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Craving for power

By Neera Chandhoke

It is perhaps futile to hope that any of the groups waging struggles on their own behalf in India's civil society will also fight for others similarly disprivileged.

MAYAWATI HAS taken the help of the BJP once again to form a Government in Uttar Pradesh. The fact that the BJP has been massively implicated in a reprehensible project that seeks to physically exterminate religious minorities in Gujarat seems to have little relevance when it comes to the craving for power. That the leaders of the BJP have been engaged in an utterly immoral exercise of defending the actions or the inaction of the Narendra Modi Government apparently means little to the BSP leader. That the party she is tying up with is complicitious in the massacre of innocent people, that it bears no marks of shame on its collective forehead for this act, that it has been condemned by the whole world for extensive violation of the basic civil liberties of the citizens of India, does not matter at all when it comes to the acquisition of power. For, all that the leadership of the BSP can see today is the prospect of power. And here lies another sorry and sordid tale of independent India, a tale of utter amorality, cynicism of the worst kind, and complete indifference to the fate of ordinary people.

Other leaders have done as much, but Ms. Mayawati should have been an exception. For she represents a people who themselves have been oppressed, humiliated, deprived and dismissed by the Hindu community for thousands of years. She represents the victims of history. And the victims of history should in principle be sensitive to the sufferings of other victims. There should at least in theory be a bond between sufferers, for they know what agony and mortification, torment and ignominy means. It means shuddering fear and pervasive insecurity. It means my diminishment as a human being, because I have been denied the respect that should in principle accrue to every human being simply because she is human.

Today some Dalit groups have emancipated themselves from this pain and suffering and asserted themselves in the body politic and society. They have demanded that they be extended not only respect, but compensation for historical wrongs. They have struggled to find a place in the political sun. But does victory at the end of the struggle mean that historically deprived groups bear no responsibility to other groups which are being historically deprived? The leadership of the BSP should have scorned to tie up with a party which will be harshly judged by history as brutal and criminal. The BJP has put itself in the dock of history, and history will not remember it kindly. The BJP will be remembered as Hitler is remembered today, with horror and revulsion, for it has been implicated in the kind of carnage the civilised world should not and will not tolerate. And along with the BJP, other parties which have joined it in the pursuit of power — the Samata, the sundry Janata Dals, the Trinamool Congress, and the TDP — are going to be judged as grimly by history as they are being judged today.

But Ms. Mayawati should have been different. She could have foregone the lust for power for the immediate moment, and refused to side with a party that is being openly identified with fascism. And she would have won our hearts and admiration for that. We would have been reassured that at least one kind of political group practices politics in a different way, that it is sensitive to the pain and the suffering of other groups. But today there is no hope that those parties of the Dalits which seek power practise a different modes of politics simply because they have been born out of struggle against entrenched structures of discrimination. Our disillusionment with Indian politics and its leadership is complete.

However, at precisely this moment let us tarry awhile and recollect that whenever we have been confident that a group will be different, just because it is and has been oppressed, we have had to witness disillusionment. And one man who fell into this conceptual trap was none other than the young and romantic Karl Marx. In 1842, writing for the Rheinische Zeitung on the traditional rights of the poor to pick up fallen wood from private property, Marx was to characterise this group as an elemental class of civil society. Their lack of property, he wrote, emancipates them from the corruption and the false conceptions of the other inhabitants of civil society. They do not worship alien material beings and hence possess a universal human consciousness. Oppression and deprivation, for Marx, seemed to guarantee that the poor are not stamped with the same artificiality and the same avarice that characterises property owners. Simply because the poor were non-members of a corrupt civil society meant that they were spared the burden of vice.

At this stage the universal consciousness of the deprived sections of society was not problematised by Marx. He did not consider that location outside the privileges of society does not automatically guarantee any revolutionary consciousness. In the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx commits the same mistake. The only class which possesses consciousness of oppression and which possesses a determination to overturn all kinds of oppression is a class outside civil society — the proletariat. This is a class that "cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of civil society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity". It almost seems as if the proletariat possesses revolutionary consciousness just because it has been oppressed; it has already developed subjectivity; it is already emancipated. Therefore, it can emancipate civil society.

It is only later when Marx shifted to Paris and came into contact with the working class that he recognised the basic principle of emancipation. Just because a class is objectively oppressed it need not be revolutionary. It has to be made revolutionary through the development of revolutionary consciousness. Many decades later Herbert Marcuse was to make the same mistake and vest revolutionary consciousness in groups, which were excluded from civil society. And his assumptions were betrayed soon enough. For, the leaders of the later 1960s and the early 1970s social protests in the U.S. and Europe soon abandoned struggle and came to be assimilated into positions of power.

Therefore, it is perhaps just too romantic to expect that just because Ms. Mayawati represents a group whose members have been subjected and continue to be subjected to massive discrimination, she will make common cause with other sufferers. It is perhaps futile to hope that any of the groups waging struggles on their own behalf in India's civil society will also fight for others similarly disprivileged. We are condemned not only to the fragmentation of spheres of resistance but also to the co-optation of the leaders of the oppressed. Perhaps it is time to bring back to life the insights of the mature Marx and learn that no group can be emancipatory unless it practices the right kind of politics and the right kind of political understanding. Is that too much to ask for?

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