THE INDIVIDUAL: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

In the age of Trumpism, we can no longer stay content with rights and be indifferent to duties. Individual citizens must create spaces to engage with global affairs

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

TRUMP and Trumpism have become global words. A whole thesaurus of meanings, synonyms and antonyms have been built around the US president's reappearance. But Trump as a set of words is anarchic, compared to Trump as a discourse. Trump as a discourse is devoted to giant collectives like large corporations and super-states. It has little space for the defeated. And Trump as a discourse restricts the conversation around power.

It is in this context that social scientist Chandrika Parmar raised an issue: how do we relate to Trump as an individual? How do we react to him to make sense of our own lives? Parmar holds that the discourse of the individual, for all the talk of individualism, has disappeared. She adds we must reassert the individual as long as Trump remains the trump card in the pack, and the individual the joker.

This point was made in a different era by social activist Ela Bhatt, who was deeply concerned about creating a new front against globalism. Home science, she said, is about homecoming. About being at home in the world. And globalism denies both. Globalism, she claimed, is neither about swadesh nor about swaraj. It is a parochial rendering of politics.

She added it is women who suffer the most. She felt that home science should create a new theory of international relations. She would have added that Trumpism destroys the very idea of citizenship. Citizenship as a right of passage is never complete. The refugee, the migrant, the transient and the student perpetually remain vulnerable.

Bhatt felt a home science of international relations would involve the individual and his domesticity. It is best caught in a joke where the housewife describes the new international relations as a 'Trump-olin'. The challenge for the individual is how not to be squashed in the process.