The Age of Bharat

Welcome to the year which marks an epochal moment in Indian history. For years we have spoken about two nations in one geography — India and Bharat. What did we mean by that? We meant that there was an urban India and a rural Bharat, prosperous India and an impoverished Bharat, an English-speaking India and a vernacular Bharat, a chic India and a gawky Bharat, an arrived India and an aspiring Bharat, a modern, ‘secular’ India and an orthodox, ‘religious’ Bharat; in this divide we hid our collective neurosis, our class prejudices and our political hypocrisies.

We crafted the tale of this divide, ironically, in those 25 years in which, more than ever, the lines began to blur between these twin worlds. It was almost as if the more the eraser of class mobility powered, in parts, by economics, rubbed away the distinction between India and Bharat and brought them closer together (or pushed Bharat closer to India, if you are still uppity), the more, in our minds, in our, to use that word only India uses, since Bharat merely lives it, ‘narrative’, we wanted to etch in the divide with as much pressure as the pencils of our knowledge hegemony would allow us. The medium is the message, and we owned the media, it had to be our message.

Let us have the humility to accept that we wanted it written in indelible ink, if possible, that India was India, and Bharat was Bharat, and as long as we held the reigns, never the twain shall really meet.

In ensuring that the distance prevailed between these distant lands in the mind, we ensured the final elitist skulduggery — we began to lustily cheer Bharat (as long as it firmly remained Bharat and remained far away from us).

So it was that when Lalu Yadav ran the most vicious empire in Bihar especially in his last few years as chief minister, we in our tree-lined boulevards of Lutyens Delhi, in our progressive magazines and newspapers, in our enlightened research papers, we cheered him as the messiah of the have-nots. Long after it had become clear to everyone who lived in his rule that his promise of giving ‘swar’ (voice, to the voiceless castes) and not ‘sushasan’ (good governance) was a criminal sham, we continued to prop him up as caste divinity.

It was a classic upper caste India move — ensure that subaltern Bharat remains impoverished and trapped in a discourse whose parameters have nothing to do with what we would expect from governance in India. The First World has often propped up dictators — and today defends terrorists — in the Third World for very similar reasons, ‘oh, they are different, we cannot apply our standards on them, this is what they ‘really’ want’. We cannot apply ‘our standards’ on ‘them’ because that would, in a stroke, make them equal to us. And that, under no circumstances, is something we could, would allow.

As long as they were far away from us, they could have their jungle raj. We would market it as emancipation. Differing standards of morality and well-being is often the final class (and race) weapon. It is through this that superior classes and races retain an aura of benevolence while cruelly ensuring that the chasm never, ever gets bridged.

But such is the magic of democracy that Bharat wised up to our charlatanry — and effectively out-googly-ed us.

You see the argument of superiority has hidden within its haughty folds the logic of fear. To be subaltern is to be afraid. Without fear there is no racism nor classism. When the proletariat become fearless, they can guillotine emperors (and queens). A head you no longer look up to is a head that can easily roll. (You only have to watch the spectacle of marquee names getting demolished every day on, for instance, Twitter to see how little Bharat cares anymore about the starlight studded surnames of India.)

So as the Age of Bharat dawns upon us, you have to understand that that is what Bharat has snatched away from India — the power of fear. Our levers of hegemony no longer work. How we roll our vowels in the English language does not guarantee us front row seats in the national debate anymore. Nor does our old school tie assure us first among equal status when the milk from the mammaries of the welfare state starts to flow. Our treasured international degrees are not the QED-s they used to be, and even, oh even, our so carefully nurtured south-of-the-city addresses, which we used to use as bourgeosie bhramashtras malfunction these days. In the era of authenticity, while we hunted for free range organic eggs for our sunny-side-ups, Bharat flipped out the joker in its pack — it had all the authentic addresses.

Everything we sniffed at in Bharat — from its accent to its accentuated religiosity has come back to haunt us. And we, suddenly, find ourselves defenceless against its earthy onslaught.

This, then, is the 2015 we face. The Age of India is over. The Age of Bharat is upon us. No longer will be able to draw our favourite line between them again.

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