'Fascism has taken a frightening avatar'

Kochi: Culture critic Sadanand Menon said fascism has manifested itself in a frightening avatar in India and the space for thinking has narrowed down. Delivering the T K Ramachandran memorial lecture in Kochi on Thursday, he said the "idea of democracy is under challenge."
Stating that people seem to have turned aloof to the events around them, Sadananad Menon said, "There is an increasing need to be sensitive to the happenings around us." Citing the recent assault on dalits in Gujarat and the outbreak of violence in Kashmir, he said it is important that people living in far-off places should connect with these happenings.
Culture and nationalism have always been close allies, he said. "Culture has always set up the contours for national movements and nations have used culture as a convenient flag to weave in ideas of superiority or exclusivity. They constantly service each other in the project of manufacturing identities and consolidating boundaries-real and imaginary," he said.
A nation that, at some point, lets its political primacy be eroded and overrun by cultural nationalism can be construed to be on the verge of an implosion, Menon said.
"India is today on the edge of such an implosion. Majoritarian nationalism masquerading as a 'cultural good' is systematically displacing the urgent imperatives of the political economy from the driver's seat, and is pushing the nation onto a path entirely contradictory to what it strived for or claimed during its movement for national independence," he said. tnn