Modi & the magic of secular-speak

George Orwell, the British novelist, argued that politics often leaves its residue in language. In his book 1984, Orwell talked of double-speak as a dialect which tyrannies use to erase the past and distort the present. Double-speak was followed by nuclear-speak in the heyday of the Cold War. Here, a technical language which evoked science-made decisions, however genocidal, appear rational.

While nuke-speak and double-speak have an Orwellian recognition which allows them to be recognised, politics is inventing new forms of double-speak. One of the most lethal and painful of these is “secular-speak”. Secular-speak must be differentiated from “pseudo-secularism”. Pseudo-secularism was a label used by the Right to claim that the Left idea of secularism was hypocritical and empty.
Secular-speak was not invented by secularists. Secular-speak is an invention of communal forces looking for a broader base. It emerges at the second stage of a riot when it is not so much the event of the disaster that one confronts but its memory.
My examples of secular-speak come mainly from Gujarat after the riots of 2002. The logic of the situation can be outlined as follows: Riots usually polarise a situation. Perpetrators and survivors, majority and minority stand in opposition, ready to yield little. As time goes by, both sides realise that it is difficult to sustain the hate and passion such hostility requires. The survivor realises justice might be distant and that a return to normalcy is necessary. The majoritarian regime realises that minor concessions have to be made and the requirement of electoral politics might necessitate some semaphore reducing earlier hostilities.
The regime realises that normalcy is a protean word which can be shaped and manipulated. Normalcy need not refer to the subjective sense of survivors. It can acquire other meanings. The regime can shift the definition of normalcy to other groups, like corporations, who can define normalcy as the openness to investment. Normalcy can become an index of investment rather than an indicator of what survivors feel. Corporations become the first collective citizens and victims lose the power of defining reality to them. More insidiously, if they refuse to recognise such normalcy, they are seen as problematic.
The victim responds with a series of ethical tactics. He proposes the idea of forgiveness which leaves both sides cold. The Hindus are not ready to accept this, as it means confessing to a grave crime. One is pragmatic enough to realise that Narendra Modi is not Willy Brandt. He is much more cold-blooded about the situation. Mr Modi and his advisers recognise on the other hand that there is an urge for normalcy. There is a need for a sense of wellbeing.
Muslim women articulate it eloquently and firmly when they claim that they want their children to live freely, openly, without the burden of the past. They realise justice is important but the past as memory can be a millstone around future necks.
A second style of closure was advanced by businessmen. If the business of business is business, then ethnic businessman are no different. They started singing hosannas to the investment atmosphere. Some religious and political leaders not wanting to be left out of the limelight echoed this. This attitude also finds an echo in the majoritarian community which speaks the rhetoric of “moving on”. The rhetoric of development allows for such an argument. Moving on secularises space and time and allegedly creates a flatland for new encounters.
Mr Modi is a shrewd politician, with shrewd advisers. The strategies he advocates are tactical and practical rather than theological. He realises a confession of guilt would be fatal to his politics. He, however, knows an invitation to citizenship sends a different message and alters the rules of the game.
Citizenship is a secular space. It provides its own entitlements. It can go beyond identity politics and, in fact, demands that a rite of passage to citizenship requires an erasure of an ethnic past. In turn, it offers a new space of belonging. This can be defined as entry into the middle class presented as a new bundle of opportunities where consumption rather than ethnicity marks identity. It demands an abandonment of caste as a public identity. For Muslims it requires a movement out of the ghetto into open urban spaces, abandoning the security of community.
Such an invitation is not a celebration of modernity but a use of modernity as a political tactic. Mr Modi realises that secularism is a composite of signals. The first is economic. It is coded in terms of investment. The second is global. He moves to Davos and also plays to the power of diaspora. He then moves to a national plane, where he has to break the communal stigma.
Politically he has to create a future more enticing than the past. He invites the Muslims to step out of the ghetto, cajoling leaders and businessman using carrot and stick. They know that justice is not possible but an acknowledgement of normalcy might provide business, profit and politicians, patronage. Mr Modi does this all in the language of secular-speak.
Mr Modi has appropriated secularism as prose for his political agenda. The Muslims remain dumbstruck realising he has put them in a double bind. Mr Modi through secular-speak has removed the power and magic of the “and”. They can no longer be ethnic and citizen, Muslim and Indian, seeking justice and mobility where the ghetto is part of an open city. Secular-speak becomes a razor cutting connections which made the community.
Secular-speak is hugely reassuring both to the media and the diaspora. They see Mr Modi as a moderniser, a technocrat who has outgrown a communal ideology, a man who has created a win-win situation out of the despair of 2002. What is Machiavellian appears angelic, leaving the minority schizophrenic. If they stay in the ghetto, they appear fundamentalist. If they move out, they play into his hands as there is no security, no guarantee of fairness. The political skill of Mr Modi has left human rights groups and the ethnic community in a cleft. He has outfoxed them. Secular-speak has changed the face of Gujarat politics leaving secularist tongue-tied and the minority in a quandary.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad