To add further bitterness to this overcooked recipe was the rise of Right-wing Hindutva politics. While the Left-liberal politics was largely circumscribed by a language of universal justice, Dalit-Bahujan politics grounded those norms of justice in a social narrative of caste. Hindutva politics today, in turn, is grounding the social processes in the imperative of emotions and human psychology. It is directly appealing and mobilizing the emotional-psychological traits, including that of fear, anxiety, anomie, envy, hatred, and alienation. There is a concerted effort to mobilize common emotions across castes and classes, directing them against the weaker social groups. Given the rampant insecurity and anxiety that have become a way of life, assaults come through as a symbolic and an emotional relief for a social life lived at the edge. The street violence has become a legitimate mode of political mobilization, as suggested earlier, whether it is by the Jats or the followers of the Dera chief. The purported violence and street mobilizations by the Arya Vaishays against Kancha Ilaiah is only a continuation of that process, which had gained currency under the current political dispensation.
Let me conclude with an anecdote. After a talk I delivered on challenges to Dalit politics in Bangalore, a young Dalit activist walked up to me to say, ‘Every Dalit in this country will become a Chanakya and manipulate in such a way till they get what is due to them’. The universalisability of the imagery of Chanakya is symptomatic of the desperate times that have disallowed social gestation necessary for free speech and dialogue. There is a need to draw a new equivalence between fraternity, justice, identity, and mobility in opposition to Right-wing populism, Hindutva, and neo-liberalism. What we have witnessed on the contrary is the shrinking social gestation and a pragmatic turn in politics that have allowed Right-wing populism to lay a claim to universal brotherhood, unity, and commonality of Hindus and an ostensibly humanitarian approach that is non-divisive and non-disruptive. While in effect it may turn out to be hegemonic in reinforcing social inequalities but in course of the political process, it will be difficult to critique it by social groups that have themselves abdicated the ideal of fraternity in pursuit of mobility
Unity between the Left and the Dalit-Bahujans
Even as the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims emerged as a contentious issue under the current regime, the long-standing issue that kept surfacing on the sidelines of the political drama over the last many years is that of the unity between the Left and the Dalit politics. There have been long-standing differences in viewpoints between both the political forces. While the Dalit-Bahujans find the Left essentially caste-Hindu in terms of who dominates and who they represent and find Dalits missing from leadership positions, the Left remained critical of the identitarian politics of the Dalits that have pushed for cultural valorization at the peril of neglecting redistributive issues. The future of Right-wing populism in particular and future of Indian democracy and the way they will play out in some measure depend on whether or not these two political forces come together, if not to merge but to engage in a more productive dialogue. Among others, one site where this tension is playing out in a full measure is the student politics in JNU. We have already discussed how JNU had come under attack under the current regime; however, on the sidelines of that conflict was the issue of Bahujan politics versus the Left.
For the Left-democratic forces, the results of the JNU student elections in 2017 came as a relief with the Left unity winning all the posts to the central panel.20 However, the emerging story is more complex than a simple-minded celebration. The worrying part of the story is that while Left unity helped win all the four posts in the central panel, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) still managed to come second on all the posts.
Even more worrying is the growing rift between the students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities and the Left student organizations. Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) fared reasonably well and seems to have managed to poll most of the Dalit and OBC votes.
Anti-Intellectualism
There was a range of sociological factors that stand common between the discourse of BAPSA and that of the ABVP. Both are steadfastly suspicious of the available institutional spaces. While the ABVP is critical of the open, socially transformative nature of institutions such as the JNU, the students of BAPSA are equally suspicious of the casteist nature of the institutional arrangements. The demand to reduce the viva voce marks to 15%, since the Dalit-Bahujan students believed that in many cases, there was a glaring gap between the marks they procured in the written as against the marks they got in viva, is a case in point.21 It is a different matter that the Left groups on campus have also fully supported the demand, a fact that BAPSA continues to ignore. Similarly, there is a streak of anti-intellectualism in both the ABVP and the BAPSA. Both are critical of the role faculty members play in the name of being progressive. While the ABVP feels that the Left-leaning faculty is ‘anti-national’, including being supportive of radical-Left politics, and are pro-Muslim and sexual minorities, support freedom for girl students, etc., the BAPSA feels faculty intellectualizes issues, ignoring the urgency of the need to provide wider representation to the students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities. For instance, anti-intellectualism takes the shape of undue emphasis on English, and the importance given to maintaining quality and merit. Both suffer from the common feeling of being short-changed by the English-speaking secular-progressive intelligentsia.
Left and Leadership
Left student groups, on the other hand, have equally failed to be sensitive to the changing political discourse and the pressing need for representation being demanded by the Dalit-Bahujan students. Left politics on campus has steadily become election-centric over the years, and yielding any space to groups that do not speak the language they do is seen more as losing space than a political experiment worth carrying out. Fears of the Dalit-Bahujan communities that Left parties use them as cadre but do not allow them to assume leadership positions remain unaddressed.
Meanwhile, it is intriguing to watch that those Dalit students that do get to leadership positions in the Left groups are perceived as being not ‘Dalit enough’ since they do not talk the identitarian language that groups such as the BAPSA are more oriented towards. The general complaint on the campus against the Left unions, not just of the BAPSA, is that they work at a distance, and most of the planning and strategization happens behind the scenes, without taking students into confidence. To Dalit-Bahujan students, this element of strategization comes across as brahminical manipulation. The split in the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) was due to such machinations.22 Left student leaders are often perceived as being less than transparent, less emotional and real, and hiding behind a cosmetic and sanitized Left-Radical discourse that fails to come across as organic.
While the Left groups successfully transform very many students from privileged backgrounds to become more sympathetic to the cause of those coming from lesser backgrounds, including garnering support for reservations, they continue to fail to provide a sense of belonging to the Dalit-Bahujan communities. What should have been an open-ended political experiment is reduced to a debate on the size, support, and presence of student groups as a precondition to forge alliances. This calculative, pragmatic and instrumental way of negotiating historical anxieties has distanced and is gradually weakening the appeal of the Left student bodies on campus. There is an urgent need for the Left and Dalit-Bahujan groups to strike a dialogue outside electoral calculations. In this, it is incumbent on the Left groups to take the first step, including listening to the alternative social logic of the Dalit-Bahujan groups.
The Dalit-Bahujan groups must realize that the identity of being a Dalit at the end of the day is an imposed identity and part of the Brahminical system they are struggling against. The more they reduce the Left students and faculty to their castes, the more they get reduced to being ‘only’ Dalits. To overcome this, Dalit-Bahujan groups must begin by recognizing the immense contribution that Lef
t politics has made to provide them an enabling atmosphere on campus to gain self-confidence and to articulate an alternative discourse.23 Acknowledgment and celebration of these enabling spaces only broadens and does not weaken the Dalit-Bahujan discourse. Missing this historic opportunity will cost all those wishing to be part of the transformative process of restoring dignity to a majority of social groups.
And this continues to be the essential difference with the Right-wing student body, the ABVP, which has been active in earlier instances in abusing Dalit faculty, vandalizing Ambedkar’s pictures, and also in physical violence.24 This common condition will not automatically lead to a unity between the Left and other political forces but it should also not lead to a competitive bargaining in making advances and forging alliances with the Right. Under the current regime, intriguingly, we have witnessed both the play out of social prejudices against the Dalits but also the moves of Dalits towards the Right. It only highlights the layered complexity in Indian politics that refuses to get straightjacketed, and this layered reality is a vibrant source on which Right-wing populism has worked itself.
Caste, Authenticity, and the Oriental Spirit
One of the issues that repeatedly came up in the public discourse in the last four years is that of claiming an ‘authentic’ past. Authenticity is one of the central features of populism on the basis of which a core constituency is built. In this case, it is about an authentic Hindu who lays claim to a grand past. Prime Minister Modi announced at a science conclave that Indian civilization had the knowledge of plastic surgery in ancient times, and the imagery of Lord Ganesh is a clear example of this.25 Similarly, he began the practice of gifting the Bhagvat Gita to foreign dignitaries, though at other occasions, he claimed that the Constitution of India alone is his Bhagvat Gita that everyone else needs to follow.26 On the sidelines, RSS repeatedly claimed that the knowledge in the Vedas, Upanishads, and other ancient texts need to be appropriated in order to make a better meaning of life in modern times.27 The problem that remains is not the claim itself but the realization that many of these texts had reference to the Varna Ashrama Dharma and directly or indirectly justified a segregated caste order. The most controversial of these texts is that of Manusmriti that codified caste and gendered practices. Ambedkar had publicly burnt a copy of the Manusmriti as a symbol of protest against Hinduism, which is otherwise considered as one of the early legal texts that codified the ancient way of life. In fact, a statue of Manu was installed outside the High Court in Rajasthan.28
Manusmriti and Ancient Past
The problem for the RSS is a long-standing one. It struggles with the question of how to create an authentic past with reference to such texts when they have references to the caste system and are rejected by the Dalit-Bahujan. While on the other hand, rejection of ancient knowledge at times also symbolizes Eurocentrism and a bias to Western Enlightenment that refuses to acknowledge a different view of social and cultural life that stands in contrast or in opposition to its own legal-rational order. Secular-progressives in India did not sufficiently engage with this question, though much before them, Gandhi had attempted to do so by reinterpreting the ancient texts to contemporary imperatives. For instance, he argued that Bhagvat Gita was a text about peace and non-violence and war was a kind of symbolism that should not be read literally. Through this, he attempted to address the sensibilities of caste and justifications of violence within the limits of Hinduism and without questioning the way of life it presents.29
The other pertinent question that is relevant and will perhaps become more significant in times to come is whether or not ancient texts represented knowledge systems outside of Brahminic Hinduism and that it is only one variant or one possible interpretation, among many others. There needs to be more pronounced attempts both at the level of the episteme and also in a more direct political manner on how to renegotiate with ancient India. One such text in the recent past was Hegel’s India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts. This was an important book at a significant time. It makes some incisive points on how the Anglophone world has refused to, and continues to ignore, the contributions of ‘far-reaching philosophical systems’ that arose outside the so-called Western traditions. Hegel was one such philosopher, who, the authors of the book, argue suffered from the vices of his era, including that of racism, orientalism, chauvinism, religious bias, the pride of cultural superiority, and anti-semitism. The authors, intriguingly, go a step further and argue that Hegel dismissed ‘Indian thought with acerbic contempt’ because ‘that which was most impressive to Hegel about Indian philosophy also posed a grave threat to him’.30 It reminded him of the painful fact that a substantial part of his cutting-edge philosophy ‘culminated in no more than those precious insights already enjoyed by distant philosophers centuries before’.31 Hegel made great efforts to distinguish the construct of the Brahman—as the Absolute—from his own ‘philosophy of the emergence of the Absolute’. Three decades of postcolonial theory in India and elsewhere seems to have fructified in not only laying a claim to the rich traditions of Indian philosophy but also in mustering the courage to expose the possible lack of magnanimity of Western philosophers in acknowledging some of the contributions to the philosophical systems that could have preceded their own understanding and elaborations.
Authenticity and the Problem of Retrieval
However, the more intractable problem could be one of what I would refer to as the ‘problem of retrieval’. If we continue to teach Greek philosophers, in spite of many of them lending active or tacit support to the system of slavery, or teach and read J.S.Mill as a philosopher of liberty, in spite of his racist attitude to those beyond the Western shores, what prevented us from retrieving the rich philosophical systems within what is being referred to as Indian philosophy. Why did Indian philosophy and systems of knowledge come to be undermined or equated to Brahminic Hinduism? In fact, the authors point out that, ‘for Hegel, (that) the oriental empire was yet to develop its rational objectivity of self-conscious substantiality, freedom, as also the condition of stable, organized law. Again, this presentation reduces the plurality of Indian history, religions, regimes, and politics to those captured in the mainstream of Brahminic Hinduism, which is a partial and misleading presentation of India’32 (p.77). The objective spirit for Hegel is, in essence, the evolution of the principle of subjectivity and self-conscious freedom, which the oriental spirit could not attain as caste divisions reduced the potential to achieve civic and legal regulations. If the plurality that the authors refer to signifies philosophical systems untouched by Brahminic Hinduism, there is a need to both pursue and retrieve those systems and also find a possible explanation for why it did not happen, and Hegel perhaps is not alone in this. The book could certainly have been more enriching in addressing the ‘problem of retrieval’, keeping Hegel as the reference point. In a sense, the book under review makes an important beginning in this direction.
There could be various entry points in framing Hegel’s engagement with Indian philosophy. The authors point out that ‘for decades, philosophers and historians from Karl Popper to Walter Kaufmann have suggested that “the Nazis got their racism from Hegel” or that Hegel contributes to “the formula for modern racism”. There is likely much truth in these views as well’.33 Hegel made dogmatic judgments not merely about India but also about Africa in claiming that, ‘Africa has no history and is therefore irrelevant to his comprehensive philosophy of world history’.34 Hegel’s critique of the oriental spirit having a static nature, emerged not merely from his racist prejudice but also his understanding of history being one with telos. In contrast, Ernesto Laclau points out that ‘history cannot be conceived therefore as an infinite advance towards an ultimate aim. History is rather a discontinuous succession of hegemonic formations that cannot be ordered by a script transcending their contingent historicity’.35 Eurocentrism and racism are closely linked to Hegelian teleology but I am not sure if we have made complete sense of this interface. Would making a ful
ler sense of this interface between an episteme, founded on the ideas of teleological history and universality as a pure ‘uncontaminated instance’ and the proposition regarding a stagnant oriental spirit allow us to reframe Hegelian philosophy in any meaningful sense? The authors, however, make a steadfast claim that ‘Indian thought really haunted Hegel somehow. In this reinterpretation, we argue that it represented a sort of nagging twin that he badly needed to shake off throughout the development of his philosophy.’36
The authors in their reinterpretation point out that Hegel distinguished his own philosophy from that of Indian philosophy around two definitive points. First, around the motif of freedom as against the omnipresent role of caste in all of Indian history, politics, art, religion and philosophy, and the second is the idea of insufficient mediation—dialectical and progressive—as against the stasis of Indian thought. The subject-object relation holds the key to understanding the Hegelian approach to social and historical processes. For Hegel, the actions of the subject, in the ultimate analysis, have to be located, sutured to the objective conditions in which he/she lives in. Instead of understanding human action as a product of unrelated sources, as the authors lucidly explain, ‘for Hegel, what is essential is that all of these are manifold expressions of the character of a community of people, of their Spirit. That is, the linkages between these different (even ostensibly opposed) aspects of human life taken as a whole are, for Hegel, the key to understanding the whole, which the Phenomenology claims to fathom’.37 Thus, Hegel concludes that in a hierarchized society like India, where Brahmins dominate the rest through scriptural sanction, the philosophy they produced must be contaminated, stagnant, and undialectical. The process of history is to finally achieve complete self-knowledge, or in other words, complete social transparency of the historical processes. It is in this that the subject finally enjoys the essence of freedom.
India After Modi Page 18
