Who’s this who has come to represent me without my concurrence? Who is this threatening to usurp my identity? Tainting and twisting my faith and my beliefs? Who is this who is snatching my right to feel and think? Destroying the values I hold dear? Who is this who kills mercilessly? Who has deigned to rewrite what they think holy in blood.
Who is this who does not spare the life of a young boy returning from festival shopping? Or a policeman, a neighbour, at a place of worship? Or anyone for that matter, on mere suspicion? How did they become the law unto themselves and the order of the day—the arbiters of destiny and life and meaning, deciding what should be eaten, how one has to dress, what healthcare to opt for, what language should be spoken, which God to worship, how and where?
I ask, because all I see is a mob—a faceless but strangely organic entity seething with drummed-up anger—driven by a culture of insecurity and retribution and manufactured anxiety. What are they avenging?
The bovine creature in whose name they kill, a symbol of a pastoral past, cannot suddenly be inspiring all this violence in its name, all over a huge landmass: The rather benign and hapless cow is still injected with all sorts of hormonal boosters so that it can give more milk, and is afterwards let loose to wander the streets aimlessly by its masters, to gorge on plastic and trash. It was at the centre of a chain of economic activity quite integral to the Indian way of life ... and still is to millions. But how and where did it acquire this tinge of poison?
Is the Indian cow just an empty symbol then, an instrumental token for a society that is angry and brutalised? A society that does not know how to find legitimate mechanisms to voice its angst—all the angst produced by modern living and its alienating effect, all the social and economic disenfranchisement—and has to resort to violence merely to find a sense of power and meaning?
As has been seen in some of the sporadic incidents of lynching, it’s not just frustrated, jobless youth from subaltern spaces who figure in the roster of the guilty. It’s often middle-aged, employed, regular people who are willing to beat another human being to death in public on the basis of mere rumour, and without provocation. This says something about the deep failure of the system: as if all democratic means of negotiating, adjusting, cooperating, conversing, arguing, even navigating through conflicts no longer have any purchase.
Democracy does not presume universal consent on things—we all do not have to agree on everything that is at stake, everything that is cast in doubt, about the past or present or future. About ancient questions of race or religion, about the planning of cities and rural economies for tomorrow, or governmental measures that affect us in the here and now. In fact, democracy presumes the opposite. That there will always be conflicts of interest, and different points of view, and incompatible assertions made from specific class and caste locations. It takes that for granted.
What democracy is meant to do is provide a framework of debate within which these things can be managed and settled in an ongoing fashion through what our humanity gives us: thought and its articulation, exchange of views, a public space where it happens.
Instead, if we see a macabre festival of violence around us, a relapse into the baser human capacities, whether it is in Kashmir or Kerala or Haryana or Jharkhand, it speaks of a void. It’s almost as if what used to be said of Kashmir in its near-collapse—philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s famous concept of the ‘state of exception’, where the usual constitutional niceties do not apply and everything goes—is now beginning to be applicable everywhere.
Any social space in India—including social media, which oozes verbal violence—can now demonstrate itself to be existing in a state of exception. It’s almost as if the old order has given way, and the sense of security a state is supposed to grant to its citizens via the Constitution is evaporating, and nothing has emerged in its place.
Some say this was a country always known for non-violence. Perhaps that can be qualified. There has always been war, armed rebellion, insurrection; the central Vedic rite was a sacrifice; massacres have preceded the rise of Sramanic religions, and also their fall; and revisionist historians of all hues see a different kind of implicit violence even in Gandhi. But for all the structural oppression of caste, and the conflicts around religion, one thing can be asserted about India: It was always known for a certain kind of concourse of thought. Always the dreams of the people were expressed in poetry and song.
From the vast, unknown libraries of indigenous oral literature, from the first glimmer of philosophy in the Vedic tradition to its Upanishadic heights, the great storehouses of secular knowledge, the fundamental value tarka held in the Buddhist discourse and Advaita’s counters, the much-underappreciated Islamic assimilation of everything from classical music to the Dara Shukoh-led translations, an intellectual robustness and aesthetic core always flowed under everything. If we judge the present, ruled as it is by memes and prime-time screamfests, we would seem to be in a very different country. It’s not just that people are unable to see that this party or that coming to power is not a mandate for everyone playing police. It’s perhaps also that the Upanishadic sage Yagnavalkya could be lynched today for what he said about what he likes to eat.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Political Editor, The New Indian Express
Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com