This column sought to ask a question last week in the light of the Durga Shakti Nagpal imbroglio: In the name of empowerment and social justice, have we set aside the core principles by which any half-decent society or civilisation ought to functionIJ For the second time in two weeks, I wish to address the question, but with greater frankness and less bashfulness.
India never came close to a Marxist revolution (not even half way close!), but perhaps it should have. As it is, our entire politco-economic philosophy is founded on redistributing wealth to end poverty, and social empowerment to end ages-old discrimination. In short, we have adopted Marxian minus the concomitant discipline and scientific methodology. This gives us what we have — a criminal political class that can brazen out the most perfidious act of public indecency. Nothing that anybody can say even mildly affects the big-faced, scruffy-looking acolytes of Akhilkesh Yadav who have been heaping themselves like loose sand on TV shows to defend the shameless suspension of Nagpal. When goons with wilful disregard for the Constitution, let alone institutions, begin to come on national TV and cock a snook at popular opinion, I think we have to believe we have reached an inflection point.
This brings us to the point about the desirability of a socialist revolution in India. Marxian ideas about equality and redistribution of economic rights are systematically laid out. Thelittle Red Book, which so many revolutionaries have carried in the past, was meant to encapsulate Mao’s revolutionary utterance on just about everything — it was like a ready reference for revolutionary principles. What is being emphasised here is that Marxist revolutions have been based on method and science. Marx envisioned stages of the economy and changing modes of, and access to means of, production, along the axis of history. The greatest challenge in all of this was the empowerment of the proletariat. Being weak and marginalised, the toiling masses were a problem. Many things may have been wrong with communism (especially as it has been practised in country after country), but at least an attempt was made to educate, empower and politically enlighten the masses. Yes, individual freedoms of the bourgeois classes were taken away, but the unwashed masses were given a real stake in society.
What we are witnessing in India is the systematic erasure of the professional politician (yes, even the professional politician), and his replacement by goons, strong-armed middlemen and the mafia, and netajis of various inflexions (though singularly devoted to self-aggrandisement and loot). Social empowerment (like secularism) has become a slogan for lumpen mobilisation, which in turn serves as a counter force for constitutionalism, and institutionalised authority. In case you find this too metaphorical, here is the real thing.
Nagpal, a constitutional (in the broadest sense) authority, doing her job according to the law (Supreme Court order on encroachment on public land), and with honesty and sincerity (laudable goals for those who believe in civil society), is struck down by the mining mafia and a crass and lumpenised political class which could not care a damn. If at all there is a mistake in the analysis here, it is the assumption that the mafia and the political class are two different entities.
But working the sectarian press, and planting the bogey of communal harmony, these too clever by half political scrappers somehow believe they can get away with doing what they want. Their constituency cares two hoots about propriety. What they want to hear is Netaji did an IAS officer in. like the redoubtable Naresh Agarwal recently observed: “The powerful do not hesitate. They act. That is real power. let others think about it.” This pithy paraphrase with Nietzschean overtones sets the note for the rest of India.
Our masses have been infantilised to serve the interests of powerful entities. Entities that have empowered themselves through patronage derived from emergent power relations in the margins of social and political discourse. There is only one way India is headed. Nagpal’s is not the last head to roll before the altar of our lumpenised political order.