Aayush Nema
Denison University, Ohio USA
Despite the omnipresent and structurally destabilising threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests have erupted not only across the United States, but all over the world in the last month. In Japan, masses of people have taken to the streets in solidarity and recognition of the invaluable lives of Black Americans; South Korean K-pop fans — as social media feeds filled with resources and call-to-actions in support of Black Lives Matter — led a virtual coup of #AllLivesMatter, tagging pictures of K-pop stars with the hashtag, and thereby diluting the projection of covertly racist sentiments.
Far from the commodification of an anarchist uprising, protests inspired by Black Lives Matter have become a resounding rallying cry against racism and police brutality. Globally, protests have remained cognisant of the movement’s significance within the context of police brutality and systemic racism in the U.S. However, protests outside the U.S have also sought to address the systemic issues within their own communities and countries.
In Belgium, protests aimed to bring awareness around racial inequalities in the country that stem from its colonial history. In a symbolic act, a statue of King Leopold II – the Belgian ruler responsible for killing millions of Congolese people – was defaced. Similar narratives of the manifestation of anti-racist sentiments have emerged from the U.K, Australia, Germany, and Syria.
To think that these protests have existed in a vacuum independent of the global pandemic is to miss a glaringly obvious point: that coronavirus has spearheaded an expository scheme against market capitalism’s role in aggressively marginalising and negatively affecting historically vulnerable communities. The driving factor of this exposition has been the fact that these communities have faced the brunt of coronavirus’ economic and healthcare impact. In the U.S, Black Americans comprise this historically vulnerable population, and one whose vulnerability has been defined by generations of systemic racial oppression.
It might only be the outward expressions of racist hate speech and violence that make it to national news cycles, but systemic racism, which is ingrained in the minutiae of society’s foundations and is reinforced by legal and political structures, has far wider and deeper consequences. For instance, according to author Michelle Alexander, the ‘New Jim Crow’ – a system of mass incarceration that has targeted people of colour (and mostly Black Americans) – has been used to deny people of colour their civil rights. Compounded with the internalised prejudices, racially discriminatory policing (Stop-and-Frisk policies, racial profiling), and racially biased laws, Black Americans have found themselves relegated to second-class citizens by those meant to serve and protect them.
The consequences of systemic racism manifest in the form of an ever-widening wage gap, fewer employment opportunities, inaccessibility to good quality education and healthcare, and overall poorer standards of living. For all the ideological embracement of a ‘post-racial America’ after Barack Obama’s election and then re-election as President, it is an indisputable fact that the wage gap between Black and white men is the same as it was in 1950.
George Floyd’s murder was the tipping point that led to protests against police brutality throughout the US and subsequently all over the world. However, the incident itself was a part of the historical progression of systemic oppression and violence – often at the hands of the police – against Black Americans. The demands, dissent, and the solidarity of the protestors with the Black Lives Matter movement speaks to the historical and socio-political context of the incident while addressing the incident itself.
The calls for justice, at least in the present moment – for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, Adama Traoré, and Belly Mujinga, among others – represent the least that can be done to recognise Black lives in equal measure as white ones. More expansively, however, the protests demand structural changes in order to begin the process of undoing generations of systemic oppression.
A common argument against these protests (and organised social movements in general) is that they do little to bring about sustained policy reform. The sweeping changes in state policies and public opinion in the U.S since the start of these protests tell a different story. After years of debate around whether statues of confederate soldiers or racist leaders should be taken down or not, many of those statues have been brought down by state governments in the last month alone. This has also been accompanied by removal of confederate symbols from certain state flags. Additionally, the public support for Black Lives Matter grew more within three weeks of the first protest in Minneapolis than it has since the movement’s conception in 2013.
Thus, keeping the significance of the Black Lives Matter’s mission in mind, there are two key lessons that are apparent from the movement’s evolution. First, that oppressed communities do not have to accept their oppression as a fact of history and remain signified by its systemic nature. And second, that intentional social movements can disrupt those historical narratives that systematised the tools of oppression.
While the reach of Black Lives Matter’s principles is transnational, how these principles are imbibed and planted is subjective to each region’s history of oppression. In India, this subjectivity is both direct and abstract: Police brutality and poverty.
The communal acceptance of police brutality in India is so deeply normalised, that instances of unprovoked police violence barely make it past sensationalised news cycles and passive social media activism. As a matter of fact, police violence became a cornerstone of India’s coronavirus lockdown. A report by UNCAT (United NGO Campaign Against Torture) lists 173 known cases of police violence, resulting in 27 deaths, within the first week of lockdown.
In February 2020, as communal riots – which were handled poorly by the police – broke out in Delhi, policemen brutally attacked five unarmed Muslim men. One of them, a 23-year old named Faizan, subsequently died. The entire episode was marred by a lack of accountability on part of the police. This was just one of many instances of excessive police violence in February which, despite documentation, did not lead to the arrest of a single police officer.
It becomes almost impossible to raise such instances as a bewildering abuse of police power when the existence of the police force is strongly connotated with authority and violence. In a report published by a human rights advocacy organisation called Common Cause, 50% of responding citizens claimed that police violence is justified. An overwhelming 80% of surveyed police officers held the same view.
Contrast this with the public trust in police, which even among residents in metropolises like Delhi and Mumbai, is embarrassingly low. India Spend, a government watchdog that frequently publishes data on public issues and spending, surveyed people in metropolises regarding theft reporting. Of the respondents who claimed to have been victims of theft, only 6-8% reported it to the police. Respondents cited a lack of trust in the police, perceived incapabilities of the police, and an aversion to complicated and unending logistical procedures as reasons for not registering a complaint.
On the face of it, there is an obvious mistrust in the police force along with what seems to be a pessimistic view of its functioning. The public perception of the police may not be the direct cause of police brutality; However, resigning to a negative perception of the police impedes the momentum for collective demands for police reform or better leadership within the institution.
In 2017, in a move to ‘modernise’ the police, the Cabinet Committee on Security approved a 25,000 crore spending scheme to improve infrastructure, equipment, and training. With little to show for in terms of positive results, the move was a trademark example of blindly throwing money at a problem without properly understanding it. Better and safer policing cannot start with militarising an already feared and distrusted police force. Fundamentally, there needs to be better leadership and organisational accountability within the police, as with any other institution. This would then need to translate into the police force’s self-perception within a democratic society.
The need for any institutional reform, especially one that directly concerns the public, must be expressed by the public. When it comes to reform that affects civil rights, the need for change must be an adamant and unmovable one. The expression of this need — be it through protests or collaborative social movements — must not rest upon those who are affected the most. Like the Black Lives Matter protests, where people of all races have come out in droves to demand institutional anti-racist reform, the burden to speak of one’s oppression should not remain on the oppressed.
In this view, there needs to be an active investment in state policing policies in order to ensure the police does not turn tyrannical against its own people. This refers to accountability, but accountability itself begins with citizens holding the police consequentially accountable.
Changing the functioning of an institution within a democracy requires contextualising its existing problems in terms of how it affects society. For instance, the India Spend report on theft reporting represents a section of society that rarely encounters police violence in the first place. Even a glancing look at most instances of police brutality provide an intuitive picture of who the victims almost always are: the poor. And more often than not, poor Muslims. These are people that have little to no leverage against excessive police force, especially in a system of law and order where calls for justice get lost in noise very quickly.
If the relatively wealthy harbour mistrust and indifference towards the police, the perception of the police for the poor and margnialised must be at the wrong extreme. Almost all instances of police brutality documented in the UNCAT report were in areas of high levels of poverty, where a short-noticed lockdown sent people scavenging for essential resources. This does not even include the numerous cases of harrasment and violence that migrant workers were subjected to while returning to their home states. In none of those cases were police officers held accountable to their actions.
A recent op-ed by Shaikh Mujibur Rehman notes the brutality of the Indian police towards the poor. Quite often, victims of sexual assault and families of missing persons are harassed by the police. Rehman adjudges a lot of the ‘anti-poor’ tendencies of the police to be a result of inadequate training. A more comprehensive reason, according to him, is the social attitude towards the poor. In this case, it is the political treatment of the poor that sets the tone for this social attitude; and since the police are often used as a right hand man by politicians, the violence is unsurprising.
The emerging picture of police brutality in India, then, is one where the police take advantage of the poor’s oppression. The lack of objective outrage towards this brutality, on one hand, is grounded in an indifference towards holding the police to a certain standard of conduct. But more structurally, the problem lies in the social attitude towards the poor.
The second reason might seem like a detracted point, but it’s not. In almost none of the cases of documented police brutality did the public empathise with the systemic nature of the poor’s oppression and vulnerability. Sure, in general, there is a recognition of the poor’s vulnerability, but this is a more objective recognition, and one that is not contextualised through the subjectivity of India’s poverty.
The view of poverty in India is connotated more with socio-economic and intellectual ‘backwardness’, rather than the systemic consequences of the caste system. More so, the connection between the latter as the cause of the former is lost in our national conversations — when they do happen — around poverty. To begin with, the caste system is still deeply rooted in India. Outlawing it does not imply its erasure from cultural practices or social treatment. However, systemic casteism imposed upon generations of Indians has led to millions of people being in abject poverty through no fault of their own. As much as we like to think that those in poverty make poor choices, over half of India’s poor did not choose to be victims of the oppression (or at least its consequences) they are subjected to today.
Although racism in the U.S and caste based poverty in India are distinct in their history and narratives (and deserve to be treated as such), the systemic nature of their modern materialisation is quite similar. In fact, systemic racism in the U.S checks many boxes of the caste system: an unfavourable wage gap, poor quality of education, disproportionate access to resources, and marginalisation in almost all areas of life. The key difference is that in the U.S, there has been a growing reckoning with how racism still exists in American society, and how far the country needs to go to eradicate it. On the other hand, in India, the view of poverty is one in which its existence is almost normalised as a fact of socio-economic hierarchy, even by the poor themselves.
India is yet to witness a sustained and nationwide anti-poverty protest. This is surprising, given the systemic nature of poverty and large sections of the population that live in poverty. Again, the onus for speaking of one’s oppression should not remain on the oppressed, and given that we find ourselves in the middle of a ravaging pandemic, there needs to be a collective voice that demands for the poor to be heard by those in power. In order for this to happen, there has to be widespread recognition of poverty as a product of systemic oppression, as well as a condition that is constantly exploited and oppressed further.
The Black Lives Matter movement stands for Black Americans’ emancipation from systemic oppression and its violence. In addition to raising awareness around Black issues, the movement has been a blueprint for countries to recognise the oppression within their own structural organisation; the recent protests set an example in acting out against the oppression.
Police brutality, in India, is more than sheer happenstance. And as evidence suggests, there is a lot to be said about the model of leadership — or a lack thereof — and conduct within the police force. However, the violence is also an act of taking advantage of one’s oppression. For any form of sustainable change, the common man’s sociological view of poverty needs to be put in perspective.
To begin with, there needs to be a wholesale investment in understanding and accepting that poverty in India is a systemic issue. It is not one up for debate; rather, the emancipation of individuals from it is a collective responsibility that falls on each and every citizen. Engaging and practising this responsibility can range from advocating for policy changes (which go beyond broad and poorly implemented reservation schemes), to participating in grassroots movements. At the very least, there is an obligation to educate ourselves.
For Indians to sympathise with George Floyd and other victims of police brutality in the U.S (as has happened), but not recognise police brutality and its victims’ oppression in their own country is an important lesson left unlearned.
References
- https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21285244/black-lives-matter-global-protests-george-floyd-uk-belgium
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=358160
- https://newjimcrow.com/about
- https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/racist-drug-laws-lead-to-racist-enforcement-in-cities-across-the-country/
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html
- http://www.uncat.org/banner/police-brutality-unwarranted-deaths-covid-19-lockdown/
- https://thewire.in/government/police-reform-funds-ccs
- https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/does-the-indian-police-have-it-in-for-the-poor-11585918414654.html
