[Reader-list] Gujarat as an act of the imagination

[pratap pandey]

Gujarat is also an act of the imagination. What is
happening in Gujarat is also a 'systematic erasure of
references', a way of erasing all presence of s/he
designated as Other, all the signs that signify the
presence of this properly constructed Other. 

"Kalyan, April 11.
Kalyan remained tense today, with attacks on muslim
businesses and establishments continuing through last
night. Even as victims of Tuesday's violence continued
their night vigils, Muslims of localities like Doodh
Naka also spent sleepless nights.
	Muslim garages were burnt, shops broken into and
trucks and rickshaws overpowered in the night's
retaliation." (Fresh violence keeps Kalyan on edge,
night vigil on, Indian Express, April 12, 2002, p 4)

The systematic erasure of references is perhaps most
immediately visible in the destruction of property
(property: the first material sign of being present).
But there are other levels, too, at which this riotous
imagination works.

The crude bomb of sorts that gets dropped on a house
is also a proposition, a kind of
imperative-declarative sentence, an imposition of a
cultural syntax. A fireball tears through the roof and
burns everything inside: "My house is empty." This is
also a feeling of being scripted upon. A bullet tears
through two closed doors in a ground floor and lodges
itself in an underarm. Pool of blood, death. A victory
for a social semiotic, imagination expressed as
reality.

There's physical erasure/evacuation of the Other.

Then there's juridical/administrative
erasure/evacuation of the Other. Its purpose is to
ensure that physical erasure/evacuation is possible. 

In a posting made on this List on April 11 (an article
Monica posted), Raja Menon wrote:
"It appears that well before the Godhra outrage, Hindu
fundamentalist outfits were extracting municipal
records, employment exchange registers, telephone-bill
addresses, electoral rolls and even a public relations
firm's business list to compile a dossier of Muslim
residential addresses. Could this be true? There is
little doubt that the state police and the IB are
fully aware whether these allegations are either true
or false. If they are true, there is no question that
both the Gujarat government and the Union home
ministry also knew the first steps towards replicating
the 'Night of the Long Knives' by the Brown Shirts had
begun in Gujarat. The IB's reporting chain leads it to
the home secretary. There is also no reason why such
information should be kept classified and denied to
the people, unless the Union agency is part of the
conspiracy"
[end of quote from posting]


But the Other also has to be imaginatively erased.
This requires a metaphysics. Indeed, it requires a
Grand Theory, a Grand Theory of Everything. So that
there can be a "power-over" the Other.

Sangh camps taught my students to hate: teacher. This
is the headline of an April 11 article in the Indian
Express (Express Newsline, p 2), written by Prarthana
Gahilote. The article says:
"Gujarat had it coming. The riots were inevitable. A
communal distrust had been building up for some time.
Parents had been insisting on discipline. They were
sending their children to summer camps. Not for
excursion but to "sakha" camps where they were
supposed to imbibe "Hindutva" values and discipline
themselves.
The idea was to steel young minds against all kinds of
modernisation and the "supposed corruption of Indian
values". What it has resulted in is, however, a
different story. A battery of young people who today
are rioting, killing, looting and supposedly avenging
the wrongs that history inflicted upon their
ancestors.
For Shubha Vaidya (name changed) these young minds are
more than a case study. Many rioters were her students
at the M S University, Vadodara. Vaidya, who taught
Arts at the University from 1999 to 2001, helplessly
saw her students attend many such camps. Today, a
little scared for her life (she doesn't want to be
named), she wishes she had spoken more to her students
and dissuaded them from attending the camps.
For the saddest part of this entire exercise remained:
Students themselves could not explain what they got
out of these classes at the camps. "It was more of a
done thing. Well educated middle class parents
insisted that summer holidays were used to attend the
Sangh camps," Vaidya, who witnessed the violence in
Gujarat in 1992, says.
"It is perhaps because of this that the Godhra
backlash continues. Even in 1992 the situation wasn't
as bad. Today the state is sitting on the mouth of a
volcano," she says.
Vaidya, who now lives in Delhi, recalls that many
university students were forced by their parents to
attend the camps and learn "wielding lathis and
activities conforming to the Sangh Parivar's
philosophy. Initially, one did not bother but it
started looking ugly when lawyers, painters,
architects and engineers would talk about drastic
steps to alter historical wrongs," Vaidya says.
[end of quote from article]

Gujarat is also an act of the imagination. An
imagination that belongs to a culture soaked in what
may be called "everyday life fascism".

Was Partition also an unresolved attempt to come to
grips with such an imagination? Is Partition also an
act of a similar (not identical) imagination? Is it
that the Partition testifies to the presence of such
an imagination? If so, what is it about everyday life
fascism that refuses to "go away"? How does everyday
life fascism manage to insist that it is not merely a
return of the repressed (a negativity), but is
actually a return to the drawing board from which an
entire reality can be made? 

Let us try and trace the contours of this imagination.
How it is configured. Through what "moments" it
passes, inflecting as it tumbles through the cultural
unconscious. And tumbles out now and again.

Let us "begin" with Partition and "end" with Gujarat,
or should we "begin" with Gujarat and "end" with the
Partition.

Certainly, it seems to me, "the Partition question"
and "everyday life fascism" are intricately connected.

Wanting to know more,
pp     
 

        


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