This past Friday, we anxiously awaited a hard-hitting talk by prominent Indian journalist Tarun Tejpal as some kind of redemption for sitting uncomfortably in the controversial SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, named after the notorious Canadian mining company facing criminal charges for alleged rights abuses. As part of the Indian Summer Festival, Tejpal was speaking on “The Idea of India: Media, Culture & Politics”, based on his decades of award-winning exposés on political corruption, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and deteriorating socioeconomic conditions in India.
The event opened with an in-abstenia speech on behalf of Canada’s immigration minister, aka Minister of Censorship and Deportation Jason Kenney, lauding India’s investment opportunities and the growing relationship between the two states. A range of figures were interested in engaging with Tejpal’s Idea of India and the country’s dance with hegemony—the consul-general of India, the president of SFU, and Indian and Canadian businessmen were acknowledged at the event.
In challenging what Tejpal called an “Anglo-Saxon” view of the world that has perceived India as a country of snake charmers, the journalist's own rendition of India reinforced Western paradigms of liberal democracy and neoliberal transnational capitalism. Attendee Itrath Syed told us that “Tejpal's remarks were framed by a discourse of Indian exceptionalism, which is as unpleasant as American exceptionalism and equally problematic.”
Tejpal bragged that the birth of India was “the single greatest act” of the last 1,000 years. This is hardly innocuous given that the dawn setting on the American Empire leaves India as a viable contender for power on the global stage.
One of Tejpal’s repeated mantras was that of economic development and investment in India, albeit on India’s terms. Tejpal exalted the development of industry and dams amid a “great nothingness” led by “Western-educated Indian elite”, erasing the rich and diverse histories and civilizations indigenous to the subcontinent while glorifying colonial institutions and ideologies. He appears to believe that progress (or what he called “modernity”) in India is fundamentally a Western import, just infused with its own spicy Indian flavouring.
Tejpal emphasized that the vision laid out by India’s founding fathers and the constitution has been the greatest post-independence achievement. Tejpal’s much-referenced "great founding father" Nehru was a proponent of mixed economies, where the means of production and profit-seeking markets remained largely privatized with strong fiscal regulation and national state-owned enterprises. Dams, which Nehru famously referred to as the "Modern Temples of India", have displaced 30 million villagers and Adivasis (tribal Indigenous) over the past 60 years.
In 1948, Nehru told those being displaced by the Hirakud Dam, "If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country."
In a scathing critique of dams and industrial development in an essay called "The Greater Common Good", Arundhati Roy wrote: “Big Dams are to a Nation's 'Development' what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons Governments use to control their own people…They're both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself.”
Furthermore, the hegemonic rise of neoliberalism in India since the 1990s cannot be extricated from Western interests. Initially imposed through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the privatization and liberalization of the Indian economy has served two key functions for transnational corporations: firstly, their profitable access to cheap land, resources, and labour; and secondly, converting the growing middle class into consumers of their products.
The proposed Canada-India Free Trade Agreement, for example, would further deregulate labour, tax, environmental, and investment laws in India. In November 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “India’s rapidly growing economy and its commitment to expand its investment regime will provide significant opportunities for [Canadian] investors in a variety of sectors, including infrastructure, education, life sciences, science and technology and natural resources.”
What a nine percent “India Shining” economic growth rate has secured for India is the unprecedented emergence of a national bourgeoisie whose vested interest lies in advancing aggressive corporate growth. India has a millionaire population that has grown by 20 percent in the past five years. Simultaneously, more than 40 percent of land expropriated for development is Adivasi land. (A Ministry of Rural Development report has termed it “the biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus”.). There have been approximately 200,000 farmer suicides in the past decade.
This massive rural displacement is one of the major causes of urban migration and poverty. Tejpal referenced the 230 million people living in hunger and the approximately 500 million people living at sub-Saharan poverty levels in India.
Tejpal’s solution to alleviating this poverty was the philanthropic notion of "getting the elite to care" about the downtrodden. His talk critically missed the connection between the logic of economic totalitarianism and growing inequality as two sides of the same coin. The lands of the villagers and the labour of the slum-dwellers subsidize the rich in their fattened and fortified cities. Tejpal, however, chalked it up to some exoticized stereotype of "charming, complicated, and contradictory" India, while joking about his friends’ jets.
Even Gandhi warned: “A single small island like England keeps the whole world in chains. If a large nation like India took to a similar path of economic exploitation, it would eat the world bare like locusts.”
Similarly, the dominant discourse of liberal democracy that Tejpal was touting as a map to genuine representation and inclusion needs to be contested. As Frantz Fanon predicted, colonial rule across the Third World has been formally replaced by a political elite who have retained the colonizers’ form of rule. This new elite seeks to gain popular support by increasing opportunities of economic prosperity for the middle class but largely ignores the needs of the most marginalized. While theoretically liberal democracy offers everyone the right to vote, in practice access to the media, the justice system, and electoral politics are all commodified to systemically exclude poor and minoritized communities.
Roy, whose book The God of Small Things was actually published by Tejpal, has written: “The nation state is such a cunning instrument in the hands of capitalism now. You have a democracy that strengthens the idea of the nation as a marketplace.”
Much like the so-called democracies of the U.S. and Israel, democracy in India is enforced at the barrel of a gun. Binayak Sen, one of India’s recent political prisoners charged under sedition laws, has claimed that “India’s democracy is a sham democracy.” Despite violent repression, movements for autonomy across North, Central, and East India—from Kashmir to Orissa—continuously disrupt the vision of a cohesive India. Naxalites operate in the jungles of over 20 states in India and over 250,000 police, armed forces, and counterinsurgency teams have been deployed against them. As a result of Operation Green Hunt, the jungles are under a heavy siege: checkpoints, army patrols, helicopter missions, and gunfire battles that kill 40 civilians per week.
In commenting about communalism, Tejpal towed the line of religious divisions between Hindus-Sikhs and Hindus-Muslims as a cause of the heinous state-backed massacres over the past three decades. Devoid of a systemic analysis of the rise of Hindutva as a dangerous nationalist force that relies on majoritarian fascism to justify itself, he relegated the pogroms of Sikhs and Muslims to occasional outbursts of religious intolerance while proclaiming that Hinduism is the only non-prescriptive religion (um, the caste system?). In response to a question about alarming rates of femicide, Tejpal gave the tiring second-wave feminist response of "but look so many women are CEO’s and politicians." He also erroneously relegated sex-selection to uneducated rural tradition (sex-selective abortions are actually higher in middle- and upper-class families).
Tejpal’s submission to power was shocking given his sharp criticisms over the years. He is well aware that the overwhelming poverty and marginalization amongst Adivasis, peasants, lower-caste Dalits, and Muslims in India is a function of an exploitative economic system, an undemocratic political system, and a hierarchical social order. The disconnect between his previous work and this talk is perhaps explained by the fact that the sponsors of the event were almost entirely government and corporate ones, thus shattering any veneer of legitimacy and independence the festival might have had. As famed historian Noam Chomsky has said: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
No comments:
Post a Comment