First published on: siawi.org

June 2018

Do you see Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of a worldwide trend of country’s electing nationalist leaders around the world?

There is an international phenomenon of nationalistic and xenophobic forces that are on the rise in the world. There are some similarities, but considerable local national differences that have driven Modi’s rise. The big common element is creating perceptions of being anti-elite, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual, and nationalist. The local national conditions are crucial here though there are international factors, the most notable being the role of India’s influential right-wing diaspora from the UK and the USA.

What can the Left do to counter the nationalist appeal of figures like Modi? What mistakes have the Indian Left made that has allowed Modi and his Hindu nationalist party to gain such a foothold in Indian politics?
The long process of rise of the Far right in India has had its own reasons and history can’t simply be attributed to the failures of the Left. The language of Modi is pretty crude, sharp, brazen, uneducated talk – often intended as a spectacle of shock and awe and that appeals to an impatient public. He is a new type of authoritarian leader – different from the old conservative elites of the Hindu right – but he is very much part of the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which dates to the mid-1920s. The RSS, whose founders saw the Nazi final solution against Jews as exemplary and made links with Mussolini to refashion their organization model along Italian lines [1] has been banned thrice since India’s independence in 1947. Modi was an RSS ground-level activist for more than 20 years and rose from the ranks to become the three-term chief minister of Gujarat state [2], which saw big pogroms in 2002, that received a huge amount of social support. The RSS believes in majoritarianism and defines Indian Identity as essentially rooted in ‘Hindu culture’, that all other religious groups must lend allegiance to the dominant Hindu-ness. This ideology is one of creating border lines and cleavages along religious lines or camps and creating an imagined glorious history of the past of India – dominated by all things Hindu and creating an atmosphere of suspicion towards the minorities and whipping up fear. It is the India version of fascism. Its growth has been slow and molecular, but widespread across India. [3].

Modi’s idiom, that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is part of the old RSS fare, but its dramatic manner of deployment of divisive communal ideology and crude nationalism has had a big social echo in political mobilization certainly starting in 2013-2014. He is popular among large sections of the jet-setting professional class, and also the new entrants to the middle classes who have an axe to grind against India’s eroding democratic institutions, and there is a social consensus for arm-twisting authoritarian ways to deal with social chaos and upheaval.

In the post 1990s liberalization phase, there has been a change in the social composition of the middle classes, and a whole vast new section of the labouring people with poor schooling and limited familiarity with history of the Nehruvian period and the anti-colonial period. The liberalization phase has certainly shifted the social fulcrum to right-wing ideas and neoliberal methods as the route to take. The Nehruvian period has been under attack by BJP and Modi. A mass poisoning of minds – crafting a ‘communalised’ social common sense. The BJP is one party which has had an early organized communication’s strategy, and which has used technology effectively. Upon being denied a visa to travel to the US in 2005, Modi spoke from Gujarat to supporters in Madison Square garden via satellite link video. The BJP used the mobile phone messages and personalized calls like no other party, since then they have a special IT cell. The BJP and Modi regime has engineered a whole new technical ecosystem in the Indian context way beyond anything attempted by other parties. Modi has over 20 million followers on Twitter, they use WhatsApp, Facebook, mobiles phones for spreading their propaganda very massively. A number of very big media networks (owned by tycoons close to the BJP) that spread fake news and target liberals also have been used to great effect. BJP adopted hologram technology in pre-election rallies prior to the 2014 general elections creating a new visual register as if in religious mythology seen on TV [4] . Over the past three years, there is a Narendra Modi App available for phones and tablets [5] and people are being encouraged and pushed into using this app with direct messages from the prime minister. A whole new technical ecosystem, that Indian political formations haven’t been used to.

On paper in statements and in its every day discourse, the left is very clearly challenging the Hindu Right, But, oddly it shares a common thread (with right-wing BJP) of disdain for India’s Congress party, a former ruling party now in opposition. The left has long history of being unable to directly mobilize the public to challenge communalism hands on. It has had interminable debate on whether ‘communalism’ is fascism or authoritarianism (or on the character of the Modi regime). It has an old fashioned ‘Comintern’ (Communist International) style take on fascism. It explains it away simply by pointing at connections to capitalist big business interests. The slow sustained work on society by RSS through propaganda, social work and thousands of schools has had a considerable mind shifting influence and cultural appeal on society in India. The RSS has over 50,000 branches in small towns and cities across India that holds daily or weekly meetings.

The RSS of today has become socially acceptable. It has a wide social influence beyond its membership that has a lot to do with BJP having been in government earlier in 1998, 1989-2004 before returning to power again after 2014. Its ‘communal’ project resonates at multiple social levels through multiple entities – it also has infiltrated different arms of the state, the bureaucracy, and particularly the police. It has a vast project of working through educational, cultural spaces and lately through the media. The RSS runs thousands of schools and coaching facilities and has a large student arm in the university campuses. Whenever the BJP wins political power it facilitates the activities of the full network of RSS associate bodies, which include ‘soft’ ones to those on the extreme right that are erroneously described as marginal fringe groups but are a connected with the RSS nomenclature. Since Modi took power the institutions of national importance have systematically been taken over by members and supporters of Hindu nationalist organisations (The National film school, The State Broadcaster, National Book Trust, Museums, Archives, Universities). Efforts have been made to intensify the communal campaigns around ‘beef eating’, ‘against interfaith love marriages’ and ‘ghar-wapsi’ (return back to the fold) or conversion to Hinduism of the tribals or indigenous people’ and whip up massive anti-Pakistan, anti-migrant, anti-Rohingya, and anti-Bangladesh hysteria. Muslim citizens and Christians are being labelled as outsiders and foreigners with suspect national loyalties.

A large chunk of India’s youth population is jobless and economically precarious, and they are politically targeted, cultivated and mobilized by the right-wing message machines. There is no shortage of social rage and short attention spans, so one-liners were used for propaganda to egg people on to join the fray against the scapegoats. The target pointing and direction setting is usually done by the right-wing activists with love for militarism, masculinity, regimentation, for scapegoating some social group as the cause of the social and economic crisis and lack of jobs. The emphasis is on nationalism, national flag, the borders, against anti-nationals, challenging reality-based facts with fake news. The RSS has in its social mobilizational project often used Hindu religion as a social marker. They have systematically infiltrated, appropriated and re-crafted religious events and festivals. Obscure festivals have been politicised where now national flags, nationalist songs and anti-Pakistan slogans get chanted in addition to religious fare. What were marches of devotees and believers have been turned into events with spectacular loud noise events – with a large number of unemployed youth as participants – promoting a muscle flexing intolerant Hindu culture. The BJP and RSS are heavily invested in this ground level mobilisation. Since coming to power in 2014, the BJP has gone in an overdrive to enlarge its membership and now have over a million members, larger than any political party in India.

The broad left (Parliamentary Communist Party’s and the socialists, the far left and the unorganised open left) doesn’t run schools, soup kitchens, do yoga in the parks, do relief work with victims of natural disasters, or put on popular festivals. It has no counter-educational program with labouring, poor classes or the middle class who are all today also divided along chauvinistic identitarian lines. It’s very characterisation & theorisation of communalism and secular politics remains a prisoner of a minority syndrome – this has been the case for most in the broad left liberal circles … where you are mostly firefighting. There has been a hesitation to push universal secular family laws for all citizens with no concessions on identity.
 

Has identity politics influenced progressive politics in India?

It’s important to mention that the Indian left has a hard time washing an old stain from the past. As the political movement led by Jinnah demanding a separate homeland for Muslims gathered steam in India in the 1940s the communists passed what was called the Adhikari resolution (1942) – which saw the Muslim demand for partition as justified in keeping with their Stalinist take on the nationality question – Muslims were turned into a nationality by this stretch of imagination. [6] They regretted it as mistake later, but there is no big public discussion of this history, and it remains a taboo topic.

The non-communist left has a long history of allying with the RSS and its political fronts. They did it in 1967 to form a non-Congress party government in different states and again in 1977. The communist left front engaged in seat adjustments with the BJP in 1989. In 1991 the far left in its bastions in Bihar refused to move against a communalist BJP mobilizational caravan that later led to the demolition of the Babari mosque in Ayodya in December 1992 by Hindutva activists.

Prominent leaders of the left addressed political meetings along with conservative Muslim religious leaders when the US President Bush came visiting India in 2006 [7]. What was the point? Why rub shoulders with the Muslim Right to challenge imperialism and war? Some on the far left, for instance, have at times joined hands with political Islamists for solidarity, turning the perfectly secular Palestinian question into a Muslim question. Many Dalit groups join hands with student Islamist groups. Progressives have given some traction to occasional alliances with different sectional interests organised along identitarian lines … allying with ‘dalits’, or indigenous people without having a shared universe. This is short-term political opportunism without doing educational work among its own membership to challenge caste and identity politics. In fact for sections of new-generation far left political activists, universalism is a bad idea, politico-religious circuits of militant Islamists, Indigenists, nativists are respectable allies, they consider India as a conglomeration of conflicting identities driven by popular will of ‘the people/ masses’ who are essentially ‘pure’, incorruptible and can’t go wrong.

The left and democrats are also way behind in efficient use of technology to challenge the right. The digital environment is now an extension of the public sphere so it’s very crucial to use that space. Left parties have been unable to address and persuade a public drawn to right-wing culture … and that is because there already had been a pre-existing social acceptability to values of obedience and conformity, misogyny and xenophobia. This is the utterly ordinary fascism of everyday, the hierarchical and authoritarian Indian family and society which is what the right wing or extremist forces have used as building blocks. The parliamentary left that ruled parts of India for over three decades hardly managed to change social mores, obscurantist beliefs, or widespread discriminations based on caste or religion among the ‘unwashed masses’. It fought public political battles over right to land, over wages, but left the social outlook connected to the personal sphere un-addressed. The left and secularist circles should have stood out by creating a new secular culture (e.g. by actively promoting inter religious, inter-caste, inter-ethnic marriage. Promoting secular public education in a manner going far beyond school, connected with daily life, everyday matters, challenging orthodoxy and social biases.) But the left put all its beans on what the state should be doing, not on what democratic forces could do to create a progressive counter culture (counter to a closed culture of moral policing over sexuality, personal freedoms and openness) in society to inculcate a practical everyday secularism and not sloganeering.

The Modi government may go out of power one day, but communalism or Indian fascism is here to stay unless it is fought every day in society.
 

Have the police made any efforts to crack down on the violent campaign against people suspected of trading or consuming beef? Have the police received impunity for some of their own alleged crimes?

The federal police and state level police administration take orders from the governments of the day. Corruption and political interference in police affairs have been going on for decades, but in current times with BJP in power at the center and in vast number of states, the police have been told to go after beef traders and cattle transporters. there also are parallel volunteer militias of the Hindu right that have had the active cooperation of police in their activities. The police have not cracked down on their own. They have acted on complaints, many of which are fake. There have been many instances of mobs attacking and even lynching people suspected of consuming beef and or transporting it. In these instances, police have watered down cases against lynch mobs, and cases have been filed instead against the victims, many who are in prison or facing continued harassment. It’s a situation that is similar to the so-called blasphemy cases in Pakistan.
 

Can you talk about how the violent campaigns against anyone suspected of trading or consuming beef has had negative ramifications on the way many Dalits make a living?

[BTW since you specifically mention Dalits (who are not just Hindu but also Christian and Muslim) you should know that the BJP and many Hindu right outfits has managed for the past decades to woo large numbers of Dalits and lower caste people and tribals within its fold, their numbers are considerable; they were the foot-soldiers in the Gujarat pogroms of 2002)]

A whole set of new cow-protection measures were introduced after the BJP came to power in 2014 and licences for thousands of small meatshops and slaughterhouses were cancelled this has hurt the cattle markets and leather industry, where the poor and Dalits are employed. And, on the other hand private vigilante groups and cow-protections militias with links to the RSS came to operate on the streets with full impunity. Dalits and low caste workers (Hindu, Muslim or other) are the ones who were butchers, meat workers, or those who would skin dead animals and trade in skins and hides. There have been umpteen public instances of mobs of Hindutva-driven right-wing men attacking dalit workers. In 2015, in Dadri not far from the national capital Delhi, a mob of neighbours attacked a Muslim home and lynched a man for allegedly slaughtering a cow calf. In 2016, there was an assault on four dalit workers in a small town called Una in Gujarat, and a Muslim man was lynched by a mob on suspicion of cow slaughter in Madhya Pradesh’s Satna district. There have been hundreds of such instances [8].

The important thing to note here is wide participation of villagers and residents of cities who join in the crowds led by right-wing militants. Phones videos of these incidents are recorded and circulated massively on social media. As to ramifications, yes there are considerable economic implications of this for rural and urban informal sector workers, vendors, consumers, even transporters. No serious studies are available, but this has led to disruption of the economy, work lives, and job losses as people have had to find alternative occupations. Statistical estimates are limited, and it will take some time for serious studies to understand the scale of impact which isn’t just limited to Dalits but to a large-sections of meat-eating India. [9]
 

What are the main sources of Modi’s popularity? Do you think it’s his promises of economic populism? Has his popularity lessened since his election? Why or why not?

Modi’s economic policies and promises have not gotten very far (The unemployment rate has gone up from 3.41 percent in 2014 to 6.22 percent in 2018), but still despite that the facts don’t seem to matter. His entire election campaign show was around corruption, but he hasn’t gone after the big guys among whom some are his own funders. He suddenly ordered a hugely disruptive de-monetization affecting millions and harming the vast informal sector of the economy. He used very clever propaganda saying all the millions standing in queues outside banks to pull out money are facing hardships like soldiers do on the national borders to protect the security of the nation. This sacrifice by the people will cleanse the country. Like a showman he launched a day of yoga where all state officials were on call to be on yoga mats. Big spectacle as if that would cleanse the country’s health in one shot. Modi has considerable popularity, though recent polls do show a decline. The four-year tenure of the Modi government has really changed the social atmosphere: vigilante mobs roam freely with impunity (they have active connections with RSS affiliates and BJP), and a widely shared sense of fear has crept in for the minorities.

The rare far-right activists, politicians or state officials/senior police officers who were charged for extra-judicial killings and complicity in 2002 Gujarat riots have mostly been acquitted of charges after Modi’s arrival to power. A very prominent case is that of Swami Aseemanand, a far-right Hindu extremist monk who worked in Gujarat state with close ties to the BJP, including to Modi himself, was allegedly involved in multiple bombings in which over a hundred people died, was acquitted and allowed to walk free, despite his confessions. [10]

Social violence has been growing. India was ranked fourth in the world in 2015 – after Syria, Nigeria and Iraq – for the highest social hostilities involving religion, the Huffington Post reported on April 14, 2017. Modi still has a star rating of sorts and manages to reach out through high velocity media spectacles. The big leader with a wide chest that the world takes note of is sold every day. His anti-intellectualism, jingoism, tall tales of mighty nationalism can be intoxicating when laced with religion or identity.

There are no simple explanations of his wide popularity, but he surely spurred a new cult of a high visibility leader figure bigger than his political party, with his photos on all roads and you name it. He has visited over 50 countries in his four-year tenure. Footage of his speeches to the abroad, particularly to the diaspora are broadcasted to ‘untraveled’ audiences in India with glamourous footage of the countries to great effect. His brash oratory seems to sell; he now officially uses the national public radio network for a monthly talk, unlike any previous prime minister of India. Massive use of social media to nurture and scale up Modi’s persona continues. A section of society is on a high (as in intoxication), and it will take them a long time to cool off. In any case, authoritarianism and regimentation are popular in Indian society, Hitler’s Mein Kampf remain’s among the most widely sold books. [11]
 

Can you talk about Modi govt’s crackdown on civil society, environmental and human rights groups as well as on journalists, academics, activists, and others critical of the government?

There is a real sense of shrinking democratic space. Yes, there has been a long crackdown. It has been two pronged, at one level it has directly involved the state law enforcement machinery and at another level it was unleashed via its political party machine, a propaganda drive using right wing private TV networks, social media etc that create fake news inciting right wing groups and militia to go after civil society organisations and individuals. The Modi govt has clearly unsettled the governing consensus, many former state officials have been repeatedly been writing open letters to the govt to respect the framework of Indian constitution to not allow for misuse of state appartus [12]. It’s a bit like 1950s’s style McCarthyist witch-hunt in America. The difference is that this hasn’t stopped at just depriving people of jobs and shaming them, some have been killed by ‘unknown assailants’. They have targetted civil society organisations working for social justice, lawyers groups, environmental groups run by activists with impeccable integrity. Many have been denied funding permits and faced trumped-charges in court to demobilize and exhaust their staying power. In 2016, for instance, the Modi-led Indian government issued a 24-hour blackout of NDTV, a TV news channel that had been critical at times of the Modi administration. Journalists have been targeted and threatened, editors have had to resign [13]. A very popular Hindi TV anchor has been facing death threats and phone calls, and other journalists are being threatened almost daily by an online army of trolls on social media [14]. The police under the control of the Modi administration has mostly desisted from taking action against these Facebook or Twitter users because they have leading members of the government, including the prime minister as followers. A number of progressive academics, intellectuals, lawyer’s, human rights activists who work with or write about campaigns of downtrodden have been arrested on charges of supporting the Maoist insurgency. Prominent citizens have taken up these matters with courts seeking relief and justice. [15]

There have been assassinations of prominent humanists: M.M. Kalburgi, Narendra Dhabolkar and Govind Pansare. The investigations into them haven’t gone far. Gauri Lankesh, a Bangalore-based journalist who was the last prominent humanist killed, has also seen an endless police investigation – finally many Hindutva right-wing activists have been detained, but they are likely get big time legal support funded by the Hindu right. [16]. Vigilante mobs attack cinema halls and certain film directors and actors, and writers, teachers and student leaders have faced assault, foreign scholars and musicians visiting India have come under attack or threat. There have hundreds of instances of intimidation of right to information activists, anti-corruption whistle blowers and journalists.
 

Why do you think the number people being punished for gender-based crimes has been so low during the Modi government?

The conviction rate on gender crimes in India is very, very low and has been for long time. Violence against women and children is a national sport that has been growing and will keep rising for a long time.

The standard talk from the right-wing figures or traditionalists is this is to constrain women’s freedoms: they shouldn’t step out, they shouldn’t wear this, etc.

Secondly, they call for death penalty for rapists, or cite security cams as the answer. The progressives may be different in outlook, but they put all their efforts in issuing statements and focus on punitive lawmaking, and ‘basta’ [Enough in Italian and Spanish].

India has had a declining male / female sex ratio since 1911. According to UN data, 37 million males outnumber women nationally in India [17]. The number of girls born in India continues to plummet. India needs to counter this. It’s already a pretty violent society. There is practically no adolescent sexuality education in schools and beyond, so for millions sexual assault is adventure sport. The right has a very repressive take on sexuality. But taboos exist on the lefty circuits too, no one has stopped the progressives, trade unions, progressive social movements to vastly promote a healthy sexual culture in a sick society or to promote equality and sexual freedoms while at the same time challenging the misogyny seen every day.
 

What kind of pushback are you seeing against Modi’s sectarian rhetoric by groups and people determined to uphold India’s tradition of secular governance?

Modi’s party, the BJP, has a domineering political hold over India. It has majority control of both houses of India’s parliament and has majority governments of its own in 13 provincial state assemblies. It is in coalition governments in several other states. So, its political footprint is big being in power in states across India.

A wide range of groups have organized public events and citizen’s tribunals to inform the public against these violent sectarian campaigns. One of the most impact-making events was the return of state awards by prominent writers: this got a lot of reading people to sit up and take note. The international media has done a remarkable job of giving visibility to dissenting voices in India. But the Modi government has hardly batted an eyelid as it has struck back by trying to discredit writers and intellectuals who speak up by calling them anti-nationals.

There is wide variety of groups speaking up for justice and freedoms. There have been long drawn out struggles by students and teachers on specific campuses, by national workers organizations, small urban non-governmental organizations, some protests by media workers but also by new citizen’s campaigns speaking out against mob lynching’s and shrinking secular spaces. These groups are able to draw a section of middle class and a silent majority to speak on single issues. But the fact remains that Modi and the RSS has a big reach-out machine. The divided opposition political parties have largely been absent or silenced and are not mobilising actively on the ground other than during elections. They are finally coming together to forge electoral alliances for the upcoming national elections in 2019, where much is at stake. Recently there have been a number of national mobilisations by political parties protesting against social and economic policies of the Modi government.
 

What kind of economic programs and policies do you think needs to be pushed to help those not currently benefiting from the Indian economy?

An imaginative new social democratic economic program that offers creative solutions to protect worker’s rights and promote safer healthy work environments. The key focus should be to promote a transition to a new economy that is ecologically and socially friendly, and not dependent to a large measure on financial markets. It should include health and social protections, promote cooperatives and instill a high dose of public funds to improve public education – civic education at all levels – and to build re-training facilities for workers. De-militarize and fund large-scale public works for scaling up social and public infrastructure. India needs a whole new model based on a non-fossil fuel dependent economy that promotes reduced water use and waste recycling on a vast scale. This model should run cooperative solar farms, consumer cooperatives, alternative housing cooperatives, and cooperative digital services. It should rethink old-fashioned trade unionism married to productivist models of endless growth. It should be a time-limited system with affirmative action and minimum guarantees for the most economically backward. It shouldn’t be based on ethnicity, caste, or religion but on indicators of class and so on …

Has Modi been supportive of caste system in India? How much popularity does the idea of caste systems still have in the country?
No political party is overtly supportive of the caste system. There is an upper caste elite of north India that has big stake in the BJP, but it also has a big sway on other political parties in India. Modi has cleverly packaged himself being low caste. Modi has a whole slew of low caste representatives in his parliamentary majority or in the government. The newly elected president of India is a dalit and he was a candidate from the BJP led government. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that the rate of crimes against Dalits has been rising over time. In 2016, there were estimated 214 incidents. But still the Modi government tried to dilute Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes [18]

Modi or no Modi, caste and all manner of identity politics is flourishing in India. Caste prejudice is part of the essential infrastructure and makeup of society. Caste composition of electoral constituencies drives electoral strategies of all parties. So, this is not simple black and white issue. It’s much more complex. Modi or BJP may go, but caste is here to stay. it’s a long-term battle to take on caste and all identity politics via a common secular civil rights movement that doesn’t run out of gas. Difficult to say if such a formation will take long-term roots.

Harsh Kapoor is the founder and editor of sacw.net – South Asia Citizens Web. The interview was conducted in June 2018.
A shorter version of this interview will be included in Andy Heintz’s upcoming book ’Dissidents of the International Left’.
Andy Heintz is a freelance journalist who has been published in the Culture Project, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres, Foreign Policy in Focus, Secularism is a Women’s Issue, Balkan Witness and CounterVortex.
 

The post Modi’s Idiom and Indian Version of Fascism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A wide variety of oversimplified and often misplaced commentary has been made on the riots in France during October-November 2005. This piece is a telegraphic attempt to raise the hidden underside that has seemingly been missed by many.

First of all, the suggestions by some right wing commentators (including in India) that pointed fingers at politico-religious actors (read Islamists), or that these were racial or ethnic riots, have missed the boat. Sure, the religio-political actors are very visible on the social landscape, but these riots were ‘secular’ in content. Similarly, the bogey of ethnic segregation in France, as compared to the rest of Europe, is skewed. There is high propensity for mixed marriages in France (nearly 30 per cent among the North Africans) compared to just two per cent (among the Turks) in Germany or a comparably low figure (among South Asians) in the UK, which is peddled as the big ‘multikulti’ mecca. Despite big hiccups, France today is a fairly diverse place with a vast mosaic of mixtures.

Secondly, the more discerning (but rushed) view of the progressively inclined that pins the blame solely on the French model of universalism/secularism (however flawed) for social exclusion, class inequality and poverty also seems out of sync. The conditions for these exist in far sharply unequal contexts across the world, this isn’t a French speciality.

Thirdly, the Left dreamer belief that the poor underclass had rebelled and that revolution was around the corner, and that this was akin to the events of May 1968, belongs in a fool’s paradise. Sorry, there were no masses as participants. It was a minority who engaged in violence vis-à-vis the police. This was no structured movement, and based on alternative ideas.

The key perception is that this was a spontaneous reaction of despair and frustration which then took its own turn against the political elites.

The events

On the night of October 27, in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, two panicked teenagers, acting on the presumption that the police were after them, took refuge in an electricity network transformer and were accidentally electrocuted. This was a case of deaths driven by fear of the police rather than of direct police brutality. As often happens, rumour and fear did the job here too. The death of the youngsters provoked huge outrage. Kids took to the streets in the night and engaged in arson attacks. The second element, like fuel to fire, was the reaction to the choice terms used by Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s minister of the interior (and of religion). ‘Sarko’, as he is commonly known, a smart alec self-propelling bully who’d give anything to get on TV, called the rioters ‘racaille’ or ‘scum’ and said that he’d clean them out with a high pressure water cleaner.

This provocative language unleashed fresh rage from the young kids. The cat and mouse game between the kids and the police, hit-and-run arson attacks, had begun.

The actors

The rioters (the ones who started it) were exclusively young males, mostly in their mid-teens. There were no leaders, no public statements, no words; just violence. CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) paramilitary units were ranged opposite and the fire brigade doing its hazardous job with great difficulty.

Television helped markedly to spread the event. It had found high value programming content, other kids in other suburbs joined in solidarity thanks to TV, and this all-male night sport spread. It was a thing of contemporary culture: cell phones, SMS messaging, blogging and TV. These kids are fourth generation French and wear the baggy clothing of the American hip-hop era. Every night it would begin again, as local gangsters also piggybacked a ride. Lasting two weeks, some 10,000 cars belonging mostly to neighbours were burnt. Local public buses, warehouses, supermarkets, clinics, schools and police stations were main targets.

The backdrop of urban crisis and the culture of violence

The so-called difficult ‘cité’ neighbourhoods in France are more common in the suburbs than in the inner cities. They are the result of decades of a deliberate urban policy to concentrate working class families in well-defined districts away from city centres. The urban housing policy dates to the 1960s where low-income high-rise tower blocks emerged close to industrial areas. The life and world of suburbia remains socially distant from the bourgeois town centres. Many of these old tower block structures in the suburbs are now decrepit and have been left to decay, with the progressive retreat of the state from high maintenance costs. The social composition of the cité is essentially working class and lower middle class with a near 25-30 per cent unemployment rate. Near 36 per cent of high school dropouts are in the suburbs. Major problems concerning parental authority mark the daily life of families.

These cités have progressively become sites of violence (domestic, street and school) and degrading social tension e.g. forms of masculine rites of passage with a phoney clan-like category of ‘big/elder brothers’ or grands frères, ‘community’ gatekeepers exercising some form of social control on, for instance, what girls wear, who they see, etc. Similarly, acts of rage that seem to represent the metropolitan centre rather than the peripheral suburb are demonstrations of belonging to the cité.

The props are a subculture that seems to interconnect low-income suburbs across France via new metaphors of slang, dress and musical expression, even dance. The term racaille used by Sarkozy has long been used in the cités. In the rap group NTM’s line, "les cailleras sont dans la ville (the gangsters are in town)", racaille (scum) is converted to caillera (gangster) using the linguistic practice of inverting syllables to create new words (verlan). The figure of la racaille/caillera has emerged as an anti-hero of cité subculture. Within cités, those labelled as la racaille due to drug peddling are viewed with envious ambivalence for their success in the illegal parallel economies. When the dropouts find work, it is in the local parallel circuit.

Suspect citizens

Heavy policing is a conspicuous aspect of state intervention in the suburbs. All the money apparently saved by cutbacks in social spending in the poor areas has, it seems, mostly been redeployed for penal and policing functions. Security mania is the new mantra of the state.

The result is fear and hatred of the police due to daily police harassment that has gone on for too long. After September 11, there was a sort of militarisation of the cités – regular checks, the detention of countless suspected terrorists and the deportation of hundreds of undocumented immigrants.

Some 10 years ago the French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz powerfully depicted the alienation in France’s suburbs in his cult film, La Haine.

Through the eighties and nineties there were a series of urban riots, each marked by its own dominant practices and style e.g. stealing a car for a race in the neighbourhood and/or to use it to smash a shopfront and then steal the goods inside.

The big factors that led to urban violence 25 years ago are a sort of continuum of changes that started in the seventies: the beginnings of de-industrialisation, unemployment, the end of Fordist work and the emergence of fragmented subcontracted precarious informal labour mainly for unskilled workers, and social exclusion.

The wider social canvas

a) The fading out of conventional social movement organisations from suburbs where new local actors don’t have a mass base: The decline in membership and influence of the Communist Party of France (Le PCF), which had a large social base among the labouring poor and in their areas of residence. The communist municipalities provided extensive support for low-income housing and social spending. The Communist party could have played a powerful role in the integration and assimilation of immigrants from North Africa, as it did before and after the second world war for Italian, Polish, Spanish and other European immigrants. The party connected local issues to the national level. The party initially took an ambivalent position on decolonisation in the 1960s and in the subsequent period its membership base of European workers lost jobs to the recruitment of North African workers (from Morocco among other places). It somehow never cultivated a base among North African migrant workers who had their own cultural associations.

The other major absentee from the suburban neighbourhoods has been the unions. The level of unionisation in France has been low compared to other countries in Europe. French unions have never managed to organise fragmented part-time low-pay low-skill informal sector workers.

The French children of (Arabic speaking) North African immigrants, like their parents, did not have much of a presence in the old social movement circles. In 1983, a march for equality and against racism was very successful, followed by a national campaign called SOS Racisme, which attracted media and political presence but couldn’t get rooted in the cités and suburbs. Beyond a certain point, anti-racism in France (as elsewhere) was caught in the double-edged game of pushing for diversity and therefore the logic of the ‘right to be different’. This can be very problematic at times when it ends up not taking a stand against obscurantist cultural practices in the name of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’.

New actors from within these neighbourhoods: Two examples: i) The autonomous, secular and progressive ones and ii) the retrogressives, with growing state recognition.

i) The autonomous, secular and progressive: Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive) – a women’s rights campaign (of largely third generation North African descent) against male domestic violence, forced marriages and honour crimes started with a bang and received huge media and public attention but has still not grown to become a force in the poor suburbs.

ii) The retrogressive and conservative: Rise of religio-political actors – Religious cults and denominations of all kinds (Muslim, Christian) are growing to fill the political vacuum in the absence of other actors among the North African migrant community in these neighbourhoods. Tablighi Jamaat-type operators alongside Christian Evangelical gospel cults compete on this territory. Ironic as it may seem in secular France, over the last 15 years the state has officially leaned hard to help craft interlocutors who are religious, notably from the so-called ‘Muslim community’. Just because a high proportion of post-war immigrants in France happen to be from North Africa, they are automatically and increasingly identified as being ‘Muslim’ and so, very naturally, it is the imams here who are seen as community representatives, even though nearly half of the North African immigrants are non-practising and non-mosque going.

There is a narrowing of any political possibility of action arising from these neighbourhoods, especially after the state cut subsidies to local non-profit associations. New national social movements like ATTAC or such anti-globalisation groups have next to no presence in the poor and working class areas. The far right National Front has been gaining in membership sections of the old working class (former supporters of the Communist party) and the unemployed (of non-North African descent).

b) Memory, ‘culture’ and history to reshape identity: It is important to note that more than four decades after decolonisation there is still a deafening silence by the political elites in France about the war in Algeria. Its wounds have been left unattended for society to deal with.

In the post-colonial period, disparate groups have recently invoked this past history with competing conceptions of it before differing political audiences. Here, notions of the past and the future collide, which are at the heart of moves to focus on identity, origins, immigration, tradition, culture, to undermine secular social space in France. Some examples:

Ø There is a sophisticated stream of the far right which is very active in supporting the ideas of ethnic diversity and the language of "difference" in the cause of ethnic separation. In France, the Groupement de Recherche et d'étude pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), with ties to neo-fascist groups, has been portraying cultural identities as fixed and irreconcilable so as to push institutionalised multiculturalism. Leading light of GRECE, Alain de Benoist says that "racism is nothing but the denial of difference".

Ø The French Parliament passed a law in February 2005 (much to the horror of historians) which now implores the national education system to teach the positive role of colonisation. This panders to the ideological platform of the conservative right.

Ø A small group of French citizens (immigrants of sub-Saharan, North African descent supported by progressives and third world-ists) claiming to be colonised ‘natives’, indigènes de la République, in a pamphlet popularised via the Internet, invokes and juxtaposes the imagery of discriminatory treatment meted out to their grandparents, who were colonial subjects, to their own current situation. There is political manufacture here, of being eternal victims, invoking colour, race and ethnicity. This is dangerous fuel to fan the flames of sealed identities and of communalism.

Ø Signs of reverse anti-white racism are on the rise. A section among the second generation of immigrants of sub-Saharan and black descent – involved in a kind of historical stocktaking of the French role in slave trade and colonisation – provides the other rationale for the current discrimination or exclusion they are subject to. (Among the most recent pointers are: an attack on a Paris student demonstration by young black kids – against the ‘whites’ and the success of the anti-Semitic talk of the humorist, Dieudonné.)

Ø The move by the French state to introduce the right to enforce ‘curfew’ in recent violence affected areas under the old French state of emergency law from 1955 (last used during the war in Algeria) has unequivocally sent out loaded metaphorical signals about the association between the old war and the recent riot. This will undoubtedly become another controversial issue in the colonialism/post-colonialism debate.

In the coming year or so, with the build-up to the 2007 presidential election, the themes of immigration/migrants/Local vs Foreign will become hot topics for debate. There is a growing move to reconstruct, to ‘protect’ and fence off national space in ‘peril’ against the backdrop of globalisation, economic crisis, flight of capital and unemployment. The resident migrant ‘other’ located inside the nation (old ones from China, Vietnam, North Africa and recent ones from sub-Saharan Africa etc.) and the non-resident international ‘other’ (e.g. the threat from China’s economy) located outside the nation get the spotlight as, increasingly, hyper-nationalism becomes the main directing thread.

Conclusion

The riots have ended up providing a powerful political launching pad for the extreme right groups in France. There will be a renewed wave of racism and who knows what else in store for the upcoming election. This rise of the far right stock will inevitably fire up their lookalikes from the ‘enemy’ camp. Let’s wait for the next riots.

Sections from women’s rights circles (such as UFAL, Coordination Féministe et Laïque, 20 ans barakat, Ni Putes Ni Soumises) spoke up against this round of violence in the poor neighbourhoods, and this will undoubtedly fuel more violence against women and repression by the state. These groups very courageously also challenged the despicable move by the French authorities to turn to the so-called ‘grands frères’ or ‘big brothers’ within the ‘communities’ to restrain the younger ones. These big brother-type figures, who have been acting as increasingly visible local power centres in the patriarchal system of social, ‘moral’ control over young women and men, need to be restrained themselves. The French state would be dangerously shirking its responsibility by denying citizens protection, when necessary, from these family/community watchdogs.

It is absolutely vital that wider (non-local) social initiatives and movements in France connect with and support the smaller local molecular civil society efforts in the poor suburbs to organise on daily matters of citizenship rights, discrimination, violence, bread and butter with a secular content. Those pushing for a politicised religion-based and sectarian/communal/nationalist agenda in the poor neighbourhoods can’t be kept out if concerned citizens’ groups/actors don’t take heed. And then there will be more violence.

Archived from Communalism Combat, December 2005 Year 12    No.113, Special Report

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