Explained : The Tyranny of ‘We’ – The Wire and Its Impact

Scarcely read today, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel, We (1924) still lives in literary memory as one of the key moments in the invention of that quintessentially modern form, the dystopia, or anti-utopia. Deriving from Samuel Butler’s Erehwon – “nowhere” written backwards – dystopian speculations, often in fictional form, explore the anxieties of our dreaded but all-too-possible futures, which are nowhere, but also seem to be, well, everywhere.

The particular anxiety that haunts We is the anxiety of mass society, in which all individuality is subsumed in a collective identity, in a compulsory “We”. Orwell reviewed Zamyatin, and suggested that Huxley’s Brave New World was influenced by it. However, it would be rather more accurate to say that of Orwell’s own Nineteen Eighty-Four – the world of multiple deprivations, the inevitable anguish of which is sought to be drowned in the compulsory community of all those who love, and must love, Big Brother. As Winston, too, finally learns to do. One face of this community is, of course, the public adoration of the Supreme Leader, but its necessary foundation is the participation in the passions and, crucially, the hatreds that define the community, “the Nation.”

I was reminded of this long-forgotten context recently when I read a report on the Sonam Wangchuk case. Apparently while addressing his Ladakhi audience, who had gathered to protest against certain issues emanating from the abrogation of Article 370, which were allegedly endangering the fragile ecology of Ladakh, Wangchuk had called upon his audience to convey their protest, non-violently, to the Central Government.

However, Wangchuk was alleged by the very honourable Solicitor General to have been guilty of referring to the Central authorities as “them”, against whose policies “we”, the Ladakhi people were being exhorted to agitate, peacefully. There is no “them”, the Solicitor General thundered, honourably: “we” are all Indians, a unanimous “us”. And any suggestion that there might be any differences amongst us – about beliefs, about strategies, about “their” sacred “vikas” – was to endanger our social harmony, our national security and sovereignty, the lot. “We” are all locked in happy harmony, joyously singing “Vande Mataram”… This “happy harmony” incidentally, includes Himanta Biswa Sarma and Anurag Thakur. Among many, many others.

I suggest, with all due respect, that this “harmony”, even without its attendant ironies, comes at a very heavy cost. This was brought home to me on several recent and apparently disconnected occasions. Thus, there was the bizarre observation of the, again, honourable Madras High Court – milord, so much “honour” tires me, but do I have a choice? – in the Amit Malaviya vs Udhayanidhi Stalin case, emanating from the latter’s critique of Sanatana Dharma. It was suggested that this critique itself, calling for the elimination of Sanatana Dharma, was “genocidal” in implication, since it allegedly targets all followers of the said Sanatana dharma – targets the “we” who are all locked in its necessarily hierarchical “community”. However, Stalin is small fry. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, was only one in a long line of people who have critiqued the varnashrama-based Sanatana Dharma that is the core of Brahminical Hinduism. It was also perceived as such contemporaneously, because a whole host of Sanatana Dharma sabhas were established to counter the “malign” influence of the Arya Samaj. Today, Swami Dayanand would stand accused of calling for genocide, no less. Because of course all critique implies difference, and difference is at the root of disharmony, and serves to fracture the “we”. The fact that the Union government recently sponsored a Sanatana Shankhnad conference (where, incidentally, a call for ‘removing Muslims’  from India was made) is, well, eloquent.

This “compulsory community” in which all difference is deemed dangerous, is of course fundamentally anti-democratic. That is why it is a recurrent theme in dystopias, as indeed in Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. It is particularly unsuited to modern, heterogeneous urban societies. The heterogeneity of modern societies, in which different people share common spaces, requires that we have laws and rules, that we have constitutions and even – a Constitution. The specified rules of engagement are there precisely to regulate the play of difference, which is the core of democratic societies, just as hierarchy is the core of an allegedly-harmonious caste society.

It is inconceivable what kind of “harmony” is even possible at the intersection of hierarchical caste society and modern ideas of equality and human rights, whether in rural societies or in urban ones. The myth of a harmonious community – enforced by “legal” coercion, (as also by decidedly unharmonious extra-legal means), serves the crucial function of allaying, or seeking to allay, the inevitable tension. It works to suppress the awareness – and certainly the assertion – of those rights whose selective denial is the very essence of the caste order, the varnashrama, the “Sanatana” dharma. (Bridegroom on horses is only one extreme example.) 

As against this, the state-backed assertion of “community”, or “harmony” even – in the “New India”, be it noted, of HB Sarma and Anurag Thakur and Kapil Mishra and Nishikant Dubey, of videographed lynchings and bulldozed habitations – is designed to invisibilise caste. And, ipso, is endangered, for instance, by calls for a caste census. This mythical “community” travels, variously, in “Hindu” and in “national”costume. It is a strange nation, indeed, in which vast sections of serious, idealistic and public-spirited citizens are deemed “anti-national”. Who can forget the image of Girish Karnad, only weeks before his death – showing up at the memorial meeting for the murdered Gauri Lankesh in a wheelchair, carrying his portable oxygen apparatus, and a placard that read: “I am an anti-national”?

But, by the same token, any assertion or even recognition of the persistent and pervasive reality of caste, whether in the form of demands for legal protection, or even an academic conference thereon (as at IIT Delhi recently), exposes that “community”, that vaunted “harmony”, as a tactical political construct, a cynical political move. It is crucial to understand that “the Muslim” –  in reality a the highly diverse plurality – is only, I suggest, the incidental victim of this “community” strategy. (The Muslim League under Jinnah sought to fuse this diversity into a political “community, and succeeded but temporarily. The RSS ideologues invented this “community” whole.)

In his various incarnations – whether as the too-visible “Gulf-returned” Keralite, or the threadbare Bihari “puncture-wallah”, whether as the stylish Lucknow aristocrat or the lungi-clad Miya in Assam – this mythical “the Muslim” serves to focus different local resentments, which the RSS and the BJP aggregate with consummate political skill to produce their “Hindu community” and their toxic “national” politics. I understand that it must be poor consolation to the millions of Indian Muslims to be told that they are only collateral victims of the deep politics of the vaunted “Hindu” community – and I offer this, with humility and respect, only as an analytical insight into our deeply perplexing condition, into the otherwise incomprehensible hostility to Muslims that has been assiduously manufactured over a whole century of dedicated, toxic labour.

The figure of “the Muslim” enables the retrospective consolidation of the mythical “Hindu community” crucial to “Hindutva” – so, no “the Muslim”, no Hindutva. But I still believe that the deeper motive of the forceful assertion and enforcement of this mythical “Hindu community” is, and has historically been, to inhibit the caste-critique – of Phule and Periyar and Narayana Guru and Ambedkar – which the “sanatani” savarna-Hindu is desperate to contain and suppress. “The Muslim”, in any of his many incarnations, is not intrinsically a sufficient enemy to explain the venom that is directed at him.

The political process by which this mythical, brahminical, community – “we” – has been weaponised has been brilliant described by Thomas Blom Hansen in his 2021 work, The Law of Force:  “… the idea that political power and popular mobilization provides an umbrella that protects against the force of law…” The legal apparatus by which this substitution of the “law of force” for the “force of law” has been studied carefully, even as “resentment” has become a crucial political resource. This legal apparatus  is very much a work-in-progress, even as we speak. Progressively, in the public space and even in the online space, any mention – critique, analysis, ethnographic description, etc – of the fissures endemic to society, has been rendered legally vulnerable. Thus, any attention to the Dalit victims of savarna atrocity, as in the case of the  Hathras rape, is likely to upset savarna-Hindus, and produce legally actionable “resentment”, because of course, it could endanger “social harmony”. Unlike, so to speak, the rape itself. The Kerala journalist, going to Hathras to fulfil his journalistic mandate, discovered this to his cost.

Any attention to the savarna perpetrators of social “harm” – which, after all, is implicit in their very social location, at the top of the pyramid in a deeply unjust society – is liable to cause resentment among the members of that savarna community – as most recently in the absurd matter of the censorship of Ghooskhor Pandat. “Pandats” were, naturally, outraged that they could ever be deemed guilty of wrongdoing! Or, to take a random instance from an overflowing basket, remember the outraged Rajputs of the Karni Sena over the cinematic representation of their Padmini. Appropriate sections of the “decolonised” law – Secs. 153, 295…lawyerly stuff – may be invoked in response to the mere possibility of angry resentment, whether on the part of the victims, or the supposed perpetrators. Both alike must submit to (as in the case of the victims) – or demand (as in the case of the perpetrators) – their “harmonious” coexistence. And, with armies of bhakts and mercenaries who can enact “disharmony” on command – in the street, at a movie theatre, in a studio – the apparatus for weaponising “harmony”, and so stifling all social critique, is firmly in place. Within such a legal regime, as Sonam Wangchuk discovered, all critical analysis may be construed as sedition, and all organisation- whether of a protest, or even a conference – as conspiracy. The loop is complete. Hang democracy.

This article went live on March first, two thousand twenty six, at thirty-eight minutes past seven in the morning.

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