Of flags, faces and fascism

When we were younger, T-shirts hung from our bodies like flags at half-mast, unlikely symbols of procrastinating rebellions. A rude message, a shocking colour, an unwashed tone, an abrupt tear, an untidy tuck – these were all part of the vocabulary of a teenager's kitchen-sink revolutions. Such battles were waged against parents, mathematics teachers, school bellboys, prudish girlfriends and evasive boyfriends, but most often against the reflections of boredom in our bathroom mirrors. Very rarely were these cheeky messages directed at notaries of institutionalised power or political nannies. Occasionally a Che would appear on a black T-shirt, or a Save Tibet or Palestine – both places as distant to our schoolbook imagination as was their imagined existence on a map. These white fingerprints of a bony hand on black fabric were our markers of protest, individuality, solidarity – and, often, our cries for help.

The recent sequence of violent events in Nandigram brought back sudden memories of our use of cloth as markers of 'protest'. Under the direction of an absurd dramatist – a stubborn chief minister sponsored by his arrogant politburo – farmers and their families were being banished and then returned, all of which culminated in an epilogue of the planting of red Communist Party of India (Marxist) flags all over the place: in front of houses, on electric poles, bridges – even at the mouth of a broken well.

What was being 'celebrated' in Nandigram was a subculture of coercion, perfected from a fledgling cottage industry to a fine craft over the 30 years of communist rule in West Bengal. The flags of the party – in Bengali a word used synonymously with the CPI (M) – were used to announce the return of the 'faithful', the party supporters who had their land and houses 'returned' to them. They also signified the baptism of the pagan, those who had opposed the seizure of Nandigram by a communist arriviste's capitalism.

Flags announce independence, declare domination, celebrate anniversaries. But in Nandigram, the wind blew only in one direction, making all the flags flutter in unison. As a child, I remember how most of my friends refused to wear Michael Jackson's emotionless face on their shirts. This was not just a protest against a culture of fawning over celebrity, but also a refusal to become one of the many – an attestation of the tiny fingerprints of difference, of individuality.

But the red flags in Nandigram are the props of the absurd dramatist's dystopic vision: the end-signs of a revolution hurried to completion. They are the Left Front government's self-delusional symbols of victory, similar to a child feeling closer to the sun by virtue of sitting nearer to the car window. The red flags, their hammer-and-sickle prints strangely decontextualised amidst farmland on which such tools had once been put to good use, hung limply outside houses like surnames forced violently onto newlywed brides, desperately erasing difference.

Modi masks
There has been a similar rhetoric of sameness during the Bharatiya Janata Party's recent election campaign in Gujarat. There, the party's supporters were moving about on motorcycles, wearing masks bearing the likeness of Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Ahmedabad had been turned into a city of mirrors, where all walls reflected the image of just one man. If the red flag in West Bengal was a sacred thread that gave the land-refugees a new religion, then the Modi masks likewise gave his supporters a common name.

Masks are hyphens between hiding and revealing. In Ahmedabad, they are hyphens and dashes, simultaneously connecting and explaining: connecting men who, unlike my friends who refused to wear Michael Jackson T-shirts, love to block out their individuality; and explaining, to the rest, that all the words in the dictionary have only one meaning, the many men becoming Modi. The masks, for these saffron men without imagination, are resolution and respite, a necessary escape from personality and an urgent indulgence in the cesspool of a virtual commonality. Masks are, oftentimes, props of satire and irony. Narendra Modi's face superimposed onto the faces of his men is the utopian's ultimate fantasy of 'democracy': not a government where he is us, but one where we are him.

Red and saffron are not too distant from each other on the colour spectrum, after all. Their alternating cycles of rejection and acceptance, as in the cases of Taslima Nasreen and M F Hussain by the West Bengal and Gujarat governments, reveal how the language of the new fascist uprising has come to be coded in the symbols of the everyday: the face, where dark circles of the memory of violence can be concealed by borrowed masks; and the flag, on which shadows have no lifelines.

— Sumana Roy teaches at the Department of Humanities, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College.