Ashoak Upadhyaay
“The real generosity toward the future consists in giving everything to the present.” Albert Camus
ON his return from the former Soviet Union, a hundred years ago, Lincoln Steffens an American journalist remarked “I have seen the future and it works…” He had his misgivings about that revolutionary society but in sum, he was convinced that he had seen the Promised Land. Never mind the history of that ‘paradise.’ leave aside the ignoble irony of that wonderfully elegiac remark of hope and redemption for a world that was being battered by the early onset of a modernity whose “corruptible seed” would invent weapons of mass destruction to aid the violent ambitions of competing nation-states. Those words remained perhaps as self-caricature, but ringing with a resonance that was perhaps missed and needs recalling.
What Steffens was telling us is that the stages of historical Time had been scaled; the telos of history had witnessed its consummation. The future was no longer a utopia to be chased; it had arrived and was now the Present. The future was no longer a distant hope for the proletariat; it was a reality thanks to the agency of that working class and poor. Steffens was no poet; he wasn’t an admirer, leastways at this point when he made that remark, of TS Eliot’s poetic meditations on Time because the great poet had yet to write ‘Four Quartets’. Steffens was affirming an early –end-of-history faith that, in retrospect at least sounds more poetic than Francis Fukuyama’s own take on History’s end, laughable as both might seem to observers of our sharp-clawed contemporary darkness.
What is even clearer to us is that the notion of the Future-in-the-Present has few takers since Steffens, with the possible exception of Fukuyama. Time as a sequential order of progression, in which the Present is attenuated to allow an expansive, if foggy notion of that Future, informs and determines our very existence by shaping our dreams, our motivations, defines Ambition for us as an attribute to be emulated by worthy children of even lesser gods. It defines Progress, without telling us when and where it ends in a state of bliss and contentment. We are Indians and inheritors of a proud ancient tradition we are fiercely informed but the purveyors of that idea are, as fiercely, the carriers of that Western-centric idea of Time and Progress towards a new dawn.
‘Vikas’ To many nostalgic followers of the old Nehruvian programmatic model of ‘growth’ the word may have been hijacked by the current prime minister but let’s face it, it works to his advantage because it counts at the competitive field of electoral politics—think of Bihar. It shapes and fashions an episteme of agency, vested, not as Steffens implied a century ago in the working poor, but in the persona of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In him the concept of ‘vikas’ has shadings and registers that make it entirely his own and yet reflect a tradition of unbridled conglomerate capitalism and the will to power, reflected in the idea that he is the master of India’s destiny; that he is its destiny.
We now enter a ‘looking glass world’ and must turn to Lewis Carroll for some help. Here’s a snippet of a conversation Alice has with Humpty Dumpty:
“The question is,“ said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master, that’s all.”
This is a delightfully ambiguous yet majestic intervention by Humpty Dumpty open to multiple interpretations. Every word has multiple meanings but they are arranged in a hierarchy. Who decides the placements of those meanings? Their ‘truth,’ relevance? ‘Vikas’ can mean a lot of things but its connotative definitions have been announced by the ‘chief utterer’ and the Uttterance has acquired a life of mastery over all other possible meanings it could have had in the past. Its connotative implications are evident in all that we see and hear around us. And if it acquires mastery it becomes a weapon of domination; not just physical but epistemic as well.
Consider its usage in the last five years. Demonetization, GST rollout were elements of ‘vikas’ as are the Citizenship legislations. The construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya embodied an idea of ‘vikas’ perfectly aligned with Hindutva’s underlying episteme that transforms Hinduism into a masculine violent ideology at ease with unbridled capitalism; both stand on its head the Nehruvian notion, itself suspect , of Industries-as-temples so that we now get a model of development based on ‘temples-as-industries. The concept of ‘vikas’ underwrote the ‘reforms’ of labour laws in Uttar Pradesh, as precedents for other states to strip labour of those protections and bargaining powers achieved over decades of struggles. And what else are the current farm laws if not the most brutal and blatant attempt at transforming agriculture into another arm of conglomerate capitalism, a “reform” or, let’s say it, ‘vikas’, that will effect the extinction of the last vestige of the pre-modern, the peasant and the village?
Most critiques of the farm laws accept the basic rationale rolled out by the ‘useful idiots’ those apostles of modernity that call for transforming a backward sector. Critiques of the current farm laws address their workings and framings rather than its hidden-in-plain-sight purposes. Modern, urban India from which the policy wonks come as inheritors of the modernisatiion drive of Nehruvian development chafe at the idea of a backward agriculture obstructing India’s climb to the city on the hill. Nehru’s response to Gandhi’s misgivings about the likely course India would take, expressed in his letter of October 09, 1945 laid the templates for post-Independent India’s attitude towards the farming sector and of course the village:
I do not understand why a village should necessarily embody truth and non-violence. A village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment. Narrow-minded people are much more likely to be untruthful and violent”
It’s not surprising that the programmatic content of ‘development’ was focused on ridding India of this ‘narrow-mindedness’ with a western scientific rationality and ideas of progress underwritten, whatever the safeguards built into the system to curb its predatoriness, by capitalism.
For decades the ‘development’ agenda was focused on reforming agriculture and village life with a view to turning the farmer, at least the rich layer, into rural industrialists, ‘primitive’ capital into ‘productive’ capital. With contract farming came as the first signs of a change in the mindset; impatient at the tardiness of the farmer to turn capitalist, sufficiently enough to turn the sector into a vast humming factory, ‘development’ introduced the idea of industrial capital’s entry into that vast sector with untapped potential for huge profits. Now, Modi’s ‘vikas’ carries that logic where it had to lead: the entry of conglomerate capital as the transforming agent of that backwardness, for a brighter future, a peasant-free future where the villlage pond would be replaced with a swimming pool; a real-estate dream.
Criticisms of the farm laws have not questioned the epistemological bias inhering in ‘vikas’ They focus on the implementation or the doubtful benefits of the entry of big capital into farming. Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemant Thakkar shrugged off the idea that big capitalists would benefit from the laws as apprehensions of the farmers and then, as if this could help allay such fears asked: “Why should agriculture be liberalised in the first place when in most countries governments subsidise this sector? In the US, the agriculture sector is expected to receive $46 billion in federal subsidies this year. This accounts for about 40 per cent of the total farm income and, if not for those subsidies, the US farm income was poised to decline in 2020, according to a report by The New York Times. Similarly, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy spending has averaged €54 billion annually since 2006.”
P Sainath weighed in with the ponderous conclusion that earlier forays of capitalists into farming had not helped farmers any. Even The Hindu newspaper tinkered with aspects of the farm laws that seemed to suggest some measure of sagacity could help tamp down farmers’ fury and protests.
Such critiques presume a veneer of formal democratic norms operate within the system, a system where some negotiations are possible. But not when policy and in this case, ‘vikas’ is a weapon used to cudgel all opposition to its violent purposes and unfolding. And, ominously, its hegemonic connotations were echoed in the sentiments expressed by Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant: “Tough reforms are very difficult in the Indian context, we have too much of democracy…” Perhaps that is why democracy’s fragile institutions are being whittled away: to remove those roadblocks on the way to ‘vikas.’
Any resemblance of Modi’s ‘vikas’ to the post-Independence model of development ends here. For ‘vikas’ is predicated on the premise that a capitalism unfettered by any laws that can hold them accountable to labour or the environment, will be the vehicle that will drive India to that rich man’s club. More than its predecessor, ‘vikas’ attempts to extinguish our multiple selves that reflect our diverse histories and ways of living and articulations, messy as they may be. Can anything be more ironic and revealing than the brutal crackdowns by the Uttar Pradesh government on the Matri Sadan sants protesting sand mining in the Ganges at Haridwar?
‘Vikas’ then does not expand the possibilities of engagement with the variedness of life but turns it, or attempts to turn it, into a homogenized banality through erasures of memories and lived experiences that fed off and sustain each other; itself historicized, ‘vikas’ attempts to historicise and thereby create a hierarchy of experiences—primitive, backward, untouchable, alien, hostile, the chosen. This historisation, as Pierre Nora reminded us is “perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.”
Through the erasure of memories and its substitution by the iron laws of history, laws that define wellbeing always as a desired future, the present is attenuated: our Present–in all its multiplicity of possibilities that sustained our identities as a pluralistic society in the here-and-now and that can still sustain us humans in harmony with non-humans through nurturing practices and myths, as Adivasis in Niyamgarh and elsewhere protect sacred groves and thereby life itself.
Under ‘vikas’ the constricted Present as historicised Time is turned transient, a stage in the march of history towards a better Future. The Present is a waiting room in which we infantiles are expected to work and wait for the new dawn that will be ushered in by Hindutva and conglomerate capitalism—both of one mind as votaries of Progress, of future imaginaries as higher stages of existence
Policymakers and experts never tire of echoing the prime minister that India will have a 5 trillion dollar economy by …2026-27. Mukesh Ambani has joined the march-of-progress group. Not too long ago he intoned that India would become the third largest economy in 20 years. That’s progress for you. Utopia is always just ahead of you, if you can bother to lift your withered body and exhausted vision to gaze out that far from the darkness that envelops your being in this awful Present. And, of course the more agile and gullible could wonder why India should remain third largest and not become the largest? Why are we fated to remain in the shadows of the West unless it fits in with the idea of Progress we have imbibed that our future is always going to be the Western countries’ past?
In this narrative of imaginary futures and attenuated presents, the looking glass world of Humpty Dumpty, meets the Baconian episteme of scientific rationality and nineteenth century theories of Progress. Ashis Nandy first offered readers a sense of what the concept of ‘development’ could mean as a post Enlightenment derivative our policymakers had incorporated into their public discourse; but he had not figured on the role that Humpty Dumpty could play in fashioning ‘vikas’ both as weapon and illusion.
The investment in the future coupled with the stripping down and homogenization of the Present has continued apace even as the pandemic would seem to make a mockery of the illusions of imagined futures. Perversely, as if in cohorts with ‘vikas’, the pandemic has provided elbow room for further constriction of the Present. In the early stages of the pandemic, the sudden announcement of the lockdown without any preparations had the effect of a minor holocaust as a wide swathe of the poor, migrant labour was put to flight. It was not just a case of bad planning or ill-management; it represented a credo that the weak had to be weeded out; that they were not worthy of public largesse, that their experiences were meaningless and irrelevant, that they could be erased from any reckoning of the march to progress. The narrative of ‘vikas’ was paramount; the fact that the labour laws were modified so drastically in favour of entrepreneurs in U.P. smack in the middle of the surging pandemic when states around the world were considering forms of welfarism and safety nets, attests not just to the heartlessness of the wielders of power but equally is indicative of their clinical devotion to such a discourse of progress based on precisely the nineteenth century forms of mercantile capitalism unfamiliar with the ideas of distributive justice.
The adherence to such a discourse trivializes the Present; not just the suffering of the weak and dispossessed especially in conditions of a historically accumulated deprivation and lack of entitlement exacerbated by the pandemic and callous public policy but even the struggles against that very trivialisation. Thus the farmers protesting the laws that threaten their existence no less, are accused of being Khalistanis and terrorists.
You can treat some of the people as infants some of the time but not all the people as infants all the time. What we also witness in the farmers’ struggles, their insistence at braving State violence, the winter cold and the pandemic to voice their dissent against the injustice of the laws is more than just that. It is an assertion that the Present, their Present is not any less brilliant than the transcendental future being promised them. What the farmers are fighting for, like the anti-CAA protesters before them is their right to a Present they believe works for them. Protests of this kind mark the struggle to expand the Present, to retain their memories, shared experiences in an immanent here-and-now.
By expanding the Present to mean more than just a transient phase in the journey to an imaginary utopia, such struggles expand the boundaries of our knowledge of the world, of the multiversity of the contemporary. Such struggles embody what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls a “…dense conception of contemporaneity…that allows for a radically broader experience of the world as one’s own.” They encompass and express the profound recognition that the understanding of the world is far greater than the understanding of the world reflected in ‘vikas’ and its illusions.
That’s a good place to be in.
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Notes --Quote by Albert Camus is cited in Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicde. p 239 --Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemant Thakkar https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/farm-bills-protets-indian-agriculture-sector-7078237/ --Santos quote from Epistemologies…p 240 --Nora, Pierre: Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire. Translated by Marc Roudebush {1989)
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