The government’s decision to invoke the National Security Act (NSA) against Satyam Verma and Aakriti is yet another warning that, in today’s India, fraternity or solidarity itself has become a grave offence—that it is now regarded as a threat to national security. Along with Satyam Verma and Aakriti, Srishti, Rupesh, Aditya Anand, Manisha, and Himanshu Thakur were arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Police. The arrests were made after the workers went on strike and protests spread on the streets in Noida. The allegation against them is that they hatched a conspiracy to provoke Noida’s workers to strike work, and that they caused violence. The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has questioned the police claim that they are “the chief architects of the so-called violent movement” and that, “ostensibly out of fear of further protests being instigated by them, they are ‘preventively detained’ to ensure that they don’t act in a manner which is ‘prejudicial’ to the ‘security of India.’”

Those who inhabit the world of reading and writing know Satyam Verma well. He is a journalist, translator, and writer. Among those arrested, he is the oldest. The others are mostly very young. Rupesh drives an auto-rickshaw. Aditya Anand is a software engineer. Himanshu is a student. Manisha is a worker. Aakriti is a theatre practitioner, and Srishti is an artist.

Those who spend their lives chanting the mantra of minding one’s own business may ask: what did these people have to do with the workers of Noida? If they chose to stand with the workers’ movement, surely they must have had some hidden motive—some secret design: perhaps to spread instability and unrest in the country at Pakistan’s behest, or to usher in a Maoist revolution in India.

There is another thing that must be noticed here. The Indian state wishes to persuade us that workers possess no intelligence or agency of their own. According to this reasoning, educated conspirators like Satyam Verma, Aakriti, or Aditya Anand create dissatisfaction among workers regarding their own conditions and mislead them into agitation and violence. They incite them to protest and rebellion. Had people like Satyam or Aakriti not existed, workers in Noida would never have agitated, there would have been no violence, peace and order would have prevailed, and we would be living our lives undisturbed.

This is precisely the argument the Delhi Police had advanced after the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. It accused people like Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam of creating confusion among innocent Muslims regarding the law. According to the police, Muslims themselves had no objection to the Act. It was clever and educated minds like Sharjeel and Umar who spread misinformation among them and incited them to protest. That, the police claimed, led to violence. Therefore, these “conspirators” had to be neutralised to preserve peace in the nation. For nearly six years now, these “dangerous minds” have remained imprisoned.

But before speaking about Satyam Verma, Srishti, or Aakriti, we should speak about the workers themselves. After all, the real issue is their movement, which these writers, students, and artists chose to support. Workers become visible to us only when they leave the factories and step onto the streets. Otherwise, we eat them, drink them, wear them, walk upon them, and live inside them, yet remain entirely unconscious of their existence. In his manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote that the entire existence of the worker disappears into the objects produced by his labour. What, after all, is a worker except his labour? The roads upon which we walk, the cars and buses through which we travel, the houses that shield us from heat and cold—all of them contain the worker within themselves. Yet we never see him. He becomes visible only when he steps out of the workplace to say that even the frame from which this labour is extracted can no longer continue in its present form.

I remember those days in the summer of 2020 when the streets of Delhi were flooded with workers. All the “respectable” people had locked themselves inside their homes to save themselves from the coronavirus. Cars stood motionless in parking lots. But the roads were not bare. On the same roads where one saw nothing but cars, workers moved on bare feet—thousands of them. It created awe, and there were many who felt disgust at the sight of these walking corona-spreaders and lambasted them for being so irresponsible as to be out in the open when they were supposed to stay still. I remember a student saying in astonishment that, despite living in Delhi for years, he had never realised that so many workers lived in the city. Why had they remained invisible to him until then?

Solidarity is sedition?

In much the same way, during April, the people of Noida and Delhi suddenly discovered that workers lived around them. Workers from several factories in Noida came out onto the streets. They were demanding an increase in wages. Before the movement began, their monthly salaries did not exceed Rs.11,000. How can a household survive on such a miserable income? Inflation had shot through the roof. Cooking gas disappeared from the market or could only be purchased in the black market at several times the normal price.

These workers were already surviving at the bare minimum level of human existence. Now they had been pushed to the edge. All they demanded was a wage sufficient to ensure that a stove could burn twice a day in their homes and that their children could go to school. They did not need an intellectual to explain their condition to them. Their own life was their teacher.

It was not only the workers of Noida alone on the streets. From Manesar to Haryana, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu, workers emerged restlessly from their cramped rooms and shacks. Were they making unreasonable demands?

Why did workers have to raise these demands at all? Why did industrialists and governments fail to understand that no family can survive on Rs.11,000 a month? Why did workers have to transform this truth into slogans so that even delicate ears would finally be compelled to hear it?

Should these workers have been abandoned in their struggle? Should other voices not have joined theirs?

Aakriti, Srishti, Aditya, Rupesh, and Satyam are not workers. But they are the people of India as envisioned in the Preamble to the Constitution. If any section of society in India feels deprived of freedom, equality, and justice, then others too ought to feel that deprivation. If people raise their voices to secure freedom, equality, and justice for themselves, then the ears of others should be capable of hearing them—not merely hearing them, but joining their own voices to theirs. It is only in this way that an Indian collectivity can be created. It is through this constitutional sensitivity, this capacity for sympathy, that Indianness itself is formed.

But the Indian state today does not believe in this call of the Constitution. It believes that the nation is nothing more than a collection of competing interest groups. Why, then, should one group concern itself with another? If you feel sympathy for someone beyond the boundaries of your profession, religion, or caste, and choose to stand beside them, the Indian state begins to look upon you with suspicion.

Why, after all, should a student feel pained by the suffering of farmers? Why should a Hindu feel disturbed by the oppression of Muslims? Why should middle-class individuals participate in workers’ movements? Why were Sikhs running langars at the protests in Shaheen Bagh? Why did writers and artists express outrage after the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq? Why was Disha Ravi, living in Karnataka, speaking in support of the farmers of Punjab and Haryana? Why were figures like Rihanna and Greta Thunberg raising their voices for Indian farmers? Surely, they say, there must be some global conspiracy behind all this.

Thus, the solidarity—the fraternity—created in this way is itself treated as a crime. The kind of Indianness that emerges from such solidarity is something the present government deeply distrusts and dislikes.

Yes, the Indian state today seeks only one kind of unity. And that unity is not founded upon sympathy, but upon hatred. It seeks to forge a Hindu unity by binding together Hindu farmers, workers, industrialists, and salaried classes with the adhesive of hatred directed against Muslims and Christians.

Satyam Verma, Aakriti, and Srishti are writers and artists. They seek to create human solidarity not through hatred but through fraternity. Their question is simple and profound: can we transcend our language, religion, profession, class, and nationality in order to create a shared humanity?

Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University and writes literary and cultural criticism.

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