Implication of the surge of lumpens as a force in India's public spaces will be a dangerous phenomenon that will have serious implications for the future of India
In the midst of the controversy over the lynchings, which are criminal, abominable and absolutely condemnable acts, the societal phenomenon underlying these have received insufficient attention. It is the rise of lumpens as a force in India’s public spaces. Three questions arise here. Why are the lynchers considered lumpensIJ How have the lumpens come to enjoy the salience and the free run they enjoy in IndiaIJ What does their emergence as a force mean for India’s futureIJ
One must begin answering the first question by examining what ‘lumpen’ stands for. The word owes its currency to the use of the expression lumpenproletariat by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. In German, ‘lumpen’ literally means ‘rags’ and the expression, the ‘proletariat of rags.’ In his book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of louis Napoleon, Marx viewed this class as comprising the lowest strata of the proletariat — social scum whose ranks included tramps, vagabonds, criminals of various kinds, who neither identified themselves with the working class nor participated in their revolutionary struggles. Marx and Engels distrusted these elements as their parasitical ways life tended to make them act as “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”
The word has since then been used by many others and its meaning has widened to include elements from all classes. Paul Baran used the term lumpenbougeoisie in his book, The Political Economy of Growth (1957), to describe mainly middle and upper-class elements — merchants, lawyers, journalists — with little collective self-awareness or economic base, who supported their colonial masters. Andre Gunder Frank used it in lumpenbourgeoisie: lumpendevelopment; Dependence, Class, And Politics In latin America (1972) to denote latin America’s comprador bourgeoisie which worked with imperialists to keep the economies of their countries stunted and under-developed.
In India, the ranks of the lumpens include not only the unemployed but several categories of rootless, alienated people including members of the lower-middle and middle classes like small shop keepers and/or lower and middle level employees of public and private institutions. Whatever their class backgrounds, an important common attribute of lumpens is a lack of awareness of, and commitment to, values like respect for life, others’ right to live as they want to, and a sense of honour.
Another is cowardice. They invariably act in groups when indulging in violence or intimidation or just bullying people.
One calls lynchers lumpens because they act like lumpens — operating in groups while killing or assaulting people — almost invariably Muslims suspected of eating, keeping or carrying beef or taking cattle for slaughter — or looting or causing public disorder. They also comprise human categories that constitute lumpen groups mentioned above. They have emerged as a virtually ubiquitous force in the country because of several reasons, one being a steep increase in their numbers.
This, again, is the result of a massive population growth annually pushing hundreds of thousands of new people into the job market which, despite India’s rapidly growing economy, can only absorb a fraction of them. The situation is made worse by the pattern of India’s growth, which is capital and technology — and not employment-intensive. Hence, employment generation is not commensurate with the pace of growth. Besides it has also conduced to an expansion of manufacture and stagnation in agriculture, triggering migration from rural to urban areas in search of livelihood.
The marginal lives the migrants lead in cities, and even expanding district towns as part of a mass of faceless and atomised humanity, powerless and without an individual identity, makes them resentful of the existing order and other social groups and wanting an identity and a feeling of power. Being part of a lumpen group gives them an identity derived from its name. It also enables them to get a feeling of power by intimidating others. If they are cow vigilantes in northern India, they are Maharashtra Navnirman Sena goons assaulting taxi drivers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in Mumbai or Trinamool Congress hoodlums attacking their party’s opponents in West Bengal or Hindu Sena activists tormenting couples in Bengaluru bars.
The conduct of such elements owes much to their being outside the moral orbit of their villages and the gaze of their community and elders which made them tread carefully at home. In cities, they have much greater scope for acting as they want to, and the nature of their conduct reflects the alarming decline in the country’s collective morality resulting from an erosion of the authority of religion-based ethics following a steep corrosion of allegiance to religions themselves. A cause of this has been economic growth through competitive private enterprise which generates a compulsion to succeed and maximise profit, which leads to sharp practices.
The most horrific manifestation of the phenomenon was the famine that killed an estimated total of 1.5 to three million people in undivided Bengal Province in British India in 1943. It was entirely man-made, a result as much of the greed and perfidy of traders and hoarders as British policies during World War II which were so amenable to manipulation by these elements as to suggest that they were crafted especially for their benefit at the cost of mass starvation and starvation-linked deaths.
The second was the large-scale slaughter and atrocities that preceded and accompanied independence and partition in1947. The two combined to undermine the authority of religion which was seen as incapable of the preventing such massive explosions of inhumanity and criminality. As it is, the post-Renaissance and Enlightenment culture of skepticism and inquiry had eroded the phenomenon of unquestioned faith in religion. While its impact was directly and most widely felt in the West, in India, it influenced articulate sections of the educated middle and upper classes, from whom it filtered down to sections of the masses in a climate of pervasive cynicism and immorality on the ground.
Unfortunately, the secular and humanist morality that has replaced religion-based morality in the West, has not spread in India for lack of propagation and institutional support, as well as insufficient spread of education and literacy, which has hindered its internalisation by a significant section of the population. As a result, India tends to becoming a moral no-man’s-land, a fertile ground for the rise of lumpens, whose emergence is also facilitated patronage from most political parties. They make good storm troopers.
As to the third question, relating to the implications of the surge of lumpens as a force in India, the result will be increasingly widespread violence and undermining of the country’s constitutional democracy. Violence and intimidation are scripted into the DNAs of lumpen groups. Spread unchecked, these can lead to a situation like Hitler’s Germany where both the rank-and-file and leaders of the SA and SS, both Nazi hoodlum formations, were lumpens. Political parties patronising lumpen groups and armies need to bear this in mind.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
