Diwali, or Deepavali, is one of
the biggest festivals in India. More than a billion Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and
Buddhists in the world celebrate the festival of lights in which good triumphs
over evil. “Despite its deep religious significance, Diwali today is also a
cultural festival observed by people regardless of faith.”[1]
In this regard, Diwali is like Christmas, which plenty of non-Christians
celebrate as a day of giving complete with the secularized myth of Santa Claus,
Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman. To claim that Diwali is
exclusively Hindu or Christmas is only a Christian holiday—and thus in
resentment to ignore either holiday—violates the spirit that both share. The “Happy
holidays” greeting is an oxymoron, given its underlying motive of
resentment. Yet if this were the extent of human aggression, the world would be
a much better place. The Indian documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing
(2021), reveals much worse than the passive aggression of dismissing a national
holiday as if it did not exist. The violence unjustifiably and wantonly inflicted
by university police on students at several universities who are protesting caste
discrimination and the politically partisan coup at the Film and Television
Institute of India, goes beyond even the harm exacted by the discrimination by
caste.
The woman narrating the film
reads from her letters to her estranged boyfriend, whose family has forbidden
the relationship due to her lower caste. The film opens with a protest of
students at the Film and Television Institute of India. The Hindu Nationalist
Party had installed a second-rate actor as the director of the school, and students
objected to the partisan nature of the appointment. Since the strike began, the
school’s administration has responded by rule-making, doubtlessly as a means of
tightening control. Five students were arrested in a midnight siege, undercutting
the administration’s rationalist approach of rule-making.
The film then moves to a
non-student woman giving a speech. She reports that police at Hyderabad Central
University have been raping and beating students amid protests. That university’s
upper-caste administration went after a Ph.D. student for protesting how
untouchables were being treated in India. Prime Minister Modi’s government
labeled the student an extremist. Other students were barred from the library (which
reflects an administration’s lack of academic values) and their dorms.
According to the speaker, “The students are on the front line against the
fascist government.”
The woman narrating the film is
left wondering about the victory of good or evil being celebrated at the
festival. “I’m not sure which is which,” she says, doubtlessly referring to the
caste system being used as a weapon by her ex-boyfriend’s parents. This line is
like that by Gandhi in which he remarked that he used to think that the Vedas
were truth but came to realize that truth itself is divine so unjust customs are
not divine even if they are in the scriptures. I used to think that truth
was God, but came to realize that God is truth.
The film then moves to New Delhi,
to a student protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A speaker at a rally
claims that for Lenin, democracy is necessary for socialism, and that social and
political change are both needed. The presumption of egalitarianism in Soviet Communism
is debatable, especially in practice, so the inclusion of socialism at an
anti-caste protest may be problematic. What about the students who were against
the injustices of the caste system but were not supporters of Lenin? It is
perhaps not easy to keep a protest focused on its main point. The speaker is on
firmer ground who argues that a low-caste person should be able to get a
doctorate. Students chant, “Stop the violence against students.” The need for
this slogan becomes clear when the film turns from the narrator’s empathy for
the women police who are doubtlessly not wealthy. Are they really so different
from the students? The narrator doesn’t think so, but then images of the police
getting violent, even being joined by the military, saturate the screen as students
chant, “A government of violence.” The narrator remarks that any ideology that
opposes that of the Hindu nationalist government’s ideology is not allowed to
exist. Campus police at JNU go on a rampage, behaving like wild animals under
the cover of government. If the beatings and raping are to teach the protesting
students a lesson, then what exactly is the lesson that is actually being “taught,”
and how presumptuous is it for thugs to teach university students a lesson!
Clearly, university police are not members of a university community. I contend that the students should have shifted to protest universities having police at all. Organizations properly have security guards, who protect the property, whereas governments have police power. Indeed, the basis of a state is its monopoly of violence.
At Yale, a police state on steroids, on one corner on the night I saw the film on campus in 2023. An academic campus is no place for non-academic employees to impose passive-aggressive intimidation as a primitive and flawed deterrent through maintaining a saturated presence on campus (and even off campus!) on a routine rather than an as-needed basis. Amid such encroachments, Yale students knew that the campus had become a police state, and that the university administration was paranoid (or had succumbed to hyper-protective parents).
Perhaps police who beat and rape students should be beaten and raped themselves; perhaps that would teach them a lesson. That goes for the government officials who give the orders in cases in which abuse of discretion by police employees does not account for all of the violence.
In the film, a student speaker claims that filmmakers should not think in black and white stark terms, but rather, in nuanced terms. Raping and beating another human being is hardly nuanced, however, and fortunately the film does not approach the heinous human beings who perpetrate such acts as such. Furthermore, given the government-sanctioning of the violence against non-violent students without the government being held accountable, can Diwali’s claim that good is victorious over evil be believed merely because it is so in myths? The violence shown in the film of police beating students and even taking out a security camera—hence evincing the arrogant presumption of being above being held accountable—makes clear that something more than protests is necessary for good to triumph over evil. It bears remembering that Thomas Hobbes asserts in his famous text, Leviathan, that a person can still act to protect one’s self-preservation even against the state. That right is not based on a state, but is inalienable because the instinct for self-preservation is for Hobbes the main human motive. In the film, the students should have had the means to protect themselves bodily, though of course Gandhi would rebuke this claim, pointing to the moral force in non-violent civic disobedience. Indeed, the moral depravity of the police (and the government) in the film, even more than the injustices of the caste system, should arguably have been the main point of the protests as they went on. The film makes this shift very well, and perhaps this is the main lesson from the film.
