Sadaf Jafar

BJP

Yogi Adityanath

Hindutva

government

Arvind Kejriwal

Some of us have slid right down the rabbit hole to land in a troublingly surreal state that has blurred the lines between crime and punishment, reparation and injury, decency and viciousness, and justice and lawlessness. By what accepted norm of right and wrong has the Uttar Pradesh chief minister plastered nearly a 100 posters with the names, faces and addresses of 53 local anti-CAA protestors who were arrested, detained and released on bail? They didn’t stand on trial, they were not convicted. But there they are, social activist, SR Darapuri, a cop who became a close Kanshi Ram associate, Shia clerics Maulana Saif Abbas and Kalbe Sibtain Noori and human rights campaigner Mohammed Shoaib, named and shamed on the banners hanging on prominent road crossings in Lucknow. Their “crime”? They have not yet coughed up the prescribed penalty for the “damages” wrought on public properties when they protested. The police on Saturday arrested Shoaib for a second time. Kalbe Noori, the son of Shia leader Kalbe Sadiq, must wonder what possessed his father to drum up support for thein 2014 and 2019 and advocate that Muslims must relinquish claim over the Ayodhya title suit.Doubtless,set the agenda at every step of the spiralling communal violence that followed the opposition to CAA since last December. After 2002, Gujarat earned the label as alaboratory but UP has pushed the envelope and demonstrated what size and shape the violence can assume, unencumbered by the law, the rulebook and ethics. What Yogi imagines and executes today, the BJP-ruled states might emulate in the near future, provided their chief ministers have the gall. The RSS could not have found an abler candidate than him to subserve its world view.Yogi’s playbook found an early conformist in the Delhi police. After being valorised by several Hindus for actively helping the rioters in the attacks and pillage, the cops have decided to recover the “cost” of “destruction” to public properties and private homes, shops and schools (there’s no mention of the razed mosques, mazars and madrassas in the reports) through hefty fines, after assuming that the violence happened clinically one way. The crime branch’s special investigative teams and the local police were directed to coordinate with the civic authorities and the Delhito size up the “damage”. The officials in the BJP-run municipalities will play ball. However,’s convictions in fairness and justice await another test.To return to the Lucknow posters, those who featured in Yogi’s “rogue’s gallery” have spoken of the depths of humiliation they were subject to, far worse than the tortures inflicted on them in custody. Passersby are spotted clicking pictures of the posters and sharing these on social media with clickbait captions that lead the viewers to a domain of unmitigated hate and ridicule. Darapuri, aDalit from Haryana who became a dedicated Ambedkarite after retirement, suffers because unlike Kanshi Ram, his late mentor, and Ram’s protégé Mayawati, he refused to make peace with the BJP. He walked a lonely path once the BSP aligned with the BJP. Had he gone their way, he might have lived in peace, tending to a farm he owns in rural UP instead of being stigmatised on public walls.There is fear among the named and shamed. They fear that the abject display of their identities might make them easy bait for the lynch mobs looking for new blood sports.Did Yogi take a leaf from China that in 2018 raised a wall of name and shame in Anhiu, a town in the eastern province? Aprovincial people’s court put up large billboards at bus stops with the names and faces of stubborn debt defaulters, some of who made good their liabilities in a day. A year later, China ramped up the practice by projecting the names and pictures of debtors onto the big screen in movie halls, ahead of popular films.If he did, he was the BJP’s only learner. When the Jats of Haryana were out on the streets on a destructive spree against the non-Jats in 2016, did the Khattar government catalogue the damage caused to private and public properties and enforce fines? No way. Last December, when the UP cops went on the rampage and broke into Muslim homes for allegedly dissenting against the CAA, ransacked their possessions and assaulted the men, was there mention of compensating the victims for the losses? On the contrary, the Yogi government adopted the “seize and action” route and punished the sufferers for their “vandalism”. In effect, the personal losses of the victims were compounded by the demand to pay penalties. Nobody knows what will happen in a regime that has skewed the conventional norms of punishing an offender and recompensing a victim.In Delhi, the police are most unlikely to admit who is culpable for the mayhem because the buck will stop at their door. In a coloured world, the victim will probably end up paying for crimes committed by someone else.