The Disappearance Newsletter

Aabha Muralidharan reflects on her research and reporting in this monthly newsletter from The Disappearance Project

Hello!

This is my first newsletter following the 18th Lok Sabha election results. While mainstream media and parliamentary sessions overflow with images of the Constitution and democracy, I find myself drawn to news columns that have vanished. These elusive columns, lost in the din, contain stories that neither pierce through the cacophony nor slip through the sealed vestibules of our algorithmic world. These are stories of arbitrary arrests and staged encounters of indigenous peoples.

Image Credit: Bhumika Saraswati

In our last two pieces, The Disappearance Project looked at the disappearance of bodies and of land in Bastar, highlighting the alarming rise in civilian killings in the region this year, and the indiscriminate destruction of the forest by aerial bombings. In this newsletter, I wish to shed some light on how these disappearances find legitimacy through a disappearance of mind.

In Gujarat under Modi: The Blueprint for Today’s India, Christophe Jaffrelot summarises how the prime minister and the state became the new ideal of Hindu majoritarianism and crony capitalism in the country. Jaffrelot notes how a deep fiscal crisis led to the liberalisation of Gujarat’s economy. With increasing fiscal liabilities and internal debts, it was easier for the state to become pro-business and introduce pro-rich taxation policies instead of working on funding and increasing the subsidies for small industries and agriculturalists.

Jaffrelot observes that specific regulations regarding land were made that made the process of acquisitions easier for business and how Modi's slogan “minimum government, maximum governance” resulted in the centralisation of economic power and the “de-institutionalization” of policy at the national level, similar to his governance style in Gujarat. This approach included unilateral decisions such as the 2016 demonetisation, which adversely affected the informal sector. Joblessness intensified as large corporations received disproportionate support at the expense of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), essential for employment. The precarious state of banks further limited credit access for SMEs, causing many to fail. Throughout Modi's tenure, there was a noticeable lack of emphasis on reducing inequalities, with significant programs like MGNREGA—designed to alleviate rural poverty and boost rural incomes—being neglected.

Jaffrelot further highlights how fiscal policies that cut social expenditure and promoted crony capitalism led to unemployment and a widening urban-rural and rich-poor divide, ultimately fostering social polarisation in Gujarat. Today, with the deep agrarian crisis and unemployment along with systemic blocks in delivery of food to people, which I believe resounded strongly in the electoral mandate, it almost seems that the blueprint of Gujarat is being grafted upon India.

With all options for employment being shut down in the country or health and education facilities in Bastar, including a fair market in the villages, and through the killing of civilians and the destruction of forests, the state is working steadfast to make the process of land acquisition easier for financial capitalists.

In the latest piece, I briefly discussed the film, “Bastar: The Naxal Story,” a film targeted to an audience scarred by economic policies that have bred mass unemployment, burgeoning debt, and rampant consumption. The film exploits the fractures within the national psyche, particularly the wounds inflicted by economic disenfranchisement and social dislocation. It offers a cathartic fantasy, projecting strength and purpose that compensates for the emasculation felt by a middle class besieged by unemployment and debt.

The choice of mothers as protagonists can be seen as a symbolic gesture, invoking the sanctity of motherhood to lend moral legitimacy to the state’s violent measures against the so-called “enemies of progress.” This manipulation of maternal imagery obscures the brutal realities of capitalist expansion, reframing it as a protective, nurturing necessity is particularly represented in the closing scene of the film where the two mothers are shown to be gazing towards the horizon and the hills. Seated on the hills of Bastar, that are soon to be destroyed for mining in order to feed their children, these maternal figures underscore the notion that the militarisation of forests is a necessary evil to eradicate the other, thereby paving the way for a development and supposed liberation from poverty. These latent emotions of the masses, cultivated by the political economy and imageries, find release in their submission to state repression, providing them with a channel and a sense of purpose.

Since the elections, the targeting of Muslims through lynchings and demolitions have already resumed. In the Chhattisgarh mob lynching case, reports noted that thousands of Bajrang Dal activists gheroed the police station, chanting Hanuman Chalisa, demanding the release of the arrestees. Within days of the new government’s formation, a wounded leader and state sought to assert their dominance with the intimidation of Arundhati Roy and Sheikh Showkat Hussain under India's anti-terror law, UAPA. Meanwhile, the killings of Dalits and Adivasis continue unabated.

The stories of economic policies, polarisations, arbitrary arrests, staged encounters, and systemic exclusions are not just footnotes in our socio-political narrative—they are the chapters that reveal the soul of our times. This rhetoric of nationalism and development seeks to enforce a silent acquiescence, and mirrors the absurdity of our times. But even in acknowledging this, perhaps it is worth asking ourselves the question: are we still complicit in this disappearance of mind?