[Reader-list] Why put Shuddha in pain?

[pratap pandey]

Dear Readers,

I respond to Shuddha's painfully-diplomatically
nuanced response to the query: "Why has the Reader's
list not been ignited over Gujarat"?

Let us forget "speech acts". From J L Austin to
Foucault to (even) Habermas, that's an abstruse issue.

Let us also forget Shuddha's pale apologetics in
favour of silence. (Any statement that foregrounds
silence must be apologetic.) The Sarai Reader List, as
handled by those who run it and those who make it
possible, is not responsible for doxa, or popular
opinion. It depends, If I am right, on the larger
reading-thinking community that writes into it.

In other words, it is the larger reader-list community
that is responsible for the silence. I fail to
understand why Shuddha must be held morally
responsible for a "speech-act" he never set into
motion, in the first place.

To defend Shuddha and the reader-list vis-a-vis
Gujarat is also to make clear that the silence on
Gujarat is a socio-political silence, and not a moral
issue. It is a silence actively invested upon by
Global Aeducated Indian everyday-life fascists.

Why is the Internet-ting public silent on Gujarat? It
is very simple. Most internetting indians (I want to
say: Global Eaducated Indians) who think they are
emancipated are actually not so. In 1992, they faced a
constitutional, and even more importantly I think, a
cultural crisis. At that time, the response was:
silence.

It is my belief that GAIs (GLobal Eaducated Indians)
are the bane of secular existence in the current
conjuncture. I believe that GAIs are everyday-life
fascists. Every day in their lives, these "little"
fascists create a social fabric, a web of interaction,
in which it becomes difficult to even consider things
such as:

in North India, the dominant language is not "hindi"
or "urdu" but one called "hindustani";      

why is it that wife-beaters in Delhi invariably depend
on boiled eggs and a pint of rum/whisky?

how is it that the image of an emancipated woman in
advertisements is one that shows the woman wearing
pants, but still doing housework? Nowadays in
advertisements related to household consumer products,
we see bobbed-hair shirt-and-pant wearing women
confirming their daily servitude in even more
sophisticated ways. These women, apparently liberated,
are liberated only to the extent that they wear
branded clothes and "love" branded sanitary napkins,
cars, washing machines, and soaps.

What I point to is that in a neo-liberal cultural
regime, there exists this space for everyday-life
fascism to grow and reproduce. Place this general
statement in the context of the existence of the
"middle class" in post-90s India, in a history of
complaints about opportunities that could have been
taken, but were not (the corporate argument, but also
the larger acquiescence to this argument). What you
find is a complete silence about an appropriation of
modes of emancipation.

Today, you might think you are falsely-spiritual, or
understandably-unreligious. If you do, it will raise
in you a Great Guilt (GG). This GG will emerge in all
those ocassions in which you are required to produce
affidavits of belonging to a majoritarian community.
 
We Hindus have this great ability to think that we are
beyond cultural (social, historical) divisions. We
Hindus want to rule over the entire climate of opinion
(as we have always done, apparently) including ruling
over the entire spectrum of opinion on current issues.
Most trenchantly, we Hindus believe we are superior
because we have the moral right to raise questions in
the Information Age (that's what makes us GAI).

That is what makes (us) GAIs silent about Gujarat.
Gujarat is an Aberration. It needn't have happened. It
is a needless extension of December 6, 1992. (When our
vetan-bhogi minds got so taxed that we stopped
watching TV.) 

We third-generation (at least) educated and so-called
liberal and liberated and now liberalised Hindus are
always informationally and so morally superior. We
don't need Muslims, right?

In supporting the presence of a fascist political
formation at The Centre, all of us have colluded in
the creation of an everyday-life fascism intent upon
reproducing the energy of December 6, 1992.

Please don't blame Shuddha.   

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