The Pathology Has Deeper Etiology Than What's Apparent

TEHELKA EXPOSE AND AFTER; FASCISM AND 'NORMALITY'



Business Standard

Tehelka and after

CRITICALLY INCLINED
Sadanand Menon / New Delhi November 02, 2007

Every bully is also a braggart. It was a matter
of time before architects of the 2002 Gujarat
pogroms would sing like parrots and boast of
their brutalities. That a Tehelka kind of exposé
would happen was inevitable. Enough criminal acts
had been perpetrated by enough number of people
for it to continue to remain under the wraps for
any extended length of time.

The Tehelka team did manage a convincing
orchestration of their material and its
dissemination. Their special issue, last week, is
a compelling document of infamy, packing in the
on-camera testimonies of some 20 lead players in
the Gujarat riots as well as an inspired
editorial by Tarun Tejpal. Obviously, he and his
colleagues are shaken by the evidentiary material
on tape. The editorial warning, "Read. And be
afraid," rings true. It is the voice of someone
who has seen the 'face of fascism' and got
politicised.

A few questions follow. One is, what made such a
large number of Narendra Modi acolytes come
clean, even if on spy-cam? What made them
describe so graphically the unspeakable acts they
committed? You don't find rapists or murderers
easily confessing their crimes. So, why did this
set of mob leaders feel compelled to talk?

The other question is, despite a 48-hour media
buzz, why has the exposé been unable to provoke
any mass reaction either in Gujarat or in the
rest of the country? Will anyone be punished?

Some explanations can be attempted. One is based
on Jean-Paul Sartre's celebrated cautionary, in
his introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched
of the Earth. Confronting his countrymen with the
excesses of French soldiers in Algeria, Sartre
writes, "It is not right (for a soldier) to be
obliged to torture for ten hours a day; at that
rate, his nerves will fall to bits, unless the
torturers are forbidden in their own interest to
work overtime." The Hindutva 'laboratory' in
Gujarat allowed their cadre to carry out
unrepentant rampage on minorities for too long.
What we are witnessing on the Tehelka tapes now
is a process of the fraying of nerves. It's the
guts spilling out. The only way the arsonist can
handle his conscience is by exaggerating it as an
achievement. It is an exhibition of unbridled
libido. You have to flaunt it. Babu Bajrangi,
Haresh Bhatt, Arvind Pandya, everyone has been
bursting to announce it. All they needed was the
promise of a secure listener. That was what the
undercover Tehelka reporter represented.

Of course, it is not as if anyone was trying to
hide this planned savagery. I have travelled to
Gujarat many times since March 2002. Each time I
have been told how recordings of rape and
killings are now part of video lending libraries
in the state, regularly taken on loan to be
'enjoyed' in the comfort of average middle class
homes. The story circulates of how private video
studios in towns and villages (usually making a
living out of recording local marriages) were
willingly or otherwise drafted and how several
acts of violence were done 'for camera'.

So, the Gujarat events are not about the
barbarity of one political figurehead or his
trusted cronies. While they were certainly
instrumental, as the tapes show, one cannot
anymore disregard the role of the 'masses'.
"Fascism," German psychologist Wilhelm Reich had
explained, "differs from other reactionary
parties, inasmuch as it is borne and championed
by masses of people." In Gujarat, it is clear
that, as Shubh Mathur's brilliant The Everyday
Life of Hindu Nationalism (Three Essays
Collective, forthcoming) has it, "the cultural
logic and institutional power of Hindutva have
become deeply entrenched in everyday life itself."

She quotes Columbia University anthropologist,
Michael Taussig: "Torture and institutionalised
terror is like a ritual art form; far from being
spontaneous and an abandonment of what are often
called 'the values of civilization', such rites
have a deep history deriving power and meaning
from those values."

I have often argued that, in the daily sphere,
this is made possible by the galloping growth of
popular mysticism. In Gujarat, it manifests in
the horizontal spread of the satsang. Subsequent
to the demagogic successes of sadhvis like
Rithambara and Uma Bharati, an epidemic of
satsangis has captured Gujarat. Morari Bapu,
Asaramji Bapu, Rameshbhai Oza, Atmagyani Niruma,
Pramukh Swami - a long list of interpreters of
Hindu tenets who pepper their discourses with
provocative contemporary political issues. Seldom
do they have audiences of less than a hundred
thousand. They are conduits through which
borderline Hindutva circulates.

It is an error to read fascism as an abnormality;
one should, in fact, seek the links between
fascism and 'normality'. Shubh Mathur's insight
is important, "A 'culture of terror' is the
cultural logic of Hindutva, and is central to its
imagining, enactment, and retelling." It is
crucial that individuals, collectives and
institutions act to dismantle that logic.
Otherwise, a sullen backlash is certain.

o o o

I hope you may find it interesting to go through excerpts from an article by Tavleensingh with a few comments edited by me.

"There is an inability among believers of this conspiracy theory to understand that in open societies, it is not possible for governments to organise acts of terrorism against their own people without being found out and condemned."

"..things have become so complicated, so twisted, so full of subterfuge, so full of lies and planted stories, fabricated evidence, that whenever there is an "attack", one never knows who has carried it out. Never. It could be the "terrorists", it could equally be the spooks. There's absolutely no knowing. This is not some crazed claim. Intelligence agencies have done this through the ages. In country after country. It's a hoary tradition. When it comes to these things, I can no longer believe what I'm asked to believe, I have no faith in what I read in the papers, in what I see on TV. It's mostly crap. No one ever gets to the bottom of anything. It's all left hanging, the air is thick with the ghosts of the victims of unsolved crimes. We seem to suffer from a pathological lack of curiosity...
(Arundhati Roy)
." Apparently, they do not notice that by refusing to accept the possibility of Islamist terrorism they create the atmosphere for it to flourish. They do this by not acknowledging that violence in the name of Islam is a reality and that on the Indian sub-continent it has become the biggest threat to peace, stability and a happy, prosperous future."

Why are the acts of terror by the RSS organizations not seen among the biggest threats, or as part of the reality?
Euphemism in this kind of bloodthirsty calls by the pen-pushers for more extra-constitutional and extra-legal State interventions implying more violence against Muslims, in the name of combating Islamic terror is easily seen through. This could well be read as evidence of further extension of US foreign policy through these 'embedded' scribes on the one hand, and part of attempts in perpetuation of Brahmanic social order by their most favoured loyalists (perhaps, after the zionist Israel State) on the other.

"First, it was only Pakistan where the state encouraged and nurtured violent Islamist groups to be used for acts of terrorism against India".

"In India we may not have so far seen the kind of suicide bombing that killed nearly 150 people in Karachi last Thursday, but we are seeing an alarming increase in terrorist violence." "Hyderabad, Ajmer, Ludhiana within weeks of each other most recently and before that a long, long list. Ayodhya, Varanasi, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, to mention only a handful of Indian cities that the jihad has targeted since Dr Manmohan Singh became prime minister."
The massacre at Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad, in which Ehsan Jaffri — who made the mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections — and 70 other people were killed and 10 women were raped before being murdered over a period of ten-and-a-half hours. A mob of thousands of armed people began to assemble inside the Gulberg Society colony. That day, Jaffri made 200 phone calls, including many to senior police officers, to Modi and LK Advani. At about 10.30am, the then Commissioner of Police, PC Pandey, visited Gulberg, which is not far from the police headquarters. At about 2.30pm, Ehsan Jaffri surrendered himself to the mob, hoping the others would be spared. The mob stripped him, hacked off his body parts, paraded him half-alive around the colony to terrify people and then burned him alive. Subsequently, 70 people were killed and 10 to 12 women were gangraped before being burned alive. KG Erda, the inspector of the Meghaninagar police station, stood by and watched. PC Pandey was promoted to Director General of Police, Gujarat. As public prosecutor, the Gujarat government appointed a man called Chetan Shah who had already appeared for the accused in the same case!..." (Arundhati Roy in the same interview)

Can we say that these things actually happened because of Islamic Jehad?
Or were they just the kind of patriotic responses, this scribe would have liked to see in the context of defending the country against 'jehad' (=godhra)?

"Privately, policemen and politicians admit that they work with only half a heart because they are afraid of being labeled anti-Muslim. It is the fear of offending ordinary Muslims that deters real action against known terrorist front organisations like SIMI and hundreds others of similar genre."

"The Indian state cannot be accused of directly nurturing terrorist groups as the military governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh have done, but not taking firm action to destroy our home-grown Islamists is nurturing of another kind."
"Meanwhile, Dr Manmohan Singh's government has gone out of its way to encourage a sense of grievance among moderate Muslims through efforts like the Sachar committee."

Actual Implementing of Sachar Report must be Certainly more than going out of the way!!

"At the end of its grand tour across the country to seek out aggrieved Muslims, the committee recommended that in districts with large Muslim populations officials and policemen should be selected with Islam as their primary qualification."

"If Narendra Modi did this in reverse in Gujarat, he would be vilified and branded."

"But, it's all right for 'secular' leaders to use religion as a job qualification because they occupy the high ground."

" So the prime minister had no compunctions last week in accusing Modi of a 'holocaust' in Gujarat without noticing that he would then need to apply an even bigger word for what happened to the Sikhs in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister."

"Dr Singh needs to choose his words more carefully and now that elections are no longer imminent he needs to recognise that his government has done nothing towards winning the fight against terrorism. If he does not recognise this, it is only a matter of time before we see in India the sort of attack on a political procession that happened in Karachi last week."

Scribes, again, arrogating to themselves the role of dictating the agenda of global ction against terror to an elected Head of State!

Do these words rhyme with the verbosity we have much familiarised with ?(I mean the US Propaganda On War On Terror? If these do not, please excuse me.)

"It will happen if we do not deal firmly with our home-grown Islamists. Moderate Muslims who inadvertently promote the Islamist cause by pretending that there is no terrorism in the name of Islam can be persuaded that they are wrong"

". All it needs is political will".

Try to make out who speaks for whom; at least try a guess work!