Between the lost childhoods of our parents and the infantile public of the Hindu Rashtra: A personal take

Weaving personal history into a reflection on the escalation of communal politics and rhetoric under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this article foregrounds the importance of childhood as a concept that can illuminate the nature of Hindutva fascism – its particular appeal to the adult followers of this ideology and the consequences for children. Briefly, while childhood is increasingly denied and taken away from Muslim children, Hindutva followers are forming into an infantile public utterly supplicant in its devotion to authoritarian figures. Against the Hindutva project and its infantile public is the memory of Partition and the anti-colonial dreams of an egalitarian, socialist society – a history remembered by adults for the sake of children.

Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé and the Narrative of Popular Revolt

In this article, I look at Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé to argue that its narrative style performs the politics of anonymity at the heart of the Paris Commune. To do this, I analyse three key elements of the novel – its autofictionality, its fragmentation and its ubiquitous present tense. By rejecting the exemplarity inherent in autobiography, this autofiction avant la lettre implies that the I of the narrator Jacques Vingtras, himself a stand-in for the author Jules Vallès, can be substituted with any other I. In the ‘révolution anonyme’ of 1871, there can be no leader; in its narrative, the central character is replaceable. The fragmentary writing further resists the unity of nineteenth-century novels to draw portraits of various actors of revolt; centralised revolution is abandoned in favour of communal politics. Finally, the narration in the present tense creates a sense of immediacy which rejects the glorification of the revolutionary past, and instead underscores the Paris Commune’s new politics in the making. The novel is thus enacting the ‘grande fédération des douleurs’ to which it is dedicated.

Communal Politics in Uttar Pradesh from Independence to the 1990s

The chapter provides a historical narrative of Hindu–Muslim relations in UP from independence till the early 1990s. The 1950s witnessed gradual emergence of a composite culture and relative peace with the adoption of a secular, democratic constitution and the leadership of Nehru and other nationalist leaders. The Muslim community supported the Congress viewing it as a secular party that would protect their interests. There was some improvement in the economic condition of the Muslim community. However, from the mid-1960s, communal forces kept under check by Nehru’s leadership, revived. The brief period of interreligious peace and promise of increasing communal harmony and secularization of society and polity did not materialize. A trajectory began of estrangement of the Muslim community, a feeling of being deprived and of insecurity due to the reappearance of communal tension and riots which reached a peak by the early 1990s with the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

Indian Democracy and the ‘Moment of Contradiction’

The sixth chapter theorizes the patterns emerging in the working of the law of sedition in India by identifying specific themes along which the law has been used. It focuses on the quotidian life of the law in the hands of the state executives who have the power of law enforcement. It chronicles the various cases of sedition in contemporary times, its use against anti-nuclear movement, students’ organizations, communal politics, the dominant discourse of nation, and so on. Through these narratives, also emerges the idea of sedition in public imaginings and its identification with what is loosely termed as ‘anti-national’ or deshdroh. It also theorizes the relationship between the routine law of sedition and the exceptional or extraordinary counter terror laws. Through the patterns identified, this chapter identifies the Indian liberal democracy being characterized by a ‘moment of contradiction’ in relation to the offence of sedition.