Why 'Ban' On What We Eat, Watch, Write, Do In Private?

Before they came to power, their lawless bullies roamed the streets and enforced self-declared edicts of morality on girls by not allowing them to hang out with boys and visit recreational facilities. When they came to power, they officially used the police to crack down on hotels to see what men and women were doing in private and how they could control it.

If the bullies of Sri Ram Sena in Mangalore chased and punched young girls because they visited pubs, in Maharashtra, the police rounded up several couples who were spending time in hotels near Mumbai, manhandled them, humiliated them and got away after imposing a fine for “public indecency” for whatever they did in private.
In Kerala, when a group of people orgnanised a unique “kiss of love” protest last year against the rising menace of culture policing, they came under attack from street bullies calling themselves Hanuman Sena and Shiv Sena among others. In the Tamil Nadu-Kerala border, thugs have severely disrupted cattle-trade because they don’t like people eating beef.

Before coming to power, they wanted to control what we ate and what we drank; after they came to power, they banned beef. Before they came to power they had a problem with even the limited scientific rigour and liberalism that our cultural, science, educational and research institutions pursued; after they came to power, they started to rearrange the genetic composition of these institutions so that their future will be shaped by a certain ideology. Probably, Indian school children will soon be taught of a new national movement and a new version of the independence struggle as the Nazi children were taught about the heroic deeds of the Teutonic knights of the middle ages. Just as the imagery of Teutonic Knights was important for German nationalism and Nazi ideology, an Indian revisionist story through alternative heroes is important for their political ideology.

Before coming to power, they also wanted to control what we read, what we saw/watched and what we did online. After coming to power, they made a mockery of film censorship, banned Internet porn, blocked websites, filed cases against TV channels and have even begun thinking about bringing back the draconian elements of the IT act. Many Right To Information (RTI) queries don’t come back with an answer. India’s new nationalist idiom of good governance can thrive without the bedrock of transparency.

In a year, effectively they have changed or controlled what we eat (no beef), how we socialise (no pubbing for girls), how we spent our private time with partners (no shacking up), what we read and watch (more beeps and cuts in movies), who we revere as our national heroes (statues for Godse and new icons), what and how we study (new textbooks), how we conduct research (new ideals and protocols) and how we communicate in social media (foul-mouthed armies of trolls)

And the most scary is the idea that the State is watching. Even without drifting to a zone of paranoia, one with a liberal mind may feel like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984. The new nationalist rhetoric is so similar to Mussolini’s “everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state”. Is the state taking control of one’s private and public lives and even one’s thoughts in an Orwellian way?

This aggressive cultural nationalism playing out as bans, ideological re-imagination of the country’s political and cultural past, ideological takeover of national institutions, threats to dissent by the State and its cronies, and abusive online armies of vigilantes, who are particularly vulgar on women, together denote a mini Talibanisation in progress. This is how the Taliban began with its Pastunwali code and in no time took away all the liberties and rights of people while banishing women from public life. Although some loud women seem to be part of this drive of nationalistic takeover, historically they had been excluded from the final scheme of things all over the world. What’s happening now is that these women are acting like their male counterparts because of prejudice, intolerance and ignorance - as it repeatedly happened in history, but ultimately, as in a Taliban controlled Afghanistan, women will be among the worst sufferers. Finally, there will be no people, but only the ideology, the State and their cronies.

The ban by the new Censor Board of India on 28 “cuss-words”, the ban on beef and punishment for even its possession, the ban on porn - which even the SC was not ready to do because of possible infringement of Article 21 -, replacing academics with ideologues and card-holders, and resetting educational materials and research have unmissable imprint of Taliban’s cultural nationalism. As history teaches us, Fascism rides on nationalism. If they get away with this campaign, that’s what’s waiting for us.

It’s not surprising that many of them also imagine a powerful, prosperous nation without any application of reason. Many of the online lumpen are also ambassadors of this imagined India. And this is also not new in history, and is part of a nationalistic package. As Italian historian Emilio Gentile noted, the “cultural roots of futurism and fascism intersect in the common terrain of modernist nationalism.”

We get carried away by fake images and rhetoric of a glorious past and a powerful future as our rights are being robbed off and our private spaces are occupied by the cultural police. And there are people to advise us: if you are not happy, go to Pakistan.