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LIKE most Indians Najman Bua also cursed when she was upset. “Taihka haija howaey. Taihka chhinni aawaey.” May you suffer from cholera was the first abuse of choice. The meaning of the second curse was lost on her Lucknow quarries and on me, her ward. She was from Rudauli, an otherwise cultured kasbah between Ayodhya and Barabanki. Only someone from her village in Pachhu Patti could translate Najman Bua’s irate Awadhi invectives, if at all.
As for the urban men in the northern stretches of India, there is always the easy recourse to hissing curses. More often than not this involves spelling out what they would do to someone’s mother, sister, daughter etc. If the weather is too hot they curse. If it gets cold they abuse. The sudden surge of motorcars on the country’s ill-equipped city roads has led to bad driving and consequent road rage, and, therefore, more abusiveness, often spawning outright assault.
Najman Bua cursed from the position of evident weakness. She was a woman in an unequal world and she was old. It was different when Shiv Sainiks abused members of a vulnerable community. They were viciously described as vermin worthy of being liquidated or something to that effect, while prompting the readily abusive police to assault them. Shiv Sainiks marshal their ‘troops’ from a position of strength, brute strength.
Alberto Moravia’s characters from the backstreets of Italian cities share their loud, vulgar trait with today’s Indians (and, of course, Pakistanis). Like the Italians who went through a terrifying patch of fascism in their political journey towards war, destruction and a still unstable democracy, India looks primed to play catch. The chief justice of the Supreme Court broke down the other day in the presence of the leader, pleading for urgent help to dispense justice to the teeming poor. There was a huge vacancy for judges that had to be filled urgently. The leader responded by advising the judges to take shorter holidays.
Whatever be the compulsions, the language of fascism is nicely in vogue. Some of the sentences common are smack out of the mouth of Benito Mussolini.
In the minds of my friends, it was a picture of stifling hopelessness. The prime minister belonged to a party, after all, that did not care two hoots for the Supreme Court’s orders when it led the mobs to destroy a decrepit old mosque in Ayodhya in 1992.
One by one the institutions of democracy are getting chipped away. Almost everyone who was in jail charged with mass murder, encounter deaths or rioting in Gujarat has been set free under the new dispensation. Cases are being withdrawn against friendly men and women accused of perpetrating right-wing terrorism be it in Malegaon or on the Samjhauta Express. Witnesses are turning hostile en masse, we are told by the new investigators.
Words like ‘sickular’ and ‘presstitute’ have been handed out to the mobs to tackle liberal voices and for use against those among the media that have failed to fall in line. Upright women journalists are particularly trolled with abuses that would make Najman Bua sit up in her grave.
The opposition response is tardy but there is a lot of academic discussion about what fascism really is. Does it derive from a cultural hegemony of the masses or from economic strife, or from a bit of both? Antonio Gramsci was well placed to offer an explanation that best described the Mussolini phenomenon. He spent the last decade of his life in his prison. The Indian left does not seem to have bothered to even sniff at Gramsci’s invaluable words of caution.
Whatever be the compulsions, the language of fascism is nicely in vogue. You might confuse it for a discussion on the Times Now news channel, but some of the sentences common in brazenly right-wing discussions these days are smack out of the mouth of Benito Mussolini.
“Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hand, and an infinite scorn in our hearts,” Il Duce had rallied his trapped people. “We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail … Fascist education is moral, physical, social, and military: it aims to create a complete and harmoniously developed human, a fascist one according to our views.”
When Mussolini was not hissing invectives, he was still crude, loud, violently appealing with his simple worldview that wooed the masses. A high point of his fulminations could also have intellectual pretensions.
“If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.” It is not uncommon in India these days to hear echoes of fascist catechisms. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty.”
Had this been any different, B.S. Moonje who helped found the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh would be without a purpose in life. After his meeting with Mussolini in Rome in March 1931, Moonje observed: “Italians, by nature, appear ease-loving and non-martial like the Indians generally. They have cultivated, like Indians, the work of peace and neglected the cultivation of the art of war. Mussolini saw the essential weakness of his country and conceived the idea of the Balilla organisation.”
Moonje’s Italian sojourn is bearing fruit today. “India and particularly Hindu India need some such institution for the military regeneration of the Hindus: so that the artificial distinction so much emphasised by the British of martial and non-martial classes amongst the Hindus may disappear.” The violent virus from Rome may be spreading more self-assuredly in Najman Bua’s muluk than her favourite curse about inflicting us with cholera.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 26th, 2016
