The Secular Riddle: Why Nandakumar Kamat Loved Bal Thackeray

For those who heaved a sigh of relief at the news of the death of Bal Thackeray, the response to his death was deeply agitating. Not merely politicians, but it appears the big names of Bollywood and sundry journalists seemed to be bend over backwards to pay compliments to a man who while doubtlessly a significant leader to members and partisans of the Shiv Sena, was responsible for much death and violence (not merely physical and material but discursive violence as well) in Bombay city and across those spaces in the country where his rhetoric had appeal. Of this violence, there has been not so much as a whisper in these accolades. It was pretty much in this vein that Nandakumar Kamat’s response in the Navhind Times to Thackeray’s death was crafted.

To a large extent, the writings of Nandakumar Kamat represent the perspective of the educated middle class segments of our society that imagine themselves to be secular. There are a number of interesting blindspots to their secularism however, that indicate the troubled nature of their commitment to, or understanding of, this virtue of contemporary democracy. It is for this reason that Kamat’s scripting of “Why Maharashtra Loved Bal Thackeray” needs to be reviewed.

Kamat’s eulogy to Thackeray, and let us make no mistake that his article is a eulogy, begins with an interesting insight into Kamat’s understanding of democracy. While a large number of Bomaicars were quite agitated by the decision to hold Thackeray’s cremation in Shivaji Park, Kamat justifies this decision by suggestion that the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan “was just bowing to the wishes of the people.” Kamat is clearly indicating here, his understanding of democracy, not as the rule of law over all people, or of democracy as the system that ensures the protection of the minority, but of democracy as majoritarian rule. This fascistic edge to Kamat’s eulogy unfortunately only deepens when he then goes on to evaluate Thackeray’s success in terms of his apparent appeal to the “grass-roots.” Masses and majority, these are two critical elements of fascism and there is not so much as a whimper of disagreement in Kamat’s essay.

In his eulogy, Kamat makes but a coy reference to Thackeray’s politics of intimidation and violence. He suggests that these politics were “basically the fear of demographic and cultural dilution followed by economic and political marginalization which creates a regional backlash in any state.” Thus Kamat is suggesting that the violent actions of the Shiv Sena were the result of the Maharashtrian inhabitants, who have first dibs on the city, feeling marginalized. Indeed this sugar-coating of a deeply problematic man’s poisonous, and avoidable legacy is carried further when Kamat suggests that Thackeray was a hero because he was able to, speaking “from his heart” give space for the Marathi middle class “looking for some respect, identity and recognition” a sense of “Maharashtrian cultural pride”.

Kamat has gotten his facts grievously mixed up however. He forgets that the borders of contemporary Maharashtra were forged recently, in 1960, as a result of the reorganization of the Bombay state into the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. Prior to this there were cultural boundaries to Marathi territory, and unlike other parts of contemporary Maharashtra that could possibly claim a unchallenged identification with just one language, the city of Bombay was never a part of this wholly Maharashtrian cultural community. The city of Bombay forged its own cultural space, being the home of the East Indians, Parsis, Gujaratis (who in 1960 even claimed Bombay for their own state), Goans, Italians, Arabs, Persians, Britishers and of course the Portuguese, to name just a few. If today Bombay can be unproblematicaly be seen as Maharashtrian territory, it is because Thackeray was able to, subsequent to the 1960 inclusion of Bombay city as a part of the State of Maharashtra, craft Bombay as an exclusively Maharashtrian city through his politics of violence. Indeed, the Maratha and Marathi, were and are, as much migrants to the city of Bombay as any of the other groups that Kamat so condescendingly dismisses as “non Marathi migrants in Mumbai who have made the megapolis their permanent home.”

I would argue that Kamat gets his facts mixed up because he looks at the issue from another fascistic perspective, which is to see the world as naturally composed of monolithic cultural communities born when language and territory overlap. In the present case it could be Maharashtra and Marathi, but it could just as well be Goa and Konkani. It is because Kamat is sympathetic to this parochial (mildly racist even) view of the world, that he is able to make sense of, and justify, Thackeray’s politics. It is for this reason that Kamat does not see the complex history of Bombay, and restricts himself only to Maharashtrian history from “original Marathi sources” when attempting to understand and put forth the case of Balasaheb Thackeray.

There is no doubt that Balasaheb Thackeray was able to capitalize on the angst of the Marathi Hindu middle-class and dominant caste groups. However we have to be able to see that these groups do not, nor did they necessarily ever, have any primary right to the city of Bombay, nor indeed in the rest of Maharashtra (in the latter case they would have to necessarily share space with non-dominant caste groups). In the case of Bombay city, the Marathi migrants were merely one more set of migrants that through a stroke of fate gained dubious claim to first dibs on the city in the state carved out on racist lines. Further, we have to recognize that Thackeray’s politics of violence, is not the only way to deal with the “fear of demographic and cultural dilution” and “economic and political marginalization” that Kamat refers to. Indeed, Kamat himself points to the fact that Thackeray was vociferously against the democratic strategies that seek to negotiate economic and cultural marginalization outlined in the Mandal Commission Report.

The last issue that needs to be addressed in Kamat’s eulogy is his muffling of the strident Hindu nationalism that lay at the core of Thackeray’s rhetoric.  It is perhaps in this realm that the problematic nature of Kamat’s secularism comes across. Rather than acknowledge that there is a profound problem with Hindu nationalism, he seems to join those “secular” nationalist who seek to justify all but the most violent of Hindutva’s manifestations. Thus, Veer Savarkar, the possible mastermind of the Gandhi assassination, and leader of the Hindu Right, is presented merely as a “great Hindu nationalist and reformer”. There is also something of a dismissal of those who aware of Thackeray and the Shiv Sena’s Hindu nationalist history saw in the huge turnout at the funeral a “Hindu backlash”. More sophisticated social science research points out that conscious action is not everything. Groups very often unconsciously follow patterns that have been established. Thus there need not have to be a conscious effort to demonstrate Hindu power, Thackeray and the Shiv Sena spent decades making sure their every action was justified in terms of the rightful assertion of Hindu power. Furthermore, the stories of the forcible shutting down of shops, of extra-legal curfews policed by youth carrying saffron flags speak volumes about the death of Thackeray being used as one more example of the assertion of Hindu power.  Kamat’s silence on this front and his muffling of the strident Hindu nationalist positions of the Shiv Sena are deeply disturbing. They are disturbing because of one, or a combination of three possible reasons; he does not see Hindu nationalism as problematic, he is unaware of that Hindu nationalist violence is possible because of the silence which routinely greets it, or because it is assumed to be the work of lumpen lower class Hindu elements that can easily be held in check by upper-caste leaders. All three are profoundly erroneous.

Kamat’s eulogy to Bal Thackeray is deeply troubling because it indicated an acceptance of political violence directed by authoritarian leaders directing mobs, where rights seem to belong first to the people of the land, and then to those persons labeled as migrants. These migrants could be randomly defined on the basis of religion, language, caste or territory. These are signs of merely a superficial commitment to democracy and secularism. Bal Thackeray may have passed on, but his legacy it appears, may still linger on.

Goans should read essays such as "Why Maharashtra Loved Bal Thackeray" only with the greatest of circumspection. This is because, in the light of the demands for 'Special Status' such essays are softening up the public opinion for the kind of horrendous changes that Bal Thackeray wrought on Bombay. A good many Goans may believe that they are being marginalized in their own land, but the Thackeray route is not solution, since it will not address the needs of the truly marginalized within Goa, and it will be built on a Hindu majoritarianism, cleverly disguised as was the result of the Konkani language movement. No, Bal Thackeray, and Special Status, despite what many fondly believe, are not the response to Goa's challenges.

Rules of Engagement: When People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy

Following close on the heels of the close of elections, the link to an article, with a rather disturbing suggestion, found its way into my inbox. “Democratic elections” it suggested, “produce mediocre leadership and policies.” This startling assertion was made a Prof. David Dunning, psychologist at Cornell University, whose research apparently demonstrated that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas.”  Prof. Dunning is represented as having argued that given that most people do not have the mental tools to make meaningful judgments, “no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. His final cut was even worse, where he suggested that "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is".

One could agree with Prof. Dunning to a limited extent. Most people do not in fact possess the mental tools to recognize the sophistication of certain ideas. Thus they simply fail to see these ideas, and address these ideas at the most basic level. But we will come to this point later. The first point we need to deal with is the basic flaw in Prof. Dunning’s work, which is that "The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it.” This may be one of the arguments for direct democracy, but it is not a foundational argument for democracy that rests on the idea that every person must have a say in the way they are to be governed. The work of people like Dunning is part of an elitist and rightist move, prevalent the world over, and also visible in Goa and India, where we would like to restrict the role that ‘the people’ and their legitimately elected representatives play in democracy on the grounds that they are ‘uneducated’ ‘unqualified’ or such like. We would rather have persons who are ‘educated’ and ‘capable’ (this is of course being just another variant of that annoying upper-caste, anti-Mandal argument of ‘merit’).

There is no doubt that most of the people may be making choices that in the long run are deeply detrimental to the status quo; but this is one of the compromises that one makes when one enters into democracy. For the sake of the principle of justice involved in allowing everyone a say in the way they are governed, we acknowledge the possibility that things will not always go our way. In doing so, we also acknowledge the possibility that our way is not necessarily the best way. Indeed, as one scholar pointed out, one the benefits of having a minority is that they often  preserve options that the majority may not be particularly inclined to think about at a particular moment in time.

The beauty with a democratic setup however, is that merely because one has given up one’s right to make the choices all the time, one has not surrendered all of one’s options. Given that democracy is also about the right to argue one’s position and persuade others, democracy is also a profoundly pedagogical system. Indeed, the great Euro-American bourgeois democracies prior to the Great War, and subsequently the welfare democracies after the end of the II World War were substantially based on education. This pedagogical exercise was not limited only to schools however, but extended to creating a public sphere where people outside of privileged backgrounds could imbibe what were essentially aristocratic and bourgeois ideals and sensibilities. Museums, opera houses, public parks, all of these ensured that a certain sensibility was imparted to persons who could not earlier ‘see’. A good amount of this exercise rested on philanthropic work given that these elites recognized that the continuation of the status-quo rested on the creation of a group of people who even if they could not see as clearly as the leading elites, would at least acquiesce to the decisions that were being made.

What Dunning’s work represents is a certain global breakdown of this earlier democratic strategy, in the face of neo-liberalism and the growing trend toward privatization. Part of the new strategy now rests on confirming the absolute, congenital even,  impossibility of certain groups to participate in democracy, laying the foundations for the nakedly oligarchic control of the State that must definitely follow. One could still follow the Greek ideal and call it a democracy, just as we are prone to calling the communidade- gãocaria system democratic, but both these system rested on forced and unfairly unremunerated labour.

In Goa, there was a valiant attempt, in the shape of the Konkani language movement, and led to a large extent by the Konkani Bhasha Mandal to follow this European ideal of forging a public with a common (Konkani) consciousness. The trouble with that effort was its timing. The period of crafting a common language as the basis of a (sub) national democratic public had long past. Furthermore, given the cussed parochial tendencies of the KBM and other Konkani language groups, anything that did not fit into their idea of what Konkani or Indian could be, was cast out. This was especially mistaken because of the sophisticated tastes of the average Goan, open to, as a result of so much migration, influences from all over the subcontinent and the world. Add to this the supercilious caste prejudice that only a certain kind of Konkani could be Konkani and they sealed the fate of their project.

In a Goa where we lament so much about the ‘bad’ choices that the ‘common’ man is making, it behooves those of us who moan and crib to engage in a project of education of these masses. There is no doubt that choices are being made that will lead us down the road to hell. And yet, there does not seem to be a broad enough consistent effort to engage these masses with a larger pedagogic project. A project that while being philanthropic in nature is decidedly not populist. On the contrary when one does have opportunities, like the IFFI for example, one sees the resort to that old Roman strategy of  Panem et circenses, where rather than encouraging the public to engage with nuanced cinema, they are treated to a common carnival.

One particularly noteworthy effort however, that runs contrary to the prevalent strategy, is that of the D.D. Kosambi Festival of Ideas. Despite the debatable caliber of more recent speakers at this festival, it is one of the more interesting attempts at engaging the public, especially given the size of the audience it manages to muster. One wishes however that this festival either traveled across Goa, or that other towns in Goa saw similar festivals of such caliber.

In sum, while it is true that not all start with  the capacity to make reasoned and nuanced decisions when faced with electoral or other political choices, this lack is not a congenital impediment. It is one that can be rectified though a systematic engagement with these groups where we hope to win these groups over to our point of view. When they fail to be won over however, rather than turn around and blame the democratic system, we need to recognize that perhaps there is a reason why our point of view is not being accepted in the first place, and go back to the drawing board. In short, we would need to suck it up for the moment, while continuing with the longer project of public engagement.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times dtd 6 March 2012)

The Sweeper: Hazare, brooms and the culture of corruption

There was a rather shocking newsreport in The Hindu a couple of days ago. The report indicated that the sad story of the widows of Vrindavan often does not end with their death. On the contrary it continues beyond, since there are no provisions, at least in two of the Government sponsored institutions, for the last rites of these destitute women. The result of this gap is that their corpses are carried away by sweepers, cut into pieces, and then disposed of in jute bags.

What was also shocking however was the tone of the first of paragraphs of this report, that, after reporting on the fact, thought fit to mention, that “This, too, is done only after the inmates give money to the sweeper!” In making this statement, the report added one more figure to the list of villains of the piece. There was, the families of these women, who abandoned or forced these women to destitute existence; the proprietors of the homes they live in; the organizations set up to care for these women; and finally, the sweepers who dispose of the bodies. And yet, because they are the final link of this chain of shame, the sweepers appear as the greatest villains of all. The sweepers are villainous here, since they seem to lack the basic humanity of disposing of the body without asking for what, this sentence suggests, is essentially a bribe.

The question that we need to ask however is why is it that the sweeper is being effectively asked to bear the burden of humanity that has been shrugged off by the rest of society? Why was no thought given to the fact that in addition to take on a responsibility that is not a part of the services they offer as part of their contract of employment, by taking on the responsibility to discard the corpse the humanity of the sweeper is in effect compromised by the fact of their having to cut up a human corpse like it were that of an animal? Catering to the dead is often seen as a mark of respect to the dead. However, it can also be thought of as catering to the sentiments of the living. By treating the dead as if they were still alive, we renew in the living the sense of value to life and the human body. By having to dispose of the bodies of the widows in this manner, it is not just the widows, but the sweepers as well who are effectively being dehumanized.

The reason these questions were not asked by the reporter who penned the story, is perhaps because of the space the wielder of the broom holds in our society. The position of the sweeper is not an open category job opportunity. It falls within the reserved category. It is reserved often for those that are deemed untouchable, or nearly untouchable. This fact was strikingly demonstrated in the course of the protests by upper-caste participants against the Mandal Commission’s recommendations, as well as general protests against reservation. The message they sought to transmit, was that thanks to this policy of reservations, they would be unable to gain respectable jobs as engineers and doctors, and have to take up the shameful jobs of being sweepers. The broom then, was a mark of shame, while at the same time indicating that there exists no need for us to necessarily respect, or treat as humans, those who generally wield the broom.

There have been other uses of the broom however, where there is an attempt to use the symbol of the broom as a positive element. Very often though, these uses have not detracted from the generally negative symbolic value of the broom. On the contrary, they rely on the negative connotation that the broom generally holds in our society. An example of this was the use of the broom in a recent art installation by Raj Bhandare, a Goan artist, in favour of Hazare’s movement against corruption. Titled ‘Anna Logue’ the installation referenced the ‘shit’ that the country was in, and incorporated into the work, a number of elements necessary for us to resolve the problem. One of these elements was the broom, incorporated as an ‘an appeal to one and all that we need to take it up upon us to Cleanse the System.’ In this arrangement, the broom gains importance primarily because it is ‘us’ respectable folk, who are taking it up. It is clear from the installation’s phrasing of the broom element, that the citizens do not normally take up the broom, that the taking up of the broom is an extra-ordinary circumstance, and it is for the general benefit of society that we must now debase ourselves to clean up the shit that we may have contributed to. In sum, the power of our action lies because of the negative value that is normally associated with the broom and the everyday, or ordinary, wielder of the broom.

The wielder of the broom then is often not understood to be human. The place of the wielder of the broom is to do their job, and their job is not regarded as the list of duties set out within a contract of employment. No, their job is to serve, without question. If this servant asks for reimbursement for extra services rendered, that is to say, demand their right, the response of the rest of the system is to sit back in shock. This demand is seen as the demand for a bribe, it is seen as corruption.

Since the past few weeks, it appears as if the Hazare saga has come, or will eventually come to an end. However, regardless of the presence of Hazare, the unquestioning attitude as to what comprises corruption continues. At the height of the Hazare mania that overtook the country, asking these questions was tantamount to justifying corruption. Perhaps it would now be a more convenient time to interrogate ourselves on what is our understanding of corruption, and if our notions of corruption, like those of the reporter for TheHindu, are not twined with a morality that stems from our own limited upper-strata of society locations.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 12 Jan 2012)