The killings are going on in Bastar. The body count is increasing. But India’s parliament gave it a pass while it was in session, choosing to look the other way.
The entire political class is silent.
The ruling party has not attempted to hide what easily could be called its genocidal actions in Bastar. Union home minister Amit Shah proclaims it loud and clear. But no opposition leader raises a voice. On the political stage, otherwise, Shah is cornered on a number of things he does. Except this. There is no delegation to meet the President, no hurried press conference, no demand for a white paper, or an investigation. The opposition seems to act as though it has not heard anything, not seen anything, not noticed anything.
Are we seeing the tragic and evil consensus of India’s political class? Are we witness to the outer limits of the democratic idea of India, even in the best version as proposed by the most progressive forces in India’s parliament? Rahul Gandhi, Mahua Mitra, Shashi Tharoor, Asaduddin Owaisi…they have all been silent.
Some of them might be privately attempting to wash their guilt by avidly following the news of the killings, but it is as though they are following a secret medieval covenant not to say anything in public. True to form, the media doles news of the killings as though these are reports of a natural calamity, like death due to lightning or a thunderstorm. What is there to discuss or deliberate? Nothing at all.
Various political parties represent or claim to represent the different social sections, castes, tribes, regions and religious communities that comprise India. Even Adivasi representatives sit in the parliament. They are all silent. In effect, the parliament is sanctioning vigilante action.
What is the covenant which binds them all? What tells them that it is best to quietly focus on other things, and look the other way?
They seem to agree on a so-called structural necessity of the Bastar killings.
Given this scenario, we must step up and act in conscience. We should lobby and sensitise parliament and go on to appeal to the legislators to uphold a moral conscience and intervene to “save democracy”.
But this will only add to the pool of self-righteousness ailing the world. Instead let us recognise how things really stand. Let us read the writing on the wall. Just pause and take note. And learn about the consensus – the silent and rather lethal consensus – which sustains India’s democracy. We must try to learn about the much vaunted “constitutional morality” the republic serves platitudes about – the constitutional morality which the opposition always claims to struggle to save, uphold and defend.
Perhaps the first thing we get to learn is that the political class as a whole has a common enemy. This opposition to that enemy binds all the stakeholders of India’s democracy. They all fear an enemy. And they must unite to kill and finish off that enemy.
Amidst the fractious squabbling between the BJP and the opposition parties, national and regional, it might be difficult to perceive the internal coherence of the Indian political class and the establishment. So consider this: Manmohan Singh might have declared that Maoists are the greatest internal security threat, but it is Amit Shah who acts on it. So does Salwa Judum and Special Police Officers, the others.
This is an issue on which Shah and Chidambaram are on the same page. If there is one thing RSS and the Congress agree on, it would be this. Secularism and communalism appear as one.
The struggle towards the just that morally and politically legitimises the republic loses its efficacy. The moral fibre of the republic is at its weakest here. No wonder then that the Indian parliament recoils from ever having to come face to face with such deep moral blind spots where hypocrisy runs free.
There seems to be an understanding that the job must be carried out as quietly as possible. So parliament should not raise a word about it. Legislators must allow the government to act in full trust and faith.
But what about the judiciary?
Even Supreme Court rulings go unimplemented in Bastar. But the court seems to give those progressive rulings precisely since it is confident that nothing will come of it.
So the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary – all three departments are one on this. So much for the separation of powers.
This means that the killings will have no paper trail, and no government record. No parliamentary proceedings will take place on them. There will be no record of any written command or circular anyone gave, notwithstanding the home minister going rather gung-ho about ending Naxalism in the country. The United Progressive Alliance government had also carried out Operation Green Hunt without really declaring it out loud, but again without a paper trail. The same applies to the lesser known Operation Steeplechase ordered by Indira Gandhi in 1971.
This is particularly ironical, given how much India has been pulverised in the efforts to find the paper trail about state complicity the 2002 Gujarat riots, the 1984 Sikh riots, or complicity in the killings in Nellie. In those cases, one or the other of the political parties found it advantageous to track and expose the chain of command. Not in this case, where the desire to cover the tracks is unanimous if not total, again establishing the inner coherence of the Indian political class.
Let us be more precise. Here, state action is like a reflex. No debate is needed. No processing is needed. The Indian republic is hardwired, programmed to automatically respond the way it is doing in Bastar. Nothing can come in its way.
What is the kind of enemy which elicits such a kind of reflex reaction – such a killer response that needs no deliberation, no consideration?
What does it tell us of the character of the Indian republic and the democratic idea of India? What is the kind of fear to which it activates such a kind of response, every time and with great perfection?
What we learn from the killings in Bastar is that Indian democracy is internally sustained by a secret understanding about its enemy.
A spectral fear seems to haunt Indian democracy. The preamble to the constitution declares or pledges the values which brings together the Indian republic: democracy, secularism and socialism. We have a struggle within the republic to defend these values – who really stands for the democratic “idea of India,” and who does not, is contested and debated. Who is faithful to the vision of Ambedkar, and who is not, is similarly debated.
But perhaps it is a spectral fear which forces all these disparate forces to huddle up, explaining the internal coherence and unity of the Indian establishment. The unity of the capitalist class, the propertied class, was, if you recall, ensured through the doctrine of the basic structure of the constitution, through the Kesavananda Bharati judgment of 1973. It being a no-brainer to point out that this doctrine is parasitic on the otherwise well-known homology between capitalist “property rights” and the rights and liberties of the individual.
The spectral fear appeared early on as the liberal establishment in India took shape, before Independence. The 1920s saw the Peshawar Conspiracy Case and the Meerut Conspiracy Case. In an insightful paper, Ali Raza shows that “Official Communism” was born around the time of the Meerut Conspiracy Case, spawned by the artifices of Indian liberalism, including Nehru, with many communists falling in line.
We are forced to ask if there is a deep lie which sustains Indian democracy in the first place.
Not unexpectedly, Indian democracy fears looking into its abyss. Nietzsche wrote, if you look into the abyss too long, the abyss starts looking back at you. The refusal to look starts with the refusal to acknowledge or talk. There is a fear that one day you might end up looking at yourself in the mirror, that you will see yourself for what you are.
The deep abyss of moral and political vacuity which founds the modern liberal constitutional republic has been theorised in political thought by Walter Benjamin. He calls it the non-law which founds the law, the “mythic violence” which founds the normal operation of the law and democracy.
Surely, if Carl Schmitt is right in saying that the sovereign is one who decides on the exception, then we know that the democratic idea of India is sustained by a “pure decision”, a non-law – one where the law is suspended and the exception begins. The exception is the new normal – not as a response to an unfolding situation, but one inseminated right at the inception, whose preservation automatically spawns an entire edifice of law, democracy and the subtleties of justice and liberty. The illegality which founds the legal then is not a dramatic Emergency but a normal boring affair, the routine functioning of democracy for which the preamble has conjured up the people.
Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation (FACAM).
Courtesy: The Wire