A journey from "Politics of Unity & Non-Violence" to "Politics of Identity & Violence" - A tale of Indian politics

 

First and foremost let me begin by extending all my viewers greetings of the 72nd anniversary of Indian independence.

At one time, India had the folklore, the myths, of coping with the outsider. Our culture was open and plural and there was always a place for the migrant, the nomad, the wandering peddler. The arrival of the Afghan Kabuliwallah was an event often anticipated with great glee. They come not only with wonderful goods, but news from elsewhere. Modernity has dulled the magic of the outsider

If we look at our pre-independence period,  we will come to know that politics of that time was to  liberate India from the hands of British, by standing united and using the tool “Satyagraha”. I strongly believe that standing united was more important in our journey of independence even though we used our prideful weapon “Satyagraha”.  

And if look at India’s political  journey of early independence period, the greediness for the power to rule a nation by Mohammad Jinnah, divided a united India into two parts (India and Pakistan). Resulting in creation of the political ideology of “identity & violence” leading to the great genocide of 1948 on bases of religious identity and end of the “politics of unity and non violence.” 

After independence the democratic India has survived on the myths of non-violence, plurality and hospitality for too long. The old stories anchored in civilisation and folklore has worn thin. Hospitality might still work, but it is more a privatised ritual .

Today, outsiders  is not an exotic creature, a peddler of wares, but a dismal victim of war, displacement and politics. They are migrant that development and war have displaced.. In fact, democracy which at one point celebrated the plurality of margins, minorities, nomads and dissenters, now wants a more uniform citizenship. Whether it is Germany and the Turks, Trump seeking to create the great wall against Mexico, or in India Rajnath Singh and Amit Shah celebrating the National Register, the outsider is treated as dirt, as matter out of place, and such human dirt becomes the subject of ethnic cleansing .  It helps populist narratives to create an easy and invidious pathology, a negative folklore against people it does not want. The displacement is not just physical but conceptual. Society wants the outsider located not only outside the geographic map but outside the conceptual one. Using the narrow network of citizenship, we place migrants, visitors, refugees in the new classificatory world called the outsider. Using the narrow notion of patriotism, we place ethics, dissenters outside our mental map.

Our jingoists argue that those who do not fit with our thought pattern should be forced to leave. In fact, our sense of patriotism today is more jingoist parochialism scaled up as a simulacrum of nationalism. The new identity politics of nationalism comes not from loving a nation but hating the outsider. Hate, suspicion, the sense of being “victimised” provides the raw material of politics.

Whether it is the Shiv Sena threatening Biharis and Tamils, the Assamese youth organisation fighting the threat of the Bengali, or bullies in Delhi harassing the Kashmiri, the Nigerian or the Muslim, one understands that pogroms have become the stuff of everyday electoral politics.  

Contemporary media or even social science has not quite the poignancy, the pathos of such a politics built on the mob and the outsider. It is the cartoon as captive that has caught the drab realism of this world.The politics of citizenship has given way globally to the invidious politics of the outsider. Democracy has to face the fact that time is a Trump and a Nellie in all of us.

Now it is for the common man like you and me to decide whether to fall again into the trap of those politicians using politics of identity & violence for their own personal ambition. By remaining in power, foolling us by giving us a small piece of pie and taking the rest for themselves.

- Francis Lazar