[Reader-list] Why Gujarat makes me happy

[pratap pandey]

Dear all,

The more I read about Gujarat, the happier I feel. For
the first time in many years (since at least Dec. 6,
1992, itself a date that has metaphorically etched
itself in the so-called liberal imagination), there
exists a metaphor (as a contributor to the Reader-list
pointed out, with a little bit of sarcasm) to be
outraged about.

The outrage is necessary. It is evident. Rajdeep
Sardesai, political editor of NDTV, has gone bonkers
on the outrage trip. For the first time in his career,
he is researching on the "genealogy" of India's Prime
Minister (witness his rhetorically-morally laden
write-up on how fascist our PM has always been in the
Indian Express). Yet the same R Sardesai, outraged,
will not allow investigative TV journalism to really
expose how Gujarat happened. (I have a "theory" about
it. In gujarat, fascism has seriously become
"everyday-life". Hence the raping and the killing can
proceed with Pleasure. How did this come about? This
Mr Sardesai will never telecast to me, or to other
viewers. You see, he is in the objective business of
what may be called "incendiary journalism". "We The
People" watch. We find our helplessness reflected. So
the reportage and the debate takes a nice moral turn.
Noboddy need ask: what is the WAY OUT?)

He will treat Gujarat as always already newsworthy.
That way, advertising revenues will leap up. NDTV will
earn, ensuring its independence from STAR TV further.

The outrage is incomplete, like George Bush's search
for Osama Bin Laden. This search (which is a moral
search, a search ultimately morally justified, a
search whose political rationality gets submerged by
the rhetoric of injury and outrage) cannot ever
finish. If Bush finds Bin Laden, he will get
re-elected by (apparently) educated Americans (and a
lot of approving Indians). More importantly, he will
have to vacate Afghanistan. How can that be?

So Bush will search eternally for Bin Laden (who
always "just" escapes). Similarly, R Sardesai et al
will search eternally for an answer to the question:
How could GUjarat have happened?

This question fills me with pleasure. It thrills me.
It trills through me, singing. It confirms me. I
thereby know that I am on the right path. I am on the
side of the right.

In being so, I will eternally encourage fact-finding
missions, whose reports I will never get to read
(because it will be deposited on the desk of the
funding organisation that has funded the mission). I
will fervently follow "gujarat", precisely as a
metaphor.

Metaphors are always unique. They are never
replicable, or transferrable. In reading the moral
outrage on Gujarat, I am not informed of some
questions:

Is "GUjarat" happening elsewhere already?

GUjarat was not a flash-in-the-pan. How was it
prepared for?

Who prepared for GUjarat?

What is the "historical wrong" that Gujarat has set
out to correct?

GUjarat was willed. Not only hoped for, but also
willed. And it happened. The Will that willed Gujarat
today revels in transforming its prognostications into
action. What of this Will? How is it to be resisted?
How is it to be transformed?

How do we jump off the moral (band)wagon, and treat
Gujarat as a problem to which solutions have to be
found. We can "solve" GUjarat, we can "resolve"
GUjarat. But what exactly is it that we do?

There are other pleasures. The image-repetoire via
which I have seen GUjarat. No different from Manto,
except in the attitude and the "necessities" of
reportage. This is very pleasruable.
 
It is comforting. Better Manto, then Gujarat!


In contrast, Gujarat has become a means to a
"media-fied" end. Manto's image repertoire (burnt
shops, smoke billowing; nightly vigils; crowds
running, arms upraised and bellowing in hatred and
fear, killing nevertheless;) clearly shows that the
rioting imagination was never spontaneous; it was
always a "planned" imagined act.

Te images I see on TV coverage about GUjarat are
smilar.I wonder of the image ofso reified that they
have lost meaning. That is to say, significance. Has
every GUjaratreporter read and then reported? What is
the malaise that grips gujarst?

Coule we please turn 

=====


________________________________________________________________________
For live cricket scores download  Yahoo! Score Tracker
 at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html