His freedoms and ours

The most disturbing thing about the political fallout from Raj Thackeray’s demagogic revival of crass nativism in politics may not be his own statements. It is rather what the reaction to his statements has revealed about politics in India. Thackeray deserves all the blame he is getting. But it is also time to be blunt and graceless about one disturbing fact. The response of the political class as a whole has been deeply disturbing in its own way along more dimensions than one.

First, as this newspaper’s editorials have been arguing, most prominent Maharashtra politicians have been at best very tepid, at worst downright equivocal, in their condemnation of Thackeray’s underlying arguments. This is the kind of issue that requires politicians from Maharashtra to express unequivocal outrage. Not one major leader, from Sharad Pawar to Vilasrao Deshmukh, has expressed the requisite sense of outrage or engaged in the kind political symbolism that can assure all Indian citizens that they are not quietly complicit in this dangerous madness. This issue demands a united response from other politicians in Maharashtra. It requires a clear signal that this sort of politics will be made a pariah. The absence of such signals suggests that the rot in our polity is deeper.

Second, we seem to be fundamentally confused over what this crisis represents. Faced with an unpalatable and dangerous ideological trend we want to have it both ways. On the one hand, we want to boil it all down to politics. But in democracy when we say that there is a political logic behind some move, it is as much of an indictment of the voters as it is of politicians. On the other hand, we want to reaffirm our fundamental virtue. This is a fringe movement, we want to claim. The daily practices of life, the great ability to live with difference that most Indians embody, so the argument goes, are far too robust to be damaged by marginal elements. But either way we are in trouble. If indeed, such ideological mobilisation can get mass traction we are in trouble. But even if this is a marginal movement, the fact that a lakshman rekha around what citizenship means in modern India has been crossed portends danger. We can lose, because large numbers of people turn over to the dark side; or we can lose, because large numbers of people, even though they have not turned over to the dark side, are willing to let the fringe run riot. Either way we lose.

... contd.

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