I have chosen to present this article just
published in The New York Times because it seems to me – with very important
differences – that it ably highlights and traces the specific ways in which
both India and China, the first potentially and the second in the most
frighteningly immediate fashion, pose the biggest danger to global democracy,
freedom and peace through a mixture of “ressentiment” (resentment against some
perceived historical wrong done by the West, in the case of China, and other
people like Muslim Pakistanis for Indian Hindus) and tumultuous anger fanned by
access to modern means of communication by a vast mass of near-illiterate
individuals! – A sobering string of thoughts, valuably useful if we are to confront
a new Evil dawning on this wretched planet…
Before
dawn on Feb. 26, Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister of India,
ordered an aerial attack on the country’s nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan.
There were thick clouds that morning over the border. But Mr. Modi claimed earlier this month, during his successful
campaign for re-election, that he had overruled advisers who worried about
them. He is ignorant of science, he admitted, but nevertheless trusted his “raw
wisdom,” which told him that the cloud cover would prevent Pakistani radar from
detecting Indian fighter jets.
Over five years of Mr.
Modi’s rule, India has suffered variously from his raw wisdom, most gratuitously
in November 2016, when his government abruptly withdrew nearly 90 percent of
currency notes from circulation. From devastating the Indian economy to risking
nuclear Armageddon in South Asia, Mr. Modi has confirmed that the leader of the
world’s largest democracy is dangerously incompetent. During this spring’s
campaign, he also clarified that he is an unreconstructed ethnic-religious
supremacist, with fear and loathing as his main political means.
India under Mr. Modi’s
rule has been marked by continuous explosions of violence in both virtual and
real worlds. As pro-Modi television anchors hunted for “anti-nationals” and
troll armies rampaged through social media, threatening women with rape, lynch mobs slaughtered Muslims and low-caste Hindus.
Hindu supremacists have captured or infiltrated institutions from the military
and the judiciary to the news media and universities, while dissenting
scholars and journalists have found themselves exposed to
the risk of assassination and arbitrary detention. Stridently advancing bogus
claims that ancient Hindus invented genetic engineering and airplanes, Mr. Modi
and his Hindu nationalist supporters seemed to plunge an entire country
into a moronic inferno.
Last month the Indian army’s official twitter account excitedly broadcast its discovery of the Yeti’s
footprints.
Yet in
the election that began last month, voters chose overwhelmingly to prolong this
nightmare. The sources of Mr. Modi’s impregnable charisma seem more mysterious
when you consider that he failed completely to realize his central promises of
the 2014 election: jobs and national security. He presided over an enormous
rise in unemployment and a spike in militancy in India-ruled Kashmir. His
much-sensationalized punitive assault on Pakistan in February damaged nothing
more than a few trees across the border, while killing seven Indian civilians in an instance of friendly
fire.
Modi
has infused India’s public sphere with a riotously popular loathing of the
country’s old urban elites.
Mr.
Modi did indeed benefit electorally this time from his garishly advertised
schemes to provide toilets, bank accounts, cheap loans, housing, electricity
and cooking-gas cylinders to some of the poorest Indians. Lavish donations from
India’s biggest companies allowed his party to outspend all others on its
re-election campaign. A corporate-owned media fervently built up Mr. Modi as
India’s savior, and opposition parties are right to suggest that the Election
Commission, once one of India’s few unimpeachable bodies, was also shamelessly
partisan.
None of these factors,
however, can explain the spell Modi has cast on an overwhelmingly young Indian
population. “Now and then,” Lionel Trilling once wrote, “it is possible to
observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” Mr. Modi has created
that process in India by drastically refashioning, with the help of technology,
how many Indians see themselves and their world, and by infusing India’s public
sphere with a riotously popular loathing of the country’s old urban elites.
Riven
by caste as well as class divisions, and dominated in Bollywood as well as
politics by dynasties, India is a grotesquely unequal society. Its
constitution, and much political rhetoric, upholds the notion that all
individuals are equal and possess the same right to education and job
opportunities; but the everyday experience of most Indians testify to appalling
violations of this principle. A great majority of Indians, forced to inhabit
the vast gap between a glossy democratic ideal and a squalid undemocratic
reality, have long stored up deep feelings of injury, weakness, inferiority,
degradation, inadequacy and envy; these stem from defeats or humiliation
suffered at the hands of those of higher status than themselves in a rigid
hierarchy.
I both
witnessed and experienced these explosive tensions in the late 1980s, when I
was a student at a dead-end provincial university, one of many there
confronting a near-impossible task: not only sustained academic excellence, but
also a wrenching cultural and psychological makeover in the image of the
self-assured, English-speaking metropolitan. One common object of our
ressentiment — an impotent mix of envy and hatred — was Rajiv Gandhi, the
deceased father of main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, whom Mr. Modi indecorously
but cunningly chose to denounce in his election campaign. An airline pilot who
became prime minister largely because his mother and grandfather had held the
same post, and who allegedly received kickbacks
from a Swedish arms manufacturer into Swiss bank accounts, Mr. Gandhi appeared
to perfectly embody a pseudo-socialist elite that claimed to supervise post-colonial
India’s attempt to catch up with the modern West but that in reality
single-mindedly pursued its own interests.
There
seemed no possibility of dialogue with a metropolitan ruling class of such
Godlike aloofness, which had cruelly stranded us in history while itself moving
serenely toward convergence with the prosperous West. This sense of abandonment
became more wounding as India began in the 1990s to embrace global capitalism
together with a quasi-American ethic of individualism amid a colossal
population shift from rural to urban areas. Satellite television and the
internet spawned previously inconceivable fantasies of private wealth and
consumption, even as inequality, corruption and nepotism grew and India’s
social hierarchies appeared as entrenched as ever.
No
politician, however, sought to exploit the long dormant rage against India’s
self-perpetuating post-colonial rulers, or to channel the boiling frustration
over blocked social mobility, until Mr. Modi emerged from political disgrace in
the early 2010s with his rhetoric of meritocracy and lusty assaults on
hereditary privilege.
India’s
former Anglophone establishment and Western governments had stigmatized Mr.
Modi for his suspected role — ranging from malign indifference to complicity
and direct supervision — in the murder of hundreds of Muslims in his home state
of Gujarat in 2002. But Mr. Modi, backed by some of India’s richest people,
managed to return to the political mainstream, and, ahead of the 2014 election,
he mesmerized aspiring Indians with a flamboyant narrative about his
hardscrabble past, and their glorious future. From the beginning, he was
careful to present himself to his primary audience of stragglers as one of
them: a self-made individual who had to overcome hurdles thrown in his way by
an arrogant and venal elite that indulged treasonous Muslims while pouring
contempt on salt-of-the-earth Hindus like himself. Boasting of his 56-inch
chest, he promised to transform India into an international superpower and to
reinsert Hindus into the grand march of history.
Since
2014, Mr. Modi’s near-novelistic ability to create irresistible fictions has
been steadily enhanced by India’s troll-dominated social media as well as
cravenly sycophantic newspapers and television channels. India’s online
population doubled in the five years of Mr. Modi’s rule. With cheap smartphones
in the hands of the poorest of Indians, a large part of the world’s population
was exposed to fake news on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp. Indeed, Mr. Modi received one of his
biggest electoral boosts from false accounts claiming that his airstrikes
exterminated hundreds of Pakistanis, and that he frightened Pakistan into
returning the Indian pilot it had captured.
Mr. Modi is
preternaturally alert to the fact that the smartphone’s screen is pulling
hundreds of millions of Indians, who have barely emerged from illiteracy, into
a wonderland of fantasy and myth. An early adopter of Twitter,
like Donald Trump, he performs unceasingly for the camera, often
dressed in outlandish costumes. After decades of Western-educated and
emotionally constricted Indian leaders, Mr. Modi uninhibitedly participates —
whether speaking tearfully of his poverty-stricken past or boasting of his
bromance with Barack Obama — in digital media’s quasi-egalitarian culture of
exhibitionism.
India
has witnessed a savage assault on not just democratic institutions and rational
discourse but also ordinary human decency.
Posing
last weekend as a saffron-robed monk in a cave at a Hindu pilgrimage site, Mr.
Modi provoked much mockery among India’s English-speaking intelligentsia. But
to many Indians who felt scorned and marginalized by a westernized
establishment, an unabashedly Hindu politician with thickly-accented English
has appeared, as the novelist Aatish Taseer claimed in 2014, “a
rare instance of India trusting to herself, throwing up one of her own, one who
did not have the blessings of the West at all.”
He was
certainly fortunate to have in Rahul Gandhi a live mascot of India’s defunct
dynastic politics and insolvent ideological centrism. However, contrary to what
many neoliberal commentators in India and the West hoped for, Mr. Modi is far
from alchemizing the passions of left-behind Indians into spectacular economic
growth. Rather, he has opened up what Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking of the “men
of ressentiment,” called “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge,
inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”
Mr.
Modi’s appointed task in India is the same as that of many far-right
demagogues: to titillate a fearful and angry population with the scapegoating
of minorities, refugees, leftists, liberals and others while accelerating
predatory forms of capitalism. He may have failed to create job opportunities
for disadvantaged Indians. But he has sanctioned them, with his own vengeful
contempt for English-speaking elites, to raucously talk back to, and shout
down, the already privileged. In lieu of any liberation from injustice, he has
emancipated the darkest of emotions; he has licensed his supporters to
explicitly hate a range of people from perfidious Pakistanis and Indian Muslims
to their “anti-national” Indian appeasers.
As Mr.
Modi allowed long-simmering ressentiment to erupt volcanically, India witnessed
a savage assault on not just democratic institutions and rational discourse but
also ordinary human decency. The India that Mr. Modi has made was never more
accurately summed up than both in the demonstrations last year, led by
women, and the justifications offered by politicians, police officials and
lawyers in support of eight Hindu men accused of raping and murdering an
eight-year-old Muslim girl.
Intoxicating
voters with the seductive passion of vengeance, and grandiose fantasies of
power and domination, Mr. Modi has deftly escaped public scrutiny of his record
of raw wisdom — one that would have ruined any other politician. Back in 2014,
the Hindu supremacist pioneered the politics of enmity that corrodes many
democracies today. This week, he triumphantly reaped one of the biggest
electoral harvests of the post-truth age, giving us more reason to fear the
future.
Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A
History of the Present.”
No comments:
Post a Comment