Politics of Hope-Politics over Dead

 Politics of Hope-Politics over Dead 

New India, Young India, Aspirational India, Swachcha India, Atmanirbhar India – many Indias have popped up in the last few years. In quick succession, one India arrives while the other has not been even graciously discarded into the archive of the nation’s memory. Some of them live only to be dusted and polished, to be presented with gust and élan under a new tag (for instance, the earlier ‘made in India’ changed into ‘make in India’). 

 

Almost, one feels, the force of compulsive commoditization is at work behind the swift pace with which new brands keep appearing. What does it say about the politics of our times? Why is there a need to brand a country again and again? A country, which obsesses over History right from within the whisper-soaking walls of the living room to that of the frenzied zeal of a mob that turned a monument into a pile of rubble, equally adores being recurrently decked in a new identity. Why is branding seen inevitable by the political class who resort to it to convince their voters and supporters? And finally, what power lays in them in terms of appeal that has almost transformed the vigilant citizens into rabble-rousing consumers of political advertisement blitzkrieg. The nexus of politics, history, and media might provide some answers to these questions. 

 

The political role and social meaning of these quickly changing tags become all the more intriguing in the light of a rather well-grounded, mammoth-like stable idea that India’s civilizational spine or core is unchangingly fastened to the ‘glorious’ Hindu past stretching back thousands of years. The role of the British in inventing the idea of this glorious Hindu past and the fervour with which the Indian nationalists adopted this as an article of fact even when they challenged the power of imperialism is not a point of consideration here. Its ramifications nonetheless are. 

 

This historical projection – a canny discourse that suited the British and served the nationalists – has further adopted a new political meaning in the last two-three decades or so. If Indian nationalists lauded the Hindu past, rallied its glory even in its invented form, they did so, by and large, in order to rebuke the civilizing claims of colonialism. The colonial derogation shepherded the need of salvaging ‘national’ pride (a generalised but not an untenable argument). One chief source of pride resided in constructing the History of the nation; the nation which was itself coming into being as its past was discovered, organized, catalogued, and narrativized.

 

------

 

To paraphrase certain historians, History and its writing are themselves an imperialist project in which we trespass into the kingdom inhabited by the dead. We listen to what they spoke and speculate on what they did not speak; we read what they wrote and decipher what they did not write; and we try to feel what they felt but were not allowed to express. This is the art of history, bound by protocols and shaped by pursuit of maximal and not absolute truth in which the key organising principle is the context.  

 

This kingdom of the dead has come alive in a new avatar under the hand of a certain variety of politics, which we are currently witnessing in India. The idea had fervidly and popularly existed along with, and parallel to other constructs of the past; it is the current almost-absolute hold of political power, painstakingly scaffolding the Hindutva ideological castle, which has made the sense of crisis acute. Beyond it, it is the pervasiveness of the politics in the everyday life – extending from moral judgements over choice of dress to mob-sanctioned collective restrictions over diet – that has become unprecedently alarming. 

 

The universalizing agenda of this Hindutva politics is less anchored in the protocols of history and more geared towards using the dead for the purposes of the present. The use of the past is not solely a feature of Hindutva politics. Its reduction to being a handmaiden of politics by turning the dead into the active divisive agents of the present indeed is. History is ever on a duty-call to serve the present by recording the past but in a singular manner. In doing so, History has also been disaggregated and decontextualized; or, in other words, it is seen only as an aggregate of dead entities sans their past lived contexts.

 

Swirled around, monuments of the past begin to hurt the sentiments of the present; the emperors of the erstwhile era become the dreadful villains of the contemporary. The social cracks within communities and between religions – which have existed in any era between various denominations, sects, and collectives within a religion or between religions – have become the politically authenticated account of the historical past. The political sentiment of the present, manufactured and felt, is thrown back as the only social reality of the past. This explains why the spectre of Aurungzeb suddenly occupies the empty corner chair in most of the living rooms the moment the chit-chat over tea becomes even slightly ‘political’? Politics has been reduced to scoring goals over the dead bodies and the past actions of the individuals and communities, which present them in distinct immutable identities rather than as part of lived and messy realities.

 

Overwritten by the present, the kingdom of the dead has been sliced into ethnicities of majority and minority, outsiders and insiders, pure and convertees. The lineages of such exercises once again precede the designs of the contemporary; but these designs themselves have been re-drawn to dig a past within a past. First the nation was invented and constructed; now the enemy within the nation is identified and disciplined. The Blacks in the U.S.A; the migrants in Europe, and Muslims in India occupy this strange place: they are historically available as the force of the dead (as remnants of the past living in the present) to justify the majoritarian present. Their limited instrumentalized relevance and their general exclusionary condition go hand in hand. 

 

 

 

------

 

The extraordinary often reveals the structure of the mundane. This new political is the extraordinary of the current Indian social life. History tempts us to seek continuity from and through the past. The new political also therefore reveals the existing mundane points of fissures that existed in the society, largely at the subterranean level for a long part. However, the changes often lie, and become apparent, through the accumulated force of degrees than absolute ruptures. The new political is markedly distinctive in expanding, fanning, and creating rather than containing and bridging the existing cracks. Unity in diversity – another ideological tagline of post-independent India – has now changed into a principle of homogenised nation. As diversity is tunnelled into uniformity, the sanction of the political has become important for vigilantising the practices of everyday choices (food, dress, love). 

 

But the question remains: after all, why among all the tags of different Indias, the Hindu India, which is clearly legible to both supporters and detractors of the current politico-ideological regime, has never been written or uttered directly by the masters of the current political project? When family WhatsApp forwards clearly state that the regime is unequivocally ‘doing’ what it was expected of (making India Hindu) then why Young, New, Aspirational, and Atmanirbhar placards are still holding the mask for the main project? 

 

One way to understand this combination of uttered absence and felt presence is to simply join the dots. Since the return to power in 2019, the BJP led government (which is mainly BJP) has brought in key legal changes (abrogation of Article 370 related to erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, abolition of triple talaaq, and the Citizenship Amendment Act) which has given a clear signal that the ‘final’ project is robustly on, intently pursued. Issues which were on ‘slow burner’ have been heated up and served hot. The crucial difference is that the earlier ideological intentions are now being given concrete legal shape. The ideological objectives are materializing into tangible actions. Not surprisingly, to people standing on both sides of the polarised society and polity, the ‘agenda’ is visible: the difference is only that a sizeable section cherishes it’s fulfilment while the other section feels anguished about it. 

 

The real actions mentioned above have made the message evident even if the actual phrase – Hindu India – remains unuttered as a slogan of governance. The theatre of these actions is spread wide across. From the floor of the Parliament to that of the TV-sets and to WhatsApp group forwards, the unity of messaging is amply clear. ‘Hindu India’ breathes under the masks of New, Young, Aspirational, and Atmanirbhar Indias. The modern brand names are not an antithesis to the projected civilizational core. They are in fact the ‘narrative’ vehicles of its realisation. They are required because they provide a good gloss over what seemingly can still cause discomfort to some people if the ruling dispensation choses to use Hindu India upfront as its slogan of governance. Sadly, in this masking, governance has become a stooge to an obvious ideological project, which is so omnipresent that it does not even need to be stated.

 

------

 

The focus on ‘narrative’ is a contribution of media whose role is crucial as a facilitator of this politics. Politics itself is now keenly packaged in units of messaging and consumed through bytes of perception. Media loves the ‘narrative’ gloss, propagates its use, and amplifies its reach. In doing so, mediatised narratives have jeopardised governance. For some time in India, governance has been hollowed of its substance, and mainly turned into not analyse-able but debatable ‘narratives’ of politics. Headlines, slogans, and quirky abbreviations have been profusely used to generate a feel good-factor around the claims of good governance and governance for all.

 

 

 

 

The Indian media, particularly electronic and also including of those who are now outside the ring of cheerleaders, have played along a major role in reducing politics to narratives. They have broken politics first into a set of news-topics, and further into a ping-pong fight of ‘viewpoints’. We learn about politics from shows which are called Dangal (Riotous), The Big Fight, and Muqabla (Clash). Politics has become an agitated commodity of indulgent consumption. Not so surprisingly, a sizeable majority of population has become the consumer of these slogans and abbreviations – waiting to be entertained rather than informed by the 9.00 p.m. tamasha – through which nonetheless the perception and narrative of politics are formed and consumed. They hardly are now citizenry seekers of information and analysis. 

 

But in acting so, they are fully aware that underneath the modern sartorial cover of the new labels lies the real project of the new nation. Under the new tags that create the impression of politics of hope, they know that the dead of the past – in decontextualized disaggregated units – will constantly be summoned to perform their auxiliary role in the present. In the current political dispensation that has fostered a mindset of homogenization, a new consolidation of the present will relentlessly utilise the faultlines of the past. It will, more importantly, stretch those faultlines, invent a few, and keep depositing the newer elements in the ever-swirling whirlpool of manufactured historical consciousness. The nexus of ideology, governance, and narrativized media will ensure that the post-truth era of ‘fake news’ will become the centrepoint of ‘informational society’. The alleged politics of hope will remain inseparably tied to the real politics over the dead. Its most recent manifestation is the propaganda package pedalled by both government and its cheerleader media: amidst unprecedented human suffering and death is emerging a new tagline of Positive India. 

(images taken from the website unspalsh, and are free of copyright).