India After Modi

by Ajay Gudavarthy

  In an era of hyper-electoralism of the BJP at the core is their strategy of alternating between development and Hindutva. The momentum is sought to be maintained by alternating the emphasis on either of the two agendas.

  Hindutva versus Development?

  Conventional analysis has pitted Hindutva as an alternative agenda to development. The BJP-RSS combine has a dual strategy of development and Hindutva where the failure of one is made good by the other.

  In other words, if development does not deliver, then the BJP-RSS combine pushes for Hindutva politics, mobilizing communal polarization while claiming integration through development. Thus, BJP’s strategy has been one of claiming ‘sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ through development, undermining the old kind of sectional mobilization based on caste and religious identities, and replacing it with integration through the large-scale developmental process. How this strategy works on the ground and what is claimed are quite different. Thus, the current impasse in BJPs electoral prospects is the result of what BJP claimed through its slogans and programme and how it has worked out on the ground.

  It is now time to rethink how this strategy works on the ground. What it does is quite opposite to the conventional wisdom. In other words, there cannot be Hindutva politics without high growth rates and an expanding economy. Hindutva, ironically, works as a political strategy only when developmental aspirations are high and are in no mood to tolerate any obstruction to its onward march. BJP’s rise to power in 2014 was precisely due to the aspirations set in by the development made possible by the Congress in its rule for 10 years.

  Modi was seen as an alternative who could take Indian development to a new level by taking more bold policy decisions that are necessitated by market forces, what former prime minister Manmohan Sigh had referred to, borrowing from Adam Smith, as the ‘animal spirits’85 that need to be unleashed in order to actualize faster development. It is in this context that Congress and its modes of functioning became synonymous with ‘policy paralysis’, and unable to push the process that they began with the vigour necessary to take it to the next level. Modi’s image as a leader with the ability to take bold decisions went in his favour.86

  This was actualized partly because of his campaign of the trumped-up claims of the ‘Gujarat Model’ that combined high growth with high-decibel majoritarianism.87 It was a rare combination marked by the Gujarat riots. It was this combination that made up the brand Modi. In popular perception, Modi delivered a combination of high growth with Hindutva, one supporting the other. One was acceptable only in combination with the other.

  The current crisis of the BJP and the challenge they will face in 2019 is precisely a breakdown of this combinatory postulation that they had projected. In the earlier moment too, the ‘India Shining’ campaign failed because the claims to development did not match the ground realities.

  Pakoda Nationalism

  Modi began by claiming the ability to create two crore jobs per annum and thus began with the slogans of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Stand up India’ as an overarching policy frame.88 However, with the dip in the growth rates, jobless growth, and sustained agrarian crisis, the developmental claims can no longer sustain, and as a result, Hindutva too does not work. National integration through developmental means is considered a better alternative to sectional inclusion based on caste and religious identities. In other words, social groups, for instance, Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, are willing to look beyond their immediate identities if there is a promise to be included through massive developmental agenda.

  This also works because it helps in economic integration and mobility and also allows groups such as the Dalits to overcome the misrecognition and stigma attached with sectional mobilization. Dalits then can also claim to be citizens rather than ‘merely’ Dalits. However, if the developmental agenda does not allow for such integration, then these groups have no option or qualms about going back to heightened sectional identities.

  BJP made similar claims with regard to Muslims in Gujarat that they were better placed in comparison with the Muslims elsewhere, in spite of the criticism that the Modi regime was patently anti-minority.89 In such a context, any talk of separate Muslim interests looks anti-national because it betrays the universal benefits that development sets in. Thus, claims against Congress for appeasing Muslims looked more credible and also as hampering development and weakening the nation. Therefore, the success of the Hindutva strategy depended on the ability of development to provide more universal-national opportunities for everyone irrespective of their specific cultural identities. Thus, communal polarization was also a response to the way it obstructs development, and therefore, a resurgent nation. It is only as part of this strategy that BJP can sustain an anti-Muslim or for that matter anti-Dalit rhetoric.

  Without development, the Hindutva nationalism looks like an empty claim. Worse, it looks like a deliberate ploy to divert attention. Suddenly, BJP’s strategy today can be projected as a diversionary strategy rather than as a legitimate nationalist assertion. Modi began by claiming that he is retaining the Congress-initiated Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Grant (MNREG) scheme as representative of the colossal failure of the Congress and making political fortunes by pushing people into perpetual poverty. MNREG, he claimed, symbolizes the failure of the agenda of Garbi Hatao initiated by Mrs Gandhi in the 1970s. Instead, what is needed is an imagination of a ‘New India’ where the youth are not dependent on doles but are asking for skill development and expanding opportunities. With the glaring failure to create either new skills or large-scale employment Modi and his finance minister turned to recognize even making pakodas as a gainful employment. Mr Amit Shah even attempted to turn the argument against by claiming that a living by making pakodas is more dignified than by begging for the doles by the government. Can hyper-masculine claims of nationalism coexist with a programme for the youth to make a living by making pakodas?90

  The problem with the current political regime under Narendra Modi is that it failed to make sense of this connection. It became a victim of its own claims. It too understood development and Hindutva as a two-pronged strategy where one needs to be used in lieu of the other; failing to understand one is dependent on the other. The reason even the demand for building the Ram Mandir does not seem to hold a similar appeal is that the Ram Mandir is symbolic of a resurgent India—New India, which means both a robust economic power and a culturally unified Hindu nation. A Hindu nationalism with a faltering economy, in fact, reminds Hindus of the cultural inferiority they are often reminded of by the RSS. Claims of an ‘authentic’ and a glorious past can work only in tandem with high-end corporate growth, fast-paced urbanization, expanding infrastructure, global capital flows, and increasing employment opportunities.

  Challenges of Technocratic Liberalism

  Since the current regime missed the link, they are faced with a political dead-end. The failure of the Modi regime is to understand that the economy needs a different set of policy frame from that of cultural assertion. Modi seems to have applied his experience in raising high-pitched cultural mobilization to that of the economy. Demonetization is a clear standout example of this bravado.

  BJP has also had much less experience in governance than street politics. Governance cannot be managed purely through electoral considerations. It needs a different set of parameters. Sometimes, it requires policy decisions that need to be considered independently. While populism successfully represents such a policy planning as elitist since it is dependent on the role of experts and fosters technocratic liberalism that caters the interests of tiny elite, while this undoubtedly has some purchase, it is also self-defeating as the populist-driven governance also has its own set of adverse impact on the promises populist leaders make.

  An example is the kind of debate under the UPA between the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), [CPI(M)] with regard to nuclear energy that almost brought down the government with the latter’s withdrawal of support. Such policy
conflicts as the very nature of politics did not take institutional functioning seriously. Institutions in a democracy have a more refracted way of expressing public issues, though not in a direct manner as in street mobilization. It is the sheer complexity of liberal democracy that institutions look to be in conflict with the democratic aspirations, while issues such as separation of powers, federalism, independence of media and judiciary, and the autonomy of universities are precisely modes of dealing with competing claims in a democracy that have no easy resolution. Easy resolution is sought to be replaced with moderate accommodation of interests, and here, the institutional arrangement seeks to play an important role. So the conflict between environmental concerns and livelihood needs plays out as a conflict between legislature and judiciary; or the conflict between global corporate capital and agrarian interests plays out as a conflict between Centre and the states. Dissent is a way of making sense of the inherent diversity of interests and competing claims. The current regime consistently worked against all of this in order to project a more robust and a decisive leadership—strongman—to contrast itself from the previous Congress regime. The wheel has turned a full circle. The same methods lead to a faltering economy, which in turn has made the cultural agenda and street mobilization look more vacuous. In course of time, it would be also become difficult to sustain the popularity and credibility of the leadership, which has been arduously built through media images.

  Theorizing Populism in India

  Contemporary populism in India has changed the nature of public/political discourse by inaugurating new meanings and effects through an overdetermination of significations that has foregrounded the limits of what we generally understood as ‘progressive’ politics. The old distinctions between the Left and Right are being replaced by new kind of a meta-narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The process of creating the ‘other’ is achieved not merely through physical violence, coercion, and intimidation but through a sustained process of gaining consent to a moral discourse that combines the old narratives, given or prevalent moral and normative structure with new aspirations, anxieties, and social imaginaries. It carefully sutures the old with the new; it carefully shifts between two ends of the spectrum, sometimes claiming what we had earlier perceived as mutually exclusive practices. It fuses the polar opposites and produces new kinds of debinarized discourse. It attempts to change with continuity and opposition and mobility without disruptive politics. It replaces ideas of antagonism and contradiction with continuity and social harmony; it replaces the emphasis on rights and liberty with fraternity and community. It is therefore imperative to decide what is old and what is new in this discourse. What is populist and what is authoritarian? What is the social narrative behind the more visible modes of exclusion, violence, and criminalization of politics?

  Chantal Mouffe argued against a moral rejection or refutation of Right-wing populism. She argues that ‘the response of traditional parties to the rise of Right-wing populism has clearly contributed to exacerbating the problem. This is why moral condemnation and the setting up of a “cordon sanitaire” have so often constituted the answer to the rise of Right-wing populist movements’.91 Instead, we need to analyse ‘its specificity and its causes’. ‘Moral condemnation’ of the right has to be replaced by an analysis of the ‘moral structure’ on which it builds its politics. As Muller puts it, ‘Populism, I suggest, is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world which places in opposition a morally pure and fully unified people against small minorities, elites in particular, who are placed outside the authentic people’.92 This idea of ‘fully unified people’, in the Indian context, refers to a unified Hindu society, while excluding the minority in the first instance; however, it also has to create a palpable unity within a diversified majority. It needs to develop a diversified strategy for a unified ideology. The diversity, internal to the authentic majority, needs to be recast into a unity. Differences of social location, conflict of interests, and structural contradictions have to be imbricated in terms of social harmony, community, fraternity, and continuity with change—a glorious past with an aspirational future. It aims for a change that is non-disruptive.

  Much of the analysis on populism has focused on the larger narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, largely ignoring how Right-wing populism attempts to maintain the unity of ‘us’, and how it produces an authentic majority that is essentially divided, in the Indian context across caste, region, language, culture, and lifestyles. It is here that Right-wing populism has introduced a new set of political discourses and practices, the tenability of which will inform us of the future of Right-wing populism in India.

  I will attempt to map these new set of practices and how they have worked themselves in order to produce a political, rather than a moral critique of Right-wing populism in India.

  Limits of Progressive Politics

  First, Right-wing populism has managed to turn the traditional progressive political practices on their head. A critique is absorbed or resignified from its original meaning. For instance, the reason for the defeat of the Congress, as largely argued, has been poor implementation of welfare policies, such as the NREGA. BJP began with a critique of poor implementation through a discourse on corruption but gradually resignified it into a critique of welfare itself and anger against growing economic inequalities leading to the election of the more pro-corporate government. Similarly, a critique of institutional crisis and the non-responsive character of the institutions leads to the adoption of strategies that further undermine institutions. It does not lead in a progressive and linear manner to a demand for more accountability but to further insularity. For instance, a critique against a slow judiciary and a corrupt police in India leads to the legitimization of a strategy or rather a policy of ‘encounters’ as recently announced by Yogi Adityanath.93 Here, it is instructive to observe how the Left-liberal critique of the class character of democratic institutions is usurped in legitimizing an aggressive state that in fact makes institutions further dysfunctional to the peril of those socially and economically weak and in targeting the religious minorities. A moral critique slips into a moral justification of the same set of practices.

  Mass Participation Coexists with Authoritarianism

  Second, the old structure of politics is stitched to a new imagery, while in essence, it remains the same. The rise of Right-wing populism also emerged as a critique against technocratic liberalism and governance based on experts. The reasoning behind such a critique was the dominance of a small elite that blocks mass participation and thereby undermines the very essence of democracy. However, the rule of technocrats is replaced by demagoguery and the strongman phenomenon, which in essence only further undermines democratic ethos. As Mouffe observes, ‘Liberal theorists looked for other explanations to fit their rationalist approach, insisting for instance on the role of uneducated, lower-class voters, susceptible to being attracted by demagogues.’94 However, this is prevalent in other sections of the society too, including the middle class.95 It justifies the strongman phenomenon as a response against the rule of the elites, the dynasty rule of the Congress, which will pave the way to the opening of the opportunities for mass participation. Strongman becomes a symbol against ‘consensus elites’, and therefore, ushers in an extra-institutional mobilization. Strongman phenomenon, therefore, coexists with extra-institutional street violence. One justifies the other, and one cannot continue without the other. Demagoguery in India coexists with street violence and rioting. The latter become modes of mass participation and do not run into conflict with the overbearing insularity of authoritarian rule. It symbolizes order, discipline, and control of the old elites and religious minorities, and it implies public sanction, patronage, and impunity for the authentic majority. It fuses polar opposites between an authoritarian ruler and an extra-institutional mobilization. In doing this, the old structure of patronage politics, the rule of few elites is resignified without changing the es
sence by not opening any new avenues for democratic participation. Here again, it stitches the critique built by Left-liberal discourses to the new kinds of extra-institutional mobilization. It builds on the fact that in India, the discourse of formal equality has spread without a commensurate change in the social and material conditions of various social groups.96 This inaugurates a different kind of social psychology.

  Economic Elites versus Cultural Subalterns

  Third, Right-wing populists mobilize culture and passions and have a grasp over social psychology that many social groups are pushed into due to this precarious condition of being aware and being aspirational about the legitimacy of equal treatment but in the concrete struggle against routine incivility. Further, Right-wing populists also sympathize with the declining social power of dominant social groups that we earlier referred to as the ‘hurt pride’. The outbursts by Jats, Patidars, Marathas, Kapus, Kshatriyas, and other dominant castes is symptomatic of the anxieties that dominant castes undergo during social transformation. Left-liberals offer no alternative political agenda to any of these groups. Further, there are economically weak among the dominant castes. The conflicting interests between these caste groups are replaced by mobility and unity. Reservations on the basis of an economic criterion, instead of caste, are a case in point. It allows for mobility without the stigma of caste. It is here that Right-wing populism is offering alternative ideas of social harmony, fraternal feelings, and community fellow feeling that ostensibly allow mobility for the subordinate groups and also empathize with the dominant groups and their declining social power. This is yet again an instance of attempting to fuse polar opposites into continuity. It partly recognizes that the economically poor among the dominant caste are also socially stigmatized. For instance, the poor among the Brahmins also suffer from a social stigma and therefore are not elites in a traditional sense of the term. They see a possibility of forging a unity between them based on their social experience of poverty. Economic elites are therefore pitched against cultural subalterns. This still leaves out the distance between them as castes and the fact that the nature of discrimination and social exclusion is markedly different. How these differences at one level are going to play out against a certain kind of commonality at another level is a continuing challenge for Right-wing populism in India. They have to stitch the ‘hurt pride’ of the dominant castes with the social stigma of the subaltern castes. The difficulty of such a mode or the socially conservative aspect of such an experiment is visible in the recent conflicts between Dalits and Marathas in Bima-Koregaon.