Into the oblivion
A week full of confusions...
Dear Reader,
I hope you are well. Well, it’s been a week since I last wrote to you.
Now, I see the purpose of writing this newsletter every week, which was very fuzzy (like the name here: fuzzy notes) and confusing. This letter can help me connect and write to you each week about what my week has been like—and what I have been reading lately.
Having said that, I now think I should clarify why this week has driven me into oblivion. Or, as Nietzsche once said, “If you gaze too deep into the abyss, the abyss will stare back unto you”. There is a lot of abyss that surrounds the world today.
There is all that is happening in Gaza. Deeply troubling—and unfathomable. I have often felt that, in times like this, the US would fuck it up wholly in what it believes—and be exposed to its own deep-seated racial biases. For the US, what happens in Gaza is merely a humanitarian crisis, whereas what Putin is doing in Ukraine is a war crime.
I have often thought of Israel as an “American Taboo”. Here is something I wrote on this aspect.
Here is a short excerpt:
We no longer talk about the Israeli state excesses, settler colonialism, or the persecution of the Palestinian people in Israel. The Zionist State of Israel, which is attempting to survive, is always the putative “victim” in this “perpetrator-victim” narrative that the rest of the world, like America, now applies to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel’s genocidal objective, which is predicated on victimhood and state survival, is currently focusing on a significant attack in the Gaza region, and hardly anyone has stood out against it.
In the process of re-telling the Israel-Palestine issue through “Secondly,” all of Israel’s transgressions are absolved, while the supposed crimes of the Gaza people are underlined. It has not only conditioned us to the point where one cannot sympathise with Palestine, but it has also made us accomplices in the historical atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Because of the linguistic manipulation, we are all now victims of the American “Israel” taboo. We cannot firmly endorse Palestine without condemning Hamas. Furthermore, we cannot criticise Israel without defending its right to exist. Today, we are all made to read the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of “Secondly”, and that has made all the difference.
Read: “America’s ‘Israel’ Taboo is Now Everyone’s to Deal With”
In times like this, we need to rethink the “social contract”—how society ought to rethink ways to organize itself so that the least empowered feel the most empowered and the most deprived feel the least deprived. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the editors at the Financial Times wrote of the need to think of “radical reforms required to forge a society that will work for all.”
I think in the instances of why wars are fought in society, we need to think of deep, underlying reasons and figure out ways to mitigate them. Is there a way of shaming those who have caused harm to society (like what the Israeli government officials have been doing to Gaza’s civilians and killing thousands of children every day)? Will history treat them kindly? Does history’s treatment even matter? All these things are something for us to ponder about.
Here is a short link to understanding the intensity of the Israel-Hamas war and its impact on civilian lives through maps.
Apart from that, Rafa Nadal (one of my favourite sportspersons) lost to Alex Zvarev in his (almost) final appearance in Rolland Garros. It was sad. Nonetheless, as someone once said, we must celebrate people for their impact on our lives rather than being sad or gloomy. I feel that each of us grows old—and in the process, we tend to lose on what we would do. And that is how it is.
It looks like Modi’s BJP will have a decisive victory once again if one were to go by the predictions of exit polls. Some have even gone overboard to predict that Modi may even cross 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. Well, in that vein, I came across this brilliant interview between Yamini Ayyar and Rohan Venkat discussing what makes Modi’s BJP really a formidable force.
In their discussion, Yamini outlines a “techno-patrimonial welfare state”—an idea of welfare not as a social contract based on a normative framework of rights but as a “gift offered by the party leader” towards its citizens. It merely means that when political leaders (specifically the BJP leaders) talk about Direct Benefits Transfer, the whole narrative sustains around the “patronage and charisma of the leader” who provides stuff.
Elsewhere, Yamini Ayyar has outlined the framework broadly:
Beyond these reductive frameworks, I posit that India is coalescing toward a “techno-patrimonial” character of welfarism, one that strips itself of any emancipatory goals such as advancing social citizenship and building solidarity. Instead, it casts citizens as passive recipients (labharthis) of state largesse rather than active claim-making, rights-bearing actors. This form of welfare is a critical to politics of the contemporary moment, where political power is increasingly manufactured through the deification of the leader and unbridled voter loyalty extracted through welfare benefits.
According to Yamini, welfare politics (even freebies) was based on the normative logic of the state as exercising its rights to ease the lives of citizens and empower their rights. However, the BJP’s new mechanisms to directly transfer money into bank accounts create a subordinate status for citizens, who are now seen as people receiving gifts from the big leader.
Besides these things, I have also written a few things myself.
I recently wrote a brief essay, with insights from my paper earlier published with IA titled: feeling for the Anthropocene. In this new article for E-International Relations, I look at how global ecological activism can benefit from the emotional valence of Chipko’s activism.
Apart from that, I also wrote this one essay on Jinnah’s Spirit for my blog this week. In this essay, I point to the initial political crisis in Pakistan soon after Jinnah’s death—and how the military bureaucratic apparatus took hold of the state. During that period, almost exactly seven years after Jinnah’s death, a certain person from the government called Mr. Ibrahim conducted a seance of Jinnah’s spirit.
After the initial pleasantries between the spiritualist and Mr. Jinnah (the spirit), Mr. Ibrahim (an officer of the Government of Pakistan) is permitted by the spirit Jinnah to speak with him. Mr. Ibrahim’s first question is: “Would you like to smoke a cigarette?” A cigarette is lighted and fixed in a wire-stand upon an affirmative answer. Mr Ibrahim adds: “Sir, as a creator and father of Pakistan, you have done your best to bring it up on proper lines, won’t you guide the destiny of the nation now? To this, Mr. Jinnah responds: “My dear friend, it is not for me now to go to Pakistan and guide the political situation there. I see here flashes of evil pictures about Pakistan. I think the political conditions there are most unhappy. There are the Heads who have in them selfishness, and none at all is eager to be selfless there”.
Read: “When Jinnah’s Spirit Spoke of Pakistan’s Future”
Well, now it looks like I have written enough for today. I hope you came to learn something or just enjoyed reading this letter. Beyond all this confusion, I hope and wish that the week ahead brings me some clarity on this. But tomorrow, we have election results in India, so fingers crossed on that! 🤞
If you enjoyed reading this essay, do spread the word—and share it with others :)
Warmly,
Adarsh.