Democracy in many ways is a collection of plural spaces which involves civil rights groups, protest movements, investigative teams, courts, media groups and so on. The list is never exhaustive, unlike our electoral process which operates within the framework of majority and minority. One feels, that with the advent of majoritarian democracy, if anything seems undemocratic it is the idea of our electoral process.
The majoritarian victory of a regime like Narendra Modi’s not only reflects the idiocy of an electoral process but also threatens our very democratic imagination. In fact, the Godhra riots, was a classic example of a frustration, which attempted to create the new electoral majoritarian imagination. Michel Mann, the British Sociologist warned against such majoritarianism in his popular book The Dark side of Democracy, in which he proved through various case studies in Africa that such an act would make democracy illegitimate and further lead to genocide.
A perfect case of this majoritarian propaganda is the war raged against the tribal population. The tribals have been cornered and decimated historically. In fact, in one of the sessions on Holocaust education in a recent conference on mass violence and memory held at Jindal University, the participants articulated holocaust or genocide as if it was an affair of the past. Most of the narratives began with the examples of World War II or Nazi Germany.
Sitting in that conference, one felt the violence of history, as it was being recited and conceptualized, as if it was a world history of Holocaust. One felt, at least the Holocaust history deserved a chapter on the systematic elimination of the tribal people right from the story of Guarani Indians in South America and Brazil to Ho in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh.
With the emergence of 21st century, the nature of evil became instrumental and inclusive within the idea of nation-state. Policy became the new creative tool with which nation-states enacted violence in their everydayness.
The story of development was one such policy thought that India retained with itself along with the concept of nation-state which was a European idea. Nonetheless, one felt, Indians especially the tribals had a different approach to articulate Holocaust or Genocide in terms of multiple notions of time. SamikBandyopadhyay, India’s famous theater and film critic, put it brilliantly in the conference when he stressed on the need to include development and the concept of nation state into Holocaust education within the broader framework of systematic elimination of tribal population and their identities
Modern day education system ignores interdisciplinary thinking but it is needed to understand violence and the studies on Holocaust. The concept of nation state is a testimony to it in the way how it thinks of education as a national commodity. If one tries to analyze the relation between education and Holocaust in a cognitive level, one doesn’t see much of a difference, because one feels education is no more knowledge induced but development induced. In that sense, one could say that challenging development alone won’t do, it requires the dialectics of interplay between development and education.
As India’s developmental plans roll across with MoU signed every now and then by Modi government, tribal people’s life and identity is at the highest stake. With the advent of several developmental projects, the number of tribals getting displaced remains an ever increasing statistic.
But, worse is the future of tribal children, who are being assimilated into modern day ashram schools or private NGO run schools and colleges for free of cost in the name of social service. These children at one level are culturally withered along with their parents. But in a deep and fundamental way, it produces a generational gap. This not only becomes an act of cultural genocide, but also becomes holocaust of the nature, ecocide as it is called.
Gladson Dungdung, a tribal rights activist and author from Jharkhand, reflected about the nature of this ecocide and genocide beautifully in his book Mission Saranda: A war for natural resources in India. This book articulated the violence of developmental thought in terms of how it violates the tribal way of life and more how the tribal identity as a whole is being systematically decimated through development.
The Modi government which operates without a hearing aid, refuses to engage in discourses of this sort. Probably, it is because of this reason that Gladson was offloaded from the Air India flight recently in which he was supposed to travel to London to be a panelist in Environmental History and the Politics of South Asia.
Such acts not only restrict one’s freedom of expression but show the fundamental lack of a regime whose policy moves are literally ending tribal lives at a mass level.
(The author is a student at Jindal School and is a co-founder of Rhythm of Nation, a socially inclined youth group. This article first appeard in twocircles.net on May 22.)