In the twenty five years that I have walked the earth, I had not seen two things, among many others: the Indian cricket team lifting the World Cup and a government without CPI(M) in West Bengal. Now that both the events have happened, one can safely say perhaps that history is back in movement. I am fortunate. Many people have to die without seeing Halley’s Comet.
In Parliamentary democracy, truth can only have two faces: the dominant ideology and its antithesis. Politics is reduced to a dyad. The totalitarian party-line of CPI (M) has been dialectically counterpointed by a seemingly self-dissolving party structure. The victory of TMC is being hailed as the victory of democratic mass movement beyond any hardened party-line. Thus the out-of-place candidatures, the beyond-party incorporation of civil society faces, eager to cash in and above all a non-theoretical prescription of alliterative simplicity: Ma [Mother], Mati [Soil] and Manush [the people]. There are three terms here. But is it really a politics of the three? The third term insists from its ex-centricity.
This is a modification indeed but is it real change? Can there be any real change from within the regime of Parliamentary Democracy, which as a structure, is perhaps the newest face of the Capital. What is interesting here is not only the way the Left political rhetoric has been hijacked by Mamta Banerjee and her party but also the way it has been radicalized in this apparent localization of democracy at a distance from the Parliamentary system of party-politics. This is a projected politics of the outside-of-politics, an effort, as it were, to reconfigure politics according to the demands of the market in this so-called post-political age.
A just subtraction has taken place. The corresponding affirmation works here as a pure promise in a mythological future. Do we wait for Godot then, knowing very well that he will never arrive? To wait for waiting’s sake only demands a lot of courage. Godot may not come, but others will. When the real outside takes on the pseudo-outside, the overlap of the two holes will produce another rupture.
It is always good to continue with ruptures.
So, let us continue to break.
There will be a point where the breaks will end. They will have to end at that pure point. How many mangled bodies still await us before that point? The body politic will have to be a real body for that to happen.
“Sparagmos” is that rotten body of truth.
Let us act in wait. As someone said, one may die a septuagenarian and still not see Halley’s Comet. Politics still seems to eclipse the not-all with the all.
