HOW MANY SEAS MUST A WHITE DOVE SAIL..
The bloodlust in our minds is also the heady lust of power and the end of imagination. Barbarism is an eternal document of civilisation
Certainly, it is not the end of ideology in contemporary India. In contrast, it is yet again the beginning of an old ideology: like the Nazis burning books while singing a robust militarist song. However, if the dominant discourse is any indication, and it is a tangible and transparent indication, it sure seems like the end of imagination and free thought.
Across the spectrum, especially the ruling spectrum, now spreading its onedimensional discourse and flames of desire across the landscape, from UP to Goa, to Manipur. By hook or crook, mostly so brazen that even legendary German writer and thinker, Bertolt Brecht’s prophesy of infinite hope might not come true. Wrote Brecht, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times.”
Will there be singing and poetry and cinema about dark times
If there is a siege, it is there for all to see. It is the uncanny silence of the graveyard. Everyone is waiting for Godot. Not only because meat shops are burnt and razed to ground at Hathras, or a famous chicken dish is allegedly branded as beef in Jaipur, with open violence as a classical symphony, which accompanies these forms of ethnic cleansing, the victory in UP of the BJP has been heralded by moral policing of girls and boys in public spaces, even a couple of friends who were out there to watch a movie, were hounded out in full public display. Acche din? Globalised India?
This is exactly what the Shiv Sena and other fanatics would do with couples during the Valentine’s Day, year after year. Clearly, vigilantism is the flavour of the season, and both free movement and free thought, least of all love, affection and friendship, are under siege, as our cuisines and cultures of food
A film is not allowed by the censor boards, other films are too stopped by fanatics of another spectrum, a seminar is violently stopped in Delhi University, students and teachers are openly bashed up by ruling party stormtroopers while the cops play footsie, professors are banned from speaking at Freedom Square in JNU, a FIR is filed against an eminent academic in Jodhpur based on flimsy charges, research positions for student candidates are drastically cut, cow vigilantes attack Dalits and Muslims, the Dadri phenomena comes back like a bad omen and a bad dream turned bitter realism, the prophets of hate speech now hold top positions, and it is a free for all for those who care a damn for public decorum or constitutional propriety, least of all, the space for contrary opinions, democratic discussions and freedom to dissent. On both sides of the fence there are fanatics; on this side of the fence, they are flexing their muscles because they are now driving the power machine from Delhi, now Lucknow. The State apparatus is in their hands, so democracy can go get damned.
You can be branded an anti-national at the drop of a hat, and you might be asked to go to Pakistan if you don’t agree with war, and pitch for dialogue and peace. You can even be branded a Maoist, terrorist and ISIS/ISI agent, for no rhyme or reason, with not an iota of objectivity or evidence. Even while the media mostly (except rare options) chooses to toe a sensational and prejudiced line, dumping both media ethics and journalistic principles in the dump yard of history, while full-scale propaganda and outright lies replace the sanctity of both truth and news. And there is never a corrigendum, a note of regret, a statement that we did do character assassination, that we were short on evidence, that the editors went wrong, we apologise. It is a circus which is as crass and perverse as it gets.
Pray, if the universities will not debate on life and society, and if the media will shut all the windows of enlightenment and enquiry, and if the streets and public spaces can’t have couples or friends walking in harmony; or, if we are all forced to turn veggie (or non-vegetarian), and if all chicken is called beef, then, truly, for India, the chickens have finally come home to roost. Surely, even Ram would feel discomfort in this promised ‘Ram Rajya’, and, surely, so would have Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar, if not Tagore and the other greats of the great Indian landscape.
Surely, this is another mirror image of a certain vicious Talibanisation of society, as in parts of Pakistan and middle-east, where a Malala is attacked because she wants to go to school, or polio workers are killed because they are branded as foreign agents, and men are routinely beheaded because of this reason or that. Sufi dargahs are attacked, hundreds of people, singing Sufi songs, or dancing in a ‘dhamal’ are murdered in cold blood, and no one can imagine anything apart from what the jehadi extremists would want them to believe. Bloodlust. Ethnic cleansing. Barbarism.
In many ways, we are becoming Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’, trapped in ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ turning into some kind of a pseudo-nuclear winter of the mind with acid rain about to fall, where the flowers are refusing to bloom, turning radioactive and carnivorous, and tall, green trees have shrunken to decimated dwarfs. The war cry is the last refuge of the nationalist. Become pure, like extremist warriors. Make war, don’t make love.
The cold comfort of extremism and fanaticism, backed by sheer power and brute force, might propagate a new form of unilateral ideology. However, it will never succeed in creating flights of imagination, or the great leap forward, which can only emerge from the tortuous bylanes of selfintrospection and collective pluralism and discourse. From the spirit of that famous doctrine: That I might disagree with you, but I will fight for your right to express your opinion
Adolf Hitler used a thousand terrible lies to make it appear a truth – and what happened to human civilisation? Millions gas chambered or mass murdered in the holocaust. The wars by the West in the middle east, looking for oil for blood, found no WMDs, not one weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. They chose their own favourite dictators and democrats. They unleashed drones and cluster bombs. Whatever happened, then, to Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’?
Hundreds of thousands butchered, exiled, condemned, turned into graveyards of dead installations, forced into trafficking and sex slavery, left at sea to die as refugees, with tragedies running like Pablo Neruda’s poetry: Come and see the blood on the streets, come and see the blood on the streets, come and see the blood on the streets.
The bloodlust in our minds is also the heady lust of power and the end of imagination. Barbarism is an eternal document of civilisation. In Stalin’s pathological time, trapped in the Cold War, apart from the death and labour camps in Siberia and the mass purges and murders of comrades and allies, a great poet disappeared from the face of the earth because, in a state of being tipsy, he recited a spoofy poem on Stalin. The BJP might hate the communists, but will they allow a spoofy poem as a caricature of their great helmsman?
In all probability, no. The communists did not allow Taslima Nasreen in Bengal, as did the Congress ban Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’, and so was Rahul Dholakia’s ‘Parzania’ not allowed to be screened in Gujarat. Even Wendy Doniger’s book, ‘The Hindus: An Alternative History’ was pulped by a leading publisher, only because of a certain Hindutva ‘intellectual’ with a rather warped and unscientific view of history, did not like the book. As is the case with a new movie by Sanjay Leela Bhansali: it’s the mob which calls the shots. And, without even reading the book, or watching the movie, perhaps. The less you read, the more you are. The more you hate, the best you are.
It’s like saying, “I don’t know your views, but I will not allow you to express your views.” It’s like Beethoven being banned during the cultural revolution in China, and, when the peaceful students put it up at Tiananmen Square (‘Ode to Joy’) in June 1984, the tanks came rolling in. At this rate, perhaps Bob Dylan will one day not be heard on the campuses of the world, and in pubs and bars, and Tagore’s ‘Where the head is held high’ will be replaced by a song in praise of cow urine. Indeed, with all the prophetic qualities of cow urine, how can a society survive on just one liquid as magic realism?