Obviously,
his arrest is politically motivated: Trivedi is known to have been associated with India Against Corruption – the NGO headed by erstwhile Team Anna member
Arvind Kejriwal. And the government clearly has a bone to pick with IAC.
This is
not the first time the Indian political class has displayed an inexplicable and
illogical paranoia over a cartoonist’s works. Back in April, WB chief minister,
Mamata Banerjee got Jadhavpur University professor, Ambikesh Mahapatra, arrested and beaten
up by her party workers for posting “objectionable” material regarding her on a
social networking site; he was slapped with absurd charges, which included
“outraging the modesty of a woman”. Of course, the UPA and other political
parties reacted vehemently against it – as expected. Now that the current
administration has found itself in a similar position, it is actually defending its action, albeit riddled with contradictions.
Before I go any
further and risk offering a merely symptomatic analysis of the situation, I’d
like to make my stance on this issue clear. I do not agree with Trivedi’s “freedom
of expression” (i.e. of him drawing what he did), and I do not do so in a Voltaire-esque
fashion of “defending his rights while I may disagree with what he has to say”. Neither do I think his cartoons "offend" anything; for it's ridiculous to even assume that. At the same time, I think the whole patriotism/nationalism discourse is balderdash. If anything, the more-than-generous usage of words like "nationalism", "true patriot" and the likes, just goes on to show the arbitrariness of these constructs.
I may
stir a hornet’s nest myself by saying so, but I see a disjuncture in Trivedi’s harsh
polemic against the government (something I understand), and in his representation
of it. By making these icons the focus of his critique he has, invariably,
reduced the meanings of the Asoka Pillar and the Parliament to a single
signifier: the present UPA government.
Personally, I found
his cartoon rather distasteful. For one, while I understand his attempt to
proffer a critique of the current and abysmal state of Indian politics and
affairs, I disagree with his target: the Parliament and the Asoka Pillar. These
icons, I believe, are institutional symbols and thus, represent something far
more than the current political class – who, I believe, are (and one may disagree) not
really in a position to invest
meanings in these icons; and secondly, because, these icons represent something
more important, and if I can use the word, sacred, than present governance and
coalition politics, and are as much victims of the current administration’s
apathy and corruption (as an example, look at the two Rajya Sabha MPs who got into a fist-fight some days back), as perhaps the common man is – symbolically at least.
These
icons are situated in a historical context and have significantly more meaning
that what Trivedi assumed them to have. The Asoka Pillar, for example, has its
own rich history, an economy of meanings; while the inscription of ‘Satyameva Jayate’ may not mean much to
the government today – I doubt very much if it means much to the people, either
– I don’t think the government has ever made a conscious effort to appropriate
its meaning or significance; the Parliament, on the other hand, is far more contentious a symbol, making it that much more difficult to analyse. It has been the target of recent anti-corruption movements, yet to many, it represents a legitimate mechanism - as pointless as it may sound.
However, my
purpose is to not interpret an iconoclash here; within this discursive
framework of (anti) nationalism-sedition, iconoclash, and free speech, I
believe there is a more malignant, a more insidious problematic embedded –
which has, unfortunately, become central to the culture of politics in India.
I
absolutely, and in the strongest words, condemn the government’s violent
reaction to this issue; it’s archaic, it’s crass, and politically motivated; most
importantly, it is representative of a deeper problem in Indian politics:
paranoia. Elsewhere, I have critically commented on what I call the
anti-ideology of contemporary Indian politics, of its hypersensitivity indealing with criticisms. One reason, I think, is because politicians have come
to represent the entire domain/culture
of politics in a way. Following Bishnupriya Ghosh’s work on bio-icons,
politicians in contemporary India have become a fragile species; at once, an embodiment
of their party ideologies – be it the Thackeray cousins, or the Gandhis, their
very image becomes a way for their supporters to rally around, and is also on
the crosshairs of dissenting voices; both, within and outside the political
realm. Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origins, Mamata Banerjee’s austerity or, as we saw recently, Digvijaya Singh’s claim that the anti-migrant Thackeray’s are originally from Bihar, these
genealogies, and thus narratives about these bodies as bio-icons, serve as a
terrain to contest politics. Very rarely does it turn out that issues of policy
and governance are sites for contestation.
That’s
precisely why they (politicians) take offense to caricatures regarding
political figures. For a healthy democratic system to function (I shall reserve
my critiques of democracy for a later time), it is imperative that the rights of
freedom of expression, right to participate in a democratic process – and I
mean so even non-electorally – are maintained. Sedition is hardly the word to
be used against cartoonists and intellectuals, and it reflects the decadence in
a legal system, and in attitudes, which refuse to keep up with times.
With Aseem
Trivedi’s arrest, the message that the administration (even though the
government has now dropped the sedition charges) is sending out to its people,
and indeed the world, is fraught with very serious problems; it is indicative
of a political system’s sheer ineptitude in dealing with pertinent issues
maturely in via political, legal processes. I tend to agree with Justice Katju when he points out, rather critically and in his usual verbose style, the systemic
failure on the part of the governance mechanism, the state, the legal system,
the police, as a whole. And that’s
precisely why I think his criticism is highly insightful: it is a critique of
the system and not an institutional symbol. Individual
institutional symbols like the Parliament or the Asoka Pillar – I restrict my
view of it as an entity invested with symbolic/historic meaning, rather than
its political inhabitants (an equally
true, but one-dimensional perspective) – are located in a system of processes, of a pattern of governance, which has become
decadent, apathetic, anti-ideological and corrupt.
Increasingly,
this process of governance is being influenced by paranoia, a tendency of
knee-jerk reactions, of recourse to archaic notions of morality and
anti-nationalism, blurring the lines between India’s democratic present and
it’s colonial past. With each such incident, the government is making a fool of itself. Maybe, in the words of the Opposition, the government has lost its moral authority to rule. But in a warped democratic system like ours, you need numbers to rule; "morality" is for cultural policing, to invoke rhetoric, an attempt of the political class to fool the people, and in the process, itself.
I have
traversed across many ideas here, and perhaps, at the cost of argumentative
coherence, but I hope you’ve managed to grasp the general themes. We live in
confused times, marked by a breakdown of coherent governance. Usually, I tend to be sceptical of the risk of slipping into totalitarianism; our current political class is far too concerned with images - a process which creates regimes of loyalty. Then again, looking at the way life is regimented, with a penetrative authoritarian gaze, and more seriously, it's arbitrariness, it's dilly-dallying and an apparently visible lack of direction (towards achieving totalitarianism; perhaps, I am wrong, looking at the way governments censor the internet, arrest cartoonists), it is precisely this scepticism,
and this governance of paranoia, which worries me.
