[Reader-list] Gandhi and Gujarat

[pratap pandey]

Dear all,

In his latest posting, Shuddha says:

"Part of the problem about thinking about the events
> in Gujarat is the difficulty of finding the
resources, the thoughts and the words with which to 
> think about communal violence at the scale that we
> are witnessing."

Part of the the problem I have with this statement is
the (perhaps convenient, most probably rhetorical)
pigeon-holing of what's happening in Gujarat as
"communal violence". This releases "Gujarat" into an
analytic whose explanatory power seems to have been
rendered redundant, an analytic whose political
rationality has acquired the status of a residue, an
analytic that has been so normalised that it can
actually be called a "paradigm". To talk about
gujarat, then, in terms of the analytic that "communal
violence" belongs to is like opening the top door of a
humungous double-door refrigerator (costs Rs 30,000
and above) and waiting for the ice-cubes to form,
frost-free. 

"Communal violence" implies, as the newspapers like to
put it, that "Some members" of "a community"
"attacked" "shops and dwellings of another community".
In other words, "communal violence" implies that 2
communities have had a bash-up.

In Gujarat, the bash-up was singularly, plannedly,
one-sided. ONE community bashed up the other. Is still
wanting to bash up the other, but has been checked,
due to political expediency.

Gujarat cannot be explained in terms of "communal
violence". We have to find other terms. Other
resources. Other solutions. (Is secularism
frost-free?). We need new knowledge on
post-independent India as seen from the lens of
"communalism", or "the construction of communalism",
and the like.

The task of finding these other terms might lead us to
rethink the very terms in which Partition is thought
about. (Is not the way in which GUjarat can be thought
of as "communal violence" an inheritance of the way in
which the Partition was, and still is, conceptualised?
Is it time to dis-inherit this imperative?)

If we consider the manner in which current, dominant
ways of talking about the Partition has "captivated"
us, held us in discursive thrall, then we might better
understand why the "set of intellectual constructs 
> that the mainstream of secularist (read secular
> nationlist) opinion has at it's disposal" is so
"meagre".

GUjarat is not about combatting communalism. It is
about combatting fascism, of which communalism is
merely an expressive front. "Communalism" is itself a
concept that has served its heyday. After gujarat, it
no longer has any explanatory power. "Fascism", on the
other hand, needs to be thought deeply into,
especially in the context of what Giddens would call a
"post-traditional society", a society "in the wake of
Development" as Serge Latouche would put it. A
society, as this "born again Integral Humanist poet"
(I appropriate this phrase, it sings!) would like to
put it, that has lost the the metabolic powers of
integration. 

Incidentally:
born again Integral Humanist poet that I am (Again, I
appropriate this description for myself), Gandhi has
never served as intellectual support for me. He
cannot. Gandhi is an Fringe Evangelical Protestant
Hindu. He tried to become a lawyer in Bombay, but
couldn't, because his English didn't match up. THat's
when he was sent to England. The rest is history, well
constructed.

"Young India" is a act of "strategic criticism". It
cannot be treated as coherent, as prophecy, or as the
deliberate expression of intentionality. Gandhi's
write-ups in Young India are unfortunately treated as
the intentional writings of a teleological national
guru/politician. Perhaps "Young India" should be read
as a hysterological text. In the "Young India"
writings (much as in the Pepsi Generation Next
campaign), consciousness is a matter of
self-flagellation. If you want to reconstruct a
"national consciouness" from this "text", not even God
can help you.

You are right, Shuddha. We should guard against the
sentimentalism in Gandhi. We should also consider, as
you say, "where this comes from". In this context, may
I suggest that we read two novels (a) Raja Rao's "the
Serpent and the Rope", and (b) Ahmad Ali's "Twilight
in Delhi"? Both of these novels are obscure, and not
part of the IWE canon. These two novels can perhaps be
read as a "dyad", as isomorphic to the Partition. Do
you think, all, we could read these two novels and
have a chat? It might specify "where...this sentiment
comes from."

In this context, let me read the Partition
simplistically. Two elites came to be at loggerheads
on the question of political representation
(read:power-play). Both believed that the power that
accrued to them was "given" (due to different
historical reasons). Both believed that "India" was
"theirs". (It was theirs, or it had been made theirs
-- it doesn't matter.) The political rationality that
united both these elites ("traditional elite",
"Browned elite", whatever you call them) was a
reliance upon the notion of sovereignty.

In a very different context, Foucault contrasts
"sovereignty" and "governmentality". Sovereignty for
Foucault is a pre-modern political rationality. With
the onset of modernity (Foucault's date, in this huge
debate, is "Europe", 1650), came a transformation in
power, in its effects, in its targets, in its
expressivities. This transformation he calls
"governmentality".

I suggest that Partition is a bash-up over that
pre-modern form of political rationality that Foucault
calls sovereignty. (Here, we have to look into the
historico-semantic overlaps between
"pre-modern"/"colonial modern", or should I say the
"tectonics" of being "pre-modern/colonial-modern
simultaneously.)

Whereas nationhood implies "governmentality", its
possibility incited the HIndu-Muslim elite (jostling
to become the omphalos of the "new" nation) to express
themselves as "the" stakeholder of sovereignty.

"Sovereignty" is an every-day life fantasy in "India".
No wonder there was bloodshed, across classes. [To
recover the stories of this "civil war" on the
conceptual terrain of this pleasure for sovereignty,
or being sovereign, at the cost of governing, is
merely to fall into the trap of this "sovereign
fantasy" or "fantasy of sovereignty".]

Once again, with gujarat, we are witness to an upsurge
of "sovereignty". Or rather, a crisis in political
rationality (sovereignty-govermentality). A crisis,
because "sovereignty" has flared up as constituent of
life in Gujarat. Not "governmentality".

Once again, we mistake it for "blood-letting",
"revenge for a historical wrong", and the like. Once
again, there has been placed a demand to think of
power (prioritised over well-being) in Pre-modern
terms.

Sad. But being sad for an upheaval, an epistemic break
like gujarat is like complaining about the cost of the
wood that goes to make up the pyre of a dead loved
one.        

Let us not get into a search for "adequate questions".
Let us look, instead, for "appropriate answers". That
is what has to be done (Integrally Humanistically
speaking).

pp         




--- Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net> wrote: >
Dear Tarun, and all on the Readers List.
> 
> This posting is in response to the Gujarat-Farzana
> Versey-Gandhi-Hey Ram- 
> cluster of postings, forwards, and prefatory remarks
> (introducing postings) 
> that the list has recently seen. I hope to think a
> few difficult points 
> through here, so apologies for something that might
> end up being rambling.
> 
> Part of the problem about thinking about the events
> in Gujarat is the 
> difficulty of finding the resources, the thoughts
> and the words with which to 
> think about communal violence at the scale that we
> are witnessing. 
> 
> What disturbs me in particular is the meagre set of
> intellectual constructs 
> that the mainstream of secularist (read secular
> nationlist) opinion has at 
> it's disposal when it sets out to "combat"
> communalism.
> 
> One of these is the Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai Bhai Bhai
> trope - which clearly 
> sets out the terms of who is the elder brother in
> the Bharatiya undivided 
> family. No wonder the Parivar people use it as
> effortlessly as secularists. 
> [No place for those of us who are Zindus, I might
> add, here : ) ]
> 
> My skepticism about the grammatical and linguistic
> solutions proposed by 
> Gandhi - 'Samas' etc, stem from the terms of
> articulation, which clearly 
> locate the Hindu Dvija (Twice Born) male at the top
> of a happy hindu muslim 
> arrangement. Wait, I am not jumping to conclusions,
> I want to be able to 
> substantiate this slightly later on in this posting.
> 
> A variation on this theme, which presumes, a bedrock
> of national identity is 
> the "carnage in the land of Gandhi " theme, which I
> had obliquely sought to 
> criticize by forwarding the Farzana Versey text.
> This assumes that the legacy 
> of the 'father of the nation' would automatically be
> seen to be violated by 
> the violence done to some of his children. The
> drawing room or NDTV 
> secularist, well meaning and disturbed, is attracted
> to Gandhism as an 
> antidote to communal madness, and it probably has
> its uses. But it is the 
> underlying spirit of this very sentimental Gandhism
> (sentiment is such a 
> volatile thing) that again, I am afraid, disturbs
> me.
> 
> This particular response which unites everybody from
> Anand Patwardhan to 
> erstwhile Gandhian Socialist cum born again Integral
> Humanist poet whom some 
> of us on this list have so eloquently been possessed
> by on occasion,  
> presumes that Gandhism has some innately redemptive
> possibility, which can 
> salvage the fabric of social life from the violence
> done to it by rampaging 
> mobs.
> 
> I want to take this sentiment seriously and see
> where it comes from.
> 
> First, a slight detour into the interesting
> Gandhi-Communalism relationship, 
> with special attention to the Sangh Parivar.
> 
> The crucial factor in the rise of M.K. Gandhi as a 
> leader, lay, one might 
> argue in his undisputed ability to rally a section
> of mass public opinion by 
> his side, through the skilful deployment of symbols
> of identity . In the 
> first instance, we are told, that by advancing the
> slogans of the Khilafat 
> movement, Gandhi was able to rally the hitherto
> 'a-political' Muslim masses 
> to the streetsThis was something that no congress
> leader had been previously 
> able to do. It is also true that no congress leader
> was able to undertake a 
> successful all india movement with hindus either,
> but that is another 
> matter.Gandhi made Hindus and Muslims alike realize
> how much it could mean to 
> "become" Hindus and Muslims in a political sense.
> 
> At the heart of any nationalist formation, no matter
> how secuar it says it 
> is, this call to "identify" oneself is perhaps
> invariably present. Even 
> agnostic, republican french nationalism had to
> invent its own 'deist' cults, 
> and latter day Soviet or Red Chinese nationalisms
> have of course have had to 
> have their own. churches and prophets and chosen
> people. Indian nationalism 
> cannot be an exception.
> 
> But to come back to Gandhi, and the 1920s, In
> effect, this was the first 
> time, that a congress leader could be a 'man of the
> people'. I am referring 
> here, obviously, to the non co-operation movement,
> (or, to refer to it by its 
> own designation - to the non-co-operation khilafat
> movement)  which 
> identified the goals of swaraj with the preservation
> of the Turkish 
> caliphate. This, movement, which under the
> stewardship of M.K. Gandhi and the 
> Ali brothers, was able to organize the most
> reactionary, the most 
> conservative elements in Muslim society, and bring
> them out into public 
> respectability for the first time, would set the
> tone for what was to come. 
> The earlier flirtations between Bengali "shakti
> worshipping" terrorism in the 
> 'swadeshi andolan's  so called "extremist" phase was
> an adoloscent, 
> aristocrats playing with an elite romantic political
> vocabulary. Tilak, with 
> the Ganapati pujas, did go a long way towards making
> the populist Hindu 
> nationalist rhetoric, that was later to mature into
> something far more 
> lethal, but it took a Gandhi to swing religion,
> identiity and politics into a 
> deadly  poplsit nationalist cocktail.
> 
>  Imagine a Delhi in the 1920s, which has militant
> arya samajist and communal 
> congressman like Swami Shraddhanand, spewing hate
> speech against Muslims, 
> through the "shuddhi" campaigns,  and the moribund 
> Khilafati maulanas, 
> arguing for nizam-e-mustapha, and you have M.K.
> Gandhi, fliritng with both. 
> Calling for Ram Rajya, and leading the Khilafatists,
> at the same time. This 
> was the bridge he was building between Hindus and
> Muslims, in which the 
> revivialists of both sides could determine the
> contours of what identities 
> would have to be.Here was the father of the nation,
> busy in the act of 
> conception
> 
> A certain M.A. Jinnah, goes into semi - retirement,
> troubled by the 
> "spiritualism" let loose in the Indian political
> scene by Gandhi. By the time 
> he re-surfaces, things have gone too far for him not
> to play the same game as 
> well.
> 
> Of course, when the Khilafat movement collapses
> under its own weight, when 
> the Turks get rid of the caliphate that was so dear
> to a section of the 
> Indian Muslim leadership, things begin to slide. The
> sangh and the shuddhi 
> andolankaris grow more strident, and the moplah
> uprising in what is now 
> Keraka takes on a distinctly communalist edge. Riots
> break out as they never 
> have before.
> 
> What does M.K. Gandhi begin to say in the wake of
> the Moplah uprising - 
> These are all quotes from "Young India" - Gandhi's
> paper, and can be verified 
> with the collected works of Gandhi's writings
> 
> On June 19, 1924, he writes :
> 
> "The Mussalman, being generally in a minority, has
> as a class developed into 
> a bully... the thirteen hundred years of
> imperialistic expansion has made the 
> Mussalmans fighters as a body. They are, therefore,
> aggressive. Bullying is 
> the natural execrescence of an aggressive spirit.
> 
> "The Hindu has an age-old civilisation. He is
> essentially 
=== message truncated === 

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