:: Farrukh Dhondy

Terror and its Freudian roots

Farrukh Dhondy

March.28 : "The writing’s on the wall —

The words to him were Greek!

‘Your days are numbered’, they said —

‘My arithmetic is weak’

‘Your goose, my friend, is cooked’ —

‘It isn’t food I seek...’"

From The Loser by Bachchoo

It was Henry Kissinger who said power was the foremost aphrodisiac. I have wondered whether he meant it was an aphrodisiac for him, lending a Viagral ferocity in bed whenever he ordered a fresh bombing of Cambodia, or whether, in a muddle about meanings, he meant that it stimulated women to embrace him in all his creaky glory. The biographical notes and gossip one has about Mr Kissinger does not tell us very much about his performances, but he was certainly seen with younger attractive women who seemed to appreciate him. The effortless magnetism created by the power field around American secretaries of state, presidents and other potentates will inevitably be the envy of other men. The really wealthy don’t need this magnetism. Their gold creates its own, though it might be counted nightly by the ugliest and most vulgar of men. When one is neither powerful nor rich, one falls back on wit and poetry — unreliable, I assure you, at their deployed best.

But I digress. The point of the Kissinger analysis is that power and sex were in his case happily associated. In our age we seem to have plenty of examples of the opposite: of an association between powerlessness and sex or a lack of it.

I am as convinced as one can be about these things — that the impulse to terror in our times has its roots deep down in sexual frustration. I have observed, read about and have been peripherally acquainted with the young men who turned to Islamicist terror in Britain in recent years. Living in Britain one recognises the type. Even if one didn’t know these namak harams who are brought up, fed, housed and educated at the expense of the British tax-payer, what can one make of the motives of ugly young men who load a car with home-made explosives and attempt to blow up a night club? One may even distinguish between these losers and the 4,000 British citizens, the majority of them from Mirpuri immigrant backgrounds, who go to Afghanistan to fight American and British troops. One may understand the motives of a person who feels he should go and join Hamas in Gaza and shoot rockets into Israel, though one may wonder at his ignorance of the fact that there are enough people doing that anyway and it’s not the cleverest choice of revolutionary strategy. The fellows who want to bomb, in their own words "the bitches that drink and dance" at the night clubs of London — what sort of ideological commitment are they demonstrating? Are they setting out to prove some twisted Freudian thesis about cultural repression and sexual frustration finally breaking out in this rage of powerlessness?

Their pose is that of disapproving moralists and they profess allegiance to some code from a social order that invariably prescribes the subservience of women to their "laws". The fundamental connection between power and gender in the social and political arrangement becomes the fundamentalist connection between what they call the immorality of the "dancing bitches" and their lack of access to them.

This morality is the opposite of that sought by the great moral teachers of all time — of Buddha or Christ or, in our day, the injunction to control and conquer the self and one’s impulses which were the socio-political creed of the Mahatma. The fundamentalist "moralist" seeks to impose discipline, in trivial ways, on men who are forbidden from trimming their beards and in the most deadly serious ways of confining women to the indignity not only of remaining uneducated or not driving cars, but of the ultimate indignity of not being equal.

It is that which the fundos resent and that is why they see in the young girls of London, who have the freedom to spend their time and money in night clubs and to dress as they please and drink what they like, the lineaments of that which will destroy their world. They would kill that which they subconsciously desire and know has transcended, gone way beyond their control.

So it is with some alarm that one sees this frustration break out on the streets of Mangalore. The Ram Sene is not the first group of thugs to resent and attack the freedom of women they term "loose". They resent the women who have stepped outside the restrictive boundaries of their prescriptive norms and have hence become inaccessible.

Before these stalwarts took up the cudgels and demonstrated their masculine courage by attacking women in pubs, there were the outbreaks of objections to Valentine’s Day celebration by the young of the then city of "Bombay", the young who wished to play this silly Western game. The feast of St. Valentine, an invention of greeting card makers, florists and chocolate companies, was nevertheless adopted by thousands of Indian young in imitation of the American young (and of some ageing and shameless losers too). They were and should be free to so do in our consumer society. The Shiv Sena, who objected to this new trend, didn’t turn their attention or their anger on people who send get-well-cards to their ailing friends. They picked on the Valentinos because they were seen as importing a form of "love" that was alien.

And, of course, it wasn’t the "love" that was alien. I would wager a pound to a paisa that none of the Shiv Sainiks could come up with any sensible definition of this elusive if universally professed and many-splendoured thing. What they were objecting to was the new social relationship that afforded women in love a freedom which a system of obedience to fathers and other males hadn’t given them. These women, with their Valentine’s Day cards, were threatening their social order.

The women with pints of beer in their fists are even more threatening and the Ram Sene, making their mob assertions, are really confessing that they fear the frailty of their own moral fabric.

That being said, I would advise the sisters to stop the pink knicker campaign forthwith. While boosting the trade of underwear manufacturers, it has the effect of giving vicarious sexual excitement to the very perverts that receive them. I shudder to think what they do with these badly-chosen tokens of righteous protest.