Courtesy edtimes.in
“There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in” Leonard Cohen
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W
e are just coming out of a cruel moment of dashed hopes. On Friday, October 14, 2022, the Bombay High Court acquitted G. N. Saibaba, Mahesh Tikri, Hem Mishra, Prashant Rahi, Vijay Tikri, and the last person, Pandu Narote who had by then died in jail. The six were held under the UAPA (Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act) for conspiring against the state. The High Court had found a major technical flaw with the trial (the UAPA can be challenged only on technical grounds). Then the very next day, on Saturday (a holiday), the Supreme Court stayed the acquittal without saying that the High Court’s findings were wrong. When students in Delhi University protested, they were forcibly dispersed by the police. The lesson that some will choose to take from this occasion is that the justice system works. They will claim that this instance just goes to show that we have a system of checks and balances in place. After all, the High Court acquitted and then the SC overturned it. This was then just another day in the world’s largest democracy!
But one of the judges spelled out the core lesson that should be taken from this episode. In response to the plea by Saibaba’s legal counsel that Saibaba be granted house arrest to G. N. on medical and humanitarian grounds), M.R. Shah, one of the two SC judges who stayed the High Court judgement said: “We are not referring to this case but in general. The brain is the most dangerous thing. For terrorists or Maoists, the brain is everything.”1 The comparison has been made to Antonio Gramsci’s sentence on June 4, 1928 to twenty years of imprisonment. Pointing to Gramsci, the prosecutor of the Italian Fascist government had said, “for 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning” (Fretigne, 2021, pp. 194-195).
Now, there is a debate on whether India is fascist or not. I am inclined to agree with Aijaz Ahmad’s (2019) claim that it is not; at least, not in the classic case we know from twentieth century Europe. What Modi and the Hindudtva project have achieved, Ahmad notes, is that they have managed to take over the institutions of liberal democracy from within – as we can see with the judiciary, the election commission, educational institutions; and media — while keeping the working façade of a liberal democracy. Ahmad’s larger point is that this turn is a world-wide trend – U.S., Israel, Turkey — and shows the fascist streak inherent in liberalism, the hollowness of liberal democracy itself. In particular, he gives the example of Turkey, where Erdogan used the liberal institutions of the state to destroy the secular fabric, arresting and detaining intellectuals and progressives, without ever needing to stage a military take over.
There is, however, much to understand about the kind of culture that such a facade of democracy, backed by state-sanctioned violence and immunity produces. What are its allures? Who does it appeal to? Are we in this for the long haul, then? Like the UAPA detainees awaiting trial, are we left with no recourse but to make endless rounds of courts only to find judges changed at the last minute and mainstream media pronouncing guilt in advance of any trial? Is this now a cruel absurdist exercise, in which the very collapse of liberal democracy is upheld as evidence of the existence of democracy?
Ahmad also claims in that same interview that each country gets the fascism it deserves, that each version is rooted in the unique history and deep structures. The learned judge described the nature of the BJP-RSS led, Hindutva-inflected version we have by identifying what it needs and cultivates — an infantile public, i.e., adults who are eager to shut their brains, to tune out any doubt or question, and close their eyes in the sukh/peace of bhakti for the Supreme Leader who will restore them to a lost glory. To understand this phenomenon, we must ask, what are the pleasures of this deliberate regression? And, are there examples of resistance to this neo-fascist creep?
It is no secret that the founding figures of Hindutva admired the Nazis and modelled their goal of turning India into a Hindu Rashtra after them. Yet, in contrast to the Nazis who called upon men, especially young men to join the war effort to avenge humiliation ( (Theweleit, 1987), Hindutva calls upon its public as “children” who must avenge the humiliation of the mother nation. Golwalkar, a founding figure of the RSS, writes (1939):
The spirit of the race beckons to us and has lighted for its benighted children (my emphasis) the path to their cherished ideal, with beacons of undying spiritual splendour. Let us rouse ourselves to our true nationality, let us follow the lead of our race-spirit, and fill the heavens with the clarion call of the Vedic seers “from sea to sea over all the land – One Nation,” one glorious, splendorous Hindu Nation benignly shedding peace and plenty over the whole world. 132-33.
I am using the term infantile here in the Freudian sense – as a regression into childhood neurosis, born out of both the sheer helplessness of the child and its desire to gain control over its world. It gives birth to feelings of rage that children express sadistically, e.g., wanting to/wishing to punish the adults for their lack of attention and masochistically, turning their anger inwards, feigning real or imagined illness. To be clear, to claim that Hindutva ideology pulls up these psychic experiences from the childhood subconscious, is not to say that real children are capable of the cruel masochistic and sadistic fantasies bhakts put on display – of mob lynchings at one end and cow worship at the other. Only, that adults are capable of regressing into an infantile expression of rage and submission.
The flip side of this masochism are sadistic displays of terror inflicted by Gau rakshaks on their victims and the videos they circulate of their own actions. Mohammed Akhlaq and so many others have been brutally killed on the mere suspicion of keeping beef, dalit men publicly flogged for supposedly dealing in dead cows. The sadistic pleasures of the upper-middle crust are palpable. Instead of empathy for the workers leaving on foot following the central government’s sudden lockdown, middle and upper middle-class neighborhoods joined whatever gimmickry they were called upon to do: whether it was banging pots and pans or switching off lights and lighting candles following some numerological mumbo jumbo as a cure for covid.
Training into this sadistic-masochistic culture starts early. Tanika Sarkar’s (2022) longstanding work on the intimate culture of Hindutva is instructive in this regard. She shows how the RSS seeks to recruit children at ever younger ages and its schools perpetuate a culture of self-destructive and violent obedience to authority by obliterating the distinction between history and myth. As with the RSS shakas, these schools celebrate “heroic” models for avenging humiliation at the cost of their lives. Muslims are presented as historic enemies. Elsewhere, Tanika Sarkar elaborates on the Hindutva imagination of the country itself as a sacred body, perpetually aggressive and threatened.2
Bhakts will of course deny that they derive any pleasures and satisfactions from their regressions. Instead, they claim they are righting historical wrongs, all the while openly admiring authoritarian figures in their political, spiritual, and intimate lives. What we are dealing with is a widespread dangerous neurosis — as adult men and women are prepared to shut off their capacity to reason, and revel in the sadistic and masochistic thrills on offer by an authoritarian state that infantilizes them and frees them from thinking about the future.
In contrast, the anti CAA protests and the farmers struggle had one remarkable feature in common. They lodged in public memory moving images of adults acting like adults and an extraordinary level of cooperation among generations, of grandfathers and grandmothers in their 70s, 80s and even 90s with young men and women by their side, and children safe in the care of their communities.
Both the farmers and the CAA were fighting not for some abstract concept of a future but in very real terms for their own children, who they understood as belonging to the entire community. It was a fight for the future/phavik as the farmers called it, fought publicly, putting all community resources on the line. In this alternative community, children were seen studying, playing, and participating in struggle.
For our Present, for our Future
The Hindutva mindset is incapable of grasping the concept of childhood as an open space of possibility, as a universal condition of humanity when we are at our most vulnerable. One of the fundamental tenets of a fascist state is that it bestows the very right to exist upon citizens. As Mussolini puts it in his Doctrine of Fascism (1932):
The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.
In other words, the fascist state decides who is worthy of life and who must die. And, in this determination it does not spare even the children. In fact, it begins the act of choosing life from its very conception, from breeding “ideal” children to separating the undesired to be impoverished, used, and killed. The Reich Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, established in 1934, barred Jewish children from schools in 1938; dismissed and persecuted teachers with opposing political views; trained children to idealize militaristic hierarchies, including assigning Mein Kampf as essential reading; and made giving birth to Aryan children the primary duty of German women.
There is a pattern now of systemically isolating and targeting Muslim children, ranging from threats to take them away from their parents to singling them out for punishment. On January 16, 2020, India’s first Chief of Defense, General Bipin Rawat, announced that “radicalized” Muslim children in Kashmir “need to be taken out separately,” and “put in deradicalization camps.” (Sen, 2020). This was followed by the Supreme Court questioning the presence of children with their mothers in the protests in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi.3 In Muzaffarnagar, UP minors were arrested and tortured, while being taunted, “will your Allah come to save you? (Masoud, 2020). Junaid, a fifteen-year-old boy, was lynched to death by a mob in July 2017 while returning home from Delhi, where he had gone to shop for Eid.4
For Hindutva, a child is a Hindu (or not), her fate sealed by the accident of birth. Ashok Kumbamu (2020), Kancha Ilaiah (2004) and others have noted, this obsession with “purification” is, deeply rooted in Hindu religion itself. It has led to bizarre practices aimed at Hindu women to produce “pure” upper caste Hindu children. In 2019, the BJP government set up the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog/National Kamdhenu Commission to advance “sustainable genetic upgradation of cow resources and to enhance production and productivity of cows” (HT Correspondent, 2019). One of its products is the panchgavya drug, made up of cow urine and dung, ghee, and yoghurt, specifically for pregnant women to help give birth to “smart, highly intellectual and healthy children” (Arnimesh, 2019).
The ultimate fantasy is to produce life outside the womb; to eliminate the messiness of having to depend on and control women altogether. So, we have none other than the Prime Minister Modi, telling doctors, “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time.” (Rahman, 2014). The claim was echoed by Andhra University vice-chancellor G Nageswara Rao, a professor of inorganic chemistry, at the Indian science congress. He reiterated that the Kauravas were test-tube babies. Another illuminary, Justice (retired) Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan High Court, India, claimed that peacocks do not mate. “A peacock is a lifelong celibate,” the peahen gets pregnant after “swallowing the peacock’s tears and a peacock or peahen is then born….that is why a peacock feather is used by sadhus.” (The Deccan Chronicle, 2017)
The mysoginist obsession with “purifying” children of any contact with mothers and their wombs, reveals a key feature of the fascist imagination—its apoclyptic and imperial desires for the annhilation of “unclean” others, both in fanstasy and practice. This feature was not missed by women in Shaheen Bagh or the farmers protest. Many remarked on Modi’s single status and his childlessness and the fact that he left his wife. They held it as evidence of a profound lack of empathy and literal inability to imagine a future. In contrast, they were fighting for their children’s future, ready to die for it because what would be the point of life if they could not bequeath a future to their children?
Pic credit: Rajvi Desai/ /theswaddle.com
It is worthwhile to remember that the point for Freud was to outgrow the powerlessness and allure of the psyche of childhood. Men cannot, he says (1927 (1989), p. 717), “remain children forever; they must in the end go out into hostile life.”5
The Hindu middle class and upper castes will readily agree that life indeed is hostile. In the three decades since the Indian economy was formally structured along neoliberal principles, the middle class has seen a meteoric rise and collapse, now arriving at a bleak horizon of relentlessly declining expectations. The speed with which this has happened is quite extraordinary. Parents who came of age with shiny new MBA degrees in the 1980s and were gobbled up by the burgeoning global corporate world now find themselves, along with their children, in a precarious market without any of the safety nets of the older salaried professions.5 Hindutva appeals to adult Hindu men (and women) to act out these humiliations in the blind and righteous rage of children out to avenge their status as victims of Muslims, western oriented leftists, Maoists etc standing in the way of a fantasized glory as rulers of the world.
I do not, in any way, mean to suggest that those enacting and condoning Hindutva do not know what they are doing; that these are subconscious desires they are not aware of. They are fully aware of what they seek – the Hindu Rashtra. They will readily give “reasons” and “facts” to justify the violence, to excuse their leaders, to claim that India is a free country. But what they will not admit – the genteel elites — is that they derive any pleasures and satisfactions from their own submission and the subjugation of others. Although, even as I write this, I can see the smirks as conversation over dinner in gated communities turn from self-improvement via diets and meditation to mob lynchings and bulldozing of Muslim homes and businesses. They must certainly nod in approval at Prime Minister Modi’s (October 28, 2022) recent announcement, “Every form of Naxalism, be it the one with guns or the one with pens, they have to be uprooted to prevent them from misleading the youth of the country.” Here we have the leader reiterating the mantra that the mind is a dangerous thing. As far as the Hindutva upper and middle class is concerned, we should expect that soon there will be no need for them to hide their enjoyment at the attacks on anyone who dares to challenge the narcissistic fantasy of Hindu glory. If anything, they will need ever more spectacular displays of violence against others. That is the dark abyss we are staring at.
Against this, reiterating the necessity of reason, stating facts, enduring the repeated failures of liberal democracy at the courts but still persisting are patient and deliberate acts of adulthood that, inch by inch, hold the fascist creep from drenching life. One of the lessons from Shaheen Bagh and the Farmers Movement was that communities which nurture intergenerational solidarity, that think about our responsibility towards future generations are joyful and free.
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Notes [1] In an expansive essay on the force of Sadhvi Rithambhara’s call to defend the “Motherland,” Sarkar (2001, pp. 268-290) traces the roots of Hindutva to a persistent effort to cast the country itself as a sacred body, perpetually aggressive and threatened. [2] Shaheen Bagh is a Muslim dominated area in East Delhi, where a largely women-led protest against the Modi government’s passing of the Citizen Amendment Act started on December 15, 2019. The Supreme Court asked the Delhi Government to take note of the presence of children in Shaheen Bagh on February 11, 2020, as the protests continued. [3] The killing launched a nation-wide movement against Hindutva terror, called Not in My Name. [4] For someone, who spent his lifetime diagnosing and showing the irrational nature of the human psyche, the critical significance of Freud’s work is that he believed in the human capacity for analyzing and understanding the workings of the mind. Describing religion as mass delusion, he writes (1927 (1989), p. 720): “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing…this is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance.” [5] I have discussed this extensively in my book The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital.
References The Deccan Chronicle. (2017, May 31). Retrieved from A peacock is a lifelong celibate", the peahen gets pregnant after "swallowing the peacock’: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/310517/peacocks-dont-have-sex-rajasthan-hc-judge-who-said-declare-cow-national-animal.html All forms of Naxalism, be it with guns or pens, have to be defeated, says PM Modi. (2022, October 28). Retrieved from Scroll.in: https://scroll.in/latest/1036075/all-forms-of-naxalism-be-it-with-guns-or-pens-have-to-be-defeated-says-pm-modi Arnimesh, S. (2019, September 5). How a govt body plans to produce ‘highly intellectual’ children with help of cows. Retrieved from The Print: https://theprint.in/india/how-a-govt-body-plans-to-produce-highly-intellectual-children-with-help-of-cows/286680/ Fretigne, J.-Y. (2021). To Live is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramschi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. (1927 (1989)). The Future of an Illusion. In P. G. (ed.), The Freud Reader (pp. 685-721). New York: W. W. Norton. Ilaiah, K. (2004). Buffalo nationalism: A critique of spiritual fascism. Mumbai: Samya ; Distributed by Popular Prakashan. Jipson John, J. P. (2019, July 22). A conversation with Aijaz Ahmad: ‘The state is taken over from within’. Retrieved from Monthly Review Online: https://mronline.org/2019/07/22/a-conversation-with-aijaz-ahmad-the-state-is-taken-over-from-within/ Kumbamu, A. (2020). Saffron Fascism: The Conflux of Hindutva Ultra-Nationalism, Neoliberal Extractivism, and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism in Modi’s India. In B. Berberoglu, The Global Rise of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century (pp. 161-177). New York: Routledge. Masoud, A. B. (2020, February 8). Will Your ALLAH Come to Save You?’. Retrieved from Caravan Daily: https://www.albiladdailyeng.com/will-allah-come-save/ Mussolini, B. (1932). THE DOCTRINE OF FASCISM (1932). Retrieved from World Future Fund: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm Rahman, M. (2014, October 14). Indian prime minister claims genetic science existed in ancient times . Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/indian-prime-minister-genetic-science-existed-ancient-times Saran, M. (2022, October 30). Desperately seeking self-esteem. Retrieved from Deccan Herald: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/desperately-seeking-self-esteem-1157762.html Sarkar, T. (2001). Hindu wife, Hindu nation: Community, religion, and cultural nationalism. New Delhi, Bangalore: Permanent Black. Sarkar, T. (2022). Hindu Nationalism in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (2020, January 30). Will we consider our own, the Kashmiri Children traumatized by years of systemic violence? Retrieved from The Indian Express: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/kashmir-lockdown-violence-children-mental-health-6243280/ Theweleit, K. (1987). Male Fantasies Volume 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Jyotsna Kapur is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and the Director of the University Honors Program. She is the author of The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital (2013) and Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (2005); both books pre-occupied with how the neoliberal turn worldwide since the 70s radically transformed the relationship between generations and our consciousness of time. She is a member of InSAF-India (International solidarity for Academic Freedom in India). This is a slightly revised version of her talk at the Annual South Asia Conference, Wisconsin Madison. October 2022
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