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Rage and helplessness-Pratap Bhanu Mehta
-The Indian Express

The protests in Delhi are generating two sorts of anxiety. The spectacle of a spontaneous, unstructured, unavoidably vague movement borne out of genuine rage has unsettled the establishment. And it will respond the way it does: by recourse to the language of order. The second is a critique that the movement is misdirected: it is blaming government for what is, in fact, a deep social problem. It is looking to the state’s power of order to rectify a social malaise, and what it will get as a result is an illusion of a solution. There is an element of truth to this critique. This column had argued (‘By her yardstick’, IE, June 22), that one of our biggest challenges will be to rectify the delicate capillaries that nourish social norms. In any society, politics can dance lightly on the surface, only when there is no catastrophic social failure.

But in India the relation between state and society has historically evolved in a way that statism has become our natural response. At independence, the Indian state, and the classes allied with it, placed itself in the vanguard of Indian modernity. The Indian state would be the site of all that is egalitarian, emancipatory and progressive. All institutions outside the state, from family to market, were inegalitarian, oppressive, and reactionary. The reality was never this simple. But this construction legitimised immense state power. Over time, this view was internalised by society itself: the mistrust the state had of it, led it to be, at most, defensive; at worst, all its energies were sapped.

In some ways, it is not so much that the movement is picking on the wrong target, government. It is also an admission that norm creation will now involve different modalities. The two traditional sites of norm production, family and religion, are in some fundamental sense, delegitimised. They have been marked out as not adequate to the task of producing a new morality. They may not condone violence, but their ability to respond to the new economy of desire and freedom is seriously in doubt. It is telling, for example, that the “traditional” response to the problem of violence involves an economy of restraint: prohibitions on drinking, movement and so on, that are unacceptable to the new regimen of freedom. Even if they had progressive resources, these institutions simply do not have the authority any more.

It is not an accident that the fight for new norms will now necessarily involve public mobilisation and spectacle. We are used to thinking of the public protest as a site of narrow political rights or economic mobilisation. Norms are no longer created just in small spaces. Modern societies, particularly because they are media driven, require the uses of public spectacle and mobilisation to convey what should be acceptable to society. A response to a moral shock cannot be just an individual emotion, or be dealt with only at the level of traditional institutions. It also requires recognition that the emotion is shared by others. It is that recognition that prevents specific incidents from being written off as an individual aberration, or getting lost in a fog of statistical jugglery. The achievement of this movement was at, one stroke, to rescue violence against women from being written off as the exception.

There is no question that we will increasingly see people inspiring emotions in others in the public by expressing those emotions in the context of protest. Whether these protests are converted into teachable moments depends on the response of society. But it is clear that our political system is simply not geared for the idea that serious moral conversation will have an element of public mobilisation. The state, used to conventional politics, does not understand this. It will simply crack down on this, not provide space for this, or try and reduce it to partisan politics.

But this protest is also more than about rape. It is now an open, generalised and largely justified contempt of the state. It is one amongst many forms of anguish against the fact that law has become a lottery; protectors have become predators, and virtue overrun by venality. A lot of the punitive rage being expressed is a sign of helplessness.

The state cannot solve every problem on its own; but its looming shadow has distorted us in the deepest sense in four respects. Traditional politics, important as it is, has unduly colonised social energy to the point where important issues are occluded. Both the energy of citizens and governance are finite resources and we need to allocate them well. Second, the functioning of the state has vast psychological reverberations. If its functioning legitimises the norm that anything goes if you can get away with it, this insidious principle will seep into all spheres of life. Third, the sheer lack of common sense and intelligence in state functioning raises costs. It is, for example, not rocket science to see that the state’s conception of planning cities is a disaster in the making for the future.

The so-called crisis of Indian masculinity is a complex phenomenon. But a moment’s reflection on the social dimensions of the political economy we inhabit will bring out the state’s role. In vast peri urban areas, you now have a peculiar syndrome: a property market-driven cash economy, which has necessitated an extraordinary gun culture; a traditional social structure suddenly catapulted into the modern economy of desire and consumption; modern institutions like colleges that are deeply alienating, and a state that would rather put more liquor outlets on streets than street lights. Under the surface, there is a volatile mix brewing, whose lines can be traced to the ways in which the state has structured the economy and its major institutions.

Finally, no one expects politicians to be psychotherapists or perfect moral exemplars. But if there is one job description that comes with politics, it is being a connection artist. It is an ability to tap into latent sentiments, emotions, hopes and fears. A demagogue exacerbates and panders to them in a destructive direction. A leader’s job is to channel them into constructive and imaginative solutions. But if there is a deep disconnect, an absence of common decency, and a constant attempt to evade political responsibility, there will be an anti-political politics.

Some ineffective states let societies go their own merry way. We are in a peculiar position where the state positioned itself as a vanguard, and then got lost in its own pathologies. Statism was a disease bequeathed to us, by the state.

The writer, president of the Centre for Policy Research, is contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’