Shikha Mukerjee | Netas & the Indian State: Reflect first, speak later

Rahul Gandhi’s declaration that the Congress is in a fight against the Indian State — even though he qualified it by explaining it had been “captured” by the BJP and the RSS — is one example. The other is RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s counter factual, or alt fact, that India’s true independence was achieved on January 22, 2024 with the consecration of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, that is, Independent India is barely a year old!

Rahul Gandhi, however, is not alone in thinking that the Indian State is now captive; at a public meeting in Kolkata, the CPI(M) coordinator Prakash Karat (a temporary assignment he had to accept after the passing of general secretary Sitaram Yechury) repeated that the Indian State had been captured by the BJP and RSS, imperilling secularism and democracy. Both Rahul Gandhi and Mr Karat seem to be interpreting what Vladimir Lenin said a long time ago, in State and Revolution: “No, democracy is not identical with majority rule. Democracy is a State which recognises the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organisation for the systematic use of force by one part of the population against another.”

To be fair, one part of Mohan Bhagwat’s bizarre claim about the date of India’s Independence as not August 15, 1947 has a basis in his ideology. His discovery is in line with the grand design for Akhand Bharat and Hindu Rashtra dreamt up by the founding fathers of the RSS. To that extent, the claim about January 22, 2024 in RSS lore can go down as one step forward, at a stretch, in the Hindu Right direction.

Indulging in making noise that signifies nothing or almost nothing is, it appears, a shared affliction of the two big parties in India claiming to represent the nation. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the Congress and the RSS. The RSS does not directly contest elections or form governments; its members do, albeit as BJP representatives. The RSS and its chief cannot be held to account in the same way as the Congress or BJP, both registered political parties that contest elections and fight over acquiring the power, actually coercive power, of the Indian State to get things done, no matter what those “things” are.

There is also a difference between the Congress and the BJP; the Congress is 140 years old, whereas the BJP was established after dissolving the Jan Sangh in 1980. That apart, Mr Gandhi is not just a Congress leader, even if he is the de facto boss of the party; he was nurtured and groomed, if not to lead, then at the very least to be politically savvy.

He must know what every high school student knows, that the Indian State is more than the government formed by the political party or coalition of parties that have a majority in the Lok Sabha. To declare that the Indian State is captive without explaining what part of the State he believed had been captured and how is the sort of empty-headed frivolity that passes for serious political discussion on the social media.

If the statements by Mohan Bhagwat and Rahul Gandhi were intended as the sort of “unique hook” that tends to go viral on social media, they succeeded. Viral information has a short life and the two statements have temporarily sunk in terms of circulating at vertiginous speed. It is almost certain that Mohan Bhagwat’s statement will resurface on social media soon as the first anniversary of the Ram Mandir approaches. It will be definitely amplified by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and other aggressive Hindu Right advocates, who will doubtless use the occasion to reiterate the theme of “Batange toh Katange”, divided is death, to titillate the sensation seeking core voters of the BJP.

Neither the righteously indignant critics of Rahul Gandhi nor the Narendra Modi 3.0 government, however, are feisty or maybe courageous enough to brand as “mad”, a lot of people who declared a long time ago that their raison d’etre is to fight against the Indian State, especially its coercive power. For starters, the Maoists or Left extremists in Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal have been locked in a fight against the Indian State since the 1960s. Insurgent outfits, including the Paresh Barua-led United Liberation Front of Asom, are at war with the Indian State. By signing “ceasefire agreements” with outfits like the NSCN(K) Niki Sumi faction, the Indian State recognises that these are bona-fide anti-State entities. There are others.

If Rahul Gandhi were politically smarter, he should have defined the nature of the fight, its purpose and goals when he said the Congress was engaged in a fight against the Indian State. He had a captive audience of party leaders who could have amplified it and spread it, since he delivered the punch line at the inauguration of the new Congress headquarters. By failing to do so, it seemed that Rahul Gandhi had no clue of what his one-liner really meant vis-à-vis lived reality of the Indian people.

There are a lot of people, who are not Maoists, insurgents or extremists, who are unhappy with the Indian State. That does not make them “urban Naxals”; they cannot be charged with treason as a shrill and defensive BJP media counter campaign insisted. Nor are these people mad and they certainly should not be locked up and removed from the public sphere, as BJP spokespersons demanded. The recommendation to lock away Rahul Gandhi is revealing of how deeply embedded in the BJP psyche is the belief that all it has to do is to define, classify people, that is label them as mad, Urban Naxals, anti-nationals, anti-Hindu in order to control, and regulate them.

The real political task, as Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky in conversation about Human Nature identified, was to criticise and unmask “the working of institutions and the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them”, which is what fighting the Indian State ought to mean. It would seriously benefit the Congress leadership and the BJP, though for different reasons, to take a temporary vow of silence to reflect on the substance of what they say.