‘Shame’ Marx says ‘is a revolutionary feeling’, but people immune to the commodity structure rarely feel that way. They accept oppression. Shame is natural. This recognition and glorification of the natural become an ideology that justifies the unnatural and hinders the human struggle against his liberation – people become shameless.
‘World is a stage’ where people come to play their roles, for wild the ‘play is badly cast’. Probably his clairvoyance had seen Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Zelensky as the future actors who reshaped the world outside in the street making it as violent as the world of entertainment was.
Gorbachev was another in line. Instead of finding a solution within the Soviet structure by transferring power to the working class, he looked to Reagan and Felipe Gonzalez of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) to solve the economic woes and ended up hoisting his own petard. He presided over the dissolution of Soviet Union shamelessly, but shame being a revolutionary feeling does not augur well for those afflicted by the castration fear. He had his job cut out by a fellow reactionary, Boris Yeltsin, the shock therapist of the Russian Federation, who took over the reins to break havoc on the people.
Pakistan had its moment of shame when ninety thousand fully armed soldiers surrendered meekly. The chivalrous, valiant commanders marching over the civilian cadavers bowed before the inevitable. Despite the humiliation, the feverish desire to retain power and the presidency never emaciated. After losing half the country to the Indians, Yahya felt scant shame. Incidentally, he akin to Yeltsin was not only arrogant but allegedly debauch and lewd. For the Islamists, these and not the colonization of the eastern wing were the real factors behind the nation’s downfall.
Reagan made the relation of power and Hollywood clear to the public eye while opening the vistas of an overt plunder to the Wall Street. ‘Entertainment fosters resignation, it does not sublimate, it suppresses’ the thought. A mediocrity in entertainment and in politics became a celebrity for a while before the specter of neo-liberalism, lurking from the 1980s, came to haunt the American people.
Both India and Pakistan had their Hamlets; the former had Nehru, a charismatic man of destiny, the face of a socialist bourgeoisie that conceded Pakistan to the British designs. When in 1946 the Cabinet Mission offered a plan, keeping India geographically intact, Jinnah latched upon the proposal but Indian capitalists in their majoritarian narcissism discarded the option; letting history took its course. Did shame ever visit the leaders of the ‘two nations’ in which millions of innocent people on either side of the divide paid the price through their blood? Incidentally, none could achieve a nation state.
How about Larry Collins’ ‘golden sparrow’, the Mahatma beseeching Mountbatten not to slice the baby, and pass on the power to Jinnah, while his own party was preparing to take over the reins of a partitioned India? On his day, did he try to save his blushes by rescuing Bhagat Singh – demanding liberation from political and economic servitude – from the gallows?
Indian history had two major turning points undermined by native capitalism. The murder of Bhagat Singh and the revolt of the Royal Indian Navy of February 1946, led by M.S. Khan and Madan Singh spreading throughout India from Karachi to Calcutta, and condemned by both leading parties. It was a historic show of unity, the negation of communalism at a juncture of history when both major parties had almost achieved the partition of India. How could they have let go of the historic opportunity of becoming the messiahs of people whom they were splitting with a religious sword?
The judicial murder of Baghat Singh and his comrades played an instrumental role in the resuscitation of Congress and especially Gandhi. Baghat’s revolutionary message moved the people, especially the younger lot, to action. Socialism touched the heart of the people, and the revolutionaries ignited the fire for absolute freedom. Both Nehru and Jinnah, the believers of non-violence, had to support them. It was probably the first time when Jinnah condemned ‘the damnable system of governance … resented by the people’.
While Gandhi found Irwin’s reasoning of not commuting the death penalty of the revolutionaries ‘weighty’, the public’s response was different; enraged they welcomed him with black flags chanting the slogan of ‘down with Gandhi’. The myth of Gandhi’s politics and his non-violence exploded. His trademark hunger strikes became a weapon in the hands of revolutionaries for triggering the flame of freedom into a blazing fire. Death of Jatindra Nath Das who gave his life after 63 days of hunger strike became a discerning feature between a series of blackmail by a bourgeois individual and a revolutionary conviction that kissed the death consciously.
The two movements enhanced the war of position into a war of maneuver by bringing the ‘underground warfare’ into open. The humiliated and insulted, the subaltern paved their way out of ‘Gandhism’, for Gramsci ‘a naïve theorization of the passive revolution with religious overtones’, by making a frontal attack through their spontaneity. Under the banner of Charkha-Crescent-Hammer and Sickle, the sailors marched in thousands raising the slogans of ‘Hindu-Muslim unity’ and of ‘Revolution’. When Admiral Godfrey threatened them of dire consequences, they appealed to the people and the Indian politicians to come to their aid, the people did but the bourgeois politician disappeared.
The general strike called by the Communist Party and Bombay Student Union was total. Both Hindus and Muslims provided basic amenities and food to the rebels for free. The barrack walls’ B.C. Dutt pointed out ‘were no longer high enough to contain the tide of nationalism’, but the hostility of Gandhi and Patel towards the rebels was undisguised. For Patel, the rebels were ‘a bunch of young hotheads messing with things they had no business in.’ Jinnah also placed himself in the opposing camp. Patel negotiated with them and once the strike was called off gave them to the wolves. The last chance to keep India united was lost with no guilt, but the massacre became a moment of collective shame for the subcontinent.
We need history but not the way, Nietzsche warned, the ‘spoiled loafers in the garden of knowledge’ gave us. There was no dearth of spontaneous revolutionary movements against colonialism in India, but none could turn itself into a permanent organization hence failed to produce its organic intellectuals. Despite the heroic efforts, the leaders had to look to the national bourgeoisie for guidance, that is, where heroism was relegated to adventurism. Milton’s ‘wicked races of deceivers took the virgin truth and hued its lovely forms into a thousand pieces’. The rebels were left in the cold to rot, and the exploits of their struggle were shared among the parasitic classes that recolonized the people once the masters left.
India under Modi and Pakistan under the Bonaparts are the continuation of the same shameless bourgeois scourge, where people deny death by avoiding life. The persecution of the weak including the Muslims and working-class Hindus in India, and the wretched of the earth, especially the Baloch in Pakistan is inseparable from the system of order. ‘Force’ Adorno says ‘is essential nature of capitalist order’ and so is persecution. The property-less are powerless but as long as ‘they challenge decadence, they will carry hope’ of a better world.
