Salman Zalman is a young man from Kerala who has recently been arrested for an alleged act of disrespect towards the Indian National Anthem. As an observer in Kerala, I think young people like him who choose to get involved in public struggles for justice face a number of predicaments that were perhaps not so severe for my generation when we were young. For this reason, I do feel that members of my generation, those of us alive to public issues, need to be more open to the challenges that public-minded younger people face today.

The first predicament 

Salman lives in a country in which the Hindutva-spouting government at New Delhi has gone about knocking down safeguards that protect India’s environment and ensure ecological security, reducing them into mere roadblocks in the way of predatory growth. As activists have pointed out, this is but an intensification of the roadblock-clearing business initiated by the predecessor, the soft-Hindu Congress government. The sense of insecurity widespread among minorities, already stoked by the soft-Hindu Congress government (who can forget the experience of Madani and K K Shahina?) has only been exacerbated by the new regime, members of which are sanguine about Hindu majoritarianism.

Salman does not belong to the Hindu upper castes (which does not automatically imply that he is a blind follower of the stereotyped Islamic extremism of the Hindutva imagination – that he has no agency as a believer) and is not part of the globalized growth-fuelled consumerist youth; so it not surprising that he would find a music video based on the national anthem, but which is sponsored by precisely the beneficiaries of the soft-hard Hindutva regimes objectionable. Especially when it is shoved down our throats in a context in which the very land and the people which constitutes  India are being reduced to dead matter, sold in bulk and loose, by and to predators who drain the national anthem of meaning and turn it into a cruel farce. In short, Salman is a true lover of the people (as different from the present-day nationalist) who protests the abuse of national anthem (that celebrates the land and its people) in this larger sense. His protest is an act of courage that can only be produced by the love of the Indian people and concern for their living spirit, but it will necessarily be over-read as the violation of institutionalized gestures of respect towards national symbols.

The second predicament

Salman lives in Kerala, ruled by the UDF, which is making desperate attempts to stop the BJP from making further gains. Recently we have seen too much that make us suspect that the Congress is now brandishing its own brand of soft-Hindu nationalism against the Hindutva-centred BJP charge. For example, the government’s new liquor policy that will hit the sale of Indian-made foreign liquor hard. Now, it appears that this might well be the fallout of the intense infighting within the ranks of the Congress, but it nicely fits the new soft-Hindu nationalist image the Congress would find useful. So also is the sudden love for Gandhi – expressed of course in the wave of indignation over Arundhati Roy’s talk in Trivandrum in which she merely repeated arguments that are not new at all, and that too, quoting from Gandhi’s writings. While the Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi did not feel it necessary to file a police case and stressed Roy’s right to dissent, political parties, especially the Congress, bayed for her blood.

Now, the Congress in Kerala has a history that is quite distinct — especially the Congress in the erstwhile princely states of Travancore and Cochin, the middle and southern parts of the present Kerala – and in any case, whatever Gandhi bhakti that was present did not survive the terrible wrangling for power of the late 1940s and 50s in the Congress. The Congress-led government presents a similar predicament to young Indian citizens like Salman Zalman: it enforces measures that would gladden the heart of soft-Hindus, like the apparent move towards total prohibition and the convenient depiction of Roy’s criticism of Gandhi as ‘insult’ but at the same time, displays total disrespect towards the very earth and the people who constitute Kerala – in the interest of unbridled predatory growth. Despite the public outcry over illegal quarrying in Kerala, and abundant evidence that it is destroying the land, the government still seeks to prop up the quarry lobby and its mafia, all citing the need for continuing ‘growth’! (The State Pollution Control Board recently reduced the minimum distance for quarries from residential areas to 50 metres from the earlier 100 metres).

In other words, the government seeks to serve up nationalism as a consumable ideology while abetting the destruction of the very elements that constitute the nation, the land and the people. Adivasis who are in struggle in front of the State Secretariat since more than fifty days are ignored by the government but the NIA is forever on the prowl here sniffing all over for Maoists cooked up in its fervid nationalist imagination. Thus a whole set of different people, from teenage girls, young students interested in public affairs, young radio program producers who interview civil social activists, and foreign tourists who were simply curious about local politics, to well-known civil social activists get identified as ‘Maoists’, and the only interesting aspect of the whole thing is its sheer absurdity (indeed, one way to survive this assault is through a keen sense of the absurd, so that we still posses the ability to laugh).

So how can a young Indian citizen who loves his country, like Salman Zalman, respond? He will have to protest of course but since all such protests against continuing social injustice are increasingly construed as aided by or by Maoists, since all the words with which we seek to engage the state are increasingly heard as emerging from hidden Maoist sources, since we are all increasingly viewed as empty piss-pots that merely echo the words and intentions of imaginary enemies of India, Maoist or Islamist, he cannot but howl. There is a lie going around that Salman howled when the RelianceMedia-sponsored music video was being shown (I refuse to accept that it is the National Anthem – it does not inspire love of this land and its people, it merely seeks to include a marginalized group within nationalism and that too, by upping the cuteness quotient using disabled children). No, the CC TV footage does not show that. In a context in which words uttered in defense of the land and the people are treated are treated as messages from imaginary subversives, in which the words of the national anthem are prettified and stripped of their connection with the land and the people, what can the loving citizen do except howl in pain and protest? But then that would be perceived too readily as disrespect towards nationalists?

The third predicament

Salman lives in Kerala, where civil social politics is facing deep crisis, but more worryingly, young people who claim to transgress dominant social mores and hegemonic social and familial expectations are increasingly depoliticized. Believe it or not, doing theatre instead of /along with Engineering is indeed a political act in contemporary Kerala, but there is no guarantee that the young people making this move necessarily perceive it as such. Also, there is appalling ignorance about the coercive face of the state and worse, about the implications of rising Hindutva majoritarianism for the future of democracy in the country.

Perhaps there are segments of Malayali youth who are sufficiently insulated – being of the upper caste Hindu middle class they may be able to pursue the arts, limit their social critique to the performance onstage, select aspects of social dissent that suit their own limited personal ends while discarding and disdaining other aspects especially when those are taken up by people they don’t like. How come such people ever pass off as the ‘oppositional public’? Well, one aspect of the crisis of the oppositional civil society in Kerala is that much of it is constituted by several narrow ‘friends’ circles’ and it is these narrow affiliations which often determine whether this group will or will not associate with particular political actions or forms of protest. This is not necessarily bad but is surely insufficient for the formation of a public. Only if these groups spend enough time in immersing themselves in public issues, seriously self-reflexive thinking, and dialoguing across narrow friends’ circle boundaries will they evolve into a public that can transcend the pressures of petty ego clashes.

So what can young people like Salman do when their own peers choose to express their petty dislikes through hurtful acts that reek of depoliticisation? They cannot help refusing to be cowed down, and indeed may be led to disrespectful responses which may break already-fragile and tentative political alliances, but it appears that few other channels or spaces for dialogues about and beyond differences are available?

Some weeks back, a prominent retired ex-bureaucrat, a noted soft-Hindu voice in Kerala, who in the course of fulminating against Arundhati Roy’s criticism of Gandhi, called Gail Omvedt the ‘new Katherine Mayo’. I doubt whether the comparison will stand – even a superficial reading of Omvedt’s scholarship and a brief examination of her biography would be enough to convince one that they are vastly different, both politically and intellectually, from Mayo’s polemic and life. But it reveals an emergent tendency, to condemn those who point fingers at social exclusion and ‘dirt’ in India as enemies and foreigners too.

But I doubt if anyone would trifle thus with EMS Namboodiripad or P K Balakrishnan, both formidable critics of Gandhi who certainly did not mince their words. In other words, this is a threat to this generation of critics of nationalism and its institutionalized symbols, which definitely has more members from outside the Malayali new elite and more women and Muslims.

Indeed, these are not easy times, and it is not for us who grew up in the pre-liberalization context to judge young people born after liberalization even as we disagree with their responses. For it may indeed be the case that Omvedt is Mayo (Gandhi who called Mayo’s book ‘the drain-inspector’s report’, for all his elitism, might not have minded, for he would have been painfully aware that even the highest seat of sacred authority in India is today likely to be nothing but a stinking, clogged drain. He would probably admit that we need today more drain-inspectors than neoliberal urban planners) but then who would Sugatha Kumari be? Sarojini Naidu? No perhaps. Aruna Asaf Ali? No for sure.

Now, that is really the predicament that Salman faces …!