Mitali Saran - Standing your ground: A toolkit

By Dilip -

India, 2021: JNU is tukde-tukde gang, Kashmiris are terrorists, Muslims are traitors, liberals are communists, communists are anti-national, dissent is sedition, intellectuals are urban naxals, Congress supporters are slaves, the elite opposition is the Khan Market gang, protesters are andolanjeevis, human rights are Western propaganda, activists are anti-development, journalists are presstitutes, dissent is sedition, critics of the BJP-RSS are a cabal, opposition mobilisation is vested interest, Shaheen Bagh is Pakistan, farmers are Khalistanis, secularism is hypocritical, comedians promote hatred, Jersey cows are lazy while indigenous cow milk contains gold, academic webinars must be vetted by the Ministry of External Affairs, and toolkits are an international conspiracy to wage war on India. Oh, and dissent is sedition.

How did public and official discourse become this bonkers? Since when can you make ‘toolkit’ a bad word with a straight face? Probably since the right wing discovered how effective coordinated messaging can be, and doesn’t want anyone else to benefit from it. If you consider that it takes only the merest few strands of saffron to yellow a whole pot of biryani, you can understand how a couple of saffron knickers, tossed into the ‘ideas’ compartment of the media laundry machine, might ruin the the whole national wash. Too few media machines have followed the all-important step of first separating the colours that make the country bleed. We crossed the thin line between ‘bonkers’ and ‘dangerous’ long, long ago. And thus it is that we have gone from an imperfect but pluralist democracy to a puffed-up state that is dangerously megalomaniacal and insecure. 

When India arrested the barely adult climate activist Disha Ravi, for editing an online toolkit for pro-environment protest, our self-goals once again went from embarrassing to dangerous. The Ministry of External Affairs had already made an international ass of India by responding to posts by singer Rihanna and climate activist Greta Thunberg, and making our celebrity robots at home mass-tweet hashtags like #IndiaAgainstPropaganda, without a shred of irony. Now the state is on a hair-trigger for arresting those who support democratic dissent.

Hindutva’s toolkit aims to create a monolithic Hindu Rashtra through intimidation and misinformation and lies. You can see, from the short amount of time it has taken for us to regress from 2014 to the political stone age, that it works very well. Here, therefore, is a counter toolkit to detoxify your environment, for anyone who misses rationality and freedom.

  1. The BJP’s (pseudo)-nationalism rests on two ideas: a) government equals nation and b) dissent equals sedition. They’re both rubbishy lies. Do not be defensive about your patriotism, and do not be timid about critique. Power will take as much ground as you give.
  2. The right wing tries to appropriate the language of moral superiority by accusing others of its own sins. When you advocate peace and pluralism, don’t be cowed by the fact that you’re accused of promoting enmity and instability. It’s totally laughable.
  3. Hindutva has weaponised pedestrian words like ‘cow’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’, ‘protest’, ‘intellectual’, ‘secularism’, ‘dissent’,‘rights’, ‘nationalism’, ’foreign’, and ‘armed forces’. Don’t start treating these words with kid gloves, else they’ll become unusable. Use them in the space they deserve, with the weight they deserve (or don’t deserve).
  4. When bhakts cannot respond to an argument, they make it about some other argument. Don’t get sucked into digressive issues and whataboutery.
  5. A favourite way of getting around rational argument is to discredit the speaker. Don’t indulge talk about whom the speaker/writer is married to, or what books are on their shelves. The best response to “Her last name is Joseph!” is, “So?”
  6. Demand journalism, not cheerleading.
  7. Do not be gaslit into thinking that you’re the only one who thinks things are terribly wrong. You are not alone.
  8. Megalomania can be contained with copious amounts of laughter.
  9. Stand your ground, to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Especially if it’s the only ground you can stand. 
  10. Oh, and—hum dekhenge.






Popular posts from this blog

Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

By Dilip -
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves.  Albert Camus     La crise de l'homme : THE HUMAN CRISIS   (Text read by Viggo Mortensen on March 28 2016)   Ladies and Gentlemen: when I was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States of America, I felt some doubt and hesitation. I am really not old enough to give lectures, and I am more at ease with the process of thinking than I am making categorical statements... since I don't feel I have any claim on what is generally called the truth. I shared this reservation and was very politely told that my personal opinion didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd be able to offer some facts about France so that my listeners could form their own opinions. It was then suggested...
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227...
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certai...
Read more

James Gilligan on Shame, Guilt and Violence

By Dilip -
Shame, Guilt, and Violence / James Gilligan During the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as "laboratories" in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between these forms and to what I will call (with a nod to William James) "the varieties of moral experience." In the course of that work, I have been struck by the frequency with which I received the same answer when I asked prisoners, or mental patients, why they assaulted or even killed someone. Time after time, they would reply "because he disrespected me" or "he disrespected my visitor [or wife, mother, sister, girl-friend, daughter, etc.]." In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it into the slang phrase, "He dis'ed me." Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary. But even when they did n...
Read more

After the Truth Shower

By Dilip -
Dear Readers Thank you for reading my blog for the past eleven years. (This is a link to the new one) During this time it has had nearly 1.7 million hits; and I have posted over 9500 posts covering a variety of themes. From July 11 to 19, 2022, my blog was withdrawn by the Blogger administration on account of what its machinery suspected to be 'Impersonation'. It took over a week and the efforts of several well-wishers to get it back online I thank them all for their kindness and goodwill  My blog has always been - and remains - non-commercial. I have used it for academic purposes; and to foster a culture of debate and informed commentary in civil society. Because it contains a large amount of material gathered and collated for over a decade, I cannot afford to lose its contents. I hope it will remain undisturbed now and function as an archive. However, I have decided to use a new blog on WordPress as a platform for my newest comments and posts The new blog is titled After the...
Read more

The Republic of Silence – Jean-Paul Sartre on The Aftermath of War and Occupation (September 1944)

By Dilip -
Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty? Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers and writers of the 20th century. He lived through World War II first as a French prisoner of war, then as a professor of philosophy associated with the underground socialist movement. Sartre writes of the Occupation: “Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-power police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle.” Some of Sartre’s post-war writings have recently been collected in an English Language edition as  The Aftermath of War  and is published by Seagull Books, Kolkata. The Republic of Silence ( Lettres francaises , September 1944) We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take ...
Read more

A Final Warning by George Orwell

By Dilip -
'In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage and triumph: the sex instinct will be eradicated we shall abolish the orgasm, there will be no loyalty except to the party.. but always there will be the intoxication of power always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless…   If you want to imagine the future; imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. The moral of this story is.. don’t let it happen.'    Eric Arthur Blair, (George Orwell) was born in Motihari, Bihar, on  25 June 1903, and died in London on 21 January 1950 Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace  (George Orwell, 1984) George Orwell: A Final warning (see video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXm5hklbBsA George Orwell statue 'too left-wing' for the BBC Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942) ******************************************************************* “There is a substa...
Read more