INDIA AFTER MODI
INDIA
AFTER
MODI
Populism and the Right
Ajay Gudavarthy
BLOOMSBURY INDIA
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First published in India 2019
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Copyright © Ajay Gudavarthy, 2019
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To my relations—Venu Kaka, Bhakti Kaka, Ravi Kaka, Naranna, Seenanna, and Anurag—for making my trips to Hyderabad warm and eventful.
Interactions with them also helped me understand Right-wing populism better!
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy
Part I: POPULISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM
Introduction
Populist-Authoritarianism in India
Populism and the Strongman: From Modi to Yogi
Award Wapsi: Reasoning with Intolerance
Why the RSS Projects JNU as Anti-National?
Autonomy of Universities and a Life of the Mind
Demonetization and the ‘War on Terror’
Corporate Capitalism, Hurt Pride, and Hindutva
Populism and Mass Violence: The Liberal-Illiberal Dilemma
Populism and Popular Culture: Are Muslims the Safest Enemy to Have?
Hyper-Electoralism and Pakoda Nationalism
Theorizing Populism in India
Part II: STATE(S) OF DEMOCRACY
Introduction
What Did BJP’s Defeat in Delhi Tell Us?
Does Bihar Hold the Key to the Future of Indian Politics?
Populism and Caste Calculus in Uttar Pradesh
Telangana: The Question of Internal Colonization
Kashmir: Is It Also a Question of Internal Colonization?
Kashmiri Pandits: Precariats of Indian Democracy
Of What Value Is NOTA?
Towards 2019: Opposition Needs to Rally Behind Mayawati
BJP’s Strategy for 2019
Part III: DALIT-BAHUJAN POLITICS
Introduction
After Rohith Vemula: Is the Dalit-Muslim Unity Sustainable?
Dalit-Bahujans and Fraternity: From Ambedkar to Kancha Illiah
Unity between the Left and the Dalit-Bahujans
Caste, Authenticity, and the Oriental Spirit
Part IV: THE FUTURE OF POLITICS
Introduction
Nehru and the Rise of Modi
Bringing Justice Back In
Women and the Future of Democracy
Anxiety, Anger, and Anomie: Mobilizing Generation Next
India’s Oscillating Public Sphere
Social Ethics of Violence and the Maoist Movement in India
Notes and References
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book is a reflection on the current political dispensation working under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi. It attempts to take a critical look at all the major events that transpired since 2014 and as a run-up to 2019. It is premised on the argument that ‘India after Modi’ is distinct from what it was before. I have attempted to tread a difficult line of making the book readable to the common reader and anyone interested in what is going on with democracy in India; further, this will appeal to social scientists, scholars, journalists, policymakers, and others with a degree of specialization relevant to reading politics.
Some of the articles published as short essays in various news dailies and web portals have been rewritten to further explore the interconnections between them and produce (hopefully) tightly held arguments, mapping the changes and pre-empting the ones to come. The essays have been published earlier in The Hindu, The Indian Express, New Indian Express, The Wire, News Laundry, Deccan Herald, South Live, Himal South Asian, Book Review and the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). I gratefully acknowledge all of them.
I acknowledge with thanks all colleagues and friends who were part of this bumpy ride, including Janjira Sambatpoonaseri, Marc Saxer, Anil Menon, B.S. Chimni, Zoya Hasan, Arfa Khannum, Amir Ali, Neera Chandhoke, Satish Jha, Burra Srinivas, Afroz Alam, Maninder Thakur, Divyaraj Amiya, Trevor Stack, Anand Teltumbde, Anindya Purukayastha, Saswat Das, Nicholas Tampio, Heike, Samir Gandesha, Anup Dhar, Swagato Sarkar, A.P.S. Chauhan, Ashok Kaul, Taru Shikha, Bal Reddy, Govindraj Hegde, T.G. Suresh, Shiju Verghese, Supriya Roychoudhary, Manisha Sethi, G. Vijay, V.S. Prasad, Dr Narshima Reddy, and many others I inadvertently forget to mention here. I thank many students at the Centre for Political Studies for engaging discussions and filling in the days with mirth, helping me avoid the distaste of institutional realities! I immensely benefitted out of continuous dialogue and discussions with all of them. I thank Gurpreet Mahajan for the discussions and Satyender for the help in processing the funding of the field trips through the Departmental Special Assistance (DSA).
I am thankful to all those who have extended invitations to be part of academic meets that they organized including Mahesh Rangarajan, Mohan Gopal, Ravi Kumar, Afroz Alam, Bijaylakshmi, Venkatesu, Rashmi Doraisamy, Dhananjay Tripathi, J. Prabash, Vivek Kumar, Gurram Srinivas, Smriti Das, Maninder Thakur, Pia David, Ajay Behera, Biju, G.N. Trivedi, Subodh Kumar Sajjan, Anindya Purakayastha and Saswat Das, Dr Kuruvila, Mangesh Kulkarni, Srirupa Roy, Rama Rao, Muslim Education Society, Jaganatham, Deepak Kumar, Radhakrishnan, and Sudhir Suthur. Presenting papers and delivering public talks at the various events that they organized greatly contributed to the clarity with which I have been able to present the arguments in this book.
Finally, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Chandra Sekhar at Bloomsbury for suggesting the idea for the book and for suggesting that I rewrite it to read like a book. Without his persuasion, this book wouldn’t be what it is.
Introduction:
Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy
Democracies across the globe have taken a populist turn, with the rise of Trump in the US, at the onset of Brexit in UK, and with Narendra Modi in India. Most populist regimes, perhaps with the exception of Podemos in Spain, have all been Right wing, notwithstanding the local-national specificities. In other words, populism across the globe has certain common features, including
the ability to create a people, projecting a strongman, polarizing between ‘us’ and ‘them’, moralization of power and exclusion, mobilizing emotions and passions, bringing the private to the public, and replacing the institutional mode of pursuing politics and governance with street mobilizations, among others. However, the real script of the rise of populism is in the details. The commonality that has emerged as a new global process perhaps is linked to neo-liberalism (essentially linked to the idea of the withdrawal of social welfare policies) and the social and economic inequalities associated therewith, and decline of the appeal of the old Left and its progressive-secular values. Although economic inequalities and the role of global capitalist structures have not been displaced, the experience of such structures has become more complicated because of the dispersed nature of capitalism after globalization.
The materiality of the structures has become dispersed through global networks that are post-Westphalian, invisible, staggered, and therefore, difficult to locate as sites or targets of resistance. Progressive Left militant politics of various hues were based on the reading of politics as outcomes of clear effects of structural dislocation, palpable inequalities, declining quality and standard of living, and visible national or local targets for mobilization, which would produce new kinds of commonality in resistance either as a class or as ‘multitudes’.
The aforementioned broad structural change has been accompanied by the production of a ‘unique historical moment’, produced and contained on the back of the history of resistance movements of the last century, including the Russian Revolution. This unique historical moment has been one where the formal reach of the political discourse of equality, dignity, recognition, and representation has spread to all quarters and sections of human society, while the conditions to realize them have become cumulatively contained and dissipated. It is a moment that is keenly self-aware but en-caged and delimited. It is a moment that is marked by vast aspirations and robust imagination but is also less optimistic and hopeful. It is a moment that has a deep sense of what it is to be wronged but without a collective narrative of what the alternative looks like or how one gets there. Neither the route nor the destination are certain but the suffocation with the current location and life is too tangible to be missed. It is a situation that mobilizes ‘resistance’ or perhaps negotiation, which could be a better way of putting it without a deep sense of hope or conviction for dramatic social change, but it is also a situation that is not content with small and everyday changes. It is a unique historical moment that is marked by what I would refer to as ‘Conformist Optimism’.
The uniqueness of the moment spills into the new kind of micro-foundations of power relations, techniques of momentary resistance and prolonged negotiation, imaginations of future change and nostalgia for past and continuity, a new kind of will of subjectivity and passions, experience and affectivity, compassion and fragmentation, relative mobility and social conservatism, curiosity and certainty or freedom and security, and protest and invisibility, among many other such hyphenated social and political processes. Populism is one expression that has best, if not exhaustively, captured some of these changes and is representative of what is good and bad with democracies across the globe. What is stifling, and where do new opportunities lie? Populism marks what is distinct about the democratic process as different from the 20th century. Most or some of the features or processes were always part of popular politics and ideas of popular sovereignty but what is distinct about the current rise of populist regimes is the cul-de-sac of accumulating and arranging them together in a distinct manner —a pattern that is global and local simultaneously. This book is about what is specific about populism in India and what it holds for the future of our democracy.
Populism has brought to the fore an explosion of the ‘irreducibility of multiplicity’—differences that cannot be reconciled. It has signified a simultaneous politicization of trends that were understood to represent democracy and also its counter-narrative. What is clear is that democracy cannot continue without resolving its ‘other’. Does this mean that politics will only be about moderating conflicts and not overcoming them? Does it mean containing social conflicts from spilling over to the excess of their violent selves without concern for deeper compassion and solidarity? Does it signal a ‘new’ kind of democracy and coexistence or a victory of majoritarianism? Does populism signify the renewed claims of the dominant over the dominated or the claims of the subaltern against the elite? Or does it represent the claims of the subaltern in the imagery of the elite and the assertion of the elite coloured in the language and emotionality of the subaltern? Does it represent an objective condition, or does it represent the excess of subjective proliferation that draws on the objective context but refuses to be tied down to it? In other words, it produces its own self-imagined ‘reality’ as a mode of resistance and as a means of survival. It is true to the extent it exists. It has to be dealt in this distinctly post-sociological sense, with a post-historical sensibility. It has and will bring new questions to the horizon that are potently hegemonic and illiberal but are also crying out for a new mode of resolution, which can create democracies that are in fact more substantive and stable.
Understanding the Right
In India, it means a resurgent and a victorious Right with claims to establishing a Hindu Rashtra, or alternatively, a politics that has exhausted the agenda of the Right by extending the limits of progressive politics. To begin with, what it definitely demands is a fresh understanding of the Right, avoiding a ‘mere’ moral rejection. The Right has articulated many aspects that have remained on the sidelines because of how modernity has institutionalized contemporary democracies. The need is to listen to those voices, without agreeing with them; those issues should be articulated without legitimizing them, and recognized without institutionalizing them. Progressive and Left/democratic and radical militant politics in India, to begin with, haven’t yet started to listen to what the Right is saying, much less understand or reflect what to do about it. On the contrary, the Right has understood, to a large extent, the ‘logic’ of the Left-progressive politics and also the imagination of liberal institutionalism. This is not because the Right was more democratic or politically astute, but because it simply had no choice. The Left-liberal overreach of the last three decades has made it a precondition for the Right to survive. What we are witnessing today in terms of the rise of the Right-wing populism is an outcome and a response to that rugged survival at the margins for so long. The conservative political being of the Right today ‘feels like a subaltern and thinks like the elite’.
The Right has encroached on the discourse of equality, dignity, recognition, and representation, and sutured them to the ideas of unity, nationalism, loyalty, and order. The attraction of the Right-wing ideas today is precisely for what it has learnt from the progressives. It has developed techniques, organizational modalities, and ideological formulations that institute their worldview on the shoulders of what progressive politics taught them. The Right that we see today is not the Right of the early 20th century, but the Left that we see today remains the Left of the good old times. The Right has understood where the ‘legitimacy’ of liberal-constitutionalism comes from, without agreeing with that mode of mobility or stability. It has understood the ‘attraction’ of articulating a language of differences for the subaltern over their call for unity and the ‘temptation’ of resistance over the tranquillity of order. Today, the ideals of stability, unity, and order are not divested from essentially institutionalizing hierarchy, hegemony, and majoritarianism but from what are clothed in the sensibilities of equality, liberty, and fraternity. The Right has learnt to tie diversified strategies to a unified ideology. It has initiated what I would prefer to refer to as ‘performative dialectics’—dialectics at the level of performativity, and unity and hierarchy at the level of substance and content. It has learnt the need to dissipate to achieve unification and the value of dispersion to achieve polarization. It has
spoken the language of multiplicity to instantiate singularity.1
Performative Dialectics
The Left-progressives have often morally rejected the performative dialectics of the Right either as opportunism or as mere doublespeak, such as what it did with the Dalit-Bahujan politics in the previous round of the ‘democratic upsurge’. The Right has been accused of spreading lies, fabricating evidence, manipulating, sparking and organizing violence, igniting riots, and lynching; however, the legitimacy of the Right does not come from these. The Right is assumed to be using force, violence, intimidation, and extrajudicial methods when other strategies fail to normalize its politics without remaning or being an exception. Presumably, the Right knows that explicit fear and domination is difficult to sustain and may eventually prove counter-productive in spreading its reach. It is important to understand that overt and visible violence has an underlying social narrative that is meant to generate consent and consensus for the overt violence. It is therefore equally important to focus on the social narrative behind the violence.
The essays in this book offer a critique of the methods that are possibly followed by the Right. It is presumed that the Right has established a unique hydra-headed organizational structure that goes by the name of the ‘fringe groups’, which makes it difficult to pin responsibility while being in tune with the participatory ethos and network society of the neo-liberal era on the other. Every action, be it by Gau Rakshaks, Romeo Squads, murders, and possibly in some cases, assassination of public activists and intellectuals, is followed by denial, criticism, and appropriation. This allows them to execute without challenging the established liberal sensibilities and legality of constitutional morality. The Right distances itself from the event even as it might be lending support.2 The performative dialectics make it difficult to build and consolidate a counter-narrative. It opposes secularism not for what it is but what it is made out to be. They criticize not secularism but pseudo-secularism, in effect, debunking and claiming secularism, emptying it of its contents, and re-signifying it to mean ‘minorityism’ and instead establishing a majoritarian ethic as the new normal. This is construed as not merely doublespeak, manipulation, dishonesty, and opportunism, but more importantly, as an attempt to disarm the established mores of liberal language, minority rights, constitutionalism, and freedom of speech and expression. It is believed that it appropriates without investing and subverts without challenging. I refer to this ongoing mobilization as the ‘liberal-illiberal dilemma’ in which the Left-progressives get inextricably entangled. The Right avails of the best in liberal traditions, including the right to freedom of expression, but is seen to deny the same privilege to those who differ with them in the name of claiming that they alone represent an authentic ‘people’. Performative dialectics work with an explicit threat of street violence and targeting of individuals.
India After Modi Page 1
