(Source: Daily Times, June 20, 2008)
NOT ARTICLES OF THEIR FAITH
by J Sri Raman
The Far Right, which is at once fiercer and more fragmented than ever before, bids fair for power in New Delhi. This is the dire warning for the anti-communal forces, also in disarray, from the Ketkar and Nandy episodes
There are two major reasons for which two recent attacks on the freedom of expression in India need special notice. The raid on an editor’s home and the legal suit against a social scientist, in response to newspaper articles by both, represented more than routine exercises of Far Right muscle flexing.
Kumar Ketkar, editor of the Marathi daily Loksatta, invited the raid by writing an editorial on the Maharashra state government’s plan to raise a statue of Maratha warrior-king Shivaji on the Arabian Sea. Ashis Nandy, who prefers to be described as a political psychologist, provoked the prosecution attempt by his bid at a brief analysis of the mandate of Gujarat’s middle class for Narendra Modi in leading national daily Times of India.
What calls for a closer look, first, is the fact that these are not really obvious, tailor-made cases for Far Right crusaders to take up. In one of the cases, the provocation seemed too weak to trigger off such a Pavlovian response. In the other, the provocation did not seem to emanate from a source that the Far Right considered “pseudo-secular” and, therefore, punishable by every means.
Ketkar appeared anxious indeed to avoid causing offence. A long-time critic of the Shiv Sena, he has only targeted Maharashtra’s ruling coalition of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). And his editorial made no mention of the communalist campaign built around the cult of Shivaji that distorts history and diminishes the Maratha legend’s stature. Ketkar only scoffed at the skewed priorities behind the statue project.
Wrote he: “It appears that all the problems of Maharashtra have been solved. People are not only happy and contented but are looking forward to a magnificent future. There are no indebted farmers in the state now, no suicides, no deaths caused by malnutrition. All children go to school, there is no unemployment among the educated as there is tremendous growth of industry as well as the knowledge sector and everyone has been employed. There is no question of the unskilled or the uneducated being unemployed because there is no such person...Indeed that is the reason why the people of the state are immensely delighted that the duo that rules the state has taken up the grand project of erecting a magnificent statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, right in the Arabian Sea, across Nariman Point, about one kilometre away. The government has decided that the statue will be taller and more grand than the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.”
The editorial, essentially critical of the grotesque extravaganza of the project with an outlay estimated at billions of Indian rupees, led to a mob attack on Ketkar’s home from an outfit called the Shiv Sangram, linked formally to the NCP but still part of the larger camp of the far right.
What has brought trouble for Nandy is an article published on January 8 under the headline “Blame the middle class”. He, of course, blamed Gujarat’s middle class for the electoral mandate won by Modi and communal politics in December 2007 and for its “inane versions of communalism”, but did not stop there. He proceeded to make observations, with which some in the Parivar (the Far Right “family”) would feign partial agreement at least.
He wrote: “The secularist dogma of many fighting the...Parivar has not helped matters. Even those who have benefited from secular lawyers and activists relate to secular ideologies instrumentally. They neither understand them nor respect them...Indeed, shallow ideologies of secularism have simultaneously broken the back of Gandhism and discouraged the emergence of figures like Ali Shariatis, Desmond Tutus and the Dalai Lama — persons who can give suffering a new voice audible to the poor and the powerless and make a creative intervention possible from within world-views accessible to the people.”
Nandy also said: “Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self-respect and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt blood, for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance and coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the media and education, which have become hate factories in recent times. And they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who, at a safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist, bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.”
The quotes should suffice to show that not all opponents of the Far Right would agree with him and that some in the Parivar can fallaciously perceive areas of agreement with his political philosophy. Nandy himself had argued, at greater length, against certain ideas of secularism elsewhere, as in an essay titled “Unclaimed baggage” in the Little Magazine.
This, however, did not stop the Gujarat police from registering a criminal case against him on May 30. The case, ironically based on a complaint by the president of the Ahmedabad-based National Council for Civil Liberties, is that the article was “prejudicial to national integration and intended to cause friction and promote enmity between different communities on grounds of religion, race, language and place of birth.”
This brings us to the second reason why this tale of attacks on two articles merits greater notice than the familiar machismo of Far Right goons. These attacks symbolised not just simple and straight communalism, but one combined and compounded with regionalism — with a particular brand of caste character, too, in the bargain.
Regionalism, with an emerging combine of intermediate castes representing it, had proved a formidable opponent of the Far Right in the past. Examples include Bihar, where the redoubtable Lalu Prasad arrested L K Advani on his Ayodhya march and the advance of the Far Right, and the Southern State of Tamilnadu, where “Dravidian” politics denied a place to “Hindutva” politics until recently.
A different story is unfolding, however, in Maharashtra (where the Shiv Sena and its version of the Shivaji cult represent Maratha power that seeks to set up “Hindu suicide squads” even while sending North Indians back home) and in Gujarat (where the “Hindutva” hordes of non-Patel nationalists seek to protect the State’s “asmita” or pride by perpetuating Modi’s rule).
The Far Right, which is at once fiercer and more fragmented than ever before, bids fair for power in New Delhi. This is the dire warning for the anti-communal forces, also in disarray, from the Ketkar and Nandy episodes. With the general election just round the comer, it is a warning that they must heed in a hurry.
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’
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