The Curse of Gandhism: A Review of Prakash Jha's "Aarakshan"

I've just returned from seeing Prakash Jha's already-controversial film Aarakshan (Reservation) at the Regal Cinema in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Built by the British in the early 1930s, it is a magnificent, cavernous space complete with a wide balcony, round arches on the side walls, and pictures of old film stars in the lobby. Surprisingly, it's also fairly clean and well kept. All in all, it reminds me once again of how fake, gaudy and soulless the multiplex "experience" can be, especially in India, and how little of the old culture of film-going remains with us.

But I digress. As far as the content of the film goes, this was also a surprise. The pre-release controversy had made it seem like Aarakshan was a bold, reactionary attempt to criticise reservations - hence why it was banned in UP by Mayawati's government. In fact, as the Times of India review notes, very little of the film even references or discusses the issue of reservations in any sustained or serious way. It's more of an incidental device to move the plot forward to the real confrontation: between Amitabh Bachchan's heroic, inspirational ex-principal of a private college who offers free classes to the community and villain Manoj Bajpai's commercial education scheme. True, Bachchan's character does resign from his post at the college over his support for reservations, and there is a fierce conflict in the first half involving Saif Ali Khan's Dalit professor and a high-caste student played by Prateek Babbar. But they come together in the end to help Bachchan defeat the for-profit coaching classes, backed by corrupt politicians and the police. The film's climactic scene is a showdown, as bulldozers approach the gate of Bachchan's compound, between the good guys (students and volunteers of all castes) and lathi-wielding policemen.

By pure coincidence, I caught a bit of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi on TV last night, a film I have not seen in years and certainly not since I began doing a PhD. in Indian history. The moving scene depicting the Dharasana Satyagraha, in which row after row of peaceful marchers are mercilessly clubbed by police, shows just how ideologically and cinematically powerful the imagery of Gandhism continues to be. In effect, Prakash Jha has resolved his plot by using the classic set-up of Gandhian struggle: non-cooperating, non-violent do-gooders versus the mighty apparatus of the state. It comes as no surprise, though it still manages to be an emotional moment drawing cheers from the audience, when the bulldozers' drivers are convinced by Bachchan's appeal and cross over to join the students in solidarity. What does this say about Jha's view of politics, and its appeal?

This has been a hot topic for discussion since last summer's hit Raajneeti, which depicted the political process and very nearly all its participants as fundamentally violent and corrupt. A perceptive essay in the current issue of The Caravan about Jha's career basically makes the point that his characters have become "bereft of a moral core". They do not ask themselves questions about the "ethical consequences" of their actions. In some cases, as in Gangajaal (2003), the film "dangerously leaves the task of public accountability to the individual conscience of one man". It should become apparent from my description that, with Aarakshan, Jha can be absolved of the charge of not creating idealistic or ethically concerned characters anymore. Bachchan's principal is a model of uprightness, honesty and fairness; when the fight over reservations erupts on the grounds of his college, he steps in to reprimand both sides and dutifully carries on the fight to improve children's lives and test scores through tireless work and self-sacrifice. Here, however, Jha's tendency to offer solutions in the form of the virtuous actions of one individual reveals itself. Though an entire community comes together to help with the free classes, and a mass protest including both upper and lower castes ends up facing the villains at the end, in the end the success of the enterprise rests on one man's shoulders. The method of grassroots voluntarism being idealised here is also extra-institutional, and leaves no room for contemplating the reform of existing institutions like the private college. Only after Bachchan is on the outside can he score his great moral victory and then be appointed back to his old post. The crooked politicians are not voted out or held judicially accountable but publicly shamed.

The appeal of this worldview is not only nostalgic but deeply connected to the ongoing debate about corruption. The self-anointed Gandhian activist Anna Hazare has been mobilising the middle classes by fasting in support of the passage of the sweeping anti-corruption Lokpal Bill. Critics of Hazare's approach have pointed to the absolutist nature of the demands, which move beyond and even seek to de-legitimise the political process. A remarkable and profound interview in Tehelka with civil society activist Aruna Roy makes the point that any attempt to change the mechanism or culture of governance in a democracy must go through the painful but necessary process of soliciting opinions from stakeholders, debating drafts of bills, compromising, and, at the end, living with the end result even if it may not be ideal: "Democracy is a dialectic and you can’t afford to lose it. And no matter how imperfect it is and how much we struggle to refine it, unless we want to opt for a dictatorship, even a benign one, it is the only viable political system we have." She tells this story to illustrate the dangers of Hazare's bottom-line approach: "Let me give you a very small example from a meeting in Tilonia in Rajasthan. Every 15 August and 26 January the gram panchayat there has meetings and invites me to speak. Once there was this big talk in the air that “Constitution koh badalna hain”. I asked the 3,000-strong crowd, how many of you have seen the Constitution? About six hands went up. Then I asked, how many of you have touched it, about four went up. Then I asked, how many of you have read it and two went up. So then I said, if a political party is telling you the Constitution of India is anti the people of India and we must amend it, and all of you are saying, yes, yes, it’s bad, change it, are you acting out of reason or ignorance?"

The "curse of Gandhism" I am referring to is not so much the substantive nature of Gandhian political thought, but the enduring appeal of the form. In Hazare's case, as it has become very clear by now, the high-profile fasting and the other theatrical aspects of his movement conceal a contestable political programme (pushing for oversight by building a new bureaucracy) while claiming to be outside and indeed even hostile to politics. Prakash Jha's recent films, along with Rang de Basanti (2006), invoke the social-patriotic conscience of mainstream Hindi cinema (largely absent since the 1950s, the decade of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy). These are films about big issues, daring to ask about how to save the country (Aarakshan's tagline: "India v. India"). The answers they provide, however, are troubling in different ways. Rang de Basanti was an extreme case; its protagonists, apathetic students inspired to love their country by making a documentary about Bhagat Singh, take action by assassinating a corrupt politician. In Aarakshan, the solution is mild and basically unobjectionable by comparison. But by not saying anything about the political process, or offering any hope about building institutions other than the Bachchan character's selfless volunteerism, the film offers a bleak assessment of the prospects of Indian democracy. We never get to hear a full argument about the politics of reservations, or understand what place they have in India's democratic system. All we know by the end is that we must "be the change we wish to see in the world", so to speak. In 2011, that's no longer enough.

One-and-a-half cheers for Indian democracy!

Arundhati Roy's breath-taking essays in Outlook, first this summer's "Walking with the Comrades" about her experiences with the Maoists, and then the latest entitled "The Trickle-Down Revolution," inspire so much debate and commentary in the Indian media that there may not be much to add. But most of it, to be honest, is not very good commentary. Take this response in Outlook by Balbir K. Punj, a BJP MP, which begins with the obligatory nod to Arundhati's sincerity and passion. The problem with her relentless advocacy for the 830 million Indians who live on less than Rs. 20 a day and who do not figure on the horizon of India's aggressively neo-liberal state is, according to Punj, that India has not been industrialized enough! Mining bauxite, big dams, even building five-star hotels, all "create jobs." In time, by following the European model as set out from the 19th-c. on, India too can become a welfare state like Sweden. I need not spend any more words on how ridiculous this is.

Yet there is a nagging thorn in Arundhati's side. Her vivid tableaux of poverty, misery and repression are painted so thick that, by the end, she is so exhausted as only to exclaim, "And you want the Maoists to stand for elections?" Well, not so fast. In an interesting critique in the pages of the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner calls Roy a "reactionary" because "she shows nothing but condescension and contempt for democracy" in general, as a process. For instance, he quotes her as saying that, "the institutions of democracy–the courts, the police, the ‘free’ press, and, of course, elections–far from working as a system of checks and balances, often do the opposite.” In other words, the observable realities of the system in India lead her to believe that it is a sham, the rule of the mighty over the weak. Chotiner responds, "democracy is much more, and much harder, and much more precious than that." He again quotes her on the Indian judiciary as railing against the Supreme Court, which has "become the premier arbiter of public policy in this country that markets itself as the World’s Largest Democracy." Chotiner responds, "A judiciary that settles disputes, that concerns itself with environmental questions, that reviews the laws of the elected branch: imagine!"

Part of the problem with Chotiner's otherwise provocative piece is that he doesn't know too much about India, and that he also misreads her. Roy is not disputing those judicial decisions that deal with environmental questions or review the laws of the executive in a fair manner, or to the benefit of economically and politically disadvantaged groups. She would not object to a court that actually lived up to its ideals, but it is observably true that it does not. But Chotiner is correct that there is a slippage in Roy's thinking that leads her to condemn the very desirability of the ideals of the democratic process. Because elections have not resolved the claims of tribals and the poor, no group advocating for those claims (which she, rightly or wrongly, sees the Maoists as) should ever stand in an election.

This more or less philosophical argument about the nature of democracy as a substantive process masks a deeper and more important set of concerns. Instead of asking, "How democratic is India?" we should seek to describe with as much accuracy as possible the particular features of the Indian state, since that is what Roy and her opponents are essentially arguing about. What does this state do, and how does it work?

There has been a mass of scholarship in South Asian history and political theory on this topic, so I will mention only two or three especially helpful interventions. Partha Chatterjee's Gramsci-inspired formulation from back in the dog days of Subaltern Studies in the 1980s introduced the Nehruvian era as one of "passive revolution," in which the technocratic state appropriated the domain of politics from the more restless and unpredictable activities of mobilised peasants, workers etc. In a more recent essay entitled "Democracy and Economic Transformation in India," Chatterjee has pushed his theories further into the neo-liberal era, showing how the influx of foreign capital and the rise of new dominant classes has changed the playing field of the "passive revolution." Yet the persistence of electoral democracy also means that those marginalised groups, the victims of "primitive accumulation," can and will find redress through the "mechanisms of democratic politics," because "it is unacceptable and illegitimate" for the government to create uprooted and discontented masses. In a sharp retort, Amita Baviskar and Nandini Sundar called attention to the "attempt to use procedural democracy and the existence of independent statutory institutions to subvert a more substantive democracy." This is more than an argument about what "substantive democracy" means. It is about the changing configurations of state power: has the state "retreated" since 1991, is it "colluding" with capital, or are its powers (as Chatterjee argues) merely "re-distributed" among a host of other non-state and non-governmental agencies? So far, an open question.

Going back again in time, what is specifically "Indian" about Indian democracy as it emerged after 1947? The celebratory rhetoric usually takes as its implicit point of comparison that shadow country, Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal's one-of-a-kind comparative study, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, places the formation of two political systems - electoral democracy and military dictatorship - in a single frame of analysis.
Jalal's explanation centres on those "structural" factors that forced the early Pakistani state to concentrate spending on the military and on the centre at the expense of the provinces. The "truncated" country that emerged out of the partitions of the two richest Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, left Pakistan with far less of an industrial and agricultural base than its neighbour. India also inherited the administrative structures of the Raj wholesale, most importantly the civil service. The extensive patronage networks and organisational capabilities of the Congress machinery (unlike the Muslim League's corresponding weakness and search for legitimacy) allowed it to co-opt the bureaucracy and the army to an extent that was not possible in Pakistan. As Jalal succinctly puts it, "The qualitatively different balance of power between bureaucrats and politicians in the two states helps explain the relative success of formal democracy in the one and its apparent failure in the other."
India also inherited much of the constitutional framework of the 1935 Government of India Act, with the notable exception of removing restrictions on the franchise. What Jalal terms the "steel frame" of the bureaucracy that kept the Raj running could be adapted with far less difficulty to its successor sovereign power in Delhi than in Karachi. Pakistan faced further difficulties in finding a formula for representation that could balance the numerically superior Bengalis with the demands of the Punjabi elite in the West, while the army grew stronger in the context of conflict with India and a strategic alliance with the United States.


So where does this leave us? One of the most eloquent spokesmen for the uniqueness and vitality of Indian democracy has been Ram Guha, who has taken it upon himself to be India's premier popular historian and national conscience-keeper. In a wonderful essay in Outlook entitled "Ambedkar's Desiderata," he composes a paean to the Indian constitution and to its author, elevating Ambedkar's wise warnings about despotism and corruption and his championing of Dalit and adivasi claims into the kind of clairvoyance enjoyed by the Founding Fathers in US national mythology. Undoubtedly Ambedkar was an unusually far-sighted thinker, and Guha's call for a return to a vision of a substantive social democracy is welcome while the Indian state exuberantly dances with Capital nowadays. But it is important to remember Jalal's point, that much of the constitution drafted by the Constituent Assembly was directly based on its colonial precedent; in many ways this was not a revolutionary document, although Ambedkar's efforts made it radical in its promises.

So when Guha writes in his massive survey India after Gandhi that the verdict on Indian democracy must be, in the words of an old Johnny Walker joke, phiphty-phiphty, he is right but it's all a bit more complicated. Indian democracy in its particular form not only co-exists with authoritarian military ventures (Kashmir, Dantewada) but enables them. The close alliance between bureaucracy, politicians and military, coupled with enormous resources and a diverse population, ensure that the state can engage in a variety of coercive measures without fearing for its existence or legitimacy. After all, there will be elections again in five years. The Pakistani army and bureaucracy never enjoyed such a privilege, having to exercise power more nakedly for fear of completely losing control of the provinces or various recalcitrant segments of the population. This also means that, on the "plus" side of the equation, the pressures of "civil society" and non-governmental power are also brought to bear more easily on the Indian state, while in Pakistan only a few voices claiming to be truly outside the political machine (despite her last name, Fatima Bhutto is one of them) can be heard. There, it appears, is where the fight will be for both India and Pakistan in the next century.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.



*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/

The Lesson of Gujarat, or How to Talk about Events

That the recent tragedy at Fort Hood should raise the spectre of anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. is by now commonplace. But the real stakes of the debate, namely the precise consequences of a certain way of thinking about events and their repercussions, are obscured by placing the focus of the debate around "how much Islam has to do with it." Framing the shootings of U.S. servicemen by this individual Hasan in the language of "terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" is undoubtedly problematic. But to respond, those of us who wish to re-frame the issue are inevitably forced into a kind of obscurantist cul-de-sac that allows no discussion of Islam or Muslims whatsoever: that this is an isolated act of a "mentally unstable" person, that religion has "nothing to do with it." What we grapple with, in essence, is the singularity of the act and its relationality to a wider field of discourses, or ways of talking about things (in this case, Islam and Muslims).

Here is what I mean: whenever such events occur and are disseminated through the media, as they inevitably will in our globalised age, we should avoid the temptation of seeing them as exceptions, as acts that stand alone in the world, infinitely contingent. Instead, we should accept from the start that they will immediately feed into a vast discursive terrain of things being said, worked out and worked over, about macro-categories we are uncomfortable with, yet ignore at our peril. We should follow this event through the discursive terrain and see where it lands, and thus make visible the consequences of its particular path. The relational consequences of singular events are often so jarring that they might yet enable many (with the exception of those who are willing to pay the price), to look at the terrain anew and be made aware of the treacherous channels through which information travels and is re-directed, of how events acquire meanings.

I will use the example of the 2002 Gujarat massacres to make my point. Here, a much-disputed and yet very "real" event, the burning of 58 Hindus in a train coach in Godhra, happened in all its garish and horrifying singularity. Whether it was deliberate arson by a mob or something else, whether the categories of Hindu victims and Muslim attackers should be deconstructed, are all important yet tangential issues. Trying to disentagle religion and politics, local contexts and broad phenomena etc. etc. from the charred remains of this event, though ethical and honest in a scholarly sense, is mere impotence in the face of what happened next, when as many as 2,000 Muslims were massacred while the state not only stood by, but actively aided and encouraged the violence. A confrontation between certain individuals at a certain point in time was a spark to a fire that burned along the axes of Big categories, "Hindu" and "Muslim," all across Gujarat. In Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines, the traumatic riots in Calcutta and Dhaka of 1964, which so decisively shape the characters' lives, can be traced back to an incident in far-away Kashmir over a stolen relic. Singular events become relational to contexts far distant in time and place. If we have a truly political, indeed moral, task in our complicated world, where information travels at once faster and more insidiously than ever, it is to break the links that are formed in this way.

What would it mean to think of Godhra, minutes or hours after it happened, with the bodies of 2,000 innocent people in mind? What would it mean to follow the contention that an individual Hasan stands in for a "Muslim problem" that must be faced, to its logical conclusion, to a widespread and concerted effort by individuals and the state to "deal" with it? The consequences of thousands of lives lost when so many minds are fixed (or being fixated) onto a category, in this case of the problematic Muslim that must be dealt with, are not worth the mental leap. There are those who will say that such violence is the inevitable result, or collateral damage, of whichever side they think is to blame acting wrongly. Yes, 2,000 Muslims died, but that's because they started it. This is, I would hope, only a small minority of those who are engaged in the conversation. The task for scholars, activists, and all of us concerned about these issues is to show that the price to pay, of creating a climate for civil violence, is far more de-stabilising to the security and internal peace of communities than a singular act unavenged, or a problematic category not properly dealt with. This is especially true in the United States, where the potential for reprisals is always high yet, with almost no exceptions, since September 11th no serious and sustained civil violence has occurred. India's lessons, from the Sikh massacres of 1984 to Gujarat and on, are vital in this regard. Communal bloodshed on general lines, visited upon individuals whose only connection to singular events from another place and time lies in the relation with those events constructed in people's minds, is a price too steep to ever pay. To suppress this urge to relate the singular, to think of unrealised consequences instead of the real and visceral event that has just happened, is admittedly difficult but it is also urgent.

On Mayawati II: The Axis of Caste

A few months ago, just after returning from India, I wrote that "Mayawati,while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster." But also, that "it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain."
I would like to revise some of these thoughts in light of a recent talk on the BSP in 2009 I heard at Harvard given by Christophe Jaffrelot, research fellow at Sciences Po in Paris.

Jaffrelot's most remarkable claim, in addressing why and how the rise of the BSP (especially as a governing party in U.P.) had been "emancipatory," was that it changed the way people thought about caste itself. He also gave Mayawati high marks, with all the necessary qualifiers and caveats, for enforcing laws aimed at preventing crimes against Dalits and attempting to extend reservations into the private sector. But it was the psychological, or rather psycho-social, aspects of her rule that have had the greatest effect. Voter mobilisation of different caste groups by the BSP has resulted, according to Jaffrelot, in Dalits no longer viewing themselves as parts of a vertical hierarchy (and thus subject to Sanskritisation), but as horizontally competing interest groups fighting for spoils. Dalits can now be "proud of who they are," and the presence of one of their own at the top makes all the difference.

One particularly biting challenge to Jaffrelot's view came from a questioner who insisted that the BSP was not "good for U.P.," and that the selective targeting of villages for development under the Ambedkar Village Scheme contrasts unfavourably with the more inclusive approach in states like Tamil Nadu, which as a result perform better in terms of human development indices for lower castes. There was also an "internal critique" by another (sympathetic) questioner about the infamous statues. What this shows, critically, is that for all the sophisticated approach of charts, graphs, and poli-sci bonhomie of Jaffrelot's presentation, the debate at the end of the day is a more visceral, and indeed a political rather than scholarly, one. The sense of deep ambivalence about low-caste governance that I captured in my slipshod June post holds up to scrutiny. This is partly to be explained by an historical conjuncture: the poorest and most backward states in India, Bihar and U.P., are also the most caste-ridden and prone to aggressive Dalit assertion. But their very backwardness begins to reflect badly on the Dalit politicians who rule them, as progress is understandably slow.

Jaffrelot softened some of my earlier truisms. Criticising Dalits in Lucknow as hopelessly corrupt stooges has a whiff of the old attacks on "Reconstruction rule" in the post-Civil War U.S. South. The emancipation of a category of people subjected to systematic oppression for centuries may have to proceed on a bumpy road. And while it is, no doubt, incredibly venal, having giant expensive statues of Ambedkar and other lower-caste leaders in the centre of Lucknow is a kind of symbolic righting of history. But the challenge of good governance, issued nowadays more as a political weapon against Mayawati, still remains. If Jaffrelot is to be believed, Mayawati has made the lives of many Dalits slightly better. For the BSP to succeed, as a Dalit party or otherwise, it must strive to reverse those damning indices (in education, health care, etc.), and quite literally keep the lights on in U.P. Mayawati as a revolutionary figure has been written into the history books. But, if the experience of the CPI(M) in West Bengal is any indication, that is never enough.

The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.

Empire and Nationalism Part II: Independence Day Reflections

Some weeks ago I wrote about why the idea of empire was, in a sense, destined to fail in its mission to supposedly bring into being a modern, secular, developed nation-state (a more technical way of summarising the laundry list of benefits that commonly goes: railroads, parliaments, laws and stock markets). On the occasion of India's sixty-second Independence Day a slew of articles appeared offering very different points of view on the meaning of a day that symbolised the triumph of nationalism over imperialism, self-rule over paternalism, and freedom over enlightened guidance. To me, accustomed as I am both to leftist-inspired denunciations of "the state" (simmering across South Asia from Kashmir to Lalgarh) and to the smug imperialist pronunciations of conservative European and American intellectuals (simmering in the halls of major universities and Barnes & Noble bookshelves), most shocking was a piece by one Aakar Patel provocatively entitled, "The British left six decades too early":

http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/13204936/The-British-left-six-decades-t.html

None of these arguments are particularly new, and I shouldn't have been surprised that an Indian had expressed them, but I was. He says, among many other things, this:"The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic." And this: "Europeans, of course, told us who and what we were. After 3,000 years of illiteracy, we learnt of the existence of the Indus Valley civilization from John Marshall in 1924. The identity of our greatest emperor, Ashok (died 232 BC), whose lion capital is our emblem, whose wheel is on our flag, was revealed to us by James Prinsep 175 years ago." Actually, I had never heard such an overt celebration of Orientalism before, at least not by an Indian and not in the last century! Usually critics of the notion that the West wrote India's history maintain that it really wasn't true, and that there was dialogue or collaboration...never that it was true, and it's a bloody good thing too. Finally, we have: "A people who block each other and themselves need a patron."

One is tempted to castigate Patel immediately as an imperialist's stooge. But there is a carefully considered rationale behind these arguments, which at times make Nirad Chaudhuri look like a Gandhian. Judging from some of his other columns, Aakar has a strong preference to the Parsi community. He has elsewhere written, "As the Parsis leave, South Bombay will become like the rest of Bombay - brutish, undisciplined and filthy...[the British] left some of their civilisation behind and the best of it remains the possession of this great Indian community." Parsis have always occupied a strange place in the mosaic of communities in India. Wealthy and Western-oriented, they profited from British contracts from the early days of the East India Company and built up an industrial empire (the Tata family has been at its forefront from the late nineteenth-century until the present day). They have also sought to stand above the fray in times of communal conflict, as shown in Deepa Mehta's heartbreaking film Earth, when the patriarch of a Parsi family in Lahore quietly exhorts his wife and daughter to be neutral "like the Swiss." None of this should be interpreted to mean that Parsis' cosmopolitanism is somehow un-Indian or anti-national. Jamsetji Tata discussed his plan to establish the Indian Institute of Science with an enthusiastic Swami Vivekananda on a boat from Yokohama to Chicago in 1893. The father of the Indian National Congress and the man who first articulated the "drain theory" was Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi. So Aakar Patel's admiration for the West, and especially his aggressive love of classical music (which he thinks, as per another column, that other Indians can't understand), doesn't neatly align with the experience of Parsis or any other group of "modernised" Indians; rather, he has taken a cosmopolitan upbringing and mutated it into a militant political feeling. He does not wish, as the family in Earth did, to merely listen to waltzes and stay out of politics. He wants to make waltzes and clean streets and nice buildings into weapons with which to bludgeon the rest of his billion countrymen, and defend empire bravely into indefensible territory. As I've written before, the British would not have given it all up voluntarily after staying a few more decades just so they could build roads and bridges to Mr. Patel's liking.
Even so, my point is that there are different ways of seeing Independence from the perspectives of different communities. For an affluent Bombay columnist who owns a media services company, the spectacle of an independent India has been more distasteful than inspiring. We may not like it, but we have to acknowledge it, and it's a perspective with far more validity than your run-of-the-mill imperialist historian in a bow tie.

Then, I read an essay that is in many ways the exact opposite: Gopalkrishna Gandhi's meditative piece in Outlook entitled "While It Rains Rose Petals." To the author, who is the Governor of West Bengal and the Mahatma's grandson, India was once "a land of abiding hope":

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?261292

He recalls a pervading sense of optimism: "There was that ‘something’ about the Nehru years which made them precious. Drawing a word from Panditji’s own masterful Hindustani, I have often asked myself: “What was the sifat of those times? What was its quality, its inner attribute, its essential nature, that made it so reassuring?” I think it was, quite simply, imaan. The trustworthiness that went with people and their word, their good faith, their honesty." But today's widespread problems place the great democratic experiment in serious danger: "Yes, and yet, that sense of pride dims even when we see the corruption and the violence that pervades our life, when we see the growing degradation of our environment, when we big-time users of precious resources go merrily on as if they live on a different planet, not our carbon-asphyxiated one. And when we see the plight of India’s vulnerable millions, especially its women. That is when the Nehru years, those rose-petalled Independence Days, seem, suddenly, like another country." The disillusionment is a profound one, even if we discount all the arguments made against it: that it romanticises Nehruvian socialism, that some things are getting better, that Congress and sarkar and democracy are not the answer anyway. Gandhi expresses, in slightly prettier language, the same problems that trouble Aakar Patel. Things aren't working, they say! We cannot celebrate when we have so much yet to do!

But there is an ocean of difference from there on. For Patel, it was all a wasted effort and the nation's failures are evidence of nationalism's inherent failure. Nothing could be achieved without the British. For Gandhi, a certain kind of nationalism, a hopeful one with the right spirit, did and may again inspire Indians as citizens and countrymen. My own sentiments have always been deeply skeptical and resistant to nationalisms of all kinds. But can we let go of the rose-petal vision of the Indian nation, Nehru on the ramparts of the Red Fort, Ambedkar's Constitution? Ranajit Guha once wrote of the nation's "failure to come into its own." This was probably a call for a new revolution, for the excavation of subaltern resistance...but whatever it was, it too begins with that promise of the nation. Sixty-two years on, Indians still have at least the promise of Independence Day, and that should be enough to never wish to go back.

Democracy and Popular Protest in India

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last month's attacks in Mumbai was not the sudden realisation by many in the West that India, as the world's largest democracy, was an ally worth standing by far more so than our friend for so many decades, Pakistan. There are serious questions on a large geo-political scale that need asking, but they are part of the ebb and flow of statecraft in South Asia and will not find easy answers soon.

No, what is downright amazing is a less-reported story that, following a wave of popular protests over the handling of the attacks by the Indian government, the Home Minister and national security adviser resigned. The BBC says "hundreds of people took to the streets" in a show of demanding accountability for the government's failure to protect its citizens:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7757122.stm

Reading this story from the U.S., where the parallel with 9/11 has been pushed repeatedly by an unimaginative media, one is struck by the incongruity of such a response: after all, when their country was attacked, why did Indians not rally around their leaders and give Manmohan Singh a 90% approval rating, as George W. Bush was honoured seven years ago? The answer lies, shockingly for Westerners accustomed to believing that their variant of "democracy" is the highest stage of political development, in the truly substantive nature of Indian democracy. The Indian public sphere is not content to shore up the establishment in a show of good faith and solidarity, as the docile and ill-informed American public did. No, the supposedly flawed and backward Indian democracy produced a textbook response to the failure of its government. Where were the masses of people in the streets demanding to know what the Bush administration knew, and did, about terrorism in the year before 9/11? Why was that infamous P.D.B. of August 2001 entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S." not burned in effigy by angry mobs on the streets of New York, Cleveland, and Omaha? And why, if Bush and his national security team presided over the most devastating attack on American soil in history, were they furthermore given carte blanche on their judgment in starting a war?

The answer lies in different traditions of democracy in the U.S. and India, indeed in the differential basis of the nation-state. The U.S. government is an entrenched and hegemonic apparatus that presides over an apathetic and generally politically uninvolved consumer society. In India, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly pointed out in a recent essay entitled "'In the Name of Politics': Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India," traditions of popular protest by workers, peasants, and other marginalised groups survive from the early 20th-century struggles of the independence movement to challenge the nation-state. Nehru was opposed to any kind of "unrest," believing it to be incompatible with a "civilised" and mature democracy (where tamer forms of accountability like petitions and the ballot box should prevail). Of course, what the nationalist elites continually failed to understand about the character of the Indian nation was the vast spectrum of minority interests found within it that could not be cajoled, appeased, or integrated without a painful process of adjustment (in other words, that hegemony was hard to come by). In all, this adds up not to a backward and unruly system but to a rich, vibrant, and relevant sense of democracy in India, which should give skeptics about India's future at least some consolation in these dark times.