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- There's No Forgetting The Trauma
This story is from July 9, 2005
There's No Forgetting The Trauma
This year, the thirtieth anniversary of the Emergency passed quietly and, one might add, tamely.
The Emergency and politics of memory
This year, the thirtieth anniversary of the Emergency passed quietly and, one might add, tamely. But for a stray article or two in the newspapers and a couple of small meetings organised by civil rights groups, June 26 was like any other day. Thirty years is a long time in mass politics and an entire new generation has grown up in India since the period; this new generation has only heard of the two years when, thanks to our rulers, the United States became the world's largest democracy by default.
This time, the Opposition's attempt to use the occasion to score debating points against the Congress party also did not cut much ice, for they too had shown scant respect for the civil rights of large sections of the population during their rule and had, in any case, made peace with many of the stalwarts with suspect records during the Emergency.
The ruling party, however, was determined to celebrate the occasion. The ham-handed Delhi police chose the week to censor a new play on Jinnah in their new incarnation as honorary censors. The police waited three weeks before asking for the script of the play, so that they could say a few days before the performance that they did not have the time to examine the script and, hence, the play could not be staged. Our law and order machinery remains as compromised as ever and our politicians and bureaucrats have learnt to negotiate the few institutional changes that were introduced after the Emergency was lifted.
Centralisation of authority has been an article of faith of the Congress party for more than three decades now and the idea of cultural and intellectual freedom is as alien to Arjun Singh as it was to Murli Manohar Joshi. Only, Joshi was funnier and looked less jaded in his role as a comic-strip hero of Hindutva.
Meanwhile, works like that of social anthropologist Emma Tarlo seem to suggest that suspension of civil rights during 1975-77 has been more or less forgotten by at least the poor and the oppressed, who remember the period mainly for the excesses of the vasectomy campaign. One must remember, however, that Tarlo is one of the few international scholars who has shown the courage to study India's fortunately-brief flirtation with authoritarianism. No Indian historian, sociologist or political scientist has produced a comprehensive, serious, political or social history of the Emergency.
I have occasionally tried to encourage PhD students to study the period; most of them have tried to avoid the subject and a few have tried to avoid me, too, afterwards. Even the official records of the period, such as the Shah Commission report and voluminous data the commission collected, are not easily accessible. Everyone knows the fickle Indian electorate and seems fully aware that some subjects should be carefully avoided in the open democracy called India, with its highly centralised reward-punishment systems of appointments, promotions and recognition.
But do people really forget major public tragedies or traumata even when they have been direct witnesses or victims? Or do the memories of such events survive as recessive or latent layers of our selves and the underside of our public life, outside the reach of formal or official commemorations? For that matter, are there alternative ways of organising and preserving these 'silent' memories to which academic histories and social sciences have no clue? Can these memories be reinvoked or remobilised at crucial moments, when a new crisis or calamity strikes?
These days I work on genocides and I have been looking at some of the data on the Partition killings. One of the most fascinating ways in which memories of extreme pain and suffering have been handled by the victims could be called a studied or cultivated form of 'trivialisation'. Many claim to remember not the killing of their parents and
siblings in front of their eyes but the loss of a favourite dupatta or a pair of bangles; some others, after losing all their property, talk obsessively of the frozen chicken they left in the refrigerator, because they had hoped to return home after, what they thought would be, a transient period of madness. The victims have not forgotten; they have only chosen to cope with their memories of violence, uprooting and humiliation by privatising and apparently trivialising them.
Tarlo is not wrong but she probably has not told the whole story. The memories of the Emergency constitute a part of the underside of our political culture; they do inform the political choices of our electorate. Even when they talk only of the excesses of the family planning programme, they know that these excesses were the symptoms of a larger assault on the rights and the dignity of ordinary people. The officially endorsed silence that surrounds the memories may not have reduced their potency an iota.
The writer is a political psychologist and cultural theorist.
This year, the thirtieth anniversary of the Emergency passed quietly and, one might add, tamely. But for a stray article or two in the newspapers and a couple of small meetings organised by civil rights groups, June 26 was like any other day. Thirty years is a long time in mass politics and an entire new generation has grown up in India since the period; this new generation has only heard of the two years when, thanks to our rulers, the United States became the world's largest democracy by default.
This time, the Opposition's attempt to use the occasion to score debating points against the Congress party also did not cut much ice, for they too had shown scant respect for the civil rights of large sections of the population during their rule and had, in any case, made peace with many of the stalwarts with suspect records during the Emergency.
The ruling party, however, was determined to celebrate the occasion. The ham-handed Delhi police chose the week to censor a new play on Jinnah in their new incarnation as honorary censors. The police waited three weeks before asking for the script of the play, so that they could say a few days before the performance that they did not have the time to examine the script and, hence, the play could not be staged. Our law and order machinery remains as compromised as ever and our politicians and bureaucrats have learnt to negotiate the few institutional changes that were introduced after the Emergency was lifted.
Irrespective of their party affiliations, political authorities in India love censorship and the ministries of home and HRD remain as enthusiastic control-freaks as they have always been. Only the flunkies have changed with the change in regime last year.
Centralisation of authority has been an article of faith of the Congress party for more than three decades now and the idea of cultural and intellectual freedom is as alien to Arjun Singh as it was to Murli Manohar Joshi. Only, Joshi was funnier and looked less jaded in his role as a comic-strip hero of Hindutva.
Meanwhile, works like that of social anthropologist Emma Tarlo seem to suggest that suspension of civil rights during 1975-77 has been more or less forgotten by at least the poor and the oppressed, who remember the period mainly for the excesses of the vasectomy campaign. One must remember, however, that Tarlo is one of the few international scholars who has shown the courage to study India's fortunately-brief flirtation with authoritarianism. No Indian historian, sociologist or political scientist has produced a comprehensive, serious, political or social history of the Emergency.
I have occasionally tried to encourage PhD students to study the period; most of them have tried to avoid the subject and a few have tried to avoid me, too, afterwards. Even the official records of the period, such as the Shah Commission report and voluminous data the commission collected, are not easily accessible. Everyone knows the fickle Indian electorate and seems fully aware that some subjects should be carefully avoided in the open democracy called India, with its highly centralised reward-punishment systems of appointments, promotions and recognition.
But do people really forget major public tragedies or traumata even when they have been direct witnesses or victims? Or do the memories of such events survive as recessive or latent layers of our selves and the underside of our public life, outside the reach of formal or official commemorations? For that matter, are there alternative ways of organising and preserving these 'silent' memories to which academic histories and social sciences have no clue? Can these memories be reinvoked or remobilised at crucial moments, when a new crisis or calamity strikes?
These days I work on genocides and I have been looking at some of the data on the Partition killings. One of the most fascinating ways in which memories of extreme pain and suffering have been handled by the victims could be called a studied or cultivated form of 'trivialisation'. Many claim to remember not the killing of their parents and
siblings in front of their eyes but the loss of a favourite dupatta or a pair of bangles; some others, after losing all their property, talk obsessively of the frozen chicken they left in the refrigerator, because they had hoped to return home after, what they thought would be, a transient period of madness. The victims have not forgotten; they have only chosen to cope with their memories of violence, uprooting and humiliation by privatising and apparently trivialising them.
Tarlo is not wrong but she probably has not told the whole story. The memories of the Emergency constitute a part of the underside of our political culture; they do inform the political choices of our electorate. Even when they talk only of the excesses of the family planning programme, they know that these excesses were the symptoms of a larger assault on the rights and the dignity of ordinary people. The officially endorsed silence that surrounds the memories may not have reduced their potency an iota.
The writer is a political psychologist and cultural theorist.
End of Article
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