The right-wing under PM Modi and Amit Shah seems to love to transgress. Desire to chase lunacy appears to be oozing out everywhere in the name a narrow nationalism. But the ex-centricities and excesses of the bakts clearly indicate that their bakti is only of Party and not of the nation. Their mindless violence and nauseating arrogance cannot cover up the miscarriage of promises of PM Modi. Nation is still absorbing the shocks inflicted by their lynch mobs. Their thirst for extermination of the violators of the holy cow is demonstrably unimaginable. Their excessive violent energy and impunity that it begets is astounding. Their terrifying actions seem to have numbed our moral consciousness. We seem to accept their moral slump as inevitable. It appears to us as a road to freedom. Several among us think that it will bring us fullness of life in some distant future. But to let it arrive we will have to write our present with an ink of blood.
This love for a nation up to a point of death is possible only when it is mixed with religion. This why right-wing continuously engages our society and keeps it on the boil. There is hardly any peace for anyone. But it is also amazing that we have limitless tolerance for their licentious indulgence. Bakti to a party and its Neta has crossed sublimity of religion.
The notion of excess might assist us to understand the excesses of the hate driven politics that is brewing in our society. Bakts and the ministers of the Government becoming a chowkidars to cover the accusation of theft by the PM is another indication of excess. Hence, we need to acutely consider studying Excess. It I hope would enable us to make sense of the intensity with which Hindutva forces transgress a great religion like Hinduism. Maybe we can illumine how under the banner of hindutva, Hinduism is made to appear as lost in the binaries of limits and excesses, inside and outside and identity and difference. Some others might say that great Hinduism has become a hiding place for anti-social element posing as bakts and Hindutva vadhins. As we look at the excesses of the reining BJP at the centre, the residues of the same defy our rational appropriation. Somehow they exceed the boundaries of our rational thought. Rational thought cannot obliterate nor incorporate the excesses that reached its climax in mob lynching. Maybe it is because of this that we are not able to discern its barbarity even when monstrosity has become mainstream in our society.
The strenuous assault on our constitution and spirit of our nation is pretentiously taken by us in silence while the time is already running out for us. Hence, we are challenged to push our thought beyond the limits of excess. We need to embrace a dissident path of thinking to become acutely aware of the pathetic condition of our society. We need such a response to defend our constitution, secularism, federalism, public institutions, education and reason. The dark night of the reign of terror has to end.
The thought of George Bataille (1897-1962), a French thinker of excess might assist us to undertake an emancipative response to growing crippling condition in our society. His thought might illumine how we are retribalised in the 21st century and the sacred cow seems to operate as our totem that we defend by murder. 21st century India has its totem and taboos. Hence, we have to deal with the discontents of our generations. Bataille addresses the irrational or excessive force differently from the psychoanalysts and the surrealists. He does not share their antagonism to it but manifests an ambiguous relation to it. He teaches that modern society has not accepted humans integrally. It has no room for human excesses. It cannot tolerate human excesses beyond the yoke of utility, functionality and use-value.
Batialle teaches that we access excess not as an object but as an affect. Affectivity tears open all subjectivity and the subject is unable to assemble a stable comprehension of the explosion of the irrational in a society. Some among us see the dark incandescence as a moral degradation. We saw it clearly in ‘not-in-my-name’ movement, while most of us seem to have chosen a silent response viewing it as serving some form of our interest.
The ancient societies were societies of excess. Excess flowed without offering any profit to the people from its flow. Secular morality and rational science has banned excess and inaugurated limits on excesses in the society. We have moved away from the vision of fullness or plenum and have entered a calculative profit oriented modern society. Hindutva is child of this modern society. It has placed all its the future in the arrival of what is imagined as a Hindu Rashtra. The present is pregnant with pragmatism and utility. Excess is allowed in the present only if it serves the purpose of establishing a Ram Raj in the future. Thus, we have become a society that allows excesses that are under the yoke of utility.
But this way of becoming excessive is tainted by profiteering and is immoral. Somehow a spirit of profiteering marks the nationalism of the rightwing. Hence, the Hindutva forces are benefiting from our excessive love for profiteering. Such a manner of being excessive is against the spirit of our civilisation. India is civilisation of excess.
Excess can only exist as an utility or functionality for Hindutva. This co-option of excess within the code of the dominant Hindutva order has to be brought to a halt. Otherwise India as well as Hinduism may be defaced beyond recognition. To achieve our goals we will have to stop writing the present with the ink of blood and embrace ‘useless giving’, giving without the motive of profit.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary)
