Can we not find it in ourselves to belong to an ancient civilisation instead of to
just a recent
nation? To love a land instead of just patrolling a territory? The Sangh Parivar
understands
nothing of what civilisation means.It seeks to limit, reduce, define, dismember and
desecrate the
memory of what we were, our understanding of what we are, and our dreams of who we
want to be.
What kind of India do they want? A limbless, headless, soulless torso, left bleeding
under the
butchers' cleaver with a flag driven deep into her mutilated heart? Can we let that
happen? Have
we let it happen?
The incipient, creeping fascism of the past few years has been groomed by many of our
'democratic'
institutions. Everyone has flirted with it - Parliament, the press, the police, the
administration, the public. Even 'secularists' have been guilty of helping to create
the right
climate. Each time you defend the right of an institution, any institution (including
the Supreme
Court), to exercise unfettered, unaccountable powers that must never be challenged,
you move
towards fascism. To be fair, perhaps not everyone recognised the early signs for what
they were.
The national press has been startlingly courageous in its denunciation of the events
of the last
few weeks. Many of the BJP's fellow travellers who have journeyed with it to the brink
are now
looking down the abyss into the hell that was once Gujarat, and turning away in
genuine dismay.
But how hard and for how long will they fight? This is not going to be like a
publicity campaign
for an upcoming cricket season.And there will not always be spectacular carnage to
report on.
Fascism is also about the slow, steady infiltration of all the instruments of State
power. It's
about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular day-to-day injustices.
Fighting it
means fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people. Fighting it does not mean
asking for
RSS shakhas and the madrassas to be banned, it means working towards the day when
they're
voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas.It means keeping an eagle eye on public
institutions and
demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the
whispering
of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds
of
resistance movements across the country who are speaking about real things - about
bonded labour,
marital rape, sexual preferences, women's wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable
mining, weavers'
woes, farmers' worries. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the
relentless,
everyday violence of abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your
newspaper columns
and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and their staged
theatrics,
which are designed to divert attention from everything else.
While most people in India have been horrified by what happened in Gujarat, many
thousands of the
indoctrinated are preparing to journey deeper into the heart of the horror. Look
around you and
you'll see in little parks, in big maidans, in empty lots, in village commons, the RSS
is
marching, hoisting its saffron flag. Suddenly they're everywhere, grown men in khaki
shorts
marching, marching, marching. To where? For what? Their disregard for history shields
them from
the knowledge that fascism will thrive for a short while and then self-annihilate
because of its
inherent stupidity. But unfortunately, like the radioactive fallout of a nuclear
strike, it has a
half-life that will cripple generations to come.
These levels of rage and hatred cannot be contained, cannot be expected to subside,
with public
censure and denunciation. Hymns of brotherhood and love are great, but not enough.
Historically, fascist movements have been fuelled by feelings of national
disillusionment. Fascism
has come to India after the dreams that fuelled the Freedom Struggle have been
frittered away like
so much loose change.
Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously called a 'wooden loaf' - a
notional freedom
tainted by the blood of the thousands who died during Partition.For more than half a
century now,
the hatred and mutual distrust has been exacerbated, toyed with and never allowed to
heal by
politicians, led from the front by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Every political party has tilled
the marrow
of our secular parliamentary democracy, mining it for electoral advantage. Like
termites
excavating a mound, they've made tunnels and underground passages, undermining the
meaning of
'secular', until it has just become an empty shell that's about to implode. Their
tilling has
weakened the foundations of the structure that connects the Constitution, Parliament
and the
courts of law - the configuration of checks and balances that forms the backbone of a
parliamentary democracy. Under the circumstances, it's futile to go on blaming
politicians and
demanding from them a morality they're incapable of. There's something pitiable about
a people
that constantly bemoans its leaders. If they've let us down, it's only because we've
allowed them
to. It could be argued that civil society has failed its leaders as much as leaders
have failed
civil society. We have to accept that there is a dangerous, systemic flaw in our
parliamentary
democracy that politicians will exploit. And that's what results in the kind of
conflagration that
we have witnessed in Gujarat. There's fire in the ducts. We have to address this issue
and come up
with a systemic solution.
But politicians' exploitation of communal divides is by no means the only reason that
fascism has
arrived on our shores.
Over the past fifty years, ordinary citizens' modest hopes for lives of dignity,
security and
relief from abject poverty have been systematically snuffed out. Every 'democratic'
institution in
this country has shown itself to be unaccountable, inaccessible to the ordinary
citizen, and
either unwilling, or incapable of acting, in the interests of genuine social justice.
Every
strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable
distribution of natural resources, the implementation of positive discrimination - has
been
cleverly, cunningly and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes
and that
class of people who have a stranglehold on the political process. And now corporate
globalisation
is being relentlessly and arbitrarily imposed on an essentially feudal society,
tearing through
its complex, tiered, social fabric, ripping it apart culturally and economically.
There is very real grievance here. And the fascists didn't create it. But they have
seized upon
it, upturned it and forged from it a hideous, bogus sense of pride. They have
mobilised human
beings using the lowest common denominator - religion. People who have lost control
over their
lives, people who have been uprooted from their homes and communities, who have lost
their culture
and their language, are being made to feel proud of something. Not something they have
striven for
and achieved, not something they can count as a personal accomplishment, but something
they just
happen to be. Or, more accurately, something they happen not to be. And the falseness,
the
emptiness of that pride, is fuelling a gladiatorial anger that is then directed
towards a
simulated target that has been wheeled into the amphitheatre.
How else can you explain the project of trying to disenfranchise, drive out or
exterminate the
second-poorest community in this country, using as your footsoldiers the very poorest
(Dalits and
Adivasis)? How else can you explain why Dalits in Gujarat, who have been despised,
oppressed and
treated worse than refuse by the upper castes for thousands of years, have joined
hands with their
oppressors to turn on those who are only marginally less unfortunate than they
themselves? Are
they just wage slaves, mercenaries for hire? Is it all right to patronise them and
absolve them of
responsibility for their own actions? Or am I being obtuse? Perhaps it's common
practice for the
unfortunate to vent their rage and hatred on the next most unfortunate, because their
real
adversaries are inaccessible, seemingly invincible and completely out of range?
Because their own
leaders have cut loose and are feasting at the high table, leaving them to wander
rudderless in
the wilderness, spouting nonsense about returning to the Hindu fold. (The first step,
presumably,
towards founding a Global Hindu Empire, as realistic a goal as Fascism's previously
failed
projects - the restoration of Roman Glory, the purification of the German race or the
establishment of an Islamic Sultanate.)
One hundred and thirty million Muslims live in India. Hindu fascists regard them as
legitimate
prey. Do people like Modi and Bal Thackeray think that the world will stand by and
watch while
they're liquidated in a 'civil war?' Press reports say that the European Union and
several other
countries have condemned what happened in Gujarat and likened it to Nazi rule. The
Indian
government's portentous response is that foreigners should not use the Indian media to
comment on
what is an 'internal matter' (like the chilling goings-on in Kashmir?). What next?
Censorship?
Closing down the Internet? Blocking international calls? Killing the wrong
'terrorists' and
fudging the DNA samples? There is no terrorism like State terrorism.
But who will take them on? Their fascist cant can perhaps be dented by some blood and
thunder from
the Opposition. So far only Laloo Yadav of Bihar has shown himself to be truly
passionate: "Kaun
mai ka lal kehta hai ki yeh Hindu rashtra hai? Usko yahan bhej do, chhati phad
doonga!" (Which
mother's son says this is a Hindu Nation? Send him here, I'll tear his chest open.)
Unfortunately there's no quick fix. Fascism itself can only be turned away if all
those who are
outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their
indignation.
Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many millions of us, to
rally not just
on the streets, but at work and in schools and in our homes, in every decision we
take, and every
choice we make?
Or not just yet...
If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as it should),
like the
ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, we too will learn to recognise revulsion in the
gaze of our
fellow human beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the
eye, for
the shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.
This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through the night.
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