Somewheres versus Anywheres
At another level, this seems to be a feasible experiment with the emergence of new cultural subalterns across caste, class, and region. They are marked by a common opposition to modernity, liberal institutionalism, the role of experts and technocrats, the difficulty of coping with global cosmopolitanism and secular ethos, and the dominance of English and its accompanying cultural valuation, among other things. Right-wing populism is articulating this common nodal point at times overcoming the sharp divisions between the various social groups. David Goodhart, in his recent book, sums this up when he argues that ‘the old distinctions of class and economic interest have not disappeared but are increasingly overlaid by a larger and looser one—between the people who see the world from Anywhere and the people who see it from Somewhere’.97 The ‘achieved’ identities based on educational and career success make them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people.98 The Somewheres are ‘more rooted and usually have “ascribed” identities…which is why they often find rapid change more unsettling’.99 Finally, he observes that even in an advanced capitalist country like Britain, the ‘gold standard’ remains that introduces this dual process of generating an aspirational class alongside social groups that perceive their declining social status. He argues, ‘The helter-skelter expansion of higher education in the past twenty-five years and the elevation of educational success into the gold standard of social esteem has been one of the most important, and least understood, developments in British society. It has been a liberation for many and for others a symptom of their declining status’.100
This partly explains the unrest among the dominant castes in India as cited before who perceive their decline and a sense of anxiety as to how castes lower down the order are moving ahead through affirmative action policies. Marathas arguing against reservations for Dalits and wanting to move out of agrarian sector to the formal job market are a clear point highlighting this tension. Further, the carefully choreographed controversy around the degrees of the Prime Minister, who has claimed to belong to a lesser privileged class and caste status, and of Smriti Irani, who is a woman public representative, precisely played out this tension. Any critique or suspicion around their degrees becomes symbolic of the elites’ denial of mobility to newly asserting social groups such as the lower castes and women. Similarly, the crisis in various institutions of higher education, including JNU, HCU, IITs, and FTII, among others is representative of breaking the hold of the social elites and their hegemony over public institutions. The controversy surrounding JNU, under the current political regime, again represents a palpable critique against the privileged spaces occupied by an elite and marked by the life of the mind and aspiration to question everything instead of expressing solidarity and loyalty. This is then linked to the discourse of nationalism. Nationalism, in other words, is a political mode of representing those left out of this process, and those suffering anxiety due to the spread of higher education. JNU in spite of a progressive admission policy becomes an elite space, while the current regime’s mode of changing the policy frame of admission, in spite of excluding the majority, becomes a step against divisive politics and symbolic of nationalist assertion. In all of this, subaltern castes remain torn between a cultural identification against elite/open spaces, where they perceive a commonality with the nationalist discourse, and the need for a more inclusive policy frame. Dalit and OBC politics in its back and forth movement between identifying with the right and also generating a counter-narrative has been a visible trend under the current populist regime. While the dominant castes suffer from the anxiety of decline, subaltern castes suffer the insecurity of losing hard-earned benefits, and both need different modes of coping with the situation that cannot be strictly realistic but needs a gloss of self-valourization. The slogans of ‘New India’ or ‘acche din’ are more of what you desire than what is real, which has variedly been referred to as ‘emotional truth’. Ronald De Souza explains this when he argues that ‘My approach to accuracy goes via an account of what makes a story accurate. Stories can be accurate but not true, and emotions can be accurate whether or not they are true. The capacity for emotional accuracy, for emotions that fit a person’s situation, is an aspect of emotional intelligence, which is as important an aspect of the rational human agency as the intelligent formation of beliefs and desires.’ 101Instincts, gut feelings, and perceptions allow for in a hierarchal context like India to articulate what may not be otherwise considered legitimate.
A New Common Sense
The emergence of the new cultural subalterns has in effect recast the ‘old Bharat versus India’ kind of conundrum. It has replaced the old kind of class orientation around issues of economic inequality to be refashioned around a conflict between economic elites and cultural subalterns. This undoubtedly tunes into the fact that caste groups are unevenly placed across the economic, political, and social indicators. While the rhetoric against the high-end and invisible economic elites creates one kind of commonality, common social stigma creates another kind of possibilities. The drama around demonetization pitched it against economic elites, while the combination of nationalism and a mounting crisis in institutions of higher education strives for a commonality of cultural subalterns.102 This allows for a queer kind of approach and unlikely combinations, such as a discourse that is pro-corporate but anti-modernity; it helps to push for high-end capitalist growth marked by bullet trains, and urbanization and also addresses the community anxieties that capitalist-modernity introduces; it allows to claim a legacy of a pure past to be co-joined with claims for a radically altered future; it sympathizes with preserving community identities, including control of their women and property, yet can lay a claim to a politics that is beyond caste and religious considerations. It is in such combinatory postulations that Right-wing populism strikes and mobilizes a new kind of common sense.
To conclude, the current round of populism has emerged in India since 2014. Indian democracy had a populist turn from the days of Mrs Gandhi with her garibi hatao slogan, however, what is distinct about the current mode of populism is that it is not restricted merely for electoral purposes but has also begun to dictate the policy frame. Demonetisation is a clear instance of this. Further, Indian democracy has moved beyond the ‘Congress System’ and is also entering a post-Bahujan phase, where large categories such as ‘Dalit’ and backward class are giving way to smaller sub-castes articulating and claiming independent identity and moving between various political parties. This has allowed the BJP to strategize by drawing up a new coalition between dominant castes at one end and the lower end of the Dalits and the OBCs at the other. They are fragmenting the polity on the one hand and conjoining them to a unified Hindutva narrative on the other. In doing this, a populist narrative works as a glue in creating a new kind of discourse of us and them, in some instance vis-à-vis the economic elites while in others, it could be the Muslims. As Prashant Jha notes in his study of the BJP’s electoral strategy, ‘it was meant to make the Hindu bitter at what he was not getting; it was meant to make him feel resentful of the Muslim for being pampered; it was meant to bracket all other parties as pandering to specific interests based on religion. In the name of a common citizenry and an unbiased state, it was meant to divide communities’.103
Populism has foregrounded what Carl Schmidt refers to as the ‘irreducibility of multiplicity’.104 While it seems to have undermined institutions and democratic ethos in the immediate context, it also carries with it the possibility of furthering democratizing the polity by highlighting the multiple voices that inhabit it. This, however, remains only one possibility, while the continued assertion of the populist mode may also permanently alter the contours of democracy providing new kind of justification to extra-institutional discourses. The events running up to 2019 are significant in this respect.
Part II
STATE(S) OF
DEMOCRACY
Introduction
One of th
e distinct features of governance under Narendra Modi was how much of the policy frame was exclusively geared towards electoral gains. Elections played a significant role in how and what kind of a discourse was deployed. For instance, demonetization is widely believed to have played a very important role in how the BJP won elections in Uttar Pradesh. This section takes a look at the various elections during the current regime and what they tell us about the state of democracy in India. What were the issues that were of pivotal importance in electoral campaigns and electoral strategy? Why did the BJP win many elections and lose some? What do the losses tell us? Do they hold the signposts for what is to come in the general elections in 2019?
Alongside elections, the current regime has a turbulent relation with the states. In spite of the rhetoric of ‘co-operative federalism’ that the Modi regime kept harping upon, it was at loggerhead with states that did not have BJP-led governments. What do these developments in various states across India tell us about the larger picture of the nature of contestation between the states and the centre?
Delhi was the first major assembly elections that BJP lost hands down. AAP won 67 of the 70-member assembly in Delhi. Delhi being the capital, and events and developments here attracting national attention, it was a fiercely contested election, where BJP’s populist narrative contested with the social democratic and welfare-oriented politics of Arvind Kejriwal. Elections in Delhi in 2015 were very close to the landslide victory that Modi won in 2014. How could the results and mood change so quickly? Or did it signify that elections in the state assemblies were distinct from that of general elections? Did the electorate in India respond very distinctly in these two elections? When does the local or the regional trump the national? What does the dynamism in Indian electoral system mean for the populist politics of the BJP that was attempting to construct a pan-Indian narrative around the Hindu identity? Does federalism in India pose a challenge to the construction of a majoritarian polity? If so, in what specific ways and how does the Right in India attempt to overcome this challenge?
Following Delhi, BJP faced yet another major electoral loss in Bihar in 2015. Bihar kick-started the process of opposition parties, overcoming their differences to fight a unified battle, recognizing the challenge that BJP posed. It brought together the unlikely parties of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav together. This coming together also meant a new era of social engineering that marked a break into smaller fragmentation of the scheduled castes and the backward castes. The larger conglomeration of caste politics as Dalit and OBC was giving way to a more complex matrix of jatis and sub-castes that were vying for political representation and social mobility. Nitish had managed to reach out to these sub-castes by recognizing Extremely Backwards Castes (EBCs) and Mahadalits. BJP was quick to adopt this strategy, a year later, in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. The challenge for the BJP, however, was to tie the further division into smaller castes with a larger narrative of the Hindutva. They traded the vulnerability of small castes and the unrepresented by stitching them to a larger and more aggressive Hindu identity. Numerical vulnerability was made good by majoritarian impulse of ‘othering’ the Muslims. BJP did not offer a single ticket to a Muslim candidate in UP. Uttar Pradesh represented a key experiment in overcoming the challenge of caste politics for the Hindutva narrative. The old kind of Mandal versus Kamandal was a passé. The Right managed to ‘discover’ a new strategy of fragmenting yet unifying the castes through the larger discourses of Hindutva, development, and demonetization.
Kashmir remained in news in India all through the current regime. For the last four years, it has relentlessly been in the news. In spite of a BJP-led government in alliance with the PDP, Kashmir was burning, with series of encounters, public assault, and the killing of Burhan Wani. Kashmir allows the BJP to overcome yet another challenge in the repertoire of the Hindutva politics, the one between communalism and nationalism. Kashmir could merge the two. Kashmir, through the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, remains an intriguing issue that can potentially unify and foreground the legitimacy of Hindu nationalism. The issue of Kashmiri Pandits stands as a challenge to the Left-progressive forces as to how they articulate the legitimate concerns of a displaced population that belongs to the majority Hindu (Brahmin) community in India and is a minority in Kashmir. This potentially challenges the majority-minority division on which much of the secular discourse is based. In a sense, the limits of the secular discourse are highlighted by the Right in festering the issue of the Kashmiri Pandits. It is argued that in times to come, Kashmir will continue to play a very significant role in building the majoritarian polity in India.
Finally, this section looks at the ongoing debate in India on electoral reforms, and the potential limitations of electoralism that has come up repeatedly in terms of lack of social change, issue of corruption, and the crisis of representation in general. Indian democracy is politically functional but dysfunctional in terms of providing social and economic mobility to majority of its constituencies. This has often led to demands for electoral reforms in order to make them more representative, effective, and dynamic. Of late, None of the Above (NOTA) emerged as one such strategy, which can potentially alter the nature of candidates contesting the elections. Did NOTA prove to be effective? Do political parties heed to the opinion that emerges through the votes polled to NOTA? Is it a constitutional mode of protest, more to replace the regime of boycott of elections in states such as Kashmir? Will it work to express the anxieties of aggrieved constituencies?
The most awaited political phenomenon in recent times has been the expectation and speculation around the next general elections in 2019. Will the opposition be able to come together in order to face the populist politics of Modi? Or will the mere agenda of defeating Modi face the disapproval of the electorate? Who will emerge as the consensus candidate for the opposition? Will it be or should it be Mayawati to provide an alternative narrative around social justice? Or is social justice an exhausted agenda in what looks like a new aspirational India?
What Did BJP’s Defeat in Delhi Tell Us?
The results of the Delhi assembly elections in 2015, when the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won 67 of the 70 assembly seats, put the first brakes following what looked like the insurmountable rise of the BJP under Mr Modi’s leadership. The BJP had seemingly become the victim of the same phenomenon as Congress during the general elections in 2014—‘higher and growing aspirations and expectations of the electorate’. While aspirations were raised with the language of development used by the Congress, these came to be appropriated by Narendra Modi and the BJP. Now it looks like the hype around the so-called ‘Gujarat model’ has caught up with Modi and his party as people sought change and wanted to see if the AAP can do something more substantial than what BJP has demonstrated since coming to power.
In this moment of a new kind of ‘conformist optimism’, the electorate appeared willing to play by the rules but is stretching its expectations in order to put pressure on the parties to initially promise wonders and then punish them for not delivering on them once in power. In this play, the BJP failed to come up with anything dramatic that could capture the imagination of the electorate. Instead, it looked like a party that was playing a rather old tune that has long been unable to keep pace with the Indian voter.1
The game of speaking the language of development and governance on the one hand and presumably polarizing the electorate along religious lines on the other—as witnessed during the riots in east Delhi’s Trilokpuri area and premeditated attacks on churches— had become rather too overtly contradictory.2 Delhi is a city state of settlers who have come essentially in search of livelihood and not out of some innate sense of belonging to the place or its culture. To sustain polarization between communities, it is essential for locals to feel threatened by either the loss of culture or livelihood. Neither applies to Delhi. Further, Delhi has remained a city free of communal carnage for more than two decades under the previous Congress government, and even during the BJP rule th
at had followed the ‘soft model’ of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Sudden occurrences of communal violence were too blatant to be believed and felt too unwarranted for people to be persuaded by the logic of their necessity. Additionally, Modi—who in his heydays of campaigning was boisterously critical of Manmohan Singh for his silence on key issues—appeared stoic to the electorate. This silence on the part of Modi on some important issues has gradually turned out to be a strategy but one that the opposition parties picked on to draw the irony of Modi’s critique of Manmohan Singh, who he often referred to as ‘Maun-mohan Singh’ during his campaign.3
Modi Wave or Anti-Congress Wave?
The modalities of the campaign in Delhi and the repeated attempts to create a premeditated impact to serve the appetite of the media did not go down too well. The appointment of Kiran Bedi as a last-minute attempt to bolster the BJP’s prospects was perceived primarily as an electoral strategy rather than a serious attempt to provide an effective leader. Bedi, in any case, was more of an administrator than a leader, and there was a more effective alternative in Harsh Vardhan, who was consciously sidelined by the party leadership – a move that brings to mind the Congress High Command’s method of disallowing local popular leadership to emerge. Moreover, the hackneyed formula of drawing in leaders with prior associations to other parties is increasingly met with disapproval from voters. Bringing candidates such as Shazia Ilmi (formerly of the AAP) into the party fold was perceived as opportunism on the part of the BJP rather than actually adding to the strength of the party. Much of the BJP’s campaign looked and sounded rather cynical and negative, and did not fit with the ‘politics of hope’ that they had played on during their general elections campaign. It targeted the AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal excessively, with commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman calling him a ‘thief’, and a campaign advertisement referring to his gotra (clan) as one that creates anarchy.4
India After Modi Page 11