Daily Times

The much-awaited but somewhat expected verdict was finally delivered. The Indian Supreme Court has sealed the fate of a demolished mosque named after a human being who was not a phantom but had a physical existence fully endorsed by history. The verdict reeks of political domination since it justifies forceful appropriation and orders to rebuild the place of worship for the dominant faith, whose divinity is branded with a different name. What an irony that one God replaces another after causing much havoc upon humankind. One need not wait for the Day of Judgment. Under the malignant gaze of the lords controlling the world, it happens every day.

In the process of production, the verdict of those in authority has the last laugh. “He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof,” (Adorno) and “He who laughs best today,” Nietzsche adds, “will also laugh last.”

However, laughter can find a dialectically opposite expression. According to Horkheimer, Adorno et al., laughter can indicate releasing an individual or a community “from physical danger or from the grip of logic.” In a totalitarian society, it “echoes the inescapability from power.”

One laughs, “when there is nothing to laugh about.”

In sick societies, it becomes a sickness infecting happiness, subsuming it into a worthless society. “Laughter about something,” they conclude, “is always laughter at it.” The oppressed ones have no other use of laughter beyond this, they laugh at themselves.

The division of labour, imposed by the market economy, has taken the specialisation and standardisation to its acme. Human being has ceased to be an individual, a versatile person, an all-rounder–a professional, a writer, a painter, and a poet simultaneously. The era of Leonardo da Vinci is gone. The modern human being boasts about his speciality in a certain field. He lives on the fringes of life and is proud of his alienation and indifference to all other professions. This kind of specialisation does not require emotions. The words sympathy and empathy ring hollow. Apathy has become the objective spirit of a spiritless situation. The human part of humanity is taken care of by the market separately. The unauthentic relation of Santa Claus with the latter has become authentic. All religious events are commodities, managed by the market that caters to the needs of the majority. The market and a dumb majority diligently following the dictates of the masters cannot be annoyed; in case of any threat, all the state power including judiciary is around to restore their hegemony.

During the era of massive scientific development, giving someone a monopoly over reason is unreasonable – if not grotesque. Even Hegel’s absolute being attained its consciousness through human beings but the institutions created, promoted and propelled by the market have attained such mythical supremacy, which needs neither consciousness nor human beings for their enlightenment. They are autonomous and, hence, totalitarian. No one can escape their whip, not even those who are given the task to dispense the role they are assigned. Everyone has to accept, play the role and follow the direction.

Is it surprising that the Indian judges were no exception to the laws of the market whose accepted norms are based on capitalistic justice, a legalised inequality? The institutions under the present dispensation are Spinoza’s, assumed conscious stones, rolling down from a height they feel autonomous and free, considering their motion solely their own. “This is that human freedom,” he says, “which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”

Muslims are the modern Marxists or Jews; the latter two were chosen to become the victims of National Socialism and the former of Hindutva

“The judge,” Max Weber says, “is more or less an automatic statute-dispensing machine in which you insert the files together with the necessary costs and dues at the top, whereupon he will eject the judgment together with the more or less cogent reasons for it at the bottom … where the judge’s behaviour is on the whole predictable.” When religion becomes an infantile neurosis, a leading force in the superstructure and economic base continues eroding the judicial system; an integral part of the whole has to sail with the wind. Those who thought the judiciary to be an organ apart from the body politics of a country were the victim of self-deception. There is no escape from the dynamics of an established system.

After what happened to Aatish Taseer whose only crime was to criticise the Indian Führer, the judiciary had no reason not to be part of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). When Nietzsche demands the invention of the justice that acquits everyone, except him that judges, his appeal to human wisdom is not without sagacity. Fascism is a cross-class phenomenon, unifying the poor and their expropriators–the filthy rich. No institution can escape it. People suffering the economic upheaval strive to seek refuge in choosing a common enemy. In India, the common enemy is the Muslim community. Muslims are the modern Marxists or Jews; the latter two were chosen to become the victims of National Socialism and the former of Hindutva.

As compared to the Jews, the Muslim population is manifold bigger–both in India and the world. If Jews survived the Nazis, the Muslims in India and Palestine would certainly weather the genocidal storm. Despite the coercion and gory crimes committed by the Indian state in Kashmir, barring few conscientious journalists, no judge or jury or even the Indian secular conscience of old Nehruan dynasty has raised any voice against it. The role of the Indian communist parties is equally hypocritical, once the mainstream political parties have hoisted their own petard because of their Janus’ face and have reduced to mere pressure groups.

By turning the Indian Muslims into Staatsangehörige, the state subjects, capitalism is using its old ploy of concealing its domination in production; like any other persecution, it is the part of the system. Genocide, in the modern world, has become a norm, from My Lai to Santiago Stadium and from Yemen to Palestine and Kashmir; the vulnerable are pushed out of the productive process and are either bombed or sent to the refugee camps to die. Domination forbids recognising the suffering it creates; it connects religious mercy with the slaughterhouse to veil the economic devastation behind the paranoia of patriotism and religion that it helps create.

A large population in India is living below the poverty line. Suicide among the peasants is not a philosophical but an existential problem, a stark reality; scorched by the blind sun of hunger and poverty, they embrace a premature death than a deadly life. The Muslim and Pakistan card – albeit the latter has played all its cards to complicate the situation and has no less to atone for – is weaning fast and soon the wrath will fall on other minorities and, in economic terms, the wretched, powerless, silent majority is the ‘other’ for the ruling class.

Not only in India, people oppressed by imperialism throughout the world are feeling what Sartre felt under Nazi domination; they despised the people, humiliated them, snatched their rights, but that made them free. Free to choose a resistance that made resistance mandatory but democratic. “Laughter,” Howard Zinn says, “is the enemy of tyranny.” “He who laughs last has not heard the bad news,” Brecht concludes with a warning.

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani based in Sydney. He has authored several books on Marxism (Gramscian and Frankfurt schools) and history