Fyodor Dostoevsky is said to have declared that if there is no God, everything is permitted. Jacques Lacan, on the other hand, teaches that precisely because there is God, anything is possible. God can thus be the source of all good, but God can also be used as a cover for evil deeds. Put psychoanalytically: if there is God, the Name-of-the-Father, then enjoyment is forbidden. But because there is God, the Name-of-the-Father, the forbidden fruit becomes tasty. Enjoyment occurs behind the back of the law. The law has to be broken in order to enjoy.[Dostoevsky][Lacan][jouissance]
It is in this psychoanalytic spirit that I wish to view the new FCRA Bill, about to find its way into Parliament.
It is too naive to think that because there is BJP at the Centre, everything will be in order and corruption will not exist. This naive view emerges from the grand posturing of the BJP and RSS that positions them as torch-bearers of Indian civilization, which is the custodian of the values and ethics of the good life. This belief is congruent with Dostoevsky’s position – that if there is no God [BJP], anything [meaning evil or acts against India] will be permitted. Perhaps this uncritical belief has been the political capital of the BJP for a long time. But with the students’ movement, it seems to be crumbling today.
This naive position is actually a totalitarian discourse that wants everything to be put under the Law of the Father. Everything, in the case of India, includes the minorities – symbolically, the NGOs. They have to be put in ‘their place’, under the strict eye of the law. In the absence of this all-seeing law, anything – all chaos – will break loose. Perhaps people oriented to Dostoevsky’s position, which tilts towards totalitarian leanings, enjoy the Government’s push of the new Bill purporting to bring strong regulation under FCRA.
This position is uncritically accepted because the NGOs, particularly the people that run them [the minorities], are seen as an inversion of themselves by the enforcers of the reform. Just as we see several inversions in the satire Gulliver’s Travels [like the Lilliputians], the sympathizers of the FCRA reforms view the NGOs as inversions of their nationalism and thus deem them suitable for rigorous surveillance by the Government. Here we can clearly see the confusion of the ego-ideal with the ideal-ego. The sympathizers identify their Ego with the ego-ideal and think that they have become the ideal-Ego, and view their other, the minorities, as lacking the ideal and thus becoming their inversion. But they do know that there is a gap between their Ego, ego-ideal [nationalism in this instance] and the ideal-Ego. Thus, while the emperor [the sympathizer of the reform] has no clothes, he/she deems it fit for the NGOs [minority others] to have their bodies covered.[minorities]
Within this context, the nationalistic discourse of the BJP and its purported antagonism towards minorities becomes the guarantee of it being the wall that will check all illegal and unbecoming flows into India. But the fact of the chanda chori at the Ram Mandir and the several paper leaks of competitive exams, the E20 petrol scam etc., indicates the truth of Lacan’s position against Dostoevsky’s view. Authorities in the BJP know this very well. They know that the Emperor is naked but has to hide this nakedness by dressing a scapegoated other. It is by clothing the other [NGOs in this context] that the Emperor continues to appear as if his highness is in his new clothes.
The fact that the authorities of the BJP know this becomes clear in the fact that they apply this logic against NGOs that receive foreign funds. Now, the fact that foreign-aid-receiving NGOs do charitable work means all is good with them in Dostoevsky’s sense. Thus, precisely because they do charitable work, this very charitable work can become a cover for some nefarious anti-national activities among some of them in the Lacanian sense, and therefore they deserve to be brought under rigorous vigilance of the Government. The issue here – whether the law that we have is impotent, castrated or not – is not clear. This suspicion that these NGOs would enjoy [harming India] under the cover of their charitable work [in the absence of the law] is in accordance with Dostoevsky. Like God, the law is thought to guard against the flow of evil. But is that so? Psychoanalysis says that one needs to break the law in order to enjoy. Enjoyment is a forbidden fruit. The NGOs, therefore, might be susceptible to eating the forbidden fruit precisely because the forbidden fruit blossoms with the coming of the law.
It is in this context that the words of Jesus on the cross – “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” – become meaningful. It appears that the Government does not know what it is doing. The Government seems not to know the paradox of enjoyment. The psychoanalysis of Lacan and Slavoj Žižek teaches us that there is no spontaneous enjoyment. Enjoyment is experienced as a transgression. But its innermost status is an imposition. All enjoyment happens at the injunction of the superego. Enjoyment is always a call from the Other. Thus the paradox is that the very law that is supposed to protect against the abuse of funds is set to produce conditions to break it.
But here there is a point that needs consideration. It is about the way the concerned NGO sees the Other as seeing itself. Thus, the way ‘I see the Other as seeing me’ can open my ways of being in the world. The NGO under the gaze of the authorities can choose to return the gaze that will free both the law-maker and the law-enforcer, where one’s honesty of purpose and action can invert the moral status of the law-giver and thus open the point de capiton to see its Other with new eyes.[Government][NGOs](Minorities)
