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On February 2, the second day of Black History Month, a tweet from a Black woman in the United States unleashed a war of words in India, with global resonance. Rihanna, the Barbados-born U.S. singer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and cultural activist posted a one-liner: “why aren’t we talking about this?!” with the hashtag #FarmersProtest and a link to a report about the government of India shutting down internet services in areas bordering the national capital, New Delhi, where farmers have been carrying out a movement to oppose three contentious farm laws.
Rihanna’s tweet went viral. The climate activist Greta Thunberg, Hollywood actor John Cusack, U.S.-based lawyer and supporter of Black Lives Matter Meena Harris, former adult star Mia Khalifa, Instagram influencer Amanda Cerny, R&B singer Jay Sean, and music composer Dr. Zeus all expressed support for the Indian farmers’ protests in their own independent tweets. Kisan Ekta Morcha, the official twitter account of the United Farmers’ Front, thanked Rihanna for her support of the movement, and countless Indians praised her for drawing international attention to the movement.
But within twenty-four hours, especially after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey liked Rihanna’s tweet, the government of India quickly rallied its own Twitter campaign. Speaking in unison and using an almost identical vocabulary, members of Prime Minister Modi’s cabinet, including External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, categorized the global support for the farmers’ movement as part of “motivated campaigns targeting India.” The hashtag #FarmersProtest was countered with #IndiaTogether and #IndiaAgainstPropaganda. A small coterie of Bollywood personalities and cricket stars (with their own Twitter followings in the millions) was mobilized within hours, and some politicians reminded international celebrities that only the government of India and Indians had the right to comment on the nation’s “internal matters.” “External forces can be spectators but not participants. Indians know India and should decide for India,” tweeted the famous cricketer Sachin Tendulkar in his tweet. This tactic backfired. Supporters of the farmers’ movement who follow Bollywood and cricket, two main public entertainment obsessions in India, criticized the government and their Bollywood and cricket idols. Underlying this government-sponsored campaign were issues of India’s sovereignty and national security. The public was skeptical, as a recent scandal involving a television anchorperson had revealed that these issues were sometimes used as a cover for ethno-religious politics. A day after Rihanna’s tweet, two questions were trending on Google India: “Is Rihanna Muslim?” and “Is Rihanna Pakistani?”
The government of India and its supporters have as much right to present their point of view as citizens and noncitizens of India who disagree with the government’s stance and want to support the farmers’ protest. But the larger question is: In this world connected by infotech and mass migration, is the right to “spectate without participation” limited to ties of blood and soil?
In the first part of this essay series, I highlighted how the ongoing Indian farmers’ movement has catalyzed a national public’s yearning to reclaim postcolonial nationalism. In this essay however I want to go beyond the Indian nation and present three points. First and foremost, the right to peaceful dissent, to register one’s difference of opinion against a government, be it one’s own or in a foreign nation, is key to the formation of the virtual global public sphere. Second, as evidenced by my opening examples, women celebrities, activists, and entrepreneurs are particularly powerful “influencers”—to use a contemporary term—in this borderless global E-world. And finally, when global diasporic communities play palpably significant roles in “national” politics, democratically elected governments cannot “contain” the resonance of national events of significance within the political boundaries of the nation. Voices like those of the Indian American Meena Harris (niece of Vice President Kamala Harris) and British Indians Jay Sean (Kamaljeet Singh Jhooti) and Dr. Zeus (Baljeet Singh Padam) will make themselves heard.
According to UN migration data for 2019, India is the number one source nation for worldwide migrants, who also contribute to its stature as a global power. These ties have long been a basis for interactions between India and the rest of the world. A contentious piece of the three farm laws being protested was the abnegation of the MSP (Minimum Sale Price) that the farmers in India, especially in Punjab and Haryana, are guaranteed, at least on paper, for cash crops such as wheat and rice. The history of these provisions dates back to the 1960s, when, with assistance from the United States, India received a wheat loan under PL 480. Following this period, India ushered in its own “Green Revolution,” and farmers from Punjab and Haryana were at the forefront of pushing India to self-sufficiency in food production. A benefit to the U.S. academy and arguably also to India studies was the acquisition of publications from India by the Library of Congress and their dissemination to U.S. university libraries, contributing to rich collections of multilingual Indian literatures and scholarship in English on politics, economy, history, and other fields. This research is supported through the Title VI South Asia centers in U.S. universities.
The 1960s was also the period of mass migration of Indian intellectuals to the United States, the “brain drain” generation. With the Hart-Cellar Act, better known as the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, national-origin quotas that preferred European immigrants were abolished, leading literally to a change of the face of the United States. Sikhs from Punjab who were part of the British army migrated to Vancouver and California as early as the start of the twentieth century, and many of them worked in farming and construction. Sikhs on the West Coast played a leading role in the construction of the Pacific Railroad. Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian American to be elected to the U.S. Congress from California’s 29th district in 1957, came from a farming family in Punjab. He was one of the very few who came in the 1920s to pursue graduate studies in mathematics. But the 1960s ushered in a new era of students and professionals coming from a socialist India to a capitalist United States, which continues in a very different form since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s under Dr. Manmohan Singh, India’s first and only Sikh prime minister from the now defunct Congress Party.
This history of migration in the context of the changing face of India and the global Indian diaspora is important to remember for two reasons. First, since the very early days of the current farmers’ movement, diasporic Indians, especially those with ties to Punjab and Haryana, were supporting the movement with parallel demonstrations in global cities such as London, Vancouver, New York, and Melbourne—each with rich histories of migrants—as well other U.S. cities with a strong Sikh presence in the Midwest and California. Second, the first political statements supporting the farmers’ right to protest came from Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. In January 2021, one hundred members of the British Parliament asked Boris Johnson to talk to his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. The official stance of the United States so far has been to play it safe, asking that issues be resolved by dialogue while promoting market efficiency.
The involvement of Greta Thunberg in the ongoing farmers’ movement created further chaos, once again revolving around national security issues. Thunberg had tweeted a “toolkit,” which was then retweeted by a 21-year-old environmental activist, Disha Ravi, who was arrested on charges of “waging a social, cultural and economic war against the Government of India.” Ravi was later released from jail as the court did not find evidence strong enough to prove that the toolkit contained seditious materials.
As a response to this, the Indian High Commission (embassy) in London wrote an open letter to the UK MP Claudia Webbe, who supported Ravi, to explain how the government has fully indulged in peaceful conversations with the farmers. Meanwhile the government of India is asking Twitter to follow Indian laws and cancel the accounts of people who are “inciting violence” as part of a well-funded conspiracy to diminish and destroy the carefully built global image of New India.
The notion of celebrities entering the fray of sensitive political discussions and debates is not new. However, the current Indian farmers’ movement explores the liberatory aspect of social media itself, as an alternative space to exercise freedom of speech and to counter hate speech rather than propagating it. The government and officials of the majority political party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have been carrying out a two-pronged public relations campaign. On the one hand, millions of tweets and retweets over the last two and a half months have communicated the benefits of the farm laws. Multicolored half-, three-quarter-, and full-page ads with images of smiling, happy farmers have been placed in all major national newspapers. On the other hand, Indian media and supporters of the BJP have been characterizing the protesters as Khalistani terrorists—referencing the separatist Khalistan movement in the early 1980s, which led to the assassination of the then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi, followed by mass killings of innocent Sikhs that can arguably be called a genocide. Others call the protestors Maoists or simply “fake farmers.”
In response, the farmers launched their own YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account, which together now have millions of followers. These followers do not just reside in India; they are part of the global diaspora, connected with their ancestral land through family and friends, even after generations of emigrating from India.
As intellectual elites from the left and the right have failed to listen to the public and therefore lack the necessary vocabulary to articulate public concerns, the gumption of everyday citizens, especially farmers, to register dissent against an all-powerful government through sheer determination, unflinching faith, and a twenty-first-century movement with an organization that is a marvel to behold is visible in the ongoing farmers’ movement. It is a citizens’ movement supported by diasporic noncitizens who hold India accountable for higher standards of democracy.
Within a day of Rihanna’s tweet in support of the farmers’ movement, which caused a major backlash from the government of India and its supporters, the singer and actor Diljit Dosanjh released a beautiful ode, “Riri.” Capturing the spirit of old Punjabi ballads and folk music, and performing a fusion between Punjabi and Caribbean rhythms, Dosanjh called Rihanna a beauty from Barbados whose massive Twitter following scares people. In a world of Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube, his song could not be restricted to the protest sites or within the borders of India. It reached a global audience within seconds of its release. In yet another song, “Voice of the Farmers’ Soul,” the author Sukhraj recites, “I’m in England, I’m in Canada, I am in America, but don’t for a second think, my dear Punjab, that I do not hear your cries.” The song conveys in simple words that national territorial insulation is incompatible with emotional sociability and togetherness.
In a globalized world marked by mass migration, the farmers’ movement in India has shown the limits of ethno-nationalist containment of “internal issues” of a nation. Drawing on the long tradition of the struggle for free speech through newspapers, but also through literature, poetry, and songs—to be covered in the last part of this essay—the movement replicates India’s image as a global democratic power. At the time of a global pandemic, a global public sphere rises to nurture and reap democracy. It resonates with India’s billion-strong worldwide diaspora, and all those connected with it.
B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literature and former Director of the Title VI National Resource Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Part one of this three-part series appears here.
