India After Modi

by Ajay Gudavarthy

  ‘Celibacy Syndrome’

  Anomie is yet another dimension of the excess of social/political life. Finding meaning has become all the more difficult. Life has become one of a combination of uncertainty with predictability. The more we strive for a certainty, the more it seems to become predictable. It has always been a hard choice to balance freedom and stability or security, as it is between a comfortable life and a meaningful life. The collapse of shared concerns, especially after the neo-liberal reforms that we referred to in our discussion about fraternity in the previous pages, has made meaning-generating activity and civic communication a casualty. While the meaning of the spiritual kind has become untenable or may be unreachable, the meaning of the pragmatic kind has become too oppressive, banal, and suffocating. Modern life cannot even be assessed in its elementary sense without referring to stress—an inexplicable experience without a point of beginning or ending. It is simply a part of the being. It has, in fact, become a way of relating to the world around us.

  ‘Time poverty’ has become a thickly collective phenomenon that cuts across class and the rural-urban divide. Individuals, and not merely the corporate, are working many times more than the eight-hour equilibrium between work, rest, and leisure, yet anxiety and ‘fear of fall’ have become inescapable in our workplaces and institutional life. In Japan, today, the stress explodes itself in intensely dark ways, where the ‘celibacy syndrome’ is becoming a norm, which they refer to as ‘Sekkusu Shinu Shokogum’ (modernity seems to have organically delivered what Gandhi arduously pursued through his experiments in Brahmacharya).46 There is a visible ‘flight from human intimacy’. Work from a means of self-actualization is becoming a model of loss of the self. It only gets further complicated with life outside of work imagined without social security measures such as pension and care of the old and aging. It is, therefore, not strange that while in India, we dither from the retirement age being reduced, in France, they were on streets when the state asked workers to prolong and extend the age of retirement to 65 years. ‘Burnout’, a term not many of us had heard when we joined jobs, is now commonly understood as what leads to exhaustion, detachment, and feelings of ineffectiveness. ‘Time poverty’ is the afterlife of the way class differences work themselves. Can radical Left politics work in these new registers to recast class from its drab structural dimension to bring it into its more felt experiential dimension? Critical theorist Nancy Fraser incisively points out that ‘socialism is cognitively compelling but experientially remote.’47 Will bringing in issues such as anomie and ‘time poverty’ bring forth a dimension of class that can reinvigorate class politics related but different from the way we understood it all along? Can it also point to a different kind of class politics that can hold appeal to the majority—99% as the Occupy Movement in the US put it,48 cutting across differences between the petite bourgeoisie, and the working class, a difference the Left struggled to bring together—as part of radical politics?

  ‘Age of Anger’

  Anger is yet another phenomenon that is present all around us, visible as road rage, growing crime, and violence and in the way multitudes erupt so naturally and spontaneously from the Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring to protests against Rohith Vemula’s suicide. Nobody organizes these protests; they are leaderless and erupt against something that we ‘feel’ is deeply wrong with the way our ‘society’ or ‘system’ works. The anger needs a trigger and many a time has no specific target. There is often, in Freud’s words, ‘transference’ of this anger unto anybody that we may find to be weak and vulnerable.49 It could be ‘Nirbhaya’, it could be an annoying small car driving next to a sport utility vehicle (SUV) or a shootout over a parking spot in an affluent south Delhi colony, or the regular shootouts in schools in the US. The ‘Age of Anger’ that we have collectively inhabited, as Pankaj Mishra pointed out in his recent book,50 is a mode of coping with the fast-paced changes that globalization has initiated. Is anger merely an after-effect of a structural feature of our times or a potential source for meaningful political mobilization? Can it be weaned away from anger against the weak and relative inequalities internal to caste and religious communities to more systemic aspects of modern life? Can this be an important dimension of ‘Left populism’, unlike what it has been so far contributing exclusively to the rise of Right-wing populism across the world?

  Finally, there is a vice-like grip of loneliness that is growing among the old and the young alike. We collectively inhabit an era of hyper-recognition. The more we are incapacitated of enjoying anonymity and solitary existence, the more we are vulnerable to the vagaries of loneliness.51 The spaciousness of anonymity that allows us to self-reflect is losing ground to the demands of finding a self in being recognized by the other. French philosopher Michel Foucault once observed that as we fail to externalize our ‘natural impulses’, we are prone to internalize them in murderous ways.52 There seems to be an inescapable circularity. The more we demand recognition and love, the less of it we find. How do we move back to an ‘original position’ of finding ourselves without being interrupted and contaminated by the outer world? Accumulated loneliness only makes us collectively incapable of making the world a more secured home that we persistently aspire for. Homelessness and ‘nomads of the present’ that reside in the deeper recesses of individual lives mark our social spaces. Loneliness has become an epidemic, prompting the government of UK to start for the first time an exclusive Ministry of Loneliness.53

  These phenomena put together add up incrementally to a social crisis that is failing to find a political language for itself. We seem to open the social spaces across social hierarchies, with, of course, an imprint of the hierarchies overlapping with the more generic spread. How do we retrieve the generalness of this crisis without slighting or clouding the known social hierarchies is an insurmountable challenge of our times. Future of politics and democracy might need to be radically recast and populism, as we are witnessing, can well be the initial and a preliminary signpost signifying an interregnum as Gramsci pointed out, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.54

  India’s Oscillating Public Sphere

  One of the intriguing aspects of the public sphere in India is its capacity to hold evidently self-contradictory practices and moments together, rather unproblematically. One such moment is the one under the current version of Right-wing populism where it appears that growing communal discourse, as part of the public discourse, is included in the political regime campaigns such as Love Jihad and Ghar Wapsi. While all of these stand for growing communal polarisation and religious intolerance, you have films such as PK and Bajrangi Bhaijan gaining astounding success at the box office.55

  A film like PK offered not only an unabashed critique of the godmen but also depicted Hindu gods in a poor light, even if it was meant symbolically. Even as protests by Bajrang Dal and many other self-fashioned Hindu outfits were on the increase, people have returned to the theatres in bigger numbers. Now, what explains this strange conjuncture between the growing popularity of a party such as the BJP and Narendra Modi—who, not long back, was symbolized as the ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’, a response to a polarised political campaign in the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Tripura and the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 that they won convincingly—and the success of a film that seems to take a dig at everything is what the politics of the moment seems to stand for.

  There is something that needs to be deciphered in the public culture of the nation, in order to understand what is in store for the future of democracy in India. Even as we are lamenting that social life and popular culture in India have grown increasingly intolerant and have become majoritarian in nature, there is sufficient evidence that this phenomenon also has its own antidote in that very popular culture. The most obvious explanation offered in popular perception in order to explain this strange conjuncture is that possibly, Hindus are innately toleran
t, and Hinduism is a ‘way of life’ that celebrates composite culture. If Hindus are becoming intolerant, then the reasons have to be sought in external social and political conditions and not in the way the religion is organized.

  Whatever might be the merits and demerits of this dominant understanding, it needs to be acknowledged that the public sphere in India—even as it is getting increasingly communalized and polarized—also shows traits of silent resistance to monolithic political constructions. This is more than evident in the way the strategy of VHP to build the statues of Godse across the nation has been rejected. The legacy of Gandhi continues to find resonance in the popular memory of the Hindus in India.

  No Visible ‘Islamophobia’

  While there might be growing distance and ‘othering’ of the Muslims, as it appears in the receding space in the public domain or spatial ghettoization of the Muslims in housing in urban metropolitan cities, there is also enough evidence to show that there is no visible ‘Islamophobia’ in India that resembles the kind of fear-psychosis visible in the US or Europe. Muslims are not made self-conscious or remain suspected outside the security discourse of the state. There might be more of cultural subjugation but not a collapse of a common sense view of an everyday Muslim visible at the marketplace. The kind of death of common sense that is visible in the way citizens in the West have responded to growing Islamophobia is not self-evident either in the smaller towns or rural hinterlands of much of India. The rise of far-Right wing groups or even BJP has been checkered and is never uniform. In fact, one could recall that BJP lost elections in UP soon after their campaign for building the Mandir in Ayodhya.

  What the Indian public sphere is witnessing instead is ‘contextual communalism’ that emerges from the complexities of its diversity and political construction of communities in terms of being the majority and minority groups, wedded to the electoral processes and significance of political power linked to the discourses of nationalism. For instance, in course of an election, Muslims are offered candidature in constituencies where they constitute a sizeable portion of the electorate. The rationale being Muslims should and rather would vote en-block for a Muslim candidate making his/her candidature viable and bring in a winnability factor to their candidature. This is a legitimate way for them to gain political representation when they are in a numerical minority. However, this strategy of en-block voting is perceived by the majority community as ‘vote-bank’ politics and communal polarisation initiated by the minority community. Hindus, on the contrary, have been arguing for some time now that ‘if Muslims can vote en-block to a Muslim candidate what is wrong in Hindus voting en-block for a Hindu candidate’.56 The counter-argument to this by the Muslims is that Muslims are willing to vote for all political parties (except BJP)57 when they offer tickets to Hindu candidates, but Hindus are unwilling to vote for Muslim candidates, irrespective of the political party that offers them the ticket. This is the kind of a logjam that perpetuates contextual communalism, where while the minority community demands a level playing field, the majority community demands equalization and standardization of norms and procedures. The secular discourse of the last few decades seems to have failed in arresting the anxieties of the majority Hindu community, without which it would be rather difficult to imagine a shared public domain between different religious communities in India. The micro-dynamics of growing communally polarized political processes need to be foregrounded in order to imagine more shared public spaces. The success of the movie PK reminds us that the opportunity for this within the socio-cultural imaginaries of the majority Hindu community perhaps is not yet a lost cause.

  Social Ethics of Violence and the Maoist Movement in India

  Political mobilization all over the world is undergoing transformations. There are two major dimensions; first, is the general ‘decline in popular/progressive mobilization’ by various subaltern social groups. In India, for instance, an active farmer’s movement of the 1980s is replaced by a spate of farmer suicides all across the countryside. Similarly, there is a collapse of the worker’s movements and the emergence of demobilized social groups such as the migrants, urban poor, and the growing informal and unorganized sector. The streets vacated by the subaltern groups have been taken over by the middle classes mobilizing street protest around issues of crime, sexual violence, and corruption. Subaltern groups have either become invisible or moved to ‘contextual negotiation’ with governmental mechanisms of the state as against resistance.

  The second important change that is visible is that popular/progressive mobilizations took the shape of street protest and not ‘mere’ negotiation—explosive and episodic rather than sustained and organized. Any number of examples—beginning with the Occupy in the US, Arab Spring in the Middle East, Brazilian Spring in Latin America to India against Corruption in India—have all been short-term, single-issue based, and petered out making it difficult to explain what exactly has been their impact. Did they have any policy impact? Did they change the terms of the discourse of electoral politics? Did they create a new kind of political consciousness? There can be no definitive answers to these questions. In spite of the fact that these movements were addressing the majority, ‘99% as against 1%’ and forged cross-class alliances and invented post-constituency-based mobilizations. Occupy in the US failed to shake up corporate capitalism and instead lead to the election of a more corporate-oriented Donald Trump. Arab Spring reinstituted the authoritarian regime of the Brotherhood, and India against Corruption brought back a resurgent Right wing BJP into power with a two-thirds majority.

  It is in this kind of a political milieu that Maoist politics in India have been swimming against the tide and continuing with the mobilization of the ‘basic classes’, including the landless poor and Adivasis of the rural hinterlands of India. The Maoist movement has been a sustained struggle for the last 50 years and is a struggle for the overthrow of the state and capitalism. It continues to speak in the language of an alternative model of development, redistribution of resources, and collective ownership and abolition of private property. The Maoist movement inhabits what has come to be referred to as the ‘Red Corridor’ from south to central and north of India, which Advani had famously referred to as ‘from Tirupati to Pashupati’. The previous prime minister, Mr Manmohan Singh, referred to it as the ‘greatest internal security threat’.58 It is in this context that the recent volume that I edited titled Revolutionary Violence versus Democracy: Narratives from India attempts to look into how and why Maoist politics sustain and whether their continued use of violently armed strategy is the best available means to bring about large-scale structural transformation.

  The first section of the book laid out the available justifications for a continued armed rebellion in India. It includes arguments of Maoist politics signifying an unflinching attempt to constitute an alternative social ethics of organizing society around collective as against competitive modes of existence, including the question that demands us to think of what inspires young Adivasis to be prepared for death as a way of living, sacrifice one’s own life for a better future for generations, and a trust in the altruism of the ‘human species’; a language that most of the mainstream politics has abdicated long back and looks at it at best as utopian and at worst as infantile adventurism, reminding us of the Gramscian dictum ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.59 Maoist politics in this sense represents the revolutionary optimism of new possibilities, and as Gramsci would remind us—the uncertainty of politics ought to be comprehended in the context of new possibilities without slipping into cynicism.

  Dialectical Materialism or Mechanical Idealism?

  Maoist politics highlights ‘structural violence’ in its use of direct physical violence. The hidden and routinized violence of the state and capital provide the political and moral justification for direct violence and the agenda of the violent overthrow of the State. While this may be true, does it not constrain itself into a paradigmatic imagination of the revolution
ushered by French Revolution? Can there be no alternative way of imagining revolutions other than through forceful overthrow of the state? Did Marx and Engels also see the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism in societies that have democracies in place of authoritarian rule? What then can be the new equation between revolutions and democracies? One of the contributions in the volume argues that ‘no revolution so far has confirmed to basic Marxist scheme and is in sight of happening in future. Capitalism has creatively reconfigured itself and is flexible enough to do it because it does not care for ideological fidelity as the revolutionaries do. It is a paradox of the kind that the behaviour of bourgeoisie reflects dialectical materialism while that of proletarian revolutionaries, mechanical idealism’.60 Does ‘mechanical idealism’ signify commitment and sacrifice in the everyday functioning of the Maoist politics?

  Maoist politics working within the contours of popular democracies have invented newer strategies of insurrection. It is not merely about the overthrow of the state but the process of building revolutionary consciousness. One such strategy of the Maoist is that of kidnap. Maoist movement in India abducted bureaucrats, powerful political leaders, and public representatives as a symbolic protest against their ‘anti-people’ policies. In almost all of these, the Maoists released the hostages without harming or killing them.61 The point was to highlight issues that were neglected by the state and the media. This they believed was one way of wedging open the corridors of power that were otherwise shut to the most deprived of social groups. In many such kidnaps, the Maoist movement and the issues they nurtured were thrown into the front pages and prime time of the electronic media. Maoists furthered demonstrated that the state was unwilling to respond to these issues in spite of violent reaction, reflecting the indifferent attitude of state officials.