The Importance Of Being Sheikh Shahjahan

Sheikh Shahjahan, if the media is to be believed, lived by extortion, extraction and dominance on an island that is at the back of beyond. The administration looked the other way, the politicians of the ruling party were beneficiaries, and none dared to call him out.

He complimented his devious ways by being even more devious, forcing women to do his bidding in the dead of night day after day. Husbands or family members who protested were routinely beaten up and forced into submission.

This is in a nutshell the life of a small-time crook, living in an isolated part of India, and a part of the political clientelism that is now quite the stock of mainstream political parties, especially those that are on the Centre and Right of the Indian polity. Citizens have become inured to these stories of desperadoes running wild with police protection and political patronage.

What is also not surprising is the silence of the so-called intellectuals who had surfaced in the last few years of the Left Front rule in Bengal as vociferous champions of rights. Sandeshkhali did not witness hordes of activists descending on the island and demanding that the women victims of sexual assaults and rape be given justice.

But it is not surprising as those who had raised their voices previously have all been accommodated in various agencies and institutions controlled by the government. They too are part of the patron-client relationship that Sheikh Shahjahan so eloquently represents.

The upshot of the silence and at best muted response from the activists and self-styled society leaders is yet another blow to ethics in public life. The moral and political imagination of a nation moulds how the future will be shaped.

To abandon the quest for an ethical standard in the public space in favour of expediency and immediate political benefits begs a larger question that we have been avoiding now for many years. Ever since the advent of neo-liberalism bolstering capitalism, this question has taken on a greater meaning and import.

The answer that is blowing in the wind is obvious, everything is up for sale. Money can buy all that we supposedly require. Political parties and their ideologies must be supportive of this dogma since it is this ideology that supposedly pays.

Our moral outrage or rather the lack of it generally is a function of this return to crude utilitarianism where homo socius is in reality homo economicus.

So where do people like Shahjahan fit in? Are we to judge him only on the horrendous crimes that he is accused of committing? Or are we to excavate a little more and dig out the dirt that makes the likes of Shahjahan?

Every human on this planet is a product of several things, or as sociologists would say social facts. These are exterior to the human and usually coercive. In other words, circumstances are important when we analyse personalities.

In Sandeshkhali we saw the coming together of petty thugs, criminals, political leaders and administrators. What brings people so diverse in intellect, educational achievements, social status and prestige to dine from the same plate? Or, what makes our elite administrators and intellectuals drawn from academia, industry and the middle classes consort and condone the likes of a Shahjahan?

There is only one word that answers it – capitalism. In his riveting narration of rubber extraction in the Congo and later in the Amazon, Mario Vargas Llosa in ‘The Dream of the Celt’ described with telling detail the lives of the natives in the hands of overseers and company managers tasked with the responsibility of feeding the juggernaut of capitalism headquartered in the West.

When told about the horrifying manner in which the trading company treated the natives, of the executions and tortures, Llosa’s protagonist, the knighted Irishman, Roger Casement representing the Crown and civilisation wondered if all that he heard was true. He knew that power and impunity had turned ordinary folks into monsters, and wondered how the poor victims would ever be free from servitude.

In a similar manner, Shahjahan was imitating and initiating the island of Sandeshkhali into capitalism, a manner reminiscent of the early foray of the capitalists into Africa and Latin America. He converted land meant for rice cultivation into fisheries forcibly, precisely because fish farming would give greater profit to his masters.

His political connections ensured impunity from prosecution – a trade-off – where he had his ‘fun’ and his masters had the money. The reign of terror that he unleashed on hapless women and men was part of a design – a strategy to subdue the population by showing that he could reach right into the bedroom, invade privacy and get away with it.

Nothing stamps the imprimatur of power as forcefully as the violation of intimate spaces. Not merely misogyny, which it is, but larger time-tested criminality that history bears testimony to. Subjugation is always initialised by sexual suppression and brute force follows.

Shahjahan may not have been aware that he was scripting a pale reprography of naked market forces that early colonialism had let loose. He was nevertheless an agent of that history, of that politics and the moral degradation that must be invoked to usher in the changes that his masters required.

Shahjahan and his cohorts are not merely an example of evil men. They are the best examples of a rampaging market that converted the rice that sustained the poor to fish that could be sold in wider markets for more profit.

Adam Smith noted that we have many different motivations apart from the single-minded pursuit of our interest, i.e., maximisation of wealth. Things like humanity, justice, generosity etc. are important and even productive for society.

But as neo-liberalism grips us in a tight embrace, the rationality of fools surfaces yet again. It is now upon us to recover our moral politics, set ethical standards and think of the common good. Shahjahan is a mirror that reflects our dereliction of all things that are more precious than money.

SURAJIT C MUKHOPADHYAY is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. Views expressed are the writer’s own.