A Game of Chess

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” Franklin Roosevelt’s honest and candid admission of political events as pre-planned has never been truer than what had happened in Bihar in less than 24 hours. Even Vishy Anand will have to salute the political masters whose planned moves on the political chess board of Bihar have successfully spaced the board with saffron pieces that augurs well for the saffronization of the National chess board, come 2019. So now we have a modified version of the popular nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty had a great Fall

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty dumped Dumpty who had a great fall.

All Rahul’s men and all Lalu’s men

Could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.

   The arrow, that was lighted jointly by the hand and the lantern 20 months back has no need for either and is now absorbed by the blooming lotus. It has been a bloodless surgical strike, drowning the Gandhi scion and the Lalu scion in its saffron bath. The saffron deluge, powerful as the Kosi floods, has washed away the Mahaghatbandhan before it could be raised to resist it. Like The Sorrow of Bihar that shifted its course from flowing westwards to flowing eastwards, the arrow has shifted its course from the Mahagatbandhan towards the Lotus.

 The history of Bihar has now got a new script, meticulously worked out where the alignment is     between foes and not friends. The allies of the past are the new opponents and the saffronites are the newfound frenemies. The astute game that had been played on the Bihar chess board reminds me of of  T.S.Eliot’s ‘ A Game of Chess’ in his modern classic The Waste Land.

 ‘A Game of Chess’ begins with a description of a woman sitting on a beautiful chair. Both the woman and the room are magnificently attired, perhaps to the point of excess. One of the paintings in the room depicts the rape of Philomela, a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the original story, King Tereus’s wife bids him to bring her sister Philomela to her. Upon meeting Philomela, Tereus falls instantly and hopelessly in love; nothing must get in the way of his conquest. Racked with lust, he steals away with her and rapes her in the woods.  He then ties her up and cuts off her tongue so that she may not tell others of what had happened. He returns to his wife, but Philomela is able to weave on a loom what has befallen her; she gives the loom to her sister, who, upon discovering the truth, retrieves Philomela, and takes revenge on him. Tereus flies into a rage, chasing both Philomela and his wife out of the palace, and all three of them transform into birds. The speechless Philomela becomes a nightingale.

One does not have to look for a one to one parallel, though such a comparison is notwide off the mark. The Modi-Shaw duo sits pretty in New Delhi looking at the painting of Bihar, depicting Crown Prince Nitish with his twin partners, the Lalus and the Ragas. The Lalus were his early friends, who had in recent times influenced him to take the Ragas also into his durbar. Racked with ambition to become the PM with the help of the Lalus and the Ragas, he decides on the Mahagatbandhan . But Nitish suspects Lalu of playing a different tune and so cuts off both Lalu’s tongue and Raga’s hand and goes in search of Dilli durbar to bolster him.

 The section in Eliot’s poem depicting the painting of the rape of Philomela – an example of love cascading into brutality and violence – is the scene in Bihar today where one sees an example of friendship cascading into betrayal and trickery. Crown Prince is lured by the promise of privileged status he could enjoy in their company- a promise that in reality is more menacing than beautiful. He fails to see how the duo trapped  him by calling him the MVP(most valued person) and made him choose the company of foes turned friends but at a heavy price of relinquishing his ambitions to become the PM  and being sneered at as a turncoat.

 “A Game of Chess” is from Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth-century play of the same title, which posited the said game as an allegory to describe historical machinations –- specifically the brewing conflict between England and Spain. Here the political machinations to abort the Mahaghatbhadan in its foetal stage are clearly seen in the political chess game that is being played. When the Crown Prince asks the Modi-Shaw duo what he should do, they tell  him “We shall play a Game of Chess”. Chess recalls “lidless eyes,” as its players bide the time and wait “for a knock upon the door.” The first knock- and that a felling knock- was on Lalu and his children by the Enforcement Directorate to nail the Lalu clan as corrupt. Chess becomes the quintessential game played on the corrupt board of Bihar, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of all moral scruples. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board.

Crown Prince is hailed by the Modi-Shaw duo as the shining Knight in a saffron armour, striding across Bihar putting out the lantern flame and the hand that had lit it. The narrative scripted by the Modi- Shaw duo has a new message given through the Crown prince- It is no longer the hand that rocks the cradle, but it is the cradle that rocks the hand.

Freedom and Enslavement

                                                             Freedom and Enslavement

The genesis of this article rests on  a mail I received two weeks  back, requesting me to put down my thoughts on the existing world order torn between fundamentalism and globalism (evidenced in international commercialization known as the McWorld) -  both  striving to impose their hegemony on the rest of the world. As a liberal humanist, nurtured by Gandhian values, it was a tempting effort to find a third alternative to the contracting idea of Jihad and McWorld. When the article was ready, I tried to test the worth of the article on a few close relatives and friends. While it was flattering to receive their appreciation, it was disconcerting to note the common advice they gave- to exercise caution in placing it on a public domain, that too in an international journal. Their logic and reasoning seemed sound as they feared a possible backlash in the event of someone misreading and misunderstanding the tenor of my argument. At 76+, with no celebrity status and no patronage of the high and the powerful, I realized how vulnerable I was to face an angry mob that believed in the hegemony of either of the two concepts. I decided to shelve the article till such time when it would be prudent to allow it to see the light of the day.  

The temptation to write to express one’s genuine feelings of apprehension and anxiety over a changed world order, that is full of sound and fury(though signifying nothing) is weakening  day by day for fear of violent reprisal from those who have both the muscle and arms power to endorse it. Contrary to the Tamil proverb that says young calves have no awareness of fear, today it is for the older cows and bulls to demonstrate their fearlessness and express what is not allowed to express. With age and experience, it is imperative that we, who belong to the older generation and brought up on classical liberal values that prioritize the freedom of an individual over all other things, must fearlessly confront forces that deny this fundamental right to live as we desire.

It is indeed an inalienable right of every individual to follow his religious faith and belief or alternately prefer not to worship.  So also everyone has an inordinate desire to express even if there is nothing to express. Everyone wants to speak about his beliefs, his ideology, his outlook and viewpoint-maybe to demonstrate that he is not straightjacketted into a uniform mode of thinking dictated by the ruling class or a powerful group. In short, we all long for a life that guarantees civil liberties, though in our own interest, we are willing to submit to an overarching law that moderates and restrains those liberties. It is this caveat against violating the rule of law in the  frenzied assertion to claim our right to freedom that  Rousseau hints at in his famous paradoxical phrase: “man is born free; everywhere he is in chains”. This dichotomy is fundamental to peaceful and orderly existence as it is founded upon individuality and solidarism - the sociological concept of interdependence of members of a society. Man can be free only if he accepts enslavement to the rules of law that legislate equal freedom to all individuals in a society. Live and let live is possible if our love of freedom is tempered by laws that do not allow anyone to privilege his own interests against and above those of his fellow beings nor desire for things he needs only for increasing his power over others. This is no doubt an impractical and utopian ideal to achieve and the only way to prevent enslavement taking over completely is to construct political institutions that allow the rule of compassion to provide the basis for legislation.  But today’s conflict is no longer my freedom versus your freedom, but has narrowed to an assertion that my freedom is the only freedom to prevail. How has this change come about?

The present day generation is stripping away history, truth and reality because of its exposure to a plethora of images through films, TV, advertisements that purport to be real, but are not, making it difficult to distinguish between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. The happy man or woman or a happy family, travelling in a plush car( the product advertised), enjoying an exhilarating evening as  shown in the advertisements is not real but shown as real. What had been seen as a solid, happy, real world is nothing but a tissue of dreamlike images. The superficial reality hides the hidden reality and has brought in a new culture of hyper-reality. We have the example given by Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist who referred to the 1991 Gulf war as something that never happened except it was a Television virtual reality. The coverage of surgical strikes during the Gulf War through computerized images of high tech weapons was nothing but an art of simulation. The present generation has been a victim of simulations whereby the simulated image tends to become the reality. Further with the new technological tools like the Social media and the Twitter, the younger generation has acquired anonymity that encourages it to use its inherent human right to  freedom of expression and  abuse all those who do not subscribe to its views and beliefs. Its restlessness, anger, violence and destruction arise out of a false belief in its right to exercise freedom without any curb on its paradoxically claimed privilege to total freedom.

We who belong to the older generation, having passed through our youthful age of fitful protestation nevertheless had appreciated the need for the chain which reflects the other side of the coin on which is stamped our basic freedom. But today that chain is no longer the arm of the government or the  Law enforcement authority, but the  chain is in the hands of the mob, who have become  the enforcing authority with regard to what we eat and what we express, what we read and what we see, what we wear and how we appear, what we acclaim and what we declaim against. Lynching by a mob has become the norm of the day. If you don’t like someone, abuse him/her using twitter anonymity. Social media has fanned out to many millions of people to influence them to think on the dotted lines. Today most of us are scared to express our fears and anxieties lest we should get lynched or attacked even while we stay within the four walls of our homes. The new generation with its impatience to read anything that demands cool analysis, logical thinking and reasoned judgement, skims through the surface, resorts to aleatory reading- selecting sentences at random -and displays hysterical frenzy if the writer’s views are not in sync with its views. Book burning, preventing screening of films it is opposed to, pelting stones and setting fire to property and vehicles and killing on false charges of smuggling beef  are being carried out as the new generation goes in search of a non- existent hyper reality. It grants itself the license to freedom of action to destroy the freedom of expression in others.

Democracy has yielded to the brute power of mobocracy. Freedom is unidirectional as directed by the mob. It is no longer the hallowed preserve of the liberal humanists and rationalists. It is only for those who refuse to be chained and not for those who are willing to be chained. The social contract is today one sided as it is weighed in favour of those who take law into their hands.  The loss of old world values that puts a premium on empathy, compassion, reaching out to fellow beings, cultivating humanity,  endorsed by Rousseau’s social contract has bred a new world that loves the spectacle of violence for the sake of violence.

Do I have the courage to write my apprehensions, fear and anxiety? Do I dare refuse to be chained by the mob? Do I have the strength and fortitude to speak about my willingness to surrender a small degree of freedom as demanded by the rule of Law? Do I dare use the Social media to plead for logic, reason and order to bring stability, peace and harmony among my people without being abused and trolled by the same media? Can we, the people of India show resilience to counter maniacal violence and restore our lost humanity?  I have shown no courage as I shelved my article far from the madding crowd. I seek comfort against the loss of my intrepidity in the great aphorism: “We are optimists by instinct and pessimists by experience.”