Image: Indian Express

Both the parties concerned – the Congress and the Janata Dal (S) – were on tenterhooks throughout and the surreal accounts of the high drama of the past three days read like they could be about the nether worlds of crime and mafias. Offers to buy off MLAs with money ranging from Rs 5 crores and a ministry to Rs 100 crores have openly been alleged but these were the relatively minor matters. Congress and JD (S) MLAs were not allowed to leave Bengaluru as their chartered flights were ‘denied permission’. [An MLA, in fact told the Times of India, in the same report linked here that by manipulating resources, the BJP had ‘caged us’ in the state]. Their security cover was withdrawn. The management of the resort in Kochi (another state, not even ruled by the BJP) they had booked into by the Central leadership, actually backed out stating that they were under tremendous pressure. Then began the trip by road to Hyderabad, where eventually, it was the Telengana police that ensured their safety. Stories of individual MLAs, either being offered with withdrawal of pending cases or being threatened with harassment with new ones have also been doing the rounds. And for those who have been following what has been happening to the AAP MLAs in Delhi, nothing of this should be unbelievable.

The long and short of the matter is that we are faced with a gang of desperadoes who will stop at nothing when it comes to seizing power. That they did not succeed this time should not lull us into believing that they will now fall in line and play the game according to its rules. In a remarkably measured and dignified press conference, Rahul Gandhi underlined what needs to be understood as the foremost challenge today: no institution, starting with the Indian Constitution, is secure under this dispensation. RSS marauders are out to get and destroy each and every institution that has been painstakingly built over the years (despite all their limitations, it goes without saying). It is, of course, difficult to be as sanguine as Gandhi though when it comes to his assertion that the Karnataka developments have proved that the ‘will of the people’ is what matters in India. The fact of the matter is that it has never mattered. Not under Congress rule over decades and not under other more malignant dispensations like the present one. And with the JD (S) leader Kumaraswamy having once gone into an alliance with the BJP, one finds it very difficult to place all one’s trust in him and his ilk. His father, H. D. Deve Gowda, of course, has had a very different track record and one hopes that his presence and Kumaraswamy’s own experiences with the BJP and the Modi-Shah duo will prevent him from doing another Nitish Kumar in the near future.

The real problem here is that we are faced with a desperate army of adventurers who have no stake at all in the entity called India. This army is the RSS – and with a section of it in government, it will stop at nothing in its quest for absolute power. That said, however, it needs to be recognized that the Modi-Shah duo was actually building on – or at least banking on – very real faultlines in Karnataka politics, both in terms of the caste community equations (the Lingayats versus Vokkaligas for instance) and the party equations (e.g. the antipathies between the JD(S) and the Congress). It also needs to be recognized that they have a game plan.

In contrast, on our side, we have a series of ramshackle parties none of which are sure of their own political commitments or that of their elected representatives. None of them knows when parts of their flock will begin to desert them. This becomes critically important in the context of the looming war (not battle, for it will not be fought only in the battle at the hustings) of 2019.

But the Karnataka moment is important nevertheless, for it could become the BJP’s Waterloo, provided we do not get carried away by the immediate but superficial victory. For above all, the Karnataka moment revealed that the Modi magic was wearing thin and, in some sense, popular pressure was being recognized by the parties in question themselves. Once again, perhaps the presence of a personality like Deve Gowda might have played a role in this recognition. After all, in an interview to the Times of India, he repeatedly underlined that this moment was nothing short of penance and/or redemption for his son Kumaraswamy who had earlier been tainted by the deal with the BJP but who now stands cleansed.

But for this moment to realize its potential the new government has to perform and bickerings between the two big parties have to be firmly pushed aside. How on earth can anybody ensure that?  Given our political culture of self-aggrandizement, there does not seem to be any way out.

However, there is one way of at least marginalizing such tendencies, and that is by starting to build a larger coalition of forces and work towards something like a common minimum programme. What does a larger coalition of social forces mean? Very simply, it means a coalition of forces that may not have any significance in terms of the electoral calculus but where social movements and smaller political groups can be drawn into the fold on the basis of a political understanding. This could be somewhat along the lines of UPA I, where the National Advisory Council became such a platform and played a significant role in spearheading major legislations. What provided the first UPA government its wider social acceptance was its conscious effort to widen its social base. This was what became the thorn in the side of the neoliberals and the corporate sector, who saw in it the main reason for the UPAs ‘policy paralysis’ – a euphemism for not allowing unbridled corporate loot.

Politically speaking, the Karnataka moment can realize its potential by galvanizing a process of opposition unity. The new chief minister, H. D. Kumaraswamy, for his swearing-in ceremony has invited the whole opposition and intends to make this into an occasion where the bugle for the war of 2019 will be sounded.

However, the crucial question that remains is this: who will be that figure – that Bonapartist figure – on whom warring groups can repose their trust, someone who is not controversial in any obvious sort of way? Given that our Opposition is full of mutually incompatible parties/ groups – the Trinamul Congress and the Left on the one hand, the Left and the Congress, on the other, not to speak of those between AAP and the Congress, it is unlikely that Rahul despite his reinvented self, can be that person. Nitish Kumar, despite his past unreliability, could have been one such character but thankfully he showed us in time that whatever he might do in the future, he cannot ever be that person.

In an interesting sort of way, the figure of Deve Gowda, despite his age, seems to have suddenly emerged out of this moment as one possible face we might need to keep in mind. As one young 23 year old trans-woman put it to the Indian  Express reporter, ‘it is time for Deve Gowda sir too…PM in 2019’. (She was among those who wanted a pre-poll alliance too, between the JD (S) and the Congress, by the way). Others figures too might emerge in the days or months to come but we do not have much time really and not many choices.
In the end, it will all depend on how much political sagacity the main party of the Opposition, the Congress can display in the coming year and beyond.

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[What Marx referred to as ‘Bonapartism’  and Gramsci in a somewhat similar sense called ‘Caesarism’ can be broadly put in Gramsci’s own words: ‘(But) Caesarism – although it always expresses the particular solution in which a great personality is entrusted with the task of “arbitration” over a historico-political situation characterised by an equilibrium of forces heading towards catastrophe – does not in all cases have the same historical significance. There can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Caesarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb. Caesarism is progressive when its intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromises and limitations. It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph…’]

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

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Journalist Sajeda Momin, covering the demolition, recalls the scene thus,
 

I can still see the thousands of saffron-clad ‘kar sevaks’ clambering atop the 16th century mosque and pounding it with shovels, iron rods, pickaxes and anything they could lay their hands on. I can hear the screeching of Sadhvi Uma Bharti egging them on shouting “ek dhakka aur do, Babri Masjid tod do” through the microphones from atop the specially-built watchtower for the BJP/RSS/VHP leadership. I can visualize the three domes of the mosque collapsing inwards one by one at intervals of roughly an hour on that cold, wintery Sunday afternoon.

Everyone knew who were the dramatis personae at each level – and practically every bit of evidence that would ever have been required exists, captured in videos and photographs. Our present prime minister was said to be  one of the key organizers of the of the Rath Yatra that led up to the demolition and can be seen holding the microphone in his  hands in the photograph below.

Rath Yatra – precursor to the demolition, image courtesy Quora.com

Worse was to follow the demolition. The  demolition of the structure of the mosque was over that day but the process of the demolition of the Indian Constitution that had begun with what was called the ‘Ram janmabhoomi movement’ continued. By ‘Constitution’ I do not simply mean the book that embodies the law of the land but rather the very weave that came to constitute Indian society as a result of the new contract that the document called the Constitution embodied. Constitution, therefore in a triple sense. The document called the Constitution too was not merely a book of laws; it was rather, the only existing, largely agreed upon, vision of a modern India. It was a vision which was put in place through the long process of struggles, debates and contestations over the long decades of the anticolonial movement and finally given shape in, in the Constituent Assembly. There was nothing benign or innocuous about it – every bit of it had to be achieved through a fight. And yet, in the end, that was the document that embodied the vision of modern India. The only political current that stood far away from both the anticolonial struggle and had no role in the creation of this vision is the political force that rules India today.

The RSS and its numerous offshoots were neither fighting the British nor joining in the anti-caste and anti-untouchability struggles through the period since they came into existence in the mid-1920s. No wonder leaders of the Sangh combine think the anti-colonial/ national struggle was about cow-protection. That they neither subscribed to the anti-British agenda nor to the anti-caste agenda around which struggles of that period took shape, is not just a matter of historical record but is also visible in the way its leaders and ranks conduct their politics today. Every single step taken by the Sangh leaders is a step out of sync with the vision of the future spelt out by the social contract of modern India. That the Sangh attributes this vision to the Congress is an expression of its own illiteracy about the diverse forces in struggle throughout that period.

Even though it is conducted in the name of Hindus, there is nothing ‘Hindu’ about its agenda. Sangh and Sanghism is the name of a malignant political machine that seeks to destroy the very body of society in the name of an ancient past. That is the political machine we confront today. That is the political machine that we must fight today with all our vigour.

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

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(T)he economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures etc – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes. – Louis Althusser, For Marx, London: Verso 1979, p. 113

The event known to the world as the ‘October’ revolution in Russia – or simply as the ‘Russian revolution’ – took place on 7-8 November, a hundred years ago. But then why call it the October revolution? Thereby hangs a tale – the tale of modernity, myth-making and of a new imagination of Time.

The moment of revolution, image courtesy libcom.org

As a matter of fact, the Revolution occurred on 25-26 October, according to the Julian calendar (so called because it had been promulgated by Julius Caesar), which Russia, along with a large part of the Western world, followed at that time. It was only in January 1918 that the Soviet government decreed the shift to the Gregorian calendar. The reason was that Russia should join ‘all cultured nations in counting time’, as a decree cited by historian Mark Steinberg put it. Accordingly, the first anniversary of the revolution was celebrated on 7 November 1918 throughout the Soviet Union.

What is interesting here is not so much the shift but the reason assigned for it – joining other ‘cultured nations’ of the world, which in the language of the early twentieth century meant only one thing – the modern West, which had long been setting the norm for everything desirable. Ways of ‘counting time’ too had to be aligned with Europe, lest one be considered insufficiently modern. Spatially, the Czarist Russian empire straddled both Europe and Asia, which had already, in the new reckoning of Time, been cast as ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ respectively. The desire to become modern and join the ‘cultured nations’ was to run through the history of the revolution and its consolidation into the new Stalinist state. This desire was to be manifested in its deep distrust of the peasantry and rural life on the one hand, and in the frenetic drive to ‘catch up’ with Western Europe. As Stalin would say, he wanted to accomplish in a couple of decades what Europe had in a few centuries, compressing time, as it were, into one dizzying experience for entire society. The continuing ‘past’ had to be annihilated.

The continuing ‘past’, often referred to as survivals, has not quite been taken head on, theoretically speaking, by Marxists in general. Many have been horrified at the violence that has often been meted out to forms of life associated with them, both by the processes of capitalist industrialization in Europe as well as by the Stalinist state in its forced collectivization and industrialization drives – and yet they have not quite cared to look at what Louis Althusser called the ‘theoretical status’ of these survivals. Althusser happens to be perhaps the lone Marxist thinker in the West to have squarely posed this question, given his deep engagement with Lenin and Mao’s thought. Thus his poser,
 

What is a ‘survival‘? …Is it essentially social or ‘psychological’? Can it be reduced to the survival of certain economic structures which the Revolution was unable to destroy with its first decrees: for example, the small scale production (primarily peasant production in Russia) which so preoccupied Lenin? Or does it refer as much to other structures, political, ideological structures, etc customs, habits, even ‘traditions‘ such as the ‘national tradition‘ with its specific traits?

Althusser went on to suggest that perhaps, ‘the new society produced by the Revolution may itself ensure the survival, that is, reactivation of older elements‘ in a variety of ways. These could have to do, precisely with the ways in which ordinary people may react to the various initiatives and steps undertaken by the revolutionary regime, as we can glimpse in the instances below.

But that too is perhaps only one aspect of the problem. The larger question, indeed, relates to the very philosophy of history that underlies the attribution of the status of ‘backwardness’ and ‘pastness’ to life forms that are our contemporaries.

Writing in December 1917, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist leader, welcomed the Russian revolution as a revolution against Das Kapital. ‘In Russia’, he wrote, ‘Marx’s Capital was more a book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as a critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type civilization, before the proletariat could even think of…its own revolution.’

Gramsci was writing long before the story was known of the Marx’s later troubled engagement with the Russian peasant communes and Eastern societies like India. That story was excavated decades later by the Japanese scholar Haruki Wada in the 1960s, and brought before the English-speaking world only in the 1980s. Wada brought before us the strange story of the suppression by his followers, of Marx’s four drafts of a reply to Vera Zasulich, precisely on the peasant commune. Very briefly, Zasulich, a former ‘populist’ (Narodnik) when she turned Marxist, had internalized the entire story of capitalism as narrated by Marx. Like most Marxists, she had begun to believe that in Russia too, a bourgeoisie and Western-style capitalism had to develop before any proletarian revolution could take place. But the Narodniks argued that in Russia this was not necessary, for the traditional peasant commune could actually form the basis of a future socialism based on common property. Zasulich’s question to Marx was about this difference of opinion, to which he wrote four drafts of a reply, but ended up not sending them. These drafts indicate he was rethinking.

Later, in the ‘Preface’ to the 1882 Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto that Marx and Engels jointly wrote, the duo conceded that indeed, ‘the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.’

While Gramsci hailed the Russian revolution as ‘the revolution against Das Kapital’, because of its not following the blueprint laid down in that text, he erred seriously in believing that the Bolsheviks had a very different understanding regarding the ‘inescapability’ of capitalist development.

As a matter of fact, the entire Bolshevik imagination – and Stalinism as its most virulent form – was predicated upon a fascination with capitalism and large-scale industry. The inescapable violence of large-scale industrialization, founded almost always on mass dispossession of agrarian and artisanal communities, that was spread over a few centuries in England, for example, was sought to be accomplished within a few decades in the USSR. Even though, for Lenin and his followers, ‘worker-peasant unity’ constituted an apparent article of faith, the peasant really was required only for the Bolsheviks to capture state power.

The war on the peasantry began immediately after the revolution. Lynn Viola, in her fascinating study Peasant Rebels under Stalin, brings to light a long suppressed story of the revolution, where it becomes apparent that in dealing the with the peasant as an exclusively economic category, the Bolsheviks erred from the very beginning. As the civil war raged, communists formed committees of the village poor to requisition and forcibly seize grain from the rich peasants, in order to feed the cities. But the poor peasants too considered themselves peasants, and were unwilling to turn in all their grain to those committees. As early as in May 1918, Lenin declared that ‘owners of grain who possess surplus grain’ but refuse to turn it in, regardless of social status, ‘will be declared enemies of the people’, against whom a ruthless war would be launched.

Undoubtedly, the exigencies of the civil war forced a certain ‘war communism’ on the peasantry in particular, but the roots of the idea lay deep in the philosophy itself: the peasants as a class, with their attachment to land and crop, had to be eliminated and transformed into propertyless workers. However, by March 1921, the communists had to retreat. A New Economic Policy was introduced that replaced forcible grain requisition with a ‘tax in kind’ and eventually, ‘money tax’. The peasant question, so to speak, was at the centre of this retreat.

And yet, this was merely a ‘tactical’ retreat for what was now in the offing was the programme of large-scale industrialization. The only way this could be done was by turning the terms of trade against agriculture, in favour of industry – with higher prices for industrial goods and lower for agricultural. This led to the peasants once again trying to secure their existence by refusing to part with their grain. Indeed, Evgenii Preobrazhensky, a significant leader of the Left Opposition, ultimately propounded his thesis of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ that made a theoretical argument for squeezing the peasantry in order to facilitate accumulation for industrialization. Then, and later during the forced collectivization drive of the early 1930s, Viola tells us, when hundreds and thousands of peasants were deported and dispossessed, the violence was seen as ‘revolutionary necessity’.

And equally interestingly, through these decades, peasants saw in the coming of the Bolshevik state ‘the reign of Antichrist on earth’. The key question that most political histories of the revolution overlook is that which pertains to the great disjunction between the virtually exclusively economic view of classes and the way these ‘classes’ actually see themselves. Viola claims therefore, that the ‘nightmare of apocalypse pervaded the rumours of collectivization. Antichrist and the four horsemen of the apocalypse became figurative symbols in rumours portending the end of traditional ways of life.’

In a sense, such notions of doom, fuelled by rumours, were nothing new: they have been noticed elsewhere in peasant societies under stress of rapid and inexplicable transformation, just as they had been seen in Russian society at large, during the time of the revolution. However, larger questions of popular consciousness are indicated here. Gossip and rumours tied to notions of the Jews and Germans as ‘the enemy’ had been important in what Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii call the ‘desacralization of the monarchy’, just as much as they had figured in the delegitimization of Kerensky, the charismatic leader of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, formed after the February revolution.

Thus ‘dark forces’ of speculative traders, Germans and Jews, and corrupt officials were seen to be conspiring to profit from people’s hunger. Such a perception helped turn bread queues ‘into food riots and demonstrations against the monarchy’, suggest Figes and Kolonitskii. It is a fact often brushed under the carpet that anti-Semitism was a fairly widely prevalent sentiment even among the supposedly ‘revolutionary’ and ‘Bolshevized’ masses. Neither the February revolution nor the October revolution actually can be understood as purely class phenomena. What is more, there is no ‘pure’ revolutionary subjectivity in evidence anywhere: the revolutionary element always co-existed with elements like anti-Semitism in the same social groups and individuals.

Kerensky recalled that as he fled the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917, he saw, written on the wall ‘Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long Live Trotsky’. The graffiti, say Figes and Kolonitskii, was doubly ironic, for Kerensky was not Jewish and there were no Jews in the Provisional Government – although it was often referred to as the Jewish government because it had given equal civil and religious rights to the Jews. And on the other hand, ‘Leon Trotsky (a.k.a. Bronstein) was the best known Jew that Russia ever had.’

Figes and Kolonitskii explain that the terms ‘Jew’, ‘German’ and ‘burzhooi’ (bourgeois) had become confused and even interchangeable in the plebeian language of the streets. ‘Kerensky had become the metaphoric “Jew” – a symbol of the fears and prejudices which had won the Bolsheviks their militant support’, they conclude.

Unfortunately, a lot of celebratory writing on the hundredth anniversary of this game-changing event of the twentieth century continues to be problematic for two interrelated reasons. First, it makes no attempt to come to terms with the ‘past’ the socialist revolution sought to annihilate. For this ‘past’ was actually the predominant present of peasant existence. Despite the predominance of capitalist relations in urban Russia, its society taken as a whole, still embodied a coexistence of different times. Second, this writing skirts important questions of the revolution’s secret history that has much to tell us about the complex relations between classes and the traditions and culture they inhabit; about forms of popular consciousness with all its complex and messy dimensions. Revolutions and projects of social transformation invariably flounder because they pay insufficient attention to culture and tradition.

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

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Rakesh Sinha

As we have repeatedly seen, their ‘having a point of view’ has nothing to do with debate. It is to be enforced by gangs of gorakshaks, anti-romeo squads, hoodlums deciding what will or will not be taught in universities and schools, what will be written, how people should dress and love – and when nothing works, ‘win’ a ‘debate’ like Arun Jaitley claimed they did, by simply arresting the opponents and slapping sedition charges on them. Given this, I do not really address, in person, the ideologue, Rakesh Sinha, who has now made it a fine art to pick up some phrases from the toolkit of what is understood as ‘postmodernism’ by many. Wasn’t it postmodernism, one can  hear them say, that said all viewpoints are equally valid and ‘everything goes’? Wasn’t it postmodernism that challenged the hegemony of Western thought, its logocentrism, its Rationalism (with a capital R) from within that very tradition? Wasn’t it postmodernism again, that by decentering West’s logocentrism, actually gave these RSS-type creatures the gumption to claim that their utterly unsubstantiated viewpoint about the past too was as valid as that of historians who struggled with evidence, painstakingly putting together texts, artefacts and procedures of dating in order to produce a plausible account of the past?

The answer to all these questions cannot be an unambiguous one. If some of these effects did come to the fore once the heavily guarded doors of theoretical and philosophical knowledge were opened, we must certainly attend to the challenge posed by them. But that does not and must not thereby lead us to an unthought return to the ‘Enlightenment legacy’. In fact, it can be argued that in many instances, it was the way modern Western thought rewrote the history of thought (excising Arab, Persian, Chinese, India, and African entirely from that history) in the world, relegating entire cultures to the domain of the ‘irrational’ and the ‘backward’, that constitutes the single biggest factor behind the emergence of what Nietszche would call the man of ressentiment (or resentment) that is, KB Hedgewar, MS Golwalkar, Mohan  Bhagwat, Narendra Modi, Rakesh Sinha…

In a very profound sense, these characters, the resentful slaves, are the most direct product of colonialism – its mirror image, as it were. The pathology of nationalism that colonized and the pathology of the nationalism of the colonized share one thing in common: they draw sustenance from each other and live off each other, just as Nazism and Fascism (pathologies of the first kind) always inspired the Golwalkars, Moonjes and Hedgewars (pathologies of the second kind). That is why , notwithstanding Rakesh Sinha’s apparent critique of ‘the West’, Hindutva in all forms shunned struggle against the British. Their utter failure of nerve and intellect in the face of the power of colonial assault, made them turn their resentment against another target – the ‘Muslim’ – no longer the ruler, but reviled by Christiandom (and Western colonialism) since the time of the Crusades. The rising Hindu/tva intelligentsia imbibed all its intellectual nourishment in terms of the villainization of Islam, directly from colonial/ Christian sources. It is worth keeping in mind that the Hindu intelligentsia of the precolonial (that is, say the Mughal) period, be it Tulsidas or the Navya Nyaya philosophers like Raghunatha Shiromani (to name just two out of a galaxy of flourishing Sanskrit and vernacular thinkers), showed little or no trace of the anxieties about Muslim rulers that their descendants of the colonial period display. Not even about the Babri Masjid, which so troubles Rakesh Sinha’s tribe today!

Present day Hindus are probably the strongest opponents of Marxism. They are horrified at its doctrine of class-struggle. But they forget that India has been not merely the land of class struggle but she has been the land of class wars. – B. R. Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism.

And of course, what was imbibed from the source/s of these anti-Islam narratives relayed through colonial-Christian sources, fitted very well with the fears and anxieties of new intelligentsia (one belonging to what Sinha calls ‘more subaltern than any other group or idea’). That this group, in colonial times, was upper caste despite its cultural marginalization, is a matter the likes of Sinha do not want to be reminded of. And what precisely were the fears and anxieties of this section that drove them to readily digest the anti-Muslim propaganda of the West? The perceived threats to their own social position from the now restive Shudras and Atishudras or Panchamas who welcomed the openings provided by the advent of colonialism. As their hegemony and dominance collapsed, and the Shudraatishudras made strategic common cause with colonial power, the need for Hindu consolidation began to be felt more and more. Hindu consolidation however, was sought to be achieved without displacing the virulent upper castes from their pre-eminent position in society. The fear of the virile Muslim man out to abduct innocent Hindu women and to procreate at rates that would marginalize effeminate Hindu men (a fear still very rampant). came in very handy. He was the villain the Shudratishudras, especially the Dalits should be afraid of, in the new discourse of fear that took hold of the late 19th century and early 20th century intelligentsia.

Having said this, perhaps it is also worth responding to a couple of formulations that Mr Sinha makes. His central contention is that calling ‘cultural nationalism’ (a code word for Hindutva) illiberal betrays Hamid Ansari’s pandering to the ‘western notion of nationhood’. The way Sinha goes about enumerating all the activities of the RSS (except for engineering ‘riots’ or murdering Gandhi) – for instance, its running of schools and ‘1,60,000 social projects to empower the poor’, it seems as if the scale itself is enough to make the argument that the RSS upholds the civilizational legacy of what we know as India. So let us get this out of the way first: it says nothing about anything. At best, all of Sinha’s arguments can be arguments for majoritarianism.

What is really interesting (and intriguing for those who do not understand how a convoluted RSS mind works), is the way he goes on to tell us about nationalism – Indian and Western. Some day, it will also be necessary to do a proper study of what one can only call Hindutvaspeak – which is but another form of Brahmanspeak. Its hallmark is that it never talks directly, it always says something when it means another. But that is better left for another occasion.

What is truly mind-boggling, as I said earlier, is the sheer scale of ignorance of history and scholarship, not to speak of the ‘tradition’ in whose name the RSS and Sinha speak. So he tells us that the Western notion of nationalism is based on the idea of ‘otherness’ which is missing from Indian idea of nationalism. So what is the Indian idea of nationalism? Sinha leads us back to the prithvi sukta of the Atharva Veda, where it is proclaimed that ‘the earth is our mother and and we are her sons.’ From this Sinha concludes (and wants us to believe him) that “humanitarian concern is at once embedded in India’s cultural nationalism and ‘otherness’ is largely missing from its narratives.”

In conclusion, let us note a few things:

1. There is only one quote that Sinha has produced that he thinks allows him to make a sweeping generalization about ‘otherness’ missing from Indian cultural nationalism’s narratives. We might suggest a reading of Manusmriti, for instance, among many others that expound on the varnashramadharma, for a robust discourse of otherness. Ambedkar’s quote as the epigraph to this post is meant to underline precisely this point, as well as to underline that much of the Hindutva rant against ‘the West’ is utterly misplaced.
2. Second, Sinha is either blissfully unaware or deliberately misleading when he makes the above deduction, that this idea as well as that of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, which generations of Hindu intellectuals of the non-Hindutva kind, have used, underlines the fact that the world is a family. There is no question in this understanding of the territoriality of a nation called India – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh along with all other parts of the world are part of the world that the Atharva Veda talks of, NOT the territorial, Hindu tinged entity called India. In that sense, it is Hamid Ansari who truly inherits the mantle of the Atharva Veda idea, not the resentful men of the Sangh.
3. Now, what is it that makes the likes of Sinha and RSS read into the Atharva Veda the territorial boundaries (including say the Macmohan Line) that were created by British colonialism? What except the fact that they are colonialism’s disavowed children? Their anti-Islamism, as much as their idea of India, is derived from the colonial project, with a little bit of fantasy (Akhand Bharat) added to it, that has been the hallmark of all nationalisms – namely expansionist fantasies of colonizing neighbours.
4.  RSS nationalism is then a direct product of the colonial project.
5. Lastly, Sinha believes that the ideal of ‘One People, One Nation’ that refuses to recognize the existence of any religious or any other minority, is an Indian idea. Any primer on fascism and Nazism would have told him that such is not the case. It is the ambition of every nationalism and the pathology of every fascism – and Western in its inspiration from the beginning to the end. That the idea of ‘One People One Nation’ has always been behind the idea of the elimination of the Jews in Germany for instance, is something Mr Sinha would do well to update himself on. In India, all those who rejected the Western idea of nationalism – Tagore and Gandhi foremost among them, rejected the idea of ‘One People, One Nation’ and celebrated the plurality and diversity of India.  In a different way, so did Ambedkar.
6. The Sangh has always been a surrogate of Western imperialism and that is something that should never be lost sight of.

Courtesy: Kafila.online

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Image: Deccan Herald

As it happens, despite the sharpness of Geevan’s comments, my sense, on reading the two pieces, is that there isn’t really as great a divergence on most issues as might appear at first sight.

The key point that is at issue in Geevan’s intervention is the role of political parties and the role they could possibly play in the struggle. I really do not think any one really believes that this fight can be carried out by sporadic movements – or even sustained ones – by writing off political parties altogether. After all, in the electoral arena, where the challenge has to be eventually posed, it is the parties which will be the deciding factor. My reading of Biju Mathew’s piece is therefore, very different. As I see it, the point really is that if we were to simply leave things to the good sense of political parties, then there is little that any one else – ‘people like us’ – can do. Individuals or movements then can only sit back and mourn their fate. I am sure this is not what Geevan has in mind – that much is quite clear from his piece which focuses on the urgency to act, if need be, sup with the Devil. If that be the case, then the key question is what can everybody else, people who do not belong to any political party, do? It should be clear from what I have said that ‘we’ are really nobody to decide whether political parties have any role in this struggle or not. And if they do, what precisely? They select or de-select themselves, entirely of their own accord. But we are certainly entitled to have our own opinions.

I do not want, at this stage, to enter into a hypothetical discussion of possibilities but would like to state my own position here in the light of the experience of the last 27 years. That is to say, from the time that the first rathayatra to demolish Babri Masjid took place and perhaps the last time, some political forces, largely representing the new bahujan upsurge, took a strong stand: Laloo Yadav’s government arrested LK Advani, VP Singh staked the very existence of his government and Mulayam Singh stood tough in preventing the kar sevaks from wreaking havoc.

All that was in 1990. By 1992, and from then on, we have seen the complete collapse of the political parties’ will to fight. The Babri Masjid was demolished with everyone looking on as passive bystanders: the Narasimha Rao government danced tango, while the parliamentary left stood trembling at the fury of the resurgent right; the Supreme Court, like a toothless old patriarch, watched helplessly as the solemn pledge made before it was blown to pieces. The entire system watched the demolition, not just of the Babrri Masjid but of the Constitution along with it. It was in those dark days that we saw the emergence of a whole range of citizens’ groups coming into action. The People’s Movement for Secularism (PMS) was formed on 7 December by many of us in Delhi who had come to join a self-mobilized protest only to discover it being taken over by the CPI(M). No one was averse to joining hands with the CPI(M) or any other force but no one was prepared for the hijack, even at that moment of unprecedented crisis.  The PMS had had important precursors in the Nagarik Ekta Manch formed during the 1984 riots and the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan – formed on yet another occasion of total paralysis, if not abdication by the political class. It was the post Babri Masjid scenario that brought the Movement for Secular Democracy in Gujarat and and similar outfits into being in different parts of the country. Through the 1990s, we were witness to citizens’ groups coming into action, in whatever limited a way they could, in resisting the onslaught. I remember a convention and rally organized by Anand Swarup Varma (formerly of CPI(ML) Liberation and editor of Samkaleen Teesri Duniya) in Lucknow, in the immediate aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid. After the rally, we even met a range of Congress leaders in Lucknow and Delhi, in order to impress upon them the need to act – of course, to no avail. Groups of socialists and former activists of the JP movement’s Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini became active in Bihar. All the while, the attempt was to build pressure on political parties as well. It was a time of despair but equally, it was a time of regrouping of forces everywhere, alongside unprecedented churning, accompanied by an intense self-examination as well. Everywhere, there was a serious attempt re-assess the limitations of secular discourse and practice as well but that is another story. From the side of the political parties, on the other hand, all we got were indications of cautious calculation and nothing more.

It is important to recall here that in 1996, when the United Front was cobbled up after elections and repeated efforts to get the CPI(M) to agree to Jyoti Basu taking up the prime ministerial offer, there was nonetheless a centrist government with the Left playing an important role in it (CPI also had ministers in the UF government). Not one new idea, not one new programme was initiated that could have actually built serious bridges between the Left and the new bahujan forces and set a new agenda for the years to come. In late 1996, the issue of workers rights became entangled with the question of environmental pollution and the Supreme Court ordered the relocation/ closure of thousands upon thousands of polluting industrial units. The issue of negotiating the two questions together rather than in opposition to one another, was undertaken by coalitions like Delhi Janwadi Adhikar Manch, not by the government of the day and the parties which comprised it. For them, it was business as usual – mutual bickerings and power hungry calculations. Within two years the NDA came to power, under Vajpayee’s leadership, with a seemingly more principled platform as far as popular perception is concerned.

The political bankruptcy of the period led to the new alignment and it was under that dispensation (NDA I) that the Gujarat 2002 massacres took place. Once again, in 2002, there was a complete prostration of political parties, across the board.  That the NDA could be formed and that it could survive though the Gujarat carnage with constituents like TDP, JD(U), TMC, BSP, DMK staying on, was indication enough that there was something seriously wrong with the ‘party’ system itself. That those who were opposed to Hindutva and the carnage – the Left being a substantial component of that lot – were overcome with complete paralysis was another indication of the same malaise. Once again, it was citizens’ groups in different parts of the country that swung into action. Coalitions like the Aman Ekta Manch emerged in Delhi and other cities – organizing demonstrations and campaigns, and engaging in relief work. Right from the work of helping run relief camps, collecting relief material, helping people rebuild their lives to fighting their cases and taking on the regime – paying immense costs in the bargain – they had to do it all by themselves. One thinks of individuals and groups like Mukul Sinha’s in Gujarat and Teesta Setalvad’s in Mumbai. All through political parties were approached, their help sought but most often, my impression was that they saw these people as intruders into what they considered ‘their’ domain. Basically, the struggle of these citizens’ groups has been a fight on an everyday level, unspectacular and thankless, with political parties stepping in only when the tide had decisively turned. The NDA’s defeat in 2004 took all parties on both sides by surprise. It wasn’t as if the anti-communal activism of the citizens’ groups and social movements had by itself turned the tide; it was the combined effect of literally thousands of molecular interventions that helped produce that effect. Perhaps, a significant section of Hindus too was disgusted enough by what had been unleashed in their name. An analysis of the 2004 CSDS survey data showed that the BJP had lost significantly among two types of voters: dalits, tribals and lower OBCs, on the one hand and a section of its middle class globalization-oriented supporters, on the other. In any case, the very fact that the UPA government had to create a special space for social movement representatives (in the form of the National Advisory Council) and went in for innovative new legislations – Right to Information, Forest Rights, NREGA – had to do with the recognition of the role of social movements in the NDAs defeat and the charting out of a possible new direction in policy.

In the present context, I think there is a new element that was not there in 2004 and the years preceding it. Biju’s piece refers to the Pinjra Tod campaign but this really forms a part of a much larger new burst of youthful energy that has arisen over the past few years. The anti-corruption movement and the December 16 gang-rape protests were two immediate precursors but really this energy draws from a whole range of other sources including the sexuality movements, new era feminist mobilizations, as the ‘Hokkolorob’ movement in Kolkata or the ‘Kiss of Love’ in Kerala or the Pinjra Tod in Delhi clearly show. Side by side with with these movements, we have seen the emergence of struggles in universities in different parts of the country – FTII, Hyderabad Central University, JNU and lately Panjab University. The issues are different in each case, but their edge is directed against rigid attempts by the government and the RSS/ Hindutva forces to control everything in people’s lives ranging from love to food habits (thus the beef and pork festivals) and worship (thus Mahishasur as a symbol of lower caste/ tribal identity).  The emergence of the slogan ‘Jai Bheem, Lal Salam’ as an index of the new synergies – despite continuing allergies – between left and dalitbahujan students groups and powerful Dalit protests after Una, point towards the arrival of certain powerful new political/ discursive currents. They do not speak the language of nationalism or Hinduism. They have a different take on key issues before us. These may have retreated a bit but they have not died down, waiting for the proper moment to make their appearance again. If anything can challenge Hindutva’s power in coming months, it is these movements. Whether political parties can do their bit by coming together to offer common resistance, at least during elections, remains to be seen.

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

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