Why in the culture-centered process listening to subaltern voices is structurally resistive: The Hindu Bengali refugee question and the CAA

The culture-centered approach (CCA) roots itself in the methodology of listening as the basis for co-creating transformative practices.

Listening as a methodological tool in the CCA is tied to the work of building communicative infrastructures in solidarity with subaltern communities.

The voices of the subaltern margins, emergent through method, disrupt the oppressive forces of colonialism, capitalism, and feudalism that violently erase subaltern voices.

The presence of subaltern voices in hegemonic discursive spaces dismantles the structures of erasure and oppression. The work of solidarity is one of walking alongside subaltern communities to address the political economy of oppressive structures that consolidate power in the hands of the ruling classes.

In this journey of walking together, culture-centered processes bring to reality communicative practices that seek to dismantle oppressive structures. The CCA, as a meta-theoretical framework therefore, is in direct opposition to the forces of fascism, and particularly to those forces of fascism that put forth oppressive forms of governmentality in the name of the subaltern margins. The fascist is often the vocal defender of subaltern rights.

This is a key point to note, the turn to listening in the CCA is  based on the ownership of communicative infrastructures in the hands of subaltern commuities, and is simultaneously rooted in opposition to the dominant forces of power and control.

Fascism as a political project is one of consolidating power and control in the hands of the ruling classes accomplished through the deployment of propaganda.

The image of the subaltern is a powerful instrument here in appealing to majoritarian logics, feeding into the networks of hate. The category of the subaltern thus drawn into the communicative architecture of hate, is paradoxically the very tool of subalternizing, producing subaltern margins through violence, propaganda, and ongoing erasure. The symbolic work of incorporating subaltern categories to prop up strategies of hate-making forms the fundamental strategy of facism.

In the name of the subaltern then, fascist regimes generate fervent public support in favour of xenophobic majoritarian policies that otherwise are entirely unacceptable in democratic societies. Ironically, the image of the subaltern serves as a powerful force in the consolidation of fascist power.

In the context of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendament Acts  (CAA) being deployed by the Hindutva regime in India, the figure of the Hindu East Bengali refugee is serving as the organizing resource for the fascist forces.

A part of my family, Hindus, had migrated to India as refugees from East Bengal, and the stories of persecution experienced by Hindus in Bangladesh that led to mass migrations form very much part of my lived experience of erasure. Many of the stories, recounted in first or second person accounts, often document the forces of violence that uprooted families, tore families apart, and displaced families from their land and livelihoods. Historically, these narratives of migration by lower caste, lower class Hindu Bengalis have been erased by the Savarna (upper caste) structures of communication. Hegemonic spaces of India, including the hegemonic spaces of West Bengal, are rife with discriminatory language and racist commuicative practices around the "Bongal". Without access to documentation and material resources for laying claim to citizenship, many refugees (largely poor), both Hindu and Bengali, that migrated from Bangladesh remain stateless. The erasure of refugee narratives is built into the everyday forms of discursive practices in Hindu upper-caste structures (just pay attention to the number of Savarna West Bengal jokes and taunts about the Bongal).

This erasure ironically forms the strategic basis of the fascist toolkit of hatred.

For the Hindutva fascists that run the 2019-India and seek to turn it into a Hindu state, the Hindu East Bengali refugee is the necessary voice to catalyze majoritarian hatred. Handpicked and strategically framed stories of persecutions of East Bengali refugees are being circulated to prop up emotions of hatred and anger. These emotions are being organized around the Hindu East Bengali, and form the recipe for the disenfranchisement of India's Muslims.

The East Bengali Hindu refugee is set in opposition to the Indian Muslim, constituting citizenship-based strategies for rendering India's Muslims stateless. The image of the Hindu refugee from Bangladesh is the necessary strategic resource for propagating anti-Muslim hatred. The Hindu Bengali refugee voice is legitimate only to the extent it fits into the hate-producing WhatsApp-friendly narrative of the Sangh. Moreover, the refugee voices can only lay claims to citizenship when they are placed within the politics of hate that make Muslims unworthy of laying claims to citizenship. An East Bengali Hindu can only find voice when she/he declares vicoferously his/her hatred for the Muslims. An East Bengali Hindu can only find voice when she/he sees her/his plight in opposition to the plight of the predominantly Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who are being ethnically cleansed by a pogrom. closely resembling the NRC An East Bengali Hindu can only claim citizenship through the CAA after she/he has declared herself/himself illegal, a non-citizen of India. Note here the politics of inventing the East Bengali or Bangladeshi (Hindu or Muslim is irrelevant). Large numbers of Bengalis (poor), both Hindu and Muslim, are labelled "Bangladeshi" in the xenophobic politics in Assam in spite of multi-generational belonging to the region. Worth noting here is the disproportionate numbers of Hindu Bengalis, lower caste and poor, that have been rendered stateless in the Indian state of Assam with its implementation of the NRC.

Subrata Dey, a 39-year-old lower caste Bengali Hindu migrant, labeled a Bangladeshi, died in a detention camp, Goalpara.

Seeming turns to represent the voices of the East Bengali refugee are located wihin hegemonic structures of hate politics, with the narrative control being held by the elite manufacturers of hatred. The refugee voice is represented by the fascist communicative resources of a majoritarian state.

The fascist ideologues "speak for" the refugee voices. These co-optations of refugee voices further erase refugee voices. For the refugee voices to be heard, they must be streamlined into the politics of hate, written into agendas of hate politics, bereft of dignity, and erased from questions of "right to voice." The East Bengali Hindu refugee must serve as an accomplice to being erased many times over under the pretence of being heard.

So what would the process of cultural centering look like in the context of the question of the East Bengali refugee and an actual transformative politics?

The CCA recognizes that the politics of listening is constituted in relationship to structures and therefore places voice politics in resistance to the hegmonic structures. The resistive work of voice politics means that the work of listening to refugee voices needs to be fundamentally resistive to hegemonic capitalist, feudal, and neocolonial structures. The fascist forces of Hindutva ought to be placed in direct opposition to such voice politics. The work of building communicative infrastructures for East Bengali refugee voices then must first-and-foremost be about dismantling the fascist structures of hate that perform an outwardly visible politics of listening while perpetuating ersure. The solidarity work of building communicative infrastructures in partnerships with refugee communities is placed in opposition to the structures that co-opt everyday, that disenfranchise and silence. Most importantly, the work of transforming the structures of hate is in seeking opportinities for building solidarity among refugee communities, Hindu and Bengali refugees, East Bengali and Rohingya refugees, Sri Lankan Tamil and Uyghur refugees from China. It is through such solidarity work that the very structures that make up hate politcs can be dismantled. That it is the politics of hate that underlies the production of the refugee through expulsion and erasure ought to form the basis of a communicative infrastructure of collaborations across contexts and boundaries. It is only in finding connections across refugee struggles against fascist regimes that both profit from and propel capitalist extraction that transformative futures can be imagined.