What started as a demand for better quota agitation for the Jat Community, within days escalated into violent protest that spread to as far as New Delhi.
The rioting and looting that entered into its ninth day on Monday has cut off Haryana from other parts of India for nearly a week now, with the authorities having a tough time in bringing the situation under control. As of today the death toll due to the uprising in Haryana has risen to 19.
The Jat community make up around 82 million of India's more than 1.3 billion population and they are concentrated in Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Paradesh, Delhi and other areas in the northern belt.
Though the Jats are considered economically and politically well off compared with many other minorities, since the 1990s they have been demanding that they be included as OBC (other backward class).
OBC is a collective term to classify groups that are socially and educationally disadvantaged. By being in the OBC, the Jats stand to benefit up to 27 per cent in reservation in government jobs and places in educational institutions.
SCHOOLS CLOSED WITH DELHI FACES WATER CRISIS
With situation worsening over the last 24 hours in Haryana, despite of the central government deploying additional 10,000 troops, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal ordered schools closed on Monday (today) as a precaution.
Jat protesters had cut water supply to Delhi from Haryana prompting Kejriwal to order water rationing as the state relies on Haryana for 80 percent of its water supply.
Delhiites are already experiencing water shortage with some residents rushing to the shops to buy pails and containers to store water.
I too bought three crates of drinking water as a precaution, though I had never experienced water cuts for the last one year.
It was reported that in some areas shops had run out of bottled water and their prices have sky rocketed.
Times of India on Sunday reported that BJP had announced that a bill for giving OBC status for the Jats would be brought in the coming Haryana assembly session.
It further said that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government "buckled under pressure" on the Haryana issue, what more with his BJP (BJP) ruling the state.
Critics and opposition politicians lashed out against Modi's failure in sending a strong message against the protesters because it might encourage other communities to hold the government for ransom on the same grounds.
PROTESTS CAUSE TRAFIC GIRDLOCK IN DELHI
In the same week Delhites not only had endure the spillover effects from the Jat community's uprising but also with the street protests following the arrest of Jawarlal Nehru University (JNU) student leader Kanhaiya Kumar.
Kanhaiya was arrested under the Seditious Act for allegedly making anti-national slogans in JNU.
Delhities witnessed the worst traffic gridlock especially in the city center when four groups of people took to the streets.
Students and lecturers protested on the high handedness employed by the police in detaining Kanhaiya. Things turned more dramatic when a group of lawyers and army veterans attacked JNU students and journalists, when Kanhaiya was brought to the court.
Following this, hundreds of journalists took to the streets demanding action against those involved in beating up journalists in the court complex in the presence of the police.
Kanhaiya was attacked twice by the same group of lawyers in two separate incidents with the police failing to stop the attack, with one of the incident occurring right in the court room.
The failure of police to protect Kanhaiya from being attacked in court room even after directive from Supreme Court raised several questions on law and order.
The students also questioned on the raids by Delhi police on JNU campus which never happened before in the history of Indian education institution.
MIGHT HAVE IMPACT ON MODI'S EFFORTS
With Modi expected to announce further incentives for foreign investors, serious questions remains whether India could be next the growth centre of the world's economy following the Haryana episode.
The Haryana riots forced one of the major automobile manufacturer Maruti Suzuki, which produced 5,000 cars per day, to close its plant temporarily mainly due to shortage of components.
A former senior police officer and BJP politician Kiran Bedi defended police action against the JNU students and journalists.
She blamed on inaccurate reporting putting the Delhi police in difficult situation.
Many Delhiites and academicians I spoke to for the last one week agreed that Indians still have a long way to go in uniting under single identity beyond caste, ethnic and religious lines.
Last week, a tragic farce overwhelmed India just as Narendra Modi was promoting his ambitious ‘Make in India’ programme to spur domestic manufacturing. It began with Zee News, a jingoistic and vastly influential television channel, whose owner had openly campaigned for Modi’s election in 2014. Zee broadcast an amateur video that showed students at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) shouting slogans in favour of Kashmir’s independence and against the 2013 execution of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri accused of attacking the Indian parliament in 2001.
Some other ultra-patriotic channels picked up Zee’s accusatory refrain against JNU students: that they were “anti-national”. Modi’s home minister declared his resolve not to “spare” the culprits. His education minister tweeted her angry refusal to tolerate any “insult to Mother India”. Delhi police raided the university campus. They arrested, among others, the president of the student union and a former teacher, booking them for sedition no less.
The home minister quoted a tweet supporting JNU students by Jamaatud Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed to accuse them of links with evildoers. Exercised about the insults to Mother India, a mob of politicians and pro-Modi lawyers at a Delhi court beat up — on two successive days, as a crowd of policemen stood by — journalists as well as JNU students, including the one accused of treason.
Soon after these extraordinary events it emerged that not only did Saeed’s supposed endorsement come from a parody Twitter account, but the original video of sloganeering students had also been doctored.
An avalanche of scorn has landed on the Modi government and its seedy partisans in the Indian media. Adverse international headlines have made ‘Fake in India’ and ‘Hate in India’ seem more plausible ventures than Make in India for now.
A government driven hither and thither by Twitter burlesque is guilty of abysmal ineptitude. But frenzied deception and self-deception over Kashmir are not unique to Hindu nationalists. Rather, unreason on Kashmir is the original sin of Indian nationalism, secular as well as hard-line Hindu.
Tens of thousands have died during more than two decades in Kashmir; an unknown number have been tortured or “disappeared”. The violence drove away an entire community of Kashmiri Hindus from the valley where most of the state’s population lives.
During this time, the political and popular mood has progressively hardened in India. The extravagant middle-class fantasy of a “Global Indian Takeover” made local Kashmiri disaffection seem a trifling irritant — to be tackled through a US-led emasculation of Pakistan.
Many journalists covering Kashmir turned into willing dupes for Indian intelligence agencies. Even liberal-left commentators, eloquent in their denunciation of the Israeli treatment of Palestinian Arabs, turned coyly evasive, or kept strategically quiet, on the subject of India’s morally questionable rule over Kashmir. Many of those trying to write about brutality and rage in Kashmir were also stigmatised as “anti-national”. Hyper-patriotism on this issue helped a whole generation of television anchors and columnists rise to fame while screaming for the blood of seditionists.
Cynically hoping to exploit this mood, the Congress government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh executed Afzal Guru in the run-up to parliamentary elections in 2014. As Amnesty International pointed out, Guru, denied a fair trial and had been sentenced to death on shockingly flimsy circumstantial evidence. While partly admitting this, the Supreme Court still ordered that “his life should become extinct” since the “collective conscience of the society” had to be “satisfied”.
Guru was not allowed even the doomed man’s customary last meeting with his relatives before he was rushed to the gallows early one morning. Burying him in an unmarked grave, the government then imposed a curfew on the valley of Kashmir that lasted for weeks.
Despite, or perhaps because of the Congress government’s crude attempts to prevent it, Guru became a martyr in the eyes of a new generation of Kashmiris. And Modi won in 2014 anyway.
Kashmiri Muslims remain as disaffected as ever — and with good reason. A few hours before the assault on JNU last week, Indian security forces shot dead two Kashmiri students in the valley. The Indian media, and even those protesting against the scoundrels of patriotism, barely noticed just another day of impunity in Kashmir.
Neither such routine killings, nor the endless crackdowns and curfews have changed or will change Kashmir’s ground realities. But last week’s multi-pronged assaults on JNU students revealed how profoundly and extensively a sustained lynch-mob hysteria over Kashmir had damaged Indian institutions — security agencies and the legal system, as well as the media and the larger public sphere — long before Modi’s ascent to power. In this sense, a long, savage but largely invisible war on India’s margins is finally coming home.
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