CITYZEN. All fired up by statues

Statues — those seemingly lifeless forms that most people take for granted when visiting a city — often turn into a political fire that can prove difficult to control. The statues Mayawati built have continued to haunt her political career. And just in case you thought that this was some uniquely Indian feature, the US is now providing ample evidence that the problem is rather more universal than that.

The conflict in Charlottesville over the removal of a statue of a pro-slavery Confederate general has brought on the national stage the conflict between White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis on one side and liberals of various hues on the other. With President Trump choosing to demonstrate to his supporters on the far right that he hasn’t completely abandoned them, the flames have been fanned at a time when the president was expected to douse them. As a result he has added statues and their politics to a long and growing list of areas where he is out of his depth.

To be fair to Trump, it is not unusual for politicians to underestimate the potency of statues as a political instrument. Very often they are just seen as independent celebrations of individuals or principles. When the majority of a society moves beyond those beliefs it is only to be expected that there will be a clamour for the removal of those statues. Given the deeply felt attitudes to civil rights in large sections of the American population it is only to be expected that civic bodies would sooner or later vote to remove statues of individuals associated with slavery.

Statues and the people they portray are, however, rarely only about a particular set of ideas the person held. They are also about a larger identity. In the case of statues of Confederate generals in the US they are also about southern states who may still feel anger about the loss of a civil war. This could hurt anyone with a regional identity even if they have long rejected the pro-slavery position on which that war was fought.

Statues in prominent places in a city could also affect the very character of that urban centre. For those who have grown up in that urban setting the sudden removal of a prominent statue could be seen as a break from how they see the city; a break from the past. This discomfort was tapped by Trump when he referred to the beauty of the statues. And the far right took it as justification for the anger they were eager to generate; an anger that took on an anti-Semitic character.

The political life a statue can take is widely recognised in India. It is not just the removal of a statue that can cause a riot but also the emergence of a new one. There is much greater awareness of statues as instruments of identity.

The response to this recognition in India is not always helpful in building a civic consciousness. Each group tries to assert its identity in the part of the city it occupies by putting up a statue of a personality that it identifies with. The groups and their interests being varied, so are the personalities their statues portray. Even within a single regional identity like the Marathi one there could be a consciousness associated with Chhatrapati Shivaji and another associated with Ambedkar. Add to this the effects of migration and the tendency for migrant groups to set up statues of their own in the places they live in, and the city develops a highly segmented character.

Indian cities try to address the absence of a single civic identity with majoritarian methods. There is a widespread view that the identity of the majority must prevail. Such a principle is not always practical. There is the question of which majority to take.

Those who would like to go with national majorities would prefer all cities to provide a prominent place to Hindi and personalities associated with it. Others might choose to go with a regional majority. This can lead to battles over the relevant symbols as in the debate on Karnataka having its own flag, or in the metros in southern cities opposing the use of Hindi.

The way out would be to develop an identity of a city that is unique and represents all its citizens. This is a challenge that is often beyond the capabilities of not just Indian cities but also those in developed parts of the world.

The writer is a professor at the School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru