The problem

THERE is a poignant, almost ironic, scene in Robert Bolt’s script of Dr. Zhivago. In the film, a peasant stands tentatively before a house, uncertain about whether to enter it. The caretaker emerges and barks authoritatively that this house belongs to the people. The peasant hesitates for a minute and then enters the house stating, ‘I am the people.’

The last few months in India have been evocative of similar scenes. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah claimed that the recent protests against CAA (Citizneship Amendment Act) were a conspiracy of ‘urban naxals’, and that the people of India would respond appropriately. The people are giving the Modi-Shah combine a lecture in citizenship that they are unlikely to forget. The protests against NRC-CAA were both an exercise in pedagogy and an act of politics and aptly they were conducted around 17 university campuses. As a witty observer said almost whimsically, ‘for years Modi has been messing with the syllabus and the Constitution, defiling the academic, and today, the syllabus and the Constitution provided an elaboration of citizenship Modi missed during his days in the university.’

The demonstrations on the campus proved the importance of political terms and concepts, emphasizing that democracy is still a battle of ideas and ideals, where concepts affect the life world of a people. Modi created brand names out of concepts like patriotism, national security and majoritarianism, to create a pliable people and a somnolent civil society, till civil society struck back to challenge his emasculation, his literal vivisection of the idea of citizenship. Modi’s electoral politics had enforced a majoritarianism, which had turned democracy into a dismal demographic science, drearier than what even Malthus could have invented. The protests first showed that democracy and electoralism should not be confused. One followed the logic of numbers while the other insisted on the normative as a break against the juggernaut of numbers. Democracy emphasized the plurality of life worlds where dissent, margin, minority were critical spaces. It is against this wider vision of democracy that the protests have to be read. The drama of citizenship unfolds in this context.

Of late the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), as a party, which is short of originality, has found a model for mimicry in Israel as a Zionist state. The BJP, like the Israel state, wants to be theocratic while holding on to the pretensions of a secular apparatus. The Israeli state, in a humanitarian move, offered refuge to Jews all over the world after the Nazi Holocaust. One must realize the invitation was a specific one where hospitality is restricted to a community. It is not the cry of the state of liberty inviting the exiled and the defeated, the homeless and the vulnerable, with open arms. Modi, mimicking the humanitarianism of Israel, announced a similar invitation, an offer of citizenship to Hindus who were being persecuted in neighbouring states. But like every BJP decision, this announcement had a backstage. It included Sikhs, Christians and Parsees, but deliberately and calculatedly ignored and excluded the Muslims.

Instead of an invitation which emphasized hospitality, as when India responded to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans, this dictat was exclusivist. It was a hyphenated invitation which included Hindus and excluded the Muslim. It was this questioning of the cosmopolitanism of citizenship that protest groups challenged. It was also symbolic that the university campus was the site for all the protests. This is a critical point to emphasize. For its tenure, the BJP has always degraded two institutions – the idea of the university and the normative sense of a plural democracy.

In fact, the challenge to the vitality of citizenship does not begin with NRC (National Register of Citizens) and Assam. It has two earlier incarnations. First was Modi’s model of development which exuded sustainability but was inherently genocidal, threatening large-scale displacement of the margins, especially the tribals (adivasis). The Narmada Dam was an embodiment of the first epoch. One must emphasize that the Congress was also guilty but Modi turned development into a statist ideology. Marginal groups like the tribals had to enter the mainstream economy or religion to survive. This hostility to the margins was also evident in the demonetization strategy, which devastated the informal economy while proclaiming a moralistic piety of reform. Dissent has already become a casualty as environmental groups challenging the discourse of development acquired the sobriquet of being anti-national. By the very first stage of the regime, it was often clear that the only way to be Indian is to be anti-national. A Tagore or a Gandhi would have understood the irony of the position.

If development was the first attempt to consolidate an India between the enclosures and the panopticon, the national security state became the second script of the regime. It was a re-enactment of the same rule game but with newer targets. First was Ajit Doval’s attempt to consolidate internal and external security, defining the nation state as fighting a war without and within. Two facts often get cited. The first was (this is more in the Congress era) that for a decade, all the gallantry awards the army received was for action against its own people. A state of permanent insurgency has haunted Kashmir, the North East and areas of Bastar in central India. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) became a slogan, a double for patriotism. Security was such a blanket term that citizens, especially women and children, who were tired of the everydayness of brutality and violence, had no means of articulating what this tiredness meant. The word ‘urban naxal’ became popular in official folklore and referred to citizens who fought for human rights.

The dissenter and his caricature, the terrorist, became models of citizenship that the state discouraged. The way violence and the varieties of violence emasculated citizenship has yet to be chronicled. This was the era when India forced displacement through development and through riots. Genocide, extinction of tribes, languages, species, and obsolescence of crafts were rampant. The merging of an ersatz civil society where riots thought of themselves as a continuation of state added to the innovativeness of state terror. The silence of civil society and the accompanying spectacle of mob violence marked the decline of citizenship and the somnolence of civil society in this period.

The triangle of state, development, national security gets consolidated through majoritarianism. The irony was that democracy as electoralism, the demography of numbers, became sacrosanct. The minority, the margin, the dissenter, in fact the very pluralism of democracy is read as various forms of innumeracy. Difference becomes a defiance of uniformity as patriotism. It is in this majoritarian phase that Assam reincarnates itself, not as a threat to Assamese identity, or even to the fate of indigenous religions, but as a Bangladeshi threat to majoritarian Hindu society. The Muslim once again becomes a threat, an outcast and eventually a non-citizen.

One is not denying the social problems a flood of unofficial refugees and migrants create. Pluralistic democracy needs to handle it. However, to use Assam to destroy the spirit of constitutional morality, to use the NRC and CAA to destabilize Bengal, to threaten the very secular enlightenment framework of a Constitution was obscene. The revolt of the campuses was not only an indication that younger citizens took concepts and their life world seriously, it was a message that the BJP neither understood the cosmopolitan or plural power of citizenship as an Heidiggarian dwelling. Citizenship to this generation meant more than identification and certification. It required new life worlds, life chances. An aspirational India could not come into being without the life worlds of citizenship. It revealed that the BJP’s idea of citizenship as consumerism or communalism was both parochial and out of date. Modi and Shah suddenly appeared like some outdated theorists from some 20th century fascist handbook.

But mere protest will not do. Knee-jerk, pavlovian responses to knee-jerk thinking of the state would merely aggravate the issue. It is time to recreate a theory of citizenship as a life world and system and convert it both to a pedagogy and politics. In a Gandhian sense, our ethics must become political as it confronts the public realm. There is a minimalist agenda of pluralism and difference we have to build around. In terms of enlightenment theory, liberty and equality were the more emphasized parts of citizenship. Fraternity and the sense of plurality, community and diversity were ignored. The stranger was seen too objectively as a refugee, exile or migrant. There is a need to create a plural model of citizenship which covers life world, livelihood, lifestyle and life chances.

Time becomes critical in such a cultural accounting. We need to look at the nation state as a procrustean and corseted identity, often too rigid in its reflexes, pretending to be French Revolution but literally being Kafka. One needs to see the border as a threshold, as something porous to acquire a flexible sense of citizenship and the hospitality it entails. After all, we have to remember that between 1948 and 1955, in the immediate aftermath of the Partition, people kept moving back and forth between India and Pakistan undecided as to what place was really home. A border becomes an arbitrary line that forces one to rewrite sentiments, ignore decades of genealogy, emotion and storytelling. The arrogance of the formal economy and the parochialism of development as a discourse vitiate citizenship. Citizens in an informal economy do not quite have the entitlements that are due to them till they are regularized. The very word regularization points to the grey economy of citizenship where individuals lead liminal lives, where rights are a paradise they may dream of.

Third, technological violence through the very civics of the innovation chain creates obsolescence of ways of life and livelihood. The state sees weaving as a sunset industry, though it involves the livelihood of 13 million people. To obsolescence enforced on livelihoods we must add triage, which rationally seeks to eliminate a vulnerable people by cutting access to lifelines. To the arguments of Kissinger and others that suspension of aid to vulnerable groups in Africa vitiates the very core of citizenship. Citizenship in its current avatars is cake that has been quartered in many ways. The nomad, the marginal, the dissenter, and craft systems are already seen or treated as less than citizens. The new efflorescence of violence through genocide, extinction, apocalypse, mob violence adds to the vulnerability of refugees, marginal groups and to displaced or obsolescent groups in general. In a sense, the idioms of citizenship, the vernaculars of freedom confront the enclosure and the panopticon. In Assam, the establishment of internment camps would create Gulags which would intern about four million people. The challenge before us is to make citizenship not a bounded grid but open, protean, and hospitable, a model where caring and freedom exist together. One needs a heuristic where othering a person does not logically lead to genocide.

The parochialism of current models of citizenship has to be understood in two other contexts. Recently, while investigating the Kochi cyclone, a victim said, ‘Delhi is a land-locked mentality, which thinks fisherman and coastline livelihoods have no entitlement.’ One needs to make the sea part of our constitutional thought. Second, modernity with liner time and a sense of progress has no sense of obsolescence or the future. Justice Weeramantry, mediating the complaints of Tahitians against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, ruled that nuclear tests threatened the rights of citizens of the future. It seems that the problems of citizenship have proliferated, that one needs to craft thinking beyond the bareness of enlightenment models, creating a horizon that can respond to new forms of technological and collective violence. The task, therefore, is clear. In re-inventing citizenship, we create a new horizon of citizenship. The models of jugaad as citizenship have worn thin. The affirmative between new thought and genocide is obvious.

SHIV VISVANATHAN