Modi’s India loves global praise, but turns angry Vishwaguru at slightest criticism

 

‘This injustice will not go on forever’: Arundhati Roy writes to her jailed friend GN Saibaba

Arundhati Roy writes to Saibaba courtesy Scroll.in

To
Professor GN Saibaba
July 17, 2020
Anda Cell
Nagpur Central Jail
Nagpur
Maharashtra

Dear Sai,

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is me, Arundhati writing to you and not Anjum. You wrote to her three years ago and she most certainly owes you a reply. But what can I say – her sense of time is entirely different from yours and mine, leave alone the speedy world of Whatsapp and Twitter. She thinks nothing of taking three years to reply to a letter (or not). Right now, she has locked herself in her room in the Jannat Guest House and spends all her time singing.

The remarkable thing is that after all these years she has started singing again. Just walking past her door listening to her makes me glad to be alive. Every time she sings Tum Bin Kaun Khabariya Mori Lait (Who Other Than You Asks Me How I Am?) it breaks my heart a little. And it makes me think of you. When she sings it, I’m sure that she too is thinking of you. So even if she doesn’t write back, you should know that she often sings to you. If you concentrate hard enough perhaps you will be able to hear her.

When I spoke of our sense of time it was wrong of me to have so easily said “yours and mine” – because surely serving a life sentence in the dreaded Anda Cell makes your sense of time closer to Anjum’s than to mine. Or maybe it’s very different from hers too. I’ve always thought that the phrase “doing time” in the English language meant something far more profound than the slangy way in which its used. Anyway, sorry for my thoughtless remark. In her own way, Anjum is serving a life sentence too, in her graveyard – her life of “Butcher’s Luck”. But of course, she doesn’t live behind bars or have a human jailor. Her jailors are djinns and her memories of Zakir Mian.

Khaki Fiction

I’m not asking how you are, because I know from Vasantha. I’ve seen the detailed medical report. It’s unthinkable that they will not grant you bail or even parole. In truth, not a day goes by when I don’t think about you. Are they still censoring your newspapers and withholding books? Do the fellow prisoners who help you with your daily routine stay in your cell, do they take shifts? Are they friendly? How is your wheelchair holding up? I know it was damaged when they arrested you –kidnapping you on your way home as though you were a dangerous criminal. (We can only be grateful that they didn’t Vikas Dubey you in “self-defence” and say that you grabbed their gun and sprinted away carrying your wheelchair under one arm. We should have a new literary genre don’t you think – Khaki Fiction. There’s enough material to hold an annual litfest. The prize money would be good and some of the more neutral judges from our neutral courts would do excellent service here too.)

I remember those days when you would visit me and the cab drivers across the street from my home would help carry you up the steps to my wheeIchair unfriendly flat. These days there’s a street dog on each of those steps. Chaddha Sahib (father), Banjarin (gypsy mother) and their puppies Leela and Seela. They were born during the Covid lockdown and seem to have decided to adopt me. But post the Covid lockdown our cab driver friends are all gone. There’s no work. The cabs are dusty and unwashed. Slowly taking root, growing branches and leaves. Small people have disappeared from the streets of big cities. Not all. But many. Millions.

I still have those tiny bottles of pickle you made me. I will wait for you to come out and share a meal with me before I open them. They are maturing nicely.

I meet your Vasantha and Manjira only occasionally, because the weight of our combined sadness makes those meetings hard. It’s not just sadness of course, it’s anger, helplessness and, on my part, a kind of shame too – shame that we have not been able to make enough people see how unjust your situation is – how immensely cruel it is to keep a man who is certified with a 90% disability in prison, convicted of having committed some ludicrous crime. Shame for not being able to do anything to speed up your appeal through the labyrinth of our judicial system which makes the process the punishment. I’m sure the Supreme Court will eventually acquit you. But by the time that happens, what a price you –and yours – will have paid.

As Covid-19 lays siege to prison after prison in India, including yours, they know, that given your condition, a life sentence could so easily become a death sentence.

So many others, including some of our common friends – students, lawyers, journalists, activists – with whom we have laughed, broken bread as well as bitterly argued, are now in prison. I don’t know if you have had news about VV (I’m talking of Varavara Rao – in case your jail censors think it’s a code for something). Putting that grand 81-year-old poet in jail is like putting a modern monument in jail. The news about his health is very worrying. After days of ill health that largely went ignored, he has tested Covid positive and has been admitted into hospital. His family who visited him says that he was lying alone and unattended on soiled sheets, that he is incoherent and unable to walk. Incoherent! VV! The man who thought nothing of addressing crowds of tens thousands, the man whose poems fired the imagination of millions in Andhra and Telengana, and all across India.

I fear for VV’s life, just as I fear for yours. Many of the others accused in the Bhima Koregaon case – “the Bhima Koregaon eleven” – are not very well and are extremely vulnerable to Covid-19 too. Vernon Gonsalves who looked after VV in prison must be at particularly grave risk. Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde were in the same prison too. But again and again the courts refuse bail. Then there’s Akhil Gogoi locked up in Gauhati who has tested positive.

What a small-hearted, cruel, intellectually fragile (or should we just go ahead and say fearsomely stupid) regime we are ruled by. How pathetic it is for the government of a country as vast as ours to be so scared of its own writers and scholars.

Music, poetry, love

Just a few months ago it really seemed that things were going to change. Millions came out against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. Students especially. It was thrilling. There was music, poetry and love in the air. A rebellion at least at last – even if not a revolution. You would have loved it.

But it has all ended badly. The entirely peaceful anti-CAA protestors are now being blamed for the massacre of 53 people in Northeast Delhi in February. That it was a planned attack is obvious from the videos of armed gangs of vigilantes, often backed by the police, rioting, burning and murdering their way through those working class neighbourhoods. The tension had been building for a while, so local people were not unprepared, and fought back.

But of course, as always, the victims have been turned into perpetrators. Under cover of the Covid lockdown, hundreds of young men, mostly Muslim, including several students, have been arrested in Delhi as well as Uttar Pradesh. There are rumours that some of the young folks who have been picked up are being forced to implicate other senior activists against whom the police have no real evidence.

The fiction writers are busy with an elaborate new story. The narrative is that the Delhi massacre was a grand conspiracy to embarrass the government while President Trump was in Delhi. The dates the police have come up with suggest that those plans were laid even before Trump’s visit was finalised – that’s how deeply entrenched in the White House anti CAA activists must be! And what kind of conspiracy was it? Protestors killing themselves in order to give the government a bad name?

Everything is upside down. It’s a crime to be murdered. They’ll file a case against your corpse and summon your ghost to the police station. As I write, news comes in from Araria in Bihar of a woman who has filed a police complaint saying she was gangraped. She has been arrested along with the women activists who were with her.

Some of the disturbing things that are happening don’t always have to do with bloodshed, lynching, mass killing and mass incarceration. A few days ago, a group of people – thugs – in Allahabad forcibly spray painted a whole row of private houses saffron and then covered them with huge images of Hindu deities against the wishes of the owners. For some reason, this made my blood run cold.

Truly, I don’t know how much further along this road India has left to go.

When you come out of prison you will find yourself in an utterly changed world. Covid-19 and the hastily called and ill thought-out lockdown has been devastating. Not just for the poor, for the middle class too. Including the Hindutva Brigade. Can you imagine giving a nation of 1.38 billion people just four hours’ notice (from 8 pm to midnight) before announcing a nation-wide curfew-like lockdown that went on for months?

Literally everything had to stop in its tracks, people, goods, machines, markets, factories, schools, universities. Smoke in chimneys, trucks on the roads, guests at weddings, treatment in hospitals. With absolutely no notice. This huge country was shut off like a clockwork toy whose spoilt rich kid owner just pulled out the key. Why? Because he could.

Covid-19 has turned out to be a kind of X-Ray that made visible the massive institutionalised injustices – of caste, class, religion and gender – that plague our society. Thanks to the disastrously planned lockdown, the economy has nearly collapsed, although the virus has travelled and thrived. It’s feels as though we’re living through a frozen explosion. The shattered pieces of the world as we knew it are all suspended in the air… we still don’t know where they will land and the real extent of the damage.

Millions of workers stranded in cities with no shelter, no food, no money and no transport walked for hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles home to their villages. As they walked they were beaten and humiliated by the police. Something about that exodus reminded me of John Steinbecks’ The Grapes of Wrath… I recently re-read it. What a book.

The difference between what happened in that novel (which is about the great migration during the years of the Depression in the US) and here, is what appears to be an almost complete absence of anger among the people here in India. Yes, there has been the occasional angry outburst, but nothing that couldn’t be managed. It’s almost chilling how everybody accepts their lot. How obedient people are. It must be such a comfort to the ruling class (and caste) – this seemingly endless capacity of ‘the masses’ to suffer and obey. But is this quality – this ability to accept suffering a blessing or a curse? I think about this a lot.
While millions of working-class people embarked on their long march home, the TV channels and the mainstream media suddenly discovered the phenomenon of the “migrant worker”. Many corporate-sponsored crocodile tears were shed at their plight, as reporters thrust microphones into peoples’ faces as they walked: “Where are you going? How much money do you have? How many days will you walk?”

But you, like so many of the others who have been imprisoned, campaigned for years against the very machine that created this dispossession and this poverty, the machine that ravaged the environment and forced people to flee their villages. While all of you who spoke up for justice – many of those same TV channels, in some cases those very same journalists and commentators – celebrated that machine. They denounced you, stigmatised you, labelled you. And now, while they weep their crocodile tears and worry about the negative 9.5% growth predicted for India’s GDP – all of you are in jail.

Even through those tears the applause in the media for every move this government makes never dies down. Occasionally it swells into a standing ovation. The first novel I read during the lockdown was Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman. (Grossman was on the frontlines with the Red Army. His second book, Life and Fate displeased the Soviet government and the manuscript was “arrested” – as though it was a human being.) It’s an audaciously ambitious book, the kind of audacity that cannot be taught in creative writing classes.

Anyway, the reason I thought of it is because of an extraordinary description in it of a meeting between a senior Nazi Army officer who has been flown in to Berlin from the frontlines of the war in Russia. The war has already begun to go very wrong for Germany, and the officer is meant to brief Hitler about the ground reality. But when he comes face to face with him, he is so terrified and so thrilled to meet his master that his mind shuts down. It scrabbles around furiously for ways to please the Fuehrer, to tell him what he wants to hear.

That’s what’s going on in our country. Perfectly competent brains are frozen with fear and the desire to flatter. Our collective IQ is plummeting. Real news doesn’t stand a chance.

Meanwhile the pandemic rages on. It’s not a coincidence that the winners of the sweepstakes for the worst-affected nations in the world are those led by the three geniuses of the early twenty-first century. Modi, Trump and Bolsonaro. Their motto, in the now immortal words of the Delhi Chief Minister (who has begun to buzz around the Bharatiya Janata Party like a pollinating bee) is: Hum ab friends hai na?

Trump is very likely to be voted out of office in November. But in India there’s no help on the horizon. The Opposition is crumbling. Leaders are quiet, cowed down. Elected state governments are blown away like froth on a cup of coffee. Treachery and defections are the subject of gleefully reported daily news. MLAs continue to be herded together and locked up in holiday resorts to prevent them from being bribed and bought over. I think that those that are up for sale should be publicly auctioned to the highest bidder. What do you say? Of what use are they to anybody? Let them go. And let’s face up to the real thing: we are, in effect, a One-Party Democracy ruled by two men. I don’t think many even realise that that’s an oxymoron.

During the lockdown so many middle-class people complained that they felt like they were in prison. But you of all people know how far from the truth that is. Those people were at home with their families (although for many, particularly women, that ended in all sorts of violence). They were able to communicate with their loved ones, they could go on with their work. They had phones. They had the internet. Not like you. And not like the people in Kashmir who have been under a sort of rolling lockdown and internet siege since August 5 last year when Section 370 was abrogated and the state of Jammu and Kashmir lost its special status and its Statehood.

If the two-month Covid lockdown has been such a huge blow to the economy in India, think of Kashmiris who have had to endure a military lockdown along with an internet siege that has lasted for the most part of a year. Businesses are collapsing, doctors are hard pressed to treat their patients, students are unable to attend online classes. Also, thousands of Kashmiris were jailed before August 5 last year. It was pre-emptive – preventive detention. Now those prisons full of people who have committed no crime, are becoming Covid incubators. How about that?

The abrogation of Section 370 was an act of hubris. Instead of settling the matter “once and for all” which was the boast, it has unleashed a sort of rumbling earthquake in the whole region. Big plates are moving and realigning themselves. According to those in the know, the Chinese PLA has crossed the border, the LAC, at several points in Ladakh, and occupied strategic positions. War with China is a whole different ballgame from war with Pakistan. So, the usual chest-thumping is little nuanced –more like gentle patting than thumping. Talks are on. So far of course, India is winning. On Indian TV. But off TV, a new world order is making itself known.
This letter is getting longer than I intended it to be. Let me say goodbye for now. Have courage dear friend. And patience. This injustice will not go on forever. Those prison doors will open and you will come back to us. Things cannot go on like this. If they do, the speed at which we are coming undone will develop a momentum of its own. We won’t need to do a thing. If that happens, it will be an epic tragedy on an unimaginable scale. But from the ruins hopefully something kinder and more intelligent will rise.

With love,
Arundhati

Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person

Alain de Boton

Noam Chomsky on worldwide anger

Labour party’s future lies with Momentum, says Noam Chomsky

Anushka Asthana in The Guardian


Professor Noam Chomsky has claimed that any serious future for the Labour party must come from the leftwing pressure group Momentum and the army of new members attracted by the party’s leadership.

In an interview with the Guardian, the radical intellectual threw his weight behind Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that Labour would be doing far better in opinion polls if it were not for the “bitter” hostility of the mainstream media. “If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him,” said Chomsky, who admitted that the current polling position suggested Labour was not yet gaining popular support for the policy positions that he supported.

“There are various reasons for that – partly an extremely hostile media, partly his own personal style which I happen to like but perhaps that doesn’t fit with the current mood of the electorate,” he said. “He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer. The parliamentary Labour party has been strongly opposed to him. It has been an uphill battle.”

He said there were a lot of factors involved, but insisted that Labour would not be trailing the Conservatives so heavily in the polls if the media was more open to Corbyn’s agenda. “If he had a fair treatment from the media – that would make a big difference.”

Asked what motivation he thought newspapers had to oppose Corbyn, Chomsky said the Labour leader had, like Bernie Sanders in the US, broken out of the “elite, liberal consensus” that he claimed was “pretty conservative”.

The academic, who is in Britain to deliver a lecture at the University of Reading on what he believes is the deteriorating state of western democracy, claimed that voters had turned to the Conservatives in recent years because of “an absence of anything else”.

“The shift in the Labour party under [Tony] Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives which, given the nature of the policies and their very visible results, had very little appeal for good reasons.”

He said Labour needed to “reconstruct itself” in the interests of working people, with concerns about human and civil rights at its core, arguing that such a programme could appeal to the majority of people.

But ahead of what could be a bitter split within the Labour movement if Corbyn’s party is defeated in the June election, Chomsky claimed the future must lie with the left of the party. “The constituency of the Labour party, the new participants, the Momentum group and so on … if there is to be a serious future for the Labour party that is where it is in my opinion,” he said.

The comments came as Chomsky prepared to deliver a university lecture entitled Racing for the precipice: is the human experiment doomed?

He told the Guardian that he believed people had created a “perfect storm” in which the key defence against the existential threats of climate change and the nuclear age were being radically weakened.

“Each of those is a major threat to survival, a threat that the human species has never faced before, and the third element of this pincer is that the socio-economic programmes, particularly in the last generation, but the political culture generally has undermined the one potential defence against these threats,” he said.

Chomsky described the defence as a “functioning democratic society with engaged, informed citizens deliberating and reaching measures to deal with and overcome the threats”.

He blamed neoliberal policies for the breakdown in democracy, saying they had transferred power from public institutions to markets and deregulated financial institutions while failing to benefit ordinary people.

“In 2007 right before the great crash, when there was euphoria about what was called the ‘great moderation’, the wonderful economy, at that point the real wages of working people were lower – literally lower – than they had been in 1979 when the neoliberal programmes began. You had a similar phenomenon in England.”

Chomsky claimed that the disillusionment that followed gave rise to the surge of anti-establishment movements – including Donald Trump and Brexit, but also Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France and the rise of Corbyn and Sanders.

“The Sanders achievement was maybe the most surprising and significant aspect of the November election,” he said. “Sanders broke from a century of history of pretty much bought elections. That is a reflection of the decline of how political institutions are perceived.”

But he said the positions the US senator, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, had taken would not have surprised Dwight Eisenhower, who was US president in the 1950s.

“[Eisenhower] said no one belongs in a political system who questions the right of workers to organise freely, to form powerful unions. Sanders called it a political revolution but it was to a large extent an effort to return to the new deal policies that were the basis for the great growth period of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Chomsky argued that Corbyn stood in the same tradition.

Welcome to the age of anger

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian


The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is the biggest political earthquake of our times, and its reverberations are inescapably global. It has fully revealed an enormous pent-up anger – which had first become visible in the mass acclaim in Russia and Turkey for pitiless despots and the electoral triumph of bloody strongmen in India and the Philippines.

The insurgencies of our time, including Brexit and the rise of the European far right, have many local causes – but it is not an accident that demagoguery appears to be rising around the world. Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swath of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, terrorism and counter-terrorism, economic and cyberwar. The conflicts, not confined to fixed battlefields, feel endemic and uncontrollable. Hate-mongering against immigrants and minorities has gone mainstream; figures foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice are ubiquitous on old and new media alike. 

There is much dispute about the causes of this global disorder. Many observers have characterised it as a backlash against an out-of-touch establishment, explaining Trump’s victory – in the words of Thomas Piketty – as “primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States”. Liberals tend to blame the racial resentments of poor white Americans, which were apparently aggravated during Barack Obama’s tenure. But many rich men and women – and even a small number of African-Americans and Latinos – also voted for a compulsive groper and white supremacist.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman admitted on the night of Trump’s victory that “people like me – and probably like most readers of the New York Times – truly didn’t understand the country we live in”. Since the twin shocks of Brexit and the US election, we have argued ineffectually about their causes, while watching aghast as the new representatives of the downtrodden and the “left-behind” – Trump and Nigel Farage, posing in a gold-plated lift – strut across a bewilderingly expanded theatre of political absurdism.

But we cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled forces.

In the hopeful years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured; free markets and human rights would spread around the world and lift billions from poverty and oppression. In many ways, this dream has come true: we live in a vast, homogenous global market, which is more literate, interconnected and prosperous than at any other time in history.

And yet we find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities. What used to be called “Muslim rage”, and identified with mobs of brown-skinned men with bushy beards, is suddenly manifest globally, among saffron-robed Buddhist ethnic-cleansers in Myanmar, as well as blond white nationalists in Germany. Violent hate crimes have blighted even the oldest of parliamentary democracies, with the murder of the MP Jo Cox by a British neo-Nazi during the venomous campaign for Brexit. Suddenly, as the liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “Enlightenment humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately “explain the world we’re living in.”

The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”

By contrast, the fundamental premise of our existing intellectual frameworks is the assumption that humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, envy or resentment.

The bestseller Freakonomics is a perfect text of our time in its belief that “incentives are the cornerstone of modern life,” and “the key to solving just about any riddle”. From this view, the current crisis is an irruption of the irrational – and confusion and bewilderment are widespread among political, business and media elites. The ordinarily stolid Economist has lately lurched from dubious indignation over “post-Truth politics” to the Rip Van Winkle-ish declaration of “The New Nationalism”. Many other mainstream periodicals now read like parodies of New Left Review, as they attend belatedly to the failings of global capitalism – most egregiously, its failure to fulfil its own promise of general prosperity.
We can now see, all too clearly, a widening abyss of race, class and education in Britain and the US. But as explanations proliferate, how it might be bridged is more unclear than ever. Well-worn pairs of rhetorical opposites, often corresponding to the bitter divisions in our societies, have once again been put to work: progressive v reactionary, open v closed, fascism v liberalism, rational v irrational. But as a polarised intellectual industry plays catch-up with fast-moving events that it completely failed to anticipate, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that our search for rational political explanations for the current disorder is doomed. All of the opponents of the new “irrationalism” – whether left, centre, or right – are united by the presumption that individuals are rational actors, motivated by material self-interest, enraged when their desires are thwarted, and, therefore, likely to be appeased by their fulfilment.

This notion of human motivation deepened during the Enlightenment, whose leading thinkers, despising tradition and religion, sought to replace them with the human capacity to rationally identify individual and collective interests. The dream of the late 18th century, to rebuild the world along secular and rational lines, was further elaborated in the 19th century by the utilitarian theorists of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people – and this notion of progress was embraced by socialists and capitalists alike.

After the collapse of the socialist alternative in 1989, this utopian vision took the form of a global market economy dedicated to endless growth and consumption – to which there would be no alternative. According to this worldview, the dominance of which is now nearly absolute, the human norm is Homo economicus, a calculating subject whose natural desires and instincts are shaped by their ultimate motivation: to pursue happiness and avoid pain.

This simple view always neglected many factors ever-present in human lives: the fear, for instance, of losing honour, dignity and status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in it for more complex drives: vanity, fear of appearing vulnerable, the need to save face. Obsessed with material progress, the hyperrationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind, and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.

And yet modern history provides enormous evidence for the persistent power of unreason. It was not so long ago – in the early 19th century – that French pretensions to a rational, universal, and cosmopolitan civilisation first provoked resentful Germans into the militant expression of what we now call “cultural nationalism”: the assertion of authentic culture rooted in national or regional character and history.

One revolution after another since then has demonstrated that feelings and moods change the world by turning into potent political forces. Fear, anxiety and a sense of humiliation were the principal motive of Germany’s expansionist policy in the early 20th century – and it is impossible to understand the current upsurge of anti-western sentiment in China, Russia and India without acknowledging the role played by humiliation.

Yet a mechanistic and materialist way of conceiving human actions has become entrenched, in part because economics has become the predominant means of understanding the world. A view that took shape in the 19th century – that there is “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest” – has become orthodoxy once again in an intellectual climate that views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.



 
A Brexit supporter, and a Vote Remain campaigner exchange views in Market Square, Northampton, on 31 May Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images


Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenment’s “narrow rational programme” for individual happiness had already become “the butt of ridicule and contempt” – as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922. Indeed, the pioneering works of sociology and psychology as well as modernist art and literature of the early 20th century were defined in part by their insistence that there is more to human beings than rational egoism, competition and acquisition, more to society than a contract between logically calculating and autonomous individuals, and more to politics than impersonal technocrats devising hyper-rational schemes of progress with the help of polls, surveys, statistics, mathematical models and technology.

Writing in the 1860s, during the high noon of 19th-century liberalism, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first modern thinkers to air the suspicion, now troubling us again, that rational thinking does not decisively influence human behaviour. He pitted his Underground Man – the quintessential loser dreaming of revenge against society’s winners – against the idea, of rational egoism, or material self-interest, then popular in Russia among eager readers of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Dostoevsky’s protagonist obsessively assaults the shared rationalist assumptions of both capitalists and socialists: that human beings are logically calculating animals, driven by perceived incentives:

Oh, tell me who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else?

Dostoevsky defined a style of thought that was later elaborated by Nietzsche, Freud, Max Weber and others – who mounted a full-blown intellectual revolt against the oppressive certainties of rationalist ideologies, whether left, right or centre. This is an intellectual revolution that is barely remembered today – but it erupted at an emotional and political moment that would seem eerily familiar to us: a period of uneven and disruptive economic growth, distrust of politicians, fear of change, and anxiety about rootless cosmopolitans, aliens and immigrants.

This was an era when the disaffected masses – recoiling from the 19th century’s prolonged experiment in laissez-faire economic rationalism – had begun to fall for radical alternatives, in the form of blood-and-soil nationalism and anarchist terrorism. This anti-liberal political uprising forced many of those we now regard as central figures of 20th-century intellectual life to question their fundamental notions of human behaviour, and to discard the positivist nostrums that had taken root in the previous century.

By the late 1850s, Charles Darwin had already shattered the notion that human beings could control how they develop – let alone build a rational society. Novelists, sociologists and psychologists examining the turbulent mass societies of the late 19th century concluded that human actions could not be reduced to single causes, whether religious and ideological faith, or the rationality of self-interest.

Freud, who lived in turn-of-the-century Vienna while demagogues were scapegoating Jews and liberals for the mass suffering inflicted by industrial capitalism, came to see the rational intellect as “a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions”. “One gets the impression,” Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion (1927) “that culture is something imposed on a reluctant majority by a minority that managed to gain possession of the instruments of power and coercion.” Long before the 20th century’s explosions of demagoguery, Max Weber, as he observed Germany’s hectic industrialisation, presciently speculated that individuals, unmoored by socioeconomic turmoil and alienated by bureaucratic rationalisation, could become vulnerable to a despotic leader.

The problem for these critics of Enlightenment rationalism, as Robert Musil defined it, was not that we “have too much intellect and too little soul”, but that we have “too little intellect in matters of the soul”. We suffer even more from this problem today as we struggle to make sense of the outbreaks of political irrationalism. Committed to seeing the individual self as a rational actor, we fail to see that it is a deeply unstable entity, constantly shaped and reshaped in its interplay with shifting social and cultural conditions. In our own time, amid what Hannah Arendt described as a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else”, this fragile self has become particularly vulnerable to ressentiment.

Ressentiment – caused by an intense mix of envy, humiliation and powerlessness – is not simply the French word for resentment. Its meaning was shaped in a particular cultural and social context: the rise of a secular and meritocratic society in the 18th century. Even though he never used the word, the first thinker to identify how ressentiment would emerge from modern ideals of an egalitarian and commercial society was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An outsider to the Parisian elite of his time, who struggled with envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection, Rousseau saw how people in a society driven by individual self-interest come to live for the satisfaction of their vanity – the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as one esteems oneself.

But this vanity, luridly exemplified today by Donald Trump’s Twitter account, often ends up nourishing in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and it can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby individuals feel acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection. (As Gore Vidal pithily put it: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”)

Such ressentiment breeds in proportion to the spread of the principles of equality and individualism. In the early 20th century, the German sociologist Max Scheler developed a systematic theory of ressentiment as a distinctly modern phenomenon – ingrained in all societies where formal social equality between individuals coexists with massive differences in power, education, status, and property ownership. In an era of globalised commerce, these disparities now exist everywhere, along with enlarged notions of individual aspiration and equality. Accordingly, ressentiment, an existential resentment of others, is poisoning civil society and undermining political liberty everywhere.

But what makes ressentiment particularly malign today is a growing contradiction. The ideals of modern democracy – the equality of social conditions and individual empowerment – have never been more popular. But they have become more and more difficult, if not impossible, to actually realise in the grotesquely unequal societies created by our brand of globalised capitalism.
The past two decades of hectic globalisation have brought us closer than ever before to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of a universal commercial society of self-interested, rational and autonomous individuals – one that was originally advocated in the 18th century by such thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Kant. In the 19th century, it was still possible for Marx to sneer at Jeremy Bentham for assuming “the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man”. In our own time, however, the ideology of neoliberalism – a market-centric hybrid of Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century utilitarianism – has achieved near total domination in the economic and political realm alike.

The success of this universal creed can be attested by many innovations of recent decades that now look perfectly natural. The rational market is expected to ensure the supply of valuable products and services, while the task of governments is to ensure fair competition, which produces “winners” and “losers”. The broad intellectual revolution in which an all-knowing market judges failure and success has even more forcefully insisted on the rationality of the individual.

Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community – to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individual’s failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.

But this abstract conception has no room for the emotional situation of real, flesh-and-blood people – and how they might act within concrete social and historical settings.

One of the first people to notice the disturbing complex of emotions we now see among self-seeking individuals around the world was Alexis de Tocqueville – who was already worried in the 1830s, that the American promise of meritocracy, its uniformity of culture and manners, and “equality of conditions” would make for immoderate ambition, corrosive envy and chronic dissatisfaction. The passion for equality, he warned, could swell “to the height of fury” and lead many to acquiesce in a curtailment of their liberties, and to long for the rule of a strongman.

As De Tocqueville pointed out, people liberated from old hierarchies “want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.”

We witness a universal frenzy of fear and loathing today, because the democratic revolution De Tocqueville witnessed has spread from its American centre to the remotest corners of the world. The rage for equality is conjoined with the pursuit of prosperity mandated by the global consumer economy, aggravating tensions and contradictions in inner lives that are then played out in the public sphere.

“To live in freedom,” De Tocqueville warned, “one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger.” This kind of life is barren of stability, security, identity and honour, even when it overflows with material goods. Nevertheless, it is now commonplace among people around the world that rational considerations of utility and profit – the needs of supply chains and the imperatives of quarterly shareholder returns – uproot, humiliate and render obsolete.

The widespread experience of the maelstrom of modernity has only heightened the lure of ressentiment. Many new individuals now “live in freedom”, in De Tocqueville’s words, even as they are enslaved by finely integrated political, economic and cultural powers: the opaque workings of finance capital, the harsh machinery of social security, juridical and penal systems, and the unrelenting ideological influence of the media and the internet.

Never have so many free individuals felt so helpless – so desperate to take back control from anyone they can blame for their feeling of having lost it. It should not be surprising that we have seen an exponential rise in hatred of minorities, the main pathology induced by political and economic shocks. These apparent racists and misogynists have clearly suffered silently for a long time from what Albert Camus called “an autointoxication – the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence”. It was this gangrenous ressentiment, festering for so long in places such as the Daily Mail and Fox News, that erupted volcanically with Trump’s victory.

Rich and poor alike voting for a serial liar and tax dodger have confirmed yet again that human desires operate independently of the logic of self-interest – and may even be destructive of it. Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new “irrationalism” through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise. Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism – the famous “end of history” – is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.

It is clear now that the exaltation of individual will as something free of social and historical pressures, and as flexible as markets, concealed a breathtaking innocence about structural inequality and the psychic damage it causes. The contemporary obsession with individual choice and human agency disregarded even the basic discoveries of late-19th-century sociology: that in any mass society life chances are unevenly distributed, there are permanent winners and losers, a minority dominates the majority, and the elites are prone to manipulate and deceive.

Even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 left undisturbed the vision in which a global economy built around free markets, competition and rational individual choices would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace. In this utopia, any irrational obstacles to the spread of liberal modernity – such as Islamic fundamentalism – would be eventually eradicated. Fantasies of a classless and post-racial society of empowered rational-choice actors bloomed as late as 2008, the year of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Today, however, the basic assumptions of cold war liberalism lie in ruins – after decades of intellectual exertion to construct flimsy oppositions between the rational west and the irrational east. The political big bang of our time does not merely threaten the vanity projects of an intellectual elite, but the health of democracy itself – the defining project of the modern world. Since the late 18th century, tradition and religion have been steadily discarded, in the hope that rational, self-interested individuals can form a liberal political community that defines its shared laws, ensuring dignity and equal rights for each citizen, irrespective of ethnicity, race, religion and gender. This basic premise of secular modernity, which earlier only seemed menaced by religious fundamentalists, is now endangered by elected demagogues in its very heartlands, Europe and the US.

Where do we go from here? We can of course continue to define the crisis of democracy through reassuring dualisms: liberalism v authoritarianism, Islam v modernity, and that sort of thing. It may be more fruitful to think of democracy as a profoundly fraught emotional and social condition – one which, aggravated by turbo-capitalism, has now become unstable. This might allow us to examine the workings of ressentiment across varied countries and classes, and to understand why ethno-nationalist supremacy has grown alongside economic stagnation in America and Britain, even as it flourishes alongside economic expansion in India and Turkey. Or, why Donald Trump, the flashy plutocrat tormented by his lowly status among Manhattan’s cultivated liberals, obsessively baits the New York Times and calls for a boycott of the Broadway show Hamilton.

That a rancorous Twitter troll will soon become the world’s most powerful man is the latest of many reminders that the idealised claims of western elites about democracy and liberalism never actually conformed to the political and economic reality at home. A rowdy public culture of disparagement and admonition does not hide the fact that the chasm of sensibility between a technocratic elite and the masses has grown. Everywhere, a majority that was promised growing equality sees social power monopolised by people with money, property, connections and talent; they feel shut out from both higher culture and decision-making.

Many people find it easy to aim their rage against an allegedly cosmopolitan and rootless cultural elite. Objects of hatred are needed more than ever during times of crisis, and rich “citizens of nowhere” – as Theresa May dubbed them – conveniently embody the vices of a desperately sought-after but infuriatingly unattainable modernity. And so globalisation, which promotes integration among shrewd elites, helps incite ressentiment everywhere else, especially among people forced against their will into universal competition.

In search of a balm for these wounds, many intellectuals have embraced nostalgic fantasies of vanished unity. Earlier this year, the New York Times columnist David Brooks returned from communist Cuba gushing about Cubans’ “fierce love of country, a sense of national solidarity and a confident patriotic spirit that is today lacking in the United States.” More recently, Simon Jenkins, in this newspaper, and the intellectual historian Mark Lilla – in a widely circulated New York Times opinion piece – have urged the rejection of “identity liberalism” and the necessity of embracing national unity and common identity. As Trump’s victory was declared, Simon Schama tweeted that we need a new Churchill to save democracy in Europe and America.

 
A Trump supporter in Ambridge, Pennsylvania during the presidential election campaign. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Such breast-beating amounts to a truly irrational demand: that the present abolish itself, making way for a return to the past. Ideally, to the time when paternalistic white liberals occupied the vital centre, little disturbed by the needs and desires of history’s forgotten, humiliated and silenced people.

These lamentations for simpler times – that all we lack is the right sort of spine-stiffening democratic leader, or rational culture, or cultural unity, or patriotic spirit – ignore the fragmented nature of our politics. Social and technological developments are not liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian; they are as prone to enshrine LGBT rights as to reinstate torture and disseminate fake news. Nor does the longing for the good old days adequately respond to the massive crisis of legitimacy facing democratic institutions today.

Political antidotes to the sinister pathologies unleashed by Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Brexit and Trump require a reckoning with the bad new days – something a lot more forward-looking than models of solidarity inspired by Cuba or Churchill, nationalist pedagogies for the oppressed, or dauntless faith in globalisation eventually delivering the promised goods.

This work is necessary – but it can only proceed with a more sophisticated analysis of how today’s landscape of hyperrational power has coerced a new and increasingly potent irrationalism into existence. And such analyses would require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus. This intellectual effort – which was first undertaken more than a century ago by the thinkers cited here – would necessarily take us beyond liberalism and its faith in the curative power of economic growth.

What Robert Musil called the “liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress” have yet again failed modern human beings in their all-important task of understanding their experience. We once more confront the possibility, outlined in Musil’s great novel about the collapse of liberal values, The Man Without Qualities, that the characteristic desolation of the modern human being – his “immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence’ – is “the result of the losses that logically precise thinking has inflicted on the soul”.

For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.

With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideals of freedom, equality and prosperity.

Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, “stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss”.

Conflict - the path to Growth and Renewal

by Pritish Nandy

Call it conflict. Call it confrontation. Or call it simply the dialectic of growth. Whatever you call it, clashes take the world ahead. We may talk endlessly about peace and stability, how crucial continuity is. But what brings about change and opens up new ideas, new markets, new opportunities is always conflict. It breaks the status quo, creates the momentum for change. In the process, the world transforms.

Yes, every time a person, a brand or an institution comes under threat, the world changes. It forces us to think afresh. The classic example is when Pepsi challenged Coke, we all recognised for the first time the amazing elasticity of demand for a fizzy drink. Or when Penthouse challenged Playboy and converted what was till then a niche business into one of the world’s biggest industries. To take a recent example, when Anil and Mukesh fought, it appeared self defeating and long dirges were written about the demise of the great Ambani empire. Two years later, we found just the opposite had happened. The conflict had quadrupled their collective wealth. Similarly, if there is one thing that can resuscitate our moribund politics, it is Anna’s aggressive campaign that has woken up a lazy, corrupt Government to its responsibilities. As indeed it has woken up an equally lazy, corrupt Opposition to its opportunities. 

So, if conflict is the catalyst for change, why do we constantly enshrine the importance of harmony, reconciliation, freedom from strife? Every spiritual guru talks about it. So do political leaders. Even businessmen claim that stability is the only way for the world to progress and prosper. If stability goes, we are warned, the markets would collapse. So would the world. Actually, the contrary is true. Even though it appear to be bloody and unseemly, conflict is good for business, politics and, often, even human rights. The status quo invariably represents exploitation, corruption, the perpetuation of wrong. It also represents the lack of free thought. If we did not have enough conflicts, the world would rot.

Great religions grew from conflict. Every emerging sect and sub sect may have drawn blood during its birth and baptism but eventually they grew the size of the following and gave these faiths their cutting edge, to see them through difficult times. So, even as religions denounce violence, the truth is that it is violence that enlarged their domain. The benign perish, unsung. The gentle leader remains enshrined in our hearts but no longer relevant in a world we have created for ourselves where only strife moves us ahead. If Osama did not exist, we would have had to create him. (And some say we did.)

Godse kept Gandhi alive by assassinating him. Or else, we would have forgotten him even in his lifetime. Like the world forgot Mikhail Gorbachev. Violence, anger, bloodshed are the highpoints we celebrate as history. Our wars are what define us as nations, as the map of the world is being constantly redrawn. Empires are shrinking. New nations are being born.

New instruments of conflict keep being discovered. These are the new change agents. So when Sibal protests against social networking sites he is doing exactly what every Government wants to do: Preserve the status quo. For in the status quo lies their only hope of clinging onto power. That is why every re-election campaign starts with the promise of stability. It is the perpetuation of the myth that what exists is perfect. What could follow may be dangerous. 

But the modern world exists because it flirts with danger. Conflict creates markets. Conflict brings us change. Conflict opens up new opportunities, redefines existing social structures, gives hope to the underprivileged, the trampled upon. It teaches us the importance of constant change. Sun Tzu is the philosopher of our times. He teaches us that we must not run away from conflict but win it artfully and use it to change our lives.

The Tomsk court is not wrong. The Bhagawad Gita teaches us exactly this, and more. It teaches us that it is our moral duty to fight every war and win it instead of whimpering about peace and stability, right and wrong. In that sense, it is indeed extremist literature for our extremist times. It is that rare manual for survival in the age of bloody, bare knuckled fights. To ban it would be stupid. To learn from it would be apt.

Everybody Hurts - aka Weltschmertz

By Pritish Nandy in the Times of India

We all live with weltschmerz in these difficult times. There's no exact translation of this charming word coined by Jean Paul Richter in 1810. What it suggests is a kind of world weariness that has entered our lives. What you can call a universal pain. Everyone lives with it and yet everyone is in denial of it. That's why we have this great love affair with the entertainment business. Movies. Broadway. Vegas. The IPL. Formula One. We are living in the greatest era of escapism simply because we live in the greatest era of pain.

This pain is not always personal. It's not just about you and me and those who we love. You see it in the eyes of the urchin who comes begging to you at a street corner. She has lost her childhood, her innocence. You see it in the eyes of those who work for you at home, cooking, cleaning, washing your clothes, or taking your well groomed dogs out for a walk. Each one of them, however well you may take care of them, dreams that one day they will walk away to be their own master. You see it in the eyes of your colleagues at work, however enthusiastic they may be about what they do. The long travel to work, the pitiable condition of public transportation, the missing footpaths, the growing pollution, the problems with putting kids through school and college, the frequent confrontations over rent, power, water, tax: everything contributes to this weltschmerz. It's everywhere.

I see it in parties and film premieres too. There's something very tragic in watching middle aged men and women dressed in absurd designer togs, their hair dyed and faces botoxed, prancing around like teenagers and pretending to have a great time. There are more sad-eyed drunks and dope heads there than in the dance bars of suburban Mumbai or the glitzy discotheques of five star hotels. While the real youngsters of this generation, equally sad-eyed, shot and lonely, are racing down empty Mumbai roads late at night on rented souped up bikes trying to prove their machismo. They challenge danger because they find it tougher to challenge life. They hide their pain by escaping it. So do their parents who helplessly watch them suffer, knowing that sermons don't help.

The day we all realise this, that the rich is in as much pain as the poor, that the employer is having as tough a time as the employee, that the cop who asks you for a bribe lives as sad a life as you, the pickpocket you catch has risked being lynched because he has no other alternative means of livelihood, that the movie star you idolise is as lonely as you are, that the one who brutalises you is perhaps as brutalised by life as you are, the less we will seek to blame others for our fate. You will feel less anger against that guy in the tax office who asks you for a bribe when you realise he is still paying back, after ten years on his job, his father's debt for getting him the job. We are lucky. The Americans are consuming today what their next 13 generations will have to pay for. The Greeks will be lucky if their next generation can survive their current crisis.

We have, all of us, mortgaged our futures to pay for being around. No, I am not saying this. Ask anyone who understands economics or the environment and they will tell you this. Yet man bravely strides ahead. As we flirt with more pain, more danger, we discover more and more ways to seek gratification, more technology to flaunt, more entertainment to excite us and, most important, more dreams to chase. So we pursue new ways to earn more money, grow more food, hunt down more pleasures, seek to extend our life spans. British scientists recently declared that by 2050 we will find a way to overcome mortality.
This is the miracle of our times. Even as most things go wrong, man's ingenuity to seek hope and happiness keeps improving. But where we fail most is in sustaining relationships. The best companies collapse, as do the best marriages, the best rock groups, the most intense relationships because our weltschmerz makes us lonely islands of pain. That's why last week, when R.E.M broke up after 31 years, I remembered their most popular song, which became the anthem of our times. Everybody hurts. Yes, everybody hurts. And that is why we hurt each other so much.