A new-age Satyagraha

Grace has become much less common than even common sense! Indeed, rude behaviour, if that is symptomatic of a graceless society, abounds in our daily social interactions, at home, in public places, offices and finally on the streets where this can easily turn into road rage incidents which sometimes lead to violent crimes. 

Most people following politics in India today will testify to the fact that the quality of grace is becoming conspicuous by its absence in any political discourse either inside the parliament (or any other legislative bodies) or out of it (say, in TV studios of big national news channels). Political opponents are routinely seen to interrupt each other and blatantly usurp the debating space to voice one’s partisan positions.  These could be something like a speculative promise of an intangible beneficial fall out of this or that government policy as a foregone conclusion or an exactly opposite view expressing apprehension of an unmitigated disaster and a dark future guaranteed to unfold from the same policy, depending on their relative coordinates vis-à-vis the political divide.

Just look at the comments people proffer in the ubiquitous electronic space, in respect of the e-paper or ezine articles, blogs and the social media postings. The proclivity to post comments is often not commensurate with minimum required knowledge about the subject, basic civility to engage in a conversation, attitude to learn and contribute to take a discussion thread forward. On the contrary, utter arrogance and extreme and foolhardy self-righteousness often characterize such responses. The more sensitive the topic is the chances are that the author has to walk a sharper razor edge so as not to offend one side or the other and invite virulent comments. To be fair, sometimes the original blogs/postings themselves are tendentious, judgmental, make sweeping statements, and include tasteless insensitive pictures, almost as if spoiling for a fight. And the extreme sensitivity and touchiness about our opinions or beliefs on virtually any subject is legendary.

Intolerance of any view, worldview or even perception other than one’s own is often found in individual or group interactions, and this probably is pointing towards a fact that Indian society is becoming increasingly intolerant. Our prescription of economic development and the way its fall out has been managed has unleashed not only irreconcilable aspirations among various sections of the people but often an ugly conflict between simultaneously prevailing centuries as a part of this modernisation project. We are a divided, indeed, very fragmented society and have too many identities - ethnic, caste-based, religious, regional (even sub-regional), and of course political identities to defend from each other’s perceived pillory.

Just imagine, on the other hand, how different our world would have looked if we, at least the majority among us, could pause in our fast-faster-fastest track of furious one-upmanship before complete derailment and choose, individually, to be the slower coach and address each other with that famously under-used quaint Indian phrase ‘pehle aap’ ! Or perhaps could have reconsidered the strategy of withering contempt for our opponent, whatever his or her identity, in real life (or virtual) and be prepared to acknowledge the inherent ‘otherness’ as a matter of diversity of ways of life, much like the bio-diversity, to be protected and celebrated rather than being demonised, hated and demolished.

   

I wish we could, in a new form of Satyagraha, disown the inept puppeteers of our economic and political choices, manipulators of our taste, and all those who goad us in our every waking moment into frenetic competition, as if our life is but a dissipative T20 match between India and Pakistan winner taking all, for space, for the right of way, for the wherewithal for conspicuous consumption now and the security to keep doing the same in a distant future. And make these choices and respond not in anger and antipathy but in awareness of colours that the colour-blind would never see.

And persuade the stalker to take the ‘no’ for an answer, admire the candle in the wind and move on. 

(A modified and updated version of an older post of mine appearing in another blog)

Why secularism and freedom of expression have India specific connotation

The democratic experience in India is, comparatively speaking, shallow. We have been introduced to democracy rather late, around the middle of the last century, our political structure based on a borrowed template and formally modeled more or less on the British practice. India was not a democratic country before the colonial take over by the British or even during the major part of their rule, if one leaves out the last twenty odd years. During this latter period some rudimentary democratic institutions came into being as ad hoc response from the rulers to meet the increasing self-rule demand from the articulate educated Indians belonging to some strands of the nationalist movement. These were by no means expressions of mass democracy.

Anti-British movement led by Gandhi and others in Indian National Congress was primarily a political agitation by the Indian masses geared principally to remove the colonial yoke and aimed at major changes in the political superstructure characterizing the country (or the major parts of the country). To the participants of the freedom movement and the people at large the facile assumption was proffered by the leaders that the ‘freedom’ from the colonial rule will necessarily mean democracy, especially as it was being sought to be safeguarded by a meticulously worked document like the ‘Constitution’ (some very erudite, brilliant and humane Indians of the time having authored it). And with the first countrywide general election based on universal suffrage a significant measure of democratic practice was also demonstrated on the ground.

Despite many apparent failures and limitations of and attempts at subversion on our democracy it has to be ungrudgingly accepted, however, that this aspect of our democratic freedom – the ability of the Indians across the length and the breadth of the country to more or less freely exercise their electoral choices at periodic intervals – has remained sacrosanct for all these sixty five years. Being able to throw out of office through a largely non-violent election process the particularly hated dispensation of Emergency introduced by the Congress party during mid-1970s, or the unusually long (for about 34 years) self-perpetuating mis-governance by the left front in West Bengal that almost appeared as a fait accompli bear testimony to the strength of the functioning though flawed democracy in India. In view of what had happened in terms of the shrinkage of the democratic space in many countries in India’s neighborhood and elsewhere, countries that won freedom from the colonial rule around the same time as India this is rightly considered by many as a significant achievement.

Within this basic and broad democratic framework our polity through its varied and evolving strands (roughly represented by various political parties and groups) has managed to develop its programmes projected to benefit the majority of the people and organize corresponding actions so as to best serve the cause laid down by these programmes. The latter could be addressing planning and executing economic development projects, scientific management of the natural resources, managing country’s finances, creating and organizing infrastructure for health and education for the burgeoning population, engineering social upliftment and promoting social mobility, maintaining peace and harmony among a large and widely heterogeneous population characterized by diverse ethnicity, religion, caste, language, economic conditions, etc.

It is in this context that quite early in our experiment with democracy in the post-independence India (in about twenty years or so), the Congress party which by virtue of the momentum it carried from leading the freedom movement had taken over the governance of almost whole of India, lost the absolute monopoly in deciding the form, the content and the priorities of these programmes and who the beneficiaries of these would be. Partly because of conceptual inadequacy in understanding and mediating democratic reforms in a poor, underdeveloped, predominantly agricultural country with effectively feudal land relations and partly out of plain incompetence, arrogance of power, greed and corruption, the ruling party quickly lost the moral hegemony to lord over such a vast and diverse land. Soon there were other claimants to the mantle. First they came flaunting contrasting ideological worldviews. But gradually the challengers put up the flagstaff of diverse identities – of castes, religions, regional and tribal aspirations for ‘self-determination’ - appearing to shoot their arms and articulate newfound voices through the imposed veil of suzerainty of a central government with an overarching national ethos and perspective.

Since then it has become an open season for competition for occupying the preeminent place within the political space among all manner of opportunistic coalitions of groups openly and avowedly promoting their sectional interests and agendas that could sometimes appear almost irreconcilable to each other, quite apart from working against the demands of a modern nation in the 21^st century world. An important aspect of freedom interpreted within democratic India is thus an almost infinite tolerance of the articulation of a restricted, sectional identity even if that works at cross purposes with the interest of ‘others’ (beyond the given group or section) and the ‘nation’ as a whole, if that matters any more to the promoters of identity politics in India.

This incidentally seems to be consistent with the common interpretation of secularism as defined in our constitution. Within the scope of this interpretation, the Indian state (governments both at the center and in the states) can not just be neutral about all religions, they will have to actually bend over backwards to publicly support disparate agendas of followers of each religion, which effectively translates to supporting the religious organizations, parties and those ambitious elites leading them. Religion in India is not something of a cultural value system or worldview practiced by individual followers in private, without demonstrably occupying public space or grabbing public attention or demanding expenditure of public money (or the state’s indulgence or munificence in any way).

That is why shifting or demolishing (even under court order) temples or mosques whether these are of older or recent origins on busy public roads causing clear inconvenience to the flow of traffic in a modern Indian city can be an emotive and law and order issue. In the same vein the financial support by the government for the Haj pilgrimage is expected to be a time honored and therefore compulsory gesture that no decent government hoping not to antagonize a religious group can withdraw. Nor can the government afford to show itself to be fatally insensitive by proposing to control the noise levels in the residential areas and townships in modern cities and towns contributed by the quotidian calls to the faithful and blaring of religious sermons and functions over loudspeakers. And to speak of being wary of regimentation and proliferation of very archaic, ultraconservative ideas and mores among the co-believers in such congregations will be construed as sacrilegious.

That is why a literary work like fiction, essay or a poem or a work of art like painting, a cartoon or a film or play in contemporary India can and does routinely run afoul with the sensitivities of the one or the other among the myriad affiliates of religious allegiances. And the secular government respecting the fundamental rights (to preach and practice a religion) of the aggrieved, enshrined under constitution, is expected to assuage the hurt feelings (due to a perceived affront) by promptly stopping a painting exhibition, live performance or a theatre show, denying censorship certificate to a movie and banning the publication and sale of a book. In addition, most often by an unwritten convention, the state has to remain a passive spectator of the active vandalism and destruction of properties by the mortified activists exercising their freedom in dispensing vigilante justice on the perceived infringement of ‘their’ fundamental rights. Curiously, though, the minor matter about protecting the freedom of expression of the artists and writers and filmmakers under the same article of the constitution never arrests the attention of the government.  

It is true that religion happens to be a common enough trigger for backlash on the freedom of expression. However, freedom to preach and practice rabid regionalism, ethno-linguistic chauvinism, to promote caste-based reservation in jobs and promotion, to demand self-determination for a dwindling tribal identity are all very sacrosanct in India. And every Indian worth his salt should clearly know that his freedom to express any rational view on any of these matters is naturally secondary to the primary freedom of a host of other Indians of sensing a hurt in their identity and ideology.   

Interestingly, recent experiences also show that the way governments – both at the center and in the states – respond to an alleged infringement of freedom of belief (in a religion, a cultural practice, a certain ideology etc.) is highly variable. A leader of a political outfit can employ a language in his speech what, for all practical purposes, appears extremely abusive to an average Indian audience in describing or interpreting an action of a political opponent or a group, generally without inviting a rap from the law enforcing authorities.  In the cases of clear hate speech by some politicians against the believers of a rival religion the police have to be literally coaxed and pressured by the superior courts and mounting public opinion to even initiate some tardy actions. But when an anonymous netizen draws a cartoon of a politician and another shares the same over the cyberspace or a non-political challenger like Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal (in the days before the Aam Aadmi Party was born) or Kiran Bedi lampoons a politician these would galvanize privilege motions in the parliament or immediate police actions by cyber-sleuths and arrests (preferably without bail) under tough provisions of the Information Technology Act. When a movie situates a budding terrorist in an in-your-face realistic cultural, religious and social setting, the filmmaker is hauled over coals for religious stereotyping of terrorism and movie theatres vandalized in whipped up public freenzy.     

Thus it is not always important as to what is being said, but rather who is saying that. Freedom is enshrined for a privileged section of the Indians to take offence on the slightest pretext and hurt others by word or action with impunity, but it will be jail for other lesser mortals in the country who dare emulate similar behavior or aspire for the same privileges.

Who killed Kader Mia ?

In the last chapter (‘Freedom to think’) of his book ‘ Identity and violence’, Amartya Sen dwelt on his personal experience as an eleven year old child in Dhaka (at the time part of the undivided India) of a nasty act of communal violence during the Hindu-Muslim riots of late nineteen forties. Kader Mia, a Muslim day labourer, happened on that day to stray into a predominantly Hindu neighbourhood of the city (where Sen’s family lived at the time) in search of work for a tiny wage to provide for his impoverished family. Hindu thugs, who did not, in all likelihood, even know him nor met him before, knifed him simply because of his religious identity.  

While expressing his bewilderment even sixty years after this incident Sen correctly rationalised it within his conceptual framework of the solitarist view of an individual’s identity – in this case the identity of Kader Mia just as a Muslim. Those who engineered his death, including those who actually executed the action, did not stop to consider his other obvious identity as one belonging to the working class (proletariat), as a poor daily wage earning odd-job workman (having to face, probably, much the same economic hardships as some among the mob of killers) or as a fellow Bengali-speaking countryman sharing the same cultural practices of the rural Bengal, a good normal human being who cared for his family.

What perplexed Sen the most, and justifiably so, is why and how “political instigators who urged the killing … managed to persuade many otherwise peaceable people of both communities to turn into dedicated thugs … made to think of themselves only as Hindus or only as Muslims (who must unleash vengeance on ‘the other community’) and as absolutely nothing else : not Indians, not sub-continentals, not Asians, not members of  shared human race” (Sen, Identity and Violence, Allen Lane, 2006, p 172). Continuing in this vein Sen made an inspired guess about who could be participating in this macabre dance of death. Though a large number of ordinary people were entrapped by the demagoguery of those preaching identity politics it is the savage fringe “often at the troubled ends of each community who were induced to kill ‘the enemies who kill us’”.

But this is the closest Sen had come to analyzing the art of fostering communal violence. In the end he came back to effectively restating his two formal propositions made in this book (see my earlier blog “Roots of communal violence – solitarist view of identity”) and rested his case. However, it is clear from above that Sen was looking for not just a formal answer to his question as to why, if violence is not the norm with an average human being but only an aberration, it has always been relatively easy for the architects of carnages and pogroms to successfully bring out the beast in men.

I suspect a rationale for ethno-communal violence may not be found in a purely rational, however confused or obdurately narrow and one-sided, view of identity that has presented the intellectual armor Sen had assiduously tried to demolish in this monograph. There is an irrational side to our mind that probably carries layers of unresolved existential insecurities men have accumulated over centuries, imbibed under hostile environment of fierce competition among racially or ethnically identifiable groups or communities. In this scenario sense of belonging and bonding among the communally homogeneous is valued and the perceived ‘otherness’ of any entity that is exogenous by way of food habits, dresses, look, conduct of daily life activities, is a potential threat and hence the subject of a deep-seated antipathy. In the modern world the perspective for above black and white distinction (singular identity) may present itself in a more ambiguous manner but is still socially perpetuated by uncritical consumption through the family values, religious practices, folklore and wider cultural behaviour patterns.

The alchemists of the partition violence in Bengal (politicians, businessmen and other vested interests and finally, the ‘troubled ends’ of the community, the criminals, lumpen elements) first engineered strategic provocative acts of desecration (of symbols and places of mass reverence), arson, rape and murder, spreading exaggerated lies and tendentious rumours about the same events. In this atmosphere of purported hostility by ‘others’ (sporting a specific selected religious identity and painted as the ‘enemies who kill us’) Kader Mia’s killers, despite sharing with him plural identities as noted earlier could be manipulated to a confused and raging state of mind whereupon they lost their ‘freedom to think’ and reacted from an instinctive fear and hatred of the ‘other’ (as a mere Muslim man) rather than reason. This reminds me of the inherent irrationality of men in the context of the partition riots to which Saadat Hasan Manto hinted (see my earlier blog “Communal riots : The heart of darkness”). In that blog  it was noted that the similarity of certain aspects of the current ethno-communal violence in Bodoland, Assam (July 2012 onward) with the partition riots was uncanny.