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ESSAY
Heroes in the
Hall of Infamy
An
independence Day introduction to the enemies of national well-being
By
S Prasannarajan
Hawkers
of Pax Indica have a million reasons to believe this bestselling item
in the marketplace of national well-being is not a fake, that only professional
despairists, those no-no Neanderthalers, can say it's some crude aphrodisiac
for the patriotically challenged. They are not unreasonable. Though they
may not be as photogenically exotic as snake charmers, once upon a time
Orientalism's sidewalk stereotypes. But their reasons are there for all
to see, written on a microchip, or buried in enriched uranium, or bouncing
in the bazaar.
Even healthy
scepticism can't deny the truth that India, at 53, is not languishing
in cryogenic state. Its freedom is not essentially backward looking; its
politics is passing past the Age of Congressism; its economy is less local
and more global, and digitally aspirational; its sense of security is
nuclear safe; and its self-expression is increasingly discarding the language
of the so-called Third World self-righteousness. India has at last come
to define its power in a new set of vocabulary that, for a change, is
more in tune with the spirit of the times. India is waking up after so
many nights of somnambulation.
So, celebration
time? Toast the surge? Hang on. Beneath the euphoria runs the realism
of India as imagined by self-chosen Ruritanians. India of their imagination
-- or, shall we say hallucination? -- is a total negation of the resurgent
republic. Their India is a Great Yesterday or an Exclusive Tomorrow in
which there won't be any space for questions. Permanent happiness, which
happens to be every rebellion's cause, for them is a translation of permanent
disintegration. Their heroism is a rejoinder to the sanity of a nation
that continues to keeps its emotional oneness -- the very grammar of nationalism
-- despite its cultural and linguistic polyphony. Their retro-heroism
ensures them a place in the hall of national infamy.
Who are
they? Easily identifiable types, they are the worst forms of dissent,
which, in ideal circumstances, is an expression of the power of the powerless,
or, in the words of Vaclav Havel, dissident-turned-president, a moral
rejoinder to power, the state of "living in truth". Rather,
they are the retail merchants of lies, absolute lies. Their freedom of
expression challenges the patience of an otherwise tolerant nation. What
follows is a brief introduction to the one-dimensional men India can do
without.
THE AUTONOMIST:
Dictatorship of Delhi, he cries. You hear the sound of disillusion rising
from places as varied as Kashmir, the North-east and Tamil Nadu. His exceptionalism,
he argues, makes him either less-than-Indian or more-than-Indian. The
argument is cultural as well as geographical in which India is an undesirable
abstraction. In Kashmir, for example, the rhetoric of the autonomy-seeker
is fast catching up with the gunshot of the azadi fighter. For, when Farooq
Abdullah, lately the most vocal autonomist, defines the freedom of the
Kashmiri, it is more than administrative. Power and desperation dictate
the semantics of his rhetoric. The power at play in Kashmir today is more
decisive than him. So his struggle against the intimations of political
mortality has to be packaged as special existential status of Kashmir
-- that is, the status of India is negotiable.
Somehow,
India continues to be generous enough to accommodate people who want to
break the emotional integrity of India. That is why there is this voice
from Tamil Nadu: "India should be declared a federation of independent
sovereign republics of national races." This is the Dravidian at
his "racial" worst. The vaudeville in Tamil Nadu, as you know,
is the kitschy culmination of the Dravidian identity politics -- an identity
independent of Brahmin supremacy and Hindi imperialism. Today, if Pattali
Makkal Katchi is the extreme manifestation of this politics, the so-called
mainstream Dravidian parties are the middle-path opportunists who want
Delhi as well as an anti-Delhi identity. The Dravidian, in this respect,
has an ally in the North-easterner, or, to a lesser extent, in the Akali.
The Autonomist:
The Indian who, by virtue of being an Indian, enjoys the freedom to de-Indianise
himself, to break India, not geographically, but rhetorically.
THE REVOLUTIONARY:
Che Guevara may be a skeleton sleeping in a glass coffin in Havana, a
true triumph of forensic science, not revolution. Or he may be eternity
pasted on a T-shirt. Also, Mao may be an amulet in Beijing streets, Marx
an alphabetical joke on Big Mac. But the Bolivian jungle and the Chinese
countryside continue to have their Indian parodies in places like Bihar
and Andhra Pradesh, inhabited by revolutionaries less romantic than Che,
and less poetic than Mao. When they play out their romance, it's a sanguineous
act against a soft state. The Spring Thunder of Naxalbari, a rebellion
borrowed from Mao's book, has morphed into a savage salvo in the jungles
of Telengana and the badlands of Bihar. The new class warriors are lumpen
murderers.
The name
itself is a prehistorical joke: The CPI(ML) Liberation Group, the Maoist
Communist Centre, the People's War Group ... All organisations of armed
liberators. If they are not killing each other, they are killing the vulnerable.
Really, revolutionaries have never been such badland bandits. Perhaps,
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, still captivating for the believers in the occult,
gets the practitioners it deserves in this post-ideology age: enemies
of society. But India doesn't deserve them.
The Revolutionary:
An inhuman error in the history of liberation, a subrural horror in the
life of India.
THE APPARATCHIK:
The apparat has ceased to be Russian in the last decade of the last century.
The sovietless apparatchik is not worthy of any job except a residentship
in the prison or the sanatorium. But the apparatchik is alive and talking
in some influential parts of India. True, he is not as dangerous as the
Maoist revolutionary, he is the proofreader of somebody else's revolution.
The text of salvation, available only in antique bookshops, still provides
him with camera-friendly, newsprint-worthy wisdom. The wisdom, for most
of his elders in the communist parivar, is rooted in some kind of struggle
-- that twinkle-twinkle-red-star romance in the first days of communism
in north Kerala, for instance. For the young in communism -- what the
ordinary people call the middle aged -- the wisdom comes from the class
struggle of the JNU campus and the dialectics of crossword puzzle.
Still a
progressive, he is for a socialist India. Though he doesn't realise that
the communist has lost India long ago. What he has got is a few districts
in Kerala and West Bengal. Unlike the grandfathers of communism, he has
no empire to keep; he has nothing at stake except the slogan and the book.
He nevertheless wants power -- not through the class struggle but through
the coalition struggle of the Third Front. And can the communist be a
communist without an enemy, a bogeyman? So he has the enemy in the market,
too foreign to be socialist, or in the politics of the right -- too nationalist
to be progressive. So his living heroes have names like Fidel Castro and
Saddam Hussain. Ideally, he should be doing some social work in Pyongyang.
Instead, he is wasting himself in the wrong country.
The Apparatchik:
Too insignificant to be noticed by history but significant enough to be
a pain in India's neck.
 |
| He is
Hindu India's glory keeper, protector of purity, slayer of blasphemies.
The religious cleanser who is dirtying the religion. |
THE MAHABHARAT-MAN:
He prefers mythology to history, great yesterday to current uncertainty.
He is Hindu India's glory keeper, protector of purity, slayer of blasphemies.
He wields the trident of the only truth, the divine truth. India, according
to his script, is a cultural misinterpretation of the Bharat of Vedic
wisdom. So he would like to see India speaking the language of its gods
-- Sanskrit. He would like to see Indians, legatees of a great civilisation,
keeping themselves away from unBharat activities. He is the saffronised
Khomeini without the Persian's revolutionary rage. But, like the dead
ayatollah, he needs enemies to emphasise the urgency of Ersatz India,
to paraphrase the inadequacies of existing India.
You can
see him in organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal.
You have seen this exotically photogenic Hindu seeking out his enemies
in cinema halls or on the banks of the Ganga. The victim of his civilisational
clash with the enemies is India itself. For, the trident-wielding, scripture-quoting
Hindu is defending something that doesn't require any defence or protection.
Hinduism, after all, is one of the least paranoid of religions. It has
survived for so long without the supreme preacher. The holy warrior who
thinks a third-rate movie or a pathetic painting can threaten Hinduism
is not serving the cause of Hinduism. Also, he is creating a scenario
where third-rate art can become first-rate cause. You saw it happening
in Benares last year, when he, as the primordial Hindu, assumed that an
average filmmaker's water cannon could kill Hinduism. For those who were
looking for exotic headlines from a country ruled by the "Hindu Nationalist
Party", he was reducing the distance between Benares and Algiers,
between the mahant and the mullah. The so-called mad mullah has ensured
that Actually Existing Islam will remain a travesty of the original. The
Mahabharat-man is doing his worst to add a new term, Actually Existing
Hinduism, to the glossary of intolerance.
The Mahabharat-man:
The religious cleanser who is dirtying the religion.
THE LEFT-LIBERAL
INTELLECTUAL: He is the conscience keeper of a wretched, godforsaken
country. You see him everywhere -- talking post-colonialism in the seminar
room of Wither India; eating the newsprint with the hungry urgency of
an anti-imperialist; quoting Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm; or raging
against an India that is nuclear, communal, intolerant, oh yes, even fascist.
Salvation, he says, lies on the left. The Right, he says, means fascism
in saffron. Well, he is so liberal with words from history books. He has
a way of making them immediately familiar. So when he says Indian fascism,
he is trivialising the history of fascism -- it is like characterising
every massacre as Holocaust, every killing field as Auschwitz. He is so
self-righteous that, according to him, you can be a Stalinist and socially
relevant but you can't be a rightwinger or a nationalist and be a relevant
Indian. Pure malarkey that goes as his sociology is an insult to the art
of argument.
He refuses
to accept the reality that the world has long ago defied his mind, that
his quarrel with India, the Land Without Justice, only brings out his
own intellectual redundancy, that the Left has long ago lost the argument
of liberation and justice. That anti-imperialism and post-colonialism
are least-selling items in the marketplace of ideas -- in spite of Edward
Said. But this self-styled subaltern Sartre continues to be a resident
of the make-believe -- though it is an altogether different matter that
Sartre himself has been posthumously mocked by history. Unlike Sartre,
there are termites in his spine and fungus in his brain. Strangely, he
gets space in India.
The Left-Liberal
Intellectual: A word-polluting citizen of the Sovereign Republic of Fantasy.
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