'Citizen Under Siege': In the shadow of power

Ganesh Devy’s Citizen Under Siege reads like ‘A Writer’s Diary’ in a time of siege.

Featuring mainly the columns he wrote for a Kolkata-based daily, the writings offer in-depth analysis and commentary on the national malaise we have been witnessing in recent years. They add up to a disturbing portrayal of today’s India — the decline and collapse of democratic institutions, the national pandemic of ideological irrationality, the rejection of cultural and religious diversity leading to the dangerous growth of monocultures of the mind.

These are only symptoms of a nascent totalitarian political system. What elevates the writing from topical commentary to a profound reflection are insights drawn from European mythology, Indian puranas, classics of world literature, political philosophy and linguistics. Despite such wide-ranging forays into several domains, the writings are not weighed down by heavy erudition.

Devy’s writings maintain a style marked by urbane felicity and a tone of open dialogue. Together, they create a powerful impression of serious engagement with issues that concern all thinking citizens. While the coronavirus epidemic is raging in the country, the political regime permits huge public assemblies of people for election campaigns.

Decisions affecting the lives of millions of common people are taken with no concern for their suffering. Paradoxically, development and progress seem to require regression into history to reconstruct it without any validity to support violent communal ideologies. The history of global knowledge systems is dislocated to puff up the imagined supremacist idea of ancient Indian knowledge systems. The latest scientific developments in genetics are falsely employed to construct the myth of a single origin of all Indian languages.

Nor are these episodes in an absurd drama with nothing to connect them. They are products of probably the most concerted effort in the modern period of a right-wing ideology which doesn’t want to rest until the past and the future are reshaped to legitimise a political system meant to dismantle constitutional provisions and curtail the assured rights of certain minorities.

Devy is able to establish this connection and thereby make clear the seriousness of the context we are heading towards. Without establishing the interconnections, the writings would have seemed to be sporadic and isolated responses to several disparate issues. It is also likely that the combined effect of the writings would be to induce despair at the helplessness of citizens.

In a powerful piece of writing, Devy takes us back to writers like Albert Camus, George Orwell and Hemingway, who, in Joseph Conrad’s words, had ‘immersed themselves in the destructive element’, witnessing the horror of war, genocide and concentration camps. Their resolve was to ‘go on doing what one should’.

Devy is hopeful that even ordinary citizens shall, amidst all despair, act according to their conscience and the Indian Constitution, which is the one unfailing guiding light. Elsewhere, the freedom movement, which created the idea of India as a secular, multicultural democracy, is also projected by the author as a cultural resource in these times of breakdown of a civilisation.

Not surprisingly, the decline is accompanied and strengthened by what Devy describes as an ‘anti-science’ temperament, which now dominates the educational system and textbooks. Darwin and the theory of evolution are being excluded from school education, and young learners are being taught that everything that modern science has accomplished (and may do so in the future) already existed in the Indian past. This is part of the ubiquitous assault on critical and independent thinking.

The question that is a troublesome ‘Yakshaprashna’ of our times, says Devy, is why citizens, oppressed, harassed and deprived of their rights, do not protest collectively? Why does only a small minority express dissent and face brutal punishment, while the majority remains silent or looks away? Why is an increasingly autocratic regime brought to power again and again? Why have our universities and research centres failed to construct a critique of the forces destroying democracy?

One of the answers Devy suggests is that ‘now the Constitution is under siege by a non-state organisation and corporates.’ He asserts that the Constitution is our ‘primary dharma’ and that the responsibility of citizens is to protect it, because it is the Constitution which has made them citizens of a democracy and not merely members of a caste or religion. In these writings, there is a fervent plea that we do not abandon our hard-won freedom and modernity, unless, of course, we are striving to hasten the coming of a dystopian future which seems imminent.

In the concluding essay, ‘Towards 2047’, Devy sums up what citizens under siege could do to avoid a dystopian future. The foremost effort should be to protect and nurture the federal structure of our society and culture. It should be given ‘the centrality it deserves’ and ‘safeguard India as a plural and diverse society’. Both cultural and ecological diversity are essential to the survival of Indian civilisation. What the effort involves is ‘cleansing the minds of the people of the poison of communal hatred’ and also restoring democratic institutions.

The reviewer is a literary critic, writer, and scholar-activist. Views are personal.