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| Dr Franklin, meet Shri Modi Photo from The Daily Pennsylvanian |
On Saturday, the group “Americans
for Free Speech” joined up with diasporic segments of the Indian right to protest
the Wharton India Economic Forum’s disinviation of Narendra Modi from
participating in the event. Modi had been disinvited due to a protest
raised by various segments of a U.S. and South Asian left (myself included) who
did not want the Islamaphobic Chief Magistrate of Gujarat, culpable in some
manner for a 2002 pogrom against Gujarati Muslims, to purify his personal
record and legitimate his Hindutva-plus-neoliberal-technocratic development
policies under the sign of “Wharton.” And so the protestors marched, claiming
that we denied Modi his right to free speech (I write about the absurdity of
that claim here),
chanting, “We want Modi,” and holding signs that put the Indian CM into a
common ideological space with Ben Franklin.
The iconographic
juxtaposition is striking, and one imagines that Modites walking on 34th Street revelled in the
comparison. Modi is, like Franklin was, invested in technology, in science; the
latter tied keys to kites and developed communication technologies and
networks, the former offers stunning, Thomas-Friedman-esque formulas like “IT+IT=IT.”
More importantly, Modi is, like Franklin was, acutely aware that nations are
formed out of and through a manipulation of a global/international fabric of
institutions, ideologies, and materialities. Franklin went to England and
France to constitute the outline of a nation that had not yet been formed; Modi
desires to go to the U.S. to naturalize and legitimate a Hindu-supremacist
image of a nation-to-come. Indeed, it is in the U.S. that Modi’s Hindu nation
can be pawned off as a nearly accomplished reality. The signs that his supporters carried read “Narendra Modi |
Future P.M. | India”; the mood is indicative, not subjunctive, as if his rise
is ineluctable. The sign functions as a request that local Philly audiences
treat the transnational collectivity of U.S-Indian right-wingers as proleptically
representative of the Indian nation and so deserving of the international recognition such a
representative deserves. The sign—and, more broadly, Modi’s invitation to
Wharton in the first place—isn’t merely proleptic; it attempts to produce the
reality it can now only project. The Indian right hopes to use transnational circuits
to secure the patterns of recognition facilitating international relations so
that Modi can turn to his national electorate and pass himself off as having
already been recognized, by the global polis, as India’s ruler. It’s simple
scale-jumping: you leap from the local (Modi’s Gujarat, say) to the
international so as to back-form the national. (That somewhat obscure senator from Illinois, Barack Obama,
did something similar with his trip to Europe during his first campaign.) The key
to such scale-jumping is that sites of transnational connection (Modi at
Wharton in Philly, Obama in Berlin) need to be coded and re-figured as scenes
of incipient international recognition. Otherwise, Modi would simply appear as
another rando addressing a foreign crowd with platitudes about India, the
internet, and what he calls democracy.
What has astonished me is
the extent to which Modi is successful in this operation. It is partially a problem
of the nearly non-existent transnational competencies possessed by your average
Yankee. Students at Penn—particularly, those running the student paper—can’t
wrap their heads around the idea that, in this case, Penn and Wharton are not local sites embedded within the U.S. but are rather scenes of a
transnational struggle with potentially extraordinary ramifications for India. But
the provincialism of Yankees is exacerbated by a certain form of
liberal-postcolonial normativity. Consider this counter-factual case: the Penn students,
professors, and administrators who support protests against Modi’s
disinvitation in the name of “free speech” would (I think) be unwilling to
support, say, a propagandistic presentation from a member of the Greek Golden
Dawn on campus. I think that they would be able to see that allowing such a
presentation would be tantamount to legitimating and supporting Greek fascism.
But the BJP is no less vicious than Golden Dawn. How, then, to account for this
discrepancy between (possible) receptions? Aside from the BJP’s possession of a
better propaganda machine, aside from the fact that BJP supporters are enrolled
at and teach at Penn, I want to suggest that a certain form of postcolonial
normativity inhibits U.S. liberals from protesting and preventing their
manipulation by Modi. The soft postcolonial normativity of the U.S.’s liberal
public sphere enables India’s diasporic right to achieve incipiently
international recognition for its racial-nationalist aims.
We can see this dynamic at work in Rajiv Malhotra’s
article, “The
Hijacking of Wharton.” A crazy conservative, Malhotra is syndicated on the supposedly progressive Huffington
Post. To be blunt, Malhotra is a moron, and he has a made a career of deploying
postcolonial critique for crazy Hindu-right ends. Malhotra is just outraged that “Indian professors
specialize in scholarship criticizing colonialism” (he’s talking about my
teachers and friends) could be complicit in “serving…American policies on
interventions in India.” Malhotra calls my teachers and friends “sepoys,” a
term he helpfully glosses in parentheses: “(The sepoys were Indian soldiers
serving the British army to fight against other Indians.)” A few things are
happening here. First and foremost, Malhotra assumes an audience entirely
unfamiliar with South Asian history; anyone with the barest modicum of
knowledge would not need “sepoy” glossed (or, indeed, would accept so
inadequate a gloss). Malhotra hopes to capitalize on the ignorance of the
average HuffPo reader. Second, Malhotra abstracts what was a transnational
dispute between a transnational South Asian left (with Yankee allies) and a
transnational Indian right (with Yankee allies) into the international field,
coding the dispute over Modi speaking at Wharton as having taken place “in
India” and as a struggle between the Indian nation and Yankee imperialists.
Third, Malhotra uses anti- and postcolonial symbolics to transform race into
the bedrock of the nation and so as a regulative principle for international
relations. Think about how Malhotra defines and uses the figure of the sepoy.
Given the uneven and complex political cartography of 18th and 19th
century South Asia, it’s difficult to understand how a sepoy could recognize
himself as an “Indian” conscripted to “fight against other Indians.” But that’s
no problem for Malhotra, for whom Indianness functions as a racial essence; it’s
there even when it isn’t or could not be. In yesteryear, British colonialism
prevented this racial nation from achieving full institutional positivity;
today, it is race-traitorish “sepoys” like my friends and teachers who inhibit
India’s ability to become a fully sovereign India (which means an India in
which non-Hindus know, or are put in, their place). By returning to the
cathected symbolics of colonialism, Malhotra can code the Hindu right’s
blockage from circuits of transnational power (Modi's disinvitation) as an international and
imperialist denial of Indian sovereignty. Malhotra’s message to a liberal
Yankee public is clear: Keep your hands off India, let it “be different” (as
one of his book title’s has it), or else you’re supporting a racist
neo-colonialism.
This soft postcoloniality
poses the moral and political borders of the international as ethically
impregnable (e.g., I, a white Yankee, can’t offer a critique of Modi without
being coded as an EIC operative) in order to provide cover for an Indian right eager
to deploy transnational economic and political resources for racial-nationalist
ends. Of course, every single postcolonialist ever knows that Malhotra is
perverting the legacy of anticolonial revolution and the ever-necessary
practice of postcolonial critique. If postcolonial critique begins with
anticolonial resistance to Eurocentric forms of power—political, economic,
cultural, epistemic, and so on—it’s very next step is to critique those elites
who, seizing upon the affective and ideological rush of anticipated
sovereignty, transform anticolonial revolt and access to global capital into a
process of inegalitarian nation-state-building. Malhotra holds onto the first,
necessary moment, using anticolonial negation as a means
to assert a multicultural right to hard-right difference. He seizes upon
aspects of 90s poco/multiculti theory, a theory that valued the difference of
dispersed particularities, in order to justify the will-to-power of a phobic,
violent particularism. He’s doing it consciously, poisonously, making a mockery
of the very real necessity to confront the structures of racial power that he
supports.
But it works. For a U.S.
public sphere, for well-intentioned liberals and college students who don’t
want to be racist or colonialist and love the right to free speech, such claims
are convincing. (I refer again to his early millennial—and
ongoing—critique
of South Asian religious studies, which [I think] knotted U.S.-based scholars
up in fear that this racist asshole was going to accuse them of being colonialist
racists because their scholarship could not be made to jive with a
racial-nationalism organized by a transhistorical
image of Hinduism.) The effect is that, in the name of postcolonial
difference, in the name of the right of colonized peoples to sovereign statehood,
U.S. liberals are willing to tolerate the intolerable, to provide institutional
spaces and pseudo-constitutional cover for a Hindutva technocrat with blood on
his hands. It’s not a question of “intervention,” as Malhotra puts it; this
shit is happening in West Philly. The soft normativity of postcolonial respect
transforms transnational interactions into scenes of international recognition.
Thus, the claim, “the U.S. needs to respect India’s sovereignty” becomes, by a
conservative poco sleight of hand, “Penn needs to welcome Modi.” By
legitimating Modi and assisting in the purification of his bloody record, such
welcome might end up producing the reality it assumes: enhanced by a positive
reception in the U.S., Modi might end up personifying India on the
international stage as its PM.
We desperately need to
update postcoloniality for transnational times. Not in theory (it’s already
there) but in our pedagogy, whether in classrooms or in the public sphere. This
is a boots-on-the-ground question: soft postcolonial normativity calcifies the
political and ethical purchase of international borders, producing what the
arch-conservative Burke called a “moral geography” utterly out of sync with the
transnational political exigencies of our times, and so inhibiting potential
allies from helping out. Indeed, those of us who organized against Modi’s
coming to Wharton were a little saddened by the lack of reception that we
expected from our friends and colleagues—people who, just last year, were out
and about for Occupy. I’m also saddened that anti-racist and anti-fascist
organizers are not more invested (invested at all?) in preventing the BJP from
using U.S. localities to gain enhanced power for anti-Muslim ends—they
certainly go after Golden Dawn. We need, then, to develop a public political
language for relating the necessity of challenging this pernicious form of
transnational right-wing organization. I’m not sure if the rhetoric of “fascism”
that some of us have been using—myself included—is useful, no matter how
accurately it describes either the existent phenomenon or anticipated project
of Modism. I say this because the sign “fascism,” in the U.S. public sphere,
invokes an event so horrendous as to be removed from politics and so (except
for antifa people) from politicization. The horrific grandeur of the term might
turn some off (“That’s an exaggeration”) or reduce others to quietism (“What
can I do?”). In the U.S., fascism is (for better or worse) in a museum, but
Modism is on the streets. It
walked across 34th Street yesterday, arm in arm with the U.S. right,
carrying posters of Franklin and Modi and racist caricatures of my teachers and
friends. College liberals clapped their hands, congratulating them on defending
their rights.
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