The significance of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka rarely smiles in the photographs. His penetrating eyes gaze out with an inherent sadness. “My life is a hesitation before birth,” he had noted down in his diary. From the early childhood a profound inferiority complex and guilt shaped his inner psyche. Hermann Kafka, his demanding and autocratic father found fault with him for almost everything and had stifled the childhood and youth of his only living son, while the loving but timid mother Julie Löwy usually took the father’s side. "Timidity," Kafka wrote, is “accounted noble and good because they offer little resistance to other people’s aggressive impulses.” Though he equally loved and hated his father “who was so tremendously the measure of all things” and struggled to live up to his father’s expectations, he could never overcome this difficult relationship with his parents and several times felt a deep desire to break away from them. Later in his life, the tormented son spilled out his emotional feelings on this disturbed father-son relationship in A Letter to his Father – a hundred page long epistle which never reached its addressee. Excepting his beloved sister Ottla, he could seldom connect or communicate with his family members though he spent a major part of his life living with them. This dichotomy is intrinsic in Kafka, whether in his personal life or in the characters of his novels and stories who are besieged with feelings of guilt and culpability. He had to be dragged to school because he hated going to, had a nervous breakdown once due to consistent pressures from his studies. Even if he was not a bad student, right through his student life he was always doubtful about his own ability. His only solace was reading and he wanted to be a writer. Kafka once wrote in his diary, “Everything has been subordinated to my desire to portray my inner life.” In an attempt to represent his ‘dreamlike’ inner universe, he had dedicated himself to the art of fiction writing and tried to do something entirely new – even though he could seldom write a single joyful page in his entire literary career. While being a competent and successful lawyer in his later life, literature became his “way of understanding, interpreting and putting order into the world”. Interlacing his creative imaginations with reflections of ineradicable guilt, anxiety, torments and repulsion, his fictions have revealed modern man’s vulnerability from repressive social forces and the constant struggle between individual and the society. His fictional output was not large. Yet, works like The Metamorphosis and The Trial has been universally recognized as modern literary cornerstones and has exerted an indelible influence on modern literature. Though died young and relatively unknown at the age of forty, this Czech author is held in high regards today for his remarkably relevant body of work that has helped to define the madness and the angst of modern age.

“The tremendous world I have inside my head”

In a conversation with Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez had expressed how Kafka has showed him that “it’s possible to write another way.” What Márquez meant by another way was to write breaking the plausibility barrier – not by escaping the real world but by apprehending it better. Kafka’s attentiveness, observation, sensitivity and apprehension of the real world are evident from the manner through which he had captured the spirit of the century he lived. In his art he had pointed out towards some of the most enduring concerns of the age. The enigmatic quality of Kafka’s prose, as Albert Camus had aptly suggested, “offers everything but confirms nothing”. His allegorical narrative never really wanted to spell out the full account or let the reader to arrive to any definite conclusions. But if looked circumspectly by breaking through the surface details, all his works contain some common thematic threads and basic motifs.

His first novel Amerika (1911) traces the struggles of sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann who was forced to immigrate to America to escape the scandal of his seduction by a housemaid. After many strange encounters and aimless wanderings, Karl finally finds a job in the ‘almost limitless’ Nature Theatre of Oklahoma as a technical worker where the narrative abruptly ends here. In The Trial (1914), Kafka weaves the story of a man Joseph K. who is formally charged and arrested by a mysterious court with some kind of terrible but unnamed crime and never knows his exact offense. Throughout the narrative, Joseph K. struggles through the strange circumstances and a whirlpool of bizarre events to learn his place with regard to the law and the world. He fails miserably to prove his innocence and is finally stabbed to death like a dog. Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Castle (1922) depicts the arrival of a professional land surveyor in a village as a result of a bureaucratic error. The village is governed by ‘The Castle’ which is in fact “a dismal collection of innumerable small buildings packed together” as Kafka has described it. No matter how hard the man attempts to penetrate the Castle or try to communicate and acquire recognition from the Castle authorities – every time he fails to overcome the ‘flawless’ bureaucratic hurdles and remains an outsider.

The Metamorphosis (1912) is the nightmarish story of a young traveling salesman Gregor Samsa who is the only earning member of a family of four – his father, mother, sister and himself. He works to clear his disapproving father’s outstanding debt and to maintain the family. He wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Even after the bizarre beginning, the story moves ahead in a rather equable manner till the end when Gregor dies in his room relieving the family from all the troubles and worries. The relieved parents take a ride into the countryside, discuss about their prospects and notice that their daughter has blossomed into an attractive girl. Then they start thinking that the time was coming to find a nice husband for her. In the Penal Colony (1914) revolves around an explorer who tours a tropical penal colony where he is invited by the officer in charge to witness the execution of a soldier who has broken the law. The convict will be put in a monstrous torture machine that inscribes the text of the law on the body of the convicts. The convict has not been granted any trial because the guiding principle of the colony’s judicial system is “Guilt is never to be doubted”. Neither does he know about the nature of his crime. However, when the explorer asks if the convict knows his sentence, the officer smilingly replies, “He'll learn it on his body”. In a dramatic end of the story, the officer in charge himself is executed by the machine.

The Judgment (1912) is a story about the strange relationship and mortal conflicts between a resentful father who have lost control of the family business and a tender son. The father finally accuses, condemns and punishes the son and sentences him to die by drowning. A Hunger Artist (1924) is the story of a professional fasting artist whose act is to starve himself in front of an audience for the cause of art. But the people have started losing interest about fasting art and hunger artists. To reestablish his lost fame and talent, he performs a marathon spell of fasting and dies in his cage. A young, lively panther now occupies his cage and the delight the spectators. The cage’s previous occupant is completely forgotten. The Burrow (1923-24) depicts the secret life of a mole like creature that spends most of his time modifying and fixing structural faults of the massive burrow it has built. Moving through the burrow’s passageways, the creature dreams or imagines all kind of preoccupations and also constantly worries about its possible destruction from the fearsome outside forces. Kafka’s final work Josephine the Mouse Singer (1924) is set among a mice community. The mouse Josephine has the rare ability to sing and therefore is both adored and loathed by the community that gathers round to listen to her devotedly. Though all mice must work in order to survive, Josephine constantly demanded to be excused from the daily struggle for existence since the very beginning of her artistic career on account of her singing. Does Josephine really sings or pips like any other mouse? This doubt remains unsettled in the story. When she disappears, the narrator tells us that Josephine will eventually be forgotten as the mice community does not have historians to record their lives.

Despite the general morose atmosphere he creates while writing about isolation, solitude, insensitivity and cruelty, Kafka in fact had an immense sense of humor – apparently subtle and claustrophobic but with piercing complexity. Yet associating Kafka’s oeuvre with humor might appear contradictory. Kafka biographers tell us that while he read out the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, he with his listeners both have laughed out loudly. The powerful black humor interwoven in the morbid dimensions of his prose has mostly been thinned down by a section of Kafka exponents by exaggerating the bleakness of Kafka’s world as well as introducing and circulating the cliché of ‘Kafkaesque’ into the contemporary vocabulary. Kafka’s humor comes from the absurd situations, encounters and comic horrors experienced by his characters. The parody of bureaucracy depicted in several episodes of The Castle, the strange tribunals in The Trial, the tragic situation of a man being transformed into an insect in The Metamorphosis and the ludicrous ambiance of his parables – they all are infused with intense black humor and satirical wit. Kafka used it to express the absurdity and paradoxes of the situations and to further exemplify the anguish of his characters. The tragic experiences and absurd encounters that the characters in Kafka’s fiction go through are actually in close proximity to the experiences of modern lives. They are dismal but at the same time their inherent absurdity and silliness give them a funny look.

“A cage went in search of a bird”

Kafka wrote about the contradictions and anxieties of his time but the central theme of his works, indisputably, is the theme of alienation. Alienation is a complex subject which is linked with its vast historicity from the Judeo-Christian beginnings. To understand alienation in Kafka’s works, it is essential to understand its foundation within a socio-economic context of the modern society. In this regard, Karl Marx and his theory of alienation can help steering our way.

The human society, as Marx had stressed in the Grundrisse, “does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves”. Human beings therefore cannot exist independently of the society but are shaped by the society they live in. Human lives are dominated by natural and impersonal forces that control society to a great extent. While studying the nature and functioning of the capitalistic form of production Marx had discovered the uniqueness of human labor: “At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer”. This physical and intellectual labor of man has resulted in the collective development of the productive forces and subsequently became capable of producing a surplus. By taking over control of the means of production, a particular minority class of people adroitly set themselves free from the need to produce directly and live on the labor of others. The rise of industrial capitalism witnessed the majority of the people losing control over their labor as well as the process of production since modern science and technology has invented machinery “with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour” and substituted them. Human beings must produce in order to survive. Productive activity is therefore the foundation of human consciousness. For transforming the world, human labour is the highest decisive factor. As a result of losing control over the process of production, man starts getting alienated from the product of their labor. Production activity turns into an alienated activity and further develops into alienation of consciousness. The cycle finally gets completed when men reach the stage of self-alienation from the very nature of human beings and is also alienated from other human beings. Individuals are unable to understand each another – alienation becomes a way of life. Alienation affects individuals of every class but as Marx has noted, experience their alienation in different ways. The propertied class “feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement” while the proletariat class “feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.”

In short, the social relations of production under capitalism have ensured the creation of the modern alienated man. Capitalism has taught mankind to consider “other human beings as competitors, as inferiors or superiors” and see other people “through the lens of profit and loss”. Marx had brilliantly described the capitalist process that leads towards alienation:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.

A feeling of suffocation, isolation and solitude, the ‘unconscious condition of mankind’, is therefore a systemic result of the industrial age and capitalism. Thus it is obvious that capitalistic alienation will be reflected in every form of reciprocal human trends and actions – in the practice of religion, philosophy, art, law and politics.

In Kafka’s writings, the source of alienation appears in form of a social state which is dominated by artificial and obdurate laws. Kafka’s paradox and contradictions are actually the inherent paradox and contradictions of capitalism. Alienation, as exemplified by Marx, is not just a mental state but actually has its roots deeply permeated into the society. The reality of the alienated individual’s life is determined by social relations. He had painted a world where “hopes of the morning are buried in the afternoon” and tender relations between family, office, friends, woman are converted into imaginary illusions under the institutions of authoritarian power that mindlessly controls the whole. Kafka uses the character of a salesman, a key envoy of the capitalist economic system, as a metaphor to articulate a similar message of anomie. He puts forward Gregor Samsa as both the voice and victim, a psyche pathetically crushed by the ruthless struggle for survival within the realm of capitalism. Gregor’s anxiety, guilt, desolation, solitude and subjugation to the social forces are the archetypal symbols of the modern man. What remains as the closest truth, Kafka writes, is “beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.” If Kafka’s world seems dark, suffocating, melancholic and bizarre, it is only because the world he so sensitively observed was like that. This is why Kafka smilingly tells Max Broad that there is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.” In his outstanding study of Kafka, Walter Benjamin has rightly observed the essence of Kafka’s aesthetic complexity: “…modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile towards him. It may happen that the man wakes up one day and find himself transformed into a vermin.” Benjamin has further noted that, “Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility”.

An insurance lawyer by profession, Kafka wrote a number of reports for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he worked for fourteen years. In one of his reports ‘On Mandatory Insurance in the Construction Industry’, he had categorically written about the need for insurance in protecting construction workers and their families in the occurrence of any accident. While preparing the reports he must have clearly obtained an insight concerning the plight of workers under a pitiless system and came to realize that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” From a genuine concern for the people he represented, he had filed lawsuits against business owners who illegally withhold the workers insurance premiums, appealed for improving their safety conditions and took initiative to implement various safety measures and methods to save their lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the very nature of his job gave him enough exposure on how an unfathomable bureaucracy works to accelerate the engine of the capitalistic system by feeding upon the rights of the people. Industrial capitalism required its bureaucratic apparatus to penetrate deeper into the societal ambiance. To fulfill the appetites of the system, it was compulsory to bureaucratize society in every aspect through a pure force of domination – the rule of law. A stringent critique of bureaucratic power, Kafka’s major achievement was to identify and express the bureaucratic system’s morbid, monotonous, agonizing and neurotic image.

In The Trial, the warder explains to a bemused Joseph K.: “That is the law. How could there be a mistake in that?” Later in the novel, a priest tells him, “One does not have to believe everything is true. One only has to believe it is necessary.” Here Kafka sarcastically pointed out that what really matters regarding the law is its capability to control and shape individuals and their social relations effectively – even if this legality lacks logic and wisdom or dehumanizes the entire society with its absurd form of justice. In Kafka’s world, “an attraction existed between the law and guilt”. The concept of justice and injustice, sin and guilt are intimately related with each other.

“From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another”

Many of the important themes that Kafka's had covered in his entire body of work have appeared in the parable Before the Law. A man from the country waits in front of the gateway of the law pleading admission. Even though the door stands wide open, the man is denied entry by an inflexible doorkeeper. To gain access, the man attempts to convince and change the doorkeeper's mind, tries bribing him but all without success. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes and continues to assure the man about the possibility of his admittance but whenever the man approaches him, he constantly impedes him by saying, “not at the moment”. Instead of forcing his way through the gate, the man decides to sit and wait before the gate. Just before the man was about to die after waiting before the door of law for days and years, he asks the doorkeeper, “How is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” and receives the answer, “this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it”. With this perfectly ludicrous note, the parable ends.

In Before the Law, Kafka had initiated a universal argument involving the concepts of justice vs. injustice, success vs. failure and truth vs. untruth. Is the path to truth always obstructed and hence inaccessible? Is life essentially nothing but a paradox, just an absurd and clueless journey, where there is no real progress? Is the search to discover the meaning of the Law destined to fail? Does the ‘law’ that determines our existence in the world really has any meaning or just a pure abstraction? Is it really possible to understand the workings of the Law? Whether “the world is really darker” or the “eyes are only deceiving” us? Is it virtually impossible to step in or out of the man made laws, to find out what lies prior or beyond its abstract dialectic? Is the Law made to guard high life and kept inaccessible for ordinary people like ‘the man from the country’? Should we agree with the priest that “doubting the doorkeeper’s worthiness would imply doubting the Law itself” or argue like Joseph K. that the doorkeeper has misled the man by denying his lawful rights of entry? Is the tale confirming about the futility of efforts, hopelessness or regress? Kafka held the view that, “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already happened. That would not be a belief.” By mocking the logical proclivity, Kafka in his unique way had explored the utter helplessness of mankind under social forces, watched over by powerful social doorkeepers of all kind.

Simplistic interpretations and over-interpretation both will always miss the significant features that sparkle in Kafka’s art. The essential quest of Kafka’s aesthetic journey, as Walter Benjamin had pointed out, was to discover how life and work are organized in human society. In Before the Law, Kafka had woven a stunning metaphor of the modern capitalist array by mixing elements of mythology and Christian themes with Jewish and Chinese fables. The profound sense of pessimism that evokes while reading this tale is the pessimism of life under capitalism, the entrapment of human life paralyzed beneath a supreme but unseen bureaucratic power from which the individual has no escape but to fall as a victim to it. The parable is a mirror that reflects the absurdity, despair and psychological tensions of the perplexing situations created in an unjust world, controlled by a labyrinthine and faceless bureaucratic system.

It is also important to note the agonist in Kafka who was by and large skeptical about religion from his childhood. He was never an orthodox Jew. With the exception of his interest in Yiddish theater, his involvement with the Jewish community was minimal. “What do I have in common with the Jews?” he once wrote in his diary. In no way Kafka’s oeuvre can be perceived as the quintessence of religious impulse. He surely believed that the imperative truths of life cannot be found in religious faith but into the very nature of mankind, their living conditions and relationships. Hence all his characters live in a godless world. Kafka wrote parables, but the writings can neither be measured as religious canons nor can be assessed within the limits of religious discourse. He had borrowed the language of religion while writing the parables, but as Walter Benjamin has noted, “he did not found a religion”. Man’s relation to his world was what Kafka considered important and not what is beyond it.

Why read Kafka?

A lot has been written about Kafka’s famous instruction to his dear friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished works after his death. A promise, thankfully, Brod refused to comply. Kafka scholars as well as popular feature writers has consistently carried out full volume psychological and clinical analysis about his ambiguous sexuality, about his sexual discontents and frustrated desires, about the crisis he faced to balance his attraction and antipathy about sex. Too much emphasis has been given to relate his morbidity, physical limitation and fretfulness with the pessimism, absurdity and gloominess of his language. There is also a tendency to regard Kafka as a prophetic visionary who had predicted the Nazi holocaust. These trendy methods of appreciation can barely comprehend the inner vitality of Kafka’s art.

Kafka believed that a book must be “the axe for the frozen sea within us”. His own creation works in the minds of his readers in an equal manner. His gripping prose and unforgettable imageries “shake us awake like a blow to the skull” by epitomizing modern man’s alienation, fear and cerebral anguishes in an amazing way. His books certainly do not make us happy but slits open the absurdity of the material existence and values. This is why Kafka has not become stale. We return to his works again and again and soak our minds in his so called ‘morbid’ prose dappled under autobiographical reminiscences. Reading Kafka gives us the indispensable ‘bite and sting’ that illuminates us about the spurious reality surrounding our everyday life.

In one of his diary entries Kafka had superbly expressed the creative struggle of a writer:

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate – he has little success in this – but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair.

Kafka’s illuminating works are largely about the “different (and more) things” he had observed “among the ruins”. He was never an exponent of gloom and doom but a true artist who had keenly observed the society and its systems he lived in. However, it will be a blunder to reduce his works to a political doctrine or ideology of any kind. His objective yet sensitive observations of the impacts of capitalism on the individual and his critique of the totalitarian structure of society are the real facets of his art that will continue to excel from generation to generation.

References:
1. Franz Kafka: The Diaries (1910-1923)
2. István Mészáros: Marx’s Theory of Alienation
3. Judy Cox: An Introduction to Marx's Theory of Alienation
4. Walter Benjamin: Illuminations
5. Milan Kundera: Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

Adivasis and the Maoists: few thoughts from an outsider

Gandhian social worker Himanshu Kumar has recently delivered a talk at the Mumbai Press Club after his NGO Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in south Bastar’s Dantewada was bulldozed by the Chhattisgarh government. Hailed by other NGO associates as their ‘only hope’ in Dantewada, the mainstream media has given wide publicity to this incident and has tried to put up Himanshu Kumar as a worthy victim of a repressive State. In the incisive talk, the Gandhian has expressed his utter discontent about the State sponsored Salwa Judum and has categorically held the State of Chhattisgarh responsible for brutalizing its own people – the adivasis (indigenous people), in the pretext of eliminating the Maoists. He has resentfully spoken about how the State has forcefully evicted the adivasis from their natural habitat in the process of bringing their villages under the Salwa Judum fold and subsequently pushed the displaced villagers into makeshift relief camps – because “the Maoists had support among the adivasis”. Calling the Indian State’s much publicized Operation Green Hunt as an operation to ‘Hunt’ innocent adivasis, he has pointed out that the real intention of the government behind the operation is to lay the adivasi land – the mineral belt of India, to the MNCs. “The State talks of the violence of the Maoists, but it is the State which is violent”, he has thundered. The Maoists, according to this now famous Gandhian, are the one “who supported the adivasis. That is why they regard the Naxalites as their friends.” He is also absolutely doubtless to declare that the awful situation in Chhattisgarh “is because of the State, not because of the Naxalites” where adivasis are held under perpetual fear and all the normal channels of redress are closed to them. The liberated zones, according to him, are actually “part of the State’s strategy” to generate a credible excuse for failure of governance in those areas. He has resentfully asked “how can peace come when you are all the time attacking the adivasis? Then you expect me to tell the Maoists, stop your violence.” (Source)

While Himanshu Kumar’s comments on the recurrent violence in Dantewada might sound like the same ‘chicken or egg’ fallacious argument currently clichéd by numerous discourses related to this subject, his fuming words regarding the repressive Chhattisgarh government and the Salwa Judum campaign cannot be straightaway disregarded. Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district is literally a Maoist hotbed. To combat the perpetrating violence, the Chhattisgarh government, apart from utilizing the state forces, has also initiated to shape a notorious vigilant force Salwa Judum by arming and training adivasis with guns and ammunition and recruiting them, including their children, as special police officers (SPOs) to fight their own people. This civil militia force is infamous for carrying out mindless atrocities against adivasis on the opposite side. Their activists have been responsible for many illegal activities and crimes including looting and burning villages, gruesome killing of innocents, torture and rape. While this counter-insurgency campaign has been strongly defended by both the centrist Congress and the right-wing BJP as a spontaneous ‘people’s movement’, in reality it has brought extreme suffering on adivasi life and livelihood by pitting adivasis against adivasis, as the executor and the victims, and creating a civil war like condition in the state.

To perceive a crisis which has its origins in socio-economic deprivation and backwardness only as a ‘law and order’ problem is a grave mistake. But the imperious Raman Singh government has precisely chosen to follow this mistaken path. Powered by draconian laws like the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act (CSPSA) and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) along with an exclusive possession over the legitimate use of forces, the BJP regime in Chhattisgarh has considered that a ruthless counteroffensive is the only solution to the problem. Instead of taking initiatives for a political solution, they started reacting with guns and bullets, went on sponsoring the Salwa Judum campaign and virtually converted Chhattisgarh into a police state which became a futile exercise to tackle the menace and have caused counterproductive effects. The Maoists could easily exploit the adivasis as a profound feeling of neglect, alienation and deprivation had already been settled among them due to the existence of acute poverty, severe inequality in living standards, intense exploitation and lack of economic prospects. The callous approach of the government has further augmented the situation by offering a fertile ground to the Maoists for spreading their red roots deeper into the adivasi heartland. Today the situation of Chhattisgarh has become a predicament from where there seems to be no way out.

* * *

This blazing issue also puts forward several uncomfortable questions. Is it an assuring or a disturbing signal when a Gandhian working among the adivasis in Chhattisgarh for seventeen long years goes “soft on Maoist violence” and eventually starts transforming into a “Maoist Gandhian”? Are the compassionate feelings extended towards the adivasis and the sympathy extended towards the Maoists equivalent to each other? Is it appropriate to severely criticize the state sponsored violence but at the same time praise the Maoists for their efforts “to take on the violence of the ruling classes and its representative state machinery”? Can we overlook the fact that the Maoists have also committed an unlimited number of indescribable atrocities on innocent adivasis by either branding them as Salwa Judum activists or police informers? Is it a morally correct stand to support the cruel Maoists since we hate the brutal Salwa Judum? Should we then also start believing that we “can’t extract morality” when the clash is between “an army of very poor people” and “an army of rich that are corporate-backed”? Can we ignore the daily annihilation program that the Maoists have undertaken to eliminate the poor and ordinary rank and file rival political activists? In which army do these victims belong to? Should we carry the belief that the poor adivasis are fighting their own battle and the Maoists deserve sympathy because they have joined them in their fight as ‘true friends’? Are they really ‘friends’?

* * *

To save their backs from the looming State onslaught, the Maoist leadership has chalked out elaborate plans and projects. They have expedited the work to build several escape corridors through Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar and Jharkhand which includes strategic places to function as transit camps. (Source) With the assistance extended by the ‘useful idiots’ of Trinamool Congress they have now included three Jharkhand bordering districts of Bengal – West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia in their list. In exchange of the ‘premeditated support’ they have received from the Maoists in places like Nandigram and Lalgarh, the TMC has gleefully agreed to assist them without considering the dangerous ramifications.

Another brilliant plan has recently surfaced. In an interview with The Indian Express, the CPI(Maoist) central committee spokesperson Azad has provided details of their insightful battle strategy against the Central forces and said that “All our plans, policies, strategy and tactics will be based entirely on the active involvement of the vast masses of people in this war of self-defense”. Using the catch-phrase “relying on the sea of people in which we swam like fish”, the spokesperson has further emphasized that “The enemy class cannot decimate us without decimating the entire population in regions we control”. (Emphasis added) This appalling statement about how the ‘entire population in regions we control’ will be used as sacrificial lambs for safeguarding the invaluable lives of the Maoist leaders bares the real face of the so called ‘friends of the adivasis’. There is no lofty revolutionary moral embed with this statement. It is just a declaration of blatant treachery with the plain and simple adivasis who have wholeheartedly trusted them with all their passion and dedication. (Source)

* * *

By living sheltered within the adivasi society, by acting as avengers and rousing the adivasi masses against elite repression, the Maoists have earned much admiration and support from them. They have also made themselves admirable in the eyes of many city-bred bleeding-heart intellectuals and academics who love to visualize them as ‘weapons of the weak’. Though the Maoists pretend as leaders of adivasi freedom, in real sense, they are nothing but an anarchic group with an erroneous ideology. It will be far more accurate to describe them as ‘social bandits’ – using the Eric J. Hobsbawm term. The learned academics may keenly argue that their paramount contribution is overturning a general assumption that the adivasis are only interested in livelihood issues and cannot get politicized. (Source) Here, the distinguished academics can be gently reminded that when the politics of a socio-political movement is fundamentally wrong, everything goes wrong. Instead of leading the adivasis towards socio-political freedom they have pushed then into a far greater danger. Their future is getting devastated almost beyond redemption by the politics of gun championed by the Maoists. They are not really ‘fighters for justice’ but merely another ‘power structure’ within the system. Therefore it will be a systemic blunder to glorify them as ‘revolutionaries’. The ‘strategy of the Protracted Peoples’ War’ is a falsehood. They need this war because war means business!

From many shady sections of our society there is an overwhelming display of compassion for the adivasis today. It is hard to distinguish how much of these compassions are genuine and how much is actually a pose or disguise of the Maoist sympathizers. If their concerns are genuine then they should stop romanticizing the Maoist social bandits as beacons of resistance and instead, start talking against their perilous plots in the same intensity in which they talk about the terrible State repression. They need to condemn both the sides equally for causing immense harm to the hapless adivasis like political and social activist Aruna Roy who has unambiguously expressed that, “anybody who indulges in violence or kills is a murderer, be it a policeman or a tribal person”.

The nonstop disgorgements of aesthetic, academic and theoretical jargon on this topic is incessantly making all of us perplexed. However, it has also made us particularly suspicious about the moral uprightness of some of our learned friends who have cherished to share the repugnant viewpoints of conspicuous Indian dissent Arundhati Roy. While passing a remark on the approaching State-Maoists conflict, the talkative ‘global justice activist’ has said, “You have an army of very poor people being faced down by an army of rich that are corporate-backed…..So you can’t extract morality from the heinous act of violence that each commits against the other”. (Source) Maoist sympathizers like Roy go on talking endlessly about a symbiotic relation between the adivasis and the Maoists. The same has been put in plain words, but differently, by the other Roy, Aruna: “The people have taken to this ideology because there is no alternative, or they see it as their best alternative. If you give them a better alternative, the people will go there.” She further continues, “For the tribals, the truth is that there is no choice, or very little.” (Source)

What is the way out from this gloom and grey? The primary task is to find out the alternative. It should be followed by asserting some tangible steps to facilitate a climate of justice, equality, freedom and peace. It is going to be another big battle; but a special one to fight. Winning this battle will depend upon the combined political will and commitment of the State and its people. But before everything, the Maoists must be separated off from the adivasi life. At the moment this is the most challenging task in front of the country.

On democratic delusions and the politics of publicity

The crucial but complex relationship between the public and political parties has been under extreme pressure in recent past due to the lack of an efficient, reliable and dynamic exchange between the two sections. The existing setting was lowering the credibility of politics in general and was looking somewhat ‘risky’ for democratic progress. To come out from this position, it was required to expose and amend the limitations and problematic aspects of the existing form and find out a newer form. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalist lackeys have found an excellent opportunity to popularize the idea that a strategic partnership between democracy and market economy constitutes the favorable conditions essential for economic growth. During the same time, in the year 1991, India has started implementing its liberalization policies. A major shift in the political landscape was also taking place. The country that had tasted only a single-party regime for 25 years since the first general elections in 1952 had started to experience various shades of coalition governance. Since the 1989 general elections, this tendency has found itself a firm foothold. Though the 2009 general elections have given a decisive mandate for the Congress Party, its share of the popular vote in 2009 has increased only by a mere two per cent from the 2004 general elections. The changing situation with its variants has fundamentally distorted the relationship between public and political parties. The political arena has been altered into a keenly competing market where essential marketing mechanisms are allowed to regulate the system for carrying out the ‘right’ message in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time. Some choice marketing phrases like relationship, credibility, loyalty and motivation are frequently being heard from the everyday political talks.

The ruling ideas of every age have always been the ideas of the ruling class. Bourgeois analysts today are spawning lot of hope around a market driven symbiotic model between the public and the political parties. The analysts feel that this model, under an extensive presence of the ‘free’ media, will strengthen and eventually improve the democratic institutions, its representatives and instruments of democracy promotion. Toeing the line, political doctrines are being shaped according to bazaar rules, ideas and strategies. It has also started to significantly regulate and shape opinions of the Indian public.

Though public opinion germinates in the imagination of the public mind, “It is not the consciousness of man that determines their existence,” as Marx has famously said, “but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Public opinion is the human response to a wide range of feelings that originates from socio-political relations; from the conflicts, choices, ambitions, compromises, purposes and uncertainties of human life. But the image that appears to the human mind from the varied aspects of the social structure can also mislead the people in their dealing with the outer world. This happens if interpretation of that image is shaped into a pattern of mental stereotypes that is influenced by preconceptions and prejudices. All sorts of complex human issues like individual aspirations, economic interests, class views, enmity and hatred, religious and racial prejudices distort the way people see, think and act.

Besides, people’s access to information is always obstructed by the establishment. Having supreme control over the access of facts, the authorities of establishment consciously decide how much the public should know. Facts are circulated in a deceptive way that prevents the public from separating the truth from the myth. On several important issues pertaining to their life, people make up their minds before the facts are verified and defined. In his major work Public Opinion, American political columnist and social critic Walter Lippmann has shown how public opinion is “pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine” and depends upon “what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see”. “The tendency of the casual mind” Lippmann continues, “is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.”

Public opinions are therefore, rarely spontaneous and mostly subjective. Opinions formed from disingenuous facts mixed with emotions, instincts, and prejudices do not remain just as opinion but transforms into delusion.

Delusions consistently influence the consciousness of the public and deprive them to perceive reality in its true sense. Fences of naïve political perceptions are erected all around the public mind that hinders them to appropriately make right decisions for their own future. It is widely acknowledged that public opinions are the deciding factor in a democracy. But delusion concerning democracy is extremely dangerous in the sense that it can smooth the progress of fascism. By damaging the rational and moral fiber of the public mind, democratic delusions drive them to follow demagogues. Experiences from history have always shown that demagogues have initially secured a following among the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia – the ‘thinking section’ of the society. Their power and influence get reinforced when they further appeal to the emotions, instincts, and prejudices of other sections of the masses through a non-centralized, awkward and discrete manner. Fascism was born in Italy under Benito Mussolini as a political revolution and was blessed by the people for being ‘too good to be true’. The hypnotic and rosy beginning did not take long to turn into disillusionment. Similar delusional behavior of the German public had immensely helped the Nazi Party to grow popular. By mixing actual dangers with imaginary scares, the fascist demagogues have always created an atmosphere where the bewildered masses lose their ability for the constructive use of reason. The mass psyche is weighed down with meandering, invisible, and perplexing facts.

*****

In the recently concluded Maharashtra assembly poll, Raj Thackeray’s three-year-old party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) has won thirteen seats including six seats in Mumbai alone. From the day of its birth, the MNS and its maverick boss have continuously been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. In the name of safeguarding Marathi culture and the rights of the Marathi Manoos (Marathi people), the party has earned national fame by instigating assault on North Indian taxi drivers, shopkeepers and hawkers, by beating up North Indian students who appeared for the all-India Railway Recruitment exam. MNS has objected to Chaat Puja celebration of the Bihari people and attacked cinema halls in Mumbai, Thane and Nasik exhibiting Bhojpuri films. (Source) The Indian IT major Infosys had to stall their expansion and shift 3000 of their employees from Pune as MNS supporters attacked on North Indian labourers in the construction site. The reputation of MNS got a huge boost when Raj Thackeray was successful in reinstating the sacked employees of Jet Airways by threatening the management with dare consequences.

MNS maintained its reputation when its newly elected legislators physically assaulted the Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Asim Azmi inside the Maharashtra Assembly House during the swearing in ceremony. Abu Azmi’s offense was that he was taking his oath in Hindi – India’s national language. The MNS legislators later justified their act by proclaiming that Abu Azmi has insulted the ‘Marathi Manoos’ by taking his oath in Hindi.

From the election results, it is apparent that MNS has obtained the consent of a sizeable section of the Maharashtra public. The regional chauvinism of ‘Marathi pride’ propagated by Raj Thackeray and his party and its street-fighting method of politics has favorably captured their imagination.

*****

On 30 December 2006, Mamata Banerjee was on her way to address a rally against the proposed Tata Motors car project at Singur where the state administration, apprehending trouble, had already imposed prohibitory orders. The police stopped her from entering the area, bundled her into a car and brought back to Kolkata. To condemn this ‘barbaric’ incident and register protest against the assault on their supremo, furious Trinamool Congress (TMC) legislators decided to discharge their rage on the Bengal Assembly House. The vandalism that went on inside and outside the House later was unparalleled in the legislative history of Bengal. TMC legislators overturned tables, smashed furniture and microphones off their holders and flung the broken pieces at the ruling Left Front legislators. Six legislators belonging to the Left Front, two staff of the Assembly and two journalists were left injured during the incident. During the extensive vandalism, one TMC legislator was seen ‘busy breaking furniture and jumping from table to table’. Some fetched eggs and chicken legs from the Assembly canteen and hurled them towards treasury benches. One CPI(M) legislator was slapped. Another female legislator of the TMC ‘kept hollering abusive slogans against the chief minister’ and ‘threatened CPI(M) legislators with dire consequences’. (Source)

Two years later following the Bengal Assembly ruckus, this same female legislator, known to have proximity with the TMC chieftain, was once more in the news as the key performer of another unmatched incidence. She had locked at least thirteen policemen including the inspector-in-charge (IC) inside a police station in Nodkhali of South 24 Paraganas district. Much to the delight of the TMC clan, she then frantically went on to hurl abusive and filthy language while threatening the IC in full view of TV cameras. Enthused by their leader, her followers snatched the IC’s badge and manhandled other policemen.

Over the last few years, TMC and its rumbustious leaders have received effective consent from a considerable section of the general public, media and business bosses, the intelligentsia and bureaucrats. Mamata Banerjee and some other minor TMC leaders have become central ministers with ‘significant’ portfolios. Political astrologers have predicted that TMC is going to rule Bengal following the 2011 assembly votes.

*****

The above two gems from the contemporary history of democratic India are cited here to reveal a blooming political culture that is steadily receiving popular support among the citizens of this country. The hooliganism of MNS workers establishes a fascistic mindset behind the act which has many similarities with the actions of the Trinamool cohorts in Bengal. What encourages Raj Thackeray to supervise the organized hooliganism of MNS activists has also been the pivotal motivation to the awkward and rancorous Mamata Banerjee and her pet ruffians – the ambition to gain quick popularity and votes. Both have perceived that showing little or no respect for the institutions and practices of democracy could also be put into effect as a publicity tool that has the potential to capture the mind and hearts of the ‘stupid’ public and deliver political mileage. The regional bigotry of MNS supremo and the imperious conducts of the Trinamool chieftain, their calculated attempt to take politics away from the democratic framework is therefore a deliberate choice – to obtain publicity.

Publicity is basically a political device which dispenses a massive influence on the society. It systematically works upon mass anxiety and offers a superior alternative to overcome the anxiety. It also works upon emotion. Emotional reactions motivate and guide the people for their future thoughts and actions. It gradually builds up a physiological mechanism or a mind model with the assumptions about what is important in life. This mind model is also attached to various kinds of incentives. Any challenge to this mental status quo faces stern resistance as it threatens the established routine of lives.

In his highly influential work Ways of Seeing, the English art critic John Berger has revealed that, “without publicity capitalism could not survive” because “publicity is the life of this culture.” Publicity needs to be dynamic and must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. It is also closely related with certain ideas about freedom. Berger further observes that publicity is not merely an assembly of competing tactics since all forms of publicity follow a certain logic which confirms and enhances one another. Publicity talks only about the future. It can offer different choices but makes just a single proposal – to transform human lives for a better future, to make them feel good. Publicity helps to put up a mirage by filling the public mind with “glamorous day-dreams” because existing social contradictions “make the individual feel powerless”. The choice of day-dreaming becomes a substitute for political choice. It is this key reason, Berger argued, why publicity remains credible. According to him, “Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society.”

The way people perceive things are influenced by what they know or what they believe. Public opinions are manufactured through gradual, systematic but insidious application of publicity. The manufactured opinions are then set into action to influence and control the courses of the land. The best way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. The fundamental purpose of publicity therefore is to manufacture fake realities and deliver them right into the people’s mind. The media, governments, big corporations, reactionary religious and political groups are all hand in glove in this manufacturing process.

Manufacturing of consent, as Walter Lippmann has depicted, is a revolution “infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power”. He has further explained the design in the following passage:

“Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart.”

When a political party gains popular support by encouraging its band of cohorts to callously violate basic democratic principles, when a political party which wishes to acquire its legitimacy through popular votes is found to have no real faith in democratic institutions or democratic practices, it squarely indicates the ineffectuality and fallacy of the democratic system. It also raises serious doubts about the mindset of the people who sanction the craven acts. But whether the people are to be blamed or they are “only a pawn in their game” is the pertinent question here.

In the disguise of democratic freedom, consents will continue to be manufactured in a deliberate way “under the impact of propaganda” to “alter every political calculation and modify every political premise”. The MNS and TMC instances might sound cliché and petty in a wider context. But the stakes caught up in these instances are high and serious. It was therefore necessary to rip the topic to bare its hidden layers.

Reassessing 'Agantuk' - Satyajit Ray’s final statement as an artist

In the year 1991 Satyajit Ray made Agantuk (The Stranger), his last film before his death in April 1992. Here, Ray made a unique attempt to convey his annoyance about the materialistic quest of modern civilization through his characteristic storytelling style. The film depicts how the protagonist uncle Manomohan Mitra’s sudden landing into a conventional milieu of hosts made a panicky effect on them and exposed their priggish pride as a sham. The uncle was initially suspected as a fraud and later assumed to be a person with an insular objective to ‘fill his empty pockets’. In fact the depiction in the film turns into a near perfect surgical analysis of not only the benevolent protagonist but his mean-minded middle class hosts. It uncovered a terrible status of the modern urban middle class – acutely selfish and self centered, extremely money driven, always worried about security and hypocrite to the core. When at the end, taking account of his host’s ‘hospitality’, the altruistic uncle simply leaves the million dollar cheque of his inherited money as a small message ‘of little or no value’ for them, it falls like a slap on the face of the middle class smugness. The only member of the host family who was totally unsuspicious about Manomohan from the beginning was his grandnephew - the host’s little son. He was the first to convincingly declare that his grandfather is not a fake but genuine. The child has not yet been infected by the synthetic worldview of his parents and is yet to become a slave of conventional habits. His innocent and keen observations of his grandfather were the only one which was without any prejudices.

In many ways Agantuk is an inciting film. Though there is a genuine doubt if at all the grungy middle class can really think today in the way Ray wanted them to think. The basic theme is an intellectual soul searching for a re-discovery of the lost human values. It bluntly focuses on the vices of the post-modern world. The reckless immorality of the elite class, their greed for material possessions is harshly criticized. A ‘civilized’ person was defined as the person who can wipe out an entire population with lethal weapon by just pressing a button but has awfully forgotten how to embrace an alien stranger! The contradictions of high-rise and rickshaw pullers, NASA and ‘NESHA’ (drug addiction), technology and organized religion, the phenomenal decay of principles and values, the deep rooted systemic corruption and the death of curiosity are among some of the dark hidden corners of civilization that Ray has scornfully declared in Agantuk as ‘symbols of civilization’. How can the tangibility of a person's identity be proved through a passport in a fraudulent world? Who is civilized and who is savage? Class, caste and religion, values and prejudices, politics and power really have no place in the concrete humanity and morality that Ray has articulated throughout the film. Through his quest and vast experience of life Manomohan has recognized the brotherhood of Man which is beyond any country, language, cast or religion and free of any form of identity crisis. Ray’s own beliefs become clear when he speaks through Manomohan that, “I do not believe anything that divides Man – religion does it, and organized religion does it certainly. For the same reason I do not believe in caste…” According to him, caste and religion in the present form is only spreading hate and dividing Man. Technological achievements may well become counter-productive to provoke blatant greed. Modern civilization boasts on the achievements of science but forgets that it was the Neolithic age when Man had already made most of the indispensable inventions crucial for his survival.

Agantuk has two discern layers. The upper layer of the film deals with the problems of the urban middle class morals. This layer is relatively easy to recognize while viewing the film. In this layer Ray is mercilessly probing the harmful effects of money, the artificiality of values, the idiocy of war, the emptiness of an acquisitive worldview and the absurdity of identity. But there is also another deeper and subtle layer that exists side by side with the upper layer which apparently looks abstract. It deals with a much wider gamut of pertinent issues. This layer is inciting the viewer to position him/her in front of the history of human race to re-discover the natural Man in relation to his social state.

Honestly speaking, the anthropological aspects of the film were not Ray’s own. He had often spoken about how Agantuk was inspired by the thinking of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his works Lévi-Strauss had firmly stressed that the mind and intelligence of the primitive savage people were certainly not inferior to civilized people. The universe of the primitives and of the civilized is different due to the approach in which primitive and civilized people conceptualized their world. The savage mind according to Lévi-Strauss is equally logical ‘in the same sense and the same fashion’ as the civilized minds and therefore no negative value could be attributed to it.

In his memoir Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss had revealed that in every part of the world and in every forms of society, whether savage or civilize, human beings has always followed its own styles and methods of thinking and has structured unlimited social systems for themselves. Every society is a product of the inescapable norms of these systems. The systems originate from the human thought process and then are applied in real life practices. The application of systems to reach the objectives of life might differ in time and space according to the cultural values of a specific society. This diversity is caused mainly by the different thought processes and its conclusion which evokes from the diverse reality of a particular time. The physical world is approached and conceptualized by the savage thought process in a supremely concrete way where the point of view originates from the sensible qualities of the savage mind. On the other end, civilized humans apply a supremely abstract method in their thought process which is derived from the formal properties of their civilized minds.

Whenever the strangeness of the primitive world is unintelligible to the people of the civilized world, the reality of the primitive people is viewed by them as ridiculous and disgusting. Frustrated by the inability to comprehend the culture and values remote from them, the primitive reality becomes insignificant, a ‘vanished reality’. This ignorance then becomes an excuse for the modern mechanistic civilization to gradually trap, overcome and finally destroy the radically different society of the primitives. As Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, human societies or individual human beings never create absolutely but “choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute.” The values and social norms of the primitives are therefore important. To understand another system one needs to be tolerant, reflective and curious. Sadly, the mechanistic civilization by and large has lost these qualities.

Lévi-Strauss has asserted that, “Certain social groups must be adjudged superior to ourselves, if the comparison rests upon their success in reaching objectives comparable to our own…” The phenomenal evolution of human beings from anthropoid apes to modern man is the greatest evidence of this success. Certain civilizations of the past knew quite well how best to solve the same problems which the modern civilized society is still struggling to solve today. If one can diversify the field of investigation into different societies it will “eventually become plain that no human society is fundamentally good: but neither is any of them fundamentally bad; all offer their members certain advantages…” Cannibalism is considered to be the most horrible, disgusting and ‘uncivilized’ of all savage practices. But according to Lévi-Strauss, “…no society is proof, morally speaking, against the demands of hunger. In times of starvation men will eat literally anything, as we lately saw in the Nazi extermination camps.” By looking from outside one could be easily tempted to distinguish two opposing types of society. But once one had “lived as they live, and eaten as they eat, one well knew what hunger could be, and how the satisfaction of that hunger brought not merely repletion, but happiness itself.” Every form of society thus has its own impurity within itself that “finds outlet in elements of injustice, cruelty, and insensitivity.” Societies which seem to be brutal may turn out, to be reasonably humane and benevolent when examined from another point of view. By nature, no society is perfect. Claiming one form of society as superior in its relation to all the others is thus a shameful stupidity. In Agantuk, the representation of the Bison of Altamira convincingly explains this point.

In a most bizarre way, the honest provocation generated by Ray in the film has stirred his detractors. He is criticized as an ‘armchair liberal functioning as a simple humanist’ who is placing his ‘hopes and disillusionment on some grass-root cultural activity’ and on the innocence of children. Is he not oversimplifying social reality by viewing it as an ‘individual vs. society conflict’? Is he not an old fashioned, anti-progressive artist under a humanist cloak trying to spread pessimism? Do not forget that Ray was accused by similar criticism for romanticizing India’s poverty for foreign consumption in his seminal work Pather Panchali. These are stupid arguments essentially stimulated to achieve solace from envious intellectual melancholy of the present time and its flatulence from indigested modernity.

Ray did not profess for the primitive form of society which many of his critics thought he did. He has simply chosen a middle path where Shakespeare, Tagore, Marx and Freud can equally contribute along with the experience and values of primitive ancestors. While he has harshly criticized the war mentality of the civilized world, similarly he has disapproved the tribal custom of polygamy. His intention was to raise relevant issues from a certain perspective which can stir his audience to look differently. As a genuine artist, Ray did not intend to show the solution but tried to guide the audience to find one. Agantuk assists to shift the focus of the civilized world towards re-evaluating its root.

Similarly, Ray has definitely not spoken about any individual vs. society conflict in the film. He got the fundamental idea from Lévi-Strauss to put up incisive interrogations on society and culture as a whole. Is it possible to take an unbiased view of customs and ways of life distant from one’s own? Is it possible to doubt the rightness or naturalness of the customs of the civilized society instead of taking it for granted? Is it possible to find a middle way between the primitive and modern values? How to find elements from other societies and make use of them that will help the civilized world to reform its own customs? How to gather experiences from a remote culture and get enriched by them? Is it possible to unravel what in the present nature of Man is original, and what is artificial? Is it possible to re-discover the natural Man in his relation to the social state he belongs to? Even if we believe, how do we prove that other societies may not be better than our own?

The level of depth inscribed in the oeuvre of Satyajit Ray’s films is unique. In the age of the banality of Slumdog Millionaire and the hoopla surrounding an overcooked myth of Bollywood’s theory of culture, it is worth talking about Ray and his phenomenal artistic mastery.

Altamira Bison image: chenzhaofu.cn

Indian Muslims and terrorism: a short discourse

The majority section of Indian society, the ‘concerned’ Hindu citizens are demanding that the Indian Muslims must immediately start to speak out and take counteractive steps against the terrorist attacks instigated by fundamentalist and anti-national Muslim groups. They are outright critical about the attitude of common Muslims and Muslim organizations of the country for not doing enough to voice their protest and instead preferring to remain mere spectators of the spiteful events. They have raised a ‘valid’ question: is this not the ideal time for Indian Muslims to prove their loyalty to the Indian state? If they are honestly against these felonious acts of homegrown terrorists, if they genuinely feel that terrorists are demeaning the entire Muslim population and in the name of Islam destabilizing the Indian society, then why are they not coming out in flocks to express their concern? A lot of voices have been built up in favor of the above view. Therefore, it is worth probing the elements of this complicated topic in detail.

During the Partition of India in 1947, a substantial number of Muslim families decided to live in secular India instead of migrating to Islamic Pakistan. It was a difficult but cognizant decision, based largely on the official stand of the new Indian Government which wanted to be recognized as a secular state. The important part played by a significant section of their Hindu neighbors and friends must also be mentioned, those Hindus who did provide the required confidence and solace to their Muslim brothers and sisters to reside beside them. At that time it was not an easy decision for the compassionate Hindus either in front of large-scale killing and violence. Communal elements were present in both communities, feeding each other on an agenda of hatred and intolerance. The Partition dusts settled down in time but left a deep scar on the face of the newborn nation. Today’s younger generation of Muslims were born and brought up in a secular-democratic India and has little or no mental connection with the Partition period’s assault of communal violence on their ancestors. They live and share the democratic milieu of this country equally with their Hindu counterparts.

Is it then beyond question that by having an equal stake in the system with their Hindu counterparts, the present day Indian Muslims should have no basis to be apathetic to the country’s democratic values? To find an answer to that we should look into the actual conditions wherein majority of the Indian Muslims live.

As per 2001 census estimates, India has roughly 150 million Muslims, constituting 13.43 per cent of the Indian population. They represent the second largest Muslim population in the world, behind Indonesia (190 million) and just ahead of Pakistan (about 140 million). The Indian Muslim community is larger than the entire population of Arab Muslims (about 140 million). Despite such a huge presence, Indian Muslims by and large are living in appalling socio-economic conditions. All post-independence commissions set up by the Indian government in an effort to find out the social, economic and educational status of Muslims – from the 1983 Dr Gopal Singh Commission to the 2006 Rajinder Sachar Commission have shown a dismaying portrayal of the community. The latest report by Rajinder Sachar Commission has established the following disturbing statistics:

1. 48 per cent of Muslims older than 46 years age can't read or write. In the age group of 6 to 14 years, 25 per cent of Muslim children are either dropouts or have never attended school. As far as enrolment ratio in schools are concerned, the share of Muslim children is lower compared to the schedule caste and schedule tribes.

2. Primary, secondary and higher secondary – at every level the dropout ratio is the highest among Muslims. Only 3 per cent of Muslim children attend the madrasa. Out of the total Muslim population of around 14 crore, only about 4 crore Muslims have received some education — 192 lakh are educated till primary level, 105 lakh till secondary, 73 lakh till higher secondary and 24 lakh till graduate level. A large section among the Muslims is Urdu speaking, but the infrastructure to teach Urdu is miserable.

3. 52 per cent of Muslim men and 91 per cent Muslim women are unemployed. Representation of Muslims in government jobs is far below their proportion in total population. They hold only 7.2 per cent of government jobs and only 3.2 per cent of the jobs in the country's security agencies (namely, CRPF, CISF, BSF, SSB etc). In some states like Delhi, Tamilnadu, Bengal, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, the percentage is even lower.

4. In towns that range in population between 50 thousand and 2 lakhs, Muslim per capita expenditure is less than that of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

5. Although they make up only 13.43 per cent of the total population, 40 per cent of the prison populations in India are Muslim.

Except if one utterly believes the Hindutva apologist’s propaganda that the Sachar Commission report is ‘full of prejudices’ and ‘politically motivated’, there should be little doubt from the above data, that the condition of common Muslims in India is not at all promising and needs a drastic change. Muslims in India have fallen behind the rest of the population, especially in employment opportunities and education. Large section of this Muslim populace is living under extreme poverty. In urban areas most of them are raised in ghettos near to posh neighborhoods, lacking the basic infrastructural facilities like clean water supply, sewage or sanitation system, banks and schools. In almost every three Muslim dominated villages, one does not have a school. Nearly 40 per cent of the Muslim dominated villages do not have proper roads, drinking water and health facility. A large section of ordinary Muslims are low status or downtrodden. A sizable section among them is former dalits, converted to Islam. Their conversion over the centuries has not helped them to realize any noticeable socio-economic uplift.

The Hindutva apologists obviously have very strong disagreement to this report as it has bluntly shatter their circulated myth about Muslim ‘appeasement’ by the ‘pseudo secular’ political class of this country. On the other hand, the report has also exposed that since independence, the main political parties have mostly ignored elevating the community in socio-economic terms. Time and again these political parties and leaders shed crocodile tears and in the excuse of ‘helping’ Muslims, compromise with the most reactionary elements among them. Time and again it was observed that these leaders and political parties erase out the community from their mind without actually carrying out any enduring benefit to them once their political goals are achieved.

From the education perspective, the situation of Muslims in India is rather depressing. From a very young age, Muslims who attend the madrasas (although only 3 per cent as per the Sachar report) receive orthodox religious teachings and throughout their lives earnestly follow it. The normal teaching trend in the madrasas is to minimize the intellectual and rational sciences and stress on purely religious orthodox disciplines, the dos and don’ts of Shariati laws and so on. The conditions of the dropouts or those who have never attended school (25 per cent as per the Sachar report) are even pathetic. They are the most wretched and deprived in the community, their outlook and values of life develop straight from their downcast and conventional social upbringing. The psyche of a larger section of young Muslims are shaped by these conventional and orthodox lessons of Islam, most of the time interpreted by the ulemas in such a way that learners are bound to incline towards a dogmatic approach in life, always suspicious to modern liberal values. The religious beliefs and practices form a blind faith on religion and thus it becomes easy for conservative minded religious Muslim leadership to draw the community's agenda in strictly religious terms, neglecting the importance of socio-economic empowerment of the community. Modern rationalistic approach towards life is absent in this rigid religious atmosphere. As a result, it becomes obligatory for the inhabitants to learn Urdu, the women to adopt veil, children to receive Islamic orthodox teachings and to grow up with all sorts of conservative values.

The role of Islamic organizations in India is also not beyond criticism. These organizations are less concerned about social and educational reforms but instead spend most of their energy and resources to organize the community in religious lines. By stressing on an identity related threat, they try to segregate the minds of common Muslims from secular lenience to religious fanaticism.

The increasing communal polarization of the Muslims has aggravated after the speedy growth of Hindutva ideology in Indian society following the Babri Masjid demolition on 6 December, 1992. This event and the subsequent communal propaganda set off by the hydra headed Sangh Parivar was responsible for strengthening the anti minority bias in all sections of Indian society and was successful to manage a parliamentary victory in the national elections for its political wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Upbeat after the electoral victory, the Parivar and its offshoots started to systemically unleash sporadic attacks on the minorities in many parts of the country and forced them to gradually segregate from the mainstream. While under direct or indirect communal attacks, the socially alienated ordinary Muslims cling more towards religion for comfort and support. Communal elements among the Muslim community have also added fuel to the fire. These elements equally contributed the increasing communal polarization and have stirred up a widely shared perception among the community that their identity is being undermined by the systemic propaganda and actions of Hindu communal forces. The degraded conditions of the ordinary Muslims were bit by bit gathering all the right ingredients for extremist Islamic ideology to spread its root among them.

Just when the Gujarat riots happened.

Immediately after the terrible incidence of Godhra train burning on 27 February 2002, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi called it “a one-sided collective terrorist attack by one community”. The following day, his speech was broadcasted on Ahmedabad Doordarshan where he remarked, “…we will set an example that nobody, not even in his dreams, thinks of committing a heinous crime like this.” From 28 February onwards, in the pretext of the ‘terrorist’ label, Hindutva communal fanatics with the active support of the state police unleashed an unprecedented collective violence upon the entire Muslims in the state. The pogrom was like a moral compulsion to the perpetrators that their robust action was the right reaction to Godhra train burning and was essential to cleanse the Indian society from the evils of radical Islam – to ‘defend the Hindu religion’. Numerous Muslim houses, shops along with people were gutted; mosques and shrines were damaged or destroyed and in the place makeshift Hindu temples were built. The largescale violence did not spare women and children; wealth and status could not shield the victims. The chief minister, instead of controlling the situation justified the pogrom by saying “it was a spontaneous reaction of the people against the terrible events of Godhra”. According to official estimate, 1044 people were killed in the violence – 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus (including 58 victims of the Godhra train fire). 1,50,000 were left homeless.

Who were beside the victimized Muslims when Gujarat was burning? It was some Muslim voluntary groups and few social activists. On ground, not a single political party dared to confront the killers or has protected the traumatized Muslims. Literary critic and activist Ganesh Devy at that time had bitterly remarked, “There is no political or ideological divide in Gujarat on the Muslim question; even the Congress hates Muslims.” The government looked the other way when its healing touch was required the most. Under brutal attack perpetrated by the religious majority, the hapless Muslims cocooned into grungy relief camps for years and were fixed more ardently to their faith. This is a perfect time for fanatic ideas to creep in. There is always an immense possibility that extremist radical thought could infiltrate and influence the victims and their kith and kin, mostly youths, when they find their whole surroundings including the civil society, government agencies and the hate factories of vernacular media are totally against them only because they belong to a particular religion. A compassionate social attitude and a concerned government could have arrested this risk but it was an absurd expectation from a society completely polarized on religious line, where a mere 9.1 per cent are Muslims. Gujarat riots of 2002 were a slap in the face of a country which proclaims to be the biggest secular-democratic state of the world.

Gujarati Hindus are arrogantly proud for what they have done in the post Godhra days. ‘Gujarati Asmita' (Gujarati pride) was finally been legalized when the first part of justice G T Nanavati Commission report was made public recently. The report supported the chief minister’s claim that Godhra was a ‘terrorist conspiracy’. It also hinted to give a clean chit to the Gujarat government when it says that there was no evidence of any lapse on the state government’s part, “in providing protection, relief and rehabilitation to the victims of communal riots or in complying with the directions given by the National Human Rights Commission.” The Nanavati Commission exclusively adopted the version of the Gujarat government’s investigating officer Noel Parmar’s report in the Godhra train burning case. Interestingly, Parmar’s same report was earlier not accepted by the Supreme Court which on March, 2008 has ordered a fresh investigation of the post-Godhra violence. Earlier, two riot cases were transferred outside Gujarat to Maharashtra by the Supreme Court because the court understood that it is impossible for Muslim riot victims to get justice from the judiciary of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat.

No one in Gujarat now talks about or recalls the 2002 riots as if nothing of that sort has ever happened there. The events are supposed to be too ‘sensitive’ to talk about. The collective Gujarati mind has been shaped so perfectly by the Sangh Parivar’s systemic propaganda that even a mention about the riots is confronted with stiff resistance from the common people of Gujarat today. Even the most effected Muslims have adjusted with the situation and try hard to ‘forget’ about the carnage they faced. Instead, their keen effort now is to motivate themselves by the vibrant Gujarat dream.

Apart from the Muslims, India also comprises other minority groups like Christians, Sikhs and Zoroastrians (Parsis). In 1999, a missionary Graham Steins were burnt to death by Bajrang Dal goons along with his two minor sons in Orissa. The Christians were also targeted in Gujarat where similar incidents of church burning and brutal killing took place precisely like what is happening today in Orissa, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. And why not? Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Guru M. S. Golwalkar had marked out Muslims and Christians as ‘internal enemy No. 1 and 2’. Are they not ‘foreign invaders’ aimed to annihilate Hindus? The charge against Christians is for forcibly converting people. In the contrary, the census figures show that the number of Christians in India has dropped from 2.5 to 2.3 per cent. Guru Golwalkar had put in plain words that:

"The foreign races in Hindusthan must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or [they] may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen's rights." (M. S. Golwalkar: We, Our Nationhood Defined, 1939)

Today Guru Golwalkar’s loyal disciples, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal are just complying with this treatise. Minorities can live in India but only at the mercy of the Hindus. If they speak out about their grievances, their concerns and aspirations, they will be dubbed as ‘anti-national’ or humiliated as being ‘appeased’ too much. When Professor Mushirul Hasan, the Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University offers legal aid on behalf of the University to the students accused for terror acts, he is harshly blamed for ‘supporting’ terrorists. At that point the accusers completely close their eyes to the fact that it is a constitutional right of the accused students as citizens of India to be entitled for legal help until their crime is proved in a court. When the same Professor Hasan was targeted by Muslim fundamentalists when he took a stand against banning Salman Rushdie's controversial book Satanic Verses – the same people has hailed him for taking a courageous position.

Who is a terrorist? Those who meticulously plan and blast bombs in crowded public places, attack temples with automatic weapons and brutally kill innocent lives in the name of Islamic jihad or those who butcher innocent lives, violently evict the victims from their homes and turn them into refugees, rape the women, destroy mosques and burn churches in the name of Hindu nationalism? Both are dangerous, both are malicious. Both are foreign funded, both have their own versions to justify their acts. Both are terrorists.

The utter hypocrisy with a section of our so called ‘concerned’ and ‘patriotic’ middle class is that they consider all secular voices as pseudo secular and thinks that condemning both Islamic and Hindutva fanatics is like ‘falling in a trap’. They are severely critical against jihadi homegrown Muslims but covertly supportive to the fanaticism of the vicious Hindutva forces. After independence almost seven decades has passed but still they never miss a chance of Muslim bashing by relating them with the 61 years old Partition day mayhem of 1947. However, these very same people carefully ignore the 16 year old Babri Masjid demolition of 1992 and purposely forget the only 6 year old Gujarat pogrom days of 2002. It has also become their obligation to glorify the headship of Narendra Modi as the potential savior of India. Their perception of democracy is selective. Muslim terror in the name of Allah is loathsome, Hindu terror in the name of Ram is explicable.

Ordinary Muslims should realize that only a fresh liberal outlook acquired from modern education can elevate them from their misery and disorientation. The reasons behind their socio-economic backwardness in large parts of this country are primarily due to this social stagnation and educational marginalization. The Muslim youths today who have been motivated as jihadi and opts the terrorist path are truly misguided. The solution to homegrown terrorism mostly depends on how the state and society as a whole, efforts to do something about the grievances of common Muslims and thus prevent their youths to be misguided by lethal influences. The state and society should also realize that until provocation is barred and the rule of law is evenly established, the problem will persist and keep India susceptible to more serious damages in future.

A year after the Baroda Fine Arts College debacle

It will not be hard to recall the name of Chandramohan Srilamantula. The master’s degree student of Department of Graphics at the Fine Arts College in Baroda who was jailed for displaying artworks in the faculty evaluation show which a Methodist pastor and a local BJP man found objectionable. The BJP man with his supporters vandalized the show and later filed a FIR against the student for ‘misusing religious symbols and causing religious offence’ and got him arrested by a nonbailable warrant. The date was 9 May 2007. One year has past after the incident in the life of democratic India. By now, everybody must have forgotten it.

However, at the heat of the moment it seemed like the democratic minded citizens of Baroda, Gujarat and India would remonstrate on the issue until they reestablish the dignity of the student and institution. The artists went for a peaceful hunger strike, arranged another campus exhibition on the erotic depiction of religious symbols from the 2500 years history of Indian art as a protest against the vandalism. The university authorities forcefully closed this exhibition and suspended the acting Dean of the Faculty Mr. Shivaji Panikkar for allowing such a vulgar show. National English language media highlighted the issue through editorials, headline news, protest articles and prime time discussions. The reaction looked genuine as it was directly related with the cliché ‘freedom of expression’. On this subject our watchdog media always over reacts. All over India, artists and citizens came on street to voice their concern. Two committees were formed to probe the incident. One by the MS University and the other by the Governor of Gujarat. Though none of the reports were officially made public.

Bleak days

There are times when all things around you look bleak. Every happening in your surroundings, your home and your work place, culture, society and politics will make you gloomy. Your mental kingdom will feel empty. You will wander around fruitlessly in search of the required stimulation, to keep you able and stable on the path, but will not find it.

The pale morning will obviously start with the headache called the morning newspaper that will begin to pour in your mind all kinds of information you loathe. You will learn that the inflation has elevated today to a new height, further instances of greed and double standards of the ugly politicians are unearthed, Gujarat government is showing more signs of fascistic bent and the BJP is emerging stronger everyday. You will also find out that CPI(M) is getting bashed universally for almost everything it has done, it is doing and it may do; RSP is immerging as a political party with a difference and the shrill and itchy voice and body language of the Trinamul Congress lady is getting louder day by day. Information in graphic details will show you how co-passengers had screwed up an arrogant CPM minister of Bengal on the day of the general strike against fuel price hike. The Gujjar agitation is showing signs of division within and BCCI has humiliated the great Kapil Dev again.