By Shiv Visvanathan
India as a society is selective about its responses to violence. Some forms of violence like a caste atrocity or a riot, a rape or a slum demolition hardly create a ripple. Human rights activists can cry hoarse and yet life goes on as if the events were invisible. Yet there is another kind of event that sends tremors that amplify the event from a local incident to a national debate, even a global debate.
The recent events at Mangalore where a Sri Ram Sene composed of goons, beat up, harassed, young people having a good time in a pub is an example. This event was reminiscent of similar incidents in Meerut, where vigilante gangs harassed boys and girls sitting together in a park.
The media was outraged. The Congress MP, Renuka Chowdhury, led the fray claiming that it was sign of Talibanisation and demanded immediate action. Chowdhury’s reaction was a healthy one but her analysis a trifle overstretched. The Taliban are a global force committed to jihad. Surely these goons beating women could be hardly compared to “just warriors”. What was intriguing was not only the event but the response. It was a middle class performance where people sitting in a pub felt their rights had been violated and people attacking them felt their culture had been threatened. Things turned even quainter when politicians attacked “holding hands” as anti-culture.
Culture is a strange word, used as a pawn in a whole series of political moves.
The old story does not work here. When Goebbels said, “when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron responded, “When I hear the guns, I reach for my culture”.
In India, the word ‘culture’ is used in a variety of ways. Culture refers to an identity, an umbilical chord, an epidermis, a pretext for rationalising behaviour, and an everyday habit. It is a second skin. But politicised, it has a different meaning. The historical dictum that nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels can be extended to culture, which has become the last refuge of every goon wishing to join politics.
It creates an immediate constituency. It has become part of a new security discourse, where Indian culture, like Indian territory, is threatened every day. So the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena and its clones, the Sri Ram Sene have become cultural security experts. They have a dual role.
They are the alleged victims and also a Kangaroo court effecting immediate “justice”.
Paradoxically, every code of civility we value is violated in this defence of “culture”.
This is not Talibanisation; it is to use a less facile word, the new goonification of public spaces in India.
The park and pub are probably the two public spaces easily available for younger people. Both get disciplined in the name of an imaginary “public” and an imagined “culture”. Let us not dub this as moral policing, a variant of the thought police made legendary by Orwell in 1984. Policing in India is a strange function. Parents, neighbours, peer groups, the crowd, all police you. In fact, policing is performed in India by everyone except police. So moral policing is misleading because it is not an act of censorship. What one witnessed is plain brutality justified in terms of half-baked politics. Beyond exclusion and negation these parties have no programme.
Brutality and philistinism appear to be their only axioms.
Their tactics are similar, the branding segmented. The Shiv Sena prefers Valentine’s Day, the Bajrang Dal, parks, the Ram Sene pubs and malls. It is a lumpen response to globalisation by those who feel repressed or left out. Let us dub this syndrome “pub envy”. What does it represent? It allows for sexual assault and physical harm of those labelled as different. The odds are stacked. It is a bully culture, philistine to core, with a sense of machismo whose juices flow after assaulting “forward looking woman”. The message is clear “the backward” looking ones are safe and hopefully sound.
There are warning bells we need to listen to. Where is this new political correctness, this philistinism in the name of culture leading up to? Let us be clear. There is a sense of the Indian body feeling more liberated.
Our youth are freer, easier, celebrating a society where socialism had once repressed the body and the body politic.
Today they are more hedonist, more guiltless about enjoyment. The mall, the pub and the park became a substitute for the exclusiveness of the club.
But in this clash, there is restricted notion of freedom meeting a narrow notion of culture. The idea of freedom is of consumption and privacy. Pub culture provides an ecology to those who can afford it. Pub culture is not quite public culture.
It does not provide a generalised notion of freedom. On the other hand, when a Gehlot or a Yediyurappa talks of culture, they talk of a conservative tradition, the codes, the mores of a middle class which restrained the body, and frowns at the ease with which the sexes meet today. This culture is also not shared. It is coercive and disciplinary rather than a shared language of creativity. In creating an opposition between pub culture and culture, they are expressing a hostility to these new modes of consumption and freedom. The danger lies in the fundamentalist and pompous conviction that violence is required to protect this “culture”.
We face a clash of two limited ideas of culture both claiming a set of virtues. If one claims “freedom” the other claims “duty” and “tradition”. Both are ersatz ideas of culture. Both need a hearing as long as they avoid violence. In fact it is violence that enfeebles the sena idea of culture. The sena idea of politics is what needs to be challenged. Whether as Ram Sene or Shiv Sena, its politics is illiterate and it sees violence as the answer to any dissenting, ethnic, marginal group asserting itself. The police, who probably share these values, watch in complicity. Only the media’s sense of outrage creates it as an event. To legislate on morals and aesthetics through such violence is futile.
The real issue is that India is moving to a mix of political correctness and intolerance, marked by violence. What is worrying is this pervasive use of violence to handle pickpockets, protesting workers, political Dalits, women, tribals, any group claiming justice, freedom and fairness.
Both express forms of repression, an envy of any form of desire or freedom. What one sees as a result is a loss of political creativity.
That is the real sadness. Violence or the microclimates of violence are ignored under discussions of freedom, consumption, youth or culture. Gehlot is right in saying pub culture produces its resentments and Yediyurappa, correct, in calling it a law and order problem. But both miss a simple truth. The fact is that their exoneration of violence threatens all forms of culture. The tragedy is that no one wants to face this.
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