In his essay Working Towards the Führer, Ian Kershaw explains how, in a certain political climate, the man or woman at the helm need not micromanage everything. The beneficiaries of the regime do it for them. Judges, administrators, policemen, media persons, traders and even housewives can learn to anticipate what power wants and contribute to it. Kershaw’s phrase describes how people throughout Hitler’s system anticipated what he wanted and abetted it.
In 1934, Nazi functionary Werner Willikens explained the principle in a speech: “The duty of every single person” was to work “in the spirit of the Führer”. Kershaw found in this a key to understanding how the dictatorship operated without the dictator having to issue every instruction. And in working towards its goals, people had something to gain: career, security, status and the protection of one’s place in the social order. Dissent appeared irrational because no greater good seemed likely to come of it. An autocracy could be even seen as utilitarian.
In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s film about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, the machinery of mass murder is approached through the domestic life of the man who administers it. Höss pursues greater efficiency in the camp, including ways to increase its killing capacity. Beyond the wall, his family’s stability is founded on Höss’s efficacy as an executioner.
What we are talking about here is the difficult subject of the individual’s role within an institution. Neha Bora and her institution represent the other side of this equation. She and the All India Students’ Association are in total convergence. She anticipates what AISA wants and works towards those goals. The same is true of Gyanesh Kumar and the Election Commission of India. The difference lies in the political objectives they represent. The process is the same, characterised by devotion to the cause.
Consider the detention of Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka of the Cockroach Janta Party. They were released on October 21 after seven days in custody. Their waving of national flags at a denotified Jantar Mantar may have been a childish act, but the consequences were disproportionate. They have been silenced indefinitely. No one in power needed to issue an instruction for what transpired thanks to a functionary’s devotion.
The question is not whether every official has a political motive. It is whether the institutional incentives encourage officials to err on the side of restriction rather than liberty. If Jantar Mantar can be denotified as a protest site, what prevents another authority from declaring the whole of the capital off-limits to protest?
The historical distance between Auschwitz and contemporary India remains vast. Invoking Kershaw or Glazer is not to equate either with the Jantar Mantar protests and their suppression. It is to ask what happens when the preservation of a system becomes a professional objective, and those who benefit from its stability cease to examine the consequences for people excluded by it.
To go back to Gyanesh Kumar, a 1988-batch IAS officer who became Chief Election Commissioner. He comes from a family deeply represented in the civil services. His elder daughter is an IAS officer; his younger daughter is an IRS officer; both his sons-in-law are IAS officers. His brother is reported to be an IRS officer, and his brother-in-law an IPS officer.
This is a family whose professional world is closely bound to the Indian State. At what point does identification with the institution become identification with the government’s priorities? In short, how does one avoid working towards the leader who represents the State?
The question that Glazer’s film poses is whether a person’s goodness extends beyond the boundaries of the world in which that person has learnt to be efficient, which is good in that context. If you are an ethical, incentivised killer for the State, are you still a good human being? Is the State inherently more bona fide than the individual? What weight should be attached to one’s conscience?
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil brings us to the question of personal responsibility. Adolf Eichmann, who helped organise the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, escaped to Argentina after the war, was captured by Israeli agents and tried in Jerusalem.
Arendt examined how a man involved in a vast criminal enterprise could present himself as an administrator carrying out his duties. She was concerned with how mass crimes could be synonymous with routine legal procedures. Eichmann claimed that he was following orders. The idea of the law as “good” in itself is in question here.
The most durable political systems do not depend on universal conviction. They depend on enough people finding conformity safer and more profitable than resistance. The official protects a career, the businessperson an income, the parent a child, the journalist access, the political enforcer his patronage. Each decision can make sense to the person making it, even as their combined effect diminishes the freedom of everyone.
It is the tyranny of little things. In our own way, we are all working towards 2047. It just seems farther than 21 years.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)