Praveen Swami: Seeds of a million tyrannies
The anti-Muslim
violence India is witnessing is significant not principally because of its
scale, but because of the processes engendering it. The new element is this:
The state is abandoning the republican project, and ceding control to local
squads independent of central authority.
Laughter illuminated
the life of the publisher Angelo Formìggini: It was, he asserted, “the
foundation of solidarity between human beings”. He won a mass audience for the
classics of satire, from Apuleius to Margherita d’Angoulême and Jonathan Swift.
Formìggini’s contribution to the canon was his university thesis, The Woman in
the Torah and the Manava Dharma Sastra, which argued that Aryans and Semites
shared a common racial genesis — a text he cheerily admitted to fabricating.
For Formìggini, who like many Italian Jews supported Benito Mussolini, seeing in fascism the prospect of a great national revival, communal identity was a prison. Even when the fascists passed racial laws stripping the Jews of their rights in 1938, he defended assimilation. “This is but a break, which will be more or less long,” Formìggini wrote, “after which the journey will resume”. Then, in November that year, in a desperate effort to evade the race laws, Formìggini jumped from Modena’s magnificent Ghirlandina. “He died just like a Jew,” National Fascist Party secretary, Achille Starace spat out, in the regime’s only comment on Formìggini’s suicide. “He threw himself out of a tower to save a gunshot”. Formìggini’s despairing suicide is a useful prism to contemplate the silence of India as it is confronted with the religious right’s apparently inexorable rise. The recent #NotInMyName protests will prove, more likely than not, a despairing lament for a dying secular order, rather than the kernel of a new politics. The remarkable feature of the ongoing communal violence in India is how much consent it enjoys: If there is public outrage, it has been remarkably slow to emerge from people’s front doors.
Yet, to end the argument
here is profoundly disingenuous. The anti-Muslim violence India is witnessing
is significant not principally because of its scale, but because of the
processes engendering it. The new element is this: The state is abandoning the
republican project, and ceding control to local squads independent of central
authority. These are the seeds from which a million tyrannies may flower. Not all revolutions
are revolutionary. Hindutva has entwined itself erratically with many
pre-existing relations of loyalty and patronage, built around family, caste and
class. The breakdown of the old Congress order has seen rival patron-client
networks compete ferociously for the spoils, using the new ideological language
for legitimacy. Inside the ranks of the Hindutva movement itself,
cow-protection violence is a means of mobility and advancement — operating with
little central direction bar the aesthetic and ideological message of the cow.
The leaders of these
new terror squads, distinct from organised terrorist groups, are often young
aspirants to BJP leadership positions. Not infrequently hailing from the Other
Backward Castes, as well as communities like the Jats and Gujjars, this cohort
of youth leaders missed the great, career-building processes that began with
the Babri Masjid movement, and the orgies of killing that accompanied it. The
case of Nityanand Mahato, the low-level Ramgarh BJP leader held for the murder
of Jharkhand resident Alimuddin Ansari, is illustrative. Elsewhere, as in
Rajasthan’s Pehlu Khan murder case, we see the role of local power seeking
legitimacy through association with the ideological order. One of the key
accused, Om Prakash Yadav, owns shops and land along the highway where Khan was
attacked and his wife, Nidhi Yadav, is a municipal corporator.
For their followers,
largely semi-employed or unemployed lumpen youth, this is a welcome opportunity
to engage in violence — an activity that gives masculine agency and meaning
that their everyday lives hold out no prospect of. These young people see themselves
as crusaders for a utopian new world, spilling blood to excise evil from the
body of civil society. For them, savagery is also a kind of narcotic high, a
means of extracting respect from a world that otherwise despises them.
To understand the
rewards such activity holds out, we need to understand how thin and worn the
“New India” Prime Minister Modi is building in fact is. R.J.B. Bosworth, the
pre-eminent scholar of fascism, referred to fascist Italy as a “propaganda
state”. “For much of the time”, Bosworth noted, “Mussolini was foreshadowing
the behaviour and the intellectual processes of the chat-show host”. “Here a
pretty woman, there a family member, minister, party chief or military officer,
were ushered in and out of his grandiose office”. His was not the granular
business of policy.
Leaders as diverse as
Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chávez, Donald Trump and Modi have used personal
charisma, and in certain cases, even an aesthetic attraction to their personal
mores. The new world full of jobs and opportunity they promise, their own
followers rapidly come to understand, is a chimera. Like the fascist state
in Italy, the Indian state, however, does hold out a road to riches - a system
of patronage. In 1933, the fascist leader Starace, ruefully noted that the
party had banned the use of raccomandazioni - the Italian version of sifarish - in 1924, 1926, 1927 and 1928, each time to no effect. The reason was simple.
The fascist state, like the liberal state, simply did not have the capacity to
enforce new institutional norms in the place of traditional ones. New élites
emerging from the Hindutva movement, thus, hope to milk the state just as old,
Congress-linked élites did.
Indians have stood
aside while this violence plays out, for the perpetrators are from among it,
and promise to share those rewards. This terror is civil society’s bastard
child, not an outsider who imposes himself upon it. The victims are of no great
consequence unless one happens to be among them, and most are not. Formìggini, silent
when Italian socialists and communists were subjugated by fascism, committed
suicide long before violence confronted him. The horrors faced by Italian Jewry
were still years ahead, and to many, simply inconceivable. His choice of death,
it seems likely, came in that moment of realisation that there are things which
cannot be laughed away.
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