An emerging pattern
In India, patriotism is fast becoming the first port of call, giving lumpen elements a calling card for thuggery
by
Salil Tripathi
How
fragile must a country be if it can’t withstand a few slogans? How
distrustful of the law are its lawyers if they beat up students they
have determined as being anti-national? How disdainful of natural
justice would a police chief be if he asks students to prove their
innocence? How cynical is the ruling party spokesman when he uses
doctored videos on prime-time television, his poker face showing a
callous disregard for reality? And are we being naive if we fail to see
the pattern and continue to believe that the prime minister is seriously
committed to the development agenda, but he is quaintly powerless to
rein in his wayward party members?
Patriotism, Samuel Johnson had warned, was the last refuge of the
scoundrel. In India, it is fast becoming the first port of call, with
loud commitment to nationalism giving lumpen elements a calling card for
thuggery. Nationalism is invoked at the slightest pretext—the proponent
of an opposing view easily described as “anti-national”. On a popular
news channel, the all-knowing megaphone who prefers to call himself “the
nation” asks a rhetorical question to a student and then admonishes him
when the student attempts to respond. He shouts at the student because
the student has actually begun to reply. Instead of letting him finish,
the megaphone has already moved to the next patriotic theme—honouring a
fallen soldier. How could the student he has just accused interrupt him,
when he is busy interrupting the student, especially when he is
honouring a martyr? Besides, all fallen soldiers are now martyrs and
bravehearts, for nothing less will do. So inflated has the language
become that a term reserved to recognize acts of exceptional bravery,
for which there are gallantry awards, has now become commonplace. We
must use it to describe anyone in uniform who dies an untimely death,
regardless of circumstances. And thus we debase our language, draining
it of any meaning.
Are these developments—the erection of
skyscraper-sized flagpoles at universities, the frequent invocation of
‘the nation’, the attacks on intellectuals, dividing the people into
‘us’ and ‘them’—coincidental? Are they spontaneous reactions to the
designs of “enemies of the nation”, or inspired by a “foreign hand”? Or
do they seem like the building blocks of fascism?
I hesitate to use the word fascism
loosely. Words, if used carelessly, dilute their original meaning.
George Orwell warned in his essay, Politics and the English Language,
how important it is to be clear. And to be sure, if fascism is to mean
people marching in black shirts out to conquer distant lands, then India
is surely not fascist. There are courts; there is the media and the
Opposition. The structures of democracy still operate with scrupulous
procedural fairness—a higher court sends a case back to the lower court;
a court wants students to surrender to the police, even if it is the
same forces that did nothing when students were beaten up barely a week
earlier, and those who beat up the students have boasted they would do
it again. Rules must be followed. And procedures trump substance.
Meanwhile, the same court system which
has charged Arundhati Roy with contempt over an article in which she
defended a disabled academic’s bail plea, has not invoked such
provisions against those who undermined its dignity within its premises.
And while the drama continues in Delhi, in Chhattisgarh, a reporter of
scroll.in and a team of lawyers documenting abuses against adivasi
groups have been called Maoist sympathizers, intimidated, and hounded
out of the state, with the authorities being complicit.
Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, died last week. In an essay in the New York Review of Books in
1995, he had described the characteristics of ‘eternal fascism’ (or
Ur-Fascism): the creation of the cult of tradition; rejection of
modernism; the cult of action for its sake and distrust of intellectuals
(even referring to them as degenerates or effete snobs); attacks on
those who disagree, particularly the elite; and therefore attacking
diversity and consensus; playing up frustrations of the middle class;
giving a clear identity to those who feel deprived; describing the enemy
both as too strong (and hence to be fought) and too weak (and hence to
be ridiculed); calling for long-term battle with the enemies of the
state; celebrating martyrs; opposing anything that undermines machismo
(including homosexuality); and making selective use of populism. Eco
wrote: “We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be
forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in
plainclothes. It would be so much easier… (if) Black Shirts paraded
again… Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most
innocent disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at
any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.”
I would be glad to be proven wrong. I feel sadder that I might have to say “I told you so.”
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
