India After Modi

by Ajay Gudavarthy

  The authors again explain this fairly abstract point in rather a lucid language that the goal of the political, then, is ‘coterminous with the end of history’. In contrast, ‘the Orientals’ Hegel argues, ‘have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such—is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free... The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness, that man, as a man, is free: that it is the freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence’.38 The authors, in their reinterpretation, in effect, make two points in opposition to that of Hegel. Firstly, that Hegel’s own ideas and philosophy are much closer to Indian thought than what Hegel actually acknowledged, and that these ideas in Indian thought emerged much earlier. Secondly, that all of the Indian philosophy cannot be reduced to Brahminic Hinduism, and that merely from the sociological fact that Brahmins dominated and denied the same freedom to others, cannot possibly be the ground to be dismissive of Indian philosophy, because philosophy can gain a certain autonomy from social dynamics.

  Hindu Unity and Ancient Purity

  This book was undoubtedly an important contribution in many senses. This is an important attempt at demystifying the hegemony of ‘Western Philosophy’ but this in no way should obstruct and provide justification for not initiating internal self-reflection that Hegel would have referred to as dialectical progress. In other words, even as we criticize the orientalism of the Western philosophy, attempts to lay a claim to both an alternative reading as well as foregrounding non-Brahmanic traditions within Hinduism, there needs to be a concerted attempt to disown and reject the discriminatory practices within the ancient mode and knowledge systems. This, however, is problematic for the Right-wing politics that wishes to reinstate the ancient as the authentic, by extension arguing for the superiority of the Hindu way of life over other religions and civilizations. For instance, Ram Madhav, RSS ideologue and currently general secretary of the BJP at an event began his speech by quoting the American writer and historian Will Durant. ‘He (Durant) has said, “India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages. India was the mother of our philosophy, of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in Christianity… of self-government and democracy. In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all”’.39 In other words, claims to authenticity clash with both modern diversity and the need for critical self-reflection. Right-wing populists, in contemporary times in India, have been struggling to negotiate with these contrasting pulls. The ancient Hindu way of life is an important mode of creating an authentic unity among Hindus. It is attempting a unity in the present and a purity of the past. Mostly, these attempts by the RSS have remained aborted. In order to circumvent the problem, RSS appears to have taken recourse to distorting many aspects of history. For instance, one such method has been to argue that practices such as untouchability came to India with ‘Muslim invasions’, and those enslaved Hindus later began to be treated as untouchables.40 They have also claimed that texts such as the Manusmriti have been distorted by the communists in order to delegitimize Hinduism. This, they believe, will help them lay a claim to an authentic past and also accommodate the discriminatory aspects within Hinduism and the ancient way of life.41

  Authenticity is an important tool for populism as it gives a sense of completeness. The frailties created by modern conflicts for mobility can be recast around a non-disruptive unity. Populism then lays a claim to legitimacy for ruling in the name of this authentic core, and also in creating an ‘other’ who lies outside of this authentic core. This overlooks the complexity and plural readings of history, including on issues such as beef and violence prevalent in the ancient way of life. In India, Brahmanic Hinduism remains to be negotiated in order to claim other traditions within Hinduism. Right-wing populism does not wish to critically distance from such traditions as that disallows them to lay claims to an authentic past and a unified present. It continues to run into problems with the anti-Brahmin political and intellectual articulations. This further makes it problematic for the Right-wing populists to spread to other parts of India such as the South, which have had strong anti-Brahmin movements claiming a Dravidian identity. For instance, in Tamil Nadu, they have a problem with figures such as Periyar who was both a staunch atheist and led anti-Brahmin movements. Brahminism remains one of the contentious issues in creating an authentic core and an idealized past.

  Part IV

  THE FUTURE OF POLITICS

  Introduction

  W hat does the future of democracy look like in India? Will the current acceptability of Right-wing populism undermine the legitimacy of democracy in the long run, along with the institutions identified with it, including the Constitution, or will it pave way for a more vernacularized democracy that speaks a local idiom and is essentially inclusive in its everyday operations? There is an inclusive dimension and an anti-elite sentiment at the heart of populism but by that very logic, it also undermines institutional procedures and articulation of differences. There was an underlying populist narrative that appealed to the popular sentiments and prejudices, which provided legitimacy to the more overtly visible authoritarian aspect of Right-wing populism. This section looks at what could be the more optimistic aspects of Indian democracy and argues that the future of democracy, in essence, depends on how it manages to block the authoritarianism instituted by the current populist regime.

  The current regime under Modi appropriated the language of the subaltern and projected itself as essentially an anti-elitist political force. Elites were marked out through various symbolic/cultural means; it included the urban middle classes; English-speaking professionals, including the Left-Liberals who are part of various institutions of higher learning; those who claimed entitlements and had a pedigree; and those who are perceived to be corrupt due their social networks, among other such aspects. This in turn was projected against the Congress and the values and the kind of politics it stood for. It therefore singularly targeted the Gandhi family as ‘naamdaar’,1 symbolizing this kind of elitism or clientelism in Indian politics. The unabated attack against Nehru was part of the same strategy. It was a kind of anti-elitism that was simultaneously pro-corporate capitalism and growth. It combined the language of aspirational ‘New India’ with an ancient glorious past. While Nehruvian politics stood for a certain kind of centrist accommodation of conflicting interests that left many social conflicts and inequalities unresolved, Modi’s brand of politics provided an assertive language against the elite-consensus and centrism of the Nehruvian kind, without necessarily providing any alternative way of resolving the social inequalities.

  Indian society, however, is not constituted only by subalterns and elites but mostly by social groups that are neither exclusively subalterns nor predominantly elites. The ladder-like caste structure of India produces, in socio-psychological terms, what I refer to as ‘Mezzanine elites’. Castes that are recognized as subaltern under a certain axis are dominant in another. For instance, social groups that are economically powerful and have access to political power can be socially backward, such as the Yadavs and other OBC castes. Similarly, there are poor among the dominant castes; in other words, castes that are socially empowered or dominant could be economically vulnerable and politically less impactful due to their weak numerical strength, such as the poor among dominant castes like the Brahmins, or Patidars and Marathas. Future of democracy in India will depend on how we reconcile these unevenly located social groups vis-à-vis each other. In other words, how we bring together the various dimensions of justice together, including cultural recognition to overcome stigma and prejudice to enjoy a fuller sense of self, redistribution of income, resources and opportunities, and representation in decision-making bodies, institutions of higher learning, and public spaces. In India, there has been a propensity of one dimension to cancel out the others. In India, there has been a propensity of strategies for recognition cancelling or blocking the strategies of redistribution or vice versa
.For instance, strategies to achieve recognition have often undermined redistributive dimension. Societies with grave social inequalities have to often face the difficulty of reconciling the various dimensions of justice.

  Yet another dimension that is closely but in complex ways related to the phenomenon of Mezzanine elites is that of an ‘oscillating public sphere’. Perhaps, because of the precarious location of the social groups, there is a tendency in the majority of them to oscillate in their social and political beliefs. Issues that are irrevocable at one point can quickly become dispensable in another context. Further, very contradictory impulses can seamlessly coexist without exhibiting any sense of self-contradictoriness. This kind of oscillation can have varied effects. It can, on one hand, make any kind of unified homogeneity—that the Right is working towards—a very difficult political phenomenon to sustain, while on the other hand, oscillation can also approve of everyday violence without opening it to the scrutiny of social conscience. Mass violence, as a phenomenon, can fall through the cracks opened by the porous nature of democracy created by an oscillating public sphere. It can, however, also fizzle out and fail to mobilize sustained tempers, as we witnessed in terms of interest in building a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, or the way popular culture represented by Bollywood continue to churn out blockbuster movies of inter-religious bonhomie, even at the height of polarized mobilization.

  Finally, the future of politics in India also heavily depends on the space that women find for themselves and de-gendering of social relations and the role of youth. India continues to claim a ‘demographic dividend’ as a ‘young nation’. In fact, both these issues are inter-related in manifold ways. Various issues of women’s empowerment have gathered momentum based on numerous campaigns. Amongst these, the campaign for prohibition of liquor in rural areas and against sexual violence in urban areas have gained unprecedented attention. These two campaigns are yet to speak to each other. The significance of the policy of prohibition of liquor, notwithstanding the huge loss of revenues, is symptomatic of the emergence of women as an independent constituency in electoral mobilizations, cutting across caste, religion, and region. Emergence of women as a strongly independent constituency will have unforeseen impact on the way we will begin to practise caste and religion. It is a known fact that women of all castes and religions become the first target of sexual violence in the context of mass violence, such as caste wars or communal riots. If women from across castes and religions manage to emerge as an independent constituency, it will reframe, in very substantive terms, the political mobilization that can take place and the way we would be approaching the question of violence during communal riots and caste massacres. In such incidents, it is women on the either side of the divide become targets of violence.

  Similarly, the question of the youth will assume more prominence in Indian democracy, with a possibility of youth-related issues garnering new space leading up to fresh perspectives. The ‘generation next’ has distinct issues of loneliness, boredom, anxiety, anomie, anger, and alienation. These are in excess of their social location but not beyond it. In other words, traditional social hierarchies such as caste, class, region, and religion might have some role to play in the way they get structured, but issues such as anxiety and anomie are also becoming common to an entire generation. These issues could have potential links to the way the State and Capital have left their traces on the everyday life. Class politics may have to be reframed through unconventional cultural issues in order to link the question of class, market, and capital to their more experiential dimension. Class politics of the Left or imagination of revolution by political groups such as the Maoists have to sieve through such issues of boredom that may not remain strictly limited to urban middle classes. The future of politics will have to rearticulate some of these issues, which, in many said and unsaid ways, will have implications for the Right.

  Nehru and the Rise of Modi

  Among the various strategies devised by the Right under Mr Modi, one of the key aspects was a call for a ‘Congress-Mukt Bharat’. The road to this agenda is through delegitimizing the nationalist leaders who led and represented the anti-colonial struggle. Mr Modi repeatedly went public with his disdain for Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India.1 Mr Modi in particular and the Right in general held Nehru and his vision responsible for creating a weak and a divided India.2 Further, Nehru is identified with scientific temper and secularism—both of which are perceived as something that presumably challenges the core of the Right wing’s idea of India and their brand of nationalism. More specifically, Nehru has been identified as singularly responsible for the long-standing problem of Kashmir and its claims for self-determination.3 In opposition to Nehru, the Right claims Sardar Patel stood for ‘authentic nationalism’ and therefore was sidelined by both Gandhi and Nehru.4 Further, delegitimizing Nehru was also a way of delegitimizing the Congress party and the ‘dynasty rule’ represented by its current leadership. It, therefore, overlaps with the critique of the elites that is imperative for populist mobilization. Nehru has been made the symbol of a ‘consensus elite’ and ‘technocratic liberalism’ against which the current regime is mobilizing the subaltern outside the given institutional frame. Anti-Nehru mobilization stands to represent the anti-establishment politics. In order to understand the roots of the rise of the Right and the need to lay a fresh path beyond the current dynamics, it is important to relocate Nehru and his contribution. It is even more important to offer a critique of Nehru that does not necessarily justify the Right or its reading of Nehru.

  Centrism and Indian Democracy

  The political scientists often trace Nehru in two dominant senses: first, the developmental state—and it has been a general trend to believe that by the 1990s, there was the death of the developmental state; second, the legacy that is often drawn on—that of secularism and which is, most of the time, a contested debate in India. I’ll avoid those two partly known territories and venture into something else, something that I feel is one unmistakably significant feature of Nehruvian legacy—that of centrism in Indian politics. This centrism is part of not only our institutional makeup now, but is also part of what I would call the way Indians work through their everyday political behaviour. For instance, in a recent interview, Arvind Kejriwal says ‘I am not Left, I am not Right, I am practical…’.5 This is the kind of centrism I am talking about of which Indian politics carries a huge legacy and much of this goes back, to my mind, to Nehru. How do we trace this specific kind of centrism back to Nehru? First, I think the very structural conditions during the anti-colonial movement and the conditions in which India actually became independent—that political scientists Llyod Rudolph and Sussane Rudolph point—is that of the sequential relationship between democracy and industrialization. Rudolphs argue that ‘...the sequential relationship of democracy and industrialization helped to revitalize and reorient traditional social groups and to enfranchize the agricultural sector before the objective conditions for post-feudal class formation were well established. In independent India, voting based on universal suffrage paralleled and unto an extant preceded industrialization’.6 And this, Rudolphs, points towards actually marginalized class politics and that they were brought in the state as an important third sector of both mobilizing the economy and the politics. So, in that sense, we have moved away from one sort of leaning in terms of class politics, which pushes one kind of centrism and also disallows any kind of polarization of social/class forces in Indian politics. The other argument that one can draw in terms of the nature of anti-colonial movement is the formation of the Congress party, in course of anti-colonial movement, to advance upward mobility for India’s urban educated middle class, who in turn, to expand political representation, aligned with the rural middle classes. This leads one to argue that this combination of a class interest in creating more representatives in political institutions and a political party that institutionalized proto-democratic commitments were, above all, responsible for
creation of democratic institutions, soon after Independence. In other words, there was a structural link between the universal adult franchise and the multi-class nature of Indian polity and society. I think there was some sort of a structural fit, and we need to further explore this. I don’t think that there is much work done on this in terms of why India went in for an adult franchise since there was not much visible pressure on India moving towards declaring itself as a Republic based on the complete universal adult franchise.

  The broad social structural context of the multi-class and multi-ethnic character of Indian society was the reason behind opting for the universal adult franchise, and this universal adult franchise in fact preceded industrialization, leading to a marginalization of class politics and centralization of the state as the third sector. In this sense, perhaps, Nehru was a man who belonged to those times. As Carlos Nino points out, acts are historically constituted, and you actually constitute them in specific contexts.7 In accordance with this foundational multi-class character, I would argue that Nehru actually belonged to those times. Consider, for instance, the fact that a great amount of rhetoric that Nehru created around socialism, and contrast it to the remarkably little attention that even a burning question like the abolition of zamindari system received in the constituent assembly debates. In the objective resolutions to the Constituent Assembly on 13 December 1946, Nehru said: ‘We have given the content of democracy in this resolution, and not only the content of democracy but also the content, if I may say so of economic democracy in this resolution. Others might take objection to this resolution on the ground that we have not said that it should be a socialist state but the main thing is that in such a resolution if in accordance with my own desire I had out in that we want a socialist state, we would have put in something (sic) which would have been agreeable to many and may not be agreeable to some and we wanted this resolution not to be controversial in regard to such matters.’ The entire Nehruvian emphasis on consensus and the politics of accommodation had an unmistakable Gandhian stamp on them, which Granville Austin argues are two strategies that were unique to Indian constitution-making process.8 Nehru kept emphasizing all through that one should arrive at a consensus and not follow a mere ‘majority principle’.