Language has an unerring way of capturing society. A word becomes a label and the label captures and classifies change. India’s Independence began with a critical word — destiny — which Nehru chose to immortalise in his midnight speech. The word ‘destiny’ has mythic sense and yet unlike fate, change is not left to the gods; man can tinker with destiny. As a nation-state we thought in a collective sense of change through planning, public sector, community development. The Nehruvian era was the time of institution-building of great laboratories like TIFR, cities like Chandigarh, networks like IIT. In an endearing way, nation-building, character building and dam building were seen as isomorphic. Whether one reads Visvesvaraya’s memoir or the Gorwala report on corruption, person, nation and institution combined to create a vision of society. There was an innocence to it which lasted till the debacle of 1962. We did not lose a war; we lost our naïve sense in the infallibility of the leader.
Societies change as perceptions change. If the Nehruvian age was epic drama, Indira Gandhi was more operatic tragedy. The Emergency years destroyed the normative base of India. The social got redefined at every step. There was a sense that society had to be rebuilt every day and that the state alone could not do it. The emergency triggered a new sense of the social through social movements, NGOs, human rights groups all of which felt the state was no longer the only legitimate social farce. The margins, the minorities, the dissenters, the eccentrics wanted to retain the India of diversity. Civil society invented new definitions of the social through ecological, feminist, human rights groups. Nehruvian unity gave way to civil society diversity. India looked more violent and vulnerable as dams created more refugees than war and a new word Naxal challenged the whole idea of peaceful change. Change was not only complex, it became a site for contestation.
When one looks at the Emergency today, one realises that a majority of India today was born after it, that memory is a poor marker of change. Events like the national movement, the Partition, the Emergency are not lived events but dates in a NCERT text book.
Liberalisation not only altered memories, it altered the idea of the social. Socialism became a dismal science and the ration card a mnemonic for waiting. Globalisation not only increased the speed of change but the pace of expectations. The sense of the body change as it broke away from the old body politic. The sense of the collective body embodied in the plan and public sector gave way to individualised bodies, the body of desire and the beauty contest, the emaciated body of development, the suicidal body of the agriculture, the surrogate body renting wombs, the foetal body destroyed before growth, the commodified body of organ transplants. Desire and commodification had individualised the body as the market seeped into Indian society. A new generation was talking about a new idea of India, an India which prided itself in the fact that the Indian century had arrived.
The prediction was premature, in fact silly as economics and politics took a downturn. Unemployment became a social secret because newspapers were silent about it. It discovered for the first time that layoffs could be mass middle class phenomenon. Suicides of farmers were still treated as mysterious phenomenon. As the economy declined, the reputation of economists went up but such experts could do little. UPA-II was a mess and Indian society felt like a dirty compost heap. Corruption, like garbage, provided a deepening sense of rot. Scams multiplied like epidemics and 2G, 3G coalgate became brand names for the UPA regime. Society watched as government went into suspended animation. Politics became a shadowplay as Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan competed as siblings in silence. A sense of cynicism reigned till a younger generation broke through the callousness. Society did not expect them to play that role.
A younger generation tuned to services in the consumer sector was no longer ready to wait or tolerate corruption. Gathering around AAP, they literally asked for a reinvention of politics pointing out that society had changed considerably. While AAP triggered the imagination, BJP won the electoral battle putting a ceremonial end to the Nehru era. A new majoritarianism had come into redefining society, its aspirations. Lutyens Delhi is waiting for a new regime to show its true colours. A new sense of the social is contesting with old stereotypes as they surface.
Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad.
