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Created: March 30, 2003
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Backup of Communal Violence: Gandhi and Gujarat[Reader-list] Gandhi and Gujarat
pratap pandey pnanpin
Sat, 27 Apr 2002 22:04:32 +0100 (BST)Dear all,
In his latest posting, Shuddha says:
"Part of the problem about thinking about the events in Gujarat is the difficulty of finding the resources, the thoughts and the words with which to think about communal violence at the scale that we are witnessing."
Part of the the problem I have with this statement is the (perhaps convenient, most probably rhetorical) pigeon-holing of what's happening in Gujarat as "communal violence". This releases "Gujarat" into an analytic whose explanatory power seems to have been rendered redundant, an analytic whose political rationality has acquired the status of a residue, an analytic that has been so normalised that it can actually be called a "paradigm". To talk about gujarat, then, in terms of the analytic that "communal violence" belongs to is like opening the top door of a humungous double-door refrigerator (costs Rs 30,000 and above) and waiting for the ice-cubes to form, frost-free.
"Communal violence" implies, as the newspapers like to put it, that "Some members" of "a community" "attacked" "shops and dwellings of another community". In other words, "communal violence" implies that 2 communities have had a bash-up.
In Gujarat, the bash-up was singularly, plannedly, one-sided. ONE community bashed up the other. Is still wanting to bash up the other, but has been checked, due to political expediency.
Gujarat cannot be explained in terms of "communal violence". We have to find other terms. Other resources. Other solutions. (Is secularism frost-free?). We need new knowledge on post-independent India as seen from the lens of "communalism", or "the construction of communalism", and the like.
The task of finding these other terms might lead us to rethink the very terms in which Partition is thought about. (Is not the way in which GUjarat can be thought of as "communal violence" an inheritance of the way in which the Partition was, and still is, conceptualised? Is it time to dis-inherit this imperative?)
If we consider the manner in which current, dominant ways of talking about the Partition has "captivated" us, held us in discursive thrall, then we might better understand why the "set of intellectual constructs that the mainstream of secularist (read secular nationlist) opinion has at it's disposal" is so "meagre".
Gujarat is not about combatting communalism. It is about combatting fascism, of which communalism is merely an expressive front. "Communalism" is itself a concept that has served its heyday. After gujarat, it no longer has any explanatory power. "Fascism", on the other hand, needs to be thought deeply into, especially in the context of what Giddens would call a "post-traditional society", a society "in the wake of Development" as Serge Latouche would put it. A society, as this "born again Integral Humanist poet" (I appropriate this phrase, it sings!) would like to put it, that has lost the the metabolic powers of integration.
Incidentally: born again Integral Humanist poet that I am (Again, I appropriate this description for myself), Gandhi has never served as intellectual support for me. He cannot. Gandhi is an Fringe Evangelical Protestant Hindu. He tried to become a lawyer in Bombay, but couldn't, because his English didn't match up. THat's when he was sent to England. The rest is history, well constructed.
"Young India" is a act of "strategic criticism". It cannot be treated as coherent, as prophecy, or as the deliberate expression of intentionality. Gandhi's write-ups in Young India are unfortunately treated as the intentional writings of a teleological national guru/politician. Perhaps "Young India" should be readas a hysterological text. In the "Young India" writings (much as in the Pepsi Generation Next campaign), consciousness is a matter of self-flagellation. If you want to reconstruct a "national consciouness" from this "text", not even God can help you.
You are right, Shuddha. We should guard against the sentimentalism in Gandhi. We should also consider, as you say, "where this comes from". In this context, may I suggest that we read two novels (a) Raja Rao's "the Serpent and the Rope", and (b) Ahmad Ali's "Twilight in Delhi"? Both of these novels are obscure, and not part of the IWE canon. These two novels can perhaps be read as a "dyad", as isomorphic to the Partition. Do you think, all, we could read these two novels and have a chat? It might specify "where...this sentiment comes from."
In this context, let me read the Partition simplistically. Two elites came to be at loggerheads on the question of political representation (read:power-play). Both believed that the power that accrued to them was "given" (due to different historical reasons). Both believed that "India" was "theirs". (It was theirs, or it had been made theirs -- it doesn't matter.) The political rationality that united both these elites ("traditional elite", "Browned elite", whatever you call them) was a reliance upon the notion of sovereignty.
In a very different context, Foucault contrasts "sovereignty" and "governmentality". Sovereignty for Foucault is a pre-modern political rationality. With the onset of modernity (Foucault's date, in this huge debate, is "Europe", 1650), came a transformation in power, in its effects, in its targets, in its expressivities. This transformation he calls "governmentality".
I suggest that Partition is a bash-up over that pre-modern form of political rationality that Foucault calls sovereignty. (Here, we have to look into the historico-semantic overlaps between "pre-modern"/"colonial modern", or should I say the "tectonics" of being "pre-modern/colonial-modern simultaneously.)
Whereas nationhood implies "governmentality", its possibility incited the HIndu-Muslim elite (jostling to become the omphalos of the "new" nation) to express themselves as "the" stakeholder of sovereignty.
"Sovereignty" is an every-day life fantasy in "India". No wonder there was bloodshed, across classes. [To recover the stories of this "civil war" on the conceptual terrain of this pleasure for sovereignty, or being sovereign, at the cost of governing, is merely to fall into the trap of this "sovereign fantasy" or "fantasy of sovereignty".]
Once again, with Gujarat, we are witness to an upsurge of "sovereignty". Or rather, a crisis in political rationality (sovereignty-govermentality). A crisis, because "sovereignty" has flared up as constituent of life in Gujarat. Not "governmentality".
Once again, we mistake it for "blood-letting", "revenge for a historical wrong", and the like. Once again, there has been placed a demand to think of power (prioritised over well-being) in Pre-modern terms.
Sad. But being sad for an upheaval, an epistemic break like gujarat is like complaining about the cost of the wood that goes to make up the pyre of a dead loved one.
Let us not get into a search for "adequate questions". Let us look, instead, for "appropriate answers". That is what has to be done (Integrally Humanistically speaking). pp
pp's message was written in response to:
Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote:Dear Tarun, and all on the Readers List.
This posting is in response to the Gujarat-Farzana Versey-Gandhi-Hey Ram- cluster of postings, forwards, and prefatory remarks (introducing postings) that the list has recently seen. I hope to think a few difficult points through here, so apologies for something that might end up being rambling.
Part of the problem about thinking about the events in Gujarat is the difficulty of finding the resources, the thoughts and the words with which to think about communal violence at the scale that we are witnessing. What disturbs me in particular is the meagre set of intellectual constructs that the mainstream of secularist (read secular nationlist) opinion has at it's disposal when it sets out to "combat" communalism.
One of these is the Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai Bhai Bhai trope - which clearly sets out the terms of who is the elder brother in the Bharatiya undivided family. No wonder the Parivar people use it as effortlessly as secularists. [No place for those of us who are Zindus, I might add, here : ) ] My skepticism about the grammatical and linguistic solutions proposed by Gandhi - 'Samas' etc, stem from the terms of articulation, which clearly locate the Hindu Dvija (Twice Born) male at the top of a happy hindu muslim arrangement. Wait, I am not jumping to conclusions, I want to be able to substantiate this slightly later on in this posting.
A variation on this theme, which presumes, a bedrock of national identity is the "carnage in the land of Gandhi " theme, which I had obliquely sought to criticize by forwarding the Farzana Versey text. This assumes that the legacy of the 'father of the nation' would automatically be seen to be violated by the violence done to some of his children. The drawing room or NDTV secularist, well meaning and disturbed, is attracted to Gandhism as an antidote to communal madness, and it probably has its uses. But it is the underlying spirit of this very sentimental Gandhism (sentiment is such a volatile thing) that again, I am afraid, disturbs me.
This particular response which unites everybody from Anand Patwardhan to erstwhile Gandhian Socialist cum born again Integral Humanist poet whom some of us on this list have so eloquently been possessed by on occasion, presumes that Gandhism has some innately redemptive possibility, which can salvage the fabric of social life from the violence done to it by rampaging mobs.
I want to take this sentiment seriously and see where it comes from.
First, a slight detour into the interesting Gandhi-Communalism relationship, with special attention to the Sangh Parivar.
The crucial factor in the rise of M.K. Gandhi as a leader, lay, one might argue in his undisputed ability to rally a sectionmof mass public opinion by his side, through the skilful deployment of symbols of identity . In the first instance, we are told, that by advancing the slogans of the Khilafat movement, Gandhi was able to rally the hitherto 'a-political' Muslim masses to the streets. This was something that no congress leader had been previously able to do. It is also true that no congress leader was able to undertake a successful all india movement with hindus either, but that is another matter. Gandhi made Hindus and Muslims alike realize how much it could mean to "become" Hindus and Muslims in a political sense.
At the heart of any nationalist formation, no matter how secuar it says it is, this call to "identify" oneself is perhaps invariably present. Even agnostic, republican french nationalism had to invent its own 'deist' cults, and latter day Soviet or Red Chinese nationalisms have of course have had to have their own churches and prophets and chosen people. Indian nationalism cannot be an exception.
But to come back to Gandhi, and the 1920s, In effect, this was the first time, that a congress leader could be a 'man of the people'. I am referring here, obviously, to the non co-operation movement, (or, to refer to it by its own designation - to the non-co-operation khilafat movement) which identified the goals of swaraj with the preservation of the Turkish caliphate. This, movement, which under the stewardship of M.K. Gandhi and the Ali brothers, was able to organize the most reactionary, the most conservative elements in Muslim society, and bring them out into public respectability for the first time, would set the tone for what was to come. The earlier flirtations between Bengali "shakti worshipping" terrorism in the 'swadeshi andolan's so called "extremist" phase was an adoloscent, aristocrats playing with an elite romantic political vocabulary. Tilak, with the Ganapati pujas, did go a long way towards making the populist Hindu nationalist rhetoric, that was later to mature into something far more lethal, but it took a Gandhi to swing religion, identiity and politics into a deadly populsit nationalist cocktail.
Imagine a Delhi in the 1920s, which has militant arya samajist and communal congressman like Swami Shraddhanand, spewing hate speech against Muslims, through the "shuddhi" campaigns, and the moribund Khilafati maulanas, arguing for nizam-e-mustapha, and you have M.K. Gandhi, fliritng with both. Calling for Ram Rajya, and leading the Khilafatists, at the same time. This was the bridge he was building between Hindus and Muslims, in which the revivialists of both sides could determine the contours of what identities would have to be. Here was the father of the nation, busy in the act of conception.
A certain M.A. Jinnah, goes into semi - retirement, troubled by the "spiritualism" let loose in the Indian political scene by Gandhi. By the time he re-surfaces, things have gone too far for him not to play the same game as well.
Of course, when the Khilafat movement collapses under its own weight, when the Turks get rid of the caliphate that was so dear to a section of the Indian Muslim leadership, things begin to slide. The sangh and the shuddhi andolankaris grow more strident, and the moplah uprising in what is now Keraka takes on a distinctly communalist edge. Riots break out as they never have before.
What does M.K. Gandhi begin to say in the wake of the Moplah uprising - These are all quotes from "Young India" - Gandhi's paper, and can be verified with the collected works of Gandhi's writings.
On June 19, 1924, he writes :
"The Mussalman, being generally in a minority, has as a class developed into a bully... the thirteen hundred years of imperialistic expansion has made the Mussalmans fighters as a body. They are, therefore, aggressive. Bullying is the natural execrescence of an aggressive spirit.. . . . . === message truncated ===
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