A group of eminent lawyers has urged the Chief Justice of India to direct the Central Bureau of Investigation to lodge a first information report against the Allahabad High Court judge Shekhar Kumar Yadav for a speech at a Vishwa Hindu Parishad event organised on the premises of the court.
During the speech, he used derogatory terms for Muslims, engaged in communal rhetoric and expressed his support for a majoritarian government in India.
At the root of his speech was the notion of ‘us versus them’, where Hindus were co-identifiable with India (Bharatiya samaj) while Muslims were outsiders whose values were incompatible with the values of the majority.
Meanwhile, Justice Yadav remains defiant, writing to the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, saying he stands by his remarks and that they did not violate any principle of judicial conduct.
When politically nurtured Islamophobia unites large segments of the populace under a homogenised and uniformised religious identity; when the State foments and supports this Islamophobia through bullying and persecuting Muslims, how do those individuals or groups who are discomfited, disturbed and angered by it articulate their discomfort and dissent with the Islamophobic commonsense of the times?
The availability of media-constituted sites of public conversation and debate, seemingly open to anyone who wants to access that site for the expression of opinion, creates the illusion of a radical democracy of speech.
However, the legibility of speech within these sites of communication is structured and regimented through the invisibilised protocols of conversation that are generated through these sites. Through constant repetition, a grammar of free expression of opinion, dissent and the stating of truths is naturalised through these sites.
Given this, is it not the case that dissent has always already been made ineffectual, if not impossible, because it can never wrench apart or dismantle the grammar of a powerful, historically contingent, commonsense of truth?
Is it not true that dissent can only be articulated within the protocols of speaking and listening through conversations that are organised and arranged in time and space at a particular historical moment?
Dissent takes the shape of jokes that exaggerate common sense while seemingly creating the appearance of criticism. Dissent reiterates what it opposes by using commonly shared conventions and strategies of shrillness. Dissent is forced to be an oppositional reply generated through and on the grounds of that which it opposes.
