Right-Wing Politics, and the Cultures of Cruelty by Aijaz Ahmad

Source: AKHBAR March 1999 SPECIAL

Ved Gupta Memorial lecture 1998

Right-Wing Politics, and the Cultures of Cruelty
by Aijaz Ahmad

(We are grateful to the author for the text and to the Democratic Teachers' Front (DTF) of the University of Delhi for permission to put it on the net.)

I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to deliver the Ved Gupta Memorial Lecture this year. Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of knowing the late Mr. Gupta. I am nevertheless gratified to be speaking in the memory of a man who gave so much of his energy and passion to the building of a culture of broad democratic values, at a time when values of a democratic culture are under greater assault and stress than ever before. Later in this lecture, I shall be arguing that the current assault on our educational and research institutions is designed specifically to permeate the educated sections of society with politics of hate and cultures of cruelty in the service of a rightwing project for which the word `fascist' seems appropriate. I shall be using this word repeatedly throughout this lecture. So, let me start by reflecting on the meaning and salience of this word.

There are three perfectly correct but quite distinct ways of using this word. One is the colloquial one, in which we sometimes use the word `fascist', when we are righteously angry and when we mean to be abusive, for any particularly repugnant act of cruelty, violence or repression, certainly in public life but also in what are generally understood as personal relations. At the opposite end is the most strictly
accurate usage of the term, whereby, really, only the Mussolini regime in Italy could be called fascist; Nazis were not, Franco's dictatorship in Spain was not, and the Sangh parivar evidently is not. But then there is also a third usage, by no means uncommon or inappropriate, but more supple and wide-ranging, in which the word `fascism' is used to negotiate a very complex experience, spanning a whole century and virtually the whole world, in which a wide range of ideologies, movements and regimes have arisen which are not exactly the same, so that it becomes irrelevant to speak of a singular `fascist paradigm' to which all of them correspond, but which are in some fundamental way of the same design and frequently of the same inspiration.

It is in this last sense that the origins of fascism are traceable not merely to Italy after the First World but to France in the last quarter of the 19th century, and that we speak of the resurgence of fascism across the whole of Western Europe today, or of the rise to power of the descendants of fascism in the four main states that have arisen from the ruins of former Yugoslavia. Also, it is in this sense that I have used the term clerical-fascist for the Islamic regime in Iran since Khomeini's seizure of power some two decades ago, or that the Hindutva brand of nationalism appears to me to be intrinsically fascist in character. The word `fascism' in this usage is not an exercise in paradigm-building or a particularly strong mode of denunciation. Rather, it designates certain forms of politics that have been with us, on the global scale, since roughly the 1880s, which is also the moment of the birth of modern imperialism on the one hand, and the moment of the emergence of mass working class parties on the other. The word itself of course came much later, but that this kind of politics and ideology should arise alongside modern imperialism and the modern revolutionary movements is by no means a coincidence, just as it is no coincidence that the RSS was formed roughly at the same time when the anti-colonial movement first became a mass movement and certain kinds of working class politics of the Left got going. The sum of ideologies for which the word `fascist' seems appropriate are ideologies that belong specifically to the age of imperialism, anti-imperialism and revolutionary class struggle, and, as I shall argue later, fundamental to these forms of politics has been the will to fashion an anti-materialist conception of revolution, anti-liberal conception of nationalism, anti-rationalist critique of Modernity, anti-humanist assaults on the politics of liberation, in a rhetoric of "blood and belonging", and in the name of a glorious past that never was. These are ideologies of a revolutionary age, pre-emptive and counterrevolutionary ideologies of course, but these too are dedicated to making their own kind of revolutionsñthat is, revolutions of the Far Right. The fundamental premise of my argument today is that India is at present undergoing a revolutionary process. We do not recognise it as such because it is a revolution not of the Left but of the Far Rightñof the sort that is currently under way in Algeria, for example. Whether this revolution shall fail or succeed is far from clear, nor is it at all clear that even the simple territorial unity of the country shall survive the fires that this offensive has lit. The cultures of cruelty that are spreading all around us are a part of this Far Right revolutionary offensive because values of democratic, secular civility must be made to crumble from the inside; and that is so because, in the conditions of electoral and parliamentary democracy prevailing in India today, what the Far Right visualizes and prepares for is not a frontal seizure of power but a hurricane from below, carried out by a widespread and pliable mass of the wretched of this earth led by a well-disciplined counter-revolutionary elite.

I have written elsewhere, more or less polemically, that every country gets the fascism that it deserves, by which I simply mean that the specific form that a fascist movement takes shall always depend on the social physiognomy of that country: that is to say, the economic, political, philosophical, aesthetic, religious, cultural and ideological forms that are specific to that country. India is no exception to this rule, and to identify the forms specific to our experience we have to look downward and inward. But the Indian experience cannot be extricated from the experience of the modern world as a wholeñthe world that begins, politically speaking, in one sense with the French Revolution during the last quarter of the 18th century, and in another sense with the onset of modern imperialism a century later during the last quarter of the 19th century, and in another sense with the collapse of communism in the closing decades of the present century. Our own experiences of colonisation, independence and what we now call `liberalisation' are a part of this larger story. It is in order to locate the phenomenon of fascism in this larger story that I have reminded you of the actual origins of this kind of politics in late nineteenth century. I should also want to offer a certain principle of periodisation for our experience of fascism during the present century, which is based on a contrast that runs as follows. Fascism of course remains a punctual but subordinate political tendency throughout the whole of the imperialist period. However, there have been two quite different historical moments when the epidemic of such movements has become particularly widespread, for somewhat different structural reasons. Thus, we might say that the fascisms of the inter-war period corresponded to the crises of accumulation brought about by the maturing of imperialism itself as it made a fuller transition from the competitive to the monopoly structure of capital. This is an explanation that Baran and Sweezy, among others, and Poulantzas in his own way, have accepted; and I would add that whereas movements of this kind were particularly strong in the core countries of Europe, their influence spread through much of the world, from Japan to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and from Argentina to India. By contrast, the end-of-the-century fascisms of today correspond to the Late Imperial period of full globalisation of the capitalist mode, in which the mode has provisionally triumphed over communist states but faces internal crises of stagnation in the core countries and unmanageable social tensions in the less industrialised countries, brought about in part by that imperialist globalisation and in part by the defeat or decay of the socialist, democratic and secular-nationalist projects within the imperializes countries.

I draw your attention to this principle of periodisation for three reasons. First, to emphasize that since the fascisms of today belong in an entirely novel period of modern history they cannot repeat the experience and the forms of an earlier and very different period. They have to be understood both in terms of their lineage as well as their particularity. Second, the characterisation of the later, more contemporary phase helps us understand a certain reversal, namely that whereas the scale of violence in such malignant movements has been relatively more manageable for the constitutional governments of Western Europe, they have erupted with far greater ferocity in the peripheries of the system where conditions of crisis are more advanced: especially in some central European and Asian zones including, notably, India. Whether not Russia will go the way of Serbia is yet not clear. Third, this sense of the scope of malignancy also clarifies that what we are dealing with here is not some kind of Indian exceptionalism but a generalized experience of our time that is taking specific forms in our own country.

That is the first point: fascism as a generalized tendency throughout the history of imperialism, but a tendency that takes different forms in different national conditions, while the history of imperialism itself needs to be understood in terms of distinct phases and periods within this larger history. But, then, all fascisms have at their core a pathological form of nationalism. Indeed, this type of ideology was called `integral nationalism' in France before it came to be called `fascism' in Italy. This pathology is as much there in the Hindutva brand of nationalism as in the National Front in France or the National Alliance in Italy or the sundry projects of national purification and ethnic cleansing that have been going on in various parts of the former Yugoslavia, not to speak of the classical variety in Italy and Germany, from which some of the founders of Hindutva, such as Savarkar and Moonje, drew so much inspiration. Now, the fact that fascism itself rests on a pathological variety of nationalism requires that we reflect on the phenomenon of nationalism itself. Yet, In the intellectual climate prevailing today, it is very difficult to discuss the subject of nationalism. There once was a time, in the period of anti-colonial struggles, when all varieties of nationalism were presumed to be good. Then, as a certain disillusion with the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie began to set in, and as anti-rationalist critiques of Modernity began to be assembled in the metropolitan countries, it transpired that anti-colonialism was nothing more than the other face of colonialism itselfña colonial discourse, to be exact. In the Indian context, it is significant that a quasi-radical indictment of the Nehruvian model of economic nationalism was forged at exactly the same time when the Rightwing indictment of Nehruvian secularism was beginning to make inroads among the haute intelligentsia; later, of course, the two indictments, of planned development and of secularism, were to converge. Meanwhile, the high ground of nationalist claim, which had earlier been associated mainly with national liberation struggles and anti-colonial movements, came to be occupied increasingly by radicalisms of the Right, more murderous in some places than others, not just in East and Central Europe after the collapse of communism there but also in great many places across Asia and Africa, notably Iran, Afghanistan and India. It was in this larger context that nationalismñall of it; all varieties of itñfell into terrible disrepute.

This has been very bewildering for someone such as myself who has been deeply suspicious of the pathologies of fascistic nationalism but who also believes in at least two other things. The first is that in a backward capitalist country like India, which is socially more heterogeneous than any other country on earth, and which is undergoing enormous stresses as it undertakes very haphazard, very hit-&-miss kind of modernisation of its anachronistic structures, nationalism is simply a necessary cement if the country is not to fall apart; if the Left fails to harness this energy and provide that cement, the Right most assuredly shall. But, then, I also believe that in an age of imperialism, a Leftist kind of nationalism is an objective necessity. To the extent that it is the nation-state that facilitates the imperialist penetrations of the economy and guarantees the various prevailing regimes of labour, the nation-state remains the necessary horizon of politics, and it is important that we not concede the ground of nationalism to the rightwing.

How does one then come to terms with this whole range within nationalism, from the revolutionary to the pathological, from the democratic to the fascist. I was saying a bit earlier that if mass politics of the working class, fascism and modern imperialism are the issue, then perhaps the 1880s, roughly, can be regarded as the point of departure. But if we were to trace the genealogies of nations and nationalisms, the point of departure shall have to be moved to a point a century or so earlier, in and around the French Revolution. It was then that all manner of nationalisms that are still with us were born. Not all of them are the gift of the Enlightenment; many are mere pathologies of the Romantic imaginationñbut it is then, in that great revolutionary upheaval at the origin of the modern world, that the fundamental bifurcation takes place.

Here I shall offer you not a periodisation but a typology, necessarily schematic, not about the history of nationalism but about its ideological formation. At the most general level, and contrary to what one has learned in certain kinds of Marxism, it needs to be said that nationalism per se is not a class ideology and that the political character of any given nationalism depends on the nature of the power bloc that takes hold of it and utilises it for its own dominance. As such, there are progressive nationalisms and retrogressive nationalisms; more frequently, any given nationalism tends to be progressive and retrogressive at the same time, with regard to one social reality on the other. An anti-colonial nationalism is perfectly capable, for example, to accommodate a high degree of xenophobia or settled prejudices against women. Among the many processes that have gone into the making of this complex history, I should want to isolate two conceptual moments that are analytically separable but appear in real history in varying combinations.

On the one hand, the modern constitutional state that rests upon the idea of the nation arose initially as a profane civil entity, against religious authority and monarchical or feudal or even colonial autocracy. In the conception of the nation that derives from the French `Declaration of Man and the Citizen' the idea of citizenship is radically separated from race, religion or any other kind of primordial belonging, and is made much looser, available to all who are willing to accept the authority of the nation-state and the rights and obligations that apply to all equally and universally. The emergence of this conception of the nation marks the transition from subjection to citizenship, from obligation to rights, and constitutes a realm of political action and legislative function based on some modern conception of legitimacy, associated usually with popular representation. This realm of citizenship is then seen as an active ingredient in agencies for social change, be it revolutionary or reformist. From Hegel to Croce to Gramsci, there is a strong tradition of requiring from the nation-state that it should punctually act as an ethical, pedagogical function designed to serve people's needs for reform and progress in the various social and economic domains. One may designate this as the Enlightenment conception of the state, in the original sense of a rationalist project that was often expressed in Idealist terms. Even the Leninist conception which squarely identifies the revolutionary moment as the moment of the smashing of the state rests on the notion of the need to create an alternate form of state, the proletarian state, as the ethical form for the transition toward a classless society. In none of these conceptions is the nation-state regarded as the expression of an ethnos, a condition of the soul, an expression of culture, a matter of religious identity and primordial belonging. A nation is emphatically not a race. From Rousseau and Kant to Lenin, this type of state has been associated with rational plans for creating the good society, while citizenship in a nation is seen as transitional toward an eventually universal society. In Marx, of course, there is a deep distrust of the division of humanity into nations and states, even though, as the Manifesto emphasized, every proletariat has to settle accounts, first of all, with its own bourgeoisie.

The other, contrasting moment in the making of modern nations and nationalisms is descended essentially from that tendency in German Idealism that is most forcefully represented by Herder and Fichte. Upon re-reading it recently, I was quite struck by the fact that in A History of Western Philosophy, a book written as far ago as 1945, Bertrand Russell associates Fichte with rightwing romanticism on the one hand, and with Nietzsche on the other, and characterises him as a prophet of what Russell calls "nationalistic totalitarianism." In this alternative conception, the state embodies a general will arising not out of a common citizenship but out of a cultural essence, based on ethnicity, race, religion, language or some other form of a primordial intimacy specific to an entity that by definition excludes others. In this conception, there is a sharp distinction between the national Self and the rest of the world; citizenship in such a nation is conceived not in terms of expanding toward a universalist inclusion but in terms of self-definition, enclosure, even self-purification. This conceptual universe rests, ultimately, on cultural wars and civilizing missions; and on the obliteration of heterogeneity to obtain homogeneous nations. More often than not, such conceptions of the nation have been prone to xenophobia, irrationalism, cultural differentialism, racism, and relativisms of all sorts.

Between these competing notions of the nation-state I undoubtedly prefer the universalist and inclusivist conception which rests on the criterion not of primordial difference but of modern citizenship. Having offered you so sharp a distinction, however, let me immediately add that this is a typology, constructed for methodological purposes, not for a strict or accurate description of the real. These are essentially poles of attraction, and rare is a nationalism that gravitates only to one pole or the other. What one needs to grasp, when one is trying to grasp the real, is the exact combination and the range, because the range within the practices of most nationalisms tend to be usually very wide. Our historical experience is that most anti-colonial nationalisms tend to be ideological hybrids. On the one hand, these are forward-looking movements specifically of the modern kind, in the sense that their entire ideological articulation is based on a very modern conception of every people's inherent right to liberty, collective self-determination and popular sovereignty. This aspect of anti-colonial movements aligns them with the rationalist and democratic aspects of the Enlightenment project and the libertarian legacy of the French Revolution. However, every nationalism of the defeated also has an inherent potential for revivalist nostalgia and national re-purification, since foreign rule is experienced ideologically as a violation of the collective identity, imposition of alien cultural forms, and a fall from a past greatness. And, to the extent that the privileged intelligentsia, especially in a caste-ridden society such as India, tends to confuse culture with religion, the slide from dreams of cultural retrieval to religious revivalism, and from cultural nationalism to religious purification and particularity, always lurks as a real potential at the very heart of anti-colonial nationalisms of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois strata. The rationalist and the Romantic elements of the imagination, the traditionalising and the modernizing impulses in projects of social change, exist simultaneously in any nationalism of the defeated, and one needs to examine any particular nationalism carefully so as to determine as to which side within this contradictory unity is dominant.

This makes very problematic the kind of opposition we normally proclaim between the communal and the secular in India. I am not referring here simply to those quite numerous individuals, especially among the professional politicians but also more generally among the urban sophisticates of the privileged classes, who are secularists one day and communalist the next. They are in reality neither the one nor the other. They are rank opportunists, and they often are, in the word that Mussolini was fond of using for himself, "super-relativists." I mean something much more complex. On the one hand, the entire history of what we call our secular nationalism is replete with nostalgic revivalisms and those claims of cultural particularly which trace themselves back to a Golden Age when India was pristinely Hindu, undisturbed by Christian and Muslim intrusions; it is possible to call this nationalism secular, though with much reservation and difficulty, only because that same formation also had, as a dominant element within itself, a vision of a modern, post-colonial India that was culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic, constitutionally federalist and republican, with extensive guarantees of individual and collective rights. The formative years of the Republic were undoubtedly marked by a nationalism which was essentially universalist and inclusive, hence largely capable of controlling its own impulses toward revivalism. On the other hand, however, revivalist tendencies were very powerful in their own right, as organized political forces such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, as subordinate ideological formations within the mainly secular nationalism, and as elements in diverse reform movements, educational societies, literary and linguistic projects, and so on. In short, then, the terrain of nationalism in India has always been a contested terrain, over which the secular and the communal have struggled as opposing forces but also as adjacent plants growing on the same soil. Just as much secular nationalism tended to be nostalgic and revivalist in the cultural domain without becoming politically communal, much of communal politics saw itself as a redemptive project in pursuit of a primordial essence that was perceived as the true cement for the national compact. For the communalist, therefore, it was perfectly possible to see himself as a true nationalist in so far as he could perceive himself as a crusader on behalf of the overwhelming numerical majority in the nation. This nationalistic subjectivity of a communalist I should want to illustrate briefly, before returning to a more methodical statement a bit later.

Let me suggest to you, more or less provocatively, that when Mr. Advani, at present our Home Minister, claims that he is a secular man, he is by his own lights perhaps right; he is not notably devout, except nominally for purposes of Hindutva mobilizations; there is little reason to believe that he wishes to impose here in India a theocracy of the type that the Irani mullahs, or worse still the Afghani Taliban, desire for their respective countries; and I would tend to thinkñI don't know for sure, but it is probably the caseñthat he is perfectly secular in relation to other Hindus and perhaps even some non-Hindus of his choice. The problem of his communalism is pre-eminently a problem of his relationship with the generality of non-Hindus. Some sources of this problem we can mention, for illustrative purposes. One is a confusion of categories: he mistakes religion for culture and culture for nation, hence the further confusion between private belief and rights of citizenship. Second, he seems to have a wrong kind of belief in arithmetic. He mistakes citizenship for a numerical calculation; more must have more rights, fewer can live with fewer rights. He seems not to understand that in a civilized society the reverse often has to be the case; a social majority can make do with general and equal rights alone, whereas it is the social minority that lives with very real possibilities and fears of infringement and therefore needs some extra safeguards. And, he believes too much in bloodñand in varieties of blood. The spilling of the blood of non-Muslims leaves him quite evidently unperturbed; the spilling of the blood of a Hindu fills him with a very special kind of passion and with great agitations of the soul. He is obviously very skillful at perpetrating culture wars and he equally obviously thinks of the RSS as a civilizing mission. Conversions disturb him because he evidently thinks of religion as a kind of race and religious conversion as a kind of racial miscegenation, contrary to the purity and primordiality of belief and belonging. The poorest adivasi, whom the Hindu caste society has never taken into its own fold, is still a part of this primordiality and becomes a nominal Hindu, retrospectively, as soon as he converts to a religion that entered India, in the remote past, from elsewhere. Like his other colleagues in the RSS, Mr. Advani seems to believe that the territorial boundary is also the boundary, the permanent boundary, between the sacred and the profane. This odd identification between territory, blood and belief is what requires that this defilement by religious conversion be stopped and undone. The ones who have undertaken these sacraments of purification, through rituals of fire and murder, are the heroes of the nation. Thus it is that he can calmly certify the goons of the Bajrang Dal as true nationalists. I am sure that those goons also regard Mr. Advani as a great nationalist. The admiration, the certification, is undoubtedly mutual.

Now, for a secularist such as myself, that kind of judgement is much easier to make. What is infinitely more difficult to assess is the meandering, contradictory history of what we call our secular nationalism. I shall come to the specifics soon, but let me first offer you the proposition that secularism is a revolutionary ideal and a modern civic virtue. It does not arise spontaneously out of a traditional society. Most traditional societies, certainly the settled agrarianate societies, are deeply hierarchical, tolerant and intolerant at the same time: tolerant of some differences and intolerant of some others, usually with wide fluctuations, even though clear and stable lines of demarcation and hierarchy are attempted all the time. Demarcations between castes, classes and genders, in the absence of any common conception of juridic equalities, give to such societies a deeply intolerant character. At their most tolerant, however, traditional societies practise a kind of benign pluralism among communities and a kind of benign neglect of a whole range of religious differences among individuals. This kind of toleration is surely a mode of social decency, much to be valued but not to be confused with what one could reasonably call secularism. The fact is worth contemplating that within Europe itself, from where most of our ideas of constitutional governance have come, secularism got enshrined as a constitutional obligation in procedures of governance only in the wake of a massive revolutionary upheaval in France; and the translation of the formal juridic equality of denominationally different persons into a substantive social equality is still very far from having become a finished achievement. Ask any Jew, and you will find out that living in Europe has been for her a living hell in the modern as much as in the premodern periods, right up to the end of the Second World War. Civic equality for European or American Jews is a phenomenon of only the last half a century, an experience that the generality of blacks are yet to take for granted in the United States, so that when a Muslim friend once asked me in what respect the experience of Muslims in India was really different than that of American blacks, I was left rather speechless. What I am trying to say is that the struggle to obtain a society based on civic, secular equalitiesñlet alone a society of equality in the domain of economic entitlementsñrequires revolutionary transformations and has so far been very difficult to obtain.

Now, it is very much a virtue of our constitutional covenant that it is based on conceptions of radical juridic equalities, which encompasses a whole range of social equalities including secular equalities. This Constitution is one of the finest documents in the long history of that global revolution that first began in France two hundred years ago and which too is yet very far from finished. I don't want to at all minimize the great value of this collective possession of ours. But I would submit to you that if we really want to understand the actual character of the Indian state we should equally examine the actual practices of the Police, the Provincial Constabularies, the other agencies of state as they operate on the ground. That is where the limits of our democracy and our secularism are the most palpable. These routinised violences of the state agencies, including their routinised participation in communal violence, their methodical neglect to investigate or punish communal violence, are not merely epiphenomenal. So substantial a part of the daily conduct of agencies of the state can never be epiphenomenal. One cannot take comfort in supposing that all this is a consequence of the degeneration of the political elite and the professional politicians. In part, it is a consequence of such degenerations. But no state, certainly no state based on electoral democracy, is ever so very epiphenomenal, so very much outside and above civil society, that its widespread personnel, which has to live within that very civil society, can go on participating in certain kinds of violences which have no substantial sanction within that society.

When the police oppresses the poor peasants and the landless peasantry, we know that the whole power and system of propertyñproperty in generalñstands behind that police. When we think of the routinised violences that are perpetrated against women in society, we know that it is not a matter, in the final analysis, of this or that individual but of the patriarchal structure as a whole. We know, or at least most of us contrive to know, the same about caste violences. And we know that agencies of state are fully implicated in these other kinds of violences precisely because they have a wide social sanction. Might it not be the case that communal violence also has a much wider social sanction behind it than we have heretofore acknowledged? That is the question that undercuts the common, comforting belief that most of our society is really tolerant and secular, or that communal violence is simply a sectional and marginal pathology. So, when I use the phrase "cultures of cruelty" I mean something more than professional politicians, more than agencies of the state on the ground, more even than organised communalism; I mean a much wider web of social sanctions in which one kind of violence can be tolerated all the more because many other kinds of violence are tolerated anyway. Dowry deaths do facilitate the burning of women out of communal motivations, and, together, these two kinds of violences do contribute to the making of a more generalised culture of cruelty as well as a more generalized ethical numbness toward cruelty as such. And when I speak of "rightwing politics and the cultures of cruelty," I undoubtedly refer to the culture of cruelties that the Hindutva right-wing is creating, methodically and in cold blood, in pursuit of what strikes me as a fascist project. I do mean that such cultures of cruelty have been a punctual feature of the politics of the far right throughout its history, everywhere in the world. I do mean to draw your attention to the great discrepancy between the spiritualist claim of defending Hindu piety, Hindu tradition, Hindu ethos, and the creation in practice of a brutish and brutalising culture as is symbolised by the average member of the Bajrang Dal, who functions as a storm trooper of the Hindutva purification over which our Prime Minister, the liberal Mr. Vajpayee, is pleased to preside. But I also mean something else, that the hindutva brigade is not only an agent and a perpetrator, it is also a beneficiary. If its acts upon the wider culture so as to brutalize it, the pre-existing cultures of cruelty also serve to sustain its projects.

That much, I thought, I should say. But what about our `secular nationalism'? This is my own tradition; it has had a powerful presence and on the whole a positive role in our society; it is what prevented India, in the midst of the communal holocaust that accompanied the Partition, from becoming a Hindu Rashtra and gave to the country a democratic, secular constitution. You would be misunderstanding me completely if you were to conclude that I wish to downplay or disregard this tradition. It is mine; it has made me what I am. It is yours, and it has made you what you are. Mr. Ved Gupta is no longer among us, but if I understand the meaning of his life correctly he too would have been proud to belong to it. And yet, because this tradition is oursñthis tradition that tries so very hard to live up to the ethical claims of a modern rationalityñwe have the birthright to criticize it, as severely as we wish, in the spirit of that Enlightenment which has taught us that the exercise of one's own critical faculty is not only a right but a duty, without the performance of which the good society cannot come into being. So, let me also say the following, in the spirit of a self-criticism, more or less.

When I emphasized that secularism does not arise spontaneously out of the traditional society but is a modern civic virtue that had come into being as part of a project to revolutionize society as a whole, I wanted to draw your attention to quite a few things. One is that modern politics in India began not as an exercise in citizenship, since no one can be the citizen of a colony, but as so many attempts to organise pressure groups that could negotiate with the colonial authority, and, inevitably, these pressure groups were organized around the fault lines that existed already in society, so that factors of religion, caste and community were paramount in the organisation of such groups. For all its attempts and claims to become secular, even the Indian National Congress, when it arose, was itself constantly attempting to reach some sort of a balance among elites of various religious entities and denominational communities. I would even suggest to you that diverse individuals and groups subscribing to a particular religion or sect came to be defined as coherent communities and political entities precisely because groups of elites needed to claim that they represented such communities and entities. In the colonial society, community was where citizenship was not. The very idea that we now take as self-evident, that Hindus and Muslims and Christians respectively constitute homogeneous and politically meaningful communities, is the product of that fantastic moment when the representors had to invent the represented. In that semi-modernizing society of non-citizenship, nationalism in its originary moment could only be cultural nationalism because it was politically too weak to claim an identity as a politically formed nation. Please contemplate the fact that the claim that we are a nation is, in our history, much older than the claim that we are a secular nation or that this nationhood in some fundamental way cannot be born without the abolition of colonial autocracy. Even the most secular of our nationalists continued to think of India as a primordial nation civilizationally defined, rather than a modern nation that was the product of the anti-colonial movement itself and an entity that arose out of the crucible of 15 August 1947. In such conceptions, the nation was already an embodiment of a supposed shared culture and not a product of common citizenship or juridic equality. Our nationalism was cultural well before it was political or civic or secular. In this ambience, the temptations of blood and belonging, of spiritual essence, of racial or religious particularity, of revivalism and purification were particularly strong. Religious identity was built into our canonical reform movements and into even the prehistory of Indian nationalism, as these evolved not only in Bengal but also elsewhere, as for example among the Muslim reformists of North India, not to speak of the Muslim political elite as a whole, throughout the history of that anti-colonial and communally marked nationalism, as much those who participated in the separatist movement as the ones who were absorbed in Congress nationalism; Jinnah and Azad, after all, equally insisted on being Muslims and leaders of Muslims, the only complication being that they offered different recipes for the Muslims whom both claimed to represent.

All of this was very much complicated by the caste and class character of these reformers, revivalists and cultural nationalists. This caste and class origin necessarily required a misrecognition of the actual character of the people who were now said to be a nation. The Orientalist scholarship which gave us the images of Aryan origin, Vedic purity and Muslim tyranny was in fact a joint product of some bookish Europeans and these upper caste gentlemen, with equal though different investment in such images. So, the nostalgia that arose out of such scholarship had peculiarly strong caste flavour; the India of the past was the past of these upper castes. The revivalisms were not even national in any substantive fashion; as Gramsci immortally remarked, the word "nation" means nothing if it does not mean "the people." For those gentlemen-reformers, however, `the people' remained a rhetorical category, always to be invoked but never granted any autonomous space in those projects of reform, while the reforms that were proposed or undertaken in the name of the nation always remained confined to their own class, caste and/or community. So, the line between reform and revivalism remained forever blurred, and the revivalisms as such were just so many narcissisms of those upper castes that could no longer rule in reality and therefore ruled only in the imagination, not in the present but in a past that was somehow to be transformed into a future. The only thing that guaranteed the security of this phantasy was the fact of property, which they still commanded, as they had commanded in the past; here, then, was the real link between their past and their present, which they hoped to continue into the future. Colonial government was acceptable because it was now the real guarantor of that property. Those early heroes of ours were conservative, socially and politically, and not even notably anti-colonial. In this milieu, then, our nationalism was born.

I shall take up this story again in a moment. What I have just said prompts me to offer you two observations, however. One is the reminder of what Hegel once said, namely that only the slave can understand the whole of society because he must understand himself as well as the conditions of his exploitation, and hence his master; whereas the master can rest his laurels on understanding merely himself and the terms on which he can exploit his slave. It is in this specific sense that the consciousness of the subjugated is always superior to the conscious of the rulers. Which leads me to my second observation, namely that in the multiplicity of our reform movements, it was only the reform movements of the oppressed castes, and the efforts of some valiant women, that were substantially free of those kinds of revivalisms and had some fundamental understanding of the social whole, and therefore of the "nation" conceived as "the people," because the overwhelming majority of "the people" were neither upper class nor upper caste. It is no wonder that among all the reformists Periyar stands out as an avowed atheist and Ambedkar ultimately undertook a formal religious conversion not as merely a personal act but as a public and participatory act, living his conversion not as a personal salvation but as militant repudiation of caste society and as an invitation to mass repudiation of the same. At this dangerous turn in our history when Mr. Vajpayee recommends a national debate on the issue of conversions, I would suggest to you that, in the larger historical sense, there is something that connects the spirit of our Constitution, which calls upon us to abolish caste and denomination as politically meaningful categories, and the spirit in which Ambedkar, the principal architect of that Constitution, undertook his own departure from caste society and led a mass conversation out of that kind of slavery. In this moment, when a spiral of fire that burns crosses as well as Christians is flaming across the country, it is important for us to say that there have been in our history, in the remote past and in the recent past, religious conversionsñout of caste society, and sometimes out of religion altogetherñthat we must take up as so many badges of revolt and honour.

But I was talking about that originary moment when revivalism and a nostalgia for a golden age in the past was rampant among impressive sections of the intelligentsia that defined the first rudiments of cultural nationalism. Precisely at the time, during the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening ones of the twentieth, when representatives of Indian economic nationalism were formulating analytic procedures for explaining colonial exploitations, some of the most influential figures in the literary and cultural fields were deeply attracted by a cultural nationalism that was distinctly revivalist in character and religiously exclusivist by implication. Neither Bankim nor Aurobindo, neither the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal nor the Shivaji cult propagated in Maharashtra by such icons of Indian nationalism as Tilak himself, were quite untainted by that kind of revivalist fervour. Indeed, so powerful was the revivalist culture of the upper castes that when anti-Brahminical movements surfaced in Maharashtra, whether under Phule or Ambedkar, it was the extremity of the backlash of the upper castes in that region that gave us the RSS in the first place, with all its mythologies of blood and belief.

This is not to say that either Tilak or Aurobindo would be quite approving of what the Hindutva of our own day is and does. And yet there is enough there for a common sense to prevail today among sections of the urban upper castes and middle classes, in various parts of India, especially the Northern and the Western, to be persuaded that the social vision and cultural idiom of this modernday Hindutva is descended from that general ambience of our `renaissance' and `awakening'.

Indeed the potentials of that kind of revivalism were so pernicious that Tagore was to warn at length, already in the second decade of this century, that there was only a short step from revivalist zealotry to communal frenzy. In two of his great novels, Gora and Home and the World, whatever other shortcomings those novels might also have, Tagore was to portray with great sensitivity and acumen how revivalist politics and communal closures may be particularly tempting to the socially insecure and the upwardly mobile.

That, then, is a crucial point: the sheer persistence of Brahminical revivalisms at the very heart of what were expected to be structures of our modernity and which never did gave us any kind of modernity, precisely because of the extensive compromises they made with colonial representations of Indian history and because of their interest in representing their caste cultures as our `national culture'. Hindutva has derived much comfort from those revivalisms, but considerable sections of what we call our secular nationalism have never been quite free of that kind of rhetoric, so much so that Hind Swaraj is of course a major document of that nostalgia fantasy of the past but even Nehru's Discovery of India tends sometimes to rehearse precisely those themes. There have of course been many valiant individuals, even some groupings, for whom secularism has been a primary value but, for the most part, what passes for secularism in India is in fact a tolerant kind of pluralism, which has tended to in fact accentuate the role of religion in public life rather than bring about its decline, and the Iftar party in which the Muslim Mullah can embrace Madan Lal Khurana is of course one of the more humorous, one of the more bizarre expressions of this professed pluralism. In this larger context, then, one can say that it is only on the Left that a whole political formation has arisen for which secularism is a fundamental premise.

So we have been caught between the rising tide of revivalist communalism on the Right, a tolerant kind of pluralism on the part of a Centre that has been collapsing and fragmenting for a couple of decades now, and a Left that has been a substantial presence but still a minority current in society as a whole, the only redeeming feature being that the Left commands a moral authority and a degree of social consent very much exceeding its numerical strength. it is in this context that the Sangh undertakes wave after wave of its offensives and dreams of completing its revolution of the Far Right within the foreseeable future. It creates a widespread culture of cruelty so that the violences it desires may be carried out not only by its actual members but also by the mobs and the vagrants whom it incites, assembles and motivates.

I said a bit earlier that a common trait among movements of this kind is that they offer an anti-materialist conception of revolution, an anti-liberal conception of nationalism, and an anti-rationalist critique of Modernity. Let me briefly explain what I mean. Historically, these movements arose in response to the emergence of mass working class parties which offered a materialist conception of revolution, based on an understanding that the real history was the history of material production and therefore of the classes that were engaged in those productions and their benefits. This conception posited the primacy of class conflict, with a vision of multi-cultural and multi-religious unities of the working class, and a revolutionary restructuring of society based on economic and social justice and the collective management of the production of wealth by an association of the direct producers. In this conception, the state was to be reduced eventually to a purely managerial function, and nations themselves amalgamated into a universalist equality. Movements of integral nationalism, and then of fascism, arose in direct opposition to each and all of these propositions. Real history, they said, is the history of culture, belief, blood, race, language and what I have called primordial intimacy. The true revolution was the one that affirmed and purified this fundamental nature and ethos of the nation, and for this purification one needed not a weakened but a vastly strengthened militarised nation. What was primary was not the domains of production or the conflict of classes but the domains of subjectivity and identity, be they racial or religious or linguistic, and the real clash was the civilizational clash of these identities. The real arena of struggle was not the material but the spiritual; and the real motivating force was not reason or even ethics but the spirit, the imagination, the myth.

And this kind of nationalism was an anti-liberal nationalism in a very specific sense. The economic project of liberalism, the project of private property and the market and the accumulation of capital, were accepted and posited against the collectivist economic project of the working class parties. But the political project of liberalismñbased as it was on individual freedoms, broad tolerance of religious and cultural diversities, and representative forms of governmentñwas rejected as inadequate for the tasks of radical re-structuring of the nation which required not individual freedom but mass consent to a homogeneous culture and the superiority of one religion over another, one race over another. It is significant that the Jews who came in for such a special treatment by the Nazis were perceived as aliens on both counts, race as well as religion. Against parliamentary democracy, these movements upheld authoritarian command structures, a cult of the leader, a cult of violence as a necessary means of purification, a virtually paramilitary organization of their cadres and an extra-parliamentary structure of the core leadership group, a culture of obedience among the cadres and of spectacular mobilizations of the masses. The March on Rome, the burning of the Reichstag, the shilanyas, the rath yatras, the spectacular destruction of Mir Baqi's antique little mosqueñthese are events in a single chain. And it is sobering to recall that the shakhas of the RSS in India were consciously patterned after the fascist training centres in Italy, after Moonje had visited those centres and had chatted with Mussolini.

Likewise the anti-rationalist critique of Modernity! It is significant that this critique of Modernity was also very partial. It does not include, for example, a repudiation of the market, which has been so central an institution of capitalist forms of rationality and modernity. Nor does it repudiate the sciences and technologies upon which modern industrial production is based, and which are so much the source of capitalist wealth. Rather, it rejects what Eric Hobsbawm has felicitously called `the Enlightenment Left': the values of non-racial and non-denominational equality, the fraternity of the culturally diverse, the supremacy of Reason over Faith, the belief in freedom and progress, the belief that the exercise of critical reason, beyond all tradition or convention or institution, is the fundamental civic virtue without which other civic virtues cannot be sustained. As educators in pursuit of a secular democracy and a Left-of-Centre polity, we understand and uphold these values of the Enlightenment Left. The radical Right also understands them, but fears them and repudiates them. Thus it is that we dedicate ourselves to the creation of a culture of civility, and they to a culture of cruelty. That, ultimately, is at the heart of all our disputes.

The assault on our institutions of education and research is a central element in this project, because these institutions are central in the reproduction of civil society. As Marx once put it:

In considering such transformations, a distinction must always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophicñin short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight it out.

The battle over ideology and consciousnessñthe battle over all their forms, be they political, or aesthetic, or religious, or philosophicñis thus the central battle, because it is here, in these domains, not simply at the point of production, that human beings actually "fight it out." We of course know that, but they also know it. If they are to re-make India in their own image, they must first win the hearts and minds of our children. It is in this battle that we must engage, because without democratic teachers there shall be no democratic India.

Notes

1. This is the text of a lecture delivered at Delhi University on 11 February 1999 in memory of Ved Gupta, one of the key founders of the Democratic Teachers Federation (DTF). The endnotes have been added later.

2. It can be plausibly argued that whereas the other organizations of the Sangh parivar, notably Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal as well as the more recently formed Hindu Jagran Munch (HJM), have used the umbrella of the BJP government, both at the Centre as well as in such states as U. P. and Gujarat, to act on a very broad front ranging from expedited pace of preparation for building the temple at Ayodhya to the attacks on minorities, the cultural project of these governments, at the Centre and in the States, has been focussed on trying to restructure the educational and research institutions, as is indicated in the attempts to revise textbooks, revamp such institutions as the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), and Hinduise educational practice by introducing the singing of the Bande Matram and the Sarasvati Vandana in educational institutions. Culture, in the broadest sense, has been a primary target area for the RSS as a whole throughout this period of governmental power.

3. A number of the historians of European fascism, notably Sternhill, have traced the origins of the fascist ideology to the anti-materialist and Romantic critique of Marxism by such figures as Georges Sorel, Charles Maurras and the revolutionary syndicalists toward the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. They have also argued that Mussolini, himself a professed socialist in his early career, was nevertheless deeply inspired by this tradition of hysterical nationalism and the cult of violence, and that he forged what we now know as the classical Italian fascism directly in opposition to the rise of Leninism as the dominant trend in international socialism. See, for instance, Zeev Sternhill (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Princeton University Press, 1994 (original French, 1989). It may be worth mentioning that Ali Shariati, the principal theoretician of the `leftwing' of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was deeply impressed by the writings of Charles Maurras, just as Moonje was directly inspired by Mussolini himself.

4. The National Front in France and the National Alliance in Italy are only two of the major rightwing groups in Western Europe whose roots in classical fascism of the inter-war years are well known. The Italian variant shall bear a more detailed comment. For forty years, Gianfranco Fini, the leader of this group, happily called himself a fascist or `neo-fascist'. Then, as his group suddenly emerged as the major coalition partner in the government of Silvio Berlusconi after the Italian elections of 1994, he fleetingly claimed that he was not a fascist but a `post-fascist' but then, recognizing that the word `fascist' has fallen into terrible disrepute, he re-named the group as `National Alliance'. Unlike the fascists of the 1920s and í30s, those of today usually adopt a different name, so as to conceal their true identity. However, their origins in fascist ideology are widely recognized. See, for example, Glynn Ford, Fascist Europe: The Rise of Racism and Xenophobia, London, Pluto Press, 1992; or the Special Issue of International Socialist entitled "Euro-Fascism: What makes it Tick?", no 60, Autumn 1993. Dozens of such analyses are available.

5. This is particularly true of the Croatian leaders and the Serb militias, whose origins date back to the pro-fascist organizations that had fought the civil war against Tito's partisans. However, the political origins of the relatively more benign rulers of Slovenia can also be traced back to those same anti-partisan formations.

6. The origins of India's anti-colonial movement are of course much older but it became a mass movement only with the Rawlatt Satyagrah and the Non-Cooperation Movements of the 1919ó22 period. Similarly, peasants' and workers' agitations of the modern type had begun already in the 19th century, but the emergence of a mass workers' movement can be traced backñin terms of convenient datesñto the founding of the All India Trade Union Congress in 1920 and the rise of several communist groups as well as Workers' and Peasants Parties (WPP) over the next few years, reaching a high level of working class militancy during 1927ó29 period. RSS arose directly in responseña rightwing obscurantist responseñto these developments.

7. Aijaz Ahmad, "Structure and Ideology in Italian Fascism" in Lineages of the Present, Delhi, Tulika, 1996.

8. Broadly speaking, we could offer the following schema. 1) The end of the Second World War witnessed an enormous upsurge of anti-colonial movements and a massive wave of decolonisation across Asia and Africa. Great expectations were attached to the rise of the national-bourgeois state as symbolized, for example, in the Bandung Conference and the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement. 2) The passing of those hopes occurred at different times in different countries, but, on the whole, it was during the ten years between 1965 and 1975 that this type of state reached its crisis, as symbolised, for example, by the defeat of Egypt and Syria in 1967 and the imposition of the Emergency in India some years later. 3) Since the mid-70sñsince the 1973 coup in Chile, let us sayñthere has been little evidence that any national bourgeoisie is seriously interested in defending national independence against imperialist pressures, and the disillusion has become particularly strong over the past decade. See, for a fuller statement of this position, Aijaz Ahmad, "Introduction: Literature Among the Signs of Our Times," in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London, Verso, 1992.

9. This critique became particularly influential with the rise to dominance of the anti-communist, postmodern theorists in the wake of the aborted Paris uprisings of 1968. That this dramatic shift in philosophical thinking was led by French intellectuals is not a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that this critique, which formalised the dashing of revolutionary hopes, became dominant in the advanced capitalist countries precisely during the years when the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa witnessed the dashing of hopes associated with decolonisation. The early 70s are the years of a triple crisis across the world: the crisis of the national-bourgeois state in the periphery of the capitalist system; the onset of stagnation in the capitalist centres, in the wake of a long wave of prosperity since the late 1940s; and a similar onset of stagnation in the COMECON countries, coupled with their failure to make a transition from extensive industrialisation to intensive industrialisation based on the more up-to-date technologies. This coincidence of various crises is central to the rise of anti-materialist and anti-revolutionary irrationalisms during this period.

10. The characterisation of nationalism as "a derivative discourse"ñderived from colonialism itselfñis of course the major conceptual contribution of Partha Chatterjee, the most influential of the subalternist theorists, alongside Ranajit Guha. See, in particular, the chapter on Nehru in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1986. The attack on Nehru's emphasis on industrial modernization within a framework of central planning converges, in not altogether agreeable ways, with similar attacks coming from the Right, including the international agencies advocating "liberalisation." Chatterjee seems much perturbed by planning and "modernity" but not much by the market itself. His identification of Gandhi with "tradition" and of Nehru with "modernity" only repeats the conventional wisdom of Indian social science and paves the way for subalternism's later turn toward a full-scale anti-rationalist, indigenist postmodernism.

11. The historic premises of the Indian state as it arose after decolonisation, with its twin emphases on secular democracy and economic nationalism, were fully under siege by the mid-90s, as the country got overwhelmed by the IMF-inspired "liberalisation" and the RSS-inspired "Hindu nationalism." It was in the midst of this historic shift toward the Far Right that Partha Chatterjee published his well-known essay "Secularism and Toleration" (Economic and Political Weekly, XXIX, 28) which questioned the very idea of secularism, a civic virtue enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and affiliated the author explicitly with Ashish Nandy who had by then had a rather extensive red-baiting career. In deed, Chatterjee was to state that his own essay was a mere continuation of the argument begun by Nandy in his "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance," in Veena Das (ed.) Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992. Subalternism has had a curious career, starting with invocations of Gramsci and finally coming into its own as an accomplice of the anti-communist Right.

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