Why Mother India in jeans haunts Modi bhakts
The incident at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) last week in which student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested under sedition charges for a speech challenging the Hindu right-wing ABVP’s notion of patriotism would be a joke had it not been initiated by anyone less than Union home minister Rajnath Singh.
The Constitution of India, authored by BR Ambedkar, whose name crops up with considerable frequency now because of his re-invented relevance in the divisive Indian politics of today, does not mention the word sedition.
As is well known by now, the definition of sedition comes from Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC): “Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law in India...”
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This just means that you can’t say anything critical of an elected government. That, in turn, means that people have no power to hold the Modi sarkar to account, because all criticism could be construed as anti-national.
This constitutes an assault on the free speech on which the idea of the argumentative Indian rests. The home minister is directly guilty of violating the interests of the citizens he is elected to represent. His confusion is the classical one: he sees the government as the state, when actually the state is the people.
The Mother India argument just doesn’t hold water. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to which Rajnath Singh and the Modi sarkar, in general, owe allegiance, are attacking the argumentative Indian, be it Kanhaiya Kumar or Rohith Vemula - the Dalit scholar at Hyderabad Central University who committed suicide last month after allegedly being hounded by the Hindu right-wing. The actions of the RSS are directed against those "offending" and "insulting" the image of Mother India.
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This imagery needs to be questioned. The typical portrait of India as a sari-clad and bejewelled woman to be worshipped and not to be touched or befriended is a drag on the modern Indian imagination. It’s a retro nationalist image and reinforces a set of ideals that the young men and women of this country are rebelling against. Instinctively, they know that nationalism is a blanket notion under which the most insidious acts of violence can be perpetrated and justified.
If the last few months are any indication, there is a clear conflict emerging between what the Modi government stands for and what the civil society wants. And what they want is to breathe and shout. Surely, a government that can’t tolerate a taunt by its citizens has no right to be in power. It’s like a god that can’t be laughed at. Do you see the very thin line between ideologies like nationalism and fundamentalism?
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Modern India in Modi’s mind wears suits and, has a laptop in hand, and quietly beavers away in MNCs and start-ups. From morning to night people work efficiently and go back home to their families. They have dinner together, watch Times Now, and in the morning they are back at work. If they make love, one devout eye will be directed motherwards.
They will carry out what their bosses say to their utmost, and so life will go on in a robotic cycle of quiet copulation, birth, work and death. These things will happen in utter silence. No one will be unhappy, because everyone is working on his future. The model is one of order, and society is command-driven. This is what Prime Minister Narendra Modi believes happiness is. This is also what Modi thinks a typical Indian wants. Economic security. As far as he is concerned, that translates into a separation of people from politics.
The conflict that he and his rather mythological cohorts are facing is precisely because the reality of India is too chaotic for the superimposition of that model. As a result, the Modi government seems always surprised that it is with Mother India while Kanhaiya or Rohith aren’t.
The government believes it is acting in the interests of Mother India, when actually the state is perceived as oppressive by the youth who at one time had allowed itself to be seduced by the hope that Modi had held out. And on the ground, the politics of that hope has taken an ugly dimension which people like Rajnath Singh and his thuggish army of bhakts are exploiting.
This is not to defend the Congress, which hanged Afzal Guru in a frenzy of secret moves, or the Left, ably misled by TV revolutionaries like Sitaram Yechury.
The so-called secular space that they vacated because of their incompetence and general lack of historical direction is why people like Rajnath are in power. It’s a default space. With men like Rajnath working their jabs, what’s made in India is likely to die in India by the next general elections. And I see Mother India wearing jeans and T-shirt by that time.