By Valson Thampu
There’s something that nobody is talking about. It surprises me no end that this is the case.
Life, for most citizens, is now overshadowed by unprecedented insecurity. Only the top 10 percent of the population–the natural heirs and inheritors of all advantages, irrespective of who is in power or out of it- are an exception.
Head or tail, they are sure to thrive. Presumably they, unlike the rest of us, are not tainted with black money and corruption. Good for them.
Frankly, I have never felt as insecure about my life as I have, since demonetization kicked in. Looking back I realize that we were all walking on thin ice and, on the fateful night of November 9, 2016, it just caved in.
We don’t need psychologists to tell us that security is a basic, deep human need. Every political philosopher avers that safeguarding the security of citizens is the foremost duty of the State. Human beings cannot live in insecurity. It is cruel to expect them to.
It is very likely that those who died on demonetization queues died as much out of insecurity as out of exhaustion. Insecurity, no one needs to tell us, is a killer.
Here I have to make a reference, pardon me, to Leo Tolstoy. In his particularly thought-provoking work titled What Shall We Do? (a very relevant question, no?) he lists the three stages in which the State unleashes its violence on citizens. (It is a must-read for those who want to make sense of where we are headed.)
The first attack falls on citizen’s land. Land is the primary source of human security. The peasants, unlike city dwellers, enjoy enviable security of life. Urbanization uproots human beings. (How we have fallen in love with being rootless and ruthless!) In the cities human beings live severed from their roots. They live, deep down, with a world of insecurity and insignificance.
City is an alien land. No one belongs there. We are at best anchored nomads and gypsies. This is, as cultural anthropologists alert us, one of the reasons why cities abound in crime; especially sex-related crimes. In the cities human beings–men in particular-are denatured. They become worse than animals. (Only think of Bangalore and Delhi!).
Hidden behind the land acquisition project is the sinister intention to degrade the peasantry into faceless, helpless industrial hands. The peasant is a worker. A worker enjoys greater stability than a laborer, who is at the mercy of an impersonal, ever-changing living environment. He lives exploited and degraded. A worker has an identity; industrial labourers are identity numbers.
The second level of attack falls precisely here. In the wake of the expropriation of land, the value of the labor by the former peasant (now a cog in the industrial machine) is taken away from him. This aggravates his insecurity several fold. He works hard, and stands others –the corporates, the shareholders etc. – fattening themselves on his sweat and toil.
If the number of billionaires in India has increased several folds since globalization, what it means is that workers are being exploited as never before. Surely these billionaires are not working in factories and producing their wealth!
The third and the most deadly stage is when the wealth, in the form of whatever money citizens have, is also taken away from them. It is this that the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described, as we understand, as “organized loot and legalized plunder.”
That, according to Tolstoy, is the symbolic meaning of taxation. The State claims the right to exact taxes from citizens as a mark of its suzerainty over them. Revenue is only of secondary importance. Gandhi knew this; hence the power of his Dandi salt march. (By the way Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy to an extent that is not acknowledged.)
In one fell swoop, we were all reduced to de facto penury. The State took complete control of all that we thought we had. The earth caved in under our feet.
But we are all dreaming of long-term gains! What nobody seems to realize is that the very need to project “long-term gain” arises only because the short-term pain is too unbearable. Anesthesia comes, these, in different brands and recipes.
I do not know if I should cry or laugh when some talk as though it is a great blessing, a fantastic forward leap, to be pushed into a world of plastic money. That, however, is not the way most people feel about it. They are confused, uncertain, bewildered, and utterly insecure. They know that their financial vulnerability will rise sky-high.
It is like this. Cash is something that you can have with you. You know it is there and it is under your control. The situation with a piece of plastic is quite different! You know it is, in itself, worth nothing. Absolutely nothing. It could mean something, if all goes well. But there is never any guarantee that all will go well. If your money world went topsy-turvy overnight, how can you be sure of your plastic world?
With each step along the highway of progress, we are being dragged deeper and deeper into a scheme of things over which we have neither any understanding nor any control. We are losing control over our lives exponentially. That is the same as saying; we are coming under greater control by distant forces and agencies that care two hoots for us.
The world out there is becoming more and more invasive. Under the cash economy there was a modicum of privacy left to our lives. Now, under the plastic dispensation even our bedrooms shall have no walls. Citizens’ privacy, on which the assault commenced with Adhaar, is now fully compromised.
There is no long-term gain in the world, I’m afraid, that can compensate for this most tragic of all losses.
But this attack on the stability and security of citizens is, truth be told, only a collateral damage. It is not the primary purpose. What, then, is the primary purpose?
That we shall consider by and by. For the time being, a clue could suffice. If you believe that means and ends are in some way related, this collateral destruction holds, within its nature, a pointer to the core purpose.
But that’s for another day!
(Valson Thampu is former principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi)