Hate is unspooling in erratic, unpredictable waves in this country. The mob is rattling its weapons. The actors are too varied to be contained. In each gully, a vanquisher cub-roars. All the scattered elements of the Hindutva cadre - the local variants - are operationalising first copies of a template perfected painstakingly by the management. The gun is firing on all barrels, and the machinery of ethnic cleansing is being oiled with the scarred semblance of state apparatus. The mainstream media is represented by those such as Aajtak News anchor Anjana Om Kashyap who takes a joy ride in a bulldozer that goes about shutting down livelihoods, homes, and places of worship. She eggs the driver on. Meanwhile, Navika Kumar, group editor of the Times Network, displays the basest of sadistic instincts in the comic timing of her venom filled tweet about bulldozers. At the centre, like a mugshot on a dartboard, the figure of the Muslim, stands, interpellated into submission.
We are taunting our Muslims, baiting them, and then turning upon them using the empty bogeys of municipality, media, police, politics, and public opinion. Where the state has receded, a clutch of mercenaries has gathered, each with their own marketable varieties of predatory violence. Asim Ali articulates this beautifully in his spirited analysis of the new socio-political formations of community, and its weaponisation against Muslims:
…This Hindutva mobilisation is more akin to a market phenomenon. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime has fomented a huge market of Hindutva mobilisation that has changed the nature of communal violence from an episodic to a pervasive and endemic phenomenon. This is not ‘Hindu Rashtra’ by intelligent design but by an accelerating mass of de-centralised mob action. The country is being transformed not just by big men sitting in Delhi or Nagpur, but by millions of little people in towns and cities, who are devising their own ways of putting Muslims ‘in their place’ and responding to the facilitative conditions created by the regime.
This is the other end of the spectrum. We have come full circle from a time when Modi was the magnet, the great equaliser, for various brands of saffron born from invented mythologies of victimhood, to a historical moment when the footsoldiers have left the fold, and are firing at will, as dangerous renegades, that have become the norm.
The demolition is the ultimate symbolic act of assault in the modern urban matrix of social relationships. It demarcates, humiliates, punishes and shames. It removes the citizen from the fold, and strips them of all dignity, and meaning. This is the fourth state in which the BJP has used this modus operandi, and the fact that the Left delegation managed to stop the design of the armed state, is a feat of great resistance. This is not the first time that the Left has stepped up, even thought it has not been in power. At every demolition, every insidious attempt to disenfranchise the poor, the left has been there, with its fact finding committees and its ground network of activists, and lawyers.
This morning, I chanced upon a poem I had written a few months ago while going through some old submissions. I had forgotten that I had written this poem. But when I read it today, it seared and smoked:
Demolition
Before the streets smell rain
an eye spies an opening in the clouds
the gaze curdles anticipation,
traces a metronome louder than a bomb.
fear splays the sun into smithereens
spreading laughter into the sky
I spoke to him once about it
the morning after
People like to demolish things
To plant a seed you need a flat surface,
he said calmly
and belief is a hungry beast.
his shoulder was a quiver of indignation
He had turned militant, nose wrinkled,
antennae rigid to the sound of the ambulance.
After decades of protecting his home,
merely a memory of coconut palms
and the sepia of streetlamps
illuminating newspaper print,
after seeing his children become fodder at traffic signals
after hiding behind his broken hutment when the bulldozers
came, draped in saffron, and khaki,
the sweeper understood to stay below the gaze, always.I keep my ear to the ground
Sometimes I hear my mother's heartbeat
a lori to drown out the sound of development.
Kindness is a moan that doesn't rise higher
than dream. Nobody notices the sweeper.
But the sweeper notices everything, his shield
is the scurrying of ants before the downpour.
The extremist right is absurd in its imagination of purity and entitlement.
Their uni-dimensional narrative is being countered across a multitude of fronts. The strategic alliances that form across alternative media, activists, legal professionals, civil society, and artists, are working overtime. This is a swell of hope that I believe in, and internalise, because it gives me a language. I do not believe we are equipped with the resilience of political armoury, and revolutionary creativity to confront such comprehensive strategy on our own. So, different kinds of work emerge, in such situations.
One kind of work is also archiving this time. We are attempting to disinter episodes from the epidemic of twisted godhood, and stack them up in transparencies, so that the world, and the future, can see, and understand. We are also telling the stories of our emotions, not individual, but communal- great surges of discontent or anxiety. When political victories are described, natural metaphors of disastrous phenomena such as ‘tidal waves’, ‘landslides’ and ‘cyclones’ are used; even forces ‘storm’ a city. In such a convolution of essentialising narratives, it becomes difficult to identify the subtler shades of fatigue that linger around a population, like an unfortunate albatross.
I turn to poetry not for answers, but as another tool of comprehension, simply to give me a language of description, simply so that I can christen the many dysfunctions of our times, and identify the consistent arc of precarity that the most marginalised sections of our people are caught in.
I share with you today, a poem by a character, most oblique in the landscape of Indian poetry in English. A. K. Mehrotra describes the elusiveness of this poet - “For decades, you only caught glimpses of Gopal Honnalgere. Before you could properly see him, he’d disappear. And then in 2003, he died, unsung, but still singing.” Honnalegere was born in 1942. His early collections of poetry - verses the kind you had never seen before in Indian English poetry - with ordinary objects reimagined in epic canvases, gods playing with vermin, and nature rollicking with politics were published under the generous aegis of the legendary P. Lal of The Writer’s Workshop.
His non-sequitirs sometimes congealed into narrative, and sometimes, into scathing satire.
Recently, Poetrywala released a definitive collected poems (for this I am grateful to the editors and publishers), from which I have extracted this poem.
I use this poem today like a pair of pincers. I use it as mask, and crowbar. The poem is a dry, no-nonsense attack on the pusillanimity that shrouds the majoritarian brahminnical impulse of purity. It is this fear that drives their blustering bombast. No blemish should come on the upper caste dominion of land and people. The white corridors of sanctified belief are built on fragile girders, and even the shadow of the “other” is a cause for concern. I am reminded of Gorakh Pandey’s Unka Dar, that also talks about this twin affect of fear, and retribution.
And so, an elaborate strategy of subjugation must be employed. As the persona speaks with the voice of the timid oppressor, the religious bigot who is scared of his own reflection, the ridiculousness of the project emerges. The threat shrivels up, like a raisin in the sun.
The evil becomes banal.
***
Note:
There are various ways to help for those of you who want to help in rehabilitation efforts. For instance, do check out the brilliant work of Miles 2 Smile. The platform has multiple fundraisers live at the moment, catering to individual victims, families and neighbourhoods affected by the recent demolition drives. Much of their work is in the area of communal violence, and is critical. I urge those who can, to contribute.
Praying for the healing and rehabilitation of those affected, across the country, in this latest swoop of Islamophobic violence.
If the poetry and the commentary resonate with you, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
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