Talking openly, talking in the open

It is possible to view road politics in Gandhamur as simply another example of failed Indian democracy. Not only is the public sphere not set apart from the "pressure of the street,"

but the Action Council is apparently using that pressure (and, indeed, whatever pressure it can) to present itself as something it is not. More generally, the approach to publicity outlined by Sujit is arguably an excellent example of the insincere, interested communication liberalism wishes to expunge. Even Sujit acknowledges that this is not how "real gentlemen" talk.

Be that as it may, if the publicity of the road is not the publicity of the public sphere, I would argue that this is not because public life in Gandhamur is unlike public life in Europe, but rather because the disembodied, socially unmarked, and purely disinterested discourse of the imagined public sphere is unlike actual public life anywhere. Indeed, in tracing out the

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mechanisms behind the particular uses of roads practiced by the Action Council, I have aimed to suggest that the basic workings of indeterminate addressivity, if not the relevant ideologies, are much the same as elsewhere. My impulse to be careful about how I, or Sunil, talked in the road was not motivated by my appreciation of local practices, but simply by an intuitive sense of how things could go wrong. I would likewise suggest that we should not expect that indeterminate addressivity will spur people to speak openly. Surely, in a world where there are no absolutely anonymous and disconnected spheres of discourse, we would more likely expect people to be careful about what they say in public.

But this is not to say that all public speech is disingenuous speech. Such a conclusion would not do justice to the dilemmas faced by participants in the Gandhamur campaign. The Action Council members believed in their cause. While taking the role of the oppressed people often required careful imagework, this is not to say that their attempts to do so were insincere.

My use of theatrical metaphors here is not intended to suggest that they were simply pretending.

Indeed, every indication during my years of studying this campaign was that those involved took themselves to be "the people," and self-evidently so. But communicating this to others,

paradoxically, required them to at times hide certain things or present things as other than they were.

The best illustration of this tension is surely Vijayan's own approach to the campaign.

Counter to Sujit's view of Malayali culture, Vijayan frequently declared to me that, for himself and for the Action Council, everything was said openly (tur̤ annu par̤ayuka). And he performed this openness in various ways as well. The day I arrived in Gandhamur for dissertation

fieldwork, shortly after the police violence, there was a demonstration in front of the factory gates. Dozens of police were there, and I knew I was being watched closely. But Vijayan insisted

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in putting me on the back of his bike and driving me to his new house. As we went, I asked if he was not concerned this would hurt the campaign's image. But he shrugged this off, saying that people would say what they were going to say. It did not matter what they said, he declared, because everyone knew the truth about the factory's pollution.

And yet, as noted in Chapter 2, Vijayan and other leaders in the campaign did their strategizing behind closed doors. Even in the road, in the midst of an event, they could often be seen to step aside and speak in low voices. I remember one day not long after that first bike ride, when I convinced Vijayan to let me follow him continuously for an entire day. Up to midday, I got to ride behind him as zipped around on his bike and made one phone call after another. Then, without warning, he set me down at the struggle tent and rode away. When he returned, I teased him about ditching me. Not laughing, he told me, "for us, mind and speech are one.³⁵" But in the evening, he tried to slip away again. When I convinced him to let me join him, he made me promise not to write about what we did. It was nothing very scandalous, but it was not meant for public display.

Critiques of Vijayan as precisely not what he claimed to be—of avowing open speech in order to further his ruse—were internal to the politics of the Gandhamur campaign. Such

accusations were the main stuff of my interviews with factory workers, but they were also given voice by some members of the Action Council. Solidarity organizers, after the split described in Chapter 2, commonly impugned Vijayan's sincerity, though they always maintained that there was a remainder in the village, the people, who were truly oppressed and would inevitably rise to challenge their oppression, even if the current campaign leadership was corrupt. Even Adarsh,

35 “nammukk manassum samsāravum onn āṇṇ”

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who never went so far as to accuse Vijayan of deceit, nonetheless often said that his speech was like that of a politician. He knew how to craft words that suited his purposes, saying what sounded grand and leaving other things unsaid.

Our analysis of politics in the road offers insight into the stakes in these concerns about instrumental speech, without taking us down the rabbit hole of accusations and

counter-accusations internal to the campaign's struggle to be seen as authentic. In their pursuit of the support of public opinion, the Action Council members were confronted with two imperatives that, although aligned in theory, often came into conflict in practice. The first was the imperative of the cause itself. Campaign participants were absolutely convinced that the gelatin factory's pollution was poisoning them and their children. They had long sought to stop the pollution and, by the time of my dissertation research, were committed to shutting down the factory altogether.

The second imperative was that they represent themselves as "the people." They had to represent themselves to the whole community (i.e., the indeterminate public) as the whole community (i.e., as those defined not by caste, class, or organizational affiliation, but only by the harm caused them by the factory). As indicated in the previous section, the latter imperative meant talking openly in the open.

However, as we have seen, the public thoroughfare is not a neutral space where the Action Council displays its oppression before a disinterested and impartial gaze. Rather, it is replete with particular, interested evaluations. The road does not sever the interested relations of everyday life, it only mixes them up with one another. The resulting indeterminate addressivity invites not candor, but careful management. And such management becomes all the more urgent, all the more careful, for Vijayan and the members of the Action Council, who understand

themselves to have so much to lose. As Vijayan suggests, the campaign participants are

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confident that, if all were fully transparent, there would be question about the justice of their cause. But all is not transparent. The mediations that make up the public are not neutral

mediations. Therefore, though everything is done openly in theory, everything is not done openly in actuality.

In short, the imperative of winning this particular people's struggle comes into conflict with the imperative of performing people's struggle authentically. At the same time, however, the former imperative can be taken to justify this contradiction. Conviction about the injustice of the harm done by the factory to the residents of Gandhamur is, at bottom, reason to break pipes, hound journalists away, or even—should it be necessary—to take up wooden sticks of their own.

If the Action Council must take such steps to stage "the people," they justify this by the

conviction that they are the people. Thus, Vijayan could at once claim that the campaign had no desire but to expose everything and also work, with great fervor, to manage the campaign's exposure. This included working to manage exposure to my own research, which, from the perspective of campaign participants, was a channel to addressees arguably more unknown than any others.

In his challenge to what he considers the inherently oppressive communicative norms of the public sphere, Cody recommends further exploration of "the people" as an embodied

alternative to the "unmarked citizen" of liberal democratic theory (Cody, 2015, p. 52). However, as analyzed in the context of road politics in Kerala, the production of the people, though very much embodied, shares with the public sphere theory many of the features of collective self-abstraction that Cody and others find politically objectionable. Like the public sphere, the people is very much an "ideology that allows some people to speak for humanity in general" (Cody, 2015, p. 51). Or, if the concept of humanity seems out of place here, we can say that the staging

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of the people in people's struggle substitutes part for whole, particular for universal. Moreover, this misrepresentation is tied to a folk theory about indeterminate addressivity that, though more realistic than that of Habermas, nonetheless grounds the notion that to speak openly in the open is to shed one's concern for social ties. As Laclau (2005) suggests, such a bracketing, if not erasure, of caste, class, or other social particularities appears to be inherent to identification with the people. For the purposes of public appeal, the bodies that make up the people in the road may not be any more socially marked than the rational arguments that make up the citizen in the public sphere.

What we have with the publicity of the thoroughfare, then, is not a coherent alternative program to that of liberalism and its public sphere ideal. Such a radical departure from the liberal imaginary could only be argued, I suspect, according to values that are radically

incommensurable with those that inspire that imaginary. Our analysis of road politics in Gandhamur, to the contrary, raises many concerns—the difficulty of speaking openly in the open, the misrepresentation of a part as the whole—that are in line with those that motivate both Habermas' thinking and that of his critics. However, the thoroughfare metaphor, as elaborated in our analysis of people's struggle, treats some of these concerns from a different angle that both complements and corrects for some of the failures of liberal democratic norms. Chief among the corrections is a setting aside of the hope that the public sphere holds out for a segregation of reason from social embeddedness, candor from performance, ethics from politics. Publicity is not enclosure, but exposure, and public rationality must be sorted out in the mix of things.

In this chapter, as in Chapters 2 and 3, I have introduced divergent but complementary approaches to conducting people's struggles, describing each as a pursuit in which ethics and politics were closely intertwined. In both cases, people's struggle provided inspiration and

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opportunities for transforming oneself. Thus, Sunny became one who "stands apart and sees differently" and Vijayan became a leader of the people. But people's struggle was also a way of changing others, whether it was focused on promoting a broad framework for understanding and evaluating campaigns and protests or on gaining public support for shutting down a particular factory.

In the next three chapters, I build upon this analysis to explore how the ethical dimensions of the activist ethics associated with people's struggles can contribute to a better understanding of ethics as a part of social life. I focus more closely on particular aspects of contention over ethical evaluation, asking how an evaluative acts carry force that can shape the actions and opinions of selves and their others. I begin, in the next chapter, with an analysis of what might at first seem a small matter—a negative evaluation of cookie eating by one activist. I describe how this evaluation exerts force not only on those who are inclined to accept it but, even moreso, by those who resist. In the mechanisms that make this evaluation of cookies persist, I argue, we can find clues to what makes ethics distinctive as a kind of evaluation.

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