Crowd as an Institution, Nation as a Crowd. Riyaz Latif

Representational Image. Courtesy Getty Images

You think you are killing me. I think you are committing suicide.¹

–Antonio Porchia

I

mitating Pablo Neruda, albeit in a very dissimilar context, today, I can write the saddest lines. Saddest lines for the relatively temperate, pluralistic India being despotically stifled by the current ruling regime from the time the reins of the nation were handed to it; saddest lines in wake of the repugnant transformations around us steeped in the menacing malice spread by the State itself; saddest lines trained at the bigoted, wily, power-hungry political midgets who have clutched the nation like a vice; saddest lines directed at the proto-fascist ruling party at the Centre brazenly cloaked in a charade of democracy — a mob of crass, bellicose ideologues regrettably propelled to the helm of our affairs by the majoritarian swarm of a willing, myopic citizenry. My customary disposition is to take refuge in a seething silence in the face of the politically and socially rancorous asphyxia into which we have been woefully made to plummet as a nation. Articulation deserts me when I try to register my voice of resistance in a meaningful effective manner. A seething silence delineates my disposition still, but if there is anything like a seething sadness fashioned out of a gnawing helplessness, it enunciates the smog that consumes me as it consumes, I am certain, many others with even an iota of ethical substance in them. For India’s present social and political degeneration signifies nothing but a consciously activated psychosis of the crowd–the nation’s ethos having capitulated to a noxious crowd: the nation has turned into a crowd. And this phenomenon – the psychosis of the crowd that has been bequeathed legitimacy to revile and manhandle the constitutional and legal structures of the nation – is precisely what the current ruling regime has purposely unleashed.

In fact, the willful calculated institutionalization of the fervent crowd, by overtly rallying it for its own political ends, inciting it against the minorities, in substance, against anything or anyone it deems to be the “other” could be considered the ruling regime’s singular triumph. Anything that exists outside the crowd,  that cannot be absorbed into the crowd’s eyeless, brainless organism, is perceived as the “other,” a ready target for not only persecution (to set right the imagined historical “wrongs” done to the crowd) but also for its studied decimation, By explicitly or implicitly granting to the crowd an illegitimate power to snub all constitutional and legal norms and mete out instant “justice” based on imagined transgressions by the “other, ” the archetypal crowd now takes (and dispenses) social-political procedural decisions which are tangibly enacted and executed through its inherent destructiveness. The beneficiary is the ruling dispensation that seeks to preserve and sustain its political clench—through the crowd,

Roughly sixty years ago, Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, proffered some astute readings into this blind dynamic of the crowd – its types, its formations, its motivations, its customary rage, and its professed goals.²

“The destructiveness of the crowd is often mentioned as its most conspicuous quality, and there is no denying the fact that it can be observed everywhere…” (Canetti, 20).

This is because the crowd

“wants to experience for itself the strongest possible feeling of its own animal force and passion and, as a means to this end, it will use whatever social pretexts and demands offer themselves.” (Canetti, 24).

This is the deep-rooted nature of the crowd, and as Canetti explicates further:

“One of the most striking traits of the inner life of the crowd is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies.” (Canetti, 24).  

Even though relatively dated now, Canetti’s expounding upon the dynamics of the crowd, its anger, its ferocity, and its associations with the crafty mechanisms of power seem ominously relevant to the political, and by association, socio-cultural maneuverings of the divisive politics in today’s “shining” India. The crowd, angry, with its misplaced malcontent, and furnished with a distorted legitimacy bestowed upon it by the State, insidiously presides over redressal of one or the other imagined wrong by the “other.” Mindless bigotry and aggressively prejudiced causes become raison d’être for its existence, as it concurrently nourishes the longevity of the power-regime that incited its ideological rancor in the first place. For what defines the core essence of the crowd is a moral vacuity, its being conspicuously empty of any ethical faculty. In fact, it thrives on continual invention of a chimera of a misplaced, fallacious conscience … And it is this erroneous morality comprising the above-outlined undercurrents of the crowd’s destructive operations (unleashed at the “other”) that the current regime has relied upon for clutching onto the stations of power.

Needless to say, a resounding rhetoric fed by the current regime permeates the crowd. Custodians of faith, aggressive restorers of India’s (read Sanatan Hindu here in its most parochial sense) past glory and honor: such obsessions are readily realized through a perpetration of lynching and violence against anyone the crowd perceives as transgressing its distorted social-cultural-moral codes. A historical past, expediently invented, is made to infiltrate the crowd as an inventory of grievances against minorities. For the crowd, wrongs of the “other” have to be redressed and an imagined greatness of the pure, glorious, former epoch has to be restored through a furious flattening of history.

Here, the cultural- historical identity of the “other” (branded responsible for all the oppressive excesses unleashed onto the crowd in history) is always perceived as an insignia of repression and regression in the eyes of the crowd whose own ingredients, ironically, are forged out of a repressive-regressive spirit.

That the crowd, by definition, is mindless and has no capacity for rational thought, is a lesser calamity in face of the graver catastrophe that the fractional, momentary ethical life of the crowd, if at all, is always already distorted and perverse.

But conversely and more disturbingly, in its thirst to perpetuate its totalitarian tenor, the current regime seems to have insidiously effectuated a truly worrisome machination. Institutions of the nation – legislature, law-enforcers, media, educational institutions, heritage … even judiciary – have been slyly transformed into crowds. They are doggedly made to surrender to the bigoted, divisive ideological disposition of the ruling regime; are pressed to function with a crowd-like ethos. All, barring a few valiant souls with profound integrity, have succumbed to the partisan dictates of the ruling dispensation where all principles of equanimity, balance, fairness, and justice are coerced into a distortion to uphold the ruling power-manipulations. Stemming from a fear of reprisals, everything seems to be skillfully compromised and surrendered at the altar of ruinous demagogic aims. In relinquishing their constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy, in forsaking their power of questioning and dissenting, in shying away from their role of maintaining checks and balances, institutions have become complicit with the bigoted procedures of the current regime. The crowds thus have been institutionalized, and the institutions thus have been converted to crowds.

After all these lamentations, however, in the final reckoning, we come again a full circle, to the computed bigotry of the current ruling regime, with the mighty-chested tsar (the precise measurements escape me in a fog of falsehoods) presiding over its biased operations. A tsar who, when he opens his mouth, customarily brags about the bigoted mess that he has pushed us into. A skewing of all the narratives of intolerance and peddling them as innovative achievements is a political weapon whose jagged edges he (and his legions) have sharpened to a disturbing degree. On the other hand, on truly critical occasions when he really ought to speak, he wraps himself in a stubbornly defiant, virtually criminal silence. Such is his leela: to keep us guessing whether he exists or not, to keep us guessing whether we exist or not! I cannot help but recall here the redheaded man of the Russian avant-garde writer, Daniil Kharms. Though engaging with Kharms’s impossible writing merely as a subversive political text would be too limiting to him, I cannot help but quote it here in all its absurd flourish:

There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him any more.³

Unlike the redheaded man, however, our tsar very much hovers over us like a specter. But then again, what are the mighty-chested tsar, the ruling regime, the State, if not the malignant apparitions of the masses that propelled them to power? And therefore, a huge onus of this macabre state of affairs must be grafted onto the aspirational chauvinism of a majority of common Indians. In this context, the resounding feat of the tsar and his “government” has been nothing but to actively externalize, manipulate and empower the lurking shades of bigotry harbored by a vast majority of the Indian people the evils of caste, creed, religion, region, race…this angst-laden inventory is sadly quite substantial.

So, all said and done, the colossal blame will lie with you, dear compatriot, for as the early twentieth-century Vienna’s biting satirist, Karl Kraus, derisively remarked: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”⁴

In your refusal to raise your voice against the current systematic assault on the human values of pluralism, tolerance, ethical coexistence and celebratory diversity, in your disavowal to act uprightly and effectively against this assault, you are unwittingly or willfully complicit. And thus, hypocrite lectuer, mon semblable, mon frère,⁵ the ominous hour is upon you to reflect on what the mirror reflects, before your reflection turns on you, before the fragile mirror is compelled to crack and you find yourself in a thousand fragments. Surely, this may be something to reflect upon. And thus, at this departure, I leave you with your mirror…alone.

*****

[1] Antonio Porchia, Voices: Aphorisms, selected and translated by W. S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1988), p. 10.
[2] All quotes of Canetti are from Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Penguin Books, 1992).
[3] Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelvich (New York: The Overlook Press, 2021), p. 45.
[4] Karl Kraus’s quote is from: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/154719.Karl_Kraus#:~:text=The%20secret%20of%20the%20demagogue,they%20are%20clever%20as%20he. (accessed: 21 August 2023).
[5] The Phrase is borrowed from Charles Baudelaire’s preface to Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil)

Riyaz Latif is a bilingual poet and translator. He teaches art history at FLAME University, Pune, India.
Riyaz Latif in The Beacon