Rakshaks and lynching

They say they’re protecting cows. I tell them, ‘don’t give me that bull’. I owned, looked after and loved a cow when I was a boy in Kerala. I know cow, if you don’t.

In the school, I wrote an essay on cow. My cow never killed anyone. So, I didn’t write, “the cow is a patriotic animal”. Unlike the children of today, I knew milk came from the udders of cows, and not from refrigerators.

So, there was, for me, a tenuous link between mother and cow. This is not to say I was confused between the two. I wonder if our adorable cow vigilantes have mothers who look pleased for being called ‘cows’.

It is a pity that despite 19 murders in two years in the name of the lowly cow, we still don’t understand what it is about. Those who think that it is about cow do not know cow. Cows don’t know them either. Here’s a penny-worth of Freudianism on the psychology of our for-cow killers.

Human beings have a need to ‘realise’ themselves. How do they do that? Ordinarily, through work and worship, efforts and enterprises, thinking and daring. According to Freud, individuals realise themselves mainly through sex.

There are deep-seated sexual echoes in all that we do. Aggression inheres in male sexuality. It is far more tempting for men, than women, to realise themselves through aggressive sexuality.

How else are we to understand the universal appeal of war, which otherwise is utter misery? There is no material gain in war. If there is any gain at all, it is only psychological.

The Bangladesh war of 1971. Any material gain? But how we loved it? How our chests swelled with patriotic pride! What does the so-called ‘surgical strike’ amount to? Nothing; did you say?

Freud would say, “Stupid. You know nothing. Why don’t you see it as a phallic thrust across the line-of-control? (LoC has a touch of virginity about it, no?) Then see how the matter stands.”

If you can take from me that urinating is a sexual symbol, why not surgical strikes? (I am not, by the way, a Freudian and I believe that he is too sex-obsessed to be taken seriously!)

When it comes to anything sexual, do not expect reason to prevail. In fact, the very function of sex is to liberate human beings from the restraints of reason. Explosive feelings and primeval irrationality are what sex shares in common with patriotism, ultra-nationalism and religious fundamentalism.

Freud takes pains to establish — in Reflections on War and Death and Civilisation and Its Discontents — that man lives repressed in civilised societies. Civilisation gains by alienating man from himself. But what is repressed is not eradicated; it lies low ever ready to erupt. The libido is held in leash by fear of social censure or state reprisal.

Relax either of the two, the libido-charged man emerges a predator. Why do you think men of power are more prone to aggression; especially sexual aggression?

Now consider our gaurakshaks, trigger-happy to lynch and kill. In particular, their two quintessential features. First, all of them look alike. None of them, for aught we can see, seems meaningfully occupied or inconveniently enlightened. Their defining experience appears to be killing, not caring. It would be instructive to find out if any of the killers-in-the-name-of-cows are, by chance, also care-givers for cows.

Second, all of them look orgiastic! They are, as Hobbes would say, in a state of nature! Kill at will; no one will ask you why. Not only that; the general ambience lends acceptance and prestige to your aggression. The promised ache din (good days) are here at least for them! Lynch anyone you like; and see how many spring up to justify you with “In-your-times-so-many-were-lynched” and all that. In contrast, no one will notice you if you take care tenderly of a thousand cows. Killing is so sexual, you know?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has now told them what’s what: “Murder will not be tolerated.” He said that, we remember, last year as well. That doesn’t seem to have worked. Why?

Modi rode to power, appealing to and playing up mobs. He hypnotised them. During campaign time, it was mobocracy all the way. His rhetoric, all through 2014, rippled with aggression.

It still does, whenever opposition parties are referred to. Development is Modi’s holy cow. Development can justify anything. National TV debates, even daily concourses, bristle with aggression these days.

Beef-lynchings

Talk shows have become wrestling-with-tongues affairs, after the fashion of WWF; so unseemly and ill-mannered that one is scared to expose children to this theatre of incivility. Between 9 pm talk shows and beef-lynchings, the parallel is alarming.

It is unfair in law to evict a person without providing commensurate alternative accommodation. Modi should extend this natural justice to gaurakshaks. How fair is it to ask them to desist from a potent psychological high, without providing an alternative?

If you ask me what that alternative is, I will have to say, “Well, that’s not up to me. It is the headache, after all, of the leader to lead; and lead people even out of their addictions.”

It is a mark of the sickness of our times that to lead is now, in many contexts, to rehabilitate. BJP veterans L K Advani and M M Joshi, thank god, have been rehabilitated as margadarshaks.

The gaurakshaks are far too many for such gubernatorials. The good thing is that Modi is blessed with an earthy pragmatism and an unearthly genius for pulling off surprises. May be, he will come up with something out-of-the-box? But hurry up, please!

(The writer is former principal, St Stephen’s College, Delhi)