The Taming of the Shrew: India’s Left in the 2019 Elections

“…the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
– Bertolt Brecht

“Procrustes, or the Stretcher …had an iron bedstead, on which he used to tie all travellers who fell into his hands. If they were shorter than the bed, he stretched their limbs to make them fit it; if they were longer than the bed, he lopped off a portion. Theseus served him as he had served others.”
– Bulfinch’s Mythology

1. Elections are procrustean rituals in an institutionalised democracy to contain and channel the social (over)flow and productivise it to manufacture a government and its legitimacy. By recursive re-discretisation of the social flow into manageable units, the citizenry is recomposed. In these elections, it is not the public that elects the government but the state that reassembles the public to produce the government. This reconstituted public gets the government that it deserves.

2. In the elections of 2019, against the right wing politics of communal polarisation, the left liberals in India have been seeking to pose a different sort of polarisation. Either you are on this side or that side. It doesn’t matter even if some who are on this side, earlier they were on the other and next time again they may fall there, whenever the juggling of elections happens and post-electoral alliances are made. For them, the poles are poles, stuck to the ground.

3. Hence, there is more to the 2019 elections for our nationalist left liberals. As they themselves say, it is a historic moment. And it is indeed something historic that liberal manichaeism seeks to achieve. If BJP is, what they say, a fascist party, then the liberals are imagining something unique in these elections – of defeating fascists in the elections. The fascist regimes, classically, might have come through elections, but have never been eliminated in them.

4. Now, the only strategy that seems to achieve this is by ensuring that votes are not divided (for which a Manichean binary is necessary). Marx’s dictum that all such phrases of not splitting votes and that the reactionaries might win because of the split are meant to dupe the proletariat seems outdated for the doomsday New Left. They want to defeat neoliberal authoritarianism through the procrusteanism of liberal democracy, while the right seeks to synchronise them.

5. However, by posing and making these elections as a two party contest, our marginalised left liberals are binding themselves to the dangerous game of attracting the median voter. In a bipolar contest the result is a more and more identity of opposites. And when much of the opposition is already centred on non-oppositional disagreements rather than based on any principled opposition, the difference is internal. You are but an image of your opponent.

6. They identify the hindutva brigade as a fascist pole, against which they want to see everyone else together. However, this ideal has never been realised, perhaps fortunately for the benefit of the left liberals themselves. The divided regional forces whether in NDA or outside are the only respite against homogenised authoritarianism in the country. From within liberal democracy, the intensification of regionalist localism, along with institutionalised parliamentarianism are the only safeguards left against the hindutva brigade. This is what left liberals don’t realise when they indulge in their anti-fascist rhetoric. Anyway, with this rhetoric they don’t impress anyone but themselves. The major regional forces whenever they take up this rhetoric seriously, they use it merely as a bargaining chip against centrism.

7. The right wing forces have been the main agencies to recompose the relationship between state and civil society across the globe – of combining authoritarianism with liberal democracy. Only by a complete profanation of institutions that emerged in earlier regimes of accumulation that capital can reproduce the state in the neoliberal conjuncture. The barriers must be broken time and again to refinancialise the social factory – the neat divisions between different socio-economic spheres, between productive and reproductive regimes are obsolete and costly. These barriers that managed the surplus/ superfluous population through much-acclaimed welfarism are not required now – they must integrate to form a continuous reserve army. The desacralisation of liberal social-administrative spheres is part of this process. In recent years the right wing attack that directly concerned the left liberals has been in academia. The academia is increasingly made market friendly, not allowing any section of population to take perpetual “study leave”. It is not the quality that matters but quantity – production for production’s sake. Ultimately all of us produce data, and are data ourselves.

8. The left in the name of defending the “gains” is caught up in a contradictory position of defending the status quo. The right-wing forces, on the other, by attacking those gains show far more clear understanding of the contradictions that they expose. They defend the status quo by eliminating those contradictions and expose the brutal structure in its naked form. But this naked coercion would need a new regime of legitimation, because a long-term overexposure of its coercive apparatus can be a doom for the whole system. One of the gains of the right wing onslaught is to regiment the progressive forces and make them complicit in preserving the status quo, by bringing legitimation back to the structure. The cover-up of gains and incremental progress provides the structure a long life. ‘Defending the gains’ doesn’t always need to be a defence of the socio-administrative structure that provisioned those gains. They can be a ground to recognise, expand and generate more cracks in the structure, and create more crises for its reproduction. And in this negation develops a new grammar of social relations. But for left liberals there is no alternative (TINA) – Liberal democracy or Fascism!

9. In an interview to New Left Review in 1975, Communist thinker and leader K Damodaran lamented the failure of Indian left to differentiate between state and government, and hence, their inability to understand their relationship too. There are some who confuse between state and government to pose the impossibility of immediate political actions and there are others who find this confusion very productive, when haloed as the relative autonomy of the state and the political, to justify indulgence in bourgeois polity.

10. In fact, this confusion is one of the means through which the state avoids an overexposure. It is how it camouflages itself in the everydayness of governmentality. The state’s mood fluctuations, given a constant reshuffling in the relationship between the political and the economic, emerge as multiple political fetish-forms, as political forces, and even regimes. You can worship the state in whichever form you like – if nothing suits you, you pronounce it, you will get what you need – a new form! The spirit of state is fathomless and boundless – all political forms, their enthronement, dethronement or re-enthronement combine to constitute “the rhythm of the spirit”. The magic of capitalist state works on only one principle, which Prince Tancredi Falconeri pronounced –

“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è bisogna che tutto cambi” (“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”) – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)

“The Hasty Genius of Aurangzeb”

Iqbal was incomparable as a political thinker, and I think a small paragraph on Aurangzeb in his Stray Reflections is a proof of his genius. It must be read by everyone who wants to understand Aurangzeb as a historical figure and his hasty genius. The demonisation of Aurangzeb has never allowed people to understand the crisis of the medieval times and the advent of colonial capitalism that shaped the specific characteristics of Indian modernity. In fact, it is in the interest of the right wing to anti-politicise the masses by devalorising the cosmopolitan contributions of ‘Muslim’ thinkers like Iqbal and political personalities like Aurangzeb, without whom the transition to capitalist modernity in India cannot be understood. The backward, conservative iconisation of (‘Hindu’ and ‘Sikh’) rulers can definitely serve the petty trading and even neoliberal interests in commodifying India’s exoticism…, but even the resistances and importance of those tribal leaders and rulers, despite their localist character, cannot be comprehensively grasped, unless we understand and give credibility to historical figures like Aurangzeb… You cannot understand your freedom struggle, the specific character of 1857 mutiny without this. Of course, you don’t expect this from RSS and RSS trained leaders who did not contribute in the freedom struggle – or those who do not look for parivartan, but sanatanta in the Indian society.

The political genius of Aurangzeb was extremely comprehensive. His one aim of life was, as it were, to subsume the various communities of this country under the notion of one universal empire. But in securing this imperial unity he erroneously listened to the dictates of his indomitable courage which had no sufficient background of political experience behind it. Ignoring the factor of time in the political evolution of his contemplated empire he started an endless struggle in the hope that he would be able to unify the discordant political units of India in his own lifetime. He failed to Islamise (not in the religious sense) India just as Alexander had failed to Hellenise Asia. The Englishman, however, came fully equipped with the political experiences of the nations of antiquity and his patience and tortoise-like perseverance succeeded where the hasty genius of Aurangzeb had failed. Conquest does not necessarily mean unity. Moreover, the history of the preceding Mohammedan dynasties had taught Aurangzeb that the strength of Islam in India did not depend, as his great ancestor Akbar had thought, so much on the goodwill of the people of this land as on the strength of the ruling race. With all his keen political perception, however, he could not undo the doings of his forefathers. Sevajee was not a product of Aurangzeb’s reign; the Maharatta owed his existence to social and political forces called into being by the policy of Akbar. Aurangzeb’s political perception, though true, was too late. Yet considering the significance of this perception he must be looked upon as the founder of Musalman nationality in India. I am sure posterity will one day recognise the truth of what I say. Among the English administrators of India, it was Lord Curzon who first perceived the truth about the power of England in India Hindu nationalism is wrongly attributed to his policy. Time will, I believe, show that it owes its existence to the policy of Lord Ripon. It is, therefore, clear that in their political purpose and perception both the Mughals and the English agree. I see no reason why the English historian should condemn Aurangzeb whose imperial ideal his countrymen have followed and whose political perception they have corroborated. Aurangzeb’s political method was certainly very rough; but the ethical worth of his method ought to be judged from the standpoint of the age in which he lived and worked.

http://www.iqbal.com.pk/allama-iqbal-prose-works/stray-reflections-the-private-notebook-of-muhammad-iqbal/982-prose-works/stray-reflections-the-private-notebook-of-muhammad-iqbal/2512-31-aurangzeb

Who’s who in the terror story

~~1. Nazis put the Reichstag building on fire, and then blamed the communists. The purpose was simple – to create an anti-communist wave and legitimise fascistic measures.~~

2. So, “Why ignore Bajrang Dal [and others’] role in blasts?”

3, Within hours of the Delhi blasts, the police administration finds heroes among rag-pickers. They are supposed to get 50,000 Rs and be made honorary SPOs…

4. A 11-year old child labourer at the Barakhamba Road crossing in central Delhi – the heart of Delhi – saw two bomb dumpers and described them for the police.

5. For middle class elite paranoiacs in media, politics and societies – it is sufficient for them to hear the word “bomb”, and they easily visualise the image of “two bearded men in black kurta-pyjamas” planting bombs. It is obvious!

6. Next day, every TV news channel showed and glorified the “spirit of Delhi” as heroic since it was back to normal – people without livelihood security swarming through the streets…

Indian expansionism’s ugly face – Hindu Fascism

For legitimising any imperialist and expansionist design, a State needs a particular ideology of “interests” that can mobilise opinion behind it within its territory, and also identify agencies outside which can justify its “cross-border” intervention. India with its rising economic interests beyond its territory has used all sorts of “identities” to create such diasporic homogeny under the garb of which it can operate. It is not very surprising that this expansionist tenor was firmly and vocally established by the Rightist forces. It can in fact be comfortably said that the rightists became a legitimate force in India only with the rise of neolliberalism, when Indian capital found Indianness, Hinduism etc to be effective in its “free” market consolidation and operation globally. One needs to cursorily go through the widely circulated weekly of Hindu fascists, Organiser and its chatterbox journalism to grasp the confident obscenity of Indian expansionism in its extreme. Recently it invented “The Western-Christian agenda in Kathmandu” and “the Christian leadership of the Maoists”, lamenting the threat to the “Hindu civilisation”:

“The bells are tolling, not just for the Nepalese monarchy, but also for the Hindu culture and civilisation of the nation.”

So embrace your khaki-nickers and oiled lathis to save monarchy, save Hinduism… while the Nepali resources – human and natural – are plundered by Indian interests in the name of “economics above politics”. Similarly, it was the leader of opposition, the instigator of the Babri Mosque demolition LK Advani who first petitioned the Indian government to “save Indians” in Uganda, where the Ugandan people are struggling against the Mehta group’s acquisition of Mabira forests.

A Report: “LYING RELIGIOUSLY: The Hindu Students Council and the politics of deception”

Full Report: http://hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org

from Prologue:

“The Hindu Students Council (HSC) is a North America based organization that publicly claims to provide a space to learn about Hindu heritage and culture and draws its membership primarily from the Indian American student community. HSC is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and is registered as a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. On its website (www.hscnet.org), HSC claims to have more than 75 chapters, most of them located on university campuses across the United States and Canada. The website also states that HSC was formed to assist Hindu students in their spiritual, emotional, and identity needs, including sorting out confusions and alienation arising from being brought up Hindu in a predominantly Judeo-Christian culture. Many Indian American youth join HSC chapter on their campus and participate in its activities because of HSC’s claim to be a cultural and spiritual organization providing an independent, apolitical space to learn about Hinduism through activities, such as celebration of Hindu festivals, discussion of sacred texts, religious rituals and community service (see http://www.hscnet.org/aboutus.php).

This report challenges the above claims of HSC and provides comprehensive evidence to the contrary. It documents the findings of an investigation into the history, organization, and political links of HSC and demonstrates that it is part of the Sangh Parivar (literally, the Sangh Family), the extended network of affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the creators of Hindutva. These findings sharply contradict the public face HSC presents in the U.S. as a spiritual and religious body. The information presented in this report locates and documents the origins and institutional links of HSC, and throws light on the concealed purpose behind the creation of such an organization. This report shows that HSC has deep-rooted connections – institutional, personal, and political – with the Sangh Parivar.”

[CSFH is a collective of academics and professionals who work on monitoring the fundraising activities of the Hindutva movement in the U.S. See http://stopfundinghate.org/resources/FAQ.htm for more details.]