Janta Curfew: Empty Vessels Make the Loudest Sound
As if the conjoining of “Janata” (people) with “Curfew,” itself does not lend legitimacy to an unbridled force of the State, one is also faced with a Janata which subverts the curfew by paradoxically celebrating it in concert. One may have felt an acute sense of frustration in observing the dashing of a sea of people, who are all loud cheerleaders of the ruling regime and playing the ‘good sport’ to preserve positivity in dark times.
Especially with celebrities performing a conceited role of playing ‘responsible citizens’ invokes a vapid response as they are preserved by an acute imperviousness to the experience of those they claim to be clapping for. Clapping as if to pay their ‘tribute’ to front line staff which is going to be at the helm of providing care and treatment to people during the breakout of a pandemic, the gesture of this celebrity humanitarianism rings a hollow bell. Similarly, instances of Doctors, Air India flight staff rescuing patients are being harassed and even, evicted from their homes for the fear of Coronavirus spread is being reported. There is a near criminalisation of the patients as well as those treating them!
It sure does feel like a morbid joke on people who are being denied adequate equipment and facilities in order for them to carry out the desired task, as well as on the people who have been kept in the dark about the nature and scale of the pandemic without concrete interventions enabling the practice of isolation. Not enough testing kits, not enough idea about the spread of the disease(d). We do not know where we are headed but the greatest of the worries that remain, for many statesmen, businessmen, analysts and activists alike, that, if it touches the informal settlements of the country then the losses will be of an immense proportion. A country like India, rife with inequalities and antagonism across vertical and horizontal lines — the stakes are high.
We can’t see this moment in isolation from its context, the underlying conditions for its emergence or set it aside from the previous precedent set by the State. We are simply buying and killing time into motionlessness.
The support is merely in word and not in deed — that dissolves all their efforts into a vast ineffectuality. It would of course take more than bright-eyed admiration for the leader to handle the crisis but this gesture of connecting with the people, remains firmly gripped in the project of the ideological growth of the system which continues despite and in spite of the discontinuity posed by the chaos of the pandemic. It is precisely because the times are bad and we are, paradoxically, confronted with a crisis within the ruling class to also settle the issue. This could potentially realign the nodes of power within the ruling class.
At this point, people too are looking for a savior who would hold things together with a whip in the hand! We need to acknowledge that the “sacrifice” of personal liberties seems a meager price to pay as a trade-off for the preservation of life and precisely, the value of human life except their own is what appears as a non-question to the propertied classes.
Behind the Curtain of Stupidity is Ideology
Sometimes, fear takes on the form of frustration and anger and we beseech those who are clanking utensils to realize that the celebrities are not as vulnerable as they appear to be. Often, we get knocked down and slide into resignation, refusing to examine the unfathomable — why people follow the rich by becoming the braces to their deluge even when they will be the ones to meet with the severity of law, policy and the virus — but it isn’t enough to cry foul!
In these times, even though it necessary to remind that substance and not rhetoric will come to their rescue and that thanking the workers means concretely improving their lives — giving them real living wage, ensuring no wage cuts or job cuts and not sneering at or caning the working class for not following curfew but rather facilitating the process of observing curfew by expanding public health system. Even though these are all perfectly reasonable and legitimate demands to make on the government — still we see that the reason of the State triumphs over logic of a common-sensical socialism.
The reason of the State is beyond rationality, or it operates at the level of an organised irrationality, from where it offers solace to the people it alienates. What might strictly appear as “non-transparency,” in the times of darkness would be appreciated for it re-affirms the State’s sense of responsibility, leadership, rule and establish control in disorderliness. Would a patriarch ever share the burden of his worries? No, so we respond by extending our deferential palms to the service of maintaining a flushed facade. Moreover, the preferred language of scientific management is too disconnected from the populace and leaves a lot unclear. Thousands of people beating thaalis are not stupid, because studpidity pacifies the critique of ideology by pathologising it. Rather, their apparent stupidity represents a popular unconscious — they know what they don’t want to know and we don’t want to know what we know. This was a show of a determined disavowal of a shared and horrifying reality which is too difficult to confront.
The government while preparing to combat a pandemic — as the scale of a world war — should be transparent in the measures it takes to fight it. Even though it is not enough to demand trust in return of sophistry, it would be slightly presumptuous to believe that everyone partaking in the show of gratitude was doing so ‘seriously,’ i.e. by way of putting their faith in the system. It could be seen as part of the produced affectualities of a contagion. The wide resonance was but a reminder of a general will of people swept by love and decay — for some of whom, it would be best to not be seen as antagonistic relation with the State, given the urgency of the situation.What is evident is the willingness to take the fantasy seriously enough to stage fictions.
But there is a catch. Even though, at first, it appears to us that there is no opportunity cost involved in having to collectively demonstrate a referendum on the government in these testing times with the count of the decibels of the claps if it helps keep up the spirits and yet, there is. Not that I’m saying that there shouldn’t be any rituals of coming together that can be observed at all, in principle, but this act does so by obscuring the risks and dangers to what it ‘pledges to fight against!’ When social isolation has become the most easily accessible solution to curtail the movement of especially the globe-trotting middle-higher classes, then their overzealous conglomeration reveals their simpering idiocy and also a disregard for those who are most vulnerable to denial of access to health care. In this case, there is a clear trading-off of responsibility — a disproportionate shifting of the onus on the public to regulate their conduct without adequate attention being paid to building up the supportive structures to enable it. Ideally, simultaneity of ideological efforts of maintaining unity and calm would come with other concrete mechanisms which reassure people in the time of distress, but that’s not what’s happening here, when the coordinates of capitalism are contradicting itself to a point of confusion.
Shankhnaad, or the Triumph of ‘Good’ over ‘Evil’
In the defense of Modi, people have argued that the clapping was not a way to substitute concrete efforts but was more like a clarion call towards its preparation. Shankhnaad, a prelude to Hindu festivities, is akin to a battle cry before going to war or a victory call which represents the triumph of good over evil! The mythological significance and symbolism of the conch could be many, but most famously is traced back to Krishna, whose conch made three worlds tremble in fear with the sound of “Om” emanating. The emission of frequencies of divine energy is said to have the power of vibration to kill negative energy from the atmosphere. In one stroke, the majoritarian symbols assert its hegemony while skirting the tensions emanating from the crisis of the system.
Despite the symbols it draws upon, the ritual performance slips into a theater, somewhere — lost in it’s own deluge- with movie stars conspicuously dressed in shades of pale and all-whites emerging through the smokescreen of fame and smog of time that they have conjured up over years of exploitation. Untouched by the police state and beneficiaries of the system, the film fraternity has been let off with a mere tokenistic approval of the masses who are up for a life of struggle over the long haul! Thus capturing a shift rather than a sharing of burden by the State onto the people and doing so, by soliciting blind faith from people in return of sophistry. This was a stunt geared towards pure virtue signaling in the name of showing gratitude and forging unity — it is a purely symbolic gesture. Without denying the relevance of the symbolic, we have to ask ourselves, whether we are going away from the symbolic toward a plan of action for the crisis or going further away from reality by instrumentalizing symbolism to protect the logical fallacy of the system.
There is little use in limiting ourselves to passionately speaking of people’s participation as infuriatingly insipid! That does not mean we won’t experience such feelings, the need to quieten them from taking over our sensibilities is because it restricts us from actually examining the nature of people’s engagement in the theater of the political.
A Cultural Anxiety on the Left
Intimidated or impressed by the show of strength of the reach of the PM’s resounding appeal, our self-criticism too cannot be defined between the frames of — a) reflections on the need for left’s revival of god-building exercises nor b) towards simplistic critique of its “atheism” a la the cult of reason. That question that returns to haunt these reflections is the apparent “absence” of a communist dream of an emancipated society which can overcome the division between work and pleasure. Such anxieties are marked by an envy and contempt of the Hindutva-fascist machinery and it’s partner, economic liberalism of global capital. The fear of a repressive police State looms over us, with a legitimacy inscribed in the social contract, there is an obligation to suspension as well as a willful submission of our rights to the State in return of protection, but the loudest outpouring has been against the tom-foolery of claps! This signifies how the moment of crisis subjectivates us by animating the chaotic field of power.
In drawing simplistic parallels between the right’s mobilisation and the scattered progressive, non-right forces, surprisingly, the broad left forgets the material basis for the production of some of these pedagogical practices, habits, rituals which are thoroughly embedded in the reproduction of class-caste relations. Thus, it is here that the left falters by similarly displacing existing social relations of the material world into the realm of mystification as done by the right, which does so through the use of mythologies. Left mystifies in other ways what it accuses the right of doing through mythologies. This exposes a hopeless longing on the left for an alternative apparatus of rituals, a felt need for a re-functioning of habit, which Jameson had described, “as zones of sentience, utopias rouse the desire for another world that might seem ridiculous or illusory when set against the present, but which is indispensable for turning radical politics into something more than just a thought exercise. Even a classic like “Workers of the World Unite!” has an undeniable erotic (embodied) quality to it, which, if denied, banishes politics to the space of boredom and bureaucracy.
It is one thing to tell people that another world is possible and another entirely to let them experience this, for however shortly.” As Saroj points out, ‘rather than making “global critiques of what we may call ideological beliefs-free market fundamentalism,” Jameson is more interested in unpacking “praxis and daily life, habit and performance” that articulate capitalism.’ Yet, it must be remembered that production produces its own culture and acknowledging that does not mean the foreclosing of the space of possibility for social transformation but rather opening it up — by simply suspecting the model of counter-hegemonic desires of formulating the struggle.
No Calm to the Chaos
Instead of lamenting the lack of a charismatic leadership on the left, or an absence of a mass movement-organisational capacity like that of the RSS’, we could use up the time to arrive at an understanding of why that has been the case! Balagopal had observed what was true for its time, “The state is simultaneously a parasite on society and an object for the parasitism of the propertied classes.”
While the left and progressives oscillate between considering this moment an opportunity for lifting the veil of ignorance from people’s eyes and a fatalistic realism, where they embrace a defeatism in acknowledging the actuality of the virus as its truth — death, as an imminent and inevitable ending. The ruling classes are aligning themselves in the newly assembled power structures. I draw this to your attention to make a simple analogous relation, just as the virus cannot live without a host, and is parasitic on them, the state too enjoys and lays a claim to the loyalty of the masses for the continuity of ruling classes’ rule, who are busy indulging in brave postures of a shackled initiative to provide relief and charity — despite their wealth signifying the very edifice of oppression.
This is a moment of heightened invisible activity, there is a simultaneous realignment of power structures happening as this crisis unfolds. A timely reminder from Balagopal would serve us good, “In times of class struggle — including intra-class struggle — it is the superstructure that becomes lively.” Today, the rapidly unfolding events would require us to pay attention to the ways in which the crisis simultaneously produces its own spheres of joy for not only subsistence but the very sustaining of the system, satisfying the needs of some in order to preserve its own perpetuity!
References:
- Saroj Giri, “Happy Accident of Utopia,” Jameson, Fredric. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. VERSO Books, 2016
- K Balagopal, “Indira Gandhi: An Attempt at a Political Appraisal” 1985, Ear to the Ground, Navayana. 2011.