our skin; the debris from blown-up hospitals settled in our lungs even as Ukraine – a legacy from last year – continued to smolder under Russian bombardment.

It was a year when India overtook China to become the globe’s most populous country. Even as the world teetered on the brink of climate catastrophe, it tried to negotiate a climate deal at COP28 . It was a cop-out eventually, with some clever language on “transitioning away from” rather than “phasing out” fossil fuels making it to the final text.

Bigotry and hate were abloom in 2023. Ethnic polarization in Manipur set off Hill against Valley, Kuki-Zo against Meitei. A conflagration that resulted in brutal killings and widespread displacement of people raged for months. Its bestiality came home to every Indian when a video of two Kuki women being paraded naked and then gang raped, went viral in July, weeks after the actual incident. The video squeezed a few reluctant words out of our political leadership who had thus far watched the state burn silently.

Bigotry saw churches burned in Manipur, a temple attacked in Nuh, and mosques threatened with demolition across India that is Bharat. Bharat as India’s doppelganger came alive when the President of Bharat invited dignitaries to a G20 do. Speaking of G20, its events crowded the year, throwing out street vendors and curtaining away slums. Over a thousand promotional G20 posters beamed from Delhi’s walls during the main event, a quarter of which bore the smiling visage of the PM. They provoked comments that the General Election seemed to have come a tad too early. But elections were never far from the mind of the PM, who slipped effortlessly, every now and then, into election mode, allowing himself to be bathed in marigolds flung by well-choreographed adoring crowds. These scenes presumably were just trailers for the 2024 blockbuster which the BJP claims it has already won, notwithstanding the INDIA challenge.

In 2023, the Supreme Court finally settled the question looming over India since 2019 and which had tortured the people of Kashmir all these years: was the abrogation of Article 370 legal? The five-judge bench had no problem in arriving at the conclusion: Of course, it was. One judge asked for a process of truth and reconciliation in the region. What truth? What reconciliation? The torture of the bakarwals at the hands of the army reinforced the truth that this wound has no healing.

It was a year when the Election Commission of India was officially designated a Government of India-owned enterprise with the passing of the portentously named Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) law which allows the PM and a minister of his choosing to be two of three members constituting the selection committee for the three election commissioners. Will this impact future elections in Bharat? Time will tell.

The fate of the ECI seemed to reflect the general meltdown of institutions. When caged parrots roar lion-like and courts adopt a tareekh pe tareekh regimen, endlessly sitting on momentous cases, endlessly postponing the possibility of bail for our prisoners of conscience, it seems that in a system of checks and balances, the balances have been checked.

But the institution that perhaps suffered the greatest in this year of meltdowns was the Indian Parliament, now housed in a grand new building that reminded onlookers of New Delhi Railway Station. The royal sengol (sceptre) installed above the Lok Sabha’s Speaker’s Chair did nothing to remind the ruling party of their kartavya (duties) during an era designated as kartavya kaal. The farcical nature of the disqualification of Mahua Moitra or the manner in which no less than 150 Opposition members were expelled from the House for nothing more than demanding accountability from the ruling party for a serious breach of Parliament, marked a new low. Bills that could have deleterious consequences were passed with lightning speed, often in the total absence of the Opposition.

As bills shrinking the democratic and media space were passed in the blink of an eye, prisoners of conscience like Bhima Koregaon’s Shoma Sen marked five years behind bars. Meanwhile the coercive agencies were on the lookout for more candidates deserving state hospitality. The BBC got raided for daring to put footage from the 2002 era, and journalists and associates of the news portal NewsClick were confronted by Delhi Police personnel at dawn, with its septuagenarian founder-editor being promptly arrested.

Penal laws got a facelift this year. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Act replaced the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act respectively. Yet, despite their weighty nomenclatures, it was difficult to get rid of the feeling that democracy in the country was in subsidence mode.

The sinking feeling found a parallel in the geographical space. Early in 2023, a large part of the temple town of Joshimath was rendered uninhabitable because it had caved in. Questions as to what caused this disaster were never allowed to fully surface but nature persists in its search for answers. Towards the end of the year, the Silkyara tunnel, one of those that were part of the Char Dham road widening project, collapsed, trapping 41 workers. It took 17 days and the expert skills of rat hole miners to finally rescue them. Did India need this road widening project that involves cutting into fragile Himalayan hill sides?  Well, the machines at the Silkyara tunnel have renewed their drilling, how’ that for an answer?

It was a year that saw a slew of Vande Bharat trains criss-cross the country, often flagged off for their inaugural run by the PM himself. Before long, we got the Namo Bharat bearing the PM’s name which was once again enthusiastically flagged off by him. But these shiny new things were not for the plebs. They had to make do with the old iron horses that form the core of railway operations, often jumping through the windows to get standing room. Nothing reflected the great divide in rail travel than the tragic accident in Balasore involving three trains and claiming 288 lives. What caused the tragedy? Signal breakdown? Human error? Failure to follow safety norms? “Don’t politicize it”, said the Union Railways Minister.

Okay, we won’t. Let’s content ourselves instead with clapping as yet another Namo Bharat gets inaugurated and waving the flag as Chandrayan-3 makes a historic moon landing. Let’s excise the Mughals so thoroughly from our consciousness that Delhi’s famed Mughal Gardens became Amrit Udayan, and let’s confine Darwin to the dustbin for daring to suggest that we descend from apes. As for eggs in midday meals, why do we need them when we have potatoes that look so similar?  And don’t even think of romancing anybody on Valentine’s Day, kissing will be restricted to cows only.

Full marks however for the women wrestlers of the country. They took on a political heavyweight and sexual predator without flinching, pinning him down in their lock and hold. This meant sitting out in Jantar Mantar for weeks on end, it also meant the ultimate sacrifice of ending a career for one of them – Sakshi Malik – who deserves a gold for that supreme effort.

The year had its share of eccentrics, with Elon Musk leading the pack. It was not just that he crossed out Twitter with an enormous X (bye bye bluebird), he was also fixated on his Neuralink programme: an implantable Brain Computer Interface (BCI). This year he received approval to take the initial steps towards what could be the first human trial of BCI in paralysis patients.

Meanwhile our own BCCI, presided over by a nepo baby, made news as the world’s premier money making cricket body, by earning $6.02 billion through selling media rights to cover IPL in the period between 2023-2027. BCCI’s last big tourney of the year, the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup at the Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, brought in a record-breaking 1,250,307 spectators. Most of them left before the final ceremony because their team had failed to lift the cup, which shows that you can’t be a cricket lover and a nationalist bigot at the same time.

I am no prophet and this is no Prophet Song. But as we leap blindly into a leap year, let courage and humour be our friends.

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 Wrong call

On December 24, podcaster Ravi Handa called out The Wire.in a tweet for featuring Suhel Seth in an interview that had introduced him as a “well-known and highly regarded individual”. Handa recalled that this portal had carried a piece in 2019 which had referenced the accusations against Seth for sexual harassment. His tweet went: “The Wire in 2023: Suhel Seth is a well-known and highly regarded individual. The Wire in 2019: Suhel Seth is accused of sexual harassment by several women. U-turn took 4 years.”

Two days later, NWMIndia, a collective that has been at the forefront of speaking out on journalistic norms, especially through the prism of gender, put out a tweet addressed to @thewire_in and @KaranThapar_TTP, and ‘all those involved’: “How can you normalize and celebrate a man who was accused of harassment and molestation by multiple women?” This was followed by another of its tweets pointing out that “championing liberal values and support a #MeToo boys’club cannot go hand”.

Another reader, N. Jayaram, mailed in: “Bewildered by the lack of response (unless mistaken) from The Wire (he was referring to the NWMI tweet).  What do you make of it?”

My response: Well, this was certainly a cringe-worthy moment for this portal especially at a time when Sakshi Malik’s press conference and Brij Bhushan Sharma were big news points.  An alert desk should have red-flagged the Seth interview before it saw the light of day.  By the time it was taken down it was too late because material on the internet has more lives than a feline.

An old lesson for the new year? I hope so.

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Israelis not villains?

Wire reader Tarakant Sinha responds to an exchange in the letters column of December 9 between another reader and me (‘Does Israel have a choice?’): “Acquisition of land by purchase in then Palestine started from late 19th century and continued even after creation of Israel. The Israelis worked hard on the fallow land to make it bloom.  All three wars — 1948, 1967 and Yom Kippur1973 were started by Arabs.  So calling the Israelis villains from the beginning is unfair.”

My response: What about the British colonialists and their nefarious resettlement plan? The Balfour Declaration dates back to 1917, so clearly not all the land was commercially acquired, even if we are to give recognition to the land deals of a century and more ago.  As for making the land “bloom”, this was achieved largely through Palestinian labour. Palestinians had made their land bloom for centuries as testified by their legacy Olive trees. Palestine, incidentally, was one of the relatively more developed and industrial regions within the Ottoman Empire. The history of the wars is a little more complex. How can it be claimed that it was the Arabs who started the 1948 war when the deliberate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians had already begun, and that there was already a secret deal between King Abdullah of Jordan and the Zionist leadership (Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan, 1988) on the carving up of a lot of the territory. The 1967 war was clearly started by Israel which is why it is referred to as Israel’s pre-emptive war. The 1973 war was started by Egypt and Syria to restore the lands taken by Israel in 1967.

Wishing readers a Happy 2024!

Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in