In the recent Netflix web-series Leila (2019) based on Prayag Akbar’s eponymous novel, the narrative focuses of the lead character Shalini’s quest for her daughter Leila, taken away by the state for her mixed parentage in a near future world of Hindutva dystopia. The quest takes her to find her daughter being raised by her former maid whose husband now holds a powerful position in the new Hindutva regime. In Ghoul(2018) another Netflix series based on Hindutva dystopia, a daughter sends her father to the militarized reformatory to clean his psyche from anti-national thoughts. It seems that the reversal of hierarchy of class or age and wisdom becomes the new order. Welcome to the world of post-liberal! But, why one should use the word post-liberal instead of the trendier neo-liberal while describing the ‘new world order’ structured by consumerist culture and post-Fordist economy in the 21st century? While ‘neo-liberal’ asserts a return of the promise of liberalism in new guise with free market economy and corporatization of institutions enabling easier transfer of goods and people across the nation-states, post-liberal would suggest a confusion of what this ‘liberty’ really means. This article focuses on the dubious use of ‘liberty’ as a blanket term for people of a deeply divided and discriminated society such as India. It also focuses on a supposedly false anti-colonial posture against the notion of ‘liberty’ and ‘rights’, the way it has been structured in world politics since European enlightenment of 18th century. One can refer here how Amit Shah, the Home Minister of BJP led Indian government, claimed in the 26th Foundation day of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) that human rights in India has to be thought differently from what it is in the west and it is already integrated in the traditional forms of family and society of this country (Huffpost 2019). This essay however, shows how a postcolonial hybrid of the notion of liberty is created in the 21st century post-truth society in which older hegemonies start crumbling. New media activism, production and circulation of variety of information, unsettles the idea and existence of transcendental knowledge and values. The desire for meaning and anchorage, however, returns in the form of ghosts of religious and ethnic identities. They return amidst economic and cultural sense of precarity in the present world where jobs, livelihood as well as cultural values are volatile and unstable. The article also connects the market driven consumerist notion of liberty as easier access to goods and services with the breakdown of intellectual and cultural hegemony in the Indian context. This is further linked with the majoritarian desire for fundamental values, often abused and maligned by the Hindutva right-wing forces in present India.

Partha Chatterjee in the “Politics of the Governed” discusses how the radical call of 1970s India to make it the decade of freedom, assumes a completely different meaning by the turn of the century when possessing an American Express Credit card would give one a sense of freedom anywhere in the world(Chatterjee 2004 83). The global internet connectivity, virtual transaction of money and goods or the travelling of ideas in one mouse click has increased the capability of not only the rich but also those below poverty line. We have moved away from a time when Chatterjee located his piece, and reached a stage where the supposed liberty not only creates an illusion of empowerment for the rich while alienating the poor, but the cyberspace creates a situation where the ‘wretched of the earth’ are also included inside the illusion of liberty. The rise of a new public space, that transcends older hierarchies and is apparently more inclusive and plastic in nature, is on the rise. In India this new ‘empowerment’ follows a specific trajectory which, however, is not completely disconnected from the rest of the world. The subcontinent has always been haunted by its colonial history and the constitutive divide between the elite and the everyman. So far the spirit of enlightenment ironically was followed by the upper caste, English educated middle-classes who bore the bastion of democratic principles. The demand for those obfuscated by class, caste, gender, ethnic or colonial hierarchies were also raised so far by this same class of privileged people having more cultural capital. All upward cultural mobility and diverse political opinions were also subsumed to the same intellectual hegemony. The demand for freedom from this hegemony set in by colonialism since 19th century proceeded in two directions. One is through political and cultural nationalism. It claimed equality as well as relative autonomy and individuality in respect to the West. The other is indigenous and/or religious nationalism that often prefers to break free from the West and asserts cultural difference as well as superiority. These two abstract trajectories are more often than not overlapping and interlocking.

The political and cultural dominance of the former has been established so far, but from the interior of the Western intellectual hegemony, but considering the Indian context, it is limited. But the latter has not disappeared and has been operative at least ideologically, often within the regime of the former. This continues to produce postcolonial anxieties of Western appropriation and loss of the mythical “Indianness” on one hand, and the alienation of the subaltern voices outside the regime of knowledge on the other. It has to be noted that these two different set of anxieties have been effectively used by the present BJP led Hindutva discourse. They harp on the return of everything ‘authentically’ Indian, expiating the guilt of westernization. They also targets people inappropriately placed within the rubric of a supposedly imported modernity and its liberal democratic values ironically introduced in India through colonial rule. While a section of these people have moved up economically, if not culturally, a large section also belongs to abject poverty and precarious condition. The impermanence of jobs, exploitation of corporate capitalism in the form of underpayment or overwork has left them with little faith in democracy. Lack of proper revolutionary ideas, progressive backfooting of communist parties and dearth of examples of resistance against organized exploitation of corporate capitalism in the present world have made this group politically weak and imbecile, even though their sense of precarity remains. More than seventy years of independence has failed these masses to provide with minimum faith in democratic principles of liberty or equality.

In the present context, following Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s discussion on the relationship between discourse of rights and discourse of development (Spivak 2004 523-581) one may recall the postcolonial flag bearers of Indian democracy as subjects of development and the alienated masses as subjects of rights. That is how the colonial difference is manoeuvred and maintained in the postcolonial world. This colonial and postcolonial difference is put under erasure by the new technologies of representation and knowledge. They don’t disappear altogether but there has been a shift in their hegemonic arrangement. Firstly, the relationship of the Postcolonial nation-makers and alienated masses has become graded and relative. There is no absolute elite, completely empowered to speak and there is no absolute subaltern in this graded arrangement. Secondly, in their cyber afterlives, the relative autonomy of the elite and the everyman makes all hierarchies precarious and unstable, often putting the idea of knowledge in what Bernard Stiegler calls – ‘states of shock’ (Stiegler2015). This happens in India in continuity with the rise of identity politics since 1990s, reclaiming the ‘knowledges’ based on race, class, caste, gender, religion and ethnic identities subjugated so far by a dominant humanist system of apparently liberal values. Just the way some people of older generation have poor handling of updated technologies (in literal sense), the idea of what is knowledge has undergone such sea changes that any form of traffic becomes difficult between generations. The use of the word ‘generation’ here is not in the simple sense of physical ageing but also in terms of a temporal lapse between enlightenment compliance to faith in a universal reason and a situation where there is a contested set of cultural values. The battleground of social media between urban intellectual elites trained in social sciences and the jobless, moderately or poorly educated professionals and students with an absolute lack in understanding social sciences can be an evidence to that. The former often mocks the latter with words such as ‘chaddi’, ‘bhakt’ etc. while the latter completely disregards the opinion and argument of the former. This can be a clear example of a failure of what Stiegler would call ‘transindividuation’ that is a passage of hegemonic ideas from one generation to another where possibilities of arguments and reframing remains, paving the path of production of new hegemonies. The left liberals are also forced to deal with such failure of hegemonic commitment to a grand narrative of liberation. In the academic sphere, transcendental humanist ideas of human emancipation have been challenged by eruption of the counter-narratives of gender, caste, ethnicity or religion. These, even in Marxist grand narratives of struggle have been often left out or rendered secondary. In the new millennium teletechnologies have spread these counter-narratives all over the real and cyber space creating confusion and chaos among the liberals. On the other hand, the image building of an idealist left individual struggling for justice has also been interrupted by real as well as concocted information exposing the limits of idealism. An example is the #metoo movement where several women came out in the open exposing their apparently liberal male colleagues and friends as sexual predators. This happened across the world and also in India. One has to remember that most of these accusations in India have been directed against left liberal individuals, possibly giving a message that they fail their honesty and idealism in spite of their commitment to liberal ideas. In this ‘state of shock’ the liberal left remains thoroughly unprepared. They are also incapable of inducing any limit thinking for being heavily trained to think in terms of older models of idealism and bigger narratives of struggle. Their failure naturally paves the way for far right groups like BJP or RSS to hijack the possibility of creating new discourses of emancipation.

The rhetoric of identity politics in its abused form where identity is simply reduced to insulated cultural specificities has been usurped by political Hindutva in this country. The colonial anxiety of uniting manifold practices of Hinduism that have been existing in the subcontinent across time and space to challenge the Semitic religions like Christianity or Islam continues. This gets further emboldened in the millennium by the global discourse of Islam as an archenemy of all civilizations and the stereotyping of Muslims as essentially illiberal. While the Hindutva brigade absorbs and propagates the myth of Islam as essentially a threat to liberal humanism, they also use Islam as an example and prop to demand the right to have an identity different and separate from western notions of liberalism. The argument exists like – if they can why not us? Like any moment of technological advancement in representation, the moment of teletechnology –electronic and social media plays a vital role in propagating rumours and myths about identities. It helps in rapid spread of stereotypes and convinces people in what they can view, almost in an unmediated way, in their mobile phones. It also works towards timeless consolidation of opinions, particularly when in a country like India both real and concocted events of violence by Muslims are repeatedly telecasted in social media like Facebook or WhatsApp. It ignites the latent Islamophobia of a large number of Hindus who carry the violent memory of partition riots. While riots happened on both sides of the border by mobilized Hindu or Muslim masses excited and abused by political godfathers for their vested interest, the Hindu migrants in India from East Pakistan have been carrying the cultural memory of riots by Islamic groups. Such memories unfortunately have not been able to be erased by the communist regime in West Bengal, who however upheld a secular mask, pushing communal anxieties under the carpet. Global and national upsurge of Islamophobia recreates that latent cultural memory. It also helps in the effective forgetting of other stories such as help and support received from Muslim neighbours in the difficult hours of riot. This even confuses people carrying apparently liberal values about the need for an identitarian consolidation of Hindus to survive a supposed threat of Islamic terror, while remaining oblivious of historicity of identities and their evolution. This couples with the failed hegemony of the left liberals, who carefully for a long period of time did not deal with the question of identity beyond their safe haven of an umbrella notion of universal rights and liberty.

In India historically the western educated liberals have been the champions of democracy, whose hegemony at present has been challenged from within its rubric by marginalized groups such as the Dalits or the feminists. This, as it has been argued already, makes the earlier hegemonies precarious. Added to this successively a miniscule group of highly educated people remains the custodians of liberal ideas, which they could access historically owing to caste and cultural privileges. The cultural elitism of these liberals not only alienated the uninitiated masses but produced fall-outs within its own system. Following social media would reveal such animosities and strife, often exposing the power-mongering of so-called liberals in the open. The myth of the left liberals as consorted idealists has been waning out. In India such crisis of value-system, however, facilitates the rise and establishment of right wing hegemony instead of the beginning of a new liberal movement. As the left liberals are shrinking in numbers, strength and organization, the moderately educated and internet-empowered lower middle-classes are forming the base of Hindutva politics. Elimination of corruption and strengthening of India as a nation-state were the clarion call of current ruling party in India, now voted for the second time. This promises a reduction of cultural marginalization of the ‘new youth’ – the children of a weak but ever expanding public education system. They feel enormously rooted in terms of identity and ‘culture’ which has been denied so far by the long drawn colonial hegemony. Ironically, the post-liberal regime of power only apparently liberates them in a world of precarity, with jobs and livelihoods becoming more and more uncertain. As it has been already pronounced, the left parties and organizations fail to fathom this situation and do not have positive programs for reducing precarity and injustice meted out to people as a result of capitalist onslaught. Education is becoming more and more privatized and expensive, jobs are becoming impermanent and poorly paid, and government healthcare systems remain inadequate, increasingly pushing people to fall prey to exorbitant medical expenses. These are issues not being taken up seriously enough by the organized left since 1990s, still enmeshed into older models of trade unionism and land reform policies. Along with privatization a rapid instrumentalization of education has taken place, where knowledge of human sciences is rendered facile and unnecessary. Vocational courses turn into labour making apparatus creating workers who are precarious as well as self-seeking. This destroys the possibility of any resistance. A glimpse into social media would show a large number of these post-90s professionals turn into supporters of Hindutva. They naturalize their process of corporate exploitation and identify academics and intellectuals as privileged people uttering big things and not contributing anything at the end of the day. This group of people contains the new upwardly mobile economically empowered consumerist classes apart from the new aspiring middle-class who thinks accessing goods and services as the only way to move up in life. There is a mass disconnect between the humanist scholars and students of this country and the burgeoning new professional middle-class. This second group of people have grown up without any allegiance or respect to grand narratives of universal human freedom. It is both due to their experience of living in a world of capitalist exploitation and precarity, coupled with their lack of proper liberal humanist training. This new middle-class on one hand remains within a post-liberal situation of limited and conditional autonomy and a perpetual state of precarity; on the other hand, they feel a sense of empowerment where they can assert themselves without bearing the burden of liberal humanist thinking, failed to them because of poor education and the feudal structure of the society.

The cyberspace could be thought of as an archetype of such precarity which simultaneously gives one a feeling of precariousness and empowerment, uncertainty and identity. Internet algorithms facilitate such identitarian solidarity that is often sans historicity and defined cultural values. A significant shift has taken place from the way knowledge was disseminated and authenticated in print capitalism. Digital capitalism establishes a new and different regime of truth which may not require enough knowledge or historical rootedness to belong to a particular group or idea. This apparently empowers people freeing them from the burden of knowledge that was often inaccessible or inscrutable to them. Thus, this also becomes a ploy for the masses to overcome the alienation from the cultural hegemony of dominant forms of knowledge or a result of the weakening of hermeneutic ability to read and interpret texts and situations. The politics of knowledge in its more plebeian and populist form has denounced all credibility of truth value, relating all process of knowing as connected irredeemably with power producing what Rita Felski calls a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ borrowing from a phrase used by Paul Ricouer (Felski2015). As previously mentioned, the counter-narratives of resistance has made the foundation of universal humanist knowledge shaky. The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is a crisis which makes it difficult for the several left oriented groups to consolidate. The void created by the absence of any grand narrative is often occupied by right wing narratives of religion or nationhood. This makes it possible for jingoism and xenophobia to be on the rise across the world. An erasure of historical memory and seamless flow of information across the cyber traffic makes it also easy to forget the lessons learnt from catastrophes resulting out of violent nationalism and xenophobia. In this post-truth world of inanity and lack of concrete field of knowledge, people seek a powerful umbrella to unite and find their identity. On the other side a complete failure of organized left liberals to understand and recognize this paradigm shift in the system of knowledge and world-making makes them reduce the digitally empowered and organized right wing to simpletons – the “chaddi wearing bhakts” comparable to a cow - the animal hailed and worshipped by Hindus. However, the uncritical rejection of the right only helps them to be more regimented and strong against the liberals. The relationship of economic and cultural precarity of the masses with the rise of Hindutva has to be traced to understand people’s inclination towards right. Perhaps there is a relationship between desire for one’s rights and the desire for the right wing, a strong religious and political foundation, living in a world beyond all sublimation of ethics and truth, beyond all securities. This may allow us to start understanding the pun on ‘right’ in the title of this essay. This precarity is not only characterized by deep insecurity of professions and livelihoods but also by anxieties of belonging amidst a consumerist world of seamless circulation of goods and services. While it empowers the ‘new youth’ without bearing the burden of past, it also keeps them on their toes to maintain their consumerist desire. This desire makes them vulnerable to their own aspirations. It also creates the crisis of a void and feeling of uprootedness, which makes them easy bait for straight forward identity politics of the right wing. Thus, the continuous newsfeed in cyber space becomes the straw for millions of precariats in the modern world to cling on. The violent actions and utterances which foreclose dialogues can provide anchorage to people floating in the super market of cyber space. The discourse of Hindutva provides them with that apparent security to get rid of the bogeyman of liberalism that confuses and opens up unknown territories. It also institutes a democratization of vulnerability. As the new youth looks back to an imagined religious past to overcome this vulnerability, the left liberals suffer from the anxiety attack of losing the secured haven, where democratic ideals were apparently in place. So far, there is a general lack of acknowledgement to the failure of democracy to reach out its ideals to a larger number of people in India. Rather there is a left liberal intolerance and smugness towards the newly empowered consumerist classes who are tech-savvy and often belong to a younger generation. This is only giving a mileage to the right and taking away the legitimacy of the left to talk about real rights and socio-ethical justice.

One can, thus, see how the post-liberal world of precarity and volatile ideas, non-fixated to an anchorage shares a symbiotic relationship with the rise of Hindutva. The more powerful the far right government in India becomes, it turns out to be more and more capable of producing and extending this precarity. Finally, we may refer the on-going debates on a possible implementation of National Register of Citizenship (NRC)across India where ‘real’ citizens shall be included and secured from ‘outsiders’ – the illegal immigrants feeding on national resources illegitimately. The Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians in a new Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA) have been assured to be given citizenship if they have migrated from neighbouring countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh for reasons of religious persecution. The law simultaneously raises a sense of precarity of being thrown out of citizenship and a possibility of giving it back. One has to remember here that the lower caste non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh have experienced greatest amount of atrocities even in a Marxist ruling state as West Bengal. The incident of Marichjhapi massacre, an eviction drive of lower caste refugees from the island of Marichjhapi by the ruling left government which caused loss of several lives is one example of such atrocities. In this context, there is also the Matua sect of Dalit migrants in West Bengal who are rejoicing the CAA law as empowering, as it supposedly guarantees some kind of citizenship to displaced Hindus in future. One has to consider here the failure of liberal left to recognize and consolidate the caste question within its rhetoric even in a left ruling state. The void has now been effectively exploited by the far right Hindutva. The upsurge of caste politics in political as well as academic discourse producing counter-narratives to the parliamentary left facilitates the visibilization of this erasure and permanent condition of precarity. The social media also plays a role in visibilizing these marginalized groups.

The politics of Hindutva led Indian government produces insecurities such as the potential lack of citizenship under the threat of a National Register of Citizenship (NRC), where one’s name may not appear. On the other hand it promises securing the “authentic citizens” of this country by throwing out the illegal as well as undesirable Muslim migrants. Their politics is also to raise hatred and animosity among groups by igniting the historical memories of mutual hatred. In the state of West Bengal, the right excites the historical and transgenerational memories of partition riots. Through an act like CAA, it indirectly attempts to convince the migrant Hindus (and other non-Muslim groups) of citizenship (which ironically they already have by virtue of their voting rights), by declaring them asylum seekers. At the same time through the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, the right wing groups assures the so-called proper citizens that the ‘outsiders’ will be thrown out from the ‘healthy’ body of the nation state. It implies that the migrant Muslims will not normally get citizenship unless they prove themselves to be Indian born through necessary papers or living in India for a long period of time. If one of the reasons for dalit migrant Matuas support for BJP is their precarity of homelessness and lack of proper rehabilitation during the communist rule in West Bengal, the other reason is effective ignition of Islamophobia owing to their generational memory of the trauma of partition violence. This also aggravates the other economic and social anxieties under which people live in this post-liberal form of capitalism. One has to remember that securing resources is one of the ploys on the basis of which NRC is presently sold in India.

Apart from the question of citizenship, the Hindutva group in power will continue to produce precarity in various other forms like shrinking of public sector jobs, reducing bank interest or exorbitant prices of goods and services. Living in a culture of precarity will make the new middle-class forget all ideas of fundamental rights and liberties. They will rather pray for a powerful government to be in place, a strong image of Nation and religion which might defer, or at least cover up their anxieties of belonging. The anxiety ridden nation always turns violent and intolerant producing imagined enemies and outsiders to be blamed. The left liberals in this situation have with no other option than to engage into limit thinking instead of clinging solely to some imagined sense of self-righteousness and transcendental liberal values. Along with that, the cross-currents of criticisms to liberal left coming up from various experiences of marginality needs to be accommodated into the discourse of political activism against far right. The historical precarity of those who became victims of colonial and ‘othered’ alienation has to be recognized, and most importantly the new form of knowledge and it’s truth regime requires to be studied in its many nuances to understand the circuit of precarity and desire for identity.

References:
“Amit Shah: Concept Of Human Rights In India Very Different From That Applicable Globally” in Huffpost, 14th October, 2019. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/amit-shah-on-concept-of-human-rights-in-india_in_5da3ebd7e4b02c9da04ccbe1
Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed.New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Graham, Patrick. (Dir.) Ghoul (Webseries). India: Netflix, 2019.
Mehta, Deepa et al. (Dir.)Leila (Webseries). India: Netflix, 2019.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Righting Wrongs” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004. 523-581.
Stiegler, Bernard. States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty First Century. Cambridge: Polity, 2015.