Daily Times

Some forty seven years ago, John Lennon had his revelation, a personal apocalypse. It culminated in a delectable expression of musical art: a famous song having a title of ‘Imagine’ emerged whose message, cadences and nuances still vibrate in human memory and recall the long cherished dream, a desire of making the world free of all ugliness while exchanging it with love. Nine years later he was assassinated by a psychotic. The soft voices were stifled, the psychosis lives.

Ever since Indian partition, a senseless solution to resolve the class contradictions and conflicts, the children of midnight find it convenient to stay at loggerheads with each other. The last seven decades have seen quite a few wars between two neighbouring countries and plenty of blood has been spilt for no reason but to satisfy the greed of a handful of expropriators having a stake in the status quo. There is no dearth of them on either side of the divide.

A lot has been stated about the wars: for some they are too serious to be left to the cynicism of generals but alternatively can they be left to the shenanigans of the politicians? Why is war so necessary? Has the human species not developed to the extent of leaving this barbarism behind? How about the rational persuasions which can provide the primitive urges a better means of catharsis? Why has the Freudian sublimated Eros faltered leaving the death wish to overwhelm the human mind?

These questions would have been pertinent had war been a clash of egos or a matter of personal pride. In that case the gory act of pushing people into an inferno could be comprehensible. But the reality is different, it is an innate contradiction of the system which functions with progress and destruction, with a stunted peace and an eternal violence. The uncertainty rooted in the system leaves the society with pervasive unhappiness and an unhappy consciousness is shaky enough to be mobilized for any kind of violence.

The process of labor and the actual working conditions in society turns human beings into alienated subjects and demands conformity to its norms. It is not conscious influence alone that separates him/her from truth, but the very nature of the system that equally plays a key role in whose dynamics make a human being dumb. For him/her domination appears to be universal; it becomes what Adorno says ‘a reason in actuality’. Precisely this is what is happening to the people of both India and Pakistan; they are doomed by the irrationality of a reason which is unreason.

On both sides of the divide a large majority fighting for its survival has little or no idea or interest about the hyped hatred which is an exclusive domain of the rulers and their protégés, the middle class, the great patriots, a half-crazed creature which in an attempt to adjust itself with the hallucinations of the rulers, named and famed as realities, maim their thoughts to adjust them to the master’s needs.

Hate is not something inborn. It is cultivated with effort and atrophies, the one who inflicts it suffers it first. Despite the trauma of a blood drenched partition the majority of people had reconciled to the fact of earning a living, survival was the existential question and not the thought that such devotion to earning a living made them incapable of living a human existence as Marcuse quipped.

In the process the specter of animosity had lost its dread. Even the separation of eastern Bengal, a wound largely inflicted by the Pakistani feudal-military nexus and abetted by the West — when Indian army saved the final blushes rescuing the ‘invaders’ from the wrath of Mukti Bahini — was healed and elapsed from the memory of the people of Pakistan. In daily life the traumatic experience of scarcity and inequality had left people with little memory of the past no matter how bitter it once was.

In the meanwhile another plague was conflagrating fast, the Frankenstein crafted by the ruling class initially with the connivance of imperialism to maintain its hegemony in a neighbouring country as a strategic asset came home to roost and struck a devastating blow. The religious fascism permeated the urban layers of the middle class dissecting and dividing them into opposing groups and left them fighting for the control of minimal resources. The state already cleaved into multiple ‘repressed’ nations fell hostage to a lumpen phenomenon. The fragmentation was the vivid display of a complete economic meltdown.

These are the moments when the process of expression of reality becomes the expression of process of reality. From the morgue of memory the enemy is brought out and resurrected, the ‘other’ is created within and outside. Both Modi and Pakistani Junta are doing the same.

The war hysteria works well to muzzle the thoughtful minds that smell the rat. A large middle class, dosed and dazed with religious opiates, can be manoeuvred and motivated to shriek the barren slogans of nationalism and religion. In this symposium of idiocy the voices of sanity are usually drowned and the field belongs to the rulers. The over maturity of the dominant overtakes the immaturity of the dominated.

The religious fascism permeated the urban layers of the middle class dissecting and dividing them into opposing groups and left them fighting for the control of minimal resources

The book of two ‘D’s, the spymasters of two so-called inherent enemy states, speaks volumes about the unity of the class that realizes itself in power structure. Asad Durrani, (in) famous for toppling governments at home, shares his insights with an archrival with nonchalant ease and cordiality. For them the Indo-Pak disputes and adventures, where working class soldiers shed their sweat and blood, are mere trifles, at best a few chess games so why bother if a few thousand workers lose their lives on either side of the divide. After all the heaven awaits them, but do the sublime warriors believe in such a place? There is nothing to suggest that they too have the fascination for a bewitching taste of wine and virgin women of hereafter or perhaps they have tasted enough in this world that their parched Eros requires no more indulgence.

The Rafale scandal, not “the biggest example of crony capitalism” but its integral part, has unravelled and shook India; simultaneously the economic meltdown of Pakistan have brought the slumbering Indo-Pak conflict in limelight again. Under the watchful gaze of the proverbial ‘Big Brother’ an artificial line drawn between people is temporarily allowed to eclipse, yet to ensure a state of constant flux, gimmickry of blame game is kept alive and the talk shows are spewing venom; “there is a great disorder under the sun”, Mao once stated, “but the situation is ideal”: ideal for whom, certainly for those who would be the ultimate beneficiaries of this Shakespearean tragedy.

It is about time that people of both countries stand up to bid farewell to arms. It is not the time to fight for the consciousness of freedom but for freedom itself. The moment has arrived to “clinically detect and remove from our lands and from our minds”, as Fanon says, “the germs of rot left behind by imperialism”. Is it not time for the dreamers to pursue their dreams into reality?

The writer has authored books on socialism and history. He blogs at saulatnagi.wordpress.com and can be reached atsaulatnagi@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, December 11^th 2018.