Look Ahead In Terror

Ashis Nandy, a psychologist, interviewed Narendra Modi
10 years ago and made the assessment that Modi is a clinical fascist. Nandy wrote that he never uses the term fascist as a
term of abuse but as a diagnostic category.

He goes on to say, in a short essay called “Obituary
of a Culture,”: “Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the
authoritarian personality.

“He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defense of projection, denial and fear of his own passion combined with fantasies of violence. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and (realised) I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer. The very fact that he has wormed his way to the post
of the chief minister tells you something about our political process and the trajectory our democracy has traversed in the last fifty years. I am afraid I cannot look at the future of the country with anything but great foreboding.”

The only good thing about that assessment of Modi is that it shows the psychologist Ashis Nandy in a good light: he has not minced words as social scientists do. But what depressing news! Another reason to feel that India is no better than Pakistan! I say India and not Gujarat, because Gujarat may become the model for the
whole country.

Whenever I feel that public culture in India is as worse as Pakistan I feel that the desolate public culture of Pakistan that Faiz Ahmed Faiz shows in his poems has no border.

All over Punjab and Karachi Sunni supremacist organisations assassinate Shias. Shias are less than 10 percent of the population. In Gujarat the number of Muslims are the same as Shias in Pakistan. The difference between Gujarat and Pakistan now becomes that Gujarat has free and fair elections, Modi can deliver his hate speech, whereas in Pakistan assassins let guns speak for them. Gujarat has a chief minister who does not say, after a train burned, that we should catch the criminals, but says we should punish Muslims. Sunni supremacists in Pakistan have guns speaking for them.
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In college I decided that that I would learn Pakistani history through Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems. Not that there really was an alternative as our libraries are full of third rate state historians (that’s a triple redundancy!). In any case, I thought a poet whose career spanned Partition and the advent of Zia ul Haq would provide a history of emotion, hope, virtue and resistance. I found all of that but I also found plenty of dismay.

In Subh Azadi (1947) I heard him singing about the dawn that was like night falling, in Hum kay theray ajnabi (it is about 1971 but he wrote it in 1973, on a trip to Dacca), he wondered when there will be a harvest that will be unsullied and unbloodied. My favourite lament, which I have no idea when he wrote but I always associate with Zia and his 80s, is called Loneliness (Tanhaai).

In Tanhaai it is dawn breaking over a city and in every sign of the dawn there is despair. Stars are no longer visible, as if blotted out by dust, the streetlights of the city are staggering shut, people are waking up from dreamless sleep, and the poet has given up waiting for someone, or for a good idea. The poem ends with: Ab yahan koi nahin, koi nahin aay ga.

We wait and see how much of India is going to turn into Gujarat.