The End of Imagination

This is a volatile assertion, so let me shelter behind Bhimrao Ambedkar. “The first and foremost thing that must be recognised,” he wrote in Annihilation of Caste in 1936, “is that Hindu society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives [who lived east of the river Indus] for the purpose of distinguishing themselves.”2

As a community, they functioned as a loose coalition of endogamous castes organized in a strict hierarchy. (Even today, for all the talk of unity and nationalism, only 5 percent of marriages in India cut across caste lines. Transgression can still get young people beheaded.)

or making sure the levers of power and wealth remain in the hands of the tiny minority of dominant castes

in which I joked about how the choice between the Democrats and the Republicans—or their equivalents in India, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—was like having to choose between Tide and Ivory Snow, two brands of washing powder both actually owned by the same company. Given all that is going on, can I honestly continue to believe that?

My crime, according to him, is that I have written about the struggle for freedom in Kashmir, questioned the execution of Mohammad Afzal Guru, walked with the Maoist guerrillas (“terrorists” in television-speak) in the forests of Bastar, connected their armed rebellion to my reservations about India’s chosen model of “development,” and—with a hissy, sneering pause—even questioned the country’s nuclear tests.

What is happening right now is actually a systematic effort to create chaos, an attempt to arrive at a situation in which the civil rights enshrined in the constitution can be suspended. The RSS has never accepted the constitution. It has now, finally, maneuvered itself into a position where it has the power to subvert it. It is waiting for an opportunity. We might well be witnessing preparations for a coup—not a military coup, but a coup nevertheless. It could be only a matter of time before India will officially cease to be a secular, democratic republic. We may find ourselves looking back fondly on the era of doctored videos and parody Twitter handles

Perhaps while we debate the true, deep meanings of freedom, those who have been so shocked by what is happening in the mainland over the last few months will be moved to ask themselves why, when far worse things happen in other places, it leaves them so untroubled. Why is it all right to for us to ask for azadi in our university campuses while the daily lives of ordinary people in Kashmir, Nagaland, and Manipur are overseen by the army and their traffic jams managed by uniformed men waving AK-47s? Why is it easy for most Indians to accept the killing of 112 young people on the streets of Kashmir in the course of a single summer? Why do we care so much about Kanhaiya Kumar and Rohith Vemula, but so little about students like Shaista Hameed and Danish Farooq, who were shot dead in Kashmir the day before the smear campaign against JNU was launched? Azadi is an immense word, and a beautiful one too. We need to wrap our minds around it, not just play with it. This is not to suggest some sort of high-mindedness in which we all fight each other’s battles side by side and feel each other’s pain with equal intensity. Only to say that if we do not acknowledge each other’s yearning for azadi, if we do not acknowledge injustice when it is looking us straight in the eye, we will all go down together in the quicksand of moral turpitude

What if some of us dream of living in a society that people of which are not forced to be part? What if some of us don’t have colonialist, imperialist dreams? What if some of us dream instead of justice? Is it a criminal offense

Trade in your hopes for a decent livelihood and buy into an exciting life of perpetual hysteria. A life in which you are free to hate your neighbor, and if things get really bad, and if you really want to, you can get together with friends and even beat her or him to death.

The aggressive insistence on unquestioning soldier-worship, even by self-professed “liberals,” is a sick, dangerous game that’s been dreamt up by a cynical oligarchy