“The world is how we want to make it, it is our creation,” the sociologist, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, quotes Benito Mussolini as telling a journalist in her influential cultural-historical study of Italian fascism. The book, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, emphasised the role of fascist leaders as “artist-creators”, engaged in a deeply aestheticised enactment of politics. According to Zamponi, the exquisitely performed spectacles of fascist violence were meant to exalt politics into a sphere of “absolute autonomy”: the “pursuit of total aims without any limits from laws, tradition, or ethical values.”
Zamponi would have appreciated the raw psychological power unleashed by the spectacular murder of Atiq Ahmad on television. The visuals were enough to “knock out the senses” of the viewer, the desired impact of fascist spectacles, as described by Zamponi. Furthermore, the act of violence explosively crystallised — in the intimate and unmistakable language of aestheticised political violence — the relationship of power between the dominant group and the dominated group. A band of anonymous criminals, symbolising the righteous vengeance of one group, felling a feared bahubali (strongman politician), the symbol of venal corruption of another group, to ritualised chants associated with dominant group violence (“Jai Shri Ram”).
The apparent ‘collusion’ of comatose police officials further consecrated the violence with the legitimacy of State protection. While the nondescript criminals would soon fade into anonymity again, the face that would be indelibly associated with this act of ‘righteous justice’/ ‘State thuggery’ would be that of Yogi Adityanath, the Hindutva leader who valorises ‘police encounters’ (‘thok denge’) and who framed his successful re-election bid as a referendum on the continuation of the “80% versus 20%” rule. The symbolic meanings that are not just quietly understood but also openly celebrated represent the wafer-thin allowance given to the official pretentions of rule and law and democratic governance.
Yet, to merely describe certain kinds of violence as ‘fascist’ does little to illuminate its roots, let alone disempower it. The function of ‘fascist spectacles’ is to ‘mystify’ political contradictions or the workings of relations of power in order to create a ‘sacred’ State and a ‘homogenous’ political community. Fascist spectacles, in Zamponi’s account, served two purposes for the Mussolini regime. One, they helped “circumvent the [regime’s] contradiction of attacking the bourgeoisie on moral grounds while cultivating it as an economic asset.” Second, they served to “revitalize the politician’s role” by basing political legitimacy on ‘sacred action’ as opposed to ‘corrupt’ bureaucratic control.
Spectacles of extra-institutional violence play a similar legitimising role for the political authority in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. Contrary to the ruling party’s rhetoric, UP is crippled by feeble State capacity and a weakly instituted rule of law. Criminal politicians remain pivotal to mobilising electoral support. Almost half of BJP’s elected legislators in the state have declared criminal cases against them. Presently, the party is desperately hanging on to one such representative, the parliamentarian, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, despite the embarrassment over allegations of sexual harassment levelled by women wrestlers.
If UP has indeed become ‘mafia-free’, what explains the ruling regime’s dogged protection of Singh? After all, the Thakur strongman from impoverished eastern UP is a politician who reportedly traversed the familiar route from illegal liquor business to controlling government contracts, raking up legions of criminal charges. Is it because the Adityanath regime represents a “monopolistic mafia raj”, as the anthropologist, Lucia Michelutti, an expert on mafias in South Asia, has characterised it? According to Michelutti, the criminal networks of the “old mafia raj” in the state have merely become “centralized” and “camouflaged” under “saffron scarfs”. The difference, Michelutti argues, is the shift in the locus of the protection apparatus, from the local party machinery under the Samajwadi Party regime to the centralised framework of an ‘authoritarian regime’ under Adityanath,
Since UP’s political economy — the contractor-criminal-politician nexus controlling economic resources — remains firmly entrenched in corruption, mafia bosses continue to thrive in the state. As the journalist, Arunabh Saikia, has noted in an exhaustive study of criminal networks in present-day UP, the much-hyped mafia crackdown has been mostly targeted at Muslim and Yadav strongmen while protecting those belonging to the traditionally powerful upper castes, especially the Thakurs, the caste-base of Adityanath. The level of visible violence has come down, as Saikia has also reported, since the mafias are operating under a ‘centralized’ form of ‘legal protection networks’ and are hence subject to increased supervision as well as reduced competition.
We can, in fact, trace the nature of State formation in UP by charting the evolving nature of violence. The State traverses the feudal-democratic-authoritarian journey, as does the institutional form of violence.
Many reputed scholars of political violence in India, such as Thomas Blom Hansen and Milan Vaishnav, have traced the emergence of local strongmen politicians in Maharashtra as well as in UP to the decline of the single-party dominance of the Congress. By the mid-1970s, the legitimacy of the patronage-based feudal authority of landlord-run party machineries started giving way to that of the populist, charismatic authority of mafia bosses. Furthermore, the march of “political democratisation” had been “paralleled” by a “democratisation of violence,” writes Michelutti. The upwardly mobile Yadav, Kurmi and Muslim strongmen in UP contested the dominance of traditional Brahmin and Rajput strongmen as competition for criminal protection networks became more de-centralised and democratic.
This transition of political violence from one institutional form to another was accompanied by an increase of ‘visible violence’. In the feudal era, violence had been neatly embedded in State institutions controlled by dominant upper-caste groups. Spectacles of extra-institutional violence were largely unnecessary as the political authority of the local landlord-bureaucrat elite appeared unchallengeable. As Pierre Bourdieu theorised, institutional violence (he termed it “symbolic violence”) generally takes the shape of socially-accepted, invisible violence. The local ‘democratic’ strongman, meanwhile, had to sometimes rely on extra-institutional ‘spectacles of violence’ because of, first, the need to cultivate/reinforce an ‘autonomous’ source of authority and, second, as a response to an open-ended competition for the control of State institutions. Thus, the ‘feudal system’ protected a brutally oppressive regime of invisible violence, whereas the ‘democratic system’ foments high levels of visible street violence. However, both landlords and mafias merely carried out different forms of institutionally-sanctioned violence. The Weberian State “monopolizing the means of legitimate violence” never quite existed in UP. The capacity of maintaining order and carrying out legitimate violence had been first parcelled out to landlord-run party machineries and, subsequently, to institutionally-affiliated mafia bosses.
Given this context, let’s now attempt to answer two related questions. What are the institutional underpinnings of the ‘authoritarian system’ of violence erected in contemporary UP? What role do spectacles of fascist violence play in this system of violence?
The apparatus of legitimate violence has now been concentrated in a central authority, represented by Adityanath, and carried out through a politicised police-bureaucratic machinery. While institutional sanction for legitimate violence can still be accorded to privileged Hindutva affiliates or criminal networks, these groups remain fairly subordinate to the police’s authority. The real institutional pillars of control in UP are the big industrial corporates, corporatised media networks, and bureaucratic channels. The alliance of these three State-allied actors represents the concentration of institutional power within a thin crust of upper-caste, middle-class elite. The vast majority of the population, the poor and the backward castes, exert little control over the State apparatus and its architecture of violence. Not too long ago, the Allahabad High Court strongly reprimanded the state police for the “thorough misuse” of the draconian Gangster Act. The court cited the case of a labourer booked under that ‘anti-mafia’ Act based on the Kafkaesque recovery of a few thousand rupees and some packets of cigarettes.
The spectacles of fascist Hindutva violence then play the very role Zamponi ascribed to it. They disembed politics from social reality, resolving the contradiction between a highly privileged middle-class elite and a disempowered population. The reality, of course, cannot be entirely obscured — 43% respondents told a Lokniti survey last year that the government only benefited upper castes. Similarly, while the concentration of power echoes the feudal era, the political authority has now been ‘sacralised’ into the figure of a monk-king whose ‘action-hero’ charisma is refurbished every day on television screens.
The inherent instability of the aesthetically constructed ‘Hindu community’ requires a forever rolling phantasmagoria of State-choreographed Hindutva violence. Perhaps the more realistic danger lies not in the population becoming morally repulsed, but it eventually becoming sensorily numb and aesthetically bored.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
