The recent electoral success of the Congress in a one to one fight against the BJP in the Hindi heart has been viewed in diverse ways by several people. I too wish to view it in a different way. It not only unveils the mask of the BJP and enables us to see its true face which of course can be seen even when the mask is on its face. What has really fallen is the inner mask of the people which had made BJP acceptable in the very first place, even when it meant for us the death of liberal Hinduism in favour of its crafty Hindutva.
Faced by the corruption cloud covering the face of Congress, something among us led several liberal Indians seem to think that BJP is the a real option for progress. This is why it seems that several liberal Indians along with the die hard bhakts of the BJP began to look at BJP favourably, although its excesses on the religious front were clearly intolerable to any right thinking liberal Indian/ Hindu. While even as we could see the naked truth behind the face of BJP, several among us found it was a meaningful option. This is why maybe the view that suggests that it is our inner mask which rendered BJP acceptable is one that is fallen with the defeat of the BJP in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in recent days. To understand this aspect of the victory of the Congress, we may have to take recourse into the work of contemporary thinker Slavoj Zizek.
Zizek is said to have succinctly said ‘in Europe you can make fun of Mohamed but if you try to make fun of the holocaust. You will be excommunicated’. He rightly points out that every society and culture has its blind spots and taboos. At most levels we are all tolerant humans.The existence of taboos and blind spots make things a bit ambiguous. Zizek suggests that most often the things we tolerate and allow in our society are constructs and means to face real life issues. This means the relations between the self behind the mask or the public image portrayed by the mask is much more complicated. It means mask is not just a mask that hides the face. Maybe with Zizek, we may have to agree that our private inner truth is the true mask. Our private inner truth is constructed to face the ghosts in front of the mask. What we construct to ourselves as a self behind a mask is an effort to render tolerable the horrors of our public life. This position of Zizek follows the Psychoanalysis of a child’s identification with its own image in the mirror worked by his teacher psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan to let us face the face of our mask that often stays hidden to us. Lacan teaches that the child between the age of six and eighteen months identifies with its own image in the mirror (face of the mother) to cope with its own fragmented immobile existence. The sense of identification with the image gives the child a sense of being integrated and whole.
The scenario that preceded 2014 somewhat produced a castration phobia. The anxieties of that time seem to indicate that everything that is sacred to us Indians was falling apart. It made us look at the image in the mirror. The broken India appeared whole and integral in the image of grand future promised by the BJP. Most of us might have begun to think that BJP will bring a progressive future to our country. It is also true that the impression of dying India struggling in the ICU was to a large extent manufactured. But we failed to read the deception as we only saw the partial reading on the wall as one that is taking us to an inevitable cataclysm. It took time for several among us to understand that we have fallen from the frying pan into the fire. While the glitter of the promised economic pie mesmerized all and sundry and saw that it brought most of us to submission and the wave that consequently arose crafted a thumping BJP victory in 2014.
It took time for the scales to fall from our eyes as election after elections we saw BJP wining. But as time went, with the delay in the coming of the promised future the tables began to turn. Dual economic blunders of demonetisation and erroneously conceived and executed GST did not also help prevent this reversal. Rafale mud sling and the ‘Chowkidar Chor’ charge began to stick . Besides, the famers distress, the Killerati instinct of the fringe, BJP’s appetite for the destruction of democratic institutions and overall loss of democracy led to the dropping of the mask among the liberal Hindus. The diehard supporters of the Sangh brigade began to feel the heat of a government that was once scornfully described as being run by two and half persons by Arun Shourie. This is why even after blowing the temple bugle and the raised volume of Hindutva, the poor of India voted courageously and wisely. This has taken some alliance partners like the Shiv Sena to further up their ante against the PM. We can also notice how ex-BJP president and a minister in the government Nitin Gadkari has clearly shifted gears and has turned the discourse against the PM. We can also find Ram Madhav and Baba Ramdev in the line of the dissenters within the right wing.
This victory of the people does not take away the effort put in by the Congress and its allies. The temple hoping spree of Rahul Gandhi is often dismissed as soft Hindutva by several political analysts. But in the wake of such analysis, we might miss an important factor it brought into play. Rahul has now made space for a liberal Hindu in our country. The space of a liberal Hindu was almost wiped out with labels that depicted him/her as sicular or liptard. The reclaiming of the secular space of liberal Hindu was indeed an important step that shaped the perception of the Congress along with strong management of its young and the old guard.Having tasted victory, after a long time, the grand old party cannot afford to be complacent but has the challenge to carrying the wining tempo into the 2019 elections along with its allies. The policies of BJP have hit the poor directly on their face and the poor have voted with courage and demonstrated politics of hate will not fool them anymore.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary.)
