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Even while politicians and pundits are engaged in analysing the sweeping victory of the BJP at the polls in UP and are still discovering the lessons to be drawn , Hindutva forces have sent a ringing message, a warning, to the entire country.

It is not so much what was stated at the elite conclave by the supreme leader. It is not the latest slogan of “New India” laced with the gross rhetoric of everything having gone wrong in the last seven decades. Nor is it the oratorical flourish to start afresh a movement to reconstruct India from a scratch, as it were. This style which seeks to substitute substance is now familiar. But it assumes a new and sinister meaning when juxtaposed with the real-politick of the choice of CM for UP.

All the feints (or was it simply wishful thinking of the media) of floating names of different candidates for that important constitutional office soon came abruptly to an end. And the choice rested on the name which is most remembered for its authorship of or association with a bunch of crude and uncouth statements bordering on or amounting to incitement to communal disharmony. And even worse, for involvement in cases of communal rioting.

Also read: The real message from UP: Need for an alternative political narrative for mobilising the peasantry and the youth

Not long ago, the 'liberal' chatterati and the self- confessed protagonists of neo-liberalism were trying hard to convince themselves and others that the dispensation in New Delhi was distancing itself from the stray elements within its fold, whose staple diet was raw communalism and whose project was to push India into pre-modern medieval times. And many political novices were hoping against hope that this was so in reality. Growing evidence that it could be quite a different ball game was being ignored. Genuine apprehensions were being dismissed as political prejudice or helpless groans of the disgruntled elements of the earlier regime now out of power.

Now it should be easy to put two and two together even for the sympathisers of the New Delhi regime. Starting with Muzaffarnagar riots on the eve of the 2014 general elections; reaching a new high in the adroit decision of not finding even a single Muslim candidate deserving a BJP ticket for the 2017 assembly elections in the very state which has the largest Muslim population; and peaking in the crude, communalising innuendoes of Kabristan vs Samshan and Ramzan vs Diwali : communal polarisation has been and continues to be the overarching political theme and the strategy. The choice of CM says it all. And says it without any gloss or ambiguity.

This is an audacious extension of the Gujarat model of politics developed successfully by the Hindutva forces. Administering 'Shock and Awe' was the essence of the Gujarat strategy. The state machinery there connived at it, and turned its eyes away from mob crimes. That strategy effectively subdued the 9 percent strong minority of Gujarat.

One always thought that this strategy may not be expedient in a state like UP with its Ganga-Jamni tehzib, with little ghettoisation of its minority community, and above all, with the huge size of its minority and its close and enduring intertwining with the majority community. But ideologues of state power seem to be in a different mood. A point sought to be driven home is that subduing of the minority is possible in UP, ergo across the whole country. This cynical and sinister mood is rooted in the hubris of being in power at the Centre, on the one hand, and the popular appeal of the supreme leader, as re-vindicated in the UP assembly polls, on the other.

For this subduing to be achieved, what is necessary is not so much the actual communal conflagration, although the fear of the same erupting any moment must always be kept alive and real. What is essential is the generation of a feeling of hopelessness and acceptance in the minority community at large, particularly in affairs political. Equally important for the strategy to be successful is the co-generation in the majority community of the fear of the “enemy within”, so essential for the sustenance of the distorted and imported concept of “nationalism” cherished by the Hindutva legions. And the right moment for this seems to have arrived in the imagination of the Hindutva forces.

The history of Indian Republic is at the crossroads. The electoral majorities and adroit communal strategies are geared to make history take a decisive regressive turn. But it will never be a one-sided affair. The response has to come and will come from those who are sworn to the IDEA OF INDIA which is enshrined in our Constitution. Which itself was the product of a long and valiant freedom struggle against colonialism, a struggle which built an inclusive political platform seeking to overcome divisions and injustices which characterised the subjugated polity and society of the subcontinent.

The political response has to come primarily from the majority community believing in the Idea of India. And mere waving of the secular flag is not going to cut much ice either with the majority or minority community. What is necessary is an all-inclusive and broad-based campaign to “Save the Constitution”, on the one hand, and, on the other, radical politics of mobilisation and involvement of peasantry, youth, and the working classes on the minimum alternative agenda of agrarian reorganisation, right to work and provision of basic economic, social and personal security to all.

Nothing short of such a response will be adequate to meet the unfolding challenge to the Idea of India.

Times are difficult. The challenge is serious. But, as Lenin said in a different context, “We shall not lose heart, no matter which turn history takes. But we shall not allow history to take any turn without our participation, without the active intervention of the working class.”

(SP Shukla is former Finance Secretary to the Government of India. He is a retired bureaucrat who has spent his life working for the marginalised in India)

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Image: Indian Express

A lot has been written about the results of the UP assembly elections which seem to have confounded the critics as well as the participants in equal measure. 

Much of what has been said is more of a description than analysis. Take for example, the belated discovery, by participants as well as commentators, of a 'Modi Wave’ or a ‘Modi March’. 

Or for that matter, the tribute paid by a veteran opposition leader that PM Modi is “the most dominant figure in politics today”. 

Leaving aside the obvious wisdom of hindsight that inspires such comments, they hardly go beyond simply describing the outcome. Moreover, even that description is questionable. How is it that 'the wave' did not touch the shores of Punjab, Goa or Manipur although the elections in these states were held in the same time-frame? Why is it that the most dominant politician failed to dominate the outcome in those states? 

At another level, the analysis such as is presented, barely skims the surface. For example, it has been stressed that BJP/ RSS have well-oiled large cadres which Congress/ Regional parties do not possess. And that gave a handsome advantage to the BJP. 

It is also argued, and rightly, that 'communal polarisation' and 'social engineering' which the BJP succeeded in bringing about influenced the outcome decisively. But there is hardly anything new in either the presence or absence of cadres in different political parties. Equally, the 'social engineering' and the 'communal polarisation' projects of BJP are not new. They are part of the long- term socio-political strategy devised by the Hindutva forces who exploit them tactically in the elections almost invariably. 

The appeal of cultural nationalism, which is but another name for ‘communal polarisation’ has a catchment which includes the better-off sections, the upper castes, the so-called ‘aspirational’ youth and, of course, the die-hard Hindutva legions. The counter to this offered by the ‘secular’ plank has no popular appeal for the majority community as it once had.

More specifically, and a little differently put, the question that needs to be probed is: Why did they succeed in UP in 2014 and 2017, but, say, not in Bihar in 2015? And in answering that, one should steer clear of taking recourse to the obvious ( eg. the presence or absence of Mahagathbandhan) and try to understand what is happening in the wider context and a longer time-frame. 

The project of nation-building commenced with the first War of Independence in 1857. It was carried forward by the freedom movement represented by the Indian National Congress. The project was founded in anti-colonialism. It sought to weld together traditionally divided and unjust Indian society and polity across the sub-continent. Divisive religious, regional and social identities were sought to be moderated, if not superseded, by means of an appeal to an overarching, modern, pan-Indian and more just Idea of India. 

The project had its adversaries. Besides the overt suppression by the colonial power, it faced internal resistance from those indigenous elements who sought to fashion Indian nationhood as a replica of the European concept, based on religious and cultural identity and in antagonism of ‘enemy within’. This was a welcome development for the colonial rulers who encouraged and supported it. 

The net result was that the modern, pan-Indian project received a major set-back in the Partition which accompanied Independence. The resilience and inherent viability of the project reasserted itself in the adoption of the Constitution upholding the basics of the Idea of India. However, the failure of the Indian polity to transform itself into a truly egalitarian and just social and economic order has brought to surface the limitations and weaknesses of the project as it has been executed. 

The weakness of the transformative agenda of the project is most evident in the gross failure in handling the question of Indian peasantry. Equally, it is manifest in the adoption of the neo-liberal policies for accelerating ‘growth’ which has no solution in sight to burgeoning problem of unemployment. On both these counts, all the structured political parties have to share the blame. 

The conjuncture is most conducive to reassertion of identity politics. Emergence of politics of ‘social justice’ based simply on the identity of caste is an example. But this soon reaches its limits as the ‘growth’ continues to be jobless as well as iniquitous. The vested interests who are the beneficiaries and promoters of this kind of ‘growth’ find it convenient to play the card of ‘cultural nationalism’, on the one hand, and ‘social engineering’, on the other. The former seeks to mask the prevalent social and economic injustice and inequity and promote a majoritarian identity encompassing smaller identities. The latter seeks to take the caste- identity politics of ‘social justice’ to its logical end of unravelling. 

The Modi-Shah duo implemented this strategy in UP elections. And they succeeded because no credible alternative narrative was forthcoming from those opposing them. 

The more or most backward among other backward classes are but large chunks of marginal and small peasantry who are the worst affected by the present model of growth practised by all political parties including BJP as well as the regional parties like SP and BSP. 

In the circumstances, counter-mobilisation of these sections, on the promise of sharing the state-power for whatever benefits it may offer in the short run, against those caste-identity parties who ruled so far, provides a strong appeal. Moreover, the appeal of a ‘wider identity’ based on cultural nationalism has some attraction for those who have been excluded or marignalised by the major “social justice” parties. 

The appeal of cultural nationalism, which is but another name for ‘communal polarisation’ has a catchment which includes the better-off sections, the upper castes, the so-called ‘aspirational’ youth and, of course, the die-hard Hindutva legions. The counter to this offered by the ‘secular’ plank has no popular appeal for the majority community as it once had in the hey-days of the freedom movement when the anti-colonial struggle required a modern, united political front. 

Moreover, the practitioners of the secular politics, the Congress and regional parties in UP, have not covered themselves with glory when it comes to communal riots or covert discrimination or opportunist alliances with communal forces. The popular appeal of secularism thus gets reduced in practice to the religious minority which is genuinely and deeply anxious about its safety and welfare under the regime of cultural nationalists. And this is precisely picked up by the BJP to malign the secular politics as politics of appeasement of minority. The majority community no longer under the spell of secular politics of freedom movement finds the appeasement idiom plausible. 

There was no credible alternative political narrative in UP. Nor even a credible leadership offering a short- term political alternative, albeit without any transformational agenda, as it happened to be the case in Bihar in 2015. The result is there for all of us to see. 

The results of UP assembly elections are important not only because UP is the ‘heart of India’. Or because they clear the way for Modi in 2019, as even some opposition leaders have said. They are important because they expose the basic malady of Indian politics unambiguously and boldly. On the national scale, there is no alternative political narrative articulated by the political opposition. And there is no credible political alternative in sight, even without a transformative agenda. 

What is worrisome is not so much that PM Modi may get his way in 2019. It is the inherent unviability of that brand of politics and policies in our situation. It is more than just non-viability. 

The explosive potential of the peasantry in crisis cannot be overstated. Nor that of the burgeoning legions of youth seeking jobs with dignity. Today they could be won over by the slogans of cultural nationalism and the tactics of social engineering. But it would not be long before the hollowness of the strategy is exposed spreading massive discontent and unforeseen, anarchic upheavals. 

No nation-state can survive long, let alone prosper, with a huge population of 18 crores of its people sulking as second- class citizens and feeling insecure. No amount of ‘nationalist’ sloganeering can eradicate that fact. No amount of force can alter that fact. The only viable politics for India is that based on the inclusive and modern values of Equality, Liberty, Fraternity and Justice. We need to reinvigorate these fundamentals enshrined in our constitution and reconstruct the narrative of nation-building. 

The obvious starting point is that of the First War of Independence of 1857. The peasantry constituted the core and the peasant-soldiers in East India Company’s army constituted the striking phalanx of that mass struggle against the onslaught of colonialism then. The small and marginal peasantry of today being pauperised and the present generation of youth being denied work opportunities with dignity and fulfilment will now constitute the core and striking phalanx of the democratic struggle against the neo-liberal policies and the model of growth imposed by those policies. 

On the issue of agrarian crisis as well as that of unemployment, there are no solutions within the framework of neo-liberalism. And no easy solutions even otherwise. Eventually we have to move towards the change of mode of production, both in the agrarian and industrial economy. 

A beginning can be made by transition to cooperative farming as a peoples’ movement. A large scale programme of input-procurement and processing of output in agricultural sector, supplemented by an equally massive programme of watershed planning, water and soil conservation, social forestry, building rural infrastructure and, above all, a comprehensive provision of social and economic security for all, will provide immense work opportunities to our youth. 

This would have to be supported by appropriate industrial and trade policies at the national level. It is obvious that these initiatives imply the negation of neo-liberal policies and rejection of the model of growth that flows from those policies. With the retreat from globalisation and multilateralism in industrial countries, sustenance of neo-liberal policies in the developing world would become far more difficult. That should provide a niche for re-orienting current policies and moving away, step by step, from the policies of neo-liberalism. 

In other words, the political crisis underlined by the UP Elections calls for alternative narratives in the spheres of politics and political economy. The crisis can be perhaps postponed a while, if a credible political alternative is cobbled together, which is what seems to be the main pre-occupation of political practitioners. But that would not alter the underlying unviability of that kind of politics. Indeed it may simply add to the explosive potential of the underlying crisis. 

The solution lies in establishing an alternative political narrative and mobilising the peasantry and the youth around it. 

(SP Shukla retired from the Indian Administrative Service as former Finance Secretary)

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Donald Trump, by Gage Skidmore

Trump’s election was a tragedy. But the outrage is its reframing – by the mainstream media and even sections of the left – as a revolt against ‘complacent liberal elites’. 

Media commentators were dismissive of Trump during his campaign. But now he’s President-elect they seem constrained for fear of echoing Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment. Everyone is terrified of implying that the working class Americans who voted for Trump shot themselves in the foot. We may be dismayed by post-truth politics, but at the same time we tell ourselves that people see through it all. False consciousness has become the ultimate taboo.

Right-wing populism across the world is harnessing public anger towards the super-rich, global corporations and financial power and turning it against politicians, experts, and the left. These are the wrong targets

People are not stupid. But they are misinformed and misled. 72% of Americans agree 'the US economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful', yet they elected a billionaire tycoon. We don’t know how to talk about this incongruity. The post-election analysis emphasises how Trump ‘connected’ with blue-collar voters. There’s an odd reluctance to perform a simple reality check – not just about whether he will build the wall, but about how his professed support for blue-collar workers contrasts with his plan to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes for the rich. The way to avoid the patronising connotations of false consciousness is to target the hypocrisy of the message, not the voters.

The priority now, many are saying, is to listen to forgotten working-class voters. They are right. But we must also be wary of regarding opinions as authentic and organic. We seem to have forgotten that opinions are made and people are influenced.

The right’s co-option of left-wing protest is what both Trump and Brexit are all about. Right-wing populism across the world is harnessing public anger towards the super-rich, global corporations and financial power and turning it against politicians, experts, and the left. These are the wrong targets: they are relatively powerless and they are the only means we have to create a fairer world. It’s true that the political class is homogenous, corrupt and aloof. But that’s a contingent, not an intrinsic reality. It’s the result of historical circumstance and neoliberal policy. We must not let the right convert resistance to financial power into an attack on political authority. 

The right has destroyed the left and stolen its language, using it as a decoy with which to push through policies that hurt the poorest. This shows that – in contrast to Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis – left ideology has won. But it also has zero power.

There is an emerging mantra that the real divide is no longer between left and right but between globalisation and national sovereignty. Naomi Wolf repeated it on Today. This is false. In a society that’s increasingly unequal, the opposition between left and right is more relevant than ever. It defines the interests of the 99% against those of the 1%. The conflation of the ‘global elite’ with ‘internationalism’ lumps Goldman Sachs together with multicultural tolerance.

Commentators everywhere are pointing to the ‘liberal elite’ and the ‘political establishment’ as if they are the real problem. Jeremy Corbyn echoed this view on LabourList earlier this week. We must resist this muddled and damaging trend. The term ‘liberal elite’ elides economic oppression with the political left. It fuses together legitimate criticism of global capitalism with the condemnation of left-wing parties. Thomas Frank, one of the original critics of right-wing co-option, has turned his fire on the Democrats in his new book, Listen, Liberal. While his analysis is correct, this serves unwittingly to reinforce right-wing populism’s undermining of the left.

Yes, the Democrats have failed to engage with working-class voters. Yes, the Labour party in Britain abandoned its core purpose by moving to the centre. But this betrayal is the result of constantly being told that the only way to get elected is to move to the right and engage with ‘business’. Sanders and Corbyn are of course the notable exceptions, but look at how they are ridiculed and excoriated by the media.

We on the left need to find our voice and reclaim our ideology. And we need to resolve and redefine our attitude towards political institutions, political office and political authority. Let’s not join in the bonfire of the elites until we know exactly who we’re talking about. Otherwise we will play straight into the hands of an ascendant fake-radical right that whips up public hostility to the system while quietly taking it over.

Eliane Glaser is a writer, lecturer, former BBC producer, and the author of Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life (Fourth Estate, 2013).

This article was first published on openDemocracy).
 

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It took an article from the iconic Guardian in Britain dated almost a month ago (May 31) authored by the redoubtable Aditya Chakrabortty, You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within to give a more honest and realistic appraisal of the fundamental upheavals and damages caused by a policy framework, ruthlessly pushed, undemocratically secured that has reduced, effectively every yardstick as measureable to, or against the market. Even within the world’s democracies.
 

Today, July 1, 2016, Indian newspapers are replete with eulogies to this market driven policy framework that has hollowed out both world and Indian institutions, whereas the UK-based Chakrabortty says, the yardstick of the National health Service and the universities say it all, “classrooms are being transformed into supermarkets”. "In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition," he adds. Nowhere could a reflection of what is happening within India, or has already happened, so readily be found.

Over the past few years most acutely, and over the past decade more insidiously, this framework has been critiqued widely by some Indian academics, journalists and activists. Nowhere is it more evident than the direct assault on Indian farming—visible in the callous loss of life among our farmers, the education and health sectors. Kanhaiya Kumar now an iconic household name thanks to the peculiar brand of proto-fascist authoritarianism of the Modi regime, flagged the issue emotively and sensitively when he demanded, in true democratic tradition, a common system of education, a common school system for all Indian children.
​
Indian Journalism was the first to fall prey to the market-driven neo-liberal framework. We were all at the middle to senior levels within respected publications when the lure of ‘contract’ jobs, at two or three times the average rates then paid to us who were ‘secure’ lower salaries but savings like provident fund etc. Most succumbed, membership to the journalists unions and federations dwindled, and died.

Those who signed up to the contract got caught up and into a new and glitzy world, where cars and a high executive club life styles, unheard of for the classic Indian journalists, suddenly became open, and possible. This capture of the media by the market – a leading proprietor of one of India’s newspapers famously said, “News and Views are what appears between the advertisement pages”—is today witness to, not just a dumbing down of institutions and content, but has been accompanied by a visible loss of integrity, and independence. [1]

Image: The Gaurdian​​

In both education and health, the state and government’s surrender to the market essentially has meant that only the rich get access because they can pay. Today the source of ferment and dissent in all Central universities –be it the Hyderabad Central University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Allahabad University, Doon University, Assam University and many others –is the significant budgetary cuts in central government (UGC) scholarships that ensure democratic access to students from rural and marginalised backgrounds (and this includes OBCs, minorities and Dalits). This regime today—in more crude continuance of earlier policies– wants to be the last bastion of a policy worldview that is being seriously questioned yes, even by the Indian Monetary Fund.

The initial resistance to policies like the rural work programme (MGNREGA) by the Modi regime has been followed up with what is happening presently: the direct assault on the statutory rights of tribals and other peoples living on and off forest lands. This is being achieved and ensured through executive overreach initiated by the central environment ministry. These policy moves, including the latest one of disempowering the grasroot Panchayati Raj (village level democratising) framework are evidence that India, at least, has not yet shrugged off a framework that the first/developing world thrust upon us and is today, somewhat, questioning.

The crux of the critical article in The Guardian is that it draws attention to three or four documents emanating from, the heart and soul of neo liberalism –the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—that today, in June 2016 point to its far from many successes. Chakkroborty calls it’s the “remarkable breach of the neoliberal consensus by the IMF.”

Read this paper by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri

This paper concludes by saying “Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion:
‘However, there are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected. Our assessment of the agenda is confined to the effects of two policies: removing restrictions on the movement of capital across a country’s borders (so-called capital account liberalization); and fiscal consolidation, sometimes called “austerity,” which is shorthand for policies to reduce fiscal deficits and debt levels. An assessment of these specific policies (rather than the broad neoliberal agenda) reaches three disquieting conclusions:

• The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries.­
• The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda.­
• Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects.­

What makes the fund’s intervention so remarkable is not what is being said – but who is saying it and just how bluntly. In the IMF’s flagship publication, three of its top economists have written an essay titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

There is more from where this comes. It is not just the IMF but also the Bank of England’s Mark Carney who is sounding the alarm. He speaks, in this speech delivered in February 2016  about “a low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest-rate equilibrium”. Then there is the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank’s central bank, that warns that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”.

The IMF. World Bankers. Economists from within the Spectrum.  When will we in India, make our own independent and informed assessment that is already showing up in increasing dismepowerment, starvation and poverty all around? 

The post The Slow Death of Neo-Liberalism But is Anyone in India Listening? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

When the poor die of heat in India, “the world’s largest democracy” it’s called “natural disaster”; but when they meet a similar death in the “illiberal” Gulf region, it’s called “modern-day slavery”

During the summer of 2015, India suffered an extreme heat wave. Over 2500 people—primarily from the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana—lost their lives, either directly from heatstroke or from lack of access to water or healthcare. Many of these people were from the poorest strata of Indian society, already malnourished or reliant on day labor in order to survive. The Indian state’s response was weak at best, and in many cases, it was individual citizens and charity organizations that assisted in easing the suffering of those most impacted.

This is not a surprising scenario, given the Indian state’s increasingly neo-liberal orientation. Indeed, the state has almost entirely moved away from a sense of obligation to the poor, replacing political discourse around poverty (garibi) with rhetoric about entrepreneurial citizenship and ties between the public and private sectors. Narendra Modi’s campaign for prime minister, his popularity among well-to-do non-resident Indians (NRIs), and his recent “Make in India” initiative seem to have cemented the newly liberalized country’s alignment toward global capitalism and the West.

While there were a handful of news and opinion pieces about the disappointing response to this national tragedy, mostly from within India, the national and international media overwhelmingly represented the attendant deaths as the result of a “natural disaster.” This representation underplayed how state policies, ongoing caste stratification, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor are responsible for who lives and who dies in the country. This was a tragedy indeed, but one evacuated of necropolitics, or the ways that states produce sovereign power through the management of death.[i]

As I followed the events in India from my home in the United States, I could not help but compare the news coverage of the heat wave with the ongoing representations of heat-related deaths in Qatar—primarily impacting construction workers building the stadiums and other infrastructure for the upcoming 2022 World Cup. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed great concern over deadly labor conditions in Qatar’s extreme heat, and a series of articles by the Guardian under the heading “modern-day slavery” have estimated that deaths from World Cup construction will total in the thousands, averaging from one a day to a dozen a week until the games.

In the news coverage and activist discourse about labor in Qatar—and in other GCC countries—the state and the small citizenry are portrayed as the sole harbingers of these deaths: an authoritarian regime and its decentralized, citizen-run migration sponsorship system (kafala) breeding the conditions for hyperexploitation of the world’s subaltern masses, who descend upon the Gulf looking for economic opportunities that they cannot find in their home countries. A large majority of these workers are South Asian, primarily Nepali and Indian. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, which suffered the most casualties as a result of the 2015 heat wave, are two of India’s largest labor-sending states for GCC countries.

It seems imperative, particularly in an era of neo-liberalism, privatization, and a receding state, to pay closer attention to which deaths become necro-political (i.e. within the purview of the state’s responsibility) and which remain merely tragic, and even normalized as part of everyday existences in the Global South.

That representations of heat-related death would be so different in India and Qatar might not seem that strange to most readers. On the one hand, we have a migration system that many have labeled “modern-day slavery,” and on the other hand, conditions of extreme poverty that many consider tragic but commonplace in the “developing world.” There is an irony here, however, that is hard to ignore: given slightly different circumstances, the men who die building Doha’s modernity could easily be among those who perish in India’s natural disasters. Yet, those who stay put under conditions of extreme poverty in the “world’s largest democracy” die deaths that carry little national or international import, whereas those who live and die under the sun of an illiberal state have become beacons for international media coverage, activism, and scholarly critique.

Is an illiberal death different than a liberal one? In an era of neoliberal citizenship, what is the political life of illiberal death? I want to suggest here that the sensationalization of exploitation, suffering, and death in the Gulf obscures similar conditions of daily life in parts of the world that are not at all disconnected from these so-called authoritarian contexts. As I and many who work on the interconnectedness of South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula have argued, labor, family, religion, and identity on both sides of the Persian Gulf are produced within overlapping transnational networks of capital, kinship, ethnicity, and citizenship.[ii]

Not only are multinational corporations, expatriate employers, and middlemen recruiters central to producing the conditions of possibility for migrating to the Gulf and for “staying put,” but the Indian state itself participates in citizenship regimes and nationalist projects that exceed the territorial boundaries of India and reach into the Gulf, both historically and in the present day. In many cases, those who are able to migrate to the Gulf have economic and social capital that allows them to escape the poverty their compatriots suffer at home, even as it propels them into new forms of constraint as well as opportunity. What erasures are required for us to turn conditions of relative privilege—the ability to become diasporic—into narratives of exceptional dehumanization?

It seems imperative, particularly in an era of neo-liberalism, privatization, and a receding state, to pay closer attention to which deaths become necro-political (i.e. within the purview of the state’s responsibility) and which remain merely tragic, and even normalized as part of everyday existences in the Global South.

Few remember the earthquake in the state of Gujarat that claimed almost twenty thousand lives in 2001, or the deadly pogroms against Muslims in the same state in 2002—pogroms that led Modi to be classified as a war criminal by the US state, a classification that was only recently lifted in order for him to make his much-celebrated tour of the United States, meet the president, and face adoring crowds of Indian middle-class diasporics. These large-scale events bookended the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, but they remain local, while 9/11 has become a global catastrophe. I am of course not the first person to suggest that some deaths matter more than others.

Postcolonial, feminist, ethnic studies, and queer theory scholars have made similar arguments for many years, employing a range of examples from around the world, both contemporary and historical. I want to add to these observations by exploring how states that are classified as liberal and democratic are increasingly absolved of the life and death of those who reside within their borders in ways that illiberal states—and illiberal organizations, most often labeled “terrorist”[iii]—are not.

Describing quite similar everyday lived experiences in such disparate ways reinforces the idea that the world is divided into two seemingly opposing spaces, forms of power, and even temporalities (one developing, one hyper-modern). These representational practices obscure the violence upon which “liberal” states have emerged and the ways that they continue to exercise power over death in uneven and highly undemocratic ways. In the process, they also center the neo-liberal subject and displace that subject’s complicity in structures and processes of inequality that can never be contained within the territorial borders of any state.

In the Gulf, it seems that there are two distinct forms of migration: exploited and mercenary, usually categorized as “migrant” vs. “expat.” Thus, when activists and scholars refer to “migrant labor” and its problems, my scholarship—previously with Indian middle classes in Dubai, and now with students and educators in Doha’s Education City—does not fall into this category. However, my research in Doha has provided the lens for the questions I pose in this piece, and in particular, it was the content of my interviews with faculty and staff at American branch campuses, which I was in the process of transcribing in the summer of 2015, that led to my desire to explore how literal and metaphorical death operate in conjunction to recuperate particular myths of liberalism and its others.

My interlocutors were quite aware of their position as expats and not migrant laborers: “migrant labor” tested their liberal values, while also shaping their daily lives in Qatar. North American faculty and staff represented themselves as simultaneously privileged and powerless. They recognized the luxuries that working in Qatar afforded them while acknowledging and being troubled by the country’s dismal labor conditions; but given an illiberal and repressive state, what could they possibly do to produce change? Some entirely exempted themselves from complicity in the system, employing nannies and maids they claimed to treat better than the Qataris, who they blamed for labor abuses. Others brought migrant labor issues into their classrooms for discussion, but within the framework of Gulf exceptionalism. Only a handful discussed with me the similarities between Gulf hierarchies and those in liberal contexts, noting the exploitation of undocumented workers or structural racism in the United States, for example.

Expatriate discourses around labor conditions highlighted their lack of privilege as non-citizens, the expectation that they are transient subjects, and the belief that illiberal power is more repressive than liberal power; in the process, they absolved themselves of responsibility in reproducing and benefitting from a system that they found distasteful. These are some of the pleasures of temporary illiberal belonging; one can remain a liberal subject while participating in a status quo that allows in many cases for greater class and race privilege than available at “home.”[iv]

For their peers in the metropolitan academy, the political life of illiberal death extends to metaphorical death—it is the context of the necropolitical authoritarian state that marks the impending demise of liberalism itself. Activists for migrant labor rights in Abu Dhabi, for example, have found hypocrisy in a New York University campus offering a liberal arts education in a place where migrant laborers have no rights and academic freedom is not guaranteed. Faculty at Yale’s main campus have expressed similar concerns about the university’s branch campus in Singapore, another presumably illiberal context, which, like the Gulf and China, is seen as threatening to the freedoms attributed to higher education in the West. During the height of opposition to the Singapore campus, for example, Seyla Benhabib wrote:

If our purpose is to set a model for a liberal arts education, why not engage India, the country with a free and contentious public sphere and an extra-ordinary intellectual life both in India and in the Indian diaspora? Experiments in democratic education are best performed with in genuinely open, multicultural and multi-faith democracies, such as India, rather than in the artificial, boutique-like security of places like Singapore or Abu Dhabi.

There is an artful forgetting that allows for such a celebration of India in contrast to Abu Dhabi and Singapore. The present climate at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, where student activists have been subject to arrest, violence, and accusations of being “anti-national” in their critiques of state policies, directly contradicts the supposed freedoms that the Indian state claims to provide its citizens. While the events at JNU will likely be folded into a narrative of Indian democracy-in-action, what narratives would emerge if similar state crackdowns took place at Qatar University, NYU Abu Dhabi, or Yale-NUS? 

This is not an exceptional situation for India, and yet the forgetting involved in representing the country as “genuinely open” is one that recuperates the life of liberalism while furthering what Gyanendra Pandey has called a “politics of indifference” to actual life. This indifference allows states and citizens in liberal democracies to simultaneously naturalize the idea that they care about the poor while doing nothing to actually alleviate poverty. Herein, India and the United States emerge unsoiled by the kinds of practices that authoritarian illiberal states employ, and their ongoing projects of slow and fast death continue to be exempted from the mythologies of liberalism as a form of freedom, equality, and civilization.

Additionally, through the act of critiquing illiberal death, the scholar/journalist/activist is not only absolved of complicity at home, but also gathers forms of cultural and material capital; there is therefore liberal profit built into the political life of illiberal death. In her new book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe explores how liberalism was produced in conjunction with the violence of slavery, settler colonialism, and indentured labor, and that the forgetting of these intimacies reproduces violence in “liberal humanist institutions, discourses, and practices today.”[v] The continued representation of Gulf exceptionalism and the distinction of illiberal death in contemporary discussions across a range of disciplines and media erase the intimacies that scholars of the Indian Ocean have tried to bring forward. These erasures are not natural disasters, but rather performances of ongoing violence that implicate us all.

Courtesy: Jadaliyya

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