The Progressive Forces Have Failed Umar Khalid

The last time I met Umar Khalid was before February 9, 2016, when we went about postering in and around the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus demanding the immediate release of Professor G.N. Saibaba from jail.

This was mid-January. When we saw off Umar and Anirban at the Vishwavidyalaya metro station, little did we know that in a month’s time, the electronic media in the country, led by a fellow Assamese, would ensure that much of the nation was soon baying for their blood.

As Umar’s implacable voice of dissent against a fundamentalist regime continued unabated, the wait must have grown rather frustrating for the Hindutva lot. It was only a matter of time before an assassination attempt was made.

Progressive forces in the country largely failed Umar Khalid. Close on the heels of the sedition row, chagrined by comments from a section of the Left, I found myself asking, “…tougher questions must be asked of ourselves, of all the people who feel part of the movement. Do we need a Hindi-speaking, high-caste Hindu male from ‘mainland India’ before we come out of our homes to join the march against his victimisation by the state? Is the Left in the country equally all ears to a Muslim activist? To an activist in the same cause but not affiliated to any party? To one speaking about the north-eastern regions of the country? To one speaking about Kashmir and its people? To one speaking about sex workers and their professional and social rights? What if those arrested are many times in number but from Telangana, and do not speak Hindi? What if they are tribals from Chhattisgarh?” (The Citizen)

Even though Kanhaiya Kumar too was hounded and harried, a special kind of hatred was reserved for Umar Khalid throughout. I continue to believe that the reasons for this must be excavated, and not from his burial site. Posthumous affection is only the guilt-purging formula of the woke.

For us the people of Assam available on social media, Umar is a much-scrutinized activist these days, thanks to the hullabaloo around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) being updated in the state after 67 years. The modern political history of the state is a history of identity conflicts. The NRC process is bound to be mired in these debates and state-crafted confusions. It is true that influential individuals and organisations are manufacturing and spreading propaganda and truthless speculations about the process but, well, everyone has a stake and a politics to cater to.

However, there is something that bothers me about the way the Umars were bedevilled by progressives from Assam. While it is extremely important and urgent to call out people on false propaganda and disinformation, we must also recognise that a lot of sincere minds like Umar’s may have been partially misled amid this din. Often, people not from Assam indeed find it difficult to understand the complexity of the state, and are wide of the mark about a lot of things.

This does not mean, however, that all of them are monsters, nor that we will hound and harry them. I was very, very pained to see familiar Hindutva names in my circle leaping in joy and celebrating the split in the anti-Hindutva struggle, and joining in insulting part of the Left.

Illiberality is not a property of the Right alone, and a lack of accommodation and dialogue can only mean that any project of a semi-organised force of dissent against the tyranny will be defeated.

The corrective journey begins at the point where we acknowledge that our collective Islamophobia contributed to yesterday’s assassination attempt on Umar Khalid.