India After Modi
Page 20
Planning Commission and the Emergency
Even in 1950, while launching the Planning Commission, Nehru toned down the socialist rhetoric, making sure that there was again consensus on the need for planning, in order to achieve industrialization. If we move further and consider the entire process of linguistic reorganization of the states, we again find the signature stamp of Nehru. It had a classical political method of accommodating the regional elite alongside many of the political formulations that Nehru suggests very actively, including the ideas such as mixed economy; decentralization; the entire debate between fundamental rights and directive principles where the exclusive thrust was to draw some sort of a balance between the two; and finally of course, the socialist pattern of society with private capita, among other such political strategies and ideals. All of this constitutes—what many of the political scientists while analyzing political processes in India—refer to it as a case of an ‘Indian paradox’.9 In economic terms, political scientists such as Francine Frankel refer to this as the ‘Gradual Revolution’;10 in political terms, it has been referred to as the ‘Passive Revolution’11 by Sudipto Kaviraj drawing from Antonio Gramsci, and in cultural terms, Christopher Jaffrelot refers to this as a ‘Silent Revolution’.12 This process of hybridization of the political process could be traced to the kind of centrism that Nehru has tried to gift to Indian democracy. Following the Nehruvian era, during Indira Gandhi’s phase, which was again an escalation of centrism that Nehru offered to Indian polity, one could possibly read the entire phase of the Emergency as one where certain authoritarian methods were used for pushing certain welfare policies of the kind focussed in the ‘20-Point Programme’. Partha Chatterjee makes a very interesting point, and I quote him here: ‘…emergency was the last sustained attempt in India to push through a developmental agenda by authoritarian bureaucratic methods of the kind that had been used, with varying degrees of effectiveness in third world countries… the failure of emergency drew home the lesson in governing circles that bio-political agendas could not be successfully pursued without passing through the sieve of voluntary consent and that governmentality could not be effectively administered except by opening its terms of negotiation with the affected population groups’.13
In other words, Chatterjee is trying to make the point that the Emergency was actually a high point of the old type of governmental mechanisms, the old kind of authoritarian bureaucratic political strategies of the prior regime, and what he has in mind here is the Nehruvian era. Chatterjee is trying to argue that the Nehruvian era, marked by planning, was actually a top-down and high-end bureaucratic strategy of implementing bureaucratic policies, and he is also arguing that the Emergency was one of the last modes through which that method was followed in Indian politics. He further argues in his book Politics of the Governed that during the post-Emergency phase, what we witness is that the State is more than willing to negotiating with the population groups and there is a more participatory ethos that comes in. This is a very intriguing aspect of Indian democracy—on the one hand is the entire agenda of universal adult franchise which has been such a fundamental aspect of Indian democracy and constitution-making, and on the other hand, the political process ends with Emergency where it takes 25 to 30 odd years to realize what the Indian state was following was a democracy that was top-down in nature in terms of its expansion of governmental mechanisms. And this, in a strange way, or shall we say in a paradoxical sense, is a Nehruvian gift to Indian democracy, and therefore, the question is still open, and the jury is still out as to how we relate to the Nehruvian kind of centrism in contemporary politics. Centrism and Contemporary India—if we are to talk about India today, with the unravelling of political events as it is happening—how do we assess this kind of Nehruvian centrism? There are different kinds of assessments that one can trace. Perhaps the most obvious of them is that there have been a great number of champions of Indian democracy’s centrist character. Scholars that immediately come to my mind are Ramachandra Guha, Sunil Khilnani, and Ashutosh Varshney, among others. Some of them have been great champions who have argued that it is the Nehruvian centrism, or to put it another way, Nehruvian liberalism, which actually needs to be given credit in terms of how it has pulled back much of the ‘extremist’ tendencies in Indian democracy and Indian politics, and here when they talk about extremism, they have both Left-wing extremism and Right-wing extremism in mind.
Nehruvian Liberalism and ‘Extremist’ Tendencies
Actually, many of these scholars do not make much of a distinction between these two types of extremism, which incidentally also tells us something about the nature of this centrism that we are talking about, that we don’t make much of a distinction. They talk of both the camps as two extremist camps, and the success of Nehruvian liberalism, according to many of these writers, is that these ‘extremist’ forms do not find space in Indian democracy. They grow but they immediately get moderated. Let me quote Khilnani on this, he says, ‘Liberalism is committed to discovering the truth but it knows this to be a slow project. Today’s battles, in the home and in the street, in the courts and in the legislatures, through the ballot and in the media, over the rights of women, sexual liberty, free speech, education, these are not signs of a death of liberalism. They speak of a society animated by its principles and its promises. If still, in spite of its institutional capacities and practices that can secure those promises. There will be detours ahead but the terrain on which we build are those unmistakably opened by Nehru.’14 I further quote him on this: ‘In choosing to make development and governance the criterion by which to judge the performance, the BJP is issuing a threat to become a party just like any other. To be judged by standards that any party in a liberal democratic system would accept. Its old dream of creating a master cleavage that could bring the majority over to its side is shattered. It must play a game of liberal democratic electoral politics, eking out support on the margins.’15 In many senses, this has been a kind of dominant narrative of Nehruvian scholars, that a huge success of Nehru actually has been that his model of liberalism does not only always succeed in arresting ‘extremist’ mobilizations, mostly of the Right-wing, but that they also include within the same ambit Left-wing ‘extremism’. But the question that I would want to extend is as follows: Does Nehruvian centrism exhaust its political effect in arresting extremism of this kind, ‘extremism’ of the Left wing and ‘extremism’ of the Right wing? Is that the only consequence? Therefore, do we need to only celebrate this kind of Nehruvian liberalism? I am trying to push this argument a little further and argue that perhaps, Nehruvian centrism takes a different character when we begin to observe Indian democracy in terms of its bottom-up mobilizations. What then would be the character of this centrism? It is true, as Khilnani and even as Ashutosh Varshney argue, that it is this kind of centrism that does not allow a certain kind of Right-wing extremism to grow but is this the only mode in which Nehruvian centrism works?16 If you look at the other end of the spectrum, I would argue that perhaps this centrism is working itself around us all the time and its effects are manifest all around us most of the time. We need only to trace it back to the way it has worked itself from the Nehruvian period. And I can trace any number of political phenomenon but let me take a few representative cases to actually argue about how one looks at some of this political phenomenon.
The emergence of caste-based parties in India has been a highly influential phenomenon, and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) stands out as one test case. When BSP began its mobilizations, a range of scholars said that it is the ‘social revolution’ that India was looking for. I think Kancha Illaiah was one of the foremost who articulated this. But what has happened to BSP in the course of time? It clearly shifted from its Bahujan agenda to what is referred to as its Sarvajan agenda. From an exclusive Dalit party, it is now a party that is giving the highest number of tickets to Brahmins. In 1998,17 it gave up to 15%, representing a new kind of reverse social osmosis.18 And this reverse social os
mosis is undeniably a feature of the kind of centrism that I have been talking about; this centrism, therefore, does not work only in its top-down version but also in its bottom-up combination. Now how do we look at this kind of arrest that happens in terms of anti-caste movements? How do we analyse this new kind of alliance between Dalits and Brahmins? Or this kind of what I call the reverse social osmosis? I think there is a complex political process working there, but I leave it at that. Similarly, consider the entire process of formation of smaller states in India in more recent times. We have shifted from the linguistic reorganization of states based on language and culture to the development criterion. But what has been the nature of these movements for smaller states? They have again had an undoubted imprint of centrism. To begin with, none of these movements are based on class mobilization or politics. Telangana is a clear case example of where we have moved from demands such as land reforms to demands for equitable redistribution of water resources. So there is the long-standing issue of landlessness that completely gets sidelined. Second, the centrality of ‘bullock capitalists’,19 that Rudolphs had written about, gets manifested in the rise of the OBCs at the height of the Telangana movement who in fact formed the backbone of the movement for a separate state. A third feature that the Rudolphs point out and that we can find is the ideological agreement of Telangana—across political formations from the BJP to the Maoists20—which is something unique to India. And this is again, I would argue, the residual effect of Nehruvian centrism.
‘Consensus-Elite’ and the Rise of the Right
We revisit Nehruvian centrism time and again in Indian politics. It may take different forms, and the demands may take different forms but one cannot somehow succeed in bypassing or circumventing it. My third representative case is the emergence of anti-corruption movements across India, whether it be the JP Movement or the more recent Anna Hazare phenomenon. Anna Hazare is a classical occurrence of an uncanny combination of participatory ethos with a very centralized institution. And this is the core character of Nehruvian centrism. It is a combination of a deeply anti-political rhetoric that is based on the separation between the social and the moral from the political domains, and it is this tension that goes on in the Anna Hazare movement—one between this social-cultural domain and the political-representative domain. This tension in Indian politics is again a kind of a new form that Chatterjee’s last ‘substantial attempt’ of top-down bureaucratic methods take. According to Chatterjee’s argument, the Emergency was the last point of top-down methods in Indian politics. I think one would disagree with that. Instead, I think that we revisit that top-down governmental mechanism in a different form in the Anna Hazare movement. This attempted separation between the social, the moral, and the political represents precisely that divide which Chatterjee was talking of during the Emergency time.21 We have perhaps actually not seen the last of it, and my point would be that we are seeing that in different forms in contemporary Indian politics. The Anna Hazare movement is a classic example of how we revisit that in a separation of the socio-cultural on the one hand and the political representative on the other hand.
The same kind of dualism is visible in the recent rise of the ‘Modi phenomenon’. One needs to only take a look at the nature of the campaign that Modi organized around the General Elections in 2014 and the kind of balancing act between issues in order to make sense of the renewed and continued effects of centrism in Indian politics. On the one hand, Modi’s campaign was based on a pitch to move beyond an old kind of constituency/identity-based fragmented politics to a new kind of politics based on development and governance. In this ostensible conflict between governance and identity politics, the BJP had claimed that it was moving beyond divisive caste politics—Sab ka Saath, Sab ka Vikas (participation by all, for development for all), even as the entire campaign in Bihar was based on referring to Mr Modi’s OBC status. Mr Modi himself claimed in Kerala that he belonged to the ‘Dalit family’; it is for this ‘family’ that he wishes to do something if he takes the reins 22—he had said. He shared the dais with Baba Ramdev, again a silent gesture toward combining OBC politics with Hindutva. Even as the BJP’s manifesto did not mention its support for reservations and instead promised to move toward ‘equal opportunity’, it is believed that a constitutional provision of reservations is mere ‘tokenism’. Mr Modi did not reveal which sub-caste he actually belonged to; instead, he claimed to represent all the poor in India. He claimed to be a ‘chaiwallah’ (tea seller) who rose through sheer determination unlike the ‘shehzada’ (prince) of the Congress.23 This resort to identity, while laying a claim to a new kind of politics, represents the uncanny ability to combine evidently self-contradictory processes in Indian politics.24
My final point is that we are also witnessing, as a result of Nehruvian centrism, a huge spurt in intra-subaltern conflict. Increasing conflict between the subaltern groups—and not between elite and subaltern groups—is why subaltern studies has already receded and Partha Chatterjee has already written its obituary.25 What we are witnessing is a massive, unprecedented expansion of intra-subaltern conflicts. Conflicts between OBCs and Muslims—Muzaffarnagar is a clear case of that; OBCs and Dalits—Khairlanji is a clear example of that; Dalit sub-caste conflict in Andhra Pradesh; conflicts between the SCs and STs—Odisha is a clear case of that, between Pannos and Kandhas; and there are any number of examples one might cite in order to elaborate this point on intra-subaltern conflicts.26 And this expansion of the conflict is one of the byproducts, perhaps the central products of the kind of centrism that Indian democracy has followed. So, one of the impacts of the Nehruvian legacy would be that we are gradually ending up towards, leaning towards, and moving towards a new kind of Right-leaning centrism in contemporary Indian democracy.
To a large extent, the structural roots of Right-wing populism in India lie in the kind of centrist polity that Nehru had institutionalized. It offered a functional democracy with a dysfunctional polity. While it did not degenerate into a ‘failed state’ and instead built a ‘soft state’ creating persistent social conflicts that were neither overcome nor accommodated. After the implementation of neoliberal reforms, these conflicts took the shape of the rise of intra-subaltern politics at one end and a manufactured majoritarianism on the other. Nehruvian secularism failed to build deep social solidarity among the various subaltern groups; instead it remained a state policy entangled in debates on the desired distance between state and religion. It ghettoized religious and caste groups in a bid to maintain harmony and provide for mobility. These cleavages became the source for political and electoral mobilization in general and provided for a structural condition for the rise of the current Right-wing populism. Future of democracy in India now depends on moving beyond both the authoritarianism of the Right and failed accommodative and centrist politics of Nehru. What could be the shape of such politics and how could one re-imagine the future of democracy around the limitations of the current impasse? One representative case could be that of reinitiating a debate on ‘post-Nehruvian secularism’, to begin with.
Post-Nehruvian Secularism
Secularism, as a Nehruvian vision, was essentially about state policy towards religious groups, and the prime focus was the distance that the state needs to maintain with them. The debate was limited to the Western kind of separation of the state from religion and instead foregrounded a secular-citizen as the core identity that the state formulates policies on, or more recently, the turn to multi-culturalism that partially recognized religious practices and cultural specificities.
The debate on secularism in India began by pointing to the difference of the Indian variation to its Western counterpart, either by pointing to an idea of a ‘principled distance’ that the state maintained, depending on the context or by pointing towards an alternative imagination of samadharma, where all religions are treated as equal. However, in focussing on the question of the desired distance between religion and state or politics, the idea that secularism essentially
promoted a social philosophy of life became sidelined.
Secularism is not merely about how religious groups are treated by the state. What it meant, in essence, was how to forge positive and proactive solidarity between religious groups in their everyday social and cultural life. The role of the state was key but not of exclusive significance. Since the debate on secularism for various reasons was overshadowed by the concern with the role of the state, secularism as a social philosophy was somewhat neglected.