Breaking Free

On the ideological tags that shackle us, divide us, and steal our independence of mind

Image source: Aspen Institute

Gujarat-2002 was the watershed event that awakened me to politics. I had just turned 16 when it happened, at which point I was soaking in everything from the world around me, when I was beginning to form my own political opinions, when I had just begun inching away from the sports section of the newspapers (The Hindu at that time) to the op-ed pages. Unsurprising then that it had such a catalytic influence; I’m sure it’s was the case with many other Indians of my generation; it was one of the most defining events of our adolescence - 9/11 being the other, but that was too global, it didn’t hit us directly. The riots - and watching how the adult world around us responded to the news coming in from Gujarat - shook us up and baptized us into a political consciousness; my move away from the last page and into the deep-end of the newspapers was complete.

There were the stomach churning images on the front pages of the newspapers every morning. There was the live coverage of the massacres on NDTV. I had nightmares where people were pounding on my door, where I ran to hide beneath the bed, where the mob broke the door down, where I heard the clang of swords on the floor getting closer to me… I would wake up from these fever-dreams to read much worse stories in the papers. Homes locked shut - with families inside them - and set on fire; and worse, much worse things; it was blood-boiling. What affected me even more though was to see how some of the adults around me were responding to all of this.

I vividly remember an episode of Barkha Dutt’s We the People (some months after the riots) - a Muslim woman broke down recalling the atrocities that were committed on her family - I don’t remember the details but I think her son or daughter was killed as she watched on helplessly. Dutt was consoling her as she wept, but my attention was on a lady seated on the row above them. She had a look in her eyes… what was it? Her lips were pursed, her eyes were hardened in anger and scorn. It was very clear to me that the anger was directed not at what happened to the lady but at the lady herself; at the fact that she was sharing all of this on television, compromising the Gujarat image. There was also a slight twitch at the corner of her lips as she watched the Muslim lady speak; a slight smile. It was the smile that did it for me. I couldn’t understand what that smile meant, I didn’t want to. I walked out of the room shaken. And then there were the people around us said that yes, what is happening is terrible, ‘but…’. But. Always the ‘but’.

That ‘but’ is what pushed me to speak up. And to clearly articulate the rage inside me, to give my thoughts some structure and credibility, to gain the vocabulary to argue my case, I read - papers, magazines, books; I learned - in quite half-baked ways, I now realize - what ‘left’ and ‘right’ meant; I read about concepts like Hindutva, Socialism, and everything else around them. The ideological mooring of all the writers I then read was the same - what can loosely be called left-liberal. And so I adopted these ideological labels that I pasted on my chest, announcing them to the world at every opportunity. I was right (thought not Right), everyone with even a slightly different stance was wrong (read ‘evil’). I think I tagged myself as ‘Leftist’ on Orkut (while driving around a comfortable car and going back home to my parents’ quite luxurious home). Gujarat had pushed me into becoming an opinionated, combative teenager.

Almost 20 years down, I still maintain many of the initial positions I had about the happenings in Gujarat and the people involved. Despite the administration getting the clean chit by repeated investigations, I am not able to shake off the conviction that there is more to the story than what official accounts claim, that the hands of the leaders in Gujarat - and of the Hindutva ecosystem around them - are tinged with blood. I felt very disoriented when the results of the general election in 2014 started coming in; 7 years later I continue feeling a constant background of discomfort toward the current leadership. But when I take a step back - when I drop the Gujarat-02 lens - and try look at my political stances somewhat objectively, I find that it was too hard-footed, extremely simplistic, naively self-righteous, too dismissive of alternate perspectives. I wonder if it would have been different, if I would have developed more moderate - more sensible, more nuanced - stances if my political awakening had happened under somewhat benign circumstances.

Over the last 10 years though, and certainly in India since 2014, there seems to be a coarsening of opinion around us. The world - and India - seems to be hardening ever more strongly into opposing camps, with absolutely no scope for reasoned debate. All nuance seems to be lost; indeed any attempt at nuance, any attempt at even considering points of view of the ‘other side’ is savagely shot down by the faithful; shot down because they are seen as concessions to the other side, as showcasing weakness. On any issue, the dividing lines are clearly drawn, and then there is the very predictable battle of words on social media - predictable because it all flows from each side’s cheat-sheets (if you read the title of, say, a TM Krishna article, you can quite easily predict all of its contents; really - try it for yourself); predictable hence useless in enlightening the topic at hand. I am not much on social media, but I am extrapolating from what I observe on Twitter. I would be quite surprised if it were very different - if people were having respectful discussions and debates - on some other social media platform. But it is not limited to social media; the narratives from the mainstream are hardly more balanced. Name-calling and sarcastic put-downs (if not more toxic alternatives) seem to be taking the place of argument and counter-argument.

Over this same period my own positions - on politics, religion, society - have gradually shape-shifted; the more I think about various issues, the more complicated they seem to me, the less amenable they are to easy answers. In some aspects a broader perspective of the world has brought with it a natural moderation in my stances, a balancing tug toward the conservative side. Over the last ten years I have better come to realize how rich our shared culture is, and yet how fragile. Not long before the pandemic I went on a bus tour - with historians, storytellers, iconographers - across major and minor sites of the Chola empire. How exciting it was to sit on the steps of the majestic Gangaikondacholapuram temple and discuss Rajendra Chola’s audacious marine expeditions, to take a closer look at the inscriptions on the walls of the Darasuram temple and discover the astonishingly rich worlds of meaning hidden in plain sight, to simply stand back and soak in the unmatched majesty of the Big Temple in Tanjavur at sunset. Our languages, our music, our art, our religions, our philosophical schools, our monuments have been painstakingly built over centuries, each generation adding their own small contribution and passing the threads on - with great care - to the next. We keep hearing about the resilience of our varied culture, but I am not so sure how much it can withstand the assaults of today’s tech-accelerated homogenization. Some of our Indian languages have unbroken living traditions of thousands of years, but they can all be forgotten in a few generations. Yes, a lot of undesirable - to our eyes - practices come along with the chain of tradition; traditions change, they need to change - they adapt to each century’s demands; they shed certain aspects, gain others. So yes, traditions need reform - but steady and gradual reform. One mustn’t hack away at the entire edifice when the need is to replace a few of it’s pillars. I think one must be wary of full-blown revolution in general; maybe it comes from my position of relative privilege, but it is who I am. I have come to realize that I never was the revolutionary-type, despite what I put on my Orkut pages in college.

In general, I find myself moving away from certainty in most of my considered stances. Away from left-right or other such binaries (whatever relevance such tags might have in the Indian context). While of course there are core values I hold dear - many of them what would be called liberal, some conservative - I find that most (all?) real-world issues do not map cleanly onto these values. Life is messy; multiple contrasting and even contradictory values are often simultaneously at play. Most of the times, I find that the only honest thing to say is ‘it’s complicated’ or ‘it depends’; or even better, keep quiet and listen to what others have to say. Which is why I find it remarkable that people seem to know all the answers, and that the answers all fit in so nicely to their self-assumed ideological tags, and that they go around sharing these answers with confidence, with vehemence. How is it that people are so certain? About everything?

While this is happening on both sides of the divide (each side very loyal to its mythology), why is it that I find myself much more dismayed by the oversimplifications and the increasing boorishness of the liberal side? I think it’s because it is the side I identify myself more with; one is harsher on one’s own I suppose. I had higher expectations of these people (I don’t anymore), so the disappointment was larger.

Image source (via Twitter feed): The Facebook page ‘Angry Kitty Needs a Laugh’

It is not just their utterances that I find to be a problem but the tactical silences too. Just see what’s happening in the coronavirus reportage - mass gatherings like the Kumbh are pilloried (rightly so, of course) and the attendees mocked and ridiculed, but almost year-long mass gathering of tens of thousands of people protesting the farm laws hardly gets a mention in any reports of super-spreaders in India. How wonderful that the virus considers the politics and intentions of the people it chooses to infect. Just like the virus chose not to infect the good people protesting on the streets for months in the USA last year. On that note, it is not clear to me how defacing and pulling down statues is laudable; examined by the lenses of today, every past figure will be problematic. Many of the things we say and do today will be considered immoral tomorrow - it’s simply the nature of how societal consciousness gradually progresses. But does that mean you demonize prominent figures from our communal histories? One must try to evaluate each person within the context of their times. It is a short and slippery slope from pulling down a Columbus statue (to atone for past sins) to razing a medieval mosque (to atone for past sins).

Instead of urging calm deliberation, most prominent media outlets - and most public intellectuals - take one of the two sides and pour ghee into the fire. Take the horrific violence that again recently took place in Israel-Palestine - the standard narratives are coming in from different sources, all very neatly lining up with their prior ideological positions. But is the issue really so black-and-white? As an article in The Economist said ‘… the polarization of the American media and the power of social platforms have made it easier to advance only one version of a tangled story. “The left is talking only about the human-rights issue, and the right is talking only about Israel’s security… it seems terribly troubling that elected officials and activists increasingly ignore one side and the incredible complexity of this conflict”’. Replace ‘American media’ with ‘Indian media’ and replace Israel-Palestine with just about any issue we face here, and the above lament will apply perfectly.

I think this is what happens when we lease out our reasoning faculties to our ideological tags. On every topic we wonder what it is that someone with my proclaimed label (liberal, conservative, leftist, centrist, Hindutvavaadi, whatever) should be saying - should be thinking - and we think and say exactly that. These tags give us the balm of simplicity - they are our life-rafts amid the rough tides of uncertainty and doubt we find ourselves in. But not just does this make us view the world in false binaries, it also dehumanizes us in some way - the way we choose to feel about other people is determined by the labels they carry. If someone has a very different opinion to you on a matter you care deeply about, if you really want them to see the light, what is the best - most practical - way to go about trying to convince them? You hear them out with an open mind (and with respect), concede to them on points that seem reasonable (this is important - you must be willing to let go), and then point out why you differ on certain other aspects of the matter under discussion. Make it about the issues and not about the people. I have no psychology credentials to back this up, but this seems like common sense to me (and it works when I have to reason with my 2 and half year old daughter) - an airtight way of not convincing your opponent to change their position is by screaming at them, by disrespecting them, by deriding them for their dearly-held opinions.

Perhaps that is the point - perhaps we don’t care as much about convincing the ‘other side’ as we do about signaling to our own. And so the battle-lines get drawn even harder. We need to break this vicious cycle don’t we. We need to be willing to deal with uncertainty and doubt - that is just the nature of the world. This does not mean we must remain undecided about every issue. But it does mean that we will hold our positions lightly. It means that when we do put our weight behind a cause it will be with the clarity and confidence that comes from having thought it through with an open mind, from having arrived at our positions independent of any simplistic ideological labels. I think we need to break free from the shackles that these tags place on us, and take back control over our minds and hearts. Let us stay independent.