Global Experiments against Mass Violence
We need to look at how other nations that have faced similar problems of violence and hysteria, and political regimes that used violence with impunity have attempted to deal with them in order to avoid repeating such historical moments. Let me draw on examples from different contexts and continents.
On 26 October 2014, over 4,000,000 Neo-Nazis held a massive demonstration in the city of Cologne in Germany. It was the biggest rally in the recent years by the Neo-Nazis, demanding a ‘White Christian Europe’, with immigrants and Muslims as their primary targets. Whatever might be the differences in Germany between the immigrants and the Muslims, there is a collective refusal against the methods of the Neo-Nazis. In a democracy, there are bound to be differences of perspective, but one issue on which we need to collectively strive for is the abject refusal of using violence either civil or military against any community, be it Muslims or tribals. This conscientious refusal can be produced only when we begin to acknowledge and begin to see and feel the unacceptable proportion of violence in our society. Many nations across the globe have witnessed this kind of violence, and perhaps in much bigger proportion. The difference, however, is many of them have evolved political strategies not to repeat them and converted the memory into a cultural resource for the future generations to learn from the historical blunders of the past.
In Germany that witnessed the Holocaust in which more than six million Jews were killed under the Nazi regime, the Holocaust is a recurring theme in public discourse. It is mandatory to teach the younger generation in the schools about the persecution of the Jews with all its gory details, from the mode of planning to execution, including a mandatory visit to the concentration camp in Auschwitz in Poland, where the Nazi regime carried out its ‘Final Solution’. Denial of the Holocaust is illegal in many of the European countries including Germany, Austria, Romania, and Hungary. Many other countries have laws that have criminalized genocide denial. Many of these nations have built a range of memorials and museums to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. Many of the streets in several countries and hundreds of cities and towns have laid stolpersteine (which literally means ‘stumbling block’ or tripping stone), a cobblestone-sized metal block installed on the pavement or sidewalks near the residence of the victim that give the details of the individuals who were picked up, with date of deportation and death. The words ‘Hier wohnte’ (here lived) grace most of the memorials, though others (where information of their residence is not available) are installed at the individual’s place of employment and refer instead to the work they did. Walking across any of these European cities, coming across these ‘stumbling blocks’ is a regular feature that sets you thinking about a history that was so dark and a history humanity has to avoid at all costs; as of 20 August 2014, over 48,000 stolpersteine have been laid in 18 countries in Europe.
In Latin America, in Santiago, Chile, the famous Museum of Memory and Human Rights stands testimony to the excesses committed during the 17-year regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. As its website states, ‘the museum houses memorabilia of torture devices used during the Pinochet dictatorship, letters to family members by prisoners in detention centers, newspaper clippings, and testimony from survivors’.81 A total of 2,279 people were executed and around 1,248 went missing during the Pinochet regime; the museum gathered the photographs of most of the victims, which are displayed in the museum.
In Africa, South Africa instituted the well-known Truth and Reconciliation Commission after putting an end to the apartheid regime in order to come to terms with the suffering and allowing an open dialogue between the victims and the perpetrator. In 1996, the South African National Broadcaster telecasted the proceedings of the Human Rights Violation Committee that was listening to the testimonies of various victims and the perpetrators who caused them to suffering. Whatever might be the limitations of such a method, these proceedings led to a worldwide debate about the effectiveness of restorative justice adopted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa as against the retributive justice adopted by Germany during the Nuremberg Trials.
India has been witness to many such mass killings beginning with the Partition, to the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984, to the Gujarat pogrom against the Muslims in 2002, and countless shameful massacres against the Dalits. In the northeast, there is violence of massive proportion leading to the 14 yearlong fast by Irom Sharmila for the repeal of AFSPA. In central India, there is a continued witch-hunt of the tribals in the name of ‘Operation Green Hunt’ and ‘Salwa Judum’, and there have been dastardly incidents of violence against the Christians including the cold-blooded murder of Graham Staines and his two very young children in Odisha. The list is endless, but what is even more disturbing is the collective refusal to debate this openly. How do we come to terms with this kind of violence, and more importantly, how do we put an end to mass violence? The debate often veers towards either a refusal to acknowledge or leave alone the prosecution of individuals, organizations, and officials responsible for this kind of violence, often in the name of maintaining ‘law and order’, or it gravitates towards a puerile debate in the media in contrasting the anti-Sikh riots to the Gujarat carnage. The collective conscience of the society has refused to wilt under the weight of the massive proportion of violence that has become routinized and thereby somewhat invisible; if anything, there seems to be a silent sanction in the name of nationalism. Will there be a possibility to draw on some of these global experiments in abating mass violence by arousing collective conscience and guilt or will they prove to be ineffective in light of our history and entrenched popular culture? These remain daunting questions. Let me now turn to the question of popular culture in order to probe this further.
Populism and Popular Culture: Are Muslims the Safest Enemy to Have?
Majoritarianism in India is being constructed faster than we can imagine. There is not only a large-scale celebration of Hindu religious symbols in the public sphere but also a deeper consent, both active and tacit, for the violence, as we elaborated in the previous essay, against the minorities, especially Muslims. Today, a cross section of castes and classes does not seem to be perturbed by the kind of lynchings that we have visualized as part of the ‘new normal’ under the current political regime. This is made possible through a commonsensical binary between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that is right at the core of the way populism works.
Among many other reasons, Muslims are the safest enemies to have in India. Muslims are a numerical minority; they are socially backward and economically marginalized. An odd 15 per cent of the population stands no chance to win against a majority of Hindus who constitute over 80 per cent of India. It would be an exaggeration to think that an average Hindu in India isn’t aware of this fact, yet we continue to vilify Muslims as a grand-stand enemy that threatens the security of the nation. Perhaps, this is precisely why there is such an easy consent and consensus in making the Muslim the symbol of all that is wrong with this nation. He is an enemy who is vanquished even before the war has begun. Where does this kind of a cultural sensibility come from? Has it got anything to do with popular culture as we imagine it?
‘Good’ against ‘Evil’
Among various other sources, including a ‘global war on terror’, is what I would refer to as the ‘epic consciousness’ – the mass/popular consciousness that we have collectively imbibed in course to getting socialized through the epics, such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In epics, the result of the war on evil is known even before there is a war. There is no question of Lord Ram losing the battle to Ravan, or in the Mahabharata, there is no chance of the Pandavas losing the battle to the Kauravas. Yet, the epics interest us immensely. The stories within the stories interest us because we know the larger narrative. The end interests us not because the story has a surprise twist but precisely because it offers us the comfort of being predictable. The narrative structure offers twists with stories within the story but kee
ps the larger storyline linear, simple, and predictable. The victory of ‘good’ over ‘evil’ where the evil is only seemingly and ostensibly powerful but in essence never stands a chance to win.
Such a narrative structure offers us many comforts, especially in times of ‘liquid modernity’ with time-space compression and with growing uncertainty in the everyday life.82 The more the everyday life becomes uncertain, the more we pine for certainty and predictability. The more the everyday challenges, the more we look for the certainty of winning. The narrative structure of the epics allows us the rare comfort of also enjoying smaller defeats in light of the larger victory that is certain to come. The smaller discomforts can be borne with while awaiting the final victory.
Further, it allows us to address the anxieties and justify violence and also be reasonably sure that the enemy is a vanquished one even before the ‘imagined war’ has begun. We can afford to lose a battle or two, as long as the final battle is ours because the smaller defeats do not add up to anything. It is unlike facing a job interview based on our past achievements, it is unlike a tournament of cricket where every loss has its impact on the final result and where every loss makes the series victory all the more difficult and all the more less authentic because even the margin of the victory matters.
Muslims fill that space of ‘vanquished adversaries’ that epics are based on. They allow the majority to feign anxiety, feign a challenge that is not real. Some masculine Hindus take part in assaults with legal impunity and in large numbers against badly outnumbered Muslims (in many cases just one old Muslim) and, in each of these incidents of assaults what we have been witness to is the playing out of this predictable-unpredictability that we are collectively socialized into. These incidents then provide the majority community a sense of victory, sense of duty, and a sense of preparedness for physical battles against the adversary in the service of the nation. The larger narrative structure of the epics is written into the isolated incidents of lynching. While at one end they reinforce the epic consciousness that the majority is socialized into, at the other end, they also provide the symbolic comfort and certainty that the modern life has robbed us of.
The imagined homogeneity, virility, unity, aggressiveness, and physicality of the ‘Muslim body’ is the ideal ‘other’; it fills in the empty space in the structured narrative of the epics. The fluidity of identities that modernity ushers in brings with it an anxiety of loss of identity, and the symbolic representation of the Muslim as the solid and a unified entity allow the majority to carve out a more unified self for itself. Muslim is also, therefore, the ‘other’ of the ‘liquid modernity’ helping us to redefine who we are as a collective. Since a positive unity becomes difficult in the complexity that modernity ushers in, the imagined Muslim simplifies that complexity into a palpable simplification of generating a unified Hindu identity.
The important point, though, is that this adversary comes with a guarantee of being vanquished. This subterranean assurance makes it inviting to the majority to identify with the project of constructing a majoritarian polity in India. Thus, even a peace-loving Hindu, an everyday Hindu, and a middle-class Hindu do not find it difficult to endorse the violence that comes with no cost. It can afford to endorse the drawing-room patriotism and cartographic nationalism that demands of us no more than a cost-free hatred against a palpably strong but essentially weak adversary.
Muslim is the hyphen that joins the comfort of certainty provided by the ancient epics with the unavoidable discomfort ushered in by fast-paced modernity. The black hole of modernity marked by pervasive insecurity and faceless urbanization is reconfigured into a more familiar terrain through the common and collective ‘othering’ of the Muslims. The current Right-wing mobilization in India has rather successfully created a fictitious enemy out of the Muslim and demonized the community that matches the proportion of the epic battles with the assurance of the victory those epics guarantee us. For every loss and every insurmountable challenge of the everyday life, here is an assured victory that we can collectively gloat on. The comfort in times of harsh realities is perhaps too difficult to let go off in near future.
Hyper Electoralism and Pakoda Nationalism
Soon after his election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commented ‘sarkar nahi chalana hai, desh chalana hai’. Under the current regime, the state and nation have become conflated into a single entity. Any difference or acknowledgment of their separation is seen as the weakening of the colossal ‘nation building’ project that the BJP has undertaken.
Democracy is seen only to further this project, and all those elements of democracy that do not overtly support such a vision of the polity are seen as limitations of democracy that need a course correction. Democracy under this vision is essentially understood as winning elections; beyond that, any accountability is understood as a blot on the will of the majority. After the 2002 assembly elections in Gujarat, majority and majoritarianism have gradually collapsed to mean one and the same thing. In fact, rule of law, the autonomy of institutions and individual rights, and minority rights, among other things have come to be seen as diluting the will of the majority. Therefore, the legitimacy of the current regime under Mr Modi flows exclusively by winning elections, and there is very little independent focus either on governance or policy because they are mere extensions of the will that is already registered in the election results.
Muscular Governance and Media Images
The rule of law, whether in Chhattisgarh or Kashmir, is seen as diluting the strength of muscular governance, while minority rights have been re-framed as appeasement and institutional autonomy, be it that of the judiciary, universities, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) or other constitutional or statutory bodies, is seen as unjustified or freedom without accountability. The singular milestone seems to be winning elections, notwithstanding accusations of trying to form governments even without a majority in the Assembly. Winning elections and forming governments are the best displays of the success of muscular governance. Perhaps, for the first time in post-independence history, a regional leader has assumed such prominence in national politics, that too in such a short span of time. Modi’s pan-India appeal, carefully crafted through the media images, can only be sustained through a renewed claim through successive electoral victories because there is very little public debate on public policy and governance in the last four years.
Neither in terms of foreign policy, Kashmir, and employment nor with regard to inflation, growth, or educational facilities has this government formulated anything new worth noting. There is either no policy framework, or they are more or less continuation of the policies formulated under the Congress, including the much-debated Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Aadhaar that were in the pipeline under the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. In fact, Shashi Tharoor of the Congress insisted that the Modi government is a ‘name-changer’ and not ‘game-changer’.83
Modi, along with the BJP, seems to perceive the ability to win elections through fresh strategies as a real-time strength. The BJP undoubtedly is in an expansionist mode, including charting out fresh territories in the Northeast and the South. The BJP is a relatively young party that can afford to be flexible with its electoral strategies and leadership choices.
Secularism without the Welfare State
All other parties have become saturated in terms of their social base, which has left out many social groups unrepresented. The BJP is taking the lead in representing such social groups, including the Dalits and the OBCs, and providing them with leadership opportunities. Many regional parties have emerged in various states as breakaway factions or from anti-Congress movements. All this provides the BJP an opportunity to forge alliances with various partners.
This is also being made possible because the RSS adds a dimension to the rise of the BJP that is missing in all other political formations. While most parties formulate policies with the immediate imperatives in mind, the BJP with the RSS is perhaps the only polit
ical force in India today with a distinct political vision and ideological clarity. They firmly believe in creating a majoritarian ‘Hindu Rashtra’, and therefore make political moves that have long-term goals in mind.
Perhaps, the terminal decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a notable example in this case. The BJP carefully worked its way by initially forging an alliance with the BSP, then compelling the BSP to move from ‘bahujan’ to ‘sarvajan’, and then finally recrafting its Dalit symbolism into Hindu symbolism found in the slogan ‘Ye Hathi nahi, Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hai’.84 The BJP’s singular focus on elections emanates from the new-found space with the collapse of the welfare state after the 1990s. India cannot afford to remain a secular state without a social-democratic welfare state in place. The Congress is groping in the dark with secularism, while it has actively dismantled the Nehruvian welfare state, it wishes to continue with a secular agenda. Secularism in India was a way of pursuing a welfare agenda. By dismantling the welfare state, the Congress undermined the ideological and social justification and roots of secularism in India.
India After Modi Page 9
