We are in an identity trap: Pratap Bhanu Mehta

He said, “There are generations of Indians who are looking at this time as full of hope rather than despair. But many of us have a deep and profound sense that a poison is creeping in our souls. Not only is authoritarianism understood as our formal conduct of public institutions increasingly, but there is a kind of communal virus spreading that I think is a little bit unprecedented in Indian history.”

Mehta referred to what he called as statistical illusion here that “the government and most part of the society is thriving upon” wherein compared to historical events of communal violence there is no massive explosion of violence.

He continued, “But there is almost a visceral and existential dread of otherness that seems to be creeping in along with a casualisation or normalisation of it. And it is being legitimised at the highest levels of governance. We have never ever had a hegemonic political leadership that openly advocates institutionalising as a norm.”

Explaining another way of looking at the topic, Mehta said that India is doing exactly what the rest of the world did in the 19th or 20th century. “If we try to reproduce a classical European nation state its consequences can only be catastrophic and one way of looking at what BJP is doing, is exactly what the rest of the world has done in history. Almost every nation state that has been created as a dominant political form had a stamp of majoritarianism on it.

Indian’s founding generation was acutely aware of that India wanted to avoid the catastrophes of Europe,” said Mehta as he referred to memoirs of holocaust survivors wherein almost all of them have mentioned that they looked at mirror after coming out of the captivity to see the creases on their faces which were individual to them.

“We are in an identity trap. Form of collectiveness that condemns us to abstract identification with a script (that comes with classification). On one hand we yearn for self-definition and completely want to forgo it in collective form of identification which is fundamentally vicarious,” he said, adding that if the politics of secularism is to have future in India, “we need to act with courage, organise, vote for right political parties, try and convince fellow citizens even close family members that being complicit with evil is not an option,” he said.