[Reader-list] All resemblances are not coincidental

[M Javed]

In a debate on Varun, it would be interesting to see this article -
how his father's career itself could be compared to what our friends
do today:
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All resemblances are not coincidental
Shiv Visvanathan

Violence has always mystified me. It seems utterly inventive and yet
on reflection one sees patterns, connections that one didn’t see at
first. Consider the politics of violence and how it unites Congress
and BJP. At first sight, the idea seems a bit ludicrous. But consider
two leaders as exemplars and paradigms of violence. For the Congress,
violence as excess was represented by Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay represents
the deinstitutionalised style so prevalent today. He represents the
tiredness with politics, the hostility and indifference to the poor
that marks our development. He represents the sense of our city as a
visual spectacle that is intolerant of the anarchy of the informal
economy. Sanjay represented the inventiveness of evil banalised
through management and development. His vision of the city encompassed
the small car we call the Maruti today. Evil in fact always creates a
populist set of semi-private goods. Hitler after all created the first
vision of the Volkswagen and people forget that Fanta was a drink
manufactured in the Nazi era. Hitler also created the people’s radio.
The technological artifact always provided the gloss for evil, which
people mistook as progress. Once one accepted the idea of progress,
development, they soon became legitimations for violence. All the
violence of the Emergency took place in the name of development,
planning and progress. Every tyrant had his willing executioners.

The reader might wonder whether this long prelude on an almost
forgotten politician is excessive. What I would like to argue is that
Sanjay lives with us mutated as Narendra Modi. Let me outline this
comparison. Both attempted to create a notion of politics around a
model of ideal citizenship. Both directed violence against those
reluctant to adhere to this model of citizenship. For Sanjay, it was
the poor; for Modi, the Muslims. Both used violence as plan, or riots
as real estate operation to cleanse the city. Both were great
advocates of privatisation. In fact, what Sanjay began was a task that
Modi completed. In the politics of mirroring, the Nano completes what
his primitive idea of Maruti began. The SEZ as empty of history,
politics, offering only technology was a vision both adhered to.

There was a frugal Arya Samaji style to both, an ersatz asceticism, a
toughness parading as urgency. Both are contemptuous of politics as a
slow decision-making process. Sanjay Gandhi created politics as
speeded-up time and this vision found its most efficient disciple in
Modi. Both had a contempt for party politics. Sanjay operated through
supine cronyism, Modi operates through a spineless bureaucracy. Both
were subjects of commissions of enquiry — Sanjay, a subject of the
Shah Commission, Modi the alleged case study of the Nanavati
Commission. Even the integrity of Justice Shah didn’t prevent the
report from going the way of the Nanavati Commission. In fact, in the
twinning of the two one sees not just similarity and continuity, but
the real thread of Indian politics.

If one reads them without blinders, one realises they are two chapters
in the history of liberalisation and globalisation. Sanjay inaugurated
the privatisation of the state to which Modi added the corporatisation
of the state. For both, concepts and ideology were secondary, mere
footnotes to the logic of power. Modi is just a later version of
Sanjay, a leader with a PRO. Both knew how to cater to middle class
vulnerabilities. In Sanjay’s time order came when trains ran on time
and clerks reached office before time. For Modi, the disciplined body
of the middle class now reacted to words like security and toughness.
Both realised that evil, fascism, tyranny becomes possible if one can
play on the insecurities of the middle class.

Both saw themselves as crime fighters. Without smashing the Muslims
gangs which ran crime in Gujarat, the 2002 riots would not have been
so easy. Sanjay as crime fighter suppressed petty crime and small
dissent to create a picture of order. As wizards of planned violence,
they know how to make the victim guilty and argue that violence was
necessary or historically inevitable. In Indian politics, the poor and
the Muslim always invite violence on themselves by being refractory to
progress or the modernising rituals of citizenship. For both,
citizenship isn’t a right but a mode of discipline. Only a
“disciplined” citizen has access to rights.

There is another similarity that few bother to think about today. Both
Sanjay and Modi had visions of the great city. Sanjay did it in terms
of the discourses of the day which emphasised beautification and urban
cleansing. Modi creates the futuristic city around privatised ports,
science cities, the SEZ. Both used violence to create futuristic
spaces emptied of dissent, ethnicity, and unionism. Sanjay’s vision of
Delhi was still one of demolition, Modi’s vision of the city, an
antidote to the anarchy of Ahmedabad, will be a revitalised
Gandhinagar built on Chinese lines, a scale of urbanism which is
futuristic, hitherto unimagined in India.

Both were open to technology, science, innovation. Both saw these as
substitutes for politics and democracy. Yet one must realise that
Sanjay is a period piece next to Modi. Sanjay Gandhi was still an
unwilling relic of the socialist period, where the information
revolution was a distant speck. He anticipated globalisation but Modi
enacted out its possibilities using the diaspora as a mirror of
legitimation. One often asks why the Congress in Gujarat is silent
about riot victims or development? Why is there a sense of the twining
of these parties, both built around the middle class as an abstract
imagination? In an unconscious sense, these politicians understand the
secret siblinghood of Modi and Sanjay — the twinning of their
political unconscious. They are two parts of a political script whose
logic operates independent of ideology or institutions. These men are
two exemplars, two narratives in the logic of politics as populist
tyranny. The power of politics today lies in the fact that as BJP and
Congress confront each other, the Sanjay in one recognises the Modi in
the other.

The writer is an Ahmedabad-based social scientist