Guest post by AKSHAYA KUMAR

I

About two months ago, while walking by the roadside in Glasgow, a middle-aged man handed me out a pamphlet. In an endorsement of UKIP, the pamphlet declared ‘Our government pays GBP 55 million a day in fees to the EU’ (emphasis added). It went on to inform that in return, the EU gives ‘us’ accounts riddled with fraud, no control over ‘our’ own borders – putting pressure on our health, education and welfare services – and a super-government that makes more than 70% of ‘our’ laws. The pamphlet intrigued me a fair bit, not in the least because as an international student in the UK, I wondered if my case was a bigger or smaller burden on the UK defined thus – their UK. But who are they? One might rubbish them as a deviant community, or one might consider them a threat to yet another definition of us – the liberals or suchlike. But what intrigued me was not the neatness of these boundaries, or the speculations about how many of ‘us’ and ‘them’ there are. I was intrigued by the language of the starkly political proposition. Let us tentatively assume that in the pamphlet, ‘us’ meant the citizens of UK and it constructs an antagonistic position vis-à-vis other national citizens who are entitled to living and working within the UK. Surely the two are politically distinguishable? Or are there too many of them living next to us, so they cannot exactly be identified as such?

The pamphlet was doing identity politics by other means, without identifying the citizen-subjects. Wishing to vilify those from the EU who enter the UK and become an economic liability on the free services provided by the State, it spoke of porous borders and ‘our’ helplessness. The pamphlet then promised, on behalf of UKIP, to ‘repair the economy for our children and grandchildren’.

In spite of having a political agenda against immigration from within the EU, the pamphlet translated its politics into an economic argument. This, according to me, is symptomatic of the crisis of political language within the UK, if not Europe itself. Economics has become the language in which the deepest fears of European politics are stated, argued and distributed. By itself, it may seem to be a minor problem, but it is not.

The language of politics may not always be in control of the larger problem it addresses, but in how it sets up its claims, it marks the key contestations within the contemporary. These sites are distributed over the field of politics that includes various community interest groups between the spectrum bookended by the State and the people. By taking over the diversity of languages in which all of them articulate their political demands, economics singularly replaces, and therefore flattens, the logic of political discourse. If political positions take pride in themselves, pleas for ‘repairing the economy’ undercut their politics. They make possible a politics that is ashamed of itself, and to that extent, anti-political. To redeem itself of this embarrassment, an impersonal economic logic is personalized by rendering to it distinctly familial terms. The usage of ‘our children and grandchildren’ to appeal against EU is vital here in drawing the boundaries and extrapolating them across time.

In the larger sense, we are speaking here of at least two tendencies worth sincere attention that enable the translation of politics into economics. First, the overwriting of historicity by the urgencies produced by the contemporary. This is something Douglas Rushkoff labels as ‘Present Shock’ and to which the media is the foremost contributor, particularly by deploying “liveness”. The urgency of the contemporary – the forever unprecedented ‘now’ – feeds into the economization of politics. While the latter nearly always makes a claim via the historical, the former poses a problem that is always upon the present. The problems of economies are not without history, but they present themselves as independent mathematical puzzles instead of a problem shaped by its historicity. Second, the welfare system. Even though it may have benefited a vast number of people across Europe, few can disagree with the idea that welfarism translates politics into economics. The entitlements that may have been claimed through the informal economy, when provided by the state over a period of time, dearly compromise the political logic of collective entitlement to them. This leads to a discursive tug-of-war over the rollback of welfare, but the broader logic by which it came into being stays outside the popular discourse. Welfarism, in spite of its many positives, continues to divest people of the political dimension by invisiblising it. Put together, we are catapulted into a climate where the political climate one inhabits is identified as an economic system.

The pamphlet under discussion is by no means an exception. In another intriguing instance when I posed the referendum question to a young British student of International Relations at King’s College, she began her reply by saying, “Well, I am not an economist, but…” Yet another spoke of Catalan’s independence having a ‘better chance of success’ than Scotland owing to the existing industrial footprint in the region. Almost every one of some hundred-odd people I posed this question to dug their claws into some economic data or the other to articulate their position. And the people out there are not the only ones indulging in such manifest translation. One of the most crucial moments in the ‘Yes’ campaign was the threat from down south that independent Scotland will not retain Sterling. More recently, the Scottish government says independence will herald a golden age of wealth creation – Every Scot will get an extra £1,000 a year – while George Osborne, says independence will lose every Scot £1,400 a year. Lately, every other day I receive a pamphlet for both ‘Independence’ and ‘Better Together’ campaigns. Bulk of their arguments have an economic basis to offer. The latter speaks of a bigger economy, keeping the pound, more jobs, cheaper bills, higher expenditure on public services, safer pensions, lower license fee and threatens us against higher interest rates and more expensive shopping. The former, on the other hand, also makes a case for stronger economy on the strength of Whisky, Fisheries, North Sea oil, tourism, more jobs, defending the NHS, fixing the banks and the taxation system, and better distribution of wealth. One of these put an astounding number to the benefits – ‘families across Scotland would be £5,000 a year better off after a Yes vote’. Various television debates too quibble over not so much the politics as the economics of the referendum, underlining the same. Regardless of the side they take, the economic value of Independence is presented as the pragmatic substance of the debate. We are made to believe that economics is realism and politics outside it would be mere sentimentality. Simon Jenkins aptly calls the modern economists, as a result of these claims, ‘the makeup artists of political prejudice’ (The Guardian, 29 May). Jenkins is right indeed, but not very attentive to the climate across Europe in which political arguments rarely appear as themselves; instead they look for proxies, and in economics they have found the most perfect one.

Economy is not merely the language in which politics exists in disguise; it also seems to establish the units of measurement for political transactions. Also, identities have become so fuzzy in the last few decades across Europe that any claims to national citizenship can hardly be made on behalf of citizen-subjects. In that sense, a certain post-national character may indeed have emerged vis-à-vis the individual. Yet, even as the individuals have been liberating themselves of the burden of one national identity, the nations continue to carry the burden of an evacuated category. Zygmunt Bauman states in The Postmodern Condition (1996:18):

“if the modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open. In the case of identity . . . the catchword of modernity was creation; the catchword of postmodernity is recycling.”

An individual may be Scottish or British depending on who her identity is projected upon. But being Scottish, as opposed to being English, continues to carry a residual historical meaning. The substance of national identity is increasingly being drawn from the corresponding national economic indicators. This is partly because, apart from exceptional events, economy alone stands up for the nation and represents it. But it is also because the economy renders to the nation a convenient anchor in the contemporary and draws it out of its historical-political provenance, fraught with dubious claims in a contractual post-national climate. This move sustains the translation of political discourse into economic arguments. It must be added, however, that the translation of politics into economics is also the narrative that distinguishes the old from the young. So stark is the contrast that the move thereby exposes its rather recent origins. The older generation, in Scotland at least, clearly speaks the language of identity politics and distinction with a charming degree of abandon.

II

On my first visit to Srinagar, capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), I spoke to students at Kashmir University, lawyers, activists and several others. Most of those discussions were about azaadi and what it meant to the people of the valley. Thousands before me had come from the mainland and posed these questions. Also, as one repeats a response, regardless of whether one has thought it through or not, the relationship between the response and the person is further reinforced. I must admit there was a distinct theatricality to most of those positions in the summer of 2008, but there was also a deep-seated sadness. I was struck by bayonets and soldiers all across the valley as would anyone visiting for the first time. On my second visit though, in 2009 summer, I observed from a distance. Staying at a Kashmiri friend’s place, I let myself sink within the melancholia of Kashmir valley. There were curfews, stone pelting sessions on Friday evenings and deaths too. But the tourists kept pouring in, and the Mughal Gardens remained as enchanting as ever. On those overcast evenings at Pari Mahal, I overlooked a valley of sadness. Around me were people from Srinagar and way beyond, photographing friends and families, having what could be called ‘a good time’. Kashmir was genial to them in spite of its anger. However, it was while returning that I had the most unforgettable experience.

I took my seat in a shared jeep with nine other passengers. Two among them were from Jammu; they kept cursing the driver for one thing or other, but even as they cursed him, it was always about ‘these people’. Somewhere on the way, a rashly driving CRPF truck overtook our jeep. Then, further ahead, our jeep overtook the truck, which clearly incensed the CRPF personnel. The truck came at us roaring from behind like a mad elephant and nearly pushed us off the road. While we survived, the truck brakes were pulled right ahead, bringing us to a screeching halt. An entire chapter of disturbing humiliation was about to begin. The truck driver came down, pulled out our driver and slapped him repeatedly, accusing him of trying to kill us. Our driver protested but to no avail; when one of us protested that it was no fault of his, it only earned him much more humiliation and physical pain. Regardless of his efforts to regain his defiance and honour, he was shattered from within. His hands shook and he mumbled to himself as we were all deposited in a state of shock. The truck drove away, having taught the Kashmiri man a lesson. The perpetrator, quite possibly a man from eastern UP or Bihar, had thoroughly abused the man from the valley and accused him and ‘you people’ of every fault possible. I witnessed this horror, shivering with anger within but entirely guilty of staying silent through a performance of physical abuse. I could claim innocence for being shocked, or I could say that I had figured that every intervention had only made it worse. But none of that would be true, for it would suggest that I was in control of my choices; I was not.

The hyper-performative subjugation of the Kashmiri people that armed personnel take immense pleasure in, is an everyday reality of the valley. But Kashmir is not exclusive in getting this treatment. Powerful personnel, whether on behalf of the state or on behalf of their timeless caste privileges, humiliate tribal citizens, Dalits and minorities across the country. The gendered vocabulary deployed to perform this humiliation only magnifies the humiliation that is often performed in relative privacy: gender-based atrocities. Yet, none of these can liquidate the case of Kashmir to demand self-respect. It is not for me to determine the extent and organization of that demand, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that Kashmir’s self-assertion was, and remains, entirely political. The economic or cultural distinctions only follow from its politics. Even if there was no case for an economically stable Kashmiri state, the desire for political sovereignty would overwhelm any opposition.

III

Kashmiris would be exasperated at being questioned ‘why azaadi?’ for their heads would buzz with a lifetime of humiliation and unforgivable acts of being dishonoured as a community. The Scots, it seems, are using the moment of referendum to indulge in an anachronistic reconfiguration of themselves as a community. Indeed, the very opportunity to vote for or against independence presents itself as a delayed one. Having appeared long after the wave of postcolonial nationalisms, and without a contemporary movement for Scottish independence, the question has found Scotland fairly unprepared. That is partly why much of Scotland has translated the question from ‘the nation it wants to be’ into a relatively more answerable one: ‘the nation it could have been’. The idea is to make a case for the society Scotland’s modern history denied it the opportunity of building. This lost time and the lost opportunities have become an anchor of what some in Scotland imagine as its future.

Most crucially, the case of Scottish independence is built primarily on economic distinctions and disappointments. We are told that an independent Scotland will take its own course and build a society rewarding entrepreneurial innovation as well as looking after welfarist necessities. Few can have a problem with that. But it needs reconciliation between cultural, political and economic strands of nationalism. If one speaks to the Scots across the board, ‘Yes’ campaign remains puzzlingly oriented around economics. The political is the missing link in the debate on the referendum; it has been overwhelmed by the utopia of economic sovereignty, to realize which political sovereignty may provide the means. Autonomy is imagined here on cultural terms and supplanted upon the economic. The belief that economic autonomy can only emerge via political autonomy is misleading because the economic and the political both have distinct histories within the European union. What seems to be appealing to many in Scotland is the narrative flourish that if Scotland did not have to go through Westminster, it could have been the nation it was destined to be. Such devices produce a convenient narrative gap through which a community could project the nation as a one-stop solution to the various ways in which the contemporary reality slips outside its grip.

Perhaps a more important question is what Scotland demands freedom from? The argument for ‘Yes’ campaign makes a case for London being against the interests of the Scottish economy. This, however, is not only true for Scotland but the very basis of what is called the north-south divide. More than a geographical divide, it is a matter of concern that within the UK, London has become an insular world in itself. Not only can no other city offer itself as a competitor, London also offers a vantage point that makes everything else seem backward and evacuated of substance. This convergence of interests within one city is symptomatic of the insecurities of capital in an investment climate turned particularly fragile by the polarization between global finance capital and nation-states. It is one thing to have access to resources, quite another to build an economic system that is fair to all. The neo-liberal economic model, particularly finance capital, has arrested the economies of the world so venomously, that there is a cause to worry about the Scottish utopia, to say the least. It is hardly difficult to guess that the emergence of another new small nation would alert this capital to cut a favourable deal with its state, but by the same process, it is quite likely to hold the state hostage. Much of Prabhat Patnaik’s recent work tries to establish the same. Gary Younge too, writing for the Guardian (2 June, 2014), makes pretty much the same point,

The limited ability of national governments to pursue any agenda that has not first been endorsed by international capital and its proxies is no longer simply the cross they have to bear; it is the cross to which we have all been nailed. The nation state is the primary democratic entity that remains. But given the scale of neoliberal globalisation it is clearly no longer up to that task.

In the process, Edinburgh, instead of negotiating with Westminster, would only be negotiating with a hypermobile finance capital. Would this negotiation leave Edinburgh enough space to dictate its desired welfarist measures? Through this referendum, is Scotland really coming to terms with itself? Or is it too desperate to split from London – which much of England sees common cause with – but too naïve about its economic utopia? While I do not offer much in terms of an economic argument for or against Independence, I am not sure Scotland is as wary as it should be of the problems in the distribution of wealth – a key demanic in the discussions over the referendum.

IV

To assess the South Asian perspective on the referendum question, we must identify the community to begin with. Who are the South Asians of Scotland, and the Great Britain? And what does Scotland mean to them, as a nation and otherwise, in relation to Britain? It may not be off the mark to claim that bulk of the community, regardless of which generation of migrants they may be, identify with Scotland as a cultural entity. I have repeatedly come across South Asians who have lived for decades in England as well as Scotland and distinguish the latter in terms of its people being warmer, possessing a much more pleasant and often gregarious personality, in comparison to the English. This cultural identification may acquire a political dimension in the midst of an antagonistic conversation, but it does not translate to a political distinction by itself. What makes the community particularly interesting though is the fact that their existence within Britain, when seen in its mundane everydayness, is not a political, but economic, existence. Which is to say that politically and culturally, they do not quite blend with the island. This should not surprise anyone because the same holds for Eastern European, African, or East Asian communities.

What, then, is the definitive substance of their economic existence in Britain? The thin bandwidth of social mobility that Britain offers to its residents – which is perhaps the bitterest grouse of its citizenry against the national political economy – does not affect the South Asians much. In a certain sense, their vantage point always remains glued to South Asia and its extremely hierarchical society. Which is not to exempt Britain from its own social hierarchies, but to bring to notice the fact that they fail to apply on the South Asians just the same. Vital to this contrast is the dignity of labour. Manual labour, the defining register of social capital in South Asia, does not apply upon them similarly within Britain. The community is overwhelmingly dominated by people who have worked in grocery stores, restaurants, government offices and elsewhere, to lead respectable lives, own property and raise families in a way they would have never been able to in South Asia, if they stuck to comparable job profiles. Scotland, for them, is contained within Britain, in this sense. It is useful to note John Harris’ article with regard to this (The Guardian, 20 May):

In the census of 2011 – the first to ask people to tick boxes for their national identity (or identities) – 60% of people in England described themselves as English only, but there were fascinating variations swirling around that number. Perhaps most interestingly, in England, 38% of people from an ethnic minority said they were exclusively British, as against only 14% of white people, and the ethnic groups in England most likely to say they were British were Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and people who trace their background to India. It’s not difficult to interpret those differences: for many people, Britain is an inclusive, outward-looking place, but a solitary England would represent something much more problematic.

The South Asians have relatives and friends across Britain and identify with the nation in terms of its quality of life, economic opportunities, respect of wage labour, and way more competent governance. Even if they associate with Scotland’s cultural distinctiveness, by way of language and social intercourse, it would rarely translate to identifying with a case for its independence. Also, in cases where they do identify with Scotland’s political antagonism with the English, the precarious economic uncertainties present an assertive contradiction. A successful restaurateur summed up the latter to me when he noted, “My heart says Yes, but the head says No.” A third generation migrant, he feels totally Scottish and would love to hold a Scottish passport, yet remains worried about the prospects of his business given how poorly thought out the economic aspects of Scottish independence remain.

V

This is not to argue that all cases of independence must be based on utter humiliation and absolute subjugation of a people. Communal identities are often built around language, race, geography or historic events. All of them could be deployed to mobilise a people as a community of sentiment. But if one were to listen to the people of Scotland, the sentiment has been subverted by the mercantile rationality that is rather afraid of passionate sentiments. That is why I am not sure that Scotland is aware of the questions that face it, much less that independence is the right answer. The independence question is often translated into a separation from the South-West (a euphemism for London) and the Tories. In the process, what is conveniently forgotten is Scotland’s own nationalist tendencies and rightward orientation. Many seem to disregard such fears, however, on the ground that ‘Scotland has an inherently leftist political orientation’. To confuse a politics of protest and rights against the incumbent state, with the political orientation of the to-be-incumbent state would be a grave misjudgment. Allow me to quote from an article by George Monbiot (19 May, 2014, The Guardian) to grapple with the contradictions:

The culture of deference that afflicts the British countryside is nowhere stronger than in the Highlands. Hardly anyone dares challenge the aristocrats, oligarchs, bankers and sheikhs who own so much of this nation, for fear of consequences real or imagined. The Scottish government makes grand statements about land reform, then kisses the baronial boot. The huge estates remain untaxed and scarcely regulated. You begin to grasp the problem when you try to discover who owns them. Fifty per cent of the private land in Scotland is in the hands of 432 people – but who are they? Many large estates are registered in the names of made-up companies in the Caribbean. When the Scottish minister Fergus Ewing was challenged on this issue, he claimed that obliging landowners to register their estates in countries that aren’t tax havens would risk “a negative effect on investment”.

Yet, Monbiot furiously hopes, ‘despite the evidence, that an independent Scottish government will take’ the opportunity to do something new. This furious hope is enough for him to vote ‘Yes’, while I see no reason to be hopeful here. In the last two decades, we have had enough evidence to note the weakening prowess of nation-states against global capital. Specificities of local constraints within national economies have consistently been overruled as resistance to globalization. The buzzword has been, and continues to be, proper investment climate. There is no reason that the new ministers would be any less concerned about Scotland’s investment climate than the present ones. Clearly, the case for Scotland’s leftist core could not be more hollow; quite the contrary.

I do not wish to undermine, however, the dream for another society – a more egalitarian and empathetic one. If Scotland dared to dream, I would root for independence. The tragedy is that the dream is too measured; it lacks poetics. Scotland doesn’t want the independence for which a price could be paid. Instead it wants independence because it might pay to have it. There is an explicit undermining of passions here, and a clear privileging of the mercantile utopia. This needs to be qualified, however. I am speaking here of the terms on which the discourse of independence is being mobilized and its mostly urban rationale. I do have reasons to believe that up in the highlands, independence may be getting translated to mean local governance, access to natural resources, and pride of place. Only when one gets away from the ‘educated’ confines towards landscapes that hold a visceral value to the people’s lives, does one find other utopias – more political and more personal vantage points wearing ‘Yes’ on their sleeve. I have no intention to undermine the genuine aspirations of a people, who have been systematically alienated from the world they have inhabited for decades, to not reclaim their nation so much as reclaim their entire universe by voting in an empathetic democracy. Instead of saying that their aspiration for independence is a sham, I am arguing that their voices are being submerged within the economization of politics. After all, the problem with translating politics into economics is that the positions taken thus may also be refuted on grounds far too numerical and alienating.

British society, on the other hand, presents an acute, even if expensive, hopelessness, and Scotland’s nationalist economic utopia may be symptomatic of the same. Britain is neither poorer, nor more unequal, than much of the world. Yet, its immense cultural investment in a highly centralized form of governance, systematic undermining of political mobilizations, and disastrous avenues of genuine social mobility, mean that this has actually turned out to be a referendum on Britain. So much so that what is intriguingly been called upon to identify itself is Englishness. If Scotland goes away, it would be England that would be left to itself, and left to explain itself, and defend Britishness too. Scotland, instead of saying ‘Yes’ to itself, may be gearing towards saying ‘No’ to Britain.

But in another sense, Scotland’s economic utopia remains a mere repetition of what Britain also swears by. By refusing to put forward a political vision for itself Scotland may just be drawing a boundary of convenience. Unfortunatley, if EU and the UK provide a framework for post-national possibilities, their benefits have been rather unevenly distributed. Nations, on behalf of those on the darker side of such equations, continue to bear the burden of an identity they can barely reconcile with. The economic utopia is not merely a freak convergence; it is the aggregated voice of those who hope to be redeemed within the national framework, instead.

But on what basis are we to believe that the national will redeem the post-national when the post-national, now falling apart [UKIP’s rise, among that of right-wing parties across Europe, has given a decisive thumbs up to Euroscepticism], was once thought to redeem the national? What reasons do we have to believe that Scotland, the new nation, will not merely mimic its own Britishness? Only by avoiding the political substance of societal transactions and translating them into economics, the ailment cannot be wished away, whether the national is dissolved into the ocean of post-national, or the other way around. That what keeps getting re-dressed as an economic ailment is the remainder of Europe’s political blind spot. The referendum may go either way, and yet the Scottish independence may have little to do with it.

Postscript: The piece was written about two months ago. In the last two weeks, however, something remarkable has begun to happen. As the referendum vote nears, the ‘Yes’ vote has gained vital ground. Spurred by the recent version of the televised debate, new energies have been infused into the campaign. Even though much of the debate took place on an economic basis, the recent turn has come on account of the ‘Yes’ campaign addressing this limitation. In the second live debate, Salmond was declared the winner by 71% of Scots. It was the most curious victory because even as Darling, on account of ‘No’ campaign tried to pin Salmond down on his ignorance and avoidance of economic ‘facts’, Salmond deployed the rhetoric of ‘nobody can tell us…’. Repeatedly citing the suffering of Scotland – in terms of numerical estimates of poverty and disability etc. – he clinched the debate by making a wider appeal to ‘not defend Westminster’. As a result, Scottish nationalism has gained identitarian ground and the referendum has come to provide the otherwise unavailable platform to speak back. This has much more to do with the inability across UK to make oneself heard as a political interest group – a sentiment shared far beyond Scotland. The vote, therefore, may provide the means to consolidate an open-ended voice of protest. While economisation of the referendum discussions helped the ‘No’ campaigners significantly to expose their counterparts, this recent turn has caught them unaware and turned things around precisely because they have not been able to respond to it. This has not, however, altered the economic basis of Scotland’s independence project internally, but has indeed asserted the political boundary of command. As Westminster has lost its legitimacy to ‘tell us’, we must become a state to command ourselves, Salmond has appealingly implied.”

Akshaya Kumar is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Glasgow. He is thankful to Atul Mishra for his comments on an earlier draft.