No country that I know installs as many women as goddesses and deities as we do in India, that is Bharat.
And, yet, it is hard to claim that we accord to their physical autonomy, their intellect, their aspirations—in sum, their totality as equal citizens and human beings the respect that is their right. Indeed, often their insistence on being themselves drives many to rape and murder, no less than the male of the species in countries that do not deify women in their mythologies.
Look where you will, and such dualities surface as a principle defining feature of our historical and current lived experience.
No wonder then that India is home to two sorts of definition of the concept “people.”
There are the sovereign “we the people” inscribed in the Preamble to our republican constitution, and there are the people who trudge the long and dreary highways of our nation, without food, water, shelter, medicine, or money, and at the mercy of the state-apparatus along the way.
So, when the sansculottes wish to return home, no mode of public transport is available to them. But when a running train cuts them into smithereens, trains are available to convey their body parts to wherever it be. And whereas no moneys may be given to them as they struggle for existence, once dead, governments may make moneys available to their kin as benevolent recompense.
As we do with our women, we valorize our people generally most when they are securely absent and invisible from the concerns that concern them only as menials on demand.
Just to note: when it comes to repatriating endowed Indians from other countries, planes, ships, trains are all at hand. And bunching is no problem.
Like the female deities whom we propitiate on one occasion or another, we propitiate “we the people” when there is need to legitimize whatever it is that the ruling classes wish to accomplish. And when things go wrong, of course the women are responsible and the people are disobedient, if not rebellious, and a danger to public order.
Suddenly, they come to form no part of the “public” we invoke, but are pushed back into the labels that the concrete arrangements of a class state and society require.
That a just “order” is precisely what these disenfranchised millions look for is not a thought we may entertain. They are promptly reminded of the great benevolence of the state and its corporate owners who decree schemes of unconscionable opulence for them (Jan Dhan yojana, Ujjwala Yojana, plus wage-work at great cost no doubt to national and corporate coffers), expecting, in thankful return, that they may never seek their enshrined prerogatives as the enabling drivers of the constitutional state as “we the people,” or begin to demand an “order of things” commensurate with their deified place in the Preamble of our Constitution.
Indeed news comes that various ministries of government are being asked to collate the bounties they have bestowed on these ungrateful millions, so as a booklet may be floated to inform the nation at large of the pro-poor predilections of the state (https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/coronavirus-centre-preps-image-correction-exercise-to-blunt-criticism-over-migrants-2226228).
How tragically removed such self-satisfaction is from the imperishable thoughts and admonition of a disinherited King Lear, when, stranded without shelter in a storm, he agonises as follows:
Poor, naked wretches wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads,
Your undefended sides, your looped
And windowed raggedness
Be protected from seasons such as these?
Take physic, Pomp, expose thyself
To feel what wretches feel,
That thou may shake the superflux
To them, and prove the heavens more just.
O, I have taken too little care of this.
Contrary to taking “physic,” our Pomp of state seems always only choke-full of self-congratulation at the non-existent consideration it shows to “we the people.”
Did not the French cultural theorist, Jaque Derrida, underscore the concrete truth (against the fake metaphysics) that the hallowed Ideals in whose name we float our systems of dominance are actually “always already” “absent” in real life. Thus we invoke the gods but practice grossly ungodly things, proving thereby that the gods are always already absent; we deify women but treat them like creatures, proving thereby that the deification is always a sleight-of-hand; homilies about how the world is one big family go hand in hand with the most elemental forms of inter-sectional hate and violence, suggesting how the so-called universal family is an ideological tool; we put a halo around “we the people” but, at bottom, value them as the Utilitarian parlance of early industrial capitalism valued them—not as human beings but “Hands,” required for discrete jobs on a conveyor belt, and herded in ghettos and slums. And then, in times of pandemic, held guilty for not observing “social distance” in six feet by six feet tenements where one toilet services thousands and where there is no water to drink, let alone for decreed hand-washing.
As India’s migrant workers trudge from end to end of our geography—pregnant women with babes in tow, old people with pitiful bundles on their backs, hard-working young men and women who, invisibly, in “normal times,” run the engines of production—the mask of Pomp seems in tatters, looking for alibis and excuses for its “inability” or unwillingness to direct the urgent attention of the state to “we the people.” Indeed, it also turns out that these millions must be held in bondage and denied their fundamental right to travel as they like for fear they may not return to restart the mechanisms of the production of wealth for the lords of the realm.
Nor, if Justice Deepak Gupta (just retired from the Supreme Court) is to be believed, is our justice system anywhere close to the reach of these sansculottes (https://scroll.in/latest/961263/indias-legal-system-favours-the-rich-and-powerful-says-retiring-supreme-court-judge); and only a few conscientious voices in the media available for recording their predicament.
And India’s elite who remain safely ensconced in gated societies and bungalows complain of boredom at the circumstance that such media channels should spend so much footage on the sight of the underclass on the march, as if they mattered beyond a gesture or two. Indeed, many can be heard in cosy groups to mutter how the sufferings of the sansculottes a have karmic roots in their previous lives. Always to remember that if and when the elite suffer any sorts of discomfort, karmic thoughts have no role there, but are attributable wholly to faulty government policies for which somebody somewhere must be held accountable on the trot. Not so in the case of the migrant labour who currently suffer an unprecedented odyssey of pain and dismemberment.
Even as other voices in civil society who draw attention to their inordinate and inhuman plight are viewed with the suspicion that they may be laced with an intent to destabilise the state (https://indianexpress.com/article/india/supreme-court-justice-deepak-gupta-virtual-farewell-6397441/).
It must also be noted that the extreme conditions spawned by the coronavirus have only unraveled a reality that has been with us always, only ameliorated from time to time by governments in unseen drips and drops in order to keep the masses from famine. Never mind that India has the largest numbers of malnourished and stunted children—a silent and conveniently invisible form of slow death. The abstract nature of our self-perception as a nation prevents any dent to be made in our national pride by the fact that even Bangladesh, other neighbouring countries, and many countries in sub-saharan Africa are ahead of us in most human development indices. (https://thewire.in/government/narendra-modi-govt-world-bank-human-capital-index) The concrete is always either spun into obfuscation, or propagated as fake.
None of which has in recent years deterred hundreds of thousands of indigent members of the farming community from self-slaughter, since loans taken even from authorized banks and financial institutions (not just private loan sharks) show them no mercy. The munificence of these state institutions remains reserved only for the fat-cats who may carry on taking without returning. And then mysteriously exit the country into afe havens abroad.
Our democracy clearly belongs to the one percent who own some seventy percent of our national wealth—a fact of life that the coronavirus has cruelly brought to the fore.
Nor is this reality any very different, for example, in what is often referred to as the world’s “oldest” democracy, where, as we write, some thirty three million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits. There too the one percent owns some seventy percent of national wealth; yet, despite being the most forthright market economy in the world, does not pooh pooh the misery of the dispossessed, but keeps institutional safety nets in place. We, however, in the “largest” and morally high-minded “civilizational” democracy (with “socialist” inscribed in the Preamble to our Constitution) have no use for things like institutionalised succor for those rendered penurious, hungry, outcast. Imagine that in the world’s richest country, the most agonizing debates during election times centre around national health care. India, on the other hand, continues to spend a shameful pittance on national health, and almost never debates the issue.
It is enough that we have once and for all enshrined “we the people:” in the Preamble, and genuflect to the idea from a canny time to a canny time.
Interestingly, now on May 12, when so much migrant labour sweat and blood has flown down the highways, when so many have died in seeking to return to their loved ones in their hinterland homes, the honourable prime minister has announced a package of twenty lakh crore rupees to put the country back on the rails.
The details so far furnished suggest that there is next to nothing there for the sansculottes, and no moneys proposed to boost the demand side of the crashed economy, only stimuli, predictably, for the more endowed among the “small and medium scale enterprises”. Direct cash transfers to the destitute, recommended by the best economic thinkers, Pickety included, form no part of the “package” the prime minister has announced.
Is it conceivable that even as the virus, acquired and circulated for the most part by the traveling elite, has brought our “people” such misery, it may also inaugurate a new recognition of their worth and place in the our national life, obliging a new listening post that may cause reformations and reformulations in our state and social organizations?
Is it likely that, after an aborted civil mobilization (before corona came in handy to the rulers) on the question of citizenship principles (CAA, NRC) India may witness a renewed mass assertion issuing from the experience of the destitution now under way?
Such speculations are indeed now rife in many parts of the afflicted globe, but may not yield any far-reaching transformations in the world order. Indeed, it is to be much feared that a contrary circumstance may take greater hold, wherein the authorities that are in place will seek more authority, and be even less tolerant of ideas critical of how the abominable greed of the few has thus far devastated the earth-order. The improvements we have seen in environmental indices—blue skies, blue waters, cleaner air—may again be set to turn red, except in select areas like Germany and Scandinavia who remain more sensitive in this regard.
Yet, opinion may be ventured that, however, the capitalist order may seek to return to business-as-usual, such a return may no longer be free of challenges fiercer than before and, ideologically far more truculent.
Who knows where the trudge of the Indian sansculottes will lead the republic, even as their own lives are in precarious balance.
There, after all, must be a limit to how far our abstractions may carry us.
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