Excuse me, but what is Right Wing?
A deep, incisive, challenging multidisciplinary investigation into the Big Question. We try to make it easy for the reader with lithographs by Honore Daumier (1808-1879), the ‘Michelangelo of caricature’.
Apart from being opposed to left-wing people, who or what is a right-wing person? In judging this, we usually go by instinct. Very often they have lots of money. Sometimes they wear khaki shorts. Like Paul McCartney, they long for yesterday. All these are clues. But such a burning issue can no longer be left to guesswork, not when whole magazines are being put together on the subject.
In India, it could be anyone who hates Sagarika Ghosh. While this can be deeply satisfying, it seems rather fragile, ideologically speaking. What happens if she actually does immigrate to Pakistan? How do we fill the empty space in our lives? We could replace her with Arundhati Roy, but the emotions she evokes are so strong that sometimes people end up frothing too much at the mouth to form coherent sentences. This is not conducive to debate.
Until the 18th century, there were no wings, only kings. The principles of governance were simple. You obeyed the king, or he chopped off your head. If he was a bad king, he chopped off the heads of your family too, and in some cases, the rest of your village. If he was a good king, he settled for an arm or a leg. Even though kings were divine, and much greater than the rest of us, it was hard for them to do everything. So they surrounded themselves with a small group of well-armed and well-funded people. This became the aristocracy. They became rich and powerful because of their proximity to the ruler. As a result, life was very good for the king and his friends, but not so good for the rest of us.
The French are well known troublemakers. They changed this. They had a novel thought. ‘Why don’t we cut off the king’s head instead?’ they thought. ‘Maybe things will be better then.’ This was called the French Revolution. It was this Revolution that gave us the term ‘right wing’. Members of the French National Assembly in 1789, who supported the king, sat on the right. They supported the ancien regime, which is French for ‘this is the hotel of my father’. Outside the Assembly, the French people were busy killing clergymen and burning the homes of the rich. The right wing hurriedly gave away as many of their privileges as they could. Soon after, the people burst in and hauled most of them off to the guillotine. From this, the right wing learnt, at the very moment of its birth, that giving things away is never a solution.
The next 100 years were full of action, as people in other countries thought, if it worked for the French, than why not us? The Russians rose repeatedly. The British were far more gradual. They did kill their king, but they brought back his son, and they let most of the aristocracy live. These aristocrats became the Tories, whose philosophy was best summed up by the Duke of Cambridge. ‘There is a time for everything,’ he said, ‘And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted.’ The French right wing continued to thrive, inspired by Edmund Burke, and represented by people like Joseph De Maistre, who thought the most important employee of the State was the executioner, the ultimate guarantor of order. Meanwhile, Ferdinand of Naples, another notable conservative, dressed up as a woman and had himself sculpted as Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, by Canova. This shows that, even at this early stage, right wing politicians were willing to embrace diversity.
As usual, what used to be a simple matter was unnecessarily complicated by the Americans. In the early 19th century, Andrew Jackson, an angry man who massacred many Native Americans, invented producerism. Producerism rallied hard-working producers against evil parasites. The middle class, the honest farmer, and factory-owners were the producers. The poor, the bankers, and people who had immigrated more recently than them were the parasites. This is a rich and powerful tradition, which lives on in America. Even today, elements of the Tea Party attack big business for supporting immigration, which is an evil plot to get themselves cheap labour.
In fact, America was where economics was first introduced into the right wing thought process. At the turn of the 20th century, economic liberals and social conservatives joined hands, and the infernal brew that resulted was known as modern conservatism. They formed a union which has lasted for over a century, and has two guiding principles, ‘Don’t touch my money!’ and ‘Why aren’t you reading the Bible?’
This thought process has been very influential, and today most countries have at least one party which hates gay people and loves bankers. But there are wide variations across societies and cultures. For example, in America, ‘liberal’ is a swear word. In the UK, it’s a political party. In India, it’s a girl of loose character, as in ‘she is very liberal.’ Most fundamentally, what differentiates the right wing from the left wing is their attitude towards change. The right wing believes nothing should change. The left wing believes everything should change until they can take charge.
How has it worked out in India? We see everything through the lens of secularism. Broadly, we have two types of people: people devoted to cows, and anti-national pseudo-sickular Porkistani sluts. I’m no expert, but it’s probably not that simple. Why view everything through the lens of religion? A toilet has no religion, and neither does a roti. Many people in India need both. This doesn’t mean that faith isn’t important. Just that it’s not all-important.
In India, like everywhere else, the right wing is a force of reaction. Reaction to one man, and his theories, economic and social. I’m not naming him because I’m not sure that’s allowed here. Let’s call him the Evil One. But maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe we should just thank him that we’re not Pakistan, and get on with our lives. Because there’s more to life than secularism. It’s a good thing we’re remembering Rajaji again. His views on caste are a bit worrying, but he was also the man who coined the phrase ‘License Permit Raj’. Instead of spending all our time cursing the Evil One and his socialism, maybe we can think about this.
Who issues the licenses? Who produces the permits? Under whose Raj do we live? Why are they answerable to no one, and immune from any form of prosecution, unless they give permission, which they rarely ever do, even if we ask nicely? Adam Smith talked about the Invisible Hand. Whose hand is it that we feel on our necks, governing everything, from where we can put our penises to what we can make money from, and how much? Whose hand builds the schools without toilets, and the hospitals without doctors, and the irrigation systems for wineries, while farmers save up money for poison? Whose hand takes away 85 paise out of every rupee that’s supposed to reach the poor? Whose hand arrests the victims, and pats defense lawyers on the back, saying there, there, don’t worry, the file will be misplaced shortly?
Whose hand steals the homes of war widows, and jeopardizes our international relations because of a nanny, and keeps our brave soldiers on glaciers, with same-size-fits-all boots and no oxygen, and the nearest medical facility hundreds of miles away? Whose hand signs the vouchers for millions of phantom cleaners, while the garbage piles up on our streets? Could it conceivably be a hand nourished on salaries that come out of our pockets? Are we actually paying them to do this to us?
Pappus will come and Fekus will go. Even AK49 will one day leave us wondering whether he was a CIA agent or a Maoist, or just a man in a muffler with delusions of grandeur. The Evil One will become a distant memory. Maybe it’s time we stopped fighting each other, and saw who our real enemy is. Maybe we should pause, just for a while, in our battle on behalf of labour, or against it, and stop arguing about what our fiscal policy should be, and what exactly a Hindu Muslim is, and whether bikinis are good or evil. Maybe we should get together, as citizens, joined by a common cause, and push through new laws that will get that dead hand off our necks, once and for all. If some of those hands break stones in Tihar, so much the better.
That’s when we’ll really be free. That’s when we’ll have genuine swarajya.