William Butler Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’, occasionally evokes resonance as a description of public life in India. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ the ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” In some ways, the most striking line in the poem is: the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The effect of this phrase is even more chilling than the apposite description of the last lines. What has been destroyed is not innocence but its ceremony, a willed ritual that allowed us to feign innocence. As if to say that all that held society together was mere ceremony in the first place. But destruction of ceremonies produces its own kind of vertigo.Why is the ‘exchange’ between Sonia and Modi disturbing? Did it reveal anything we did not know? Or did it merely wash away ceremonies of innocence? Is anyone surprised that Modi would rhetorically get his audience to condone violence? Is anyone surprised that the real issue when Congress campaigns on the rule of law card, its credibility appears so low? The findings of the Srikrishna Commission, for instance, remain just that: findings. Is anyone surprised that Modi’s affidavit to the Election Commission is an exercise in sarcasm par excellence? It is an artfully constructed argument in which the accused becomes the judge while the constitutional authority doing the judging becomes the accused. And the notice to Sonia now puts the Congress in the same position.Modi draws upon a long tradition of debasing language. There was a time when we used to worry about ‘encounters’. These were understood to be pretexts for the state to kill possible suspects. Encounters needed justification. Now ‘fake encounters’ exempt ‘encounters’ from justification. What is the difference? But in making this distinction Modi reveals the secret of the state. He makes us complicit as if saying “all of us really do support encounters after all”. This is the tradition that the Congress has drawn upon, in Punjab, in Kashmir and elsewhere. But if the state wants to assuage its conscience, hold on to a ceremony of innocence, it can insist that there is a distinction between a fake and real encounter. But Modi’s brilliance is to expose our complicity. Will the Congress say with a straight face that encounter killings are illegitimate? Modi may have incriminated himself, but he has the virtue of destroying our ceremonies of innocence. It was not what he said that was chilling; it was the audience responding, “Kill, kill.”And so Modi’s unmasking continues. If you want peace, as we all claim to do, he seems to be saying, should you not find any provocative speech objectionable, perhaps even a truth told with bad intent? Another ceremony of innocence we wrap ourselves in is this: that in practical politics there are no trade-offs between peace and a belligerent articulation of the truth. One of the ironies of this exchange is that people otherwise deeply antagonistic to Modi also wish that Tehelka had not done its expose when it did, that Sonia Gandhi had not raised the political temperature in the manner she did. Part of this for prudential reasons: there is genuine fear that a politics of polarisation would play straight into Modi’s hands. But this fear reveals our nervousness about ourselves: that we are the sort of society where certain truths can be approached only indirectly, or discreetly; otherwise they have the opposite political effect. It is also a sign of deep moral confusion in the Congress camp that whoever’s words ‘maut ke saudagar’ were, Sonia doesn’t clarify their meaning herself; instead different mouthpieces go around giving different interpretations of what they might have referred to. The sense of the words remains, but the reference changes according to context.Then there is the distinction between a politics of Hindutva and a politics of development. There are different confusions here. First, this distinction has never made any political sense. It is as if to say that someone who can build good roads cannot engage in dangerously communal politics. Admittedly, Modi was emphasising different issues. But it is naive to assume that Hindutva had vanished. If Hindutva is being emphasised less, it is not because it is no longer an issue; long battles over cultural pride and coming to terms with history do not disappear overnight. It is rather for the opposite reason: consciousness in Gujarat seems to have shifted to the right so much that there is no longer any issue. Hindutva as a political strategy, however, needs a framing context. This time even Modi’s favourite, Mian Musharraf, was in no position to oblige him with a context. But when the Congress obliged, he took the chances. Second, in practical terms this is the ugly truth about Indian political parties: 99 per cent of the members of any political party could have easily been members of another political party. Can the Congress really have a leg to stand on the communalism issue in Gujarat? Just examine its contribution to communalisation of the state pre-Modi; just look at its welcoming with alacrity former associates of the ‘maut ke saudagar’. Many Gujarati Congressman envy Modi’s single-mindedness more than they demur from his beliefs. But the investment we have in the distinction between development and communalism is another one of our ceremonies of innocence; and Modi has clearly drowned that.Finally, we cannot decide what elections, our grandest ceremony of innocence, are about. Are they about the issues? Are they about local alliances? Do they turn on a Patel here or a Patel there. What do mandates mean? And how manipulable are voters? Are they ready to abridge their own experience and reflection based on a few speeches? We know that elections are an important means of feeling empowered. What they are beyond that is anyone’s guess. I suspect elections are not about issues as much as they are about credibility; a politician’s ability to push through the issues depends upon the credibility they have rather than the other way round. So if Narendra Modi is voted out, it will not be so much because we have gone from communalism to secularism, from fake encounters to encounters. It will simply be because enough voters want to say, “We don’t trust you any more.” But our ceremony of innocence is that we hold onto the illusion of choice, but it is its absence that marks most elections.The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research pratapbmehta@gmail.com
