Ramchandra Guha, historian. Wikicommons/Pushkarv. Some rights reserved.When the 'fascist' Modi was verging on becoming
India's Prime Minister, intellectuals told us that he would be a threat to the
very idea of an inclusive and democratic India. Amartya Sen declared that he
could not be part of an India which had Modi as its PM. Modi is now PM, but
nowhere does it seem that he has to abandon the idea of India in order to
pursue his agenda. Instead many proponents of the idea of India have become
Modi-supporters. Sen himself now says that Modi is no reason to leave the
country!
One major votary of 'the idea of India',
Ramchandra Guha, informs us that Rabindranath Tagore used the phrase in a
letter to a friend in 1921, writing that “the idea of India is against the
intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others,
which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts”. Be that as it may, the point I want
to make here is this: if ever there was any hegemonic claim which is enormously
difficult, almost impossible, to expose or unpack, then 'the idea of India' is
that claim. The Thatcherite idea of 'There is no alternative' (TINA), for
example, would pale in terms of its hegemonic effects and vice-like grip by
comparison. The idea of India is indeed part of what Perry Anderson called the 'Indian
ideology', even though his critique of this ideology proved woefully
inadequate.
The idea of India performs a remarkable
feat with
utmost dexterity: pushing a right-wing agenda (like the defence of private
property) through progressive, left-wing values and proposals. The Indian
constitution, on which the idea of India largely rests, is so replete with
values like democracy and even social transformation that it needs enormous
critical acumen to cut through its many radical-sounding layers. Large sections
of the left pathetically compete with each other and render liberals jobless in
trying to don the mantle of being the true defenders of this idea and the
Indian constitution.
Like firing from somebody else's shoulders,
Indian elites early on in the 1940s managed to get their constitution drafted
by a radical leader of the oppressed castes, none other than B. R. Ambedkar who
otherwise was up against this 'upper caste' elite. Ambedkar joining the
Constituent Assembly backed by the upper caste elite was a tremendous 'achievement',
a pernicious move. This one stroke allowed the Indian elite and capitalist
class massive leverage and made their hegemonic claims, now penned by a
radical, appear as the truest and most genuine of intentions. Both Dalits and
the left were marginalised, if not bought over.
Imagine, if the racist structure in the USA
got someone like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King to draft the constitution of
the USA, without of course really changing oppressive race relations – that
would be a very clever and intelligent racist structure, indeed! The very fact
of a constitution supposedly 'intending' to do away with racism would mean that
racism gets re-presented in a new way:
actually existing racism would now be seen as a 'deviation' from the
constitution, or from the intent of the 'founding fathers' of the constitution.
The focus would be to realise the 'vision' of the 'fathers of the constitution'
rather than fighting racism per se. The reality of racism gets underplayed,
undermined. This logic is better practiced in India.
Secularism
Let us have a close look at one key
component of this idea of India as embedded in the Indian constitution –
secularism against communalism (meaning mostly Hindu majoritarianism).
A secular constitution now meant that
communalism or attacks on minorities would be presented as a deviation, a
violation of the constitution. The reality of communalism is underplayed as it
gets presented as a deviation from the normal. Communalism is cognised as a
discursive displacement, a violation, not really that pervasive since it
'normally' does not exist. Communalism is not about what actually exists in society but is like a second-order effect which one gets when the constitution is
violated.
Hence, till today the massacre of Sikhs in
1984 engineered by the ruling secular Congress or the 2002 pogrom of Muslims
backed by Narendra Modi who is the Prime Minister today (and innumerable
'small' massacres or riots) would never be 'enough' to account for the
persistence of communalism as a persistent, normal feature of Indian society,
and not just the handiwork of a narrowly defined 'Hindu right-wing'.
There have been approximately 60 major
communal riots since 1961. A huge majority of them took place under the rule of
the ideologically secular Congress and very few under the ideologically
communal BJP. Anyone can see that communalism is an internal moment of
secularism and not a deviation from it – but the defenders of the secular-democratic
idea of India deny this. They present secularism as the way to defeat
communalism.
No amount of 'empirical evidence',
massacres and progroms, is enough to drive home this point so long as
communalism is understood as a 'deviation from secularism'. A positively
existing secularism is already assumed, such that the struggle and the
progressive movement must be directed towards defending this secularism –
defending something which is non-existent! Many of the people's movements for secularism are steeped in the
ideological mystification of the idea of India.
How does one fight communalism, in this
formulation? Of course, by 'strengthening our secular constitution' rather than
directly fighting communal forces! Thus, when in Bombay of the 1960s the
right-wing 'fascist' Shiv Sena directly attacked and decimated left-wing
forces, the left ran to the police and law enforcement agencies for protection,
pretty much repudiating the struggle on the ground – they thought that they
should struggle within the constitutional norms, uphold secularism and not fall
into the trap of the right-wing to lure the left into a fight outside the
limits of the constitution. The left 'sincerely' upheld the constitution only
to lose the battle. The constitution is the perpetual price the left happily
pays for their perpetual defeat and deep decline in India!
The more communalism intensifies, the more
fervently one is expected to stick to secularism. Secularism created its own
conditions, its own necessity by redefining communalism as a deviation from it.
This has led to a downward spiral, now ending in a pathological attachment to
secularism and the idea of India. It is only now with new forces within the
Muslim minority like the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), who reject official
secularism, that this spiral is being checked. MIM claims to fight communalism
directly and not through the mediation of secularism. But this 'break' has come
from the right-wing rather than the left.
In their own way, forces like MIM have realised the ideological
duplicity of Indian secularism.
The idea of India is not incomplete or
defective. It does not suffer from a lack as such. It is a full and a perfect
discursive machine, reproducing 'reality', and thereby making itself
indispensable in the cause of justice, democracy and equality. It is presented
as a radical intervention in the grim realities of India, for example, reducing
inequalities in a deeply divided and unequal society. That inequalities have
not been reduced one iota, and in fact have increased since Independence in
1947 is a fact which even its votaries cannot deny. But by promising to reduce inequalities, creating trust in this promise,
such that radicals too were inducted in its project, it has produced these
seriously deceptive hegemonic effects.
The idea of India created the very conditions
for its own relevance. Any other progressive path and any other left-wing
approach would by now have been criminalized and repressed. Nehru's
commitment to social justice in the famous Objective Resolutions of the
Constituent Assembly could go hand-in-hand with sending the army in to crush the
Telangana peasant rebellion.
There is just one word for the whole idea
of India: pernicious.