India After Modi: Populism and the Right

By Ajay Gudavarthy

Have you realized that the divide between 'Us' and 'Them' has grown steadily in Indian politics? Do you sometimes wonder whether it will be repaired at all in the near future? Do you ever pause to reflect why emotions spill on the streets and why democratic institutions in India have become dysfunctional? Have you thought about why we get hurt easily and how this gets reflected in everyday politics?

India after Modi attempts to address these questions through an analysis of events like Award Wapsi, demonetization, the crisis in JNU and higher education, and electoral outcomes, including in the states of Bihar, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Through this collection of essays, Ajay Gudavarthy focuses exclusively on Indian democracy after Narendra Modi took over as the prime minister in 2014. He looks at the politics that India has been witnessing since then and addresses emerging issues in Indian democracy, including that of women's participation, new urban spaces, and the role of youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9789388038836

Ajay Gudavarthy

Ajay Gudavarthy is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Earlier, he taught at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. In 2012, he had been Visiting Fellow, Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law, University of Aberdeen. He was Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Hyderabad, in 2011, and Visiting Fellow, Goldsmith College, University of London, in 2010.

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Introduction:

Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy

Democracies across the globe have taken a populist turn, with the rise of Trump in the US, at the onset of Brexit in UK, and with Narendra Modi in India. Most populist regimes, perhaps with the exception of Podemos in Spain, have all been Right wing, notwithstanding the local-national specificities. In other words, populism across the globe has certain common features, including the ability to create a people, projecting a strongman, polarizing between ‘us’ and ‘them’, moralization of power and exclusion, mobilizing emotions and passions, bringing the private to the public, and replacing the institutional mode of pursuing politics and governance with street mobilizations, among others. However, the real script of the rise of populism is in the details. The commonality that has emerged as a new global process perhaps is linked to neo-liberalism (essentially linked to the idea of the withdrawal of social welfare policies) and the social and economic inequalities associated therewith, and decline of the appeal of the old Left and its progressive-secular values. Although economic inequalities and the role of global capitalist structures have not been displaced, the experience of such structures has become more complicated because of the dispersed nature of capitalism after globalization.

The materiality of the structures has become dispersed through global networks that are post-Westphalian, invisible, staggered, and therefore, difficult to locate as sites or targets of resistance. Progressive Left militant politics of various hues were based on the reading of politics as outcomes of clear effects of structural dislocation, palpable inequalities, declining quality and standard of living, and visible national or local targets for mobilization, which would produce new kinds of commonality in resistance either as a class or as ‘multitudes’.

The aforementioned broad structural change has been accompanied by the production of a ‘unique historical moment’, produced and contained on the back of the history of resistance movements of the last century, including the Russian Revolution. This unique historical moment has been one where the formal reach of the political discourse of equality, dignity, recognition, and representation has spread to all quarters and sections of human society, while the conditions to realize them have become cumulatively contained and dissipated. It is a moment that is keenly self-aware but en-caged and delimited. It is a moment that is marked by vast aspirations and robust imagination but is also less optimistic and hopeful. It is a moment that has a deep sense of what it is to be wronged but without a collective narrative of what the alternative looks like or how one gets there. Neither the route nor the destination are certain but the suffocation with the current location and life is too tangible to be missed. It is a situation that mobilizes ‘resistance’ or perhaps negotiation, which could be a better way of putting it without a deep sense of hope or conviction for dramatic social change, but it is also a situation that is not content with small and everyday changes. It is a unique historical moment that is marked by what I would refer to as ‘Conformist Optimism’.

The uniqueness of the moment spills into the new kind of micro-foundations of power relations, techniques of momentary resistance and prolonged negotiation, imaginations of future change and nostalgia for past and continuity, a new kind of will of subjectivity and passions, experience and affectivity, compassion and fragmentation, relative mobility and social conservatism, curiosity and certainty or freedom and security, and protest and invisibility, among many other such hyphenated social and political processes. Populism is one expression that has best, if not exhaustively, captured some of these changes and is representative of what is good and bad with democracies across the globe. What is stifling, and where do new opportunities lie? Populism marks what is distinct about the democratic process as different from the 20th century. Most or some of the features or processes were always part of popular politics and ideas of popular sovereignty but what is distinct about the current rise of populist regimes is the cul-de-sac of accumulating and arranging them together in a distinct manner —a pattern that is global and local simultaneously. This book is about what is specific about populism in India and what it holds for the future of our democracy.

Populism has brought to the fore an explosion of the ‘irreducibility of multiplicity’—differences that cannot be reconciled. It has signified a simultaneous politicization of trends that were understood to represent democracy and also its counter-narrative. What is clear is that democracy cannot continue without resolving its ‘other’. Does this mean that politics will only be about moderating conflicts and not overcoming them? Does it mean containing social conflicts from spilling over to the excess of their violent selves without concern for deeper compassion and solidarity? Does it signal a ‘new’ kind of democracy and coexistence or a victory of majoritarianism? Does populism signify the renewed claims of the dominant over the dominated or the claims of the subaltern against the elite? Or does it represent the claims of the subaltern in the imagery of the elite and the assertion of the elite coloured in the language and emotionality of the subaltern? Does it represent an objective condition, or does it represent the excess of subjective proliferation that draws on the objective context but refuses to be tied down to it? In other words, it produces its own self-imagined ‘reality’ as a mode of resistance and as a means of survival. It is true to the extent it exists. It has to be dealt in this distinctly post-sociological sense, with a post-historical sensibility. It has and will bring new questions to the horizon that are potently hegemonic and illiberal but are also crying out for a new mode of resolution, which can create democracies that are in fact more substantive and stable.

Understanding the Right

In India, it means a resurgent and a victorious Right with claims to establishing a Hindu Rashtra, or alternatively, a politics that has exhausted the agenda of the Right by extending the limits of progressive politics. To begin with, what it definitely demands is a fresh understanding of the Right, avoiding a ‘mere’ moral rejection. The Right has articulated many aspects that have remained on the sidelines because of how modernity has institutionalized contemporary democracies. The need is to listen to those voices, without agreeing with them; those issues should be articulated without legitimizing them, and recognized without institutionalizing them. Progressive and Left/democratic and radical militant politics in India, to begin with, haven’t yet started to listen to what the Right is saying, much less understand or reflect what to do about it. On the contrary, the Right has understood, to a large extent, the ‘logic’ of the Left-progressive politics and also the imagination of liberal institutionalism. This is not because the Right was more democratic or politically astute, but because it simply had no choice. The Left-liberal overreach of the last three decades has made it a precondition for the Right to survive. What we are witnessing today in terms of the rise of the Right-wing populism is an outcome and a response to that rugged survival at the margins for so long. The conservative political being of the Right today ‘feels like a subaltern and thinks like the elite’.

The Right has encroached on the discourse of equality, dignity, recognition, and representation, and sutured them to the ideas of unity, nationalism, loyalty, and order. The attraction of the Right-wing ideas today is precisely for what it has learnt from the progressives. It has developed techniques, organizational modalities, and ideological formulations that institute their worldview on the shoulders of what progressive politics taught them. The Right that we see today is not the Right of the early 20th century, but the Left that we see today remains the Left of the good old times. The Right has understood where the ‘legitimacy’ of liberal-constitutionalism comes from, without agreeing with that mode of mobility or stability. It has understood the ‘attraction’ of articulating a language of differences for the subaltern over their call for unity and the ‘temptation’ of resistance over the tranquillity of order. Today, the ideals of stability, unity, and order are not divested from essentially institutionalizing hierarchy, hegemony, and majoritarianism but from what are clothed in the sensibilities of equality, liberty, and fraternity. The Right has learnt to tie diversified strategies to a unified ideology. It has initiated what I would prefer to refer to as ‘performative dialectics’—dialectics at the level of performativity, and unity and hierarchy at the level of substance and content. It has learnt the need to dissipate to achieve unification and the value of dispersion to achieve polarization. It has spoken the language of multiplicity to instantiate singularity.¹

Performative Dialectics

The Left-progressives have often morally rejected the performative dialectics of the Right either as opportunism or as mere doublespeak, such as what it did with the Dalit-Bahujan politics in the previous round of the ‘democratic upsurge’. The Right has been accused of spreading lies, fabricating evidence, manipulating, sparking and organizing violence, igniting riots, and lynching; however, the legitimacy of the Right does not come from these. The Right is assumed to be using force, violence, intimidation, and extrajudicial methods when other strategies fail to normalize its politics without remaning or being an exception. Presumably, the Right knows that explicit fear and domination is difficult to sustain and may eventually prove counter-productive in spreading its reach. It is important to understand that overt and visible violence has an underlying social narrative that is meant to generate consent and consensus for the overt violence. It is therefore equally important to focus on the social narrative behind the violence.

The essays in this book offer a critique of the methods that are possibly followed by the Right. It is presumed that the Right has established a unique hydra-headed organizational structure that goes by the name of the ‘fringe groups’, which makes it difficult to pin responsibility while being in tune with the participatory ethos and network society of the neo-liberal era on the other. Every action, be it by Gau Rakshaks, Romeo Squads, murders, and possibly in some cases, assassination of public activists and intellectuals, is followed by denial, criticism, and appropriation. This allows them to execute without challenging the established liberal sensibilities and legality of constitutional morality. The Right distances itself from the event even as it might be lending support.² The performative dialectics make it difficult to build and consolidate a counter-narrative. It opposes secularism not for what it is but what it is made out to be. They criticize not secularism but pseudo-secularism, in effect, debunking and claiming secularism, emptying it of its contents, and re-signifying it to mean ‘minorityism’ and instead establishing a majoritarian ethic as the new normal. This is construed as not merely doublespeak, manipulation, dishonesty, and opportunism, but more importantly, as an attempt to disarm the established mores of liberal language, minority rights, constitutionalism, and freedom of speech and expression. It is believed that it appropriates without investing and subverts without challenging. I refer to this ongoing mobilization as the ‘liberal-illiberal dilemma’ in which the Left-progressives get inextricably entangled. The Right avails of the best in liberal traditions, including the right to freedom of expression, but is seen to deny the same privilege to those who differ with them in the name of claiming that they alone represent an authentic ‘people’. Performative dialectics work with an explicit threat of street violence and targeting of individuals.

Intractable Symbolism

Further, the Right has built a repertoire of issues for which the progressive-seculars have no easy answers and at best remain silent and at worst reject the social narrative and mobilization strategies of the Right as ‘backward’. The Right has articulated the question of, for instance, the poor and marginalized within the dominant castes and majority religion, not perhaps out of compassion for the weak but to reinstitutionalize the hegemony of the dominant. The issue of reservations for the economically weak among dominant castes such as the Patidars, Marathas, Jats, Kapus, and even Brahmins foregrounds what I refer to as ‘intractable symbolism’.³ What is the agenda of the progressives for such marginalized groups except to argue that in a relative sense, these groups are better off?

Similarly, at a more generic level, the dominant castes are in decline due to the assertion of Dalit-Bahujans, women, the landless, and other marginalized communities, and are in no position to accept the changing power equations. The Right has ‘successfully’ mobilized them into the fold of Hindutva, politicizing the ‘Hurt Pride’ these groups suffer from. They further realize that this is a sentiment that has the potential not only for political conflict but also at times, criminalized counter-violence. The hatred precedes the target. It appears that the violence against Muslims that we have witnessed does not necessarily emerge because of what Muslims do but due to the caste dynamics inherent in the Hindu society.⁴ Therefore, progressive-secular angst against public display of Muslimness does not answer the question of violence against them. Even if Muslims were made to be invisible, there is no guarantee of their security because the violence does not happen because of what Muslims do. I have, therefore, argued that in India, there is, in fact, no Islamophobia but possibly an a priori hatred for which Muslims become the appropriate targets, perhaps because ‘Muslims are the Safest Enemy to have’. The genesis of that hatred emerges from the hurt pride of the dominant castes, which can also be reproduced by the Dalits and Bahujans as a generic anxiety after the neo-liberal reforms.⁵ What is the political agenda for the dominant castes in decline by the Left-progressives, except to dismiss these anxieties as signs of backwardness and symbols of feudal remnants? How do we alternatively politicize these ‘legitimate’ anxieties for the purposes of progressive transformation? Far from answering, the Left-liberals have not even begun to articulate such issues, leaving the field wide open for the Right to mobilize. Would it, as I suggest, provide the progressives an alternative template if they begin to legitimize some of these concerns, and instead of dismissing their demands, begin to articulate them as those of a ‘mezzanine elite’ that is precariously perched at the edge of an uneven social and economic structure? Similar is the issue of Kashmiri Pandits in the public memory in India. They remain what I call the ‘Precariats of Democracy’, abandoned by the Left and subjugated by the Right.⁶ Kashmiri Pandits are socially dominant and spatially dislocated. Their social status allowed them to reclaim economically secured lives but that did not compensate for their hurt pride or pathos. What are the modes of politicization of compassion available in the suffering of the Pandits? It is not necessarily polarization, but their suffering could hold clues to more universal compassion, provided we see them not in the immediate context reducing them to their identity but as ‘victims of circumstances’. The Left seculars, however, remained caught in the quicksand of the ‘intractable symbolism’ produced by the Right.⁷

The Right has been the face of both corporate globalization and community anxieties that are triggered due to the undermining of the community it brings with it. It talks of bullet trains, Smart Cities and also responds to the demands of Kshatriyas in Rajasthan, claims the scientific knowledge in Vedas as a symbol of the greatness of Hindu civilization. The Right is pro-corporate but anti-modern. It has initiated a unique conflict between economic elites and cultural subalterns. Economic issues of inequality are being addressed through cultural assertion. The ‘transference’ happens at multiple levels. The question of growing economic inequalities is leading to more justification of corporate capitalism, and the anxiety and anger of a declining economic standard of living has turned into demands for relative mobility; at times, it turns against those who are poor and vulnerable within each community, or against the mobility of those from hitherto marginalized communities such as the Marathas demanding scrapping of the reservations for the Dalit-Bahujans. In other words, Marathas are essentially an agrarian caste; however, due to sustained crisis in agriculture began to demand the status of ‘backward class’, reservations in jobs and higher education, scrapping of reservations for the Dalit communities, and scrapping of the SC/ST Atrocities Act as it is susceptible to misuse. The Marathas wish to retain their social status that is threatened due to declining prospects of agriculture and growing assertion of Dalit-Bahujans by demanding reservations for themselves and scrapping the same for Dalit-Bahujans.⁸ In another context, the economic crisis and perceived decline in social status can take the shape of protests for re-claiming a glorious past, as we witnessed with regard to the Rajput community and the street mobilization surrounding the release of the film Padmaavat.⁹

Further, in the era of corporate globalization, the symbolism of the vulnerability of being poor and the power of being rich and powerful are being simultaneously appropriated by the Right. Although from a humble background, Prime Minister Modi now leads a life of power and ostentatiousness, which prompted Rahul Gandhi to refer to Mr Modi’s rule as the ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’.¹⁰ Modi claims the legacy of the poor and the marginalized based on his past and the power of the rich and the corporate based on his current stature. This symbolizes the journey of a self-made man, and at another level, justifies aggressive corporate growth and lifestyle. He attempts to forge continuity, not a dichotomy between the two.

Strongman and Mob Violence

The strongman phenomenon that lies at the core of populism operates through a complex maze of symbolic gestures. However, one could wonder how the claims of a strongman—who is in absolute control of things—can coexist with mob violence that signifies anarchy? The leader claims a decisive decision-making capacity without being restrained by the niceties of liberal institutionalism. The legitimacy here is mobilized because of the available discontent against dysfunctional institutions. However, he is also a chaiwala, a dass (servant), and a chowkidar who is working against the establishment representing the interests of ‘the people’.¹¹ This idea of the ‘people’ however, is selective, sectarian, and refers to an authentic core that stands with and not against the leader. Outside the fold of this authentic constituency, the leader is not expected to extend similar humility, but contrarily, is understood to be strong, intolerant, and ruthless.

When protests in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) took place in the name of national versus anti-national, the manner in which protestors were treated demonstrates how the core constituency expects them to be treated in order to further consolidate the leader’s followers. Being anti-democratic here, in the popular domain, is considered both legitimate and valid. It is considered truthful and in the national interests. Further, the strongman phenomenon is all about taking responsibility that in turn justifies the silence on violation of law and the use of violence. In order to deliver, it could well mean that one may need to violate the law and use violence. Street violence and mob lynching are connected to the ability of the leader owning up to the responsibility for his decisions. In the neo-liberal condition of a faceless political system in a post-Westphalian context, the leader becomes the only identifiable entity. Taking sole responsibility and projecting a singular identity and leading the governance in the name of the leader, and not a collective, becomes a powerful way of building credibility and trust.¹² This singularity is then compensated not through available institutional means of participation but is assumed through extra-institutional modes such as lynching and mob violence. One reinforces the other—more the violence, more the need for a strong leader; more the strong leader sticking out his neck, more the need to express loyalty through occupying the streets. It is a throwback to the latent demand for a direct democracy circumventing the labyrinths of the liberal institutional frame.¹³

In all of this, the Left-liberals got cornered into further justifying the same institutions that are dysfunctional—institutions that they were themselves critical of not being responsive and decaying internally. The more the liberal-progressives claimed to reinstate the legitimacy of the dysfunctional institutions, the more they looked as apologists for them.¹⁴ Extra-institutional modes look more credible, direct, tangible, and effective, beyond the drab procedurality of legal imperatives. Street violence and vigilante justice are both the justification and reason for the strongman phenomenon.¹⁵

In the context of India, unlike other societies, creating the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ kind of polarisation is not easy because the majority Hindu society is itself divided across castes. The Right had the unenviable task of creating the Muslim ‘other’ and a unified Hindu ‘us’. The social hierarchies that come with prejudices are the dominant mode in which social arrangement is structured within the Hindu society. The Right could still create a unified Hindutva, not through a simple-minded unity but unity based on fragmentation. In Uttar Pradesh, it supposedly fragmented and mobilized the smaller OBC and Dalit castes, which in turn were stitched to the unified Hindu identity. The more they were accommodated and represented, the more appeared to be their acceptance of a Hindu identity.¹⁶ The discourses of fragmentation and fraternity went hand in hand. Fragmentation provided them representation, while fraternity provided them recognition. While the Left-secular mode of representation, through for instance reservations, created misrecognition and the burden of carrying and politicizing differences, the Right mode of providing representation without the stigma of misrecognition ostensibly held some appeal. One is a Dalit to gain representation but a Hindu to gain recognition. The idea that differences need to be positively politicized in order to create mobility and also overcome misrecognition is the core Left-secular mode, while it is a legitimate method in its own right, it should also be recognized that undermining differences in the name of a larger collective, community, and fraternity also holds its own promise, even if it has the flip side of hegemonizing the subaltern under the yoke of the dominant culture. The Right refers to this as the practice of samarasta.¹⁷

Differences and Fraternity

In a survey I conducted of the Dalit-Bahujan students working with the Right-wing student bodies, the constant theme that the Dalit-Bahujan student leaders returned to was the ‘empowerment’ they felt in not being recognized by their castes and being ‘included’ as part of the larger Hindu community.¹⁸ Their complaint with the Left-wing or independent Dalit-Bahujan student politics was the burden of wearing ‘caste on your sleeves’. Instead, one could