Situating Injustice in the Frame of Dalit Politics: A Case of Democracy in Nayattu

Introduction

Nayattu is a 2021 Malayalam movie directed by Martin Prakkat. Shahi Kabir, the film writer, who is himself a police officer, says that the movie tries to bring to the fore some of the troubles confounding the day-to-day workings of the police as did the 2018 film Joseph, his first. The movie tells the story of three police officers, Maniyan (played by Joju George), Praveen Michael (played by Kunchacko Boban) and Sunitha (played by Nimisha Sajayan). The uneasy relationship between the police force and the Dalit community is portrayed in one of the first scenes when Biju, a village goon who is a Dalit, is locked up for constantly harassing Sunitha. The issue escalates as the trio of police officers are implicated in a road accident involving Biju’s friend, Jayan. They are doomed to defend themselves from an accusation of murder though they are not directly responsible. The matter acquires a political turn because the Dalit community is reckoned to be a vote bank in the upcoming byelection. The movie lifts itself off the ground when, in a grim situation of societal frenzy, the ruling government not only disowns the police officers without any evidence but leads the hunt for the accused themselves determined to use the occasion for political gains. For Kabir, ‘the film is an ode to the police force which is being vilified everywhere and it’s his humble effort to stave off the dreadful image it has had for long’ (Vilakudy, 2021).

Nayattu, which can be translated ‘hunting’ in English from Malayalam, is denotative of hunting out civic rights in a travesty of democratic politics in the Martin Prakkat movie. The movie’s one-liner in a theoretical light would articulate the near engulfing of the ethos of democracy by populist politics, with the theoretical light itself illuminating democracy’s dark comedy and paradox. This paradox of democracy seems to be well subtitled in the movie itself when one finds that the adrenaline pumping the movie’s final stages is, largely, thanks to the freezing portrayal of the corrupt executive’s utter unconcern for the delivery of justice. It prompts one to ask the question—is democratic sovereignty incompatible with democracy itself? This is a question that has been posed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in an attempt to deconstruct the incompatibility he sees in the concept of democratic sovereignty, particularly in his book Rogues.

Nevertheless, choosing a predominantly Dalit constituency as the focal point of the drama might be the result of a stereotype that has been challenged at least as early as the late 1990s, namely that of Dalit and Adivasi’s forming a voting bloc with party cleavages (Thachil & Herring, 2008).

Another sliver of light one could imagine with one’s eyes closed would be the lack of a pronounced presence of Dalit elite characters who seem to be substituted in the film by a mob. Although two of the accused, Maniyan and Sunitha, belonging to the police force, are Dalits themselves, the movie is primarily a portrayal of their utter incapacity to aspire to be torchbearers for their own community, let alone the larger society. Maniyan expresses his helplessness and annoyance at this early on when he is forced to implicate an innocent person at the whim of higher officials, manipulating his role as an investigative police officer. This portrayal it might be argued is a fallout of mainstream thought not to legitimize a Dalit national saviour, perhaps someone of the stature of B. R. Ambedkar. Gail Omvedt, in her Introduction to the book Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India, says about this national appeal of Ambedkar: ‘He was a national leader—in a different sense from the well-known elite nationalists who led the struggle for freedom from British colonial rule’ (Omvedt, 2004). With diasporic communities working to criminalize aggressions against the community, this additional note could not be an oversight.

Yogesh Maitreya’s memoir Water in a Broken Pot has these lines in it.

Despite all this, the issue dealt with in Nayattu can only appear very significant today, particularly with the rise of populist regimes in democracies around the world. In the study Exposing the Demagogue, a joint publication of the Centre for European Studies and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and funded by the European Parliament, contemporary populism is defined

as a technique or a style of political mobilization that is based both on the creation of an identity between a leader and the ‘ordinary people’, whose problems that leader pretends to know and to care about, on the one hand, and a fundamental critique of the ostensibly distant political establishment that has forgotten or ignored the problems of the ‘ordinary people’ on the other. (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. 17)

Behind the Scenes

The reasoning of democracy comes under sharp criticism and is shown to be constantly displaced by Jacques Derrida in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. An interesting illustration of the sham or scam of democracy is the movie in question. Wearing the robe of post-truth is the scene in the movie that constitutes its climax and anticlimax where an investigative police officer who symbolizes truth and its perceptive simplicity hangs in a turn and return of the rope of democratic reasoning near a defunct court atop a hill. (The rope could well be, for our purposes, the executive red tape without a change of meaning.) The defunct court, either suggestive of justice’s past glory or its impossible delivery, seems to pronounce the ultimate death warrant for democracy from the hill when even the death note of the deceased as the final trace of truth is expunged in a last surge of executive mania, which is shown throughout the movie as coupling and crippling any meaning of democracy.

It is well within the sight of a critique of the kind made by Derrida to view the impassivity of the red tape as well as the active quelling of the voice of the demos (the people democracy intends to serve) as the turn and return of the same corruptive or supplementary paradigm of democracy as a reason to come (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. xii). The appeal of the demos for justice is represented in the movie by the significantly outnumbered police officers who—adding to the irony—are falsely accused and are on the run from the light of anything democratic. Seeking a hideout and being entirely outnumbered and outpaced unto their eventual capture shows the plight of democracy both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Under the manhunt, the plot takes a turn where the falsely accused are used as bait to further the democratic interests of the ruling party, which culminates in the purest metaphor of Maniyan’s suicide—one Dalit is made a bait to bait the entire Dalit population. This is aided by a false narrative fed on to the media and internalized by the mob, who are depicted as swallowing the bait. The party wants to salvage its image and, thereby, its chances of re-election to power by appearing to be concerned about the interests of the community and the delivery of justice. What the movie does show is thus the setting of reason and the rise of post-truth to any ordinary citizen who ‘attempts’ (the Latin root of the word being suggestive of temptation) to be a careful surveyor of democracy.

It is almost the perfect image one can also discover of the discrimination encountered by Dalits in their workplaces or educational institutions, where they are represented as either less of a Dalit or less of a citizen. Many instances of this kind are increasingly coming to light, such as the piece ‘How Caste Discrimination Permeates the Language of Meritocracy on Campus’ in The Hindu by Barathi Nakkeeran tries to show (Nakeeran, 2023, p. 18). Being less of a citizen as a precarity faced by a Dalit represented in national institutions through government reservations can be contrasted with the ‘so perfect, so perfectly perfect, so absolutely perfect, more than perfect’ comparison that taking democracy in its ‘strict sense’ occasions (Derrida, 1993/1995, pp. 75, 73).

This issue of discrimination facing Dalits may, therefore, be deemed to have been given rise to by something like a state passivity, which does not sufficiently balance efforts to give visible representation to Dalits with commensurate informative campaigns among non-Dalits.

The tragedy of state-sponsored disinformation is apparent. Furthermore, another sin of passivity, or sometimes activity, the state is likely to be guilty of is that of abetting disinformation. The tragedy of this is brought to relief when one understands that the Supreme Court of India has observed it to be the onus of the state to contain ‘irresponsible and explosive messages and videos having content which is likely to incite mob violence and lynching of any kind’ in the Tehseen S Poonawalla vs Union of India (2018) case.

For Derrida, ‘the demagogic and the democratic’ is ‘at the indecidable limit’ between populism and democracy (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. 67). The irony of the excess of such a limit is captured in the movie when anarchy is unleashed by members of the community upon being manipulated by the party in power. A real-life incident that could illustrate this, especially considering the kind of political commentary it made to surface, is the dissemination of false news concerning attacks on Bihari migrant labourers in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The spread of the fake news, coming a day after a group of opposition leaders had come together for a meeting and with elections around the corner, had prompted pointing fingers at the involvement of the ruling party at the centre. Speaking about the disinformation campaign in The Hindu, a spokesperson for the DMK and advocate Manuraj Shunmugasundaram suspected political powerplay to be a motivation for the spread of disinformation (Shunmugasundaram, 2023, p. 10). In this sense, the movie is a realistic portrayal of the vicissitudes of democracy that could characterize the Indian context.

What it efficiently showcases is that a feeling of otherness could blow minor fracases out of proportion. This is not unlike the larger trend of populism that is on display in the democracy graph today. Studies substantiate evidence that such a feeling is primary to the eruption of major nationalist movements. Yascha Mounk says in his book The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It that ‘Once mass immigration into societies that defined themselves by a shared culture and ethnicity began, the tension between theory and practice became increasingly explosive’ (Mounk, 2018, pp. 165, 166).

Thinking of this in the Indian context, Niraja Gopal Jayal says in talk that ‘civic identity rather than any cultural identity’ and ‘universalist political values rather than particularistic ones’ formed India’s secular nationalism. She says,

it would be accurate to claim that the progressive and inclusive Constitution that came into being in 1950 gave India a form of secular nationalism that was grounded in civic identity rather than any cultural identity; and in universalist political values rather than particularistic ones. (Jayal, 2019)

Contrasting with the assumed practicality of universalist political values, the movie seems to raise an important question pertaining to the open electorate system followed by the country. Elections are due in the political constituency where all the drama is shown to unfold. Being an electorate whose majority share of voters are from a particular community determines the general attitude manifested by politicians, especially of the ruling party, in their policies and approach; it is one of tolerance and appeasement of the vicissitudes of the majority population. This gives rise to a clear case of demagoguery. Coupled with the fear held by constitution makers of independent India that the members of less populous communities might not have fair access to the parliament, such instances of geographical localization could pose the opposite effect on overall representation.

Setting the Stage

Praveen joins the police department as CPO during a by-election time. Sunitha’s politically influential relative, named Biju, is summoned to the police station on a complaint lodged by her, leading to a fracas at the police station. Both Praveen and Maniyan lock him in jail, but he soon gets released due to his Dalit influence. The clash goes against the trio when they get involved in a climactic episode with Biju and his friends again. They attend a wedding party where both Praveen and Maniyan get drunk. Maniyan’s nephew, Rahul, drives the vehicle on the way back, which gets involved in a collision with a motorbike. Rahul flees immediately, leaving the police officers to handle the situation. Soon, it is revealed that the rider is Jayan, Biju’s friend. They bring Jayan to the hospital, but the doctor pronounces him dead on arrival. As they find evidence piling up against them, Maniyan realizes that they will be accused of murder and arrested soon at the police station. They escape narrowly from an immediate arraignment, but the police soon begin the search to find them.

Through mass media, the general public is deceived to such an extent that they rise against the truth tellers. Protests, violence and bloodshed ensue as a result. Though daily news hours at prime time discuss the issue, no one questions the authenticity of the news. It betrays the biased nature of such debates and illustrates how they go on to shape people’s opinions. Playing on a loop, Maniyan’s video of trying to shoot the Dalit protesters can be seen in this light. The accused become national enemies due to media intervention. This happens because of the belief that ‘factual truth that goes against the interests of a particular political group will be received with great hostility’ (Brahms, n.d.). Since Jayan, the deceased, is a Dalit and the accused are policemen, his caste identity automatically becomes the talking point. Reports on the incident are presented, fuelling, at the same time, pre-existing notions about police cruelty against minorities to the extent of suppressing inquiry into the Dalit background of the police officers Maniyan and Sunitha. The fact that Biju and his friends knew how they could leverage their identity to influence the elections must also be noted. When Biju says, ‘We don’t bow down anymore, Sir. It’s a thing of the past’, it is an indication of the advantages his community enjoys as vote banks (my translation).

The representative of the government in the movie is the Chief Minister (CM). The higher-ups in the police administration are shown to be serving, willingly or unwillingly, the interests of the party in power such that the two discrete machinery arms of the government are often seen without a distinction of power. The upcoming elections and his political supremacy are more important to the CM than the truth. Thus, he, too, appeals to caste sentiments rather than ordering a probe into reality. Stories are fabricated to suit these interests.

Truth is one of the most contested and contented terms. Due to its multifaceted nature, truth is very important in deciding one’s nature and shaping one’s opinions. In the 21st century, truth assumes importance due to widespread instances of manipulation and falsehood. The term post-truth became prominent as the Oxford Dictionary chose it as the ‘word of the year’ in 2016. It frequently surfaced during the United States presidential elections that year and the UK referendum on Brexit. The dictionary defines it as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Media and the problem of visibility, politics and media attention and caste and vote-bank politics are tools used in the movie’s plot to imagine its regionalized depiction of post-truth.

However, for Derrida, in the sovereign manner of decision-making in a democracy, what comes to the fore is the incompatibility of the twin truths reckoned central to its functioning. On the one hand is ‘the rondure of a return to self’ which characterizes sovereignty where ‘the turn is always the possibility of turning round the self’ (Derrida, 1993/1995, pp. 10, 12). On the other hand, is ‘another truth of the democratic, namely, the truth of the other’ (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. 14). This disjuncture is on display throughout the movie, where the sovereign pursuit of his interests to self by the CM and of the ruling party, the wishes of every other stakeholder who is a party to democracy are thwarted. Maniyan’s death and its coming to ‘nought’ are seen thus as the embodiment of the statement by Derrida that ‘Autoimmunity is more or less suicidal, but, more seriously still, it threatens always to rob suicide itself of its meaning and supposed integrity’ (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. 45). Thus, the scene constitutes the climax-anticlimax of the movie, which puts to rout any question of truth concerning democracy.

Climax-Anticlimax

If what forms the movie’s climax is the depiction of the futility of putting faith in the liberatory power of truth in democratic institutions, Maniyan’s suicide is thus also an anti-climax for this movie and all movies that engage in make-believe. But more importantly, it is perhaps the anti-climax of the enlightening reasoning of democracy and of life itself. What could virtually or actually save the climax is, ironically or non-ironically, analogically or non-analogically, the final warrant or the death warrant that Derrida produces at the end of Rogues, ‘A reason must let itself be reasoned with’ (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. 159).

It was Steve Tesich who, in his 1992 article ‘A Government of Lies’, used the term post-truth in its contemporary meaning. He rebuked the American public for accepting the lies of the Bush (Sr) administration unquestioningly and for deliberately deciding to live in a post-truth era (Brahms, n.d.). But what might be the cause of such an unquestioning attitude? Political domination and media influence can be seen as the prime culprits. As George Orwell said, ‘Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’ (qtd. in Brahms, n.d.). Thus, for political gain, truths are manipulated and presented to the public. The result of such manipulations is a confused public who finds it difficult to distinguish between facts and fabrications. This confusion is fuelled by mass media. Brahms talks about the influence of mass media in the post-truth world:

Yet, while in the past, lies were usually directed against individuals and mainly outwardly against enemies, today, lies are primarily channelled domestically through mass media to deceive everyone. A consequence of this is that domestic tellers of factual truth are sometimes perceived by the public as more dangerous and hostile than foreign enemies.

The specific details of the case were seen as threatening the caste sentiment, especially the fact that the police were innocent was seen as highly inconvenient. The administration took the easy route in dispatching the case, which was to challenge the inconvenient fact. Here, truth becomes secondary as there are other issues more important. ‘Thus, post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not. And this is a recipe for political domination’ (Brahms, n.d.).

The movie highlights the strange juxtaposition of democratic elections alongside the unfortunate incident involving common people whose political identities clash and who are catapulted to the ‘colossal’ political arena. Their life and colossus, however, inaugurate politics itself. People are prone to believe what fits their interpretation of reality, and politicians pander to such beliefs of the people to create a regime of post-truth which is tantamount to the exploitation of democratic processes.

In such a regime, the officers offer a moment of resistance. Through them, truth tries to make its final lap. After the case turns into a full-fledged lie, access to reality becomes increasingly insurmountable. Truth gets removed from reality multiple times, and the existence of reality/truth is challenged. Maniyan’s death poses a challenge to Praveen and Sunitha in the journey of establishing the truth. The police department also finds itself in a fix because of the dummy arrest. But as the Crime Branch officer dismantles all claims and evidence given by Praveen, the two realize that the truth ceases to exist.

It was Maniyan, more than the others, who had sought truth and justice. He had come to the old, dilapidated court in Kodempakkam to end his life. His search for justice had led him there. It is also significant for its symbolism, as the ‘new’ justice that is served is the fabricated post-truth. As Praveen and Sunitha are forced to sign the witness form of Maniyan’s suicide, Sunitha puts up a final protest of sense, detailing why Maniyan should not go down in the minds of people as a murderer. This last flame of resistance is again thwarted as Maniyan’s death note video is deleted and Rahul’s false testimony is presented in its stead. It allows one to conclude that the post-truth era is not just about the erosion of factual evidence and a heightened emotional appeal made to the masses, but it denotes the diminishing capacity of the public to distinguish between reality and fiction.

Conclusion

Neither plus d’un (more than one as the definition of democracy) nor less than one (less of a citizen) is the answer to justice for the Dalit in a democracy. India seeks to repair historical injustices institutionally. In the case of Dalits, it takes the form of reservations aimed at the economic uplift of the community. This, however, is hardly the answer to the overall development of the community if it is not complemented with a transformation in the mentality of the other—general—population as Dalpat Chauhan, a Dalit writer in Gujarati, says ‘Real change will come only when the Savarnas’ hearts will change’ (Kaur, 2023, p. 2).

A transformation, however, into what ‘the other as other can’ is hard to ‘idealise’ (Derrida, 1993/1995, p. 84). The powerful nature of the sovereign autoimmunity even here threatens everything, including such a reasoning of democracy. In Nayattu, Maniyan is the clearest crystal of clear-headed and commonsensical thinking—indeed of truth—who is killed by this suicidal power or who kills us (the general public of democracy).

The corruption of justice—equally, an unreasoned democracy—leads to the nayattu of the largely innocent police trio of Praveen, Maniyan and Sunitha through a series of decisions made by the higher echelons of power, including those in the police force, in an attempt to ‘salvage’ their existence. The intersection of various power interests becomes the crucial factor that necessitates for that very reason that the officers are almost extra-judicially condemned in the public eye in a massive shamming of democratic values.

Trying to focus justice or injustice in the person of the Dalit can be seen as not helping, as the Dalit symbolizes the word democracy itself in all its ambiguity. In one sweep of understanding that ought to dawn on the majority in a democracy, democracy and the Dalit must be seen as the same if one needs to untie the knot of the red tape of injustice that is always around his figure.

Maniyan needs to arrive outside of Nayattu.