Bal Gangadhar Tilak Is Unacknowledged As the True Progenitor of Hindu Nationalism
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24 AUGUST 2020 / 50 www.openthemagazine.com CONTENTS 24 AUGUST 2020 EDITOR S Prasannarajan MANAGING EDITOR PR Ramesh EXecUTIVE EDITOR Ullekh NP EDITOR-AT-LARGE Siddharth Singh DEPUTY EDITORS Madhavankutty Pillai (Mumbai Bureau Chief), Rahul Pandita, Amita Shah, V Shoba (Bangalore), Nandini Nair CREATIVE DIrecTOR Rohit Chawla ART DIrecTOR Jyoti K Singh SENIOR EDITORS Sudeep Paul, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Moinak Mitra, Nikita Doval AssOCIATE EDITOR Vijay K Soni (Web) ASSISTANT EDITOR Vipul Vivek CHIEF OF GRAPHICS Saurabh Singh SENIOR DESIGNERS Anup Banerjee, Veer Pal Singh PHOTO EDITOR Raul Irani DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR Ashish Sharma NATIONAL HEAD-EVENTS AND INITIATIVES Arpita Sachin Ahuja AVP (ADVERTISING) THE Rashmi Lata Swarup GENERAL MANAGERS (ADVERTISING) Uma Srinivasan (South) FREEDOM NATIONAL HEAD-DISTRIBUTION AND SALES Ajay Gupta REGIONAL HEADS-CIrcULATION D Charles (South), Melvin George ISSUE (West), Basab Ghosh (East) HEAD-PRODUCTION Maneesh Tyagi SENIOR MANAGER (PRE-PRESS) Sharad Tailang MANAGER-MARKETING Priya Singh 6 Editor’s Note CHIEF DESIGNER-MARKETING By S Prasannarajan Champak Bhattacharjee CFO & HEAD-IT Anil Bisht 84 The Woman CHIEF EXecUTIVE & PUBLISHER Past Is Prologue Art of the Time Neeraja Chawla on the Balcony 8 The Ideal Pursuit 54 An Oath to Keep By Nandini Nair All rights reserved throughout the By MJ Akbar with a Final Breath world. Reproduction in any manner is prohibited. By Riyas Komu Phenomenal Women Editor: S Prasannarajan. Printed and 14 Speak, History published by Neeraja Chawla on behalf By TCA Raghavan 88 In This World of the owner, Open Media Network Pvt Moving Spirit Ltd. Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd, I Only Weep 18-35 Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, 20 His True Nature 60 The Best of Times By Ira Mukhoty Faridabad-121007, (Haryana). By Keerthik Sasidharan By Lhendup G Bhutia Published at 4, DDA Commercial Complex, Panchsheel Park, 92 The Legend of Nangeli New Delhi-110017. 25 Apostle of Social Realism By Sabin Iqbal Ph: (011) 48500500; Fax: (011) 48500599 the Active Citizen To subscribe, WhatsApp ‘openmag’ to By Keshava Guha 64 There Shall Be No Vanity Fair 9999800012 or log on to Love Lost www.openthemagazine.com 30 The Enigma of Heroes By Nikita Doval 96 Bio Dictatorship or call our Toll Free Number By Sudeep Paul 1800 102 7510 By Sumana Roy or email at: Learning Curve [email protected] The Momentous Moment Fiction For alliances, email 68 [email protected] The Broken Class 34 I, the Hindu 100 For advertising, email By Kaveree Bamzai Tomorrow We Will Be [email protected] By PR Ramesh Wolves For any other queries/observations, 72 A Higher Degree By Deepa Anappara email [email protected] 40 The Eternity of Exile By V Shoba By Rahul Pandita Disclaimer The Mind Is Its Own Place 106 Not People Like Us ‘Open Avenues’ are advertiser-driven marketing 44 The Decline of Dissent By Rajeev Masand initiatives and Open assumes no responsibility for content and the consequences of using By Siddharth Singh 76 Praise the Stoic products or services advertised in the magazine By Madhavankutty Pillai 48 Whispers in the Shadow Cover by By GN Devy 80 Rohit Chawla and Volume 12 Issue 33 Desire Unbound For the week 18-24 August 2020 By Ullekh NP Saurabh Singh Total No. of pages 108 4 24 AUGUST 2020 EDITOR'S NOTE THE FREEDOM ISSUE n whatever we read today, and we read in isolated absorption of the castaways, freedom is the motif that overwhelms the text. It’s as if, in the end, the existential dread gets elemental, more biological than philosophical. It only takes a relentless virus to make us all poets of our mortality, to turn fear into resolutions, to meditate on what were till the Day Before the things we had taken for granted. We were too rattled to realise that when a pandemic stepped out of his- tory, or when reality began to mime the still resonating chronicles of Albert Camus and Daniel Defoe, our inherited certainties would collapse, our vulnerabilities would be accentuated by the limits of our safety measures, be it the possibilities of political leadership or the promises of science. Freedom, in a world made poorer and paranoid by a pathogen, is the most shared sentiment, and we are still struggling to express it, and even protesting against the futility of our struggle. Didn’t I say the possibilities of politics? The first days of the outbreak saw, across the world, politics making false choices, most responses dictated by ideologies and incomprehension rather than information. Freedom, Ievery politician assumed, required heroism, and in varying degrees of statesmanship, stupidity and outright evasion, they played the liberator. Some of them maintained that our essential freedoms as open societies were too precious to be ceded to a virus in transit. Some remained steadfast in their denials. And a few alone respected science and expertise. What united them, the convenient libertarian and the manipulative populist and the honest realist, was the urge for freedom; and what set them apart was the method. Five months into the pandemic, and still devising desperate measures to cope with change, freedom is a struggle. The struggle is not just about being alive in a world where the future is a dispute—or a source of acute depression. The original question of identity—Who am I?—reduced social distancing and united the streets in a country chosen by history as the leader of the free world. Freedom gasped for air under the weight of a White policeman, and anger against “systemic racism”, the totemic term for domination today, would spread across cities. For the Blacks, it was the ’60s all over again, though the crowds swelled by nihilistic fury were denied a Martin Luther King Jr. The angry streets would be matched by the angrier public square. Dissent, joined by self-righteousness, demanded sole proprietorship of Conscience keeping is a conscience. The raw grievances of a community were appropriated by ideological orthodoxy, putting the stamp of regulated industry. stigma on anyone who dared to differ. Freedom hurt, divided, Someone, loftier than the and invented the renegade for a unipolar world of argument. Conscience keeping is a regulated industry. Someone, loftier rest of us, is out there, than the rest of us, is out there, always, watching, proofreading, always, watching, and looking for the subversion of ironies. What Václav Havel described, in his essay on the “power of the powerless”, as “living proofreading, and looking in truth”, the prerequisite for dissent, is not what we see in the for the subversion of ironies loudest arguments for justice today. We see a mobilisation of 6 24 AUGUST 2020 Illustration by SAURABH SINGH consensus, and a rhetorical militancy in the effort for social justice. It is then inevitable that truth is either “fake” or too fragile to withstand the intrusion of another opinion. The most conspicuous mobiliser here is the progressive, the freedom fighter who detests the pusillanimous liberal and the culturally entitled conservative. When viewed from certain historical angles, the new progressivism may look as didactically oppressive as the old ideologies that sought to create the New Man. The dispute over freedom remains unresolved. As it has always been. Don’t we Indians know? One of the best books that have come out on racism is called Caste, making social hierarchy a more convincing explanation for inequality and injustice. Which only further explains that, as long as identity alone powers the struggle for social justice, our incompatibilities will continue to remain as stark as ever in the slogans of the progressives. It was the politics of social justice that set the mood for India’s enchantment with political Hinduism and displaced gods. It was the project of a caste-based balkanisation that turned India to the right. The one word that marked every point of rupture, whether it was Mandal or Mandir or Modi 2014, was ‘freedom.’ On August 5th in Ayodhya, it was independence day for those Indians who had all along believed that their god was a victim of cultural vandalism. Even in victory, they could not have missed the cruel irony that their god alone needed constitutional legitimacy, that they alone had to be apologetic about the original adjective of their national identity. Their freedom was someone else’s anxiety. That someone could be the progressive in denial, or an Indian with a different god who has consistently been told to behave. Freedom is an uneven text in which what is being read as redemption can be misread as subjugation by the silent minority. The persistence of a pathogen may have restricted our movements and exhausted our resources, but we are all time travellers today. Regaining something even as we keep losing something else. On the 73rd anniversary of India’s independence, we invite you to a journey through stories and arguments—and we have no idea where it will take you. n S PRASANNARAJAN 24 AUGUST 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 7 THE FREEDOM ISSUE MJ AKBAR PAST IS PROLOGUE PAST Photo ALAMY Jawaharlal Nehru delivers his 'Tryst with Destiny' speech to the Constituent Assembly towards midnight on August 14, 1947 The Ideal Pursuit Between independence and freedom THE FREEDOM ISSUE n unsuspected, and The Norman conquest of Britain in Gandhi understood from an early age, hence uncorrected, 1066 was more nuanced, for the trium- British rule depended not on British fallacy has caused phant Frenchmen from Normandy strength but on Indian weakness. Fear much confusion in soon blurred the difference between de- of the British kept the British in power. political philology, pendence and independence. The new Once fear was gone, the British would impairing analysis conquerors did not rule England from follow.