A most curious feature of identity
movements promoting an exclusivist ideology with language, religion,
caste, ‘ethnicity,’ race and any other coordinate one may devise,
including, perhaps, at some point gender, as the focal point of such
mobilisation is that almost all of them eventually split into mutually
hostile factions. Such is the nature of the beast. Perhaps such is also
the law of nature for, natural organisms too eventually split and
reproduce themse lves in newer forms. However, the dislocations as may
be inherent in natural evolution do not as a rule violently and
immediately impinge on human societies. This is not so with identity
movements, now modishly known as mobilising of ethno-nationalism, and
their obverse, separatism, that of their nature are prone to violent
atomisation.
Such mobilisations are not unique to Assam and its neighbourhood. For
instance, the Dravidian separatist assertion with secessionist
undertones that now lie buried deep predates independence. This is now
represented by several mutually hostile structures,
crypto-secessionist, ultranationalist, some even with rationalist and
socialist pretensions. The mobilisation of the ‘hurt Telugu pride’ was
a crucial element in the consolidation of Telugu nationalism. Following
the inescapable split, this ideology is now appropriated by the
Congress leaving the Telugu Desam Party with no agenda. Much the same
has been the case with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra where the original
and its clone are now engaged in competitive chauvinism. Spending the
last seven months of 2007 in Bangalore, I was struck not merely by the
similarity of the grievances articulated by organisations claiming to
defend the vital interests of the land (Karnataka) and the language
(Kannada) to what is now the common currency of identity mobilisation
in Assam and its neighbourhood, but also by the fact that the noisiest
structure promoting Kannada exclusivism had split, with the other
faction no less virulent and exclusivist.
The most successful of such mobilisations based on religion, with an
imperilled identity (Islam under threat) as the rallying cry, was the
movement for the attainment of a separate nation of Pakistan, the Land
of the Pure. That nationalism could not survive its success for even 30
years.
The fact is, barring the Left, political parties including the Congress
in most parts of the country have been exploiting identity grievances,
adept at playing the ‘regional’ or ‘national’ card depending on whether
they are in power or out of power.
A common, indeed necessary, feature of every such mobilisation is the
Other, the hated and reviled Enemy seen as the root cause of one’s own
perceived diminishment as well as of one’s larger environment. However,
the identity of this Other is not always the same, constant. The small
restaurateur and pavement trader from the south, mainly Karnataka and
Kerala, who was the Enemy for the Shiv Sena over 30 years ago, has now
been replaced by that even more generalised ‘north Indian’, the Bhayya,
seen as the cause and effect of Mumbai’s urban decay and squalor, and
has indeed come to symbolise its quintessence. While for the present
the Tamil stands at the apex of the oppressors in the imagination of
the Kannadiga, with other neighbours lower down the line, increasingly
this spot is being allotted, as in the current demonology of the Shiv
Sena and its clone, to the ‘north Indian’, crowding out the Kannadigas
from Bangalore and other cities.
Two other features are shared by such movements of aggressive identity
assertion. They are all profoundly anti-democratic; and following from
this, their methods are necessarily coercive, eschewing reasonable
debate of the issues and grievances involved. It would take a
courageous person to question the increasingly widespread opinion in
Karnataka that the State and its people have been served short by the
Union government on issues of their vital concern, like the sharing of
the Cauvery waters and the recognition of Kannada as a classical
language. The daring dissident is straightway put in the doghouse. It
is not accidental that on both these issues the DMK whose support is
crucial to the survival of the UPA government, is seen as the villain
of the piece, though there is little difference among the various
factions of Dravidian nationalist articulation on these issues.
Not all such assertions are inherently anti-democratic, as some Indian
ultra-nationalists argue. For instance, by acknowledging the uniqueness
of a people’s resonance to their language, the very essence of their
being, and by providing such a language identity a political and
territorial space, the Union government by its Reorganisation of States
in 1956 responded, however belatedly, to what was essentially a
democratic demand, something that had been built into the very
structure of the freedom movement as part of the anti-colonial struggle.
This did not, however, admit any kind of exclusivism, nor was it
counterposed to the broader inclusive Indian nationalism. The
anti-colonial struggles had not yet become merely ossified memories.
Half a century down the line, this is not the case. Many developments,
local, national and international, affecting the economy and society
consequent upon the policies of successive governments have contributed
to the transformation of what was once a legitimate inclusive
democratic aspiration into an exclusivist and coercive ideology,
feeding the sense of diminishment and deprivation where narrower and
narrower definitions of identity going under the rubric of ‘ethnicity’
now determine the identity discourse.
For instance, the now apparently irreversible transformation of labour,
in particular the unorganised labour, into another marketable commodity
freely traded cross the state and, increasingly, also across national
boundaries poses new challenges to the old concepts of the nation state
as well as to the more limited space defined and determined by a
people’s inviolable identity – an almost mystic sense of being what
they are and articulated in terms mentioned at the beginning of this
essay. That those who exploit such anxieties about the increasing
threat posed by the rampant outsider in their midst are also among
those who exploit the opportunities opened up by this dynamic of forced
and closely monitored mobility of unorganised labour does not in the
least mitigate the pain and worse of its passive victims. The terrain
of struggle is full of pitfalls, holds false promises. Yet, ‘ethnic
mobilisation’ is now a flourishing growth industry not merely in Assam
and its neighbourhood, but also in most parts of the country.
The difference between the killing, with their hands tied behind their
back, bearing the message, ‘Go back to where you came from’, of
Hindi-speaking labourers brought by contractors to work on building
projects in Manipur, and the chasing away of Hindi-speaking youth
seeking to appear in Railway Recruitment Boards tests in Guwahati and
Bangalore by competing local youth is only one of degree. Coercive
violence takes all kinds of forms.
Those who scoffed at the Indian freedom struggle, not all of them White
Colonel Blimps, used to ask the supposed argument stopper question: But
is there an India and are there Indians? The question is even now asked
by some authentically native intellectuals for whom India is merely a
‘colonial construct’, the dismantling of which is a revolutionary duty.
The logical extension of such reasoning, at least in Assam, has been
the asking of a similar question: Who is an Assamese? Nothing seemed
sillier than this question when it was first raised, even when it was
solemnly debated in the state Assembly.
However, given the trend and direction of ethno-nationalistic assertion
and mobilisation in virtually every part of the country, it may not be
long before similar questions are asked about even the narrowest and
most insular definitions of oneself. Put simply, to divide is to
multiply.
http://www.thehindu.com/2008/03/26/stories/2008032655611100.htm
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