<nettime> Ashis Nandy on Gujarat

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

>From the Sarai Reader-list & with apologies for cross-posting.

Keep this text in mind if & when Indian PM Vajpajee's call for 'sacrifice' 
and 'victory' is redeemed.

Ashis Nandy is a senior fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of 
Developping Societies (CSDS).


----- Forwarded message from Ravi Sundaram <ravis@sarai.net> -----

Subject: [Reader-list] Obituary of a culture
Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 17:53:33 +0530


This is a powerful piece by Ashis Nandy in the special issue of Seminar on 
Gujarat. This issue, one of the best collections that have come out 
on  Gujarat is long sold out, but is now available on-line

http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.htm

Obituary of a culture

ASHIS NANDY

THE massive carnages at Rwanda and Bosnia have taught the students of 
genocide that the most venomous, brutal killings and atrocities take place 
when the two communities involved are not distant strangers, but close to 
each other culturally and socially, and when their lives intersect at many 
points. When nearness sours or explodes it releases strange, fearsome demons.

Those shocked by the bestial or barbaric nature of the communal violence in 
Gujarat would do well to read some accounts of the carnages in Rwanda and 
Bosnia. In both cases, the two communities involved were close to each 
other and ethnic cleansing took the forms of a particularly brutal, 
self-destructive exorcism. And the same thing happened during the great 
Partition killings in 1946-48. The ongoing death dance in West Asia, with 
the Arabs and Israelis locked in an embrace of death, is another instance 
of the same game.

Gujarat was being prepared for such an exorcism for a very long time. It is 
a state that has seen thirty-three years of continuous rioting interrupted 
with periods of tense, uncomfortable peace. During these years, a sizeable 
section of Gujarat's urban underclass has begun to see communalism and 
rioting as means of livelihood, quick profit, choice entertainment, and as 
a way of life. Riots have, in addition, ensured temporary status gains for 
this underclass; they are considered heroes in their respective communities 
during riots and for brief periods afterwards  an important reward for 
persons at the margins of society.

Rioting everywhere is pre-eminently an urban disease. Demographers of 
riots  from Gopal Krishna to Asghar Ali Engineer, and from P.R. Rajgopalan 
to Ashutosh Varshney  have shown repeatedly that it is even more so in 
India. The icing on the cake is that the urban middle class in Gujarat is 
now the most communalised in the country; it has become an active abetter 
and motivator of communal violence. Sections of it participate in the loot 
enthusiastically, as we have seen in the course of the recent riots; those 
that do not often participate in the violence vicariously.

(For the last hundred years or so, the so-called non-martial races of the 
subcontinent  Bengali babus, Kashmiri Muslims and Gujarati upper castes, 
for instance  have had a special fascination for violence, particularly if 
someone else was doing the fighting and risking their lives. However, in 
recent years, this fascination and the search for redemptive violence, 
which bestows heroic stature by being expiation for one's own 'passivity' 
and 'effeminacy', have often found direct expression in public life.)


Unlike in places like Uttar Pradesh, cities matter in Gujarat. Urbanity is 
a crucial presence in Gujarat's political life. The state has fifty cities, 
many of which have already become cauldrons of communal hatred and 
paranoia. The result is that Gujarat is now a classic instance of the 
urban-industrial vision, decomposing and spitting out in a blatant form the 
violence that the vision has always hidden in its belly. The state has not 
only been riot-prone but at war with itself. Even after the present riots 
die down  available data show that riots last longer in Gujarat than in 
other states  it would be at best a temporary truce. Tension and hatred 
will persist and both sides will remain prepared for the next round. 
Gujarat is and will continue to be an arena of civil war for years.

This situation has come about not because the Inter-Services Intelligence 
or the ISI of Pakistan  omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent like God 
himself, according to many Indians  has planned it that way. Nor because 
the minorities have been the main victims in the recent riots. This 
situation of civil war has arisen because minorities now know that they 
cannot hope to have any protection from the state government. Lower-level 
functionaries of the state government have been complicit with rioters many 
times and in many states. But this is probably for the first time after the 
anti-Sikh riots of 1984 that the entire state machinery, except for some 
courageous dissenters among the administrators and in the law-and-order 
machinery, has turned against the minorities.1

The minorities of Gujarat are by now aware that, for good or worse, they 
will have to prepare to protect themselves. This is a prescription for 
disaster. It will underscore the atmosphere of a civil war and create a new 
breeding ground for terrorism. More than Operation Blue Star, the anti-Sikh 
riots spawned terrorism in Punjab in the 1980s; the two decades of rioting 
in Gujarat has by now similarly produced the sense of desperation that 
precedes the breakout of terrorism.

In the early 1960s, when I first went to Gujarat as an adolescent student, 
it was difficult to believe that Gujarat could ever have a major riot. 
People talked of riots that had taken place in the past and the state did 
have a history of small riots and skirmishes. Many Ahmedabadi Hindus seemed 
afraid and suspicious of the Muslims, but they were afraid and suspicious 
mostly of non-Gujarati Muslims, many of them labourers in the huge textile 
industry of Ahmedabad. They took the Gujarati Muslims, a large proportion 
of them business castes, as a part of Gujarat's landscape, though there was 
clear social distance.

In retrospect, the picture was remarkably similar to that of Cochin, which 
I studied a few years ago as a city of religious and ethnic harmony.2 The 
only difference probably was the more than moderate dislike for the Muslim 
as representing a tamasic principle in Ahmedabad's predominant Jain-Bania 
culture. That dislike was, however, 'balanced' by a similar dislike for the 
westernised outsiders congregating in the new, fashionable institutions 
being established in the city. Traditional Ahmedabad kept away both.

The 1969 riots began to change the city radically, though at the time the 
changes were not that obvious. Like all riots in South Asia, that one too 
was organised, and it was organised with great managerial panache by the 
RSS. The violence paid rich dividends. So did the imaginative hate 
campaigns unleashed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS. Together they 
gave a kick-start to the process of ghettoisation of the Muslims and the 
growth in the power of Mafia-like bodies in both communities, always 
itching for a fight and acting like protectors of the Hindus and the 
Muslims at times of rioting.

However, the growth of this criminal sector was disproportionately high 
among the young, unemployed Muslims. Understandably. The existing social 
distance between the communities had already acquired another tone. Facing 
discrimination in job situations and housing, many among the unemployed 
Muslim youth began to take to professions in which slum youth everywhere in 
the world specialise  illicit distillation, drug pushing, protection 
rackets and petty crime. And they always seemed ready for street violence. 
The situation worsened once Ahmedabad's famed textile industry collapsed. 
The changing political culture of the city ensured that this collapse, too, 
affected the Muslims more.3

The dragon seeds sown by the 1969 riots have sprouted over the years. 
Gujarat's regular annual harvest began to include gory communal clashes and 
mob violence. We saw the full flowering of this culture during the 
Ramjanmabhoomi movement. As the great charioteer Lal Krishna Advani moved 
through Gujarat, he left in his wake a series of riots in which, according 
to Achyut Yagnik, for the first time, women and children were seen as 
legitimate targets of attack and atrocities. Riots were now becoming more 
brutal and barbaric.

During the last decade, Gujarat has kept up with that tradition. In the 
ongoing riots, women and children have not only been attacked but also 
often killed with a sadistic glee that will be inconceivable in a civilised 
society. Even in the attack on karsevaks at Godhra, the one that 
precipitated the riots, it now transpires that the main victims were women 
and children. The following is an extract from a widely circulated 
eyewitness account, which some of the readers might not have seen. It is 
written by an officer of the Indian Administrative Service:

'Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the 
terror and massacre that convulsed the state. ... As you walk through the 
camps of riot survivors in Ahmedabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, 
men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of 
overt grief are unusual. ... But once you sit anywhere in these camps, 
people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by 
slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so 
macabre, that my pen falters... The pitiless brutality against women and 
small children by organised bands of armed young men is more savage than 
anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to 
time during the past century...
'What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be 
spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus 
and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of 
nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then 
electrocuting them with high-tension electricity?
'What can you say? A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his 
mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. 
He survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A 
family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in 
Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, 
because a police constable directed her to "safety" and she found herself 
instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and 
her baby on fire.
'I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women 
so widely as an instrument of violence as in the recent mass barbarity in 
Gujarat. There are reports every where of gangrape, of young girls and 
women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by 
their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one 
case with a screw-driver.'4

Gujarat disowned Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi long ago. The state's political 
soul has been won over by his killers. This time they have not only 
assassinated him again, they have danced on his dead body, howling with 
delight and mouthing obscenities. The Gandhians, in response, took out some 
ineffective peace processions, when they should have taken a public 
position against the regime and the Nazi Gauleiter ruling Gujarat. One is 
not surprised when told by the newspapers that the Sabarmati Ashram, 
instead of becoming the city's major sanctuary, closed its gates to protect 
its properties.5

Almost nothing reveals the decline and degeneration of Gujarati middle 
class culture more than its present Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. Not only 
has he shamelessly presided over the riots and acted as the chief patron of 
rioting gangs, the vulgarities of his utterances have been a slur on 
civilised public life. His justifications of the riots, too, sound 
uncannily like that of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president and mass 
murderer who is now facing trial for his crimes against humanity. I often 
wonder these days why those active in human rights groups in India and 
abroad have not yet tried to get international summons issued against Modi 
for colluding with the murder of hundreds and for attempted ethnic 
cleansing. If Modi's behaviour till now is not a crime against humanity, 
what is?

More than a decade ago, when Narendra Modi was a nobody, a small-time RSS 
pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary, I had the 
privilege of interviewing him along with Achyut Yagnik, whom Modi could not 
fortunately recognise. (Fortunately because he knew Yagnik by name and was 
to later make some snide comments about his activities and columns.) It was 
a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a 
classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term 'fascist' as a 
term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one's 
ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational 
patterns contextualising the ideology.

Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the 
criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up 
after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the 
same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use 
of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions 
combined with fantasies of violence  all set within the matrix of clear 
paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, 
measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against 
India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential 
terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the 
first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective 
killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.
The very fact that he has wormed his way to the post of the chief minister 
of Gujarat tells you something about our political process and the 
trajectory our democracy has traversed in the last fifty years. I am afraid 
I cannot look at the future of the country with anything but great foreboding.

The Gujarat riots mark the beginning of a new phase in Indian politics. We 
talk of terrorism in Kashmir and the North East and proudly speak of 
subduing the terrorism that broke out in Punjab. The total population 
involved in these cases, particularly the section that could be considered 
sympathetic to militancy, has always been small. Even if we believe that 
Pakistan's ISI and the Indian Army between them have persuaded all 
Kashmiris in the Valley to support militancy, these Kashmiris add up to 
only three million, one-third the size of the city of Delhi.

The forces the Gujarat violence might have released are a different kettle 
of fish. They seem to have done what the Partition riots did. Also, given 
that they have been arguably the first video riots in India  riots taking 
place in front of TV cameras  their impact will be pan-Indian and 
international. The minorities all over the country have seen the 
experiments in ethnic cleansing and the attempts to break the economic 
backbone of the Muslim community. The sense of desperation brewing among 
the Gujarati Muslims is likely to be contagious.

I wonder what we should do with 120 million bitter Muslims, a sizeable 
section of them close to desperation. Will it be another case of Palestine 
now onwards, at least in Gujarat? Prima facie, Modi has done his job. The 
Sangh Parivar's two-nation theory is genuine stuff and has already 
initiated the process of a second partition of India, this time of the 
mind. We, our children and grandchildren  above all, the Gujaratis  will 
have to learn to live with a state of civil war. The Gujarati middle class 
will have to pay heavily  culturally, socially and economically  for its 
collusion with the recent pogrom.

Footnotes:

1. This point has been indirectly made by Tridip Suhrud, 'No Room for 
Dialogue', Economic and Political Weekly 47(11), 16 March 2002, pp. 1011-2.
2. Ashis Nandy, 'Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the 
Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin', The Japanese Journal of Political 
Science 1(2), December 2001, pp. 293-327.
3. The Godhra incident, which precipitated the recent riots, was partly a 
product of this larger process, not a conspiracy of the ISI, as the Sangh 
Parivar claims. Nor was the incident the result of a provocation by 
karsevaks so severe that the Muslim victims of the provocation had to burn 
alive scores of train passengers, most of them women and children, as some 
politically correct secularists have begun to insist. For the moment, I am 
ignoring the even more inane attempts to explain away the Godhra episode as 
a non-event. In some ways, the episode is a typical example of the chain of 
events that have characterised a huge number of communal riots in recent 
times  deliberate provocation leading to violent reaction from desperate, 
angry youth in slums and ghettos, followed by fully organised, large-scale 
attacks on Muslims in general.
4. Harsh Mander, 'Cry, the Beloved Country: Reflections on the Gujarat 
Massacre', unpublished report circulated over the Internet, 21 March 2002.
5. Ibid. See also Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, 'Whither Gujarat? 
Violence and After', Economic and Political Weekly 47(11), 16 March 2002, 
pp. 1009-11.



----- End forwarded message -----

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net