The anti-national
Every word in a political vocabulary has an owner, and you can tell who owns a word by watching which way it points. In India the word anti-national points in one direction only. It points at students, at Muslims, at farmers on a highway, at professors, at comedians, at anyone who suggests that a citizenship law which sorts people by religion might not be a good idea. It never points the other way. It has never once, in a decade of nightly use, been aimed at anyone with access to the Prime Minister's office.
This is what I have spent years calling communicative inversion. A thing is renamed as its opposite, and the renaming is broadcast until it hardens into common sense, and then the common sense does the work that arguments used to do. Propaganda is renamed journalism. Stenography is renamed patriotism. And the people who are being stripped of their papers are renamed as the enemies of the country whose papers they are being stripped of. The inversion is not an accident of sloppy language. It is the product. It is manufactured with the same care as a soap advertisement, and by many of the same people.
So let us take the word seriously for a moment. Not rhetorically, not as an insult, but as a category with a meaning. If anti-national means anything at all, it must mean something like this: acting in ways that damage the security, the institutions, and the collective capacity of the nation. Not disliking the government. Not criticising a minister. Damaging the country itself.
Apply that test honestly and see where it lands.
In January 2021 the Mumbai Police annexed to a supplementary chargesheet running to some three thousand four hundred pages a set of WhatsApp conversations recovered from the seized phone of Partho Dasgupta, the former chief executive of the Broadcast Audience Research Council, the body that measures television ratings in India. Hundreds of pages of those chats are purportedly between Dasgupta and Arnab Goswami of Republic TV. Goswami has denied wrongdoing and the matter remains contested in court. But the contents were widely reported, and they are worth setting out plainly, because if these words had been found on the phone of a student in Jamia rather than the phone of a ratings executive, the country would have been told for six years that it had caught a terrorist.
On the twenty third of February 2019, according to the transcript, Goswami told Dasgupta that something big was about to happen. Three days later, on the twenty sixth of February, Indian Air Force jets struck Balakot. The day after the strike, when Dasgupta asked whether that was the thing he had meant, the reply was that there was more to come. Elsewhere in the same conversations there appears advance knowledge of the abrogation of Article 370. And on the fourteenth of February 2019, within hours of a suicide bomber killing forty personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force at Pulwama, the anchor is reported to have messaged the ratings chief about what the attack had done for his numbers.
Sit with that last one for a moment, because everything else is detail. Forty men were scraped off a highway in Kashmir, and the alleged content of the conversation that followed was about audience share.
There is more, and it is squalid rather than dramatic. The ratings chief asking the anchor to help him secure a post as media adviser in the Prime Minister's office. The anchor referring to his own proximity to that office and to the information and broadcasting ministry. The ratings chief asking the anchor to stall a regulator's proposal to make viewing data public, and the anchor indicating he could arrange it. The chargesheet noting silver and expensive watches recovered from the ratings chief's home, which the police allege were given as inducement to rig the numbers. Again, all of it denied, all of it contested, none of it yet tested at a trial.
But now notice what did not happen next.
The Home Minister of Maharashtra said publicly that he was taking legal advice on whether section five of the Official Secrets Act applied. A national party demanded a joint parliamentary committee. Another used the word treason. And then nothing happened. No terror law was invoked. No special cell was constituted. No anchor spent five years in Tihar while charges were not framed against him. The country that can find a conspiracy in a WhatsApp group of anti-CAA protesters, that can read a students' collective's minutes as the preparatory stage of a terrorist act, that can hold a man for years for driving towards Hathras with a notebook, looked at a document alleging that details of a forthcoming military strike were known in a television studio three days in advance, and found in it nothing worth investigating at all.
And the timing makes the point better than any argument could. Arnab Goswami was arrested on the fourth of November 2020 in an unrelated abetment case. On the eleventh of November, seven days later, a vacation bench of the Supreme Court granted him interim bail, and told the high courts to exercise their jurisdiction to uphold personal liberty, and warned that criminal law must not be used to harass citizens selectively.
Every word of that warning is correct. It is one of the better things an Indian court has said this decade.
Umar Khalid was arrested on the thirteenth of September 2020, seven weeks before Goswami, and he is still in a cell. Charges against him have still not been framed. In January of this year the same Supreme Court refused him bail. In May a different bench of that court said that even under the anti-terror law bail is the rule and jail the exception. In July a trial court refused him again. Six years, no trial, no verdict, and no special sitting convened at short notice to consider whether the heavens might fall if the man were released.
So personal liberty in India is not a right. It is a service, and the quality of service depends on your proximity to power. This is the inversion in its purest form. The nation's highest court speaking beautifully about liberty for a man who broadcasts on behalf of the state, and speaking procedurally about the same liberty for a man who spoke against it.
What has actually been done to this country, then, and by whom?
Not by the students. Whatever you think of a slogan shouted at a march, a slogan does not damage a nation's capacity to function. What damages that capacity is the destruction of the possibility of shared facts. A country is not held together by a flag. It is held together by a rough public agreement about what is real, without which no argument can be settled, no government can be held to account, and no election means very much. That agreement is infrastructure, as much as a bridge is infrastructure, and it has been systematically dismantled by an industry that discovered it could make more money from hatred than from news.
Consider the actual output. A lynching in Palghar turned into a communal story it was not. A religious gathering during a pandemic turned into a nationwide campaign against a minority. A young actor's death turned into months of trial by television, for which the Bombay High Court had to remind broadcasters what the law of contempt is for. And underneath all of it, allegedly, the numbers themselves being rigged, which means the advertisers were defrauded, the industry's measurements were corrupted, and the entire market that funds Indian journalism was poisoned at the root.
Compromised security. Corrupted institutions. A public deliberately made incapable of knowing things. If that is not the meaning of anti-national, then the word has no meaning, and we should stop pretending it ever did.
Which is, in the end, exactly the conclusion I want.
I do not want this word. I do not want anyone jailed for terrorism because of what they said on television, and I do not want an Official Secrets Act prosecution to become the left's revenge fantasy, because a state that can imprison Umar Khalid on a chargesheet can imprison anyone on a chargesheet, and the answer to a bad law is not a better list of defendants. To pick up the word and hurl it back is to agree that the word should exist and that someone should get to decide who it lands on. That is their game and their frame, and playing it well is still losing.
But the record should be read out anyway, and it should be read out precisely, because for ten years this country has been told a story about who was destroying it, and the story was manufactured by the people doing the destroying. They wrapped themselves in the flag on Monday and allegedly sold the movement of the air force for ratings on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday they went on air and called a twenty two year old with a placard the enemy of India.
The young people at Jantar Mantar understood this without needing the theory. They did not call anyone anti-national. They just turned the cameras around and pointed them at the men who had been holding them.