Defamed in death - the scurrilous implications of the CD on Tapasi Malik

By Shamita Basu. May 7, 2009. The Statesman

Recently, a propaganda film was made on Tapasi Malik’s death, based essentially on the premise that her murder was not political, but the result of a family feud stemming from an abortion, an affair, and an irate father. The film was written by Mandakranta Sen, and propagated a myth created by the CPIM within minutes of the discovery of Malik’s body in December 2006 - ed.

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha election, the Election Commission has issued a notice to CITU on its controversial production and circulation of a CD on Tapasi Malik’s murder in Singur. The CPI-M’s trade union front sent its reply on 17 April. It reads: “The CD has been produced by Citu but it does not have the symbol of any party and does not undertake any kind of campaigning”.
The Citu secretary told the Indian Express that the CD was produced “to expose the CBI’s role in the murder and to inform the working class about the case”. It is paradoxical that the ruling party’s labour wing should defame and vilify one of the members of the segment that they supposedly represent ~ the working class.

The name of Tapasi Malik, who had participated in the peasant uprising in Singur, had steadily acquired the status of a memorial. The production and circulation of calumny through the CD was intended to undermine the memory of Tapasi who died an untimely and tragic death. It was a desperate attempt to provoke the backward rural poor. So obsessive is this culture of necropolitics that the dead is subjected to humiliation and ignominy through the circulation of sordid scandals and rumours. Very palpably, it is a culture of vulgarity and depravity, embedded in what can be described as the “productivity of death”.

Vulgar mentality

It is outrageous that a Left trade union organisation, that rides high on rhetoric of progress and describes itself as the protector of the working class, should even be remotely connected with the production and circulation of a story intended to defame the dead.

It is intended also to denigrate the victim’s family by concocting a plot that reeks of a venal, decadent and vulgar mentality that has characterised the ruling party’s culture in Bengal. The feeling of shame is a scarce commodity in the politics of contemporary Bengal.

Jacques Lacan had once argued that “shame is a function of one’s own situation within, a hyper-awareness of the gaze of the other”. To discount the value of the other as witness to one’s own life is to live without shame. The regime in Bengal lives without shame because there has been a steady suppression of the “other’’. The “otherness” or opposition is not only exceptional but also offensive. The party’s government cannot tolerate criticism or the opposition’s scanner.

This is the hallmark of a non-democratic totalitarian regime which is driven by what the celebrated African social scientist, Achille Mbembe, describes as the instincts and habits of “phallocracy”. As he famously argued: “Phallic domination has been all the more strategic in power relationship not only because it is based on the mobilisation of the subjective foundations of masculinity and feminity, but also because it has direct and close connections with the general economy of sexuality.”

The more the party mandarins are pressured into civility, the worse is the catharsis that flows out in the form of virulent verbal assaults on the opposition. Either a representative of the minority community is to be imprisoned or the opposition decimated. No sphere of womanhood has been spared by the party, the intemperate criticism occasionally extending to the leader of the opposition. So crude and relentless is the barrage of obscenities that it can now only be described as the delirium of a regime gone mad.

Inherent is the lack of self-control. The CD on Tapasi points to a degree of perversity that is alarming. It seeks to influence the rural poor by denigrating the standards of civility.

The sordid CD is an attempt to circulate and valorise a backward and primitive view of sexual mores. This is inflicted on the minds of the rural poor as the parameter of moral conduct by which the likes of Tapasi who dared to dissent can be judged.

Incidents of rape, torture, felony, trafficking in women, are now the regular and ordinary features of everyday life in Bengal. Instead of effectively engaging itself in the business of delivering and distributing goods and services equally to people, this government of 32 years’ standing seeks to create a myth about the supposedly progressive condition of workers, peasants and the poor.

The myth went unchallenged because of the two-pronged strategy of power that has ruled the people through appropriation and penetration. Rape is one such strategy; penetrating and appropriating public space through party cadres is another. Proper names, argued the political philosopher Carl Schmitt, are concerned with appropriation and appropriateness.

Radical indifference

It is indeed a social scientist’s wonder how such names as “Rice (chaal) Swapan” and “Fish (machh) Swapan” or “Boot Clad Asoke” are circulated and socially validated to strike terror among the people. Popular euphemism, relating to staple food items, sustains power and corruption. Political leaders thereby demonstrate the close relationship between consumption and domination.

The ability to penetrate, appropriate and consume is public proof of power complete with a radical indifference to utility. Political narratives and practices dealing with symbolism probably signify an excess of consumption and power, exemplified in vulgar speech and obscenity that overshadow the functions of the State.

Bengal is in a state of primitive rule where the bodies of women, the minds of the people and the space that they inhabit are all sought to be appropriated and consumed without fear, and in the name of Marx. Indeed, Marxism has met a tragic fate in this part of the world. As a run-up to the elections, a cynical propaganda is constantly evoked and projected to conceal reality. It is time this mask was lifted to at least rescue Marxism in Bengal.

(The writer is the Indian representative of Women in War, an academic project of FemAid, a humanitarian organisation based in Paris)