Populism: The End or Beginning of Democracy?
The populism of the Right, I believe, presents both the prospects for democracy and of substantially undermining it to create a totalitarian regime. It has foregrounded the ‘irreducibility of multiplicity’ in bringing to fore the voices that got waylaid. It also pursues this not merely to present a lateral vision of the future but a monolithic order based on unity, homogeneity, and hierarchy. The Right, therefore, identifies the pathways of community anxiety created by the corporate capitalism but also possibly criminalizes in politicizing them through street violence and vigilante justice. The violence is symptomatic of the tension of identifying multiplicity and tying it with its unified ideological system. The former is justified, the latter is not. The Right, however, supposedly gains legitimacy from the former and validity with the latter. It stitches one with the other—‘a diversified strategy is tied to a unified ideology’. In pursuing the multiplicity the Right has, willy-nilly, presented the possibility of further democratization. The Left-liberals have conflated the two, and in doing this have imposed the overreach of a Left liberal system over the heterogeneous reality than the transcendentalism of the Left. David Goodhart refers to this as the conflict between the progressive and cosmopolitan ‘Anywheres’ and the communitarian and territorial bound ‘Somewheres’ that I refer to in some detail in the following pages.26 Left-radicals have pursued a binarized mode of politics, instead of the dialectical mode that they ideologically vouch for, while the Right has adopted, what I referred to as ‘performative dialectics’. While the Left is critical of corporate capitalism, it holds no agenda for the communitarian anxieties that come with global capital flows; the Right has mobilized the communities without critiquing but by reinforcing corporate capital. While Left-progressives have politicized antagonistic relations to undermine hierarchies and play out differences, the Right has undermined mobility with calls for social harmony and hierarchical fraternity. While the Left-liberals have taken an institutional path, the Right has mobilized extra-institutional pathways.
Social Solidarity
The ‘future of democracy’ in India lies in the interstices of this reality. Is there a pathway that cuts across for the Left-progressives to adopt? This pathway must illuminate the tensions as well as hold the capacity to conjoin them into new modes of inter-subjectivity—solidarity with conflict, fraternity with differences, mobility with harmony, development with the community, representation with recognition, and so on. Social theorists have expressed the possibility of such a politics by calling for a new kind of ‘Left populism’ or ‘progressive populism’ as against the ‘conservative populism’ of the Right. ‘India after Modi’ has changed, and I do not think that there is a way to return to the accommodative politics of the old kind of centrism under Nehru that I discuss in detail. It is not about taking back populism to the age-old social democracy. What we are witnessing is a distinctly post-Congress system that is also post-Bahujan with the fragmentation and politicization of smaller caste groups. The alternative kind of politics, whether populist or otherwise, has to adopt a new idiom. It has to take the performative dimension in staring at the possibilities of mobilizing and not de-limit passions and emotions to the private domain. It has to mobilize the family, religion, and school to link it to enlarging what Martha Nussbaum refers to as the ‘circle of concern’. Secularism, as I suggest in the last section of this book, cannot be a mere state policy but a social philosophy of solidarity and friendship. This mode of politicization cannot occur without a robust welfare state and a politics that has an inbuilt ‘social reform’ agenda that includes consistently working on the prejudices between religious and caste-based communities. We cannot have merely caste alliances between the Dalits and the OBCs, or Dalits and the Muslims without facing up to the social prejudices between them. The endemic gap between the political and the social foundational to postcolonial politics needs to be bridged by the political parties, policy, and other collective initiatives.27 This remains central to the ‘future of democracy’ in India.
Unconventional Progressive Populism
‘Fear of fall’ frames the growing anxiety and self-alienation in modern politics. It refers to two kinds of inextricably linked ideas of the fall, fall from your economic position that you hold and falling in love. Guy Standing has proposed the idea of the ‘Precariat’ that partly captures the complexity of the new age being redefined by anger, anxiety, anomie, and alienation. He argues,
There are many varieties of precariat. For example some have fallen out of working class communities, pushed out by increasing insecurity and few resources with which to redeem or improve their position in society. Migrants, who often come from something worse, are included. Young people are drifting into the precariat too. There is often anger attached to this especially for those with tertiary education.28
This sometimes cuts across the castes and classes. Politics need to articulate the conventional issues of caste, class, and gender politics through a new language of issues that overlap with such categories but are also in excess of them. The point is to simultaneously capture the specificity of such social locations and to locate the generality of issues that extend beyond the confines of known social categories. The excess in turn influences in unsaid ways the workings of the known social categories. Anxiety, anomie, alienation, and anger refuse any easy or complex resolution of issues; their afterlife exists in the recesses of antagonism. Where to draw a line between antagonism—as Mouffe points out between politics and the political—and reconciliation needs a wider context and a larger array of variables than the immediacy of a conflict and the imperatives that collective mobilization often permit. For instance, critical philosopher Axel Honneth points out how love is exclusive but foundational to more universal modes of life. The ‘uncanny double’ of political acts that encroach on neo-liberal spatiality sometimes in oppositional moments also tend to reproduce the same trends eluding the logic of ‘other spaces’. In Left or for instance the Maoist politics, as we suggest in discussing the social ethics of violence, we see how the centralization of capital was reproduced in the militant modes of mobilization. Feminist politics reproduces individuation and anxiety as reflected in its campaign to ‘name and shame’. Caste politics reproduce pragmatism and alienation of modern life in its turn to indifference and sectarianism ingrained in electoral politics, as we briefly discuss in the context of the emergence of Dalit Panthers as a political party in Tamil Nadu, moving away from Ambedkar’s simultaneous emphasis on fraternity. The ‘future of democracy’ depends on how we can collectively delineate and disaggregate the complexly overdetermined human condition.
Populism has robustly contributed to foregrounding this complexity without necessarily providing an alternative narrative. The multiplicity of voices and an urge for intimacy as authenticity are signposts for a precarious condition that need to be coloured and tuned to democratic ethos. It needs the power to act without the consequence of silencing the voices. The Right in India, as elsewhere, has taken a lead in reflecting the multiplicity without articulating it. They encroach on the spaces opened by the multiplicity in an urge to redirect them into producing the compulsions of regulation and order. For instance, it is possible that the Right very legitimately reflects communitarian concerns but pushes them into street violence and criminal intimidation. It highlighted the issue of the poor among the dominant castes, and it highlighted the issue of ‘hurt pride’ of the declining caste and emergent concerns of a mezzanine elites. The excess of materiality—rooted in social psychology—in demonstrating a majority community can also be mobilized into self-imposed anxiety, and the private needs to be tied to the public. These are some of the issues I point out in the various essays of this book.
They stoke anxiety and anger but offer no alternatives to overcome anomie and alienation and instead push them into self-directed and self-consuming passions. There is a repetitiveness in the new common sense it produces but what it does ‘su
cceed’ in establishing is an accessible common sense that is as Werner Muller points out a core feature of populism. The point is to block the repetitiveness without rejecting the logic of accessible common sense. If what is being signified by populism is either misread or left unaddressed or pushed under the carpet, it will represent itself in the afterlife of crime, violence, fear, and hatred, which can potentially consume the effervescence of collective living and replace it or answer it with a majoritarian ethics. Right-wing populism, in this sense, has the immense potential to make democracy more substantive and stable. Ironically, ‘it has lifted the mask of the guilt of multiplicity in demanding a hegemonic homogeneity’.
The suffocation of the ‘dark times’,29 as Hanna Arendt points to, also produces its other. As I point out in the essay on the ‘oscillating public sphere’ in India, we are collectively moving from one end to the other like a pendulum. Even in the heydays of Hindutva mobilization of Love Jihad and Ghar Wapsi, popular culture reflected a mass consent to composite living. Even in times of high-end pragmatism, we continue to witness the idealism of open spaces in JNU and in the militancy of the Maoists and other collective mobilizations. The point, however, is that both the ‘life of the mind’ and violent militancy carry their own underside. The simultaneity to ‘act and listen’ can potentially reside in the current round of populism and create a new social ethic for ‘India after Modi’.
Part I
POPULISM AND
AUTHORITARIANISM
Introduction
It was briefly explained in the introduction to the book that populism is a contemporary global phenomenon that has specific characteristics. They include, the ability to create an authentic ‘people’, as against a perceived or constructed ‘outsiders’. In other words, populist leaders speak of addressing and working in the interests of ‘the people’, cutting across castes, classes, regions, ethnicity, nationalities, gender, and ideologies. This, by its very logic, is created in imagining an ‘outsider’ or an enemy. The friend-enemy dichotomy in the Indian context is played in the context of Hindu-Muslim conflict or polarization. Further, populism is maintained around a ‘strongman’, it is personality-centric and undermines party, political institutions, and processes. It is anti- or extra-institutional in nature and proposes to deliver results due to the decisive and authoritarian leadership of a single leader. Finally, as populism is high on symbolism, and therefore merges fact and fiction, it holds the capacity to create a narrative that holds true in popular perception, popular prejudice, and without much evidence. Perception is the driving force for policy, breaking the dichotomy between politics and policy that lies at the heart of liberal democracies. Populism is a mode of mobilization that challenges the way democracy is understood by liberals and constitutionalists. Law does not have social legitimacy in excess of public opinion. It is in this sense inclusive in respecting popular perceptions and authoritarian in undermining law and institutions.
This section of the book takes a close look at how the current regime under Narendra Modi, through various events, attempted to construct an idea of an authentic people, which essentially meant a pan-Indian Hindu society, by cutting across the various differences that exist within the Hindu community. It also analyses the challenges it faced in the course of pursuing the populist politics of constructing an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ kind of an antagonistic narrative. Early into the Modi regime, in 2015, more than 50 writers and artists decided to return their national awards as a protest against growing mob lynching against minorities, assassination of public intellectuals and rationalists, and a crackdown on freedom of expression. For instance, Social activist, Shabnum Hashmi argued, ‘I return the National Minority Rights Award, which has lost all its credibility, in protest against the consistent attacks and killings of the members of the minority communities and total inaction, apathy, and tacit support to the violent gangs by the government.’1 Those opposed to the Award Wapsi campaign raised the issues of violence by Muslims in Kashmir, Kerala, and West Bengal, and argued asking why such attacks were not condemned by social activists.
The second major controversy under the current regime was the crisis in the institutions of higher education, including the University of Hyderabad, Film and Television Institute India (FTII), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Such institutions were considered as expressing Left-liberal views that were antithetical to the ethics of Hindu nationalism. They were seen as working through borrowed philosophy of the ‘Western’ world that did not suit the popular communitarian ethics or ‘Indian values’. The students in these institutions felt that this view was an assault on their freedom to think and on the autonomy necessary for a healthy democracy. The crisis foregrounded the language of national versus anti-national, where globally renowned institutions such as the JNU were declared to be the hub of ‘anti-national’ activities.
The third major event was the demonetization of currency. On 8 November 2016, Prime Minister Modi declared the use of all `500 and `1,000 banknotes as invalid. He argued that such a step had been necessitated in order to curb black money, rampant corruption, and evasion of tax and also to gain control over the terror activities of the Islamic groups and the Maoists. Later on, the current regime claimed that demonetization broke the back of terror networks, as the cash they stacked away in safe havens became invalid. Demonetization combined the battle against corruption, yet again with the ‘war on terror’ against the Islamic groups, and thereby continued with its agenda of ‘othering’ the Muslim community, and symbolically equating them with corruption, terror, and the ‘black’ economy.
The fourth significant development was the protests led by various dominant castes in India, including the Jats, Patidars, Rajputs, and Marathas, demanding reservations and inclusion in the list of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). These protests flew in the face of the purported attempt to construct a unified Hindu society. In spite of being dominant castes, why did they take to the streets? Why did they perceive themselves as victims of governmental neglect? Did it have anything to do with the rapid socio-economic changes initiated by corporate globalization and spread of education among the marginalized groups such as the Dalits and the OBCs? Was it for instance, as illustrated in the protest by the Rajputs against the release of the film Padmaavat, essentially a symbol of communitarian anxiety with the invasion of global capital in the form of urbanization, migration, and growing socio-economic inequalities? How should the issue of the poor among the dominant, including the Brahmins, be framed? Does this issue have the potential to overcome caste-based reservations and shift towards reservations based on the economic criterion? Does the economic criterion pose less of a challenge to the imagination of a unified Hindu nation?
In analyzing these issues, this section attempts to trace the various discourses and counter-narratives that emerged in the last four years. It also analyses the role of street violence, as witnessed in the mob lynching of Muslims, and its innate links to social authoritarianism found in the majoritarian ethic and political authoritarianism found in the emergence of the ‘strongman’ phenomenon, initially with Modi and later with Yogi as the heir apparent. The essays in this section attempt to analyse how a new consensus or a new common sense that naturalizes a majoritarian ethic is being constructed and the various challenges it faces in the course of doing this.
Populist-Authoritarianism in India
Populism has returned, in the sense of understanding some of the contemporary global changes that are modifying the way we understand democratic ethics and democracy itself. I will try to map some of the issues that might be relevant for us to understand the rise of populist-authoritarian regimes in India and how we can make sense of the possible turns of democracy in the future.
First, we have to understand the convergence amongst three dynamics that seem to be taking place simultaneously: there is a neo-liberal turn in the economy, a populist turn in democracy, and a certain kind of enculturalizatio
n mediatization in the social and cultural realm. This convergence is creating a new kind of social will. We need to make sense of what exactly this convergence does to democracy and democratic processes.
One big change, obviously, is that the entire issue of liberal democracy, which is based on individual rationality, has come under huge stress. The very idea of rationalism and rationality as the basis for an individual’s choice of being liberal and democratic and the choices s/he makes are under stress partly because of the way we understand the idea of ‘truth’. The way we approach truth itself in terms of understanding certain political events or political dynamics no longer depends on empirical accuracy. It depends more on its symbolic power and enactment. This shift has influenced much of what we are witnessing today, and the media plays a big role in this shift from data, evidence, and empirical accuracy to symbolic power. This is happening because of the kind of democratic spaces that neo-liberalism has opened up—we are no longer interested merely in understanding the existing reality by asking ‘what is’ (the reality), rather we are more interested in interpreting the reality through questions of ‘what should have been’ and ‘what should come’. This makes a huge difference because at the moment we open up our thinking to ‘what should be’ rather than ‘what is’, we are making a big leap in terms of framing political questions, for it is no longer merely about collating data and empirical facts.1 Hence, the difference between the fictional and factual is collapsing to a large extent. There is no other idea of the factual outside how it is imagined. Therefore, there is a move from the ‘rational’ to what I would call the ‘intentional’ as it matters the most in the present political scenario. We are thinking more in terms of the intentions behind human actions rather than the evidence or the immediate consequences of human actions.
India After Modi Page 3