'An Independence Day introduction to the enemies of national well-being'

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. .preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}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, dissidentturned-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 Indian who, by virtue of being an Indian, enjoys the freedom to de-Indianise himselfThe 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 autonomyseeker 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 Northeasterner, 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.mosimage}The new class warrior is a lumpen murderer, author of a subrural horror in the life of India. 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.Ideally, he should be doing some social work in Pyongyang. Instead, he is wasting himself in the wrong country.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.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.He is Hindu India's glory keeper, protector of purity, slayer of blasphemies. The religious cleanser who is dirtying the religion.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 firstrate 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. This self-styled subaltern Sartre continues to be a resident of the make believe.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 selfstyled 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.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 30, 1999--- ENDS ---

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'An Independence Day introduction to the enemies of national well-being'

An Independence Day introduction to the enemies of national well-being.

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