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
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 .
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.
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
