the tragedy of C.K Lal

I used to admire C.K Lal’s writing. He has been writing weekly columns for the Nepali Times as far back as I remember. I used to find his columns sharp and lucid, and often full of unexpected insights. When I was in Kathmandu during the period immediately following the royal takeover in 2005, in that period of widespread uncertainty and anxiety, I eagerly awaited his weekly columns. Not only because they were insightful, but because they reflected my own mood at that time of cynicism and melancholy.

But lately I’ve begun to find him tiresome. His weekly writings on Nepali politics don’t irk me as much as his pompous monthly pronouncements about the South Asian region in Himal Southasian. The cynicism and anger, with which I identified with in 2005, now annoy me to no end. It has become clear that cynicism and bitterness is Lal’s response to everything, it informs and infects his entire worldview.

Lal’s ideological moorings veer towards that of the old Indian left. He is not explicitly a Marxist or a Gandhian-activist, but, amid the stale whiffs of the old socialist-bureaucratic ideology of the Indian state that his writings emit, are traces of both those strands of leftist Indian thought. All this is couched in heavy-handed metaphor and hyperbole, which Lal no doubt considers poetic.

Perhaps he thinks his lack of analytical and factual rigour will be camouflaged by his embarrassingly purple prose. His essays are so pompous and overstated that the image one derives of the writer is of an intolerant codger who will brook no argument. He not so much argues a point of view as tries to drown out all opposing voices. Reading him is like listening to a rant by someone who wants to coerce you into accepting his point of view.

In this month’s Himal he tackles one of his favourite themes: the injustices of globalization and the adverse affects it has upon the poor. That globalization in India has brought with it an increased disregard and callous contempt for the poor is a fact that nobody can deny. What is problematic in Lal’s essay is the manner in which he makes his argument and the conclusions he derives from it. By a breathtaking leap of logic he finds the serial rapes and killings of children in Nithari to be a symptom of middle-class India’s obsession with growth. This disease he terms “Sezophilia” as in the combination of SEZ (Special Economic Zones – emblematic of India’s liberalization drive) and paedophilia.

From this he derives two farfetched conclusions. First, globalization in India is only ‘Westoxification’, he says. It is so superficial as to be the equivalent of choosing a burger with stale meat in it over the more wholesome puri-bhaji. Second, he compares those poor people who are attracted to the glitter of the new globalizing India to moths attracted to flames. Both moths and the poor get burnt and die when they get close to the heat of their object of desire. According to Lal, the children who were attracted by the comforts of that house in Nithari, where they were raped and killed, is an example of this.

Nowhere in Lal’s writing – in this essay or the other ones published in preceding issues of Himal – is there an understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the globalization process. Dismissing the rapid and deep changes that are currently occurring in India’s economy and culture as mere ‘Westoxification’ only reveals Lal’s superficiality of thought. To compare the poor to moths who die when they approach the flames they are attracted to only reveals his lack of understanding of the poor. For, in making this analogy, he unwittingly commits the old Marxist mistake of assuming that the poor have no agency and are passive recipients of whatever the rich dole out to them. For Lal the poor’s attraction to the wealth brought about by globalization is simply an irrational instinct. He has no sense of the complex mixture of feelings – of fear, of hope, and a sense of possibility – with which the poor view the rapidly changing world around them.

Lal is stuck endlessly repeating the stale pieties of the old left. Only this time the enemy is globalization instead of colonialism. He is so set his ways of thinking and feeling that nothing can challenge his worldview. As a result he is condemned endlessly churning out resentful and sterile ideas. This is the tragedy of C.K. Lal.