- Ravi Sinha
There is yet another head on the political platter of the world’s largest democracy. This head is not metaphorical. It does not signify a disgraced leader or a government that has fallen. It is a literal head dripping with literal blood – battered with bricks that supported a leg-less bed. The bed belonged to one Muhammad Akhlaq who lived in a village called Basehara in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, not too far from the national capital of India. The head too belonged to him.
It has been only a few days but this latest episode in the long-running Indian serial is already well-known to the world. On a late September night it was announced over the loudspeakers of the village temple that there was going to be beef on Akhlaq’s dinner plate. A mob hundreds-strong – some say thousands – gathered within no time. It attacked the family killing Akhlaq on the spot and badly injuring his son, Danish.
In the meantime, meat-loafs confiscated from the family fridge have been sent for forensic examination. The system of justice must check whether it actually was beef, although, as one commentator points out, “…mere possession of beef isn’t illegal in Uttar Pradesh.”[1] Shedding helpful light on feebly lit corners of the Hindu moral universe, a prominent Hindutva ideologue wrote in a national daily, “Lynching a person merely on suspicion is absolutely wrong, the antithesis of all that India stands for and all that Hinduism preaches.”[2] The lynch-mob should have waited till the forensic reports came.
A few suspects have been apprehended for the murder. This has made the village livid with anger. There are protestations that those arrested are innocent. Journalists have been attacked for making such a big thing out of a small matter and bringing a bad name to the village. Cameras have been broken and OB vans damaged. There is a pertinacious wall of angry women guarding the village against any further intrusion by outsiders who can neither understand the village mind nor the Indian culture.
It is not easy to understand the collective mind of an Indian village. Even learned anthropologists are of little help. Their ethnographic techniques of studying a form of life from its internal standpoint are particularly susceptible to the rationalizations of a complex cultural species. If anyone has a chance, it would, perhaps, be a villager who has stepped out – an Archimedean Point created out of the same cultural universe. Ravish Kumar, by now a near iconic journalist and anchor of a prominent Hindi news channel, stood out for this very reason.[3] His eyes could see the natural rhythm and the instinctual response of an Indian village in the immediate aftermath of a collective crime. Nearly everyone had disappeared from the village. Whoever could be found claimed that he was miles away at the time of the incident. The lynch-mob had materialized instantaneously out of thin air. It had as quickly melted away after the job was done. Everyone has now returned to defend the honor of the village and strategize about how to deal with the unwarranted intrusions of modernity including that of the law.
Predictably, the lynching has been linked to politics, and rightly so. I would not have described the platter as political if Akhlaq’s head on it was not an offering to a new goddess called Indian democracy. Contemporary India, much like its new Prime Minister, is always high on elections. At any given time there is an election around the corner – elections to one state assembly or another, or else, local elections to the village Panchayats and urban local bodies. There is nothing local, however, about these local elections. All these battles feed into the perpetual war for Delhi. And, in an increasingly vigorous democracy in a society such as India’s, nothing is more efficacious in winning elections than inciting a lynch mob or fomenting a riot. Commentators have seen links between Dadri lynching and Bihar elections, and it may not be far-fetched. As everyone knows, it is not just Bihar that is at stake in the Bihar elections. At such times the nation may keenly watch what is on Akhlaq’s dinner plate.
I will not dwell further on the details of Dadri lynching. My concern, primarily, is with what lies underneath. I intend to deal with a phenomenon that, borrowing from the term Depth Psychology, I callDepth Politics. It arises when a modern political and economic system arrives in a land and a civilization that has existed for centuries and millennia without much help from or engagement with modernity. Invariably it is a tumultuous affair and requires wide-ranging adjustments on both sides of the modern-ancient divide. By the time things begin to settle down, neither the actually existing modernity nor the still living antiquity are recognizable to an eye accustomed to their canonical forms.
All this occasions a great deal of controversy. There are worries about modernity not taking roots in the society in question, or getting mutated into something spurious or disagreeable. There are complaints from the other side about a pristine culture being disfigured and an indigenous form of life being colonized. I will not join the controversy here, although I will not make any special effort to conceal my dispositions. My objective is to make some sense of the phenomenon itself, and my premise is that existing explanations are not satisfactory. In particular, my concern is with that set which attempts to understand the intricacies and the vicissitudes of Indian politics through concepts such as false consciousness, ideology, hegemony or superstructure-lagging-the-base. I do not entirely reject any of these explanations, but, in my reckoning, they do not seem to suffice.
Another disclaimer may be in order. I will proceed with my argument in a largely hand-waving manner, making use of analogies, metaphors and conceptual borrowings, and often relying on that ever popular criterion of plausibility. A rigorous mode of presenting the case may require a different kind of writing which will be attempted elsewhere.
Walzer’s Paradox
Two prominent philosopher-theorists have, very recently, written two little books that are remarkable for their depth and sweep. India figures in both of them, although their concerns are not confined to it. One is a book called The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson which is basically a collection of three articles on India published in the London Review of Books.[4] I will come to it a little later. The other is a book by Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation – Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, which contains the text of his Henry L. Stimson Lectures at Yale.[5] I start with Walzer because he poses the problem through an insightful observation and in a manner that is particularly helpful to the purpose behind my own argument.
