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--- On Wed, 12/1/11, Sruthi Krishnan <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Sruthi Krishnan <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [silk] The republic of fear > To: [email protected] > Date: Wednesday, 12 January, 2011, 11:51 > >> >> Will there be a day > when an Indian will be > >> faced with mortal danger from a young hardliner > because he is > >> considered 'anti-national?' > > > > I know this column is pegged to the Taseer murder, but > surely Indians should > > have learned the answer to this question on or around > January 30, 1948. > > > > > There is an implicit class element here. When there was a > clash > between law college students in Chennai, we did a story > trying to > understand student activism. What we found wasn't > surprising -- > students from the middle to upper class prefer civil > society > organisations to change society. Those who join politics > are from the > lower classes; one guy who was starting a new political > party said > that he preferred to target the lower classes because the > upper > classes were not interested in joining politics. A > Chennai-based > lawyer had an interesting take. She said that given lack > of > inspirational movements, students were drawn to identity > politics, > which again is linked to the economic situation. > > That's why I think there's a difference between Gandhi's > assassination > and what's happening in the current scenario. Though a part > of it > relates to resolving issues resorting to violence, there's > another > thread which is economic.Income inequality at the scale in > which it is > now means democracy is um, a rural legend? > > > Sruthi No, it doesn't. It does mean that there is a branching away between the rural and urban India, that Bharat and India are separating faster than we thought, and that India is by no means homogenous, it contains a set of Bharatiyas (bhartis, in Pakistani web-site slang) folded in. We didn't start with unalloyed inspirational politics. That lasted all the way until 1917. Once Gandhi made the horrible error of opening the communal can of worms, inspirational politics coexisted with communal politics. It was here that identity politics commenced, and it was much later that identity politics and class-based politics came face to face with each other. The politics of the independence movement was a titanic struggle of two equally defective models, the One Nation Theory, never articulated per se, but always implicit, always backed up by wise Sanskrit saws, of the INC, and backed by Gandhi literally with his life, and the Two Nation Theory, postulating an unbridgeable gap between Muslims and all other kinds of human being in an Abrahamic kind of separation of the Pure, the chosen people, over all others. Abrahamic because Pure, to a Muslim, equates to being circumcised as often as any other meaning; to that extent, they share their sense of being the select of the Lord with Jews and early Christians who were not gentile. Both were wrong. It is not clear when the One Nation Theory died in India, but dead it is. It died under the impact of identity politics, which can be termed, for the sake of symmetry, the Multi Nation Theory. If we take a quick count of the suppressed identity searches at the time of Independence, we find the Tamils, the Sikhs, the Nagas, the forest tribals of Central India, centred around the princes of Bastar, the forest and hill tribals of North-east India, centred around the Nagas, but soon exceeding their reach and objects, the Ahom themselves, the Hill Gurkhas, the scheduled caste and the rest of the Muslims who did not emigrate to Pakistan, east or west. Possibly also the Telugu people. Did anyone notice the omission of the K word? None of these were accommodated without a struggle. All had to agitate, hold up traffic, block railways, go on strike and hunger strike, stop government from functioning, refuse to cooperate, chuck stones at the police, shoot the police, shoot others who didn't agree, shoot themselves to keep themselves pure and all the rest of that. All, or many anyway, got accommodation of sorts in some manner or the other, within and on the borders of the Indian constitution (look up Article 371). This is the reality. Mandal only stirred the pot and added ingredients. Identity politics was built into the sweep-everything-under-the-carpet agreement that constituted Gandhi's line. Class-based politics came later, after independence, and failed signally, largely because of the lack of localisation by the Socialists and the Communists of their imported theories. Now if we look at the Indian political scene, there is a broad division into two on top, between the One Nation Theory and the Majoritarian Theory, but with the politics of identity fighting it out just below the noses of these two mega-factions. When a youngster has to choose, it becomes a stark choice. A youngster from a privileged background has no percentage gain in joining the Congress, because power and position is distributed in the Congress in an idiosyncratic manner, difficult to predict or to forecast, or to build political careers around. He or she has no percentage in joining identity political groups; that would cut straight at the roots of their own privileged positions in society. If they were to join identity-based groups, they would immediately lose their head-start. A youngster from a less-privileged/ unprivileged background, on the other hand, is propelled towards his or her identity banner almost against his or her own choice. There isn't much volition in that. The Congress will take him on, but nothing is going to happen to him in a hurry. The Sangh Parivar will take him on, but there are wheels within wheels, and in the end, it is better for an OBC or Harijan to seek supporting roles in his or her native grouping.
