We are caught between two extremes. If on the one hand there is what John Berger in his novel A Painter of Our Time described as “an accumulated absence of sound” around issues such as Manipur or other topics of national importance such as China’s incursions, there is on the other hand “an accumulated presence of sound”, if I may paraphrase Berger. A Prime Minister who has otherwise steadily refused to address a press conference or give a meaningful interview has now suddenly flooded the airwaves with 40-odd scripted interactions in a month. The tone of these talkathons (interview would be a misleading term) has ranged from the banal to the bizarre, the most extreme example of the latter being Modi’s declaration that he was “convinced” he was not born biologically but was “sent to earth by god”.
To call it merely wacky would be to underestimate the real purport of Modi’s statement, coming as it did on the heels of Sambit Patra’s ostensible slip of the tongue when he called the very god of Puri, Jagannath, a devotee of Modi; and just months after images were distributed of Modi holding an infant Ram’s hand and leading him into the new temple in Ayodhya. The frequent references by doting TV anchors to Modi’s infinite energy, his shining skin, his manic work hours, and his mind-boggling childhood have all been leading up to this moment, this revelation: that Modi is no mere mortal but the very messenger of god. It is, after all, the knockout punch, from which no opposition party can hope to recover, because when it has been declared that there is nobody to measure up to Modi the Supreme Leader, where does one find someone to oppose Modi the Demi-God?
“In ignoring a State and a people devastated by violence, Prime Minister Modi’s intention is not only to deny the violence but also to deny any knowledge of the state’s complicity in it.”
Modi’s avatar card, however, appears to have come a little late in the game. Across north India, where swathes of the population have been brainwashed by the BJP’s politics of religion, there is now a visible ennui. Reporters from across the Hindi belt are bringing news of more and more people simply fatigued with the subject of religion, people more worried about food prices, jobs, and homes, people openly mocking mandir-masjid politics. Are these voices part of the same 62 per cent of the population that did not vote for Modi and the BJP in 2019? Or are they from the 37 per cent that did? We will not know until June 4, but the voices can be heard. That Modi, too, hears them is clear from the glut of interviews, the relentless “noise” being generated.
Where there is complete silence is on the subject of Manipur, where it is now one year since the terrible violence that resulted in the death of hundreds (the official number is 221) and the displacement of tens of thousands (official number: 60,000), and where there is absolutely no government initiative towards a mediated and just solution.
This is the silence of impunity, the silence of forgetting, where the withdrawal of attention from an event works to erase the event itself. In ignoring a State and a people devastated by violence, Prime Minister Modi’s intention is not only to deny the violence but also to deny any knowledge of the state’s complicity in it. The Indian state has long practised what Oishik Sircar in his book Violent Modernities calls the “hierarchized calibration of suffering”, where attention is measured by religion, class, and caste. We are now seeing it play out in Manipur, where victimhood and indignation are luxuries extended to some and denied to others.
In this issue, Frontline revisits Manipur if only to break the silence that reigns in the midst of the overwhelming noise of democracy all around us.
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