Creeping Fascism

As the Political Class Fiddles...

After the 2002 state-supported pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat, India has been remarkably free from large-scale civil violence. Instead, we have seen the eruption of small but equally insidious incidents. Attacks on tribal Christian communities in Orissa; violence against ethnic groups in Maharashtra; Maoist terror in Central India; insurgencies in Kashmir and the Northeast; and now, organized assaults on urban youth in Karnataka.

The rise of these local fascist groups is a growing phenomenon. Their protest is not political: against secularism, which is the BJP/RSS agenda; or against class like the Communists. Their beef is against modernization, a sweeping phenomenon that embraces lifestyle, art and entertainment. The core of their dogma is feudal: a revolt against practices such as intermingling of sexes, “Western” ways of dressing and entertainment, freedom of expression and non-hierarchical behavior.

These thuggish bands don’t stand for anything but are defined by what they are against. Even then, there is no consistency and their targets are wholly arbitrary. The only thing they concede to modernity is the media; they always take care to inform the media before they strike innocents. In fact, their members are ridiculous and pathetic, easily contained by a police force backed by political will. They are a bunch of maladjusted, violent individuals, nevertheless dangerous in a mob.

Not too long ago, we were in Goa, where we attended the first showing of the film Slumdog Millionaire at the Inox multiplex in Panjim’s awesome Maquinez Palace Plaza. We got there early only to find a television crew hanging about. We thought the TV guys were there to get a reaction from viewers. Soon, a bunch of sorry-looking men showed up and unfurled a banner protesting that the film showed the Hindu mythological god Rama in a bad light. They said they were the Hindu Janjagran Manch, a formation intended to galvanize the Hindu majority against foreign influences.

Many of us argued with the demonstrators, asking why they were protesting especially when they could not have seen the film. This was the first show; unless they had seen a pirated DVD, in which case they had violated the laws of intellectual property rights. I talked to their leader, who seemed supremely unaware that India was governed by laws. He said the film was an insult to Rama and must be banned. I told him there was no such provision in the Constitution and he looked at me quizzically. Clearly, he did not know that our country is governed by the Constitution. I explained to him that Republic Day celebrated the charter. He walked away with an incredulous look in his face, as though I was from Mars or some other planet.

In the event, we walked into the cinema hall to see the film. It was a slap -in-the-face experience. There was a film that dealt with urban slum dwellers made in 1963 by the leftist ideologue K A Abbas. Shehar aur Sapna was a naïve treatise that combined elements of Marxism and romantic anti-industrial zeal. It flopped at the box office but won the government’s National Film Award in 1964, largely because it suited the prevalent socialist ideology. It was a depressing, nihilist film that I saw as a teenager because like all kids growing up then, I was vaguely leftist.

Unlike Abbas’s film, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is uplifting. Interviews with slum kids who saw the movie reveal they relate to it because it gives them hope that they can escape the filth and poverty of the slums. The Abbas film, on the other hand, was an indictment of the system. His anger was directed against industrial development and the displacement and anomie that accompany it. Sadly, even today, such attitudes are prevalent among large sections of the privilegentsia. At a time of rapid urbanization and explosive growth of the middle class, the old battles of caste and class identity have largely been bypassed to be replaced by issues of governance.

The Boyle film challenges the hopeless and bleak vision of urban poverty and rural feudalism painted by books written by Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance) and Arvind Adiga (White Tiger). It is also a love story and that sweetens the film’s relentless portrayal of slum life in today’s India, especially for Muslims. The moral is simple: you can escape poverty by the sheer dint of individual effort. It’s an important message to deliver, especially to politicians who build vote banks of poverty. Even the political system has been unable to deliver the basic minimum including primary education and public health care.

Coming back to the showing of Slumdog Millionaire in Goa, we were shocked to learn as we came out of the cinema hall that the peaceful protesters of the Hindu Janjagran Manch were displaced by the hoodlums of the Shiv Sena, who destroyed posters and threatened to break the glass frontage of the Inox box office. In the event, the police came and took them away and no serious damage was done.

It is a worrying situation because the mainstream political system is still fighting the old battles of religion, caste and class. Instead of standing resolutely against the rise of these fascist groups, mainstream politicians have been equivocal in their response. Thus, Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot felt compelled to condemn the rise of “pub culture,” as did various other politicians. They are blind to the incipient rise of local fascist groups that target not Muslims or Dalits but those who represent the emergent culture of achievement and optimism.

copyright rajiv desai 2009

A version of this article will be published in the forthcoming issue of Education World.

The Defeat of Evil

The Advani Karat Pact

Paritranaya sadhunam vinashaya cha dushkritam
Dharma sansthapanarthaya sambahvami yuge yuge

(Gita 4:8)

(For the upliftment of the good and virtuous
For the destruction of evil
For the re-establishment of natural law
I will come in every age)

So the BJP and the Left and the casteist Mayawati have been defeated conclusively; time to take stock of why they did what they did. A bit of history will help understand what happened.

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin entered into a secret agreement with Germany’s Adolf Hitler. It was the ultimate act of appeasement because Stalin felt that would focus Hitler's attention on Western Europe. On July 8 2008, Prakash Karat made a not-so-secret pact with L K Advani, whose naked ambition is to become India’s Prime Minister.

Karat is a diehard Stalinist, who is enjoying his place under India's democratic sun. Most people believe he gets his marching orders from the mandarins in Beijing. Because the Left is what it is, he remained unchallenged until the Speaker of the House, Somnath Chatterjee, called his bluff with support from the more flexible members of the CPM. He defied Karat and stayed on as Speaker and was quick to call "The Ayes have it" on the voice vote after the debate, rudely disrupted by BJP thugs, over the confidence vote called by the Prime Minister.

Then there’s Advani, who for all the years he’s been in politics, comes off as an amateur actor seeking a role in the major play of governance. For many years he served as the home minister and forced his way into being the deputy prime minister of the clueless Atal Vajpayee. For all the darts, deserved or not, hurled at the current home minister, Shivraj Patil, Advani was clearly the most incompetent incumbent.

On his watch as home minister and deputy prime minister, terrorists were freed and flown by external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in an abject surrender to the world’s worst thugs, the Taliban of Afghanistan. Under his watch also, Islamic terrorists attacked Parliament House with a view to taking Indian lawmakers hostage. And on and on the story goes. There were so many terrorist incidents, including the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gujarat, under his dispensation that when he gets up in Parliament to attack this government for being soft on terrorism, he comes off sounding like a hypocrite.

Remember, this man is so desperate that he has become discombobulated. He went to his native province of Sindh in Pakistan and was so "moved" that he lost all sense of bearing; he ended up calling Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, a secular leader. He forgot that Jinnah led the Muslim League and asked for a Pakistan as a home for the Muslims of British India. Jinnah's intractable stand caused the Partition and a loss of millions of lives and the largest transfer of populations the world has ever known to this day.

Sadly, Advani and his family were among the victims of Jinnah’s communal calculations. But then Jinnah was personally suave and secular and used the communal divide just to grab power. Advani understands that; he took out his rath yatra in the 1980s that left thousands dead in it‘s wake. Like Jinnah, Advani has cynically manipulated communal divisions in India in his no-holds-barred pursuit of power.

Between the ideologue Karat and the incompetent Advani, our country is being held hostage today. They have come together to try and topple India’s most liberal and reformist government. This is not the first time that India’s Hindu nationalists and communists have come together. They colluded in 1977 to support the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai and then in 1980 to support V P Singh, the feudal thakur who managed through sheer deviousness to become the prime minister for a few months.

Both experiments ended in disaster. Who can forget Madhu Dandavate, the finance minister in V P Singh’s ill-starred government? A man of great integrity, Dandavate was nevertheless an inexperienced person with no sense of the importance of his position. His first comment on assuming office in 1989, “The coffers are empty,” set the stage for the rapid decline of India into bankruptcy. The man who presided over the mortgage of India’s gold reserves to the Bank of England was Yashwant Sinha, an equally incompetent bureaucrat who served as finance minister after Dandavate. Sinha is today a leading light of the BJP, partly because he is among the few articulate people in the saffron combine.

The communists and the communalists joined forces in opposing the government over the nuclear deal. The communists’ objection is bigoted; they hate the US; the communalists’ opposition is purely opportunistic because they would rather have done the deal. Who can forget Jaswant Singh strutting around the place, dropping names: “My friend Strobe.” A senior British executive told me that he was struck by the number of times this obstreperous BJP minister dropped the name in a 15-minute conversation.

This is why, despite the desperate 11^th-hour drama of dubious BJP MPs smuggling currency into Parliament House, the Advani Karat pact was defeated convincingly on July 22. They are the forces of darkness and India has already awoken to that Tagorean heaven of freedom, “where the mind is without fear and the head held high.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008