Jantar Mantar has become a time machine. Grievous head injuries incurred there recall the death of Lala Lajpat Rai from wounds sustained in a lathi charge on a peaceful protest against the Simon Commission. With steadfast impunity, the British colonial authorities had insisted that Rai died of heart failure, not the assault. A century later, the Delhi Police are denying the use of illegal force at Jantar Mantar.
But now, with cameras everywhere, the Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force risk looking like colonial thugs brutalising a native population. It so happens that I’m re-reading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which explains such things clearly. It’s the Grove Press edition foreworded by Harvard postcolonialist Homi K Bhabha, who brought the 1961 text up to speed with our era.
Fanon explained the rise of brown and black sahibs, who slid into the roles of departing white sahibs and maintained the superstructure of colonialism. Decolonisation, proposed by the German academic Moritz Julius Bonn in the 1930s, was developed by Fanon in this 1961 book, his last work. It changed the world’s understanding of colonialism and its aftermath. But Fanon couldn’t have anticipated that decolonisation would be embraced by a wide spectrum of interests, sometimes in a garbled form, and that the structure of colonialism would survive his hopeful era.
A colonial police force flourishes in 21st-century Delhi. It sees political leaders as masters and the people as an underclass. Police reform should have erased this peculiarity. In 2006, former IPS officer Prakash Singh won a landmark ruling against the Union of India, in which the Supreme Court issued directions for insulating the police from political influence. But in the Delhi riots of 2020 and the current cockroach protest, the police feature as colonial oppressors. As always.
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) aims to decolonise the Modi government, which treats citizens as subjects. Ironically, the BJP had won office by promising to decolonise Indian minds. Its method has been to trash past elites, especially Congress leaders, as deracinated brown sahibs. It positioned itself as the only autochthonous, authentic party, and branded the Congress and the opposition inauthentic.
This was hailed as a cleansing, purifying process, taking the nation closer to its authentic roots. The BJP tried to decolonise India’s very landscape by changing the names of streets (Aurangzeb ceded to Abdul Kalam), railway stations (Mughalsarai to Deendayal Upadhyaya), towns (Ajmer to Ajaymeru), institutions (Planning Commission to Niti Aayog) and even statutes (CrPC to BNSS). And via temple agitations, it relentlessly promoted a return to the authenticity of antiquity.
But real decolonisation looks ahead. It does not look back to seek validation. Fanon had lamented the frictionless ease with which newly independent African states backslid into clannish and tribal politics. Real decolonisation also equalises, but India’s people are still divided into rulers and subjects. In his preface, Bhabha recalls the India Shining campaign which cost the BJP the 2004 election, because it insulted darkest India. Now, another insult has raised a cockroach army. The BJP can never decolonise anything, because it confuses the process with atavism.
The lens of colonialism/decolonisation now explains many modern social and political phenomena. Neocolonialism, the appropriation of the wealth of weaker nations via commerce, without bothering to invade them, has been closely studied. Bhabha writes of the extractive nature of IT body-shopping and outsourcing, and reminds us that Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, said that the Bretton Woods institutions have “the feel of the colonial ruler”.
But the device is equally useful for understanding everyday phenomena. Doesn’t the system of migrant labour also have a colonial feel, whether it’s Biharis working the fields of Punjab or Indian techies in Fortune 500 companies? Without the dubious theory that an Aryan invasion and settler colonialism ended the Harappan civilisation, would north and south India remain in cultural opposition, vying for archaeological supremacy in Rakhigarhi and Keezhadi?For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant publi
The gated colony built on erased farmland, the club that insists on Western dress code, the five star hotel which stops autorickshaws at the gate―aren’t these colonial institutions? Indeed, any dual population of the empowered and the powerless exhibits features of colonialism.
The Jantar Mantar protest, the latest faceoff between rulers and the ruled in a turbulent decade, also raises questions about the Westminster model, a relic of the colonised past. Protest is the last resort of democracy, but it has become a routine mode of engagement with power. Also, protests are focused on issues. Many protesting students and farmers support the ruling party but oppose it on specific issues. Our democracy, based on party lines and ideologies, cannot readily accommodate such specificity.
The CJP is not even a party. It cannot stand for election. Yet it is a lightning rod swiftly communicating public anger which was lost in transmission in the formal political system. Their protest actually provides an opportunity to decolonise the Westminster model, to include mechanisms for citizens to be heard directly, so that they don’t have to fight street battles to have every anxiety addressed. The cockroach is the bug in the system that can keep Indian democracy alive at a difficult time.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
(Views are personal)
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