BJP and Congress are both opportunists. We all are guilty of enabling them
The dance of Indian democracy is the dance of rank opportunism. Perhaps it has always been so. But in recent years it has become brazen, unabashed, naked and unapologetic as it flaunts in our faces every day a fresh outrage to numb us further into cynicism and apathy.
If the BJP makes “gathbandhans” with just about anybody to win the game of numbers, including more recently the Adivasi Samanvay Manch, backed by the outlawed CPI (Maoist) on the Bengal-Jharkhand border, then the Kerala Congress has no compunction in joining with the forces that protest the Supreme Court decision on the Sabarimala issue.
Even as one is criticising the BJP for the disastrously profligate Sardar Patel statue, one is checked mid-stride by the news that Shashi Tharoor has spoken up in support of the Karnataka Congress.
We are locked horn to horn in immovable positions, the whataboutery of one against that of the other in a Mexican impasse that shows no sign of getting resolved.
Almost every one of us today acknowledges this fact about politics that it is simply the crucible for the amoral and braver of heart and derring do to realise their ambitions of pelf and power. That it is only achievable in our country by exploiting the schisms and faultlines of our deeply religious and caste-riven society, and not by any nobler or higher ideals is of no consequence.
That the basic principles of the Constitution are simply like the moral and ethical catechisms dinned into the ears of a child until (s)he reaches adolescence, after which (s)he is exhorted to be practical, with feet on the ground, dovetail into becoming a hustler and shady “jugaadi” to be able to cope with the competition of India’s teeming millions.
We have adapted to such disconnects from an early age, and have grown to incorporate them in our everyday lives without feeling any sense of regret or shame. We have learnt to compartmentalise and feel smug in the worst of circumstances.
Yet, in spite of the lack of idealism in any of these political parties, and in spite of them resembling close mirror images of each other, territorialism is ingrained in us. We are compelled to take sides. Even the fence-sitters take sides if one closely scrutinises their selective choice of issues for devil’s advocacy.
Tribalism sans idealism makes absolute demands and expects absolute loyalty without cogitation or intellection of any sort. You smear the colours of the tribe and you whoop and stamp banging your spears. Collectivism holds the power to create affiliations and loyalties in the most absurd of circumstances. It also stretches the limits of incredulity infinitely, normalising the absurd and even making the unacceptable attractive and appetising.
Four years ago, having a Pahlaj Nihalani as chairman of the CBFC was possible, but having a Rajiv Malhotra as an honorary visiting professor to JNU was not. Today, it is possible.
The analogy of the boiling frogs comes to mind. Because yes, what we are experiencing today is full-blown fascism.
Our political parties led by the liberal class, have detached themselves from the working class, and have become weak and irrelevant mainly because they have failed to take cognizance of the needs of grassroots workers and the realities of our industrial and farming communities.
The left has been neutered and failed to articulate an alternative vision to capitalism to the very same communities. Tripura was happy to get rid of a Manik Sarkar, who had worked for them sincerely over so many years, in favour of a Biplab Deb, no matter how much of a humorous figure the latter may cut. What we are facing today is what Antonio Gramsci described in his Prison Notebooks as a "crisis of authority".
In such a scenario, fascism finds itself on the ascendant and state repression aided by neo liberal interests becomes steadily more severe and totalitarian.
Mussolini’s regime claimed, like our Indian corporate state, to be implementing a government based on efficiency, meritocracy, the management of society by “experts” and specialists and the elimination of class conflict through mediation. Like us, it too celebrated “heroic” military values, traditionalism and a mythical past that stretched back, (in the case of fascist Italy, to ancient Rome.) It too rewarded conformism and loyalty, denigrated the humanities and culture in favor of vocational and technical training, spectacle and patriotic kitsch. It advocated a relentless positivism on the lines of "all is well", ridiculed the concept of social welfare and defanged the media systematically.
Dissent and criticism were condemned as treason by conflating the individual in power with the state. Gramsci described it as "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". This is amply demonstrated by Finance minister Arun Jaitley’s recent defense of demonetisation as a “shake up” of the system after all the other purported reasons, recovery of black money, curbing cash access to terrorists, etc., have failed to cut the mustard.
For Gramsci, hegemony meant how ruling elites, through the bread and circuses of mass culture, stage-manage our understanding of reality to promote their interests. The passive consumers of mass culture see the world not as it is but as it is interpreted for them.
Mass culture, including the press, schools and systems of entertainment, demonises and ridicules all those ruling elites scapegoat and fear — in our case social activists, the poor, Muslims, Dalits, immigrant workers, anti-capitalists, labor unions, liberals, intellectuals, and dissidents.
The corporate elites use mass culture to trivialise legitimate economic and social grievances into psychological and emotional problems that have glib populist solutions — hence the admonition throughout our consumer society for navel-gazing spiritualism, unquestioning obedience, yoga and self-help gurus, rote education (Exam Warriors) and competition, xenophobic aversions to corral us in and control us, and a belief in the hyper nationalist hive mind.
Collectivism holds the power to imbue seemingly mundane objects and practices with broad symbolic significance. It could be a statue, it could be a game like cricket. It could also be the burning of crackers on Diwali.
In the wrong hands, all these can be mobilised and deployed for the fascist project by creating a sense of emotional investment that builds, in the words of Rabindranath Tagore "narrow divisive walls". One cannot imagine past cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar saying what Virat Kohli did recently. The very idea of “going to another country” if one admires a player from that country is preposterous, in the context of a game like cricket, once known as a gentleman’s game and the epitome of sportsmanship.
One cannot imagine that critiquing the wasteful expenditure on a colossal statue can lead to one’s nationalist credentials being questioned. Or that the very air pollution that is generated during Diwali impacting millions of Indians with pulmonological diseases should be held up as a proud trophy defiantly, as an assertion of Hindutva and a cock and snook against our Muslims. Or else, one is not an Indian.
This is the dilemma of false choice that is packaged and presented to us every day by the self-appointed custodians of “nationalist” culture, morality and aesthetics.
Paulo Freire, who was influenced by Gramsci’s philosophy and teachings wrote in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce, to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.”
We live today in the myopic era of overweening pride and voluntary self harm. It is not as if Yogi Adityanath is not aware of the wave of mirth and mocking memes that have been sweeping through social media, or even the talk in the street corners and tea shops, about his renaming spree. Or that the PM or Arun Jaitley or any of the rest of them are unaware of the valid points made against practically every action of this government since it came to power from the failure of demonetisation, the case against “Urban Naxals” to that embarrassing statue to the murky Rafale deal.
None of it, not a thousand erudite articles in the papers, PILs by activists, media bloopers by the BJP’s own party spokesmen, statements coming out from France about the Rafale deal, from the UK about loans being wasted on statues, stops their bloody-minded determination to carry on regardless.
The dance of opportunism — in which every political party has twirled and pirouetted, swayed and sashayed all these years — has ensured that we as a collective have been silenced.
But we as collectivists have become willing collaborators to the endgame of our own demise.