Time has a strange way of empowering or disempowering regimes. It provides the metaphors, the grand images of a regime. For example, the current regime of Narendra Modi moves like a juggernaut of time, representing huge acts of symbolic consolidation. It is not just that the Congress as a party appears anachronistic but that the BJP sees itself as a cadre rectifying time and speeding up history, bringing justice to a tortured past. But ‘rectifying history’ is only the first step in regime consolidation. The BJP has added two new scenarios to strengthen the process. The first is the revitalised idea of development encapsulated in the G20 model. The second is the civics of sustainability which combines corporate and voluntarist strategies. Tied together as a composite strategy, it sought to solidify the regime. The coming election is already seen as a fait accompli of the BJP era. In an extrapolative, linear sense, the BJP sees the future as a repetition of the recent past.
Yet, as one watches in anticipation, the canvas of time suddenly seems to have become problematic for the BJP. What appeared tactical in the first phase suddenly seems rudimentary and reductionist. Take history. At a time when history is becoming plural, emphasising the marginal and subaltern, the BJP is becoming an archetype of the 19th-century model of the nation-state. There is little sense of dialogue or plurality. While Indian nationalism created a plurality of time and scripts, the BJP standardised it into a monolithic, mono-lingual model called the nation-state.
If the nation-state is standardised, so is the idea of the future. While the regime waxes eloquent on a deprived past, it becomes monologic about its sense of the future. The future becomes a linear extrapolative process without a sense of alternative imagination. As a friend commented, the BJP projects Lutyens’ Delhi as its own future. One can hardly see or imagine a Dalit city or a tribal alternative to official development. The official language of time creates brands around governmental words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’. But sustainable development is a narrow corporate concept strategised to keep capitalist-industrial development alive. Sustainability hardly represents a rethinking of nature and is even less about diversity.
A trusteeship of nature and culture is missing from the BJP’s official categories. By making time linear and by bypassing alternatives, the BJP’s narratives of alternatives have become clichéd and predictable. At a time when tribal and alternative movements are celebrating plurality and in the process commanding global attention, the current regime plays custodian of monologic development. Its ecological record, especially in the Himalayas, is worrying. The regime has little sense of the Anthropocene when we as a civilisation should have revived Earth as sacred. The regime enacts its sense of consumer capital. The entire thesaurus of official terms such as sustainability and development has become banal.
As we explore the implications of these official terms, we sense a backstage of violence around them. There is a conviviality between official policy and violence. The term ‘banalisation of violence’ was used by philosopher Hannah Arendt to describe the behaviour of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, she claimed, was a clear cliché. Modi created a variant of this for his own actions after the Gujarat violence. He emphasised that violence was a routine ritual used by the perpetrators of bureaucracy to create a new normal. Victims of genocide were only seen as citizens if they accepted violence as a wider call for development.
The logic of the regime goes further as it ignores the metaphysics of the Anthropocene. Here, it is not the capitalist or the development expert we are focusing on but the human self as she or he ruthlessly damages the Earth. Anthropocene labels the period when human intervention has devastated Earth as an ecosystem. Time is not a linear phase here but ecological and geological, calling for a different imagination. We must think cosmically. We need to provide an individual or civilisational response to the Anthropocene. Instead, the Anthropocene has turned into a nationalist nightmare. The current India has little to do with the new idea of trusteeship of the Earth even though Gandhi was one of the original innovators of the idea. Our civilisation empties out as the regime becomes a goose-stepping nation-state. Restrictive time becomes impoverished time with little sense of flexibility in the future.
As a monologic idea of top-down development, the current national regime has little to offer in terms of diversity or plurality. Development merely becomes a technical timetable with managers who have little to say about the ethics of trusteeship or plurality. It is ironic that India, which had a genius for cosmic and civilisational time, has rendered it into a militarised uniform.
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Today, when we talk about the opposition, we need to locate it in civilisational time and not in short-run politics. We need a sense of seasonal time. Time and nature are two ingredients we have impoverished. The opposition must go beyond the provincialism of party politics and dream of a trusteeship of the Earth for a few billion years.
Gandhi’s idea of Swaraj and Swadeshi guarantees both nature and diversity along with their linguistic consequences. Time literally provides a new framework for ethics. It creates a new commons of time. The model of the innovation chain accounts very little for the cost of obsolescence and memory or museumised time. An impoverishment of time and erasure of plurality becomes the first step to triage and obsolescence. We need to playfully invent cosmic time and not make historical time punitive. We need to summon creation myths and make historical time open to multiple interpretations. By doing so, we recover the imagination of a plural democracy.
What we need most today is a plurality that can dream new imaginaries, creating a variety of narratives. It is time India playfully redeems the myths and categories of a democracy. We need to re-summon the sense of diversity in the folklore and everydayness of the country. In a powerful and literate way, folklore, seasonal and cosmic time becomes an answer to the provinciality of the development discourse. It requires a new metaphysics, a playful sense of translation. A new acceptance of the Bhakti movement, where the sacred and secular and the cosmopolitan and vernacular combine to create new conversations and more humane ideas of the future.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations