The Enemy System
By Dilip Simeon
He (Pontius Pilate) took
water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying 'I am innocent of
the blood of this man, see to it yourselves.. And all the people answered,
' His blood be on us and on our children'! "(Bible, Mathew's Gospel)
"No law in the world
punishes a son for the crime committed by his father. How can we justify
the killing of a 5-year old in Ahmedabad for a crime committed in Godhra?"
- upper-caste shopkeeper in Ahmedabad.
The shopkeeper was wrong.
For centuries, the Catholic Church (and its Protestant offshoots) did
indeed justify the punishment of Jews for their mythical role in the
murder of Jesus Christ. The myth originated in the Biblical accounts
of the life of Jesus, and was perpetuated by Christianity's greatest
intellects, including Paul, Aquinas, Martin Luther and Calvin, not to
mention the Papacy. The story was that the Jews took upon themselves
and all their children the onus of this crime. For centuries Jews were
condemned as the devil's offspring, sensual, money-worshipers who deserved
to be enslaved, their property confiscated, their synagogues burnt,
their homes destroyed. They were to live separately, forbidden from
owning land, from marrying Christians. They were held responsible for
the Black Death in the 14th century, they were the special targets of
the Spanish Inquisition.
This tradition attained its
apogee in the Nazi genocide of six million European Jews between 1941
and 1945. Significantly, in a conversation with senior Church functionaries
in 1933, Hitler is reported to have assured them that "he will
take no steps against the Jews that the Church has not taken in 1500
years". In the end, it was only a matter of degree, of elevating
murder into an industry, that marked the difference between Nazism and
the hoary traditions of Christian anti-Semitism. The thundering silence
of Pope Pius XII in the 1940's, despite evidence of mass murder and
repeated appeals by ordinary Catholics, Allied governments and Jewish
organisations was a logical outcome of this theologically ordained 'enemy
system'. It is equally significant that after the Russian Revolution,
a section of the Church began to see a link between Judaism and Communism
- Hitler's favorite theme. The man who acquired the informal title of
being 'Hitler's Pope', is currently in process of being made a saint.
Meanwhile, the burden of Christianity's sins against the Jews has
conveniently been transferred to the shoulders of Palestinians.
The cruel doctrine that
guilt passes from one generation to the next has ancient lineage but
is alive and well in modern India. It is the fulcrum of the world-view
of our communalists. All Muslim citizens of independent India are supposedly
responsible for the actions (real and imaginary) of Muslim rulers in
the 16th century. They are also deemed to bear the guilt of Partition.
The same logic was applied to justify the carnage of Sikhs in the aftermath
of Mrs Gandhi's assassination, and in Bangladesh in 1993, where the
Hindu population was blamed for the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
Connected to the doctrine
of collective guilt is the encouragement given to extra-legal punitive
action. Mobs led by groups of well-organised hooligans 'punish' ordinary
people whose guilt was established prior to their being born. Revenge
and retaliation have been made instruments of state policy, hence, our
ultra-nationalist Lok Sabha could pay silent homage to the victims of
9/11, but cannot pass a condolence resolution for victims of communal
violence in India.
How could this happen? Article 21 of the Constitution grants every Indian
the right to life and liberty unless deprived of them by process of
law. After the gruesome events in Godhra in February, state officials
in Gujarat withdrew these protections from a section of Indian citizens.
The entire Muslim community was held responsible for the actions of
a few. The killing of innocents was justified on the grounds of collective
guilt. Meanwhile the VHP attacked the legislative assembly in Bhubhaneshwar
on March 16, confident in its links with the Union Government.
Contemporary events have
shown that a section of India's ruling establishment is tolerant of
mob violence, as long as it is directed at ordinary citizens and channelled
along religious lines. Indeed, it mobilises and prepares such violence,
while it criticises Naxalite violence for being mindless and anti-national.
Senior retired bureaucrats and policemen have supported this endeavour,
along with industrialists, wealthy NRI's and some religious leaders.
The violence of the Bajrang Dal and VHP is 'nationalism', that of anyone
outside the 'familial' ambit of the RSS is lawlessness and terror. This
hypocrisy has been transformed into the common sense of our elite, for
whom terrorism is a language spoken exclusively by Muslims.
All this is not a matter
of the whims of demented persons. It is part of a systematic project
to undermine constitutional democracy, which, for all its flaws, remains
a major institutional resource for the working peoples struggle for
a better life. The "enemy system", as described by John Mack,
Harvard psychiatrist, is an instrument by which political leaders sustain
popular hostility towards imagined adversaries as a means of maintaining
power. It thrives on lies, intolerance and ignorance, the demonisation
of other peoples, the surrender of personal responsibility to 'great
men'. In extreme form, it appeals to the most destructive and exclusivist
aspects of the human mind. And it glorifies brutality as a 'selfless'
form of violence.
The destruction of the Babri
Masjid was a foundation stone of the new political order being constructed
by a section of India's ruling establishment. We are witness to an ongoing
'constitutional' coup d'etat. By acts of deliberate deception, (such
as the arguments in favour of the VHP by the Attorney General and the
acceptance of a 'sacred' brick in Ayodhya by an official), the government
supported the fraudulent claim of the VHP to represent all Hindus. By
so doing, the swayamsevaks in high office undermined the status of Parliament,
which has been elected by millions of citizens, including a large proportion
of Hindus. A parallel system of representation is being forced upon
the Indian public.
What is the purpose of such
a project? Nearly thirty crore Indians belong to families working in
the informal sector of the economy. Savarna-capitalism uses a hierarchical
caste structure, the constant threat of corporal punishment, and oppressive
customs to keep wages abysmally low, neglect social security systems,
and undermine the social-democratic potential of modern state institutions.
What we have in place of a duly regulated work-process, is an institutionalised
Social Darwinism. Ultimately, it is political authority that regulates
markets and wage relations and stabilises economic systems. Hence governance
must be examined for patterns of regularity. Why is there a gap between
official regulations (regarding working conditions, minimum wages),
and their implementation? Why is the status of citizen effectively denied
to millions of workers? Why does the zone of informality drain away
the rights that arise from the zone of formality? Why do the reigning
authorities periodically suspend the right of citizens to remain alive,
by instigating mass murder in the guise of communal or caste 'riots',
for whose duration the police apparatus is suspended and the judicial
conscience stricken by amnesia? Is it not true that their main victims
are the labouring poor and self- employed artisans?
Communal and caste violence
has become the preferred mode of governance of the Indian ruling classes,
the mode by which they have negotiated their discomforts with democracy.
The periodic outbreaks of mass murder that we call 'riots' can no longer
be explained away as unfortunate tangents in an otherwise steady course
of India's development. They are the very face of Indian modernity.
Unless we abolish the enemy system, we will transfer its burden to our
children. And that will be a crime which will not wash easily.
(Published in The Hindustan
Times, New Delhi, December 6, 2002, tenth anniversary of Babri Mosque
demolition)
Dilip
Simeon is a Delhi based historian