Bhabani Shankar Nayak - Disenchanted India and Beyond: Musings on the Lockdown Alternatives

Disenchanted India
and Beyond

To

My youngest brother

Siddhartha Shankar Nayak

With love

Disenchanted India
and Beyond

Musings on the
Lockdown Alternatives

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Lexington Books

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021931961

ISBN 9781793642790 (cloth)

ISBN 9781793642806 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

The collection of articles and commentaries in this book have been published in different newspapers, journals and web portals like Oxford Political Review , South Asia Journal , Eurasia Review , Law School Policy Review , Outlook , Student Struggle , Frontier Weekly , The Frontier Post , Economic and Political Weekly , Counter Currents, Counterview, Kashmir Times, South Asia Times, The Citizen, Media Scanner, Morning Star, India News Diary, Sabrang, The News Room, Times Now News, Eleventh Column and many other online media platforms. The essays and commentaries in this book attempt to engage with everyday issues in a disenchanted world and attempts to unlock some existing alternatives. I am thankful to all the editors.

I am immensely grateful to Khushboo Mattoo for designing the books cover page. Her sublime and subtle painting represents the vastness in ocean, challenges in mountains, potential alternatives and hopes in the sky.

I am thankful to Pritam, Ernesto, Geeta, Mahmood, Suresh, Safraz, Nazia, Suhas, Usha, Subir, Indrajit, Smeeta, many friends and family members for all their encouragement and support. I am grateful to Maa, Bou, Bapa, Tuku and Sansia for all their support. I am particularly obliged to my youngest brother Siddhartha for all his inspiration. He is the one who asked me to write this book. I dedicate and gift this book to Siddhartha for successfully completing his high school. I am particularly thankful to Joseph Parry and Alison Keefner of the Lexington Books for their timely editorial help and support in the making of this book. All inadvertent mistakes are mine only.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak
London, 29 November 2020

The disenchanted world did not start in 2020. But the year 2020 has started with mass franticness as the contagion of COVID-19-led deaths and destitutions continue to keep people under lockdowns. It has accelerated the pandemic of prevailing inequalities, exploitation and authoritarian dominance, ethnic and racial violence, hunger, homelessness and unemployment issues. These are not apocalyptic signs but products of the capitalist system before the COVID-19-led growth of global health crisis. The social maladies and religious carnage, civil disorders, political unrests and economic crisis are creating havoc in every nook and corner of the world. The wistfulness of the will and disenchanted environment move together in an unending treacherous road. But capitalism and its systems are flourishing when masses suffer under multiple forms of miseries. The religious right-wing groups, conservative political parties, socially reactionary and authoritarian forces in the United States, United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Brazil and many other parts of the world have exploited the mass discontent against neoliberal economic crisis and marginalisation. These forces have mobilised the masses with their populist slogans based on religious, nationalist, cultural and narrow political lines. These forces were successful to capture state power to reinforce authoritarian neoliberalism in service of the corporates.

The disenchanted world beyond India is a product of such a praxis. People are disenchanted with the neoliberal, authoritarian and reactionary political culture in which electoral democracies were used as a method to capture the state power that serves corporates. The states and governments are abandoning the idea of citizenship rights and civil liberties of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Americas and Europe. The market-led democracy destroys the welfare abilities of the states and governments and makes them conformist institutions to provide security to the corporates for capital accumulation. The security state is a blessing to capitalism and a curse to the growth of democratic society. In this way, the neoliberal project and its praxis have created a perverted culture of utilitarian monopoly, where citizens are converted into customers. The amoral mass media and fictitious celebrity culture help in spreading consumerism worldwide. The culture of consumerism has not only destroyed our unique culture of consumptions based on local production, but it also writes the final epitaph of our own lives and fate of our own society.

Such a disenchanted trend in the society is not confined within India. This worldwide disenchantment is a product of crisis-ridden capitalism as an economic, political and cultural system, which is opposed to the idea of freedom, prosperity and peace for the masses. It survives by spreading its culture of crisis, conflicts and contradictions. It outsources its problems by forming alliance with religious and right-wing forces in politics. These forces insulate capitalism from collapse by stopping the growth of class struggles. This dysfunctional anarchy of capital destroys everything that is human, social, secular and sustainable. The capitalist governance based on pure greed for power and profit is against life and planet. Distrust and disenchantments are twin outcomes of capitalism and fascism.

The lure of capitalist economy, culture and its deceptive political system is the foundation of an unavoidable gap between reality and dreams of people in their everyday life. It creates rootless belongingness. But the decadent society of orderly objects creates new desires to conceal everyday issues, dreams, aspirations and realities of life. The human labour within bodies have become commodities to survive and explore the world. There is no time to discover ones own self. Human beings are just meaningless numbers in the Excel sheet of computer screens. In this landscape, price and profit become twin pillars in establishing the value of relationships among fellow human beings. The bond between human beings and nature became functional essentialism to hoard more and feel less. The pestilence of pandemic made us to realise human touch, importance of nature and relationships. The lockdown stories talk about human longing for freedom from self-imposed loneliness. The quarantine body and free mind failed to enjoy the lockdown holidays. The material needs and desires have imposed limitation on freedom of individuals.

The tranquillity of time and harmony of human emotions are attached with commodities. We are all becoming moving objects where utility, pleasure and satisfaction determine self-worth. The humane tales of ethno-sphere is imprisoned in a society of happiness industry. The assassins of market waiting with their new products; their weapons to enslave human imagination within organised objects; the money; the god of all gods and goddesses, living in such a society create the foundation of a deceptive mountain of sand where everything looks like beautiful dreams from a deceptive distance. Like belongingness is a distant memory of long past, it is like an old boat for an elderly boatman. Emotion is weakness in the wilderness of orderly objects, where commodities reciprocate and replace relationships in a new civilisation called market. It is global and local. It is omnipresent and omnipotent. It is new god and religion where metaphysical spirituality is replaced by credit card. It enables us to access the impossible in our society. It runs on the deficit of human values, emotions, necessities and human feelings.