They use BJP flags to tie up brooms tight here.

As I write this, I cannot shake off the fact that 28 years ago, today is the day when Babri was demolished. I read somewhere that many kar-sevaks brought in broken pieces of the Masjid as a reminder to the ‘heroic victory’ that they had had, as a reminder to the realization of the dream of a ‘Hindu rashtra’. I wonder what have they done with those broken concrete pieces of the Masjid? Do they still adorn their homes or have they been forgotten in some dusty insignificant corner of the house? The life-history of objects can really help us understand the behavior of people as individuals, communities and nations.

I have been doing my doctoral fieldwork from my ancestral house in a small village in lower Assam. This is a largely upper-caste village of Kalitas and Ganaks (the caste tasked with the ritual of naming infants). At one point, this used to be a socialist village, but for many years now there is a strong grip of the Assamese nationalist cum chauvinist party — Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and since 2016, a growing presence of the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On one bright winter afternoon, I noticed something interesting. Many of the tables in my ancestral house have AGP posters and big banners as table cloths while several BJP bandanas (or pieces of cloth to tie around the head by followers of the party) have been used to tie up home-made brooms and fix leaky pipes. On asking our house care-taker, Gopesh kaka, he said that people here wait up for the political parties’ rallies and meetings, particularly those organized by the BJP and AGP so that they can take back freely distributed Caps, flags, bandanas and if lucky, T-shirts. If one knows someone from the organizing committee, requests are often made to bring left-over or used posters back to the house which are then recycled to dry up rice, chilies or as in my house, even table-cloths.

To look at life-history of objects, as anthropologist Anna Tsing does with the mushroom can be fascinating as it can reveal a lot about larger structures and functioning of ideologies, particularly in the everyday. Material culture studies have shown how objects are not simply a set of things but a set of practices and with time and context, they can invoke a frenzy of varied meaning-making. Look at the AGP banner for example, while in a public meeting, this banner invokes meanings, sentiments and how it goes on shifting hands to finally reach a room where it is used to adorn tables and invoke absolutely different sentiments and meanings. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist had written how certain symbols gain existence only in a frenzied collective of people, and not with individuals alone. Those symbols gain sacredness in such collective groups while can remain profane for individuals in the everyday. Hence, Durkheim has always in his writings placed the sacred and hence the collective over and above the profane and hence the individual. I am not saying that in the context of these objects associated with the party politics. I am NOT placing the BJP flag used as a bandana in a public meeting above the flag used to fix leaky taps, nor am I indicating that the people here do that. But people indulge in constant meaning-making and it is fascinating how over-time objects are understood and experienced by people.

Also, what does it talk to us about the sacredness or functioning of an ideology among the commoner rural public? So when people in my village decides to tie up brooms or fix taps using party symbols, does it mean they demean the ideology? I do not think so. In fact I will go on to say that this mundane presence of party symbols and politics in the invisible everyday are important ways and avenues of how ideologies and parties can draw power and legitimacy. The effortless presence of such objects in the everyday is how party politics go on participating in the lives of the illiterate, rural voter who though can engage in giving completely different meanings to the objects but is in constant exposure of these objects and symbols visibly in their everyday. Such exposure familiarizes them, makes them comfortable to certain symbols, objects over others which can play a critical role in they subsequently believing and interpreting the ideologies behind these objects. It reminds me how people in my village replies to questions of ‘Who will you vote this time?’. They always reply back as ‘Haati (elephant/for AGP)’ or ‘Podum (Lotus/for BJP)’ versus the ‘Taala Saabi (lock and key/for AIUDF; that is for ‘Miyas’ they say, derogatively to indicate Bengali Muslims) and the ‘Nangol (plough/for BPF; that is for Bodos they say).

The ‘everyday’ as opposed to the ‘event’ is always imagined as ‘monotonous’, ‘boring’, ‘repetitive’ and ‘cyclical’. However, thinkers like Lefebvre goes on to show how the everydayness can reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary, in fact people’s and communities’ complex behavior is embedded in the everyday. And political parties do seek to penetrate and control this everyday of the people. The party politics and its ideologies is not therefore limited to fancy rallies and glittery gimmicks and public meetings but it is when it spills over beyond them, it is when people scramble for party caps and T-shirts and left-over flags and bandanas and make them part of their everyday existence that party politics and their ideologies gets a fresh breathe of life. It is no surprise then that the famous Bulgarian writer and journalist was assassinated by the communist state not because he exposed some great state scandal but because he wrote how the state functioned in the everyday — the everyday banality of evil — is what he called it.

So yes, no doubt let Babri and it’s broken concrete pebbles remind us how this right-wing state is destroying us, but let us go beyond these events, and plunge into the ordinary, everyday life and find out how parties and their ideologies and politics are shaping the people and how people are negotiating and absorbing them.