Interview
The changing forms of victimhood in India with Sanjay Srivastava, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and British Academy Global Professor, University College London, by Ankur Datta, South Asian University, Delhi.
Ankur Datta (AD): What would you say constitutes the contours of contemporary victimhoood?
Sanjay Srivastava (SS): Well, I think there are different ways of looking at it – both in the Indian and international contexts. A significant aspect concerns a dramatic change in the idea of the ‘ordinary’ person. Now, even people who historically have been in a position of power are reconstituting themselves as ordinary people. Pauline Hanson, an Australian politician, has recently stated that she is subject to anti-white racism.
1 So, now you have people who have historically been in positions of power saying, ‘we are ordinary people; we are also subject to power.’ Whereas, perhaps some 20 or 30 years back the notion of ordinary people was someone who is powerless. You would never think that someone who is in a position of power would say that they were being discriminated against.I think that is a dramatic change, particularly in the Indian case. Now, for example, the ordinary person is a middle class person whereas historically, under the post-colonial state, the ordinary person was the poor farmer, the slum dweller and so on. Now, the new ordinary people, the middle class, are saying ‘we are also victims.’ I think that is a big change in the Indian idea of ‘ordinariness’ and the remaking of Indian-ness. Of course, it is also true for other places: Trump’s America, for example. That is why you can have white people saying, ‘we have been discriminated against’, and that ‘we are also ordinary people, we are not powerful people.’ I think that this is a very significant change.
AD: When in time would you locate the point of this shift?
SS: I think, in the Indian context, it is relatively recent, and it seems to be located at the conjunction of different factors. One moment relates to the transition from the Nehruvian state to the ‘liberalization’ of the economy. For example, when the economy is opened up, there are fewer government jobs because of privatization and so on. You will hear complaints from the middle class saying, ‘reservations are affecting us and we cannot get these jobs. After all, we are also ordinary people.’ You have movements like ‘Youth for Equality’. Of course, you have the Aam Aadmi Party movement that crystallized the notion of the ordinary person.
So I think that the process in the Indian context begins in a crystallized form from the late 1980s, and the Mandal agitations of 1990 sharpened the point. Now the notion of who is a victim has changed.
2 What also matters is the connection between class and caste. Let me give you an example. In the Indian context, when the economy opened up there was some movement in terms of economic mobility for several ‘lower caste’ groups. Once they became better off, however, it did not mean that they shifted from an exclusive caste identity to a class one. Rather, they continued to maintain their caste identity with the growing sense that they should not be ‘defamed’ by anyone. So, this is one aspect: as you are moving up the social hierarchy and your class position might be changing, there is also the growing idea that your caste identity, which earlier may have been a low one, should not be defamed, it should not be looked down upon. So, people want both a new class identity but also want to remain attached to their caste identities. Of course, this is not only true of the non-upper castes.In general, however, there is a desire now for both class and caste identities, which might fly in the face of how modernity has been theorized but this is the empirical state of affairs. I think some of these things have kept alive the notion of victimhood. The defence of an older identity in the face of significant social and economic changes is a significant part of what is happening. Of course, it is an important part of electoral politics that includes caste, religious and linguistic identities. However, politicians can only build upon a sense that exists, they can’t really manufacture it.
Sociological theorization would say that what people feel offended by is the ‘hurt sentiment’ syndrome that relates to atavistic identities. However, caste identity is very much part of Indian modernity. It is Indian modernity and hence an important source of claim-making by a range of actors like ‘community leaders’ and politicians. It is also frequently argued (or perhaps it’s a hope) that marginalized communities (Dalits, Muslims, etc) will support some form of ‘progressive’ politics. As recent reactions by a wide cross-section of the Indian population shows, this is not serious social analysis.
3 Those who are victims of history do not necessarily – by that fact alone – become the harbingers of a new politics. In fact, in a changing environment, they frequently transform the idea of victimhood to assert the continuing significance of their older identities, which at other times were the reason for their oppression. Hence one appeals to victimhood because one wants to maintain that caste-community identity which was the source of ones misery and, at other times, is at risk of being ‘defamed’. I should emphasize that this is not a specific non-upper caste strategy – it operates for different reasons across the caste divide. What is clear, however, is the desire for both a class identity and other, older forms of personhood.
AD: I would like to push you on this phrase you have mentioned before; how do you regard the question of ‘hurt sentiment’?
SS: I think that one aspect is the clear division between a constitutional life and a social life. We have various volumes by historians and political scientists about the constitutional life of the Indian republic. But our everyday lives have a character that is quite divorced from the Constitution. Second, I think sentiment continues to be a significant part of Indian public life, whereas in the West, it has shifted to private life. That division between the private and the public is still absent in India: you are likely to be asked very intimate questions by complete strangers in a train in a manner unthinkable in the West. In India there has never really been a division between public and private. However, I think that was the idea when the Constitution was formulated: that irrespective of what one believes in private life, one may hate Muslims or Hindus, but one cannot express that in public. With us it has never been true; our social life diverges significantly from the constitutional one.
Perhaps my observations also derive from a specific disciplinary perspective. If one speaks to anyone who does fieldwork, they will tell you, ‘we never really had a constitutional society. Large numbers of people hate each other and say so quite openly.’ But if you read books by historians – both professional and popular – you will get a sense that India has always been a particular kind of liberal society. And that, the ‘India we grew up in has disappeared.’ However, I think the ideas of the public and private that the Constitution has sought to enforce have not succeeded. If, for example, at the present time Hindus claim that certain acts hurt their sentiments, it cannot be that this has begun to happen because in the past five years or so we have changed dramatically. I think this is a non-constitutional society where affect and sentiment are aspects of public policy and public life.
And I think that is why this ‘hurt sentiment’ business matters. In most other countries, the notion of ‘hurt sentiment’ is not acceptable in the same way because their notion is that public policy cannot be influenced by sentiment. That seems to be at the heart of things. If one looks at our legal judgements, one can see something similar taking place – that sentiments are to be considered seriously, rather than dismissed. I think that is one way one can think about it without wanting to, sort of, explain it away as Indian exceptionalism. But I think many societies like India have a similar experience.
AD: The risk is that it becomes a divide between western and non-western perspectives.
SS: I would not say that it is a black and white thing. But as much as one can generalize, to some extent, Indian public life is much more accepting of the idea that affect is a significant part of publicness. It is also because many aspects of our public life are based on the heroic figure who can do this, that or the other, who could change society by sheer force of personality. A hero, however, is a figure who is able to both utilize and affect public sentiment. A great deal of our public life, for example, is about the lone IAS [Indian Administrative Service] officer who can bring about change or a national level politician who can – once again, single-handedly – make all the bad go away. As long as any society is strongly focused on the individual – the heroic figure – rather than systems, sentiment will remain significant. Systems are the non-emotional, non-affective things. Individuals are affect-centred. Our public life is based on the individual rather than on systems.
Therefore, newspapers are full of reports about an IAS officer who made changes. As long as we have this great emphasis on the heroic figure, sentiments and ‘hurt sentiments’ will play a significant part in matters that are handled differently in other societies. Our public life is so full of hurt sentiments that we barely have space to move.
AD: If we think about the founders of this Republic, it is always in the messianic register. I think the concern now is with new politicians who seek to be seen in the same way.
SS: Well, that is the problem. Whether on the left or the right, if one continues to appeal to individuals, then one continues to perpetuate the system, rather than seriously thinking about the processes necessary to change it.
AD: I was wondering if I could shift the conversation to populism or movements that privilege the moral, ethnic, communal and national majorities across the world. Donald Trump’s campaign was appealing because it invoked a kind of ‘sense of suffering’ faced by the white American majority. To an extent, that might be the case for the victims of late capital. But it became configured as ‘all white people are being attacked.’ A similar situation is observed in India and Turkey where majorities are said to be persecuted by Nehruvian and Kemalist visions. Victimhood appears to be appropriated in that sense. How can we react, and perhaps challenge this appropriation of victimhood?
SS: Populism is difficult to challenge because, well, it is popular. It relies on the notion of something called ‘common sense’, whereas any anthropological analysis would tell us that there is no such thing as common sense. Contemporary populism is based on the notion that some things are common sense and it is based on the notion that historically what the ‘liberal elites’ have done is to deny common sense. In terms of how one counters this, I am not sure that there is actually a clear-cut way. On the one hand, there is a kind of social science which says that to think in that way is to place far too much emphasis on what the individual can do, and that this form of ‘humanism’ takes away from a structural analysis. On the other hand, there is the perspective which argues that individuals can do something. So, in terms of presenting an argument against populism, it has to be in terms of any harm the people may suffer. We have to go back to some older arguments without mystifying them, and focus on the actual harm that people suffer in the long run.
I don’t think that people hold long-term ideological positions. Largely, people hold contingent positions in terms of what they will support and what they will not support. Increasingly, I think it is a mistake to counter populism through suggesting any kind of ideologically rigid position. The extraordinary series of recent events in Maharashtra in forming a new government, must tell us that if we were once living in an age of ideologies, that time is well and truly dead. This is not to say that we should not hold ethical positions. Rather, that we need to think about the harm people suffer and formulate contingent political positions; that is what is needed now, rather than what we should do according to historical principles. I doubt if the people in whose name ‘we’ speak are particularly interested in coherent ideological positions and therefore we now need to think about ad hoc politics based on actual – rather than constitutional – conditions of life. As most anthropologists know, any information people give you is always contradictory. There is no expectation ‘out there’ that life unfolds within the crucible of any ideologically consistent context.
So, it is in that context that I think we have to formulate ad hoc strategies. What I mean by ad hoc reactions and ad hoc political strategies is really, in some sense, to abandon some of the older left strategies. We have assumed for far too long that the only form of politics is to, for example, criticize shopping malls as neo-liberal. Does anyone really care? People go there for a number of reasons. What are the ad hoc strategies through which we can hold on to those ideas which we think are important, which may be about different forms of inequalities, discrimination etc. and yet not utilize the older strategies that the left has always used. One of the great failures of so-called progressive politics in our times is to produce the ‘people’ in ‘our’ image, rather than formulate a politics that takes account of actually existing people.
I think the left has some important questions to ask, but very few answers. And in our reaction to populism ‘we’ imagine a population that does not exist. For example, look at the reaction to the scrapping of Article 370. It is actually difficult to work out which section of the population is opposed to it – not Dalits, not Buddhists, not people in the Congress, not the middle class, not Muslims beyond Kashmir. Who is actually against it? Is there an ideologically coherent framework by which we can say that this is wrong? There isn’t one and that is the difficulty. We then, need, ad hoc ways to counter it. How do we tackle this situation when this ‘theoretical’ population does not exist? Earlier Dalits and Muslims were seen to be saviours of progressive politics by forming a bloc. Now that has gone. Buddhists were going to be our saviours because they would oppose this. However, the Ladakh Buddhist Association has said, ‘No, no; scrapping Article 370 is a wonderful thing!’ Is the working class going to be our saviour? In slums where I am carrying out fieldwork, people mostly think that it is a wonderful move. I spoke to some Dalits in Shimla as part of another project. One of the first things they said was: ‘It is wonderful; Article 370 has gone.’
Because there are no fixed ideological positions, I think that ideas of victimhood and ‘hurt sentiment’ keep changing. They change – and can be influenced to produce different versions – according to circumstances. They can become ways of preventing interrogation of established positions of power, ideas of a ‘glorious’ Indian past, and the idea that there is a monolithic and unchanging Indian way of thinking that must be preserved. At different points in time any or all of these ideas are brought into play by those who wish to utilize ‘hurt sentiments’ for their own purposes. Opposition to it must be just as nimble and ad hoc. I think it is a mistake to assume that people hold any ideological position consistently or that something called ‘constitutional morality’ will see us through to better times. No one knows this better than politicians. I sometimes think they know it far better than social scientists.
AD: I have just one last question – how could we address the appropriation of victimhood?
SS: I would go back to what we discussed earlier. One is that I think the idea of victimhood has become much rubberier, much more flexible, much more pliable than earlier. Now there is a much wider range of people who claim victimhood. Victimhood can be claimed by almost anyone because it seems to be something that is not necessarily attached to one’s position in a structure or hierarchy. It is now primarily connected with identity and almost nothing to do with structure, whereas historically, victimhood was about a lack of power, being low down in the structure of society. For example, if one looks at recent cases of lynching where those accused of lynching were acquitted: their defenders, and many politicians, actually said that the individuals lynched were smuggling cattle and hence they were criminals and not victims of a crime. This is because the idea of victimhood has now been extracted from the structure and can be molded to suit the occasion. So now anyone can use it for any purpose. This movement from empirical victimhood to an imagined one is fundamental.
* Interview transcribed by Sariful Islam.
Footnotes:
1. Pauline Hanson is an Australian politician of the One Nation party – a right wing populist party.
2. In 1990, a series of agitations took place against the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. The Mandal Commission, first set up in 1979, had recommended reservations for Backward Classes. This led to protests that advanced the demand for ‘merit’ as opposed to caste and other markers for allocation of government jobs.
3. This interview took place sometime after the abrogation of Article 370 by the Indian state. This article until its abrogation was a constitutional article that defined the relationship of India with Jammu and Kashmir. The abrogation of Article 370 was followed by the suspension of the state legislative assembly in Jammu and Kashmir, the bifurcation of the state into two union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh and the communication lockdown that began on 5 August 2019. While some limitations have been lifted in regions such as Jammu, the lockdown persists in some form along with the continued presence of a large security apparatus in the Kashmir valley into 2020. While this move was criticized in various places across the world, there was little protest against its abrogation in Indian political circles.
