There is Justice in this Book !
Soumyabrata Choudhury _________________________ Towards the end of its compelling career, Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy, says that Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s were two incommensurable ways to the question of justice, that is to say, the thought of equality. The book, then, must be about at least three things—the two incommensurable ways and the thought as such. I intend this statement to be more than just a logical inference. It aims to go to the heart of the author’s profound concern with what will appear in the book as an insistent motif, the motif which is also a fundamental problem of “means and ends”. The problem is the following: Even before posing the moral question whether an end justifies the historical means adopted to reach it, one must ask, can there be historical ways and means adequate to an end insofar as that end is a “thought”? That is to say, the thought of equality, if it means anything, must mean the thought proper to a principle. So the basic problem turns out to be—how can there be an empirical, historico-human path, even if as fabulous, singular and, in Aishwary Kumar’s words, “incommensurable” a path as Gandhi’s or Ambedkar’s, to the perpetual pre-existence of a principle and its true thought? For this true thought or thought of the perpetual anteriority of a principle, the book creates another insistent motif, which is the motif of sovereignty, and the rhythm of the insistence is theological. Clearly, theology can provide a kind of model for perpetual anteriority of existence in the form of divine sovereignty or God’s sovereign pre-existence. “Religion” would be the common name of the terribly inadequate means and variously traced ways to the divine end and in accordance with the image and model of historico-human subjection to theological sovereignty. Strangely, the first casualty of such a subjection is the very stakes of the thought in question—the thought of equality. The theological model seems to turn the very passion of that thought towards a power so sovereign, so sovereignly other that it becomes radically unthinkable. And therein would lie its transcendental force to which no thinkable form of a principle can correspond, no principle of equality can be equal to this divine condescension. And yet the author of Radical Equality knows that the subject of his pioneering investigation—I do think he is the first of his kind in a certain field of research, something I will talk about later—is not an affair of mere empirical measurement of a humanist principle in its historical realization. At the same time, the thought of equality is a historical declaration of that thought and opens up an epochal thinking in history that Aishwary Kumar has no hesitation in identifying as revolutionary. He is, indeed, a pioneering archivist of such revolutionary thinking in modern Indian history. The complex formalizing statement to provide overall support for the epochal research is the following: Not only is there a fundamental incommensurability between the ways, means and historical measures of equality; but also there is an incommensurability at the heart of the very thought of equality as such. Which is that the declaration of the principle of equality is an absolute yet utterly immanent interruption of the history of inequalities which is the only history there is. The evaluation and arrangement of the archives of history take place along the axes of differentiation and commensuration. The axis of commensuration institutes historical measures and regimes that articulated with the axis of differention, converts differences into inequality, of which equality is only an empirical and relative variation. The declaration of equality as a principle, on the other hand, to speak like Neitzsche, breaks history in two: the old regime of inequality and a revolutionary epoch for which there isn’t and mustn’t be, measures, indices and proofs of equality; instead there will be post-egalitarian acts and dispositions. It is at this point that the sceptic might as well speak up and ask, is there nothing in-between? Some sort of transitory dialogue or talks of temporary peace at the barricades? Or, what about the history of power, that runs deeper and at a diagonal with respect to sovereignty, whether theological or revolutionary? And aren’t these aspects the really meaningful parameters by which modern Indian history, since the epoch of Ambedkar and Gandhi, needs to be judged in all its radical hypotheses and rotten realities? Let me withhold any comments of my own and try to be the medium for Aishwary Kumar’s possible response to these very crucial sceptical queries. Kumar, to my mind, will cite at least two key phrases here from his book, “egalitarian sovereignty” and “insurrectionary citizenship”, as idiomatic, even contradictory, constructions for the inconsolable betweenness of our times that we sometimes also call democracy. However, it seems the medium has started lending its partisan tonality to the original voice in question; so let me resume speaking on my account. I think that the book declares “radical equality” as a sort of lightning-flash across the archives of history to re-localise the force of the declaration in the materiality and force-field of historical texts—mainly Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s texts. In this, the author seems to join a line of distinguished writers, from at least D.R. Nagaraj to Arundhati Roy recently, who as it were, stage the Ambedkar-Gandhi sequence in theatre of history as protagonist-antagonist, as duellists wearing their swords, masks and grimaces. Yet it seems to me, Aishwary Kumar is a pioneering departure in that he perforates the borders of Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s texts, as well as others, to open their constitutive figurations, the play between them, to a performativity, a vector of force, which surpass the commensuration the imagination of a theatre produces between the protagonist and the antagonist. Indeed, Gandhi and Ambedkar, more than dramatis personae, are scintillating effects of Aishwary Kumar’s own singular text. The immanence of the two historical figures to the text is the same as the utter exteriority of the declaration of