India after Modi : populism and the right 9789388038836, 9388038835

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy
Part I: POPULISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM
Introduction
Populist-Authoritarianism in India
Populism and the Strongman: From Modi to Yogi
Award Wapsi: Reasoning with Intolerance
Why the RSS Projects JNU as Anti-National?
Autonomy of Universities and a Life of the Mind
Demonetization and the ‘War on Terror’
Corporate Capitalism, Hurt Pride, and Hindutva
Populism and Mass Violence: The Liberal-Illiberal Dilemma
Populism and Popular Culture: Are Muslims the Safest Enemy to Have?
Hyper-Electoralism and Pakoda Nationalism
Theorizing Populism in India
Part II: STATE(S) OF DEMOCRACY
Introduction
What Did BJP’s Defeat in Delhi Tell Us?
Does Bihar Hold the Key to the Future of Indian Politics?
Populism and Caste Calculus in Uttar Pradesh
Telangana: The Question of Internal Colonization
Kashmir: Is It Also a Question of Internal Colonization?
Kashmiri Pandits: Precariats of Indian Democracy
Of What Value Is NOTA?
Towards 2019: Opposition Needs to Rally Behind Mayawati
BJP’s Strategy for 2019
Part III: DALIT-BAHUJAN POLITICS
Introduction
After Rohith Vemula: Is the Dalit-Muslim Unity Sustainable?
Dalit-Bahujans and Fraternity: From Ambedkar to Kancha Illiah
Unity between the Left and the Dalit-Bahujans
Caste, Authenticity, and the Oriental Spirit
Part IV: THE FUTURE OF POLITICS
Introduction
Nehru and the Rise of Modi
Bringing Justice Back In
Women and the Future of Democracy
Anxiety, Anger, and Anomie: Mobilizing Generation Next
India’s Oscillating Public Sphere
Social Ethics of Violence and the Maoist Movement in India
Notes and References

Citation preview

INDIA AFTER MODI

INDIA AFTER

MODI Populism and the Right

Ajay Gudavarthy

BLOOMSBURY INDIA Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7, Vasant Kunj New Delhi 110070 BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in India 2019 This edition published 2019 Copyright © Ajay Gudavarthy, 2019 Ajay Gudavarthy has asserted his right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes ISBN: HB: 978-9-3880-3881-2; eBook: 978-9-3880-3883-6 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Created by Manipal Digital Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press Pvt Ltd Bloomsbury Publishing Plc makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in the manufacture of our books are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in wellmanaged forests. Our manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

To my relations—Venu Kaka, Bhakti Kaka, Ravi Kaka, Naranna, Seenanna, and Anurag—for making my trips to Hyderabad warm and eventful. Interactions with them also helped me understand Right-wing populism better!

CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy Part I: POPULISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM Introduction Populist-Authoritarianism in India Populism and the Strongman: From Modi to Yogi Award Wapsi: Reasoning with Intolerance Why the RSS Projects JNU as Anti-National? Autonomy of Universities and a Life of the Mind Demonetization and the ‘War on Terror’ Corporate Capitalism, Hurt Pride, and Hindutva Populism and Mass Violence: The Liberal-Illiberal Dilemma Populism and Popular Culture: Are Muslims the Safest Enemy to Have? Hyper-Electoralism and Pakoda Nationalism Theorizing Populism in India Part II: STATE(S) OF DEMOCRACY Introduction What Did BJP’s Defeat in Delhi Tell Us? Does Bihar Hold the Key to the Future of Indian Politics? Populism and Caste Calculus in Uttar Pradesh Telangana: The Question of Internal Colonization

Kashmir: Is It Also a Question of Internal Colonization? Kashmiri Pandits: Precariats of Indian Democracy Of What Value Is NOTA? Towards 2019: Opposition Needs to Rally Behind Mayawati BJP’s Strategy for 2019 Part III: DALIT-BAHUJAN POLITICS Introduction After Rohith Vemula: Is the Dalit-Muslim Unity Sustainable? Dalit-Bahujans and Fraternity: From Ambedkar to Kancha Illiah Unity between the Left and the Dalit-Bahujans Caste, Authenticity, and the Oriental Spirit Part IV: THE FUTURE OF POLITICS Introduction Nehru and the Rise of Modi Bringing Justice Back In Women and the Future of Democracy Anxiety, Anger, and Anomie: Mobilizing Generation Next India’s Oscillating Public Sphere Social Ethics of Violence and the Maoist Movement in India Notes and References

Preface and Acknowledgements

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his book is a reflection on the current political dispensation working under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi. It attempts to take a critical look at all the major events that transpired since 2014 and as a run-up to 2019. It is premised on the argument that ‘India after Modi’ is distinct from what it was before. I have attempted to tread a difficult line of making the book readable to the common reader and anyone interested in what is going on with democracy in India; further, this will appeal to social scientists, scholars, journalists, policymakers, and others with a degree of specialization relevant to reading politics. Some of the articles published as short essays in various news dailies and web portals have been rewritten to further explore the interconnections between them and produce (hopefully) tightly held arguments, mapping the changes and pre-empting the ones to come. The essays have been published earlier in The Hindu, The Indian Express, New Indian Express, The Wire, News Laundry, Deccan Herald, South Live, Himal South Asian, Book Review and the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). I gratefully acknowledge all of them. I acknowledge with thanks all colleagues and friends who were part of this bumpy ride, including Janjira Sambatpoonaseri, Marc Saxer, Anil Menon, B.S. Chimni, Zoya Hasan, Arfa Khannum, Amir Ali, Neera Chandhoke, Satish Jha, Burra Srinivas, Afroz Alam, Maninder Thakur,

Divyaraj Amiya, Trevor Stack, Anand Teltumbde, Anindya Purukayastha, Saswat Das, Nicholas Tampio, Heike, Samir Gandesha, Anup Dhar, Swagato Sarkar, A.P.S. Chauhan, Ashok Kaul, Taru Shikha, Bal Reddy, Govindraj Hegde, T.G. Suresh, Shiju Verghese, Supriya Roychoudhary, Manisha Sethi, G. Vijay, V.S. Prasad, Dr Narshima Reddy, and many others I inadvertently forget to mention here. I thank many students at the Centre for Political Studies for engaging discussions and filling in the days with mirth, helping me avoid the distaste of institutional realities! I immensely benefitted out of continuous dialogue and discussions with all of them. I thank Gurpreet Mahajan for the discussions and Satyender for the help in processing the funding of the field trips through the Departmental Special Assistance (DSA). I am thankful to all those who have extended invitations to be part of academic meets that they organized including Mahesh Rangarajan, Mohan Gopal, Ravi Kumar, Afroz Alam, Bijaylakshmi, Venkatesu, Rashmi Doraisamy, Dhananjay Tripathi, J. Prabash, Vivek Kumar, Gurram Srinivas, Smriti Das, Maninder Thakur, Pia David, Ajay Behera, Biju, G.N. Trivedi, Subodh Kumar Sajjan, Anindya Purakayastha and Saswat Das, Dr Kuruvila, Mangesh Kulkarni, Srirupa Roy, Rama Rao, Muslim Education Society, Jaganatham, Deepak Kumar, Radhakrishnan, and Sudhir Suthur. Presenting papers and delivering public talks at the various events that they organized greatly contributed to the clarity with which I have been able to present the arguments in this book. Finally, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Chandra Sekhar at Bloomsbury for suggesting the idea for the book and for suggesting that I rewrite it to read like a book. Without his persuasion, this book wouldn’t be what it is.

Introduction: Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy

D

emocracies 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 selfaware 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 microfoundations 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 postsociological 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 liberalconstitutionalism 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 Leftprogressives 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 progressiveseculars 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 Leftprogressives, 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 DalitBahujans 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 extrainstitutional 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 assimilate to avoid humiliation. One of them intriguingly argued that ‘if eating beef segregates us from the rest of the society, what is the harm in giving up eating it’. He emphasized that there might be a conflict between various castes but that they all also need to live ‘together’ in a village, highlighting the point that conflict and coexistence was the everyday reality. The Left liberal mode of exclusively politicizing differences without striving for fraternal feelings in the given context makes them susceptible to look divisive—even in effective terms, they mean to forge solidarity between caste groups alongside achieving mobility. The fact that Ambedkar emphasized fraternity alongside equality and liberty, also allows the Right to appropriate him in striving for fraternal feelings between caste groups without directly fighting against social prejudices.19 In effect, it had its own mode of protest against the dominant castes. One of them argued that ‘even if they (upper castes) are forced to accept, even if falsely, that there was no Varna system in the past, is it not an acknowledgment of the mobility of the lower castes?’ The Right has an alternative mode of politicizing caste and other differences within the Hindu community. While such a mode might be hegemonic, it also holds the potential to create a ‘feeling’ of being inclusive. It also provides a readymade discourse or covers against everyday humiliation and stigma.20 This submersion of the identity, as I could see in the course of the survey, also creates a repressed self. This in turn provides a template to justify street violence for the subaltern to vent their frustration, even if it is against the misplaced enemy in a Muslim or a Left liberal, and to further entrench this process, the Right takes recourse to constructing an alternative or a distorted history.21 The ‘deceit also works as a conceit’ for the subaltern castes. Distortion is a mode of unsettling the privileged narrative. It also highlights the voice of the victim or the marginalized. The communitarian modes of articulation strike a similarity with even the dominant castes; there seems to be a possibility of forging an alliance between the poor among the dominant and the those among the subaltern castes as the ‘New Cultural Subalterns’.

New Cultural Subalterns are those divided across the fault line of those inhabiting the modern institutions and those that are distanced from modernity.22 As it appears, it is not a coincidence that taking recourse to lies, justifying manipulation, and fabricating stories has also been off late justified as a legitimate repertoire even in Dalit mobilizations. In fact, Kanshi Ram had announced that since we do not have opportunities, there is nothing wrong in being opportunists.23 Similarly, in laying claim to a glorious past, the Veeranganas of the Dalits, in Uttar Pradesh, are not very different from the way history seems to be distorted by the Right and its associates.24 The claim to victimhood, by the Right, even if trumped up is similar in its sentiment to the sense of victimhood of the Dalits and it partly explains why the modes of articulation are somewhat similar. Further, the Right has legitimately claimed that there is more to Indian Philosophy than Brahmanic Hinduism, even as they refuse to explicitly critique or distance themselves from the Brahmanic traditions. Even as they conflate the two, the Left-progressives too took the same path of conflating the two and did not critically engage with what I refer to in this book as ‘the problem of retrieval’—how to retrieve the past and its heterogeneous traditions, without either submerging or conflating it with the Brahmanic traditions? In one of the essays, I point to the similarity of the Left-liberals with Western philosophers, such as Hegel, who equated the entire Hindu Philosophy to its Brahmanical tradition, and thereby referred to it as a ‘Oriental Spirit’ that got stagnated. The fact that the Left, by and large, can be accused of a Eurocentric bias or a modernist bias can be maintained, even as we can continue to differ with the credibility of the Right in privileging a heterogeneous rendering of history. The Left, in abandoning an exploration of the possibilities of appropriating the alternative renderings, has again allowed the Right to not only appropriate but also apparently distort history, as it was never part of the public debate in popular mobilizations of the progressive politics.

Secular in Public, Prejudicial in Private

Finally, the Right has transformed the relationship between the private and the public. The state has become an emotional being. It is no longer soulless and distant; it is a part of the private and the everyday. In this, the Right has created a conversational mode of public communication, mobilized emotions and passions, and adopted a symbolism of a paternal compassion. From a grand redistributive programme, the state has taken to the immediate needs. The symbolism of Amma in Tamil Nadu captures a state that is concerned with the girl child’s education, marriage, and distribution of sanitary napkins. It sought a seamless continuity between the two, bringing not only the state closer to the ‘citizen’ but also carrying the pride and prejudice in the private to the public realm. It has breached the schizophrenic existence that the secular politics demanded of being civil in public and carrying one’s prejudices in the private. The Right begins its mobilization, not in the secular-associational domain but in the realm of religion, family, and schooling. It moves from the private to the public, while the Left-progressive politics maintains a strict division between the public and the private. It privileges personal freedom that is at a crosscurrent with the collective of the public domain. The Right politicizes the available social location, while the Left-radical attempts to create new spaces of politicization in creating new subjectivities.25 In this tension between the immanent and the transcendental, the affective and the experiential domain seems to have a more organic link with the Right than the transcendentalism of the Left. Critical theorist Nancy Fraser observes, ‘Socialism is cognitively compelling but experientially distanced’. Left politics has to bridge that gap to undercut the burden of politics as a specialized avocation of a few. It is true that the Right reinforces the given political culture, while the Left attempts to transcend the given, especially that which is discriminatory and exclusionist; however, this cannot come at the cost of undermining the experiential dimension. How Left progressive politics can create an experiential politics that also historicizes and does not naturalize the given social hierarchies remains an insurmountable challenge.

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 selfconsuming passions. There is a repetitiveness in the new common sense it produces but what it does ‘succeed’ 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

I

t 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

P

opulism 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 enculturalization 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.

Everyday and the Political The other big shift is that the equation between the every day and the political has changed with populism making a comeback. The populist regimes allow everyday socio-cultural practices—including interpersonal practices—to determine the political in a much bigger way. This also has some strange and complex linkages with the changes in neo-liberal dynamics because of the features of neo-liberalism that extend beyond social constraints of class, caste, and religion. Neo-liberalism is producing dynamics of its own kind, and therefore, the microscopic aspects of everyday interpersonal life are beginning to matter much more in the political realm than what they have done in the past. In that sense, populism is liberating and inclusive, i.e. one is not under the burden of preconceived frames of ideology, one needs to think in terms of a received or available political, and also does not possess a programmatic idea of what politics should be—populism allows individuals to imagine politics from the location where s/he stands. Populism, in one sense, is nothing but the celebration of the ‘irreducibility of multiplicity’ in politics. There are immense multiplicities and heterogeneities in society, and populism is that which gives you a sense of being included in political dynamics from your

own social location rather than asking you to change your perspective in terms of a pre-received constitutional vision or a vision of the liberal democracy. Populism gives one the empowering feeling of entering with one’s own location, own identity, social vision, culture, and so on. This authoritarian regime is populist in nature, the most complex, and simultaneously, the most significant aspect of this regime. This populist tinge comes from the fact that it is inclusive in a very strange sense. This regime is inclusive of all those groups that perhaps have remained at the margins, those who have been dropped out of the system. Although it creates all kinds of ‘others’, there is also a sense of inclusiveness in this populism. The current regime also creates a sense of inclusiveness in questioning the class-character of the liberal institutions. Liberal institutions and Constitutionalism expected a certain kind of familiarity with procedural language, civil etiquettes that went along with proficiency in English, and being urbane. There is a convergence of a certain kind of subalternization and a certain kind of Right-wing authoritarianism. The Left assumes the regime to be fascist, authoritarian, or a top-down force. It is presumably authoritarian, but that is just a part of the story. The larger and more significant part of it is not merely top-down authoritarianism but something more inclusive and populist.

A New Symbolic Order There has been an exclusion of the subalterns such as migrants and nonEnglish speaking individuals from liberal institutions, such as the bureaucracy, judiciary, and media for far too long. For example, who are the lawyers who resorted to assaulting in the court premises?2 They were social dropouts, or in sociological terms, ‘deviants’3—who could not make it big in life—who belonged to economically vulnerable upper castes and did not do well for themselves under the demands of the liberal democratic institutions.4 It is this kind of new social constituencies5 that the symbolic ordering of the populist regime makes feel more inclusive. We are moving from

empirical accuracy to normative ordering,6 and we can all do that from our own social experience. Therefore, there is an explosion of symbolic social space.7 This populism is somehow making that possible in a strange way. On one end, some social groups are making an entry on a symbolic plane, and that entry is happening through this symbolic imagination of ‘what should be’, which is not based on truth, facts, evidence, and empirical accuracy. Therefore, the current populist-authoritarian regime can respond to you by making you inclusive in this symbolic order. And quite a few new things are happening in this kind of inclusivity. For instance, if you were to ask someone about demonetization, they would say that it succeeded, while most of the economists would hold the view that it was an ineffective strategy to fight black money. Then, what was it that succeeded?8 This symbolic opening up of a space is occurring partly because of a large growth of insecurity as a pervasive phenomenon. Today insecurity grips all social groups from the middle class to the poorest. Contrary to the European middle class, the Indian middle class, in fact, grew at the time of neo-liberal reforms. Therefore, the very growth of this class took place, on one hand, through expansion of opportunities, and on the other hand, through withdrawal of social security measures—for instance, golden handshake, VRS, withdrawal of pensions, contractualization of jobs, and massive expansion of informal sector, among others. In fact, Zygmunt Bauman points to it, in his book In Search of Politics, that till the 1970s, primitive accumulation was slower than the expansion of industries. Therefore, more jobs were created prior to the 1970s than people getting displaced. Post 1970s, globally, the ability of industries to create jobs reduced significantly than the number entering the job market as a result of displacement due to the process of primitive accumulation, and this has declined compared to the people who are entering the job market. Therefore, insecurity today is a driving force and something that is experienced across classes, even the middle class and the well off.9 This insecurity has also become a part of social relations. To form any kind of social relation, you need the consent of two people, but to break it you just need the decision of one. The very idea of contractualization of

social life, even when you are in a happy relationship, brings insecurity, as it just needs one party’s decision to break away. We have been witnessing the flipside of these ideas of democratization of social relations, perpetuated by liberal democracy for quite some time. While we began the century by believing that secularization of social life—that is the growth and expansion of civil society and associated life, secular shifts from ascriptive10 to prescriptive identities are all about freedom—all social commitments today have become ad-hoc. We are all now a part of contingent commitments as there are no full-time and absolute commitments. All social bonds today are ad-hoc bonds. We have to understand that the expansion and secularization of civil society have made this a reality of everyday life. That is how we have been secularized to think about our social relations—through rational, critical, and self-interrogatory means. Therefore, we now need to revisit this liberal idea of expansion of freedom under secularization. Look at the entire debate around the freedom to wear a burqa or the legalization of sex work.11 In the 1960s, sex work was perceived as a form of exploitation, a residual effect of capitalism, and this labour, upholding the objectification of women, could not be absorbed into the job market. Today, we are talking about the rights of sex workers and also the legalization of sex work. There are appeals to not stigmatize sex work but treat it as a kind of alternative profession. These are the two examples that should lead us to question how the liberal idea of expansion of freedom and choice comes within certain constraints and in terms of social adhocism.

Neo-liberalism and Populism This is also occurring within the limits of neo-liberalism. We are taking for granted that neo-liberalism is here to stay and that it confines and limits our political imagination. The fact that there is no alternative to growth and development is also determining how we plan our social life. This convergence of a certain kind of liberal freedom12 in social and cultural life, which includes mediatization, means that on the economic front, it is the neo-liberal economy, and on the political front, it is the populist democracy.

We need to see the possible convergence that is occurring on these three planes. Therefore, even if neo-liberalism leads to jobless growth and material insecurity, it is not questioned. Freedom and insecurity are not in direct conflict today, and something else13 is occurring in a liberal democracy. Perhaps, the reason that more than freedom what is being privileged today is security and securitization. This populist-authoritarian regime is symptomatic of these changes. First, we do not have an alternative narrative to neo-liberalism coupled with big growth and development; secondly, we have landed upon contingent, adhoc social commitments as a result of the expansion of the discourse of freedom in social and cultural life; thirdly, neo-liberal growth itself. I think these three parallel processes are producing a convergence, which allows a populist-authoritarian regime to thrive. Perhaps, this is why we find the movements—born out of inequalities—are electing regimes, which in turn, are furthering these very inequalities. The amount of frustration and anger among the people of the United States, due to the lack of jobs and social inequalities, eventually ends up electing someone like Donald Trump. In India, we have growing inequalities but we end up electing a Right-wing regime, which is seemingly more pro-corporate, pro-jobless growth, prosecuritization rather than a social democratic process. It tells us that there is no linear equation between what we expect and what we are doing. Rightwing populism is successful today because it is able to bank on, be inclusive, and respond to these basic insecurities in social, cultural, and economic life. Populism is providing a symbolic succour, which is in terms of moving away from these massive insecurities that we are stuck in right from the most intimate interpersonal social life to collective and political life. Populism is one way of ordering these insecurities by giving us a vague symbolic structure.

Populism and Emotions The other part of the success of this new populist regime is its ability to include subjective emotions more upfront than liberal democracies and

moving away from the liberal democratic conception of a rational self based on separation of the private and public realm of an individual. The liberal individual was a public individual. It was acceptable to hold discriminatory opinions in the private realm as long as one didn’t express in the public and professional life. Liberalism expects us to be civil and politically correct in the public domain and the opposite at home, whereas populism has allowed the passage of this private individual in the public domain without any sense of guilt. Following this, we may say that one way to understand the spread of these populist regimes is that they are allowing the private individual some social space for expressing her own emotions and beliefs. The private emotions of our leaders today are in the public domain.14 Populism is allowing subjective emotions to play out in public. It is no longer the imagination of a rational individual, according to the Benthamite formulation of pleasure and pain—maximizing the pleasure and minimizing the pain—but a whole range of emotions, real emotions—of fear, anger, sense of vulnerability, resentment—are allowed to be expressed in the public domain in this populist regime. This recognition of the fact that human beings are agents with self-contradictory emotions and that our political decisions are going to be self-contradictory is what the populist regimes are putting on the table in front of us. Leaders can very conveniently pass off self-contradictory emotions today, as it no longer looks dishonest, rather more real. This new kind of articulation of emotions and consequent actions are considered popular instead of false, breaking the private and bringing it into the public. The functioning of a liberal democracy is based on a rational, rounded individual, but today symbolic imaginations provided by populism are making what may seem uncivil real. Today, the state is willing to speak in the language reserved for the private realm. Centrist social democratic systems hinged their politics on the bifurcation of the civil and uncivil but today’s regimes are willing to speak erstwhile uncivil things openly. In that sense, populist regimes, strangely, come across as more honest. Today’s regimes are putting subjective emotions into a policy frame. The state is becoming an emotional being.

The divide between the public and the private that liberal democracy stood on is witnessing a huge shift as the private is becoming the public and vice versa. The state has assumed the role of a patriarch, what a father stands for in the private realm. We must not reject these regimes as merely populist, as there is something inclusionary about them that is not in line with the old discourse of equality15 but along the discourse of relative mobility. Equality has turned into a non-issue in the light of the failure of poverty alleviation programmes in Russia, China, India, and even globally. And what has replaced equality is the idea of relative mobility, that is, we are better off than the position where we were previously. This very idea of relative mobility itself opens up the space for the triangular convergence that is happening now and the playing out of a lot of subjective emotions. This, to a large extent, is a kind of relief from the secular, rational individuals that liberal institutions expected us to be. In that sense, the populist-authoritarian regimes have succeeded, in terms of allowing the play of these private emotions. What marks our everyday idea of social life today is the idea of ‘resentiment’—a combination of resentment and sentiment,—which, in a sense, is a mix of envy, humiliation, and powerlessness. These factors lead to a deep sense of pragmatism.16 Another shift is from idealism to pragmatism. Normative politics with principled positions are finding it difficult to articulate current aspirations, and instead, we are witnessing a move towards a more pragmatic turn in popular politics.17 Politics to a large extent has become very pragmatic. We understand that there are limits to social achievement and that social conflicts have no solutions. From an imagination of overcoming conflict, we are reconciled to the fact that conflict is an everyday reality and that we will live with these conflicts for a long time to come. The social utopia that the Left and other progressive political parties created across the globe has begun to look increasingly unreal and imaginary now. The other reason why populism is succeeding is precisely because it is more pragmatic and more real. As long as the idea of irreducible social conflict, and undeniable heterogeneity in terms of caste, gender, ethnicity and so on is true, there are going to be conflicts. There is historical evidence that societies have never

and will never exist without social conflicts, bereft of differences and inequalities. If we begin to believe that conflicts can be managed and moderated, we would begin to understand politics differently. The state that was forced to speak a social democratic language, now, under populist regimes has given voice to the views that we used to hold all through only in the private realm. The state has also accepted that conflicts are going to stay unsolved to become our lived reality. The populist state has allowed the space for the articulation of the realities that we used to acknowledge only in our private life but never admitted in public. Therefore, being consistent, idealistic, and committed is no longer a virtue, not merely because it is opportunism but a given reality, a compulsion. One takes contradictory positions in accordance with the social location one is placed in. And why should that necessarily be considered dishonest? There is a complete demystification of the state. The state has come home and speaks the everyday language of emotions rather than the impersonal language of citizenship. Populism is allowing you to be your inconsistent self in the public domain. Liberalism has taught us to not express our private feelings in public. Populism has allowed free-floating emotions in public. Therefore, we have a nice continuity between the public and the private. All dominant social groups stand to gain in the populistauthoritarian regime. Once you begin to understand the range of these emotions, you have to understand how to channelize them for progressive means and give them a new direction. We have to understand this new language of authoritarianism.

Populism and the Strongman: From Modi to Yogi

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ne of the central features of populism is dependence on a strongman and Indian politics is once again at the cusp of debating how to have a strong leader who does not undermine the significance of the political party he or she belongs to. In the popular perception, a good leader is someone who is decisive and clear-minded. But the leader is also expected to be amenable to public opinion, approachable, and accountable. These popular perceptions of leadership influence the manner in which political leaders manage their parties and the way they project themselves. Indira Gandhi was lauded for her strong, almost authoritarian, personality and was portrayed as ‘Durga’. But she was also chastised for undermining inner-party democracy, for initiating a process of deinstitutionalization, and for making demands for a ‘committed judiciary’ that finally landed Indian democracy in the crisis of the Emergency in 1975. This tension and friction, between the rather opposing imaginations of leadership, is a continuing thread of Indian politics and democracy.18 Arvind Kejriwal was touted as an honest and approachable leader who cared about public opinion. But when he sat on a dharna and did a sit-in while being the chief minister of Delhi, he was roundly criticized. The general opinion then was that a leader cannot bring down the prestige or garima of an official position by taking to the street as a ‘commoner’—He needed to maintain the dignity that comes from keeping a distance from the

street. Looking approachable was no longer perceived to be an act of bringing power closer to the common citizen—read direct democracy — but as a violation of the sense of self as a citizen. Kejriwal himself has agreed that what he did came as a ‘cultural shock’ to the aam aadmi in Delhi and elsewhere.19

Ascetics and Celibate A ‘good leader’ also cannot be a ‘part-time’ politician; he has to be a professional and committed to spending all his time with the machinations of party and government. This view coexists with the idea that a good and strong leader is ascetic, who believes in renouncing his personal and private pursuits for the larger cause of the nation. By this logic, those without a family are often, ipso facto, considered, to be honest leaders. Power has to be managed with a single-minded pursuit and without personal attachments. This is the gift of the Gandhian imagination of brahmacharya, which means celibacy in the immediate sense but also indicates a sense of detachment, in the broader sense.20 It is, therefore, more than a coincidence that Narendra Modi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Mamata Banerjee, Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik, and Mayawati are considered popular leaders. They pursue power single-mindedly all the time and never display private emotions. Even leaders who work outside the institutions of state are often gauged by these very standards. There is deep discomfort among Indians with the idea of the private and with being ordinary. The leader has to be larger than life and, perhaps, masculine to gain the ‘respect’ of fellow party men and the cadre. In this mode of imagining, the leader should not ever have to face dissent or difference of opinion, which are considered signs of weakness and disrespect. There is a serious problem for those who lead an active public life to retreat into the anonymity of the private. This seems to be something specific to the culture of our nation. Nelson Mandela, who led a tireless public life as part of the anti-apartheid struggle, very seamlessly slipped

into a quiet private life.21 Even George Bush preferred to pursue painting, after rather ‘eventful’ two terms as president of US.22 However, mass leaders and politicians in India rarely ever announce retirement from public life. Given the dominant public morality in India, it only looks logical that leaders and their lifestyles assume a greater importance over parties and procedures that are seen as necessary to keep them democratic and open. Personality cult is not, therefore, that which emerges merely from certain ideological proclivities; its source may well lie in the way public morality is structured. What we are witnessing in Indian politics today has a long history and deep socio-moral base. What it has done under the current populist regime is to grow into a full-fledged personality cult that is presumably crafted by the media and its associated campaign. It began with Modi as the larger-than-life leader who is a ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ and moving into placing Yogi as the next-generation Hindutva idol.23

From Modi to Yogi There are now definitive signs of the next major shift in the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP-RSS) combine in times to come. While Modi broke the ranks by shifting the tag of the BJP as a ‘Brahmin-Baniya’ party by invoking his backward class/caste status, the induction of Yogi Adityanath will lend the next major shift to creating a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. The BJP-RSS also perhaps believes that this carefully crafted image of a yogi becoming the head of state will revive the age-old Hindu tradition of a sannyasi taking up political power to cleanse the system of its inertia and revitalize it with valour. Yogi himself believes that sannyasis are necessary for politics to cleanse it.24 There are parallels and subtle shifts in the symbolism of the imageries of Modi and Yogi. Both have sacrificed their family lives to adopt the nation as their family. Both have led ascetic lives detaching themselves from worldly temptations. While Modi as ‘Bal Narendra’ fought crocodiles and was a fearless child,25 Yogi took the tough decision of taking up a life

of a sannyasi without informing even his parents, even though he was close to his sisters.26 While Modi joined as a pracharak and emerged as a Hindu Hriday Samrat, Yogi joined the Gorakhpur math. Both are considered good orators with the ability to issue open threats against Islamic jihadi forces.27 Both seemingly understand human suffering, Modi on account of his poverty and eking a life by selling tea, Yogi by taking up voluntary poverty.28 The shift is obviously from Modi as a social and political symbol of Hindutva to Yogi as perhaps the decisive religious symbol of Hindutva. There has been a very carefully designed and planned move from a centristhumanist sounding Vajpayee to the more robust Advani to the militant Modi to the explicit religious symbolism in the rise of Yogi.

From Hindu Hriday Samrat to Hindu Samrat Yogi is taking the discourse and politics of Hindutva many steps ahead. Modi cleanses politics through demonetization and Yogi purifies politics as a sannyasi. Modi had already introduced an everyday language in popular mobilization. He crafted simple symbols, coined acronyms, and articulated everyday concerns of the citizenry through his Mann ki Baat. Yogi takes it a step further in talking about even personal habits of cleanliness, bathing and brushing regularly, and keeping surroundings clean, among others. It gives a sense of a return to an ancient Hindu way of life. Gandhi had a similar mode of articulating and linking the every day to the political. He had similar interests in personal ethics, personal habits of cleanliness, and symbolism of an ashram, among others. Gandhi had already occupied the space that the figureheads of Hindutva are experimenting with today in bridging the gap between the private and the public. The symbolism of a yogi allows for politicizing everyday emotions of fear, anxiety, alienation, anger, and hatred. Added to this shift in the model of leadership is the near-absolute clarity of the BJP-RSS combine in how a Hindu Rashtra should be ushered in.

Yogi is the first step under whose tutelage the remaining agenda can be carried out, including the building of a Bhavya Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, repealing Article 370, implementing the Uniform Civil Code, amendment of the Constitution, reconfirming reservation from caste to economic criteria, and finally perhaps disenfranchising religious minorities.29 Right is the only political force today that has near-absolute clarity of agenda and purpose in comparison to the rest of political groups in India.

‘Fascism in Us All’30 It has now become commonplace to compare Hindutva with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, though in spite of all the comparisons, we do not have a clarity as to where does this kind of a mass consent to militant Right-wing politics comes from, except from a perceived construct of a hurt pride, of being victims of histories of invasions, a sense of inferiority, and humiliation. Both the Germans then and the Hindus now continue to suffer the sense of being ‘taken for granted’ for being polite, accommodative, and peace-loving. Further, the economic crisis of the Second World War and the current global crisis marked by a massive rise in inequalities are also comparable to why Hindutva has become a viable project, including the blatant use of fear, street violence, physical attacks, and elimination of those opposed to their politics, but this again too has some degree of social consent, if one is to believe the social media. Beyond this, we need a more in-depth understanding of how a social psyche is being created that replicates itself from political and institutional heads to the common man on the streets. The social has a deep psychological root and an ability to reproduce itself, what Michel Foucault refers to as ‘Fascism in us all’.31 Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, was forced by the British to write his autobiography in the interim period between his capture and execution. Hoess was in charge of a concentration camp in Poland that murdered over three million Jews. Some of his early reflections include self-observations such as, ‘My two sisters were attached to me… But I never wished to have much to do with them… I was never able to have any

warmer feelings for them. They have always been strangers to me.’ He further adds, ‘I had the greatest respect for both my parents… but love... I was never able to give them. Why this should have been, I have never understood. Even today I can find no explanation.’ He narrates his memory of being repeatedly deceived and double-crossed; as a result ‘my only desire then was to run away… and be alone, and never see anyone again’.32 Finally, his chilling account of mass killings where he admits ‘the killing of this Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time. The order had been given, and I had to carry it out’.33 What other lessons need to be learnt from histories of secrecy, conspiracy, violence, masculinity, and misogyny, hatred and genocide, suffering and humiliation continues to remain open to scrutiny, as long as we have possibilities of politics of hatred gaining mass consent, out of fear or admiration. In understanding the phenomenon of the strongman, be it Modi or Yogi, the interface between fear and admiration is difficult to track. Right-wing populism has attempted, as we discussed, a complex maze of symbolism in producing its leaders, drawing connections among ascetism, vulnerability, and selflessness. The popular support they draw is connected to the way these aspects are perceived to become connected to an individual, which are otherwise disparate and work at cross-purposes in our everyday life.

Award Wapsi: Reasoning with Intolerance

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ward Wapsi was the first major controversy and protest by artists and film-makers, after a year of the Modi government in power, against what they perceived as growing religious intolerance represented by the killing of a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh over cow killing and the deaths of rationalist thinkers who were murdered in cold blood. Over 50 film-makers, writers, and others returned their national awards as a mark of protest.34 As a response to this protest, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Amit Shah, released a booklet titled Know the Truth: Why the So-called Intellectuals Are Silent Then and Violent Now on 5 November 2015. It is a collection of columns published in various Indian dailies defending the BJP against the accusation of rising intolerance under its watch. The document was presented as a response to the criticism it faced from various artists and writers, who returned awards given to them by the state under what came to be known as the Award Wapsi punning on the Ghar Wapsi campaign by the RSS. Accompanying these columns were statements made by senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley and two write-ups by Venkaiah Naidu and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. The writings assert that the claim about India being more intolerant today than it was in the past are devoid of substance. While the booklet itself received scant attention, and now that the dust has settled on the rage against intolerance, it is important to interrogate the arguments it presents. Is there any truth, for instance, in the defense that

attacks against the BJP are ‘manufactured’ and biased? Were these public intellectuals simplifying political complexities? And why does the rationale presented by the BJP-RSS apologists hold the propensity to become ‘common sense’ for the majority of Indians in times to come? Know the Truth: Why the So-called Intellectuals Are Silent Then and Violent Now presents a number of arguments to defend the BJP. First, those similar events have happened in the past under the aegis of the Congress regime. Some examples given are the anti-Sikh massacre of 1984, the imposition of the Emergency in 1975, and the expulsion of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits from their homes. Second, they present what happened in Dadri— where, on 28 September, a mob killed a Muslim man for allegedly eating beef—as a ‘stray incident’.35 How does one respond to these?

Lynching and Mob Violence While there is no defense for either the Emergency or the riots against the Sikhs, both spearheaded by Congress leaders, there is a difference. The BJP, with its close organizational link with the RSS, has an organized vision of building a Hindu Rashtra in India, which besides censoring religious minorities and their cultural worlds, also privileges a monolithic Hindu way of life over plural imaginations within Hinduism. Notwithstanding the riots that broke out in many of the states governed by the Congress in the past and some intemperate statements by some of its leaders, the Congress does not share this narrow worldview. Are lynching and mob violence, such as those in Dadri, stray incidents? In Dadri, six of those involved had links with the BJP. What may connect the Dadri incident with the killing of rationalists such as Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar, and Govind Pansare, is the persistent attempt to attack public reason and replace it with a Hindutva interpretation of history and culture in India. Dabholkar, though murdered in 2013, when BJP was not in power in New Delhi, was killed by those committed to silencing ‘threats’ to Hinduism.36

It is always the variously named ‘senas’, which have sprouted across Karnataka, Maharashtra, and other states that carry out these reprehensible acts. How fringe are these groups when violent assaults against those questioning Hindutva politics appear to be given tacit support by the ruling BJP should be questioned. Statements made by BJP’s Giriraj Singh—who in the run-up to the 2015 Bihar polls, declared that those who do not support Prime Minister Modi should go and settle in Pakistan—have not been officially condemned.37 Political scientist Paul Brass in his book Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India observes in his studies that unlike riots, usually race related in the US and UK, mob violence and riots in India are not spontaneous. Given the persistent organizational support to fuel distrust among communities, one cannot brush aside these incidents, as Jaitley wishes to do, as ‘stray’ or blamed on fringe groups.38 Another major contention in the booklet is the supposed ‘intellectual opportunism’ among progressive public intellectuals. The document argues that they are selective in their condemnations and are more interested in appeasing minorities. It accuses these intellectuals of not voicing their dissent when a fatwa is issued against A.R. Rahman, or when Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie are threatened by Islamic groups. The booklet asks, aren’t these actions brushed aside because these threats are issued by Muslims and other religious groups, who are a minority? Nehruvian secularism indeed expected a certain ‘generosity’ from the majority community towards the minorities, owing to their vulnerability in the aftermath of Partition. But the demand today is for ‘equal respect’ for all religions, which includes equal accountability when it comes to excesses of all religious groups. However, secular intellectuals have been hesitant about protesting against the bigotry of minority communities in the belief that it cannot assume the proportions of majority intolerance, and is never backed by the state. This line of reasoning – where more leeway is given to the intolerance by Muslims, because of its minority status – has helped Right-wing mobilization in India and smacks of a politics that depends on majority patronage.

BJP’s document repeatedly mentions Kashmiri Pandits and asks why progressive intellectuals have remained silent about their displacement. Except for the BJP’s more sectarian understanding of the issue, which has culminated in the idea of resettling Hindu Pandits in separate settlements in Kashmir – there has been very little public deliberation on this subject. This has been further complicated by the fact that a majority of the Pandits are moving closer to the BJP since they see it as the only political outfit articulating their concerns. While the displacement of the Pandits is a tragedy, they are seen to represent Indian security forces and the Hindu nation state in the valley. In popular perception, progressive intelligentsia and their views come across as being sectarian, because of their support for the Muslims and their reluctance to articulate a clearer and fair position on the Pandits—a perception the BJP cites as a glaring example of ‘selective’ outrage.

Saffronization of the Public Institutions Finally, the document addresses the question of whether the ‘saffronization’ of institutions and the rewriting of history ought to be seen as a mark of growing intolerance. It emphasizes a government’s legitimate right to make appointments of their choice. The BJP alleges that, up until now, only one point of view has found space in Indian academia, that alternative (nonsecular) viewpoints were suppressed and provided little opportunity. Undoubtedly, India does need further public deliberation regarding appointments to public institutions. It is well within an elected government’s ambit to appoint academics of their choice. Previous non-BJP regimes, especially the Left in West Bengal, made appointments based on their proximity to the party. And even the accusation that many progressive public intellectuals did not make any noise about such appointments or complain about the institution being ‘taken over’ is not without merit. But the complaint against the BJP now is not on ideological grounds; it is on the issue of protocol and qualification. Curriculum and history are now being altered and rewritten without emphasis on evidence or research.

For instance, the BJP-appointed chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, Sudarshan Rao (who resigned in November 2015), claimed that the Ramayana and Mahabharata were historical events and not mythology.39 Much of the BJP’s mobilization on these issues touch upon what is perceived to be ‘popular’ opinion and ‘common sense’ beliefs. These should not be brushed aside as mere constructs by a Right-wing party. It is important that secular-progressive politics take note of where and how these grievances are finding a groundswell of approval as common sense and becoming a tool for political mobilization. This, in turn, would also be a necessary approach to avoid the ghettoization of minority politics in a democracy. There is a need to foreground debates that demonstrate not merely tolerance but ‘mutual respect’ among communities. It is this lack of clarity and preparedness that offers the breeding ground for Right-wing and ultra-nationalist politics. It is only through the further articulation of secular-progressive positions on contentious issues that the intolerance of Right-wing politics becomes more explicit and clear.

Why the RSS Projects JNU as AntiNational?

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he Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat announced that JNU is a hub of anti-national activities. The RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya had alleged that JNU is home to ‘a huge anti-national block which has the aim of disintegrating India’. Another article in it alleged ‘JNU is one such institute where nationalism is considered an offense. Presenting Indian culture in a distorted way is common. The removal of Army from Kashmir is supported here. They advocate various other anti-national activities here.’40 These statements were followed up by a crackdown on JNU on 9 February 2016, with an alleged claim that students of JNU shouted anti-India slogans that supported the separation of Kashmir from India, and some of them were arrested for sedition. From openly debating why the Kashmiris demand for a plebiscite may be legitimate, today, even uttering a doubt about the possible human rights violations committed by security forces could count as anti-national activity. Demanding rule of law and accountability from the police and armed and paramilitary forces has become sedition. Raising slogans— however objectionable some of them might have been—is now being seen as an act of terror. Universities have been, perhaps, the last public spaces to assert a right to express and debate, which are utterly indispensable for holding a nation together. The RSS, in its mouthpiece as stated above, argued that JNU is a bastion of anti-national activities and a hub of terror.

What we witnessed in JNU is an outcome of that kind of an understanding of a place that is willing to penetrate the political nature of various problems, including the nationality struggles in the Northeast, socioeconomic roots of the Maoist insurgency, everyday humiliation suffered by Dalits, marginalization of Muslims, sexual harassment of women, and stigmatization of sexual minorities. Not long ago, demanding reservations for the OBCs and implementing the Mandal Commission report were described as anti-national, and today, the BJP-RSS that had vehemently opposed such demands proudly projects an OBC person as its leader.41

‘Nationalism without a Nation’ On the day of the public meeting in JNU on 1 February 2016, to protest the police clampdown and demand the release of Kanhaiya Kumar, a handful of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) activists were waving black flags and raising slogans against the massive gathering. They were allowed the space to protest. In no small measure, this reflects the spirit that JNU has stood for all these years. A spirit that stands in complete opposition to the way the current political dispensation has handled students, not at JNU alone but at the University of Hyderabad, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), and FTII. A spirit that refuses to be subsumed under the simple-minded, mediocre nationalism of the current dispensation that wishes away every difference of opinion and perceives it as ‘Bharat Ma ka apman’. Nations flourish when they instil a sense of belongingness and meaning in their diversity. Universities play an important role in this by contributing towards extending the inclusive character and democratizing social hierarchies. Otherwise, we often end up with ‘nationalism without a nation’. The death of ideas is also the death of a nation. In fact, the persistent crisis of the present government is one of a lack of imagination and failure to create a new energy that often comes with fresh and innovative ideas in a democracy. Growth is stuck, and the government is not willing to innovate new welfare policies that can reinvigorate its social mobilization.

Communal polarization had failed both in Delhi and Bihar. The only option was hyperbolic nationalism. The unwillingness to look for new political strategies is also reflected in the way the dispensation was handling problems in universities. Rohith Vemula’s case was striking in the way the HRD ministry got itself engulfed in a crisis that became cynical to the point of denying Rohith’s Dalit identity and the role of casteism on campuses. Part of the problem is the disregard for the autonomy of universities and disallowing administrators from tuning in to the mood and aspirations on campuses. The way ahead is to listen and understand the way Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar have become symbols of a simmering multitude that cannot simply be pushed away or cowed down through the use of force. Even nationalism demands a dialogue. Love for the nation has to be nurtured, not shoved down throats. Diversity has to be acknowledged, not merely by recognizing various social identities, but the ideas that come with them. Finally, to eventually resolve the Kashmir issue (we will analyse this issue in some detail in the next section), we need to empathize with why Kashmiris feel so distanced from India, and wedge open a social narrative on the growing majoritarianism and radicalization of the Kashmiri youth, problems of Kashmiri Pandits and their resettlement, and unresolved issues of gender and religion, among other not-so-agreeable features of Kashmiri society. But in order to produce such a dialogue, we need to look into ourselves. Are we prepared for the social spaces that such a political dialogue requires or are we filled with the fear of diversity?

BJP/RSS and Tacit Consent The developments after the crackdown on JNU have surprised and offended the democratic sensibilities of many who have been reflecting and demanding a right to free speech and arguing that dissent is not sedition and that difference of opinion is not necessarily anti-national. However, BJP, on its part, has not dithered from moving from one offensive step to the next. It

began with an outrageous arrest of the JNU student union president without any evidence, followed by an assault on him and the assault on journalists and others at court apparently by lawyers, where the police, in an act of brazen impunity, simply looked the other way.42 Furthermore, the then Delhi police commissioner B.S. Bassi asked for evidence against the lawyers even when their video was all over the news. Along with this, Bassi came up with a statement saying that students needed to prove their innocence.43 This, in a sense, stands for a certain kind of brazenness with which support is mobilized for the government in general. As a sideshow, BJP Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) joined the chorus to make the event even more muscular. To begin with, O.P. Sharma beat up a Communist Party of India (CPI) activist, later alleging that it was in response to some anti-India slogans that the activist had raised.44 A Rajasthan MLA asked for Rahul Gandhi to be shot dead for participating in a public meeting in support of Kanhaiya Kumar, while another MLA asked D. Raja of the CPI to shoot his daughter for extending support to Umar Khalid.45 The official BJP spokesperson offered only a token disclaimer but never promised to act against either the lawyers or the MLAs. Much of this was countered as a violation of constitutional morality. Why does the BJP not dither even in the light of mounting criticism and disapproval of the media, academics, legal experts, and other political parties? It is perhaps because it is clear as to who it is catering to in staging a spectacle of this nature Even a casual conversation with an auto driver, a street vendor, a shopkeeper, and neighbours in a South Delhi colony would allow one to understand that there is a section among us that does not only approve of but wishes to push and even perhaps participate in public acts of what they feel is patriotism. As one among the lawyers from the Patiala House Court hooliganism row revealed on a video, even the police said they would have joined the assault had they not been in their uniforms.46 The approval is not merely among the subaltern classes, it is perhaps stronger among the upwardly mobile middle class, which has come to value security more than freedom. The ultra-nationalism of the BJP-RSS kind seems to be a tipping point for the sociological distinctions between the elite and the

subaltern. It is understandable why various sections of the society have begun to lay premium on security rather than freedom when everyday life is constituted by violations of law—not as an exception but as a norm. The outrage we witnessed at court along with the violent declarations of BJP MLAs, speaks of a malaise more rampant than we would want to believe. Does it look like an aberration only when it gets into media and we watch it from the comfort of our drawing rooms? If one only looks closer, it is evident that public assault—be it of women found drunk in Guwahati, Africans in Delhi and Bangalore, or by khap panchayats in Haryana—is more routinized and less organized. Even the more organized protests of the kind we witnessed against the 16 December rape case, Nirbhaya, in Delhi used the language of public lynching and castration and demanded death penalty for the accused. Along with these public spectacles that draw silent justification and consent for vigilante justice, there is the omnipresent language of the security state that seems to justify collateral damage, extrajudicial killings, and exceptionalism. One needs to only watch one of these successful Bollywood cop movies where a super cop relishes an encounter or an act of delivering street ‘justice’.

‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and Vigilante Justice The roots of the brazenness that BJP pursues also exist in the way our public morality works. It is, therefore, not surprising that anti-national activities also should, as a rule, go with ‘naked dancing, alcoholism and use of condoms’ in JNU, as one of the BJP MLAs remarked.47 In public morality, perhaps this makes sense. Sexual freedom, freedom to choose one’s life partner, and freedom of speech and anti-national activities are not as far away as we perhaps imagine them to be. Nationalism, patriotism, and symbols that accompany this language are not manufactured only by the BJP. One has to only pause and look back at the famous movement led by Anna Hazare to realize that the symbolism was so common to what we are witnessing today—from slogans of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ to waving the national flag and celebrating celibacy and

teetotalism as patriotic virtues. What we witnessed with regard to JNU is not an exclusive creation of the BJP and the RSS. Instead, BJP is only consolidating what is perhaps a more general sense of public morality in India. It is to this constituency that the BJP responds and therefore believes that it can afford to ignore and slight those in support of the agitating students in JNU. It is an interrogation of the morality, language, and symbolism that goes in the name of popular culture and populism that we would begin to make gains against spaces that are closing in on us. The present political dispensation under Mr Modi has undoubtedly provided us with an opportunity, and we need to only look beyond the smokescreen.

Autonomy of Universities and a Life of the Mind

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ne of the features of the Modi regime was the apparent crackdown on various institutions of higher education, including TISS, FTII, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), University of Hyderabad, and of course, JNU.48 Autonomy of universities granted by the Parliament and the culture of speaking truth to power under Modi seemed to be systematically undermined through various methods—including posting those close to the RSS as the heads of administrative positions, removal of grievance mechanisms internal to these institutions, and removal of individual faculty opposed to the viewpoint of the ruling dispensation. BJP dispensation led by the RSS does not imagine universities as sites of autonomy where a life of the mind is fostered; instead they see them as citadels of discipline, efficiency, loyalty, and standardization.49 Quality and work ethic have been a long-term problem in India’s higher education. The strange situation in India, in comparison with foreign universities in the US and Europe, has been that of having a few institutions of global quality and the rest remaining in the backwaters of the educational system. The best of our institutions and scholarship is comparable to global standards and our worst is as worst as that of any other lesser developed nations. The problem is posed by the middle-level institutions; while they maintain a bare threshold level in the US and Europe, our institutions fare rather poorly. The primary reason for having a poor average has been both poor infrastructure and even poorer work ethic. When analysts of social

policy want a robust state intervention, they hardly reflect on how to bring about a better and more accountable work ethic.50 Further, over the last few decades, there has been an erosion of the quality of state universities and institutions in comparison with the Central universities. In the 1970s, the best of scholars who returned with degrees from foreign universities returned to their home states and contributed to their growth. Universities such as Allahabad and BHU in the North, and Osmania and Madras universities in the South were recognized as top-rated universities. However, over the last few decades, these institutions have witnessed a terminal decline. They declined primarily because of poor funding from state governments, owing to which the best of the faculty migrated to central universities, essentially located in Delhi.51 Universities such as the IITs, JNU, and DU, while undoubtedly contributing a great deal in pursuing globally recognizable research, nevertheless have singularly undermined the state universities by poaching on the best available scholarship in these institutions. Better academic atmosphere, more autonomy, and differential payments made central universities more attractive, while the institutions of state government became dens of ‘ignorance and isolationism’. They collapsed into sites of inbreeding, networking, and kinship-based recruitment. Added to that or owing to that was poor work ethic and infrastructural facilities. In much of North India, higher education simply caved in with dysfunctional universities and an education of abysmal standards.52

Global Ranking and Differential Education After India became a signatory to the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on educational institutions, overnight, there was a realization of the need to stand up to global standards. And global ranking has made this even starker. The urge to figure in the top 200 universities of the world has prompted changes in the way higher education was being regulated by the University Grants Commission, and later by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). As part of the ongoing changes, the UGC

has come up with its latest order—UGC (Categorization of Universities for Grant of Graded Autonomy) Regulations, 2017. Under this order, it is stated: The Commission may have different provisions for different categories of Institutions as defined in Clause 3.1 with the objective of giving higher levels of autonomy to Institutions under Category I compared to institutions under Categories II or III, and to institutions under Category II compared to institutions under Category III. 4.2 While framing any Regulation, the Commission may also sub-categorize any of the Categories in that Regulation to give a differentiated autonomy under that specific Regulation to institutions within that category.

This is a far-reaching regulatory order that is probably recognizing that there is a massive gap between the quality of education provided by the various universities; essentially, the gap is between state and central universities. However, in recognizing the gap, the UGC is promulgating graded autonomy, which in effect will also mean providing graded funding to the differentially located universities that would only end up exacerbating those differences.53 The primary reason is that there is neither a concerted effort to understand the reasons behind differential performance and outcome, nor is there desire to protect, nurture, and improve the poorly performing universities. Instead, in line with the rest of the policy framework, only public institutions of standing will be retained for state funding and the rest would be eased out gradually, yielding space for private universities. Private universities, going by their track records, perhaps have had a far worst-off track record compared to even the poorly performing state universities. Quality has never been the mainstay of private universities; instead, what they brought in was job-oriented courses that offered some kind of opportunities. In essence, what the current government intends to do is to phase out public-funded universities the way state-owned industries, airways, railways, telecom, and postal services have gradually been shrinking. Research cannot be improved merely by regulating universities; instead, they need efforts to create an enabling atmosphere for which it is imperative

to grant more autonomy, better funding, and new instruments to regulate work ethic. Work ethic has been a long-standing problem. In order to improve the work ethic and output, it is imperative to address the impending problems that include linguistic skills, bringing local knowledge systems into formal structures, and improving diversity through more representative schemes. If the developments in JNU are a case in point, where there has been a massive seat-cut in the name of teacher-student ratio and maintaining quality, it is only apparent that quality is only a trope to pursue marketization and commercialization of the education system in India. These policies will be disempowering a majority, pushing them into technical and vocational education and reserving higher education to a privileged few; whether the open democratic system India will succeed in resisting this is a question that one has to wait and answer.

JNU: Mandatory Attendance Following the administrative orders that attempt to create a differential system between various state and central universities, individual university heads across the nation took various measures to undermine the basic ethics of higher education that provide an atmosphere of freedom to think, write, and reflect. One such measure that led to a series of protests was the imposition of mandatory attendance in JNU in 2018. Administration in JNU pushed for a mandatory 75% attendance as the minimum eligibility criterion for students to take exams and be eligible for the degrees they are pursuing.54 JNU, perhaps, comes closest to Ivan Illich’s dream of ‘de-schooling’55 and creating decentralized webs of learning, since universal education is not possible through an institutionalized education system. The university is a rare combination of institutionalized learning and de-institutionalized living of a life of the mind. You learn by living a philosophy. This ‘authenticity’ is what is troubling the current Right-wing dispensation because for them, a ‘life of the mind’, goes against an established order of things. An additional problem that afflicts the current administration in JNU is the double-edged

problem of seemingly improving academic standards but essentially undermining the basic ethos of a university. On the one hand, current vice-chancellor Prof. M. Jagadish Kumar received the award for best university for JNU from the President of India, and on the other, there are claims that the varsity is a space for ‘antinational’ activities and that faculty appointments have been made in violation of procedures and are way below the available talent pool in the country. One ‘advantage’ that Right-wing politics seems to enjoy is that they are ‘liberated’ from both commitments and convictions. Sushma Swaraj, minister for external affairs, praised the IITs, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), and other premier institutions at the United Nations (UN) to belittle Pakistan, but in reality, the Right wingers appear to be undermining the same institutions.56 In fact, the current dispensation at JNU is using mediocrity as a weapon against the system. All those who were at the margins of the current liberal/English educational system are being talked into dislodging the best practices and introducing a ‘tradition’ of discipline and control. Making attendance compulsory for students is yet another step in furthering this not-so-hidden agenda. Refresher courses that are meant for lecturers are being organized in JNU and other universities with a circular asking not to invite or organize lectures that are ‘anti-national’. This attempt to completely control the system is born out of both a sense of academic inferiority and construing freedom to think and live a life of the mind as at best anarchic. It is not simply sufficient to offer a critique or dismiss the current move to make attendance compulsory; even as we do that, the progressives on and outside the campus need to think about how to reach out and include those at the margins of the educational system, who have remained mediocre, inferior, and therefore anxious to control the system and make it an assemblage of disciplinarian methods.

New Challenges of Pedagogy

Further, it is an open secret that there is a lurking anxiety among the faculty of JNU that class attendance has been steadily declining. At the Centre where I teach a compulsory course, while the student strength is around 80, not more than 50 students have been attending classes. It’s been a longstanding issue that students, as they progress in the course, do not attend classes but what is new is that even fresh students in their first semester itself have been lackadaisical in attending classes. However, this is not merely an issue of discipline but new challenges that pedagogy is facing in the light of the many changes the educational system is undergoing globally. To begin with, liberal arts courses are not the first preference of many who join these courses but they are mostly the last resort to stay afloat. New exposure to technology and internet has given easy access to information that the teacher was the sole source of earlier. Attention spans of the students have taken a beating. Further, JNU has other sites of learning including student politics and informal interactions. Even the post-dinner talks that were at one point in time the high point of student life on campus have witnessed a steady disinterest. Easy access to faculty, growing democratization of studentfaculty relations, and rising aspirations among students have set in a culture of pretentiousness and a false sense of confidence that is not backed by hard work and professional ethics. Earlier, students inquired about the chapters they needed to read in a book; now they inquire about the paragraphs they need to focus on in a chapter. It is also a fact that in institutions such as JNU, because of the overwhelming reputation it enjoys and the little competition it has from other central or state universities, students have got an easy claim to superior academic status over their compatriots in other places (this problem continues to plague JNU students when they join mofussil universities as academics; they struggle to strike a rapport with others and often end up forming ‘JNU Clubs’ that exclude others. In most cases, students refuse to move outside Delhi and some even outside JNU.).

There has been a clear decline in the quality of dissertations, where most Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) work is written in the last leg before submission. Since evaluation methods are lenient, for various reasons, quality of research has not been something that JNU can really boast about. Not many of the theses that are submitted are eventually published. In fact, most students find it difficult to even publish the mandatory paper that is now required for PhD submission. A culture of self-arrogation not backed by matching competence has inaugurated a non-dialogic posturing and aversion to criticism. In fact, more often than not, students in JNU begin their research proposals with their conclusions. In this intriguingly deductive logic of research, open-ended spaces and sites of interaction have been supplanted by political activism and experiential fundamentalism. Research proposals take their inspiration more from the daily dose of prime-time news than from interactions in class. JNU continues to suffer the confusion of drawing a clear line between activism and scholarly interventions. While they are undoubtedly related, it is also a fact that they cannot be collapsed into each other. The interpersonal relations among the faculty are marred by extracurricular concerns and a scarcity syndrome. Students that are taken under the fold for guidance are seen more as social and cultural capital rather than co-equals in the sojourn to discover newer aspects of research agenda. As a consequence, evaluation standards of MPhil and PhD work have suffered, and students are keenly aware of this fact and prefer to appear as the surrogate progeny of their respective supervisors and demand that their supervisors treat them like their adopted children. While students do opt for courses from other disciplines, interdisciplinary research has been a non-starter in JNU. The interactions between the various schools and centres belong to an ‘imagined community’ of the hierarchy of the Vedic period. Amid all the talk of egalitarianism, a class system prevails between the various centres, with particular centres and schools representing the ‘high culture’ and the rest relegated to ‘low culture’ and subalternized. For instance, economics

assumes to be the king, and history the queen, and disciplines such as political studies and sociology occupy the position of intermediaries or provincial fiefdoms. Schools outside of the School of Social Sciences are imagined as backwaters meant for recreational purposes. Academic life on the campus is not in the pink of health but the diagnosis and medication that the current administration has administered make wayside quacks look more authentic and reliable. Part of the problem is the current political dispensation, and in this, I must add not just the Right-wing parties but all and sundry have developed a contempt for higher education in India. There have been budget cuts and attempts to further privatize higher education in India. In order to circumvent this grave problem, the current dispensation did what it is best at—changing the goal post. Earlier in the year, it was a seat cut in the name of teacher-student ratio; now it is mandatory attendance to usher in more accountability. It is important to resist these rather devious methods, but equal care should be taken not to sidestep the declining academic standards. While the university administration is ostensibly resisting a ‘classless’ society, it should not be an occasion to undermine the need for revolutionary changes in pedagogy that a premier institution like JNU urgently requires. This internal debate on pedagogy has to be in tandem with the need to resist and protect the basic ethos of universities such as JNU that not only provide globally acknowledge education but also perform the social role of admitting students from weaker backgrounds and enabling them to emerge as individuals with self-confidence and a worldview.

It’s A Class Struggle The protests at JNU, against mandatory attendance imposed by the administration, were not about the right not to attend classes. However, attendance, as I suggested above, is gradually becoming a concern due to various other pedagogic reasons. It is a much more serious issue that was struggling to find a language to articulate itself. It is, in essence, about the

life of the mind in an increasingly technocratic world. Critical thinking, to think against the grain, and to live a life that is infused and inspired by ideas, rather than the lure of money, comfort, and power is a very uphill task in a world marked by the pressures of a secure life. Students of JNU continue to carry the burden of this cross that society at large has by and large given up in succumbing to the imperatives of pragmatism. One needs to understand the life on campus and what it does to scores of students coming from extremely deprived backgrounds. JNU does not merely transform their social status; it also equips them to undergo a metamorphosis of sorts in enabling them to develop a reflexive self. This reflexive self is a guarantee of sorts for a dignified life outside the campus in a society plagued by prejudice. JNU does not merely teach philosophy but an ability to live a philosophy. This is a process that is delicate and ephemeral. It is an everyday life that leaves nothing unquestioned and thereby creates a sense of meaning in questioning the immediate identity that one is born into and one is often reduced to living. That’s the point Rohith Vemula made in his dying letter—the burden and suffocation of being reduced to one’s immediate identity and ‘to a thing’.57 It is the anxiety to protect this internal critical culture on campus that has taken the route of protesting against the mandatory class attendance. The current administration is beyond even an elementary debate on this issue. It does not understand what the students wish to strive for when they protest against mandatory attendance, they would compulsively merely look at it as an act of indiscipline. I am afraid much of the larger society would also fail to make sense of this protest as being anything other than a protest to preserve a privileged unaccountable lifestyle. Even most parents of the students might view it as a self-goal, given the pressures of career and settling down. Classrooms are unique spaces in JNU. They are not merely for a monologue by the teacher or for information to be consumed by the students.

Dignity and Self-Confidence In fact, classrooms are part of the larger learning process that goes on in many other sites on campus, including at the dhabhas (one of which used to be open till late night hours has been ordered to be closed well before midnight by the current administration), post-dinner talks (that have been made virtually impossible, again by the current administration, by invoking many procedures and checks to get permission to organize a talk), study forums, and informal discussions with the faculty. What students gather from these sites form a loop to critically interrogate what is being taught in the classroom. It is this unique loop that compensates for the insurmountable gap in social location and linguistic skills within the student community to make the classroom a more even playing field. It is a constant tussle between experiential knowledge and textual and professional skills that remains aesthetically unsettled in JNU. Students coming from marginalized backgrounds, who are hesitant to speak up in the classrooms in the first semester of their joining JNU, gain the selfconfidence to raise issues even as they struggle with English and the categories of social sciences. A change that would otherwise take perhaps decades is a kind of a marvel to witness in JNU in a few months’ time. Self-confidence is gained from the space that swims against the tide and refuses to be judgemental about issues of lived diversity. It is not about the right not to attend class, but it is about how clamping down through rules will dislocate this rather ephemeral idea of selfconfidence. It is the complexity of demanding the right to self-confidence that takes the language of a protest against mandatory attendance. Even if class attendance were to be a problem, it calls for a debate on pedagogy and it cannot be viewed as an issue of indiscipline. In fact, my own experience has been that classes overshoot the allotted time. Even as protests progressed, students were asking for classes to be taught outside classrooms, sitting in corridors on cold winter days. The protest is to

preserve this unsaid and sometimes difficult-to-verbalize process that students are anxious to protect. It is an ongoing conflict between an idea of education of the Right that is marked by discipline, standardization, information without questioning, and technical education versus an idea of education that allows you to bridge the gap between thinking and being. Students were, in the true spirit, taking a cue from Marx, once again reminding those currently heading the university that ‘educators need to be educated’.58 ‘Class’ remains the missing link in all of this.

Demonetization and the ‘War on Terror’

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n 8 November 2016, the Modi government in a dramatic move announced a policy of demonetization of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, in order to arrest corruption through illegal hoarding of currency.59 Apart from arresting corruption, we were also told that demonetization had also ‘broken the back’ of the terrorists and the Maoists. In emphasizing that demonetization is a new method of fighting against terrorism and continuing the on-going global ‘war on terror’, it had introduced a new and a subtle shift in terms of the discourse of governance. Demonetization attempted at drawing a new equivalence between the fight against corruption and the global ‘war on terror’. The discourse of war on terror changed the legal discourse, the way the law was sought to be implemented and used to arrest criminals, and acts of terror. As part of the war on terror, various exceptional laws were passed globally and in India, beginning with the Patriotic Act in the United States (US) to Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA), The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), and Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) in India. What is common to all of these is the institutionalization of ‘criminalizing intention’. Conviction and state action were sought to be implemented not ‘merely’ on the basis of evidence and investigation but on the basis of the purported intention of those seen to be involved with terror activities. The larger justification was that the state cannot wait till the crimes take place to take action but that it needs ‘preventive strikes’ to close spaces available to such

activities. This has had a popular reach, which was partly evident from the justification that was sought over the encounter of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists in Bhopal and the way the officers involved were felicitated by the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. One could not have waited till those who allegedly escaped the prison to commit the acts of terror for the state to act.60

Criminalizing Intention One possibly cannot wait even for them to be convicted as their ‘intention’ to produce terror in society in popular perception was sufficient ground for the state to act in order to not compromise the larger security of its citizens. The arguments flow somewhat similar to the recent demonetization. What is being assumed is that unless we prove ourselves innocent by depositing clean cash in the banks, we are all guilty of holding an intention that is corrupt. Since the state cannot find evidence and cannot investigate who amongst us are the corrupt, black marketers, and money hoarders, the state is justified in assuming that the money we hold could have been earned through corrupt means. In other words, by investigating and finding evidence against those who actually make black money, the state ‘distributes guilt’ among its ‘people’. Each one of us is at least potentially prone to corruption, and therefore, the best way to make sure the economy is cleansed of black money is to push everyone into the process of proving themselves innocent. War on terror similarly declares everyone potentially guilty if some in a specific community or territory are guilty of acts of terror. Thus, it is assumed that every Muslim is potentially prone to be attracted to terrorism, as every tribal is prone to be attracted to Maoism. ‘Distribution of guilt’ in the entire community as a ‘suspect Muslim’ or a subversive tribal, in turn, is necessary for the state to justify ‘collateral damage’ that the security forces now have come to believe will be inevitable in arresting terrorism and Maoism. Citizens the common man, the poor, and the farmers standing in long queues without cash, and the

daily wage earner surviving without food constitute the necessary collateral damage that is necessary for containing corruption. As displacement and dispossession are the unavoidable consequences of development, certain collateral damage to the tribals in fighting the Maoists and innocent Muslims in fighting Islamic terrorism is also inevitable, so is the suffering of the common people in re-hauling the system against corruption. Amit Shah, in an interview on the television, said that when the system is changed, there will be ‘jerks’. The collateral damage, however, needs to be understood as one made in the greater national interests. Those questioning demonetization are told that they are tacitly supporting the parallel economy. Very similar to how those wanting to interrogate security forces and their alleged excesses in security-related operations, be it in Kashmir or Chattisgarh, are often told they are silently supporting the acts of terror by scaling down the morale of the security forces. Further, the war on terror coincided with the rise of the neo-liberal economic order. The growing model of jobless growth, global migration, growing socio-economic inequalities, and the stigma of poverty was sought to be countered by what one could refer to as ‘retributive mobility’.

Populism and Retributive Mobility Retributive action on some sections of the society drawing battle lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been the story of populist mobilizations across the globe. Whether it is between the White Americans and illegal immigrants and Muslims in the mobilization as a run-up to the election of Donald Trump in the US or the permanent ‘othering’ of the Muslims in the rise of BJP and Modi in India, it is the retributive action against these groups that is sought as a solution to the problems plaguing the citizenry. It is a relief that provides momentary, if not a lasting mobility, to the majority. On similar lines, demonetization too is sought to provide a retributive relief to those suffering from economic and social marginalization. It is an action against the unknown villain who has cornered public money.

We do not know the names or addresses of these individuals but we are told that those who have accumulated this wealth for the last 70 years are powerful and that demonetization is supposed to siphon off all that they stored in their treasury, under their beds, and in their farmhouses. It could be the industrialists, the politicians, and anyone we collectively hate. It is their unseen suffering that is sought to provide us with the relief and a sense of security and mobility. This is markedly different from the discourse of ‘ache din’ that promised jobs, control inflation, and social welfare. War on terror was more of a security and a legal battle (such as countering the imperatives of rule of law) that the state was fighting on behalf of its citizens; demonetization is the social and economic corollary of that battle. It is at the crux; therefore, demonetization is the populist version of translating the war on terror into the everyday ‘direct democracy’ that India was collectively dreaming about.

Corporate Capitalism, Hurt Pride, and Hindutva

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t the heart of the Sangh Parivar’s strategy is an irreducible contradiction between a modernity that augments high-end capitalism best symbolized by the rhetoric of growth and the bullet train and a politics that systematically destroy the social form necessary for capitalist growth. This is a tension that will effectively decide the future of Right-wing political mobilization in India. One way to read this growing contradiction is to argue that the Right under BJP is attempting to tie both ends of the spectrum. In other words, they are laying roads to fast-paced corporate globalization and neo-liberal reforms and also mobilizing the growing discontent against it. This in effect seems to be the global current with the election of Donald Trump in the US. He is the first ‘White President’ symbolizing the ‘white backlash’ of the countryside that has struggled to cope with the consequences of two decades of neo-liberal reforms.61 That is precisely the reason that more the discontent with neo-liberal capitalism, the more pro-corporate governments are put in place by the electorates. In India too, the discontent began with the poor implementation of welfare policies such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) by the Congress. However, the electorate chose a government that in effect cut funds for such welfare schemes. What we have today is a right-based politics that both introduces corporate globalization and also provides its antidote. We have the rhetoric of development but also a rise in

the so-called fringe groups that mobilize against the very modernity necessary for capitalist development, including principles of rule of law, civil liberties, right to privacy and dignity, diversity, and contractualized social relations. In effect, these are the principles that challenge and undermine the communitarian sensibilities. Capital, by its very logic, displaces community through the processes of individuation and consumerism. The insecurity of communitarian sensibilities is mobilized through growing protests against films such as Padmaavat catering to Rajput pride, Love Jihad, and countering demands for criminalizing marital rape, among others.62 Majoritarianism is being constructed by disallowing the same communitarian sensibilities of the religious minorities, such as the Muslims, by legislating on Triple Talaq, raising the issue of Pasmanda Muslims, and further sharpening the conflict in Kashmir. Exclusion of the Muslims and disallowing a monolithic imagination for the religious minorities is to by default allow the majority to consolidate.

Modern Capitalism and Communitarian Hindutva Further, the Right, therefore, lays emphasis on constructing a monolithic Hindu Community by taking up or inventing issues such as beef or sanctity of the cow as a common practice among the Hindus across the nation, which also sharpens the divide with the religious minorities.63 The tension between the two-pronged strategy of Modern Capitalism and Communitarian Hindutva is reflected in the anxieties of the liberal elite’s concern about the image of India globally and its impact on global investments, which compels the Prime Minister to issue a warning against the ‘cow vigilantes’ being a mafia that cannot be allowed, but without any follow-up action against them.64 The Prime Minister also issues statements in favour of freedom of press and rule of law, even as some party men issue threats to artists, journalists, academics, students, and anyone who opposes or critiques the current political dispensation. The critique is signified through the discourse of nationalism, in effect equating the party, and the

leader of the nation. Further, the electorate is mobilized against any effective critique through the discourse against corruption. Corruption and nationalism are the two ‘empty signifiers’ that tie up the loose ends in the two-pronged strategy.

Three Strategies of the Sangh Parivar The Sangh Parivar’s strategy of forming a monolithic/majoritarian ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is operating through three distinct but inter-related strategies. Through these, they are attempting to go for a monolithic-majoritarian Hindu nation. The first of their strategies that is potent is to flare-up a ‘hurt pride’.65 The Parivar is raking up the hurt pride, what Ambedkar referred to as counter-revolution of the forward castes. As part of this, we have witnessed the mobilization of the Patidars in Gujarat, Jats in Haryana, Marathas in Maharashtra, and a generic victimhood psyche of the Brahmins. There is a massive insecurity among these castes comparable to that of Dalits and Muslims today. These castes suffer from an insecurity of losing the hold on political and bureaucratic power, and as a result, a sense of suffocation of their social power that they wielded so long. Due to the sustained agrarian crisis that is the result of corporate capitalism, these caste groups, in a relative sense, are losing out. Even if they continue to be far ahead of Dalits, OBCs, and Muslims, they feel that they have lost out for not staking a claim in the modern economy, government jobs, and higher education. They are also projecting the valid problem of the poor among these castes, which remained unaddressed in the political discourse of the secular-progressive forces. On the basis of this somewhat legitimate claim, they wish to either push themselves into the bracket of the OBCs or question the very validity of reservations on the basis of caste. Secular-progressive forces have no ready political strategy to deal with this political phenomenon where you have Brahmins who are economically weak and socially conservative. These social groups, reflected recently in the language of political mobilization of

Marathas that is increasingly turning anti-Dalit in its rhetoric, are holding on to their old-time prejudices. Similar is the case of Kashmiri Pandits, who are in a sense, victims of displacement but socially continue to hold on to an ultra-nationalist discourse close to the RSS strategy. Here too, the Sangh can invoke the history of Muslim rule; excesses on the Hindus, such as the role of Razakars that are indefensible; and the fact that Muslims come across as a more united lot in comparison to the Hindus who have divided more actively along caste lines. Even Ambedkar argued that while Muslims are a nation, Hindus are not.66 This kind of a political logic readily available in the public domain generates its own set of anxieties among the majority Hindu community.

De-Brahmanized Hinduization? The second is the strategy of the Congress-style accommodation. The RSS has moved towards what could be referred to as a process of deBrahamanized Hinduization, wherein it does not adopt the old type of overt justification of discrimination along the lines of Manusmriti but a more covert and accommodative form of inclusion. Here, RSS is willing to support the reservation of the Dalits, and one need not be surprised even if they make a Dalit or an OBC as their chief pracharak. They, in a sense, have already made that move in anointing Modi as the prime ministerial candidate as against the essentially Brahaminical old guard represented by Advani and Vajpayee. Further, the Modi government made a new policy of offering `2.5 lakh for marrying a Dalits, encouraging inter-caste marriages.67 It is again important to point out that the old-time secular-progressive forces made no distinction between Brahmanism and Hinduism, but a more representative Hinduization seems to be a possibility. It is again in tune with the demands of Dalit-intellectuals who have time and again raised questions such as whether a Dalit can be the head priest of Tirupati.68 Political representation without directly challenging social hierarchies is a possibility in the way liberal democracy has operated in India. In much of UP, if one

travels the rural hinterlands, it’s not uncommon to find in the Dalit households pictures of Ambedkar hanging next to that of Lord Ram and Krishna. Conversion to Islam or Christianity has not yielded any results for the Dalits, and in today’s context, one wishes to claim to be a Dalit rather than try and escape it through conversion. For the purposes of claiming reservations and remaining politically/ electorally potent, remaining a ‘Hindu-Dalit’ makes more sense. In this sense, the policy of reservations, ipso facto reinforces the Hindu-identity of the Dalits.

Extra-Institutional Violence The third strategy appears to be of fear and extra-institutional violence. Here, one can cite the violence of the gau rakshaks; Muzaffarnagar riots; attacks on Dalits in Una; and, finally, the case of the disappearance of Najeeb in JNU, right from the heart of Delhi.69 Also foisting of cases such as in the case of Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar—falsity, rumours, morphed videos, false evidence, and brazen use of state machinery.70 The case of former Delhi police commissioner Bassi and his flip-flops followed by his re-appointment by the current dispensation as a member of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) is a case in point. The mainstream media has already fallen in line. Journalists in India are less free than 135 other countries, according to an index of press freedom by a global media watchdog.71 Some have in fact claimed that 2017 was perhaps the worst year for freedom of the press in the post-independence period.72 It also includes creating a sense of fear among academics, artists, activists, and all those who can potentially raise their voice. Even vice chancellors, such as those of Allahabad University, appointed by the current government, can be implicated in cases or inquiry initiated against them if they do not side with the political regime.73 Here, issues of institutional autonomy, merit, and qualification of those appointed that we discussed in some detail in the previous chapters, make very little sense in the Sangh strategy. The overall strategy appears to be that of high-intensity growth combined with low-intensity communalism, accommodation, and double-

speak combined with more blatant attacks against the Muslims and the Dalits. Each of these strategies is being deployed in tune with the other. Where ready-made social cleavages are available, they are being used for counter-mobilization; where there is space for accommodation, it is being acknowledged. Secular-progressive forces will not only have to address each of these strategies but also need to make better sense of the distinct political atmosphere being created in the way they are being combined.

Hindutva and Its Counter-Narratives How long can the Right hold on to this two-pronged strategy of propelling corporate capitalism on one hand and containing its effects by mobilizing communitarian anxieties on the other? There have been chinks in the script laid out by the Right in the recent past in relation to the dip in the GDP as a result of the populist policy of demonetization, issue of employment on account of the model of jobless growth, and discontent among traders with the effects of GST, as far as the economy is concerned. These are the inherent limitations of capitalism itself. However, there have been other kinds of counter-mobilizations erupting when community concerns have been raised, not as issues of culture, identity, and recognition but as issues of social backwardness and economic opportunities reflected in the rise of opposition from the Patidars, Jats, and Marathas with relation to the demand for reservations, or those of the Dalits such as that of the Bhim Army in Uttar Pradesh, or the movement lead by Jignesh Mevani in Gujarat demanding land and social mobility. The Right, in effect, has no plausible strategy to accommodate such demands, except to opt for downright intimidating tactics that we referred to as the third strategy of the Sangh Parivar, alongside raking up hurt pride and de-Brahmanized Hinduization or releasing videos and implicating the representatives of these political movements. In this context, it is important to note that the Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar was arrested, on accusation of spearheading riots in Saharanpur, while he was, in fact, working towards better relations between the Dalits and the Muslims.74 The

situation would not be very different if Rajputs were to raise issues related to social and economic mobility in place of community pride. Right-wing mobilization correctly identifies communitarian and cultural anxieties in order to articulate anxieties that have neither historical nor sociological reasoning but have investments in the collective memory, imagination, and undirected emotions. These strategies are less effective when it comes to hard and more visible issues of social and economic mobility, where the Right, at best, is unimaginative, and at worst, mediocre.

National and Regional Parties How long will the two-pronged strategy work also depend on the counternarrative of the opposition parties? The Congress is playing a waiting game. Its imagination and strategy are driven by a belief that it is the only default alternative to the BJP at the national level. It, therefore, is in no hurry to script a counter-narrative but emerges as a natural alternative out of the discontent that they understand best gets accumulated in a country with vast diversity and deep economic and social inequalities. Regional parties are playing the game of collective bargain, given the fact that they have local compulsions to cater to. While in the case of Nitish Kumar, who has no independent social base, he opted to undo regional competition by switching sides; with Mamata Banerjee, she is allowing space to the BJP in order to undermine the Left in Bengal. She assumes the BJP will take time to grow, but meanwhile, the Left would go into terminal decline.75 Between the strategies of the waiting-game and collective bargain, there is no effective emphasis on a counter-narrative. The space for the narrative too has shrunk with the collapse of social democracy in Indian politics. What remains is hard number crunching and who does it in a more disciplined and organized manner is what matters, unless some of the political movements that are working beyond the pale of pragmatism begin to have some impact on regional and national parties as signposts for a counter-narrative, which at the moment needs a fair stretch of imagination and optimism to be believed in. In effect, Indian politics is

caught between the pragmatism of the opposition and as it appears, dependence on mass violence as a legitimate mode of containing the inherent contradictions within the emergent Right-wing strategy that are held together by what we have referred to as Right-wing populism represented by the BJP and the Sangh Parivar.

Populism and Mass Violence: The Liberal-Illiberal Dilemma

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ith the resurgence of a robust Right-wing mobilization in India, we are struck with a new kind of liberal-illiberal dilemma. Liberal democracies work with an implicit idea of a political culture that respects the liberal ethos of protecting the rights of those who are a numerical minority, in religious and ideological terms, and those who are socially and economically weak and underprivileged. The differences that exist are sought to be settled through a deliberative process that is the hallmark of liberal institutions, including an idea of separation of powers between various pillars of democracy, one working as a check on the other between the legislature, executive, and judiciary. Much of the Right-wing mobilization stands in contrast to most of these liberal sensibilities and institutional arrangements. The Right-wing politics essentially believes in centralizing power through undermining institutions, and as it appears at times, by mobilizing violence. The question today is how you deal with a politics that seemingly believes in the righteousness of street violence.76 All ideological, cultural, and political differences stand at the doorstep of street violence. How do you deal with everyday violence, especially when the Right-wing political groups enjoy a massive electoral majority of the kind they enjoy today? The Right uses the best of liberal ethos, extended by way of legal protections and a political culture built in the course of the nation-building exercise and denies the same to others in the course of following their own ideals. This poses a unique dilemma for

the Left-liberal project that is unable to either replicate the methods that the Right uses (for it undermines the very essence of their politics) and is also in a quandary on further extending liberal privileges (because that only seems to further augment the cause of the Right-wing mobilization with impunity).

From Gandhi to Gauri Marxist thinker Herbert Marcuse had stated that the liberal ideal of tolerance always works in favour of the privileged by arguing that all points of view need equal space as we cannot arrive at a single notion of truth. He, therefore, propounds the ideal of ‘right to intolerance’.77 Intolerance here refers to intolerance against vigilante justice, intolerance against the language of war, and the domination of the majority over the minority, among other issues. The Right has developed elaborate mechanisms to deal with such easy counter-posturing by the liberals to gain clarity over the situation. The hydra-headed character of Right-wing mobilization is a unique way of dealing with the existing liberal political culture and the ethos of tolerance and coexistence. Since they cannot directly take on these ideals as they have taken roots in popular culture, they seek to undermine them by acting and denying. Further methods include mobilizing in the name of liberal ideals, but in actuality, they are being undermined; for instance, the attacks and public threats being issued in the name of tolerance. The Right attacks those who have in the past been critical of India becoming intolerant. They express intolerance against being called intolerant. Here they uphold the ideal of tolerance even as they display rampant intolerance. It is linked to their selfbelief that India and Hinduism are compared to other nations and that religions are more tolerant. They hate and are critical of Islam for its ostensible distaste for democracy, dialogue, and difference but wish to exactly replicate that in their own politics. In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud refers to this as ‘penis-envy’, envying what you don’t have.78 Similar is the Right’s method of dislodging secularism. They undermine secularism

in India not because they don’t believe in secular ethos but because what is followed in India is pseudo-secularism. Finally, they have a strategy in states like Kerala where violence is countered by violence from the Left parties, whereby the Left no longer has a moral high ground in claiming tolerance over the Right-wing kind of intolerance and violence with impunity. It is all equalized, and thereby the Right-wing kind of violence no longer remains distinct or unique to their brand of politics but just another kind of political violence that is sought to be depicted as a more general feature of Indian politics.79 The questions that remain for the Left-liberal kind of politics in India are how they collectively delegitimize the Right-wing kind of violence with impunity. How do they convince the majority that this kind of violence is born neither from being a victim nor as a response but remains a core strategy of generating fear and undermining the ability of democracy to ask uncomfortable questions. Finally, how does one convince the majority that the Right is not merely anti-minority but in fact anti-majority in its deep conviction to control everyone, irrespective of religion and beliefs? Even though Fareed Zakaria refers to the current scenario as the rise of ‘illiberal democracies’, the elaborate strategies devised by the Right do not make this task any easy to convince the majority that they are essentially illiberal.80 The majority is lost in the maze of these diffused strategies that the Right has devised, and the gradual change in the political culture without overtly hurting the liberal sensibilities will make it all the more difficult to pin down the Right to its essential core. How else do we then make the Rightwing populist’s deployment and justification of mass violence illegitimate?

Global Experiments against Mass Violence We need to look at how other nations that have faced similar problems of violence and hysteria, and political regimes that used violence with impunity have attempted to deal with them in order to avoid repeating such historical moments. Let me draw on examples from different contexts and continents.

On 26 October 2014, over 4,000,000 Neo-Nazis held a massive demonstration in the city of Cologne in Germany. It was the biggest rally in the recent years by the Neo-Nazis, demanding a ‘White Christian Europe’, with immigrants and Muslims as their primary targets. Whatever might be the differences in Germany between the immigrants and the Muslims, there is a collective refusal against the methods of the Neo-Nazis. In a democracy, there are bound to be differences of perspective, but one issue on which we need to collectively strive for is the abject refusal of using violence either civil or military against any community, be it Muslims or tribals. This conscientious refusal can be produced only when we begin to acknowledge and begin to see and feel the unacceptable proportion of violence in our society. Many nations across the globe have witnessed this kind of violence, and perhaps in much bigger proportion. The difference, however, is many of them have evolved political strategies not to repeat them and converted the memory into a cultural resource for the future generations to learn from the historical blunders of the past. In Germany that witnessed the Holocaust in which more than six million Jews were killed under the Nazi regime, the Holocaust is a recurring theme in public discourse. It is mandatory to teach the younger generation in the schools about the persecution of the Jews with all its gory details, from the mode of planning to execution, including a mandatory visit to the concentration camp in Auschwitz in Poland, where the Nazi regime carried out its ‘Final Solution’. Denial of the Holocaust is illegal in many of the European countries including Germany, Austria, Romania, and Hungary. Many other countries have laws that have criminalized genocide denial. Many of these nations have built a range of memorials and museums to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. Many of the streets in several countries and hundreds of cities and towns have laid stolpersteine (which literally means ‘stumbling block’ or tripping stone), a cobblestone-sized metal block installed on the pavement or sidewalks near the residence of the victim that give the details of the individuals who were picked up, with date of deportation and death. The words ‘Hier wohnte’ (here lived) grace most of the memorials, though others (where information of their residence is not

available) are installed at the individual’s place of employment and refer instead to the work they did. Walking across any of these European cities, coming across these ‘stumbling blocks’ is a regular feature that sets you thinking about a history that was so dark and a history humanity has to avoid at all costs; as of 20 August 2014, over 48,000 stolpersteine have been laid in 18 countries in Europe. In Latin America, in Santiago, Chile, the famous Museum of Memory and Human Rights stands testimony to the excesses committed during the 17-year regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. As its website states, ‘the museum houses memorabilia of torture devices used during the Pinochet dictatorship, letters to family members by prisoners in detention centers, newspaper clippings, and testimony from survivors’.81 A total of 2,279 people were executed and around 1,248 went missing during the Pinochet regime; the museum gathered the photographs of most of the victims, which are displayed in the museum. In Africa, South Africa instituted the well-known Truth and Reconciliation Commission after putting an end to the apartheid regime in order to come to terms with the suffering and allowing an open dialogue between the victims and the perpetrator. In 1996, the South African National Broadcaster telecasted the proceedings of the Human Rights Violation Committee that was listening to the testimonies of various victims and the perpetrators who caused them to suffering. Whatever might be the limitations of such a method, these proceedings led to a worldwide debate about the effectiveness of restorative justice adopted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa as against the retributive justice adopted by Germany during the Nuremberg Trials. India has been witness to many such mass killings beginning with the Partition, to the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984, to the Gujarat pogrom against the Muslims in 2002, and countless shameful massacres against the Dalits. In the northeast, there is violence of massive proportion leading to the 14 yearlong fast by Irom Sharmila for the repeal of AFSPA. In central India, there is a continued witch-hunt of the tribals in the name of ‘Operation Green Hunt’ and ‘Salwa Judum’, and there have been dastardly

incidents of violence against the Christians including the cold-blooded murder of Graham Staines and his two very young children in Odisha. The list is endless, but what is even more disturbing is the collective refusal to debate this openly. How do we come to terms with this kind of violence, and more importantly, how do we put an end to mass violence? The debate often veers towards either a refusal to acknowledge or leave alone the prosecution of individuals, organizations, and officials responsible for this kind of violence, often in the name of maintaining ‘law and order’, or it gravitates towards a puerile debate in the media in contrasting the anti-Sikh riots to the Gujarat carnage. The collective conscience of the society has refused to wilt under the weight of the massive proportion of violence that has become routinized and thereby somewhat invisible; if anything, there seems to be a silent sanction in the name of nationalism. Will there be a possibility to draw on some of these global experiments in abating mass violence by arousing collective conscience and guilt or will they prove to be ineffective in light of our history and entrenched popular culture? These remain daunting questions. Let me now turn to the question of popular culture in order to probe this further.

Populism and Popular Culture: Are Muslims the Safest Enemy to Have?

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ajoritarianism in India is being constructed faster than we can imagine. There is not only a large-scale celebration of Hindu religious symbols in the public sphere but also a deeper consent, both active and tacit, for the violence, as we elaborated in the previous essay, against the minorities, especially Muslims. Today, a cross section of castes and classes does not seem to be perturbed by the kind of lynchings that we have visualized as part of the ‘new normal’ under the current political regime. This is made possible through a commonsensical binary between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that is right at the core of the way populism works. Among many other reasons, Muslims are the safest enemies to have in India. Muslims are a numerical minority; they are socially backward and economically marginalized. An odd 15 per cent of the population stands no chance to win against a majority of Hindus who constitute over 80 per cent of India. It would be an exaggeration to think that an average Hindu in India isn’t aware of this fact, yet we continue to vilify Muslims as a grand-stand enemy that threatens the security of the nation. Perhaps, this is precisely why there is such an easy consent and consensus in making the Muslim the symbol of all that is wrong with this nation. He is an enemy who is vanquished even before the war has begun. Where does this kind of a

cultural sensibility come from? Has it got anything to do with popular culture as we imagine it?

‘Good’ against ‘Evil’ Among various other sources, including a ‘global war on terror’, is what I would refer to as the ‘epic consciousness’ – the mass/popular consciousness that we have collectively imbibed in course to getting socialized through the epics, such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In epics, the result of the war on evil is known even before there is a war. There is no question of Lord Ram losing the battle to Ravan, or in the Mahabharata, there is no chance of the Pandavas losing the battle to the Kauravas. Yet, the epics interest us immensely. The stories within the stories interest us because we know the larger narrative. The end interests us not because the story has a surprise twist but precisely because it offers us the comfort of being predictable. The narrative structure offers twists with stories within the story but keeps the larger storyline linear, simple, and predictable. The victory of ‘good’ over ‘evil’ where the evil is only seemingly and ostensibly powerful but in essence never stands a chance to win. Such a narrative structure offers us many comforts, especially in times of ‘liquid modernity’ with time-space compression and with growing uncertainty in the everyday life.82 The more the everyday life becomes uncertain, the more we pine for certainty and predictability. The more the everyday challenges, the more we look for the certainty of winning. The narrative structure of the epics allows us the rare comfort of also enjoying smaller defeats in light of the larger victory that is certain to come. The smaller discomforts can be borne with while awaiting the final victory. Further, it allows us to address the anxieties and justify violence and also be reasonably sure that the enemy is a vanquished one even before the ‘imagined war’ has begun. We can afford to lose a battle or two, as long as the final battle is ours because the smaller defeats do not add up to anything. It is unlike facing a job interview based on our past achievements, it is unlike a tournament of cricket where every loss has its impact on the

final result and where every loss makes the series victory all the more difficult and all the more less authentic because even the margin of the victory matters. Muslims fill that space of ‘vanquished adversaries’ that epics are based on. They allow the majority to feign anxiety, feign a challenge that is not real. Some masculine Hindus take part in assaults with legal impunity and in large numbers against badly outnumbered Muslims (in many cases just one old Muslim) and, in each of these incidents of assaults what we have been witness to is the playing out of this predictable-unpredictability that we are collectively socialized into. These incidents then provide the majority community a sense of victory, sense of duty, and a sense of preparedness for physical battles against the adversary in the service of the nation. The larger narrative structure of the epics is written into the isolated incidents of lynching. While at one end they reinforce the epic consciousness that the majority is socialized into, at the other end, they also provide the symbolic comfort and certainty that the modern life has robbed us of. The imagined homogeneity, virility, unity, aggressiveness, and physicality of the ‘Muslim body’ is the ideal ‘other’; it fills in the empty space in the structured narrative of the epics. The fluidity of identities that modernity ushers in brings with it an anxiety of loss of identity, and the symbolic representation of the Muslim as the solid and a unified entity allow the majority to carve out a more unified self for itself. Muslim is also, therefore, the ‘other’ of the ‘liquid modernity’ helping us to redefine who we are as a collective. Since a positive unity becomes difficult in the complexity that modernity ushers in, the imagined Muslim simplifies that complexity into a palpable simplification of generating a unified Hindu identity. The important point, though, is that this adversary comes with a guarantee of being vanquished. This subterranean assurance makes it inviting to the majority to identify with the project of constructing a majoritarian polity in India. Thus, even a peace-loving Hindu, an everyday Hindu, and a middle-class Hindu do not find it difficult to endorse the

violence that comes with no cost. It can afford to endorse the drawing-room patriotism and cartographic nationalism that demands of us no more than a cost-free hatred against a palpably strong but essentially weak adversary. Muslim is the hyphen that joins the comfort of certainty provided by the ancient epics with the unavoidable discomfort ushered in by fast-paced modernity. The black hole of modernity marked by pervasive insecurity and faceless urbanization is reconfigured into a more familiar terrain through the common and collective ‘othering’ of the Muslims. The current Rightwing mobilization in India has rather successfully created a fictitious enemy out of the Muslim and demonized the community that matches the proportion of the epic battles with the assurance of the victory those epics guarantee us. For every loss and every insurmountable challenge of the everyday life, here is an assured victory that we can collectively gloat on. The comfort in times of harsh realities is perhaps too difficult to let go off in near future.

Hyper Electoralism and Pakoda Nationalism

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oon after his election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commented ‘sarkar nahi chalana hai, desh chalana hai’. Under the current regime, the state and nation have become conflated into a single entity. Any difference or acknowledgment of their separation is seen as the weakening of the colossal ‘nation building’ project that the BJP has undertaken. Democracy is seen only to further this project, and all those elements of democracy that do not overtly support such a vision of the polity are seen as limitations of democracy that need a course correction. Democracy under this vision is essentially understood as winning elections; beyond that, any accountability is understood as a blot on the will of the majority. After the 2002 assembly elections in Gujarat, majority and majoritarianism have gradually collapsed to mean one and the same thing. In fact, rule of law, the autonomy of institutions and individual rights, and minority rights, among other things have come to be seen as diluting the will of the majority. Therefore, the legitimacy of the current regime under Mr Modi flows exclusively by winning elections, and there is very little independent focus either on governance or policy because they are mere extensions of the will that is already registered in the election results.

Muscular Governance and Media Images

The rule of law, whether in Chhattisgarh or Kashmir, is seen as diluting the strength of muscular governance, while minority rights have been re-framed as appeasement and institutional autonomy, be it that of the judiciary, universities, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) or other constitutional or statutory bodies, is seen as unjustified or freedom without accountability. The singular milestone seems to be winning elections, notwithstanding accusations of trying to form governments even without a majority in the Assembly. Winning elections and forming governments are the best displays of the success of muscular governance. Perhaps, for the first time in post-independence history, a regional leader has assumed such prominence in national politics, that too in such a short span of time. Modi’s pan-India appeal, carefully crafted through the media images, can only be sustained through a renewed claim through successive electoral victories because there is very little public debate on public policy and governance in the last four years. Neither in terms of foreign policy, Kashmir, and employment nor with regard to inflation, growth, or educational facilities has this government formulated anything new worth noting. There is either no policy framework, or they are more or less continuation of the policies formulated under the Congress, including the much-debated Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Aadhaar that were in the pipeline under the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. In fact, Shashi Tharoor of the Congress insisted that the Modi government is a ‘name-changer’ and not ‘game-changer’.83 Modi, along with the BJP, seems to perceive the ability to win elections through fresh strategies as a real-time strength. The BJP undoubtedly is in an expansionist mode, including charting out fresh territories in the Northeast and the South. The BJP is a relatively young party that can afford to be flexible with its electoral strategies and leadership choices.

Secularism without the Welfare State

All other parties have become saturated in terms of their social base, which has left out many social groups unrepresented. The BJP is taking the lead in representing such social groups, including the Dalits and the OBCs, and providing them with leadership opportunities. Many regional parties have emerged in various states as breakaway factions or from anti-Congress movements. All this provides the BJP an opportunity to forge alliances with various partners. This is also being made possible because the RSS adds a dimension to the rise of the BJP that is missing in all other political formations. While most parties formulate policies with the immediate imperatives in mind, the BJP with the RSS is perhaps the only political force in India today with a distinct political vision and ideological clarity. They firmly believe in creating a majoritarian ‘Hindu Rashtra’, and therefore make political moves that have long-term goals in mind. Perhaps, the terminal decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a notable example in this case. The BJP carefully worked its way by initially forging an alliance with the BSP, then compelling the BSP to move from ‘bahujan’ to ‘sarvajan’, and then finally recrafting its Dalit symbolism into Hindu symbolism found in the slogan ‘Ye Hathi nahi, Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hai’.84 The BJP’s singular focus on elections emanates from the new-found space with the collapse of the welfare state after the 1990s. India cannot afford to remain a secular state without a socialdemocratic welfare state in place. The Congress is groping in the dark with secularism, while it has actively dismantled the Nehruvian welfare state, it wishes to continue with a secular agenda. Secularism in India was a way of pursuing a welfare agenda. By dismantling the welfare state, the Congress undermined the ideological and social justification and roots of secularism in India. In an era of hyper-electoralism of the BJP at the core is their strategy of alternating between development and Hindutva. The momentum is sought to be maintained by alternating the emphasis on either of the two agendas.

Hindutva versus Development?

Conventional analysis has pitted Hindutva as an alternative agenda to development. The BJP-RSS combine has a dual strategy of development and Hindutva where the failure of one is made good by the other. In other words, if development does not deliver, then the BJP-RSS combine pushes for Hindutva politics, mobilizing communal polarization while claiming integration through development. Thus, BJP’s strategy has been one of claiming ‘sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ through development, undermining the old kind of sectional mobilization based on caste and religious identities, and replacing it with integration through the large-scale developmental process. How this strategy works on the ground and what is claimed are quite different. Thus, the current impasse in BJPs electoral prospects is the result of what BJP claimed through its slogans and programme and how it has worked out on the ground. It is now time to rethink how this strategy works on the ground. What it does is quite opposite to the conventional wisdom. In other words, there cannot be Hindutva politics without high growth rates and an expanding economy. Hindutva, ironically, works as a political strategy only when developmental aspirations are high and are in no mood to tolerate any obstruction to its onward march. BJP’s rise to power in 2014 was precisely due to the aspirations set in by the development made possible by the Congress in its rule for 10 years. Modi was seen as an alternative who could take Indian development to a new level by taking more bold policy decisions that are necessitated by market forces, what former prime minister Manmohan Sigh had referred to, borrowing from Adam Smith, as the ‘animal spirits’85 that need to be unleashed in order to actualize faster development. It is in this context that Congress and its modes of functioning became synonymous with ‘policy paralysis’, and unable to push the process that they began with the vigour necessary to take it to the next level. Modi’s image as a leader with the ability to take bold decisions went in his favour.86 This was actualized partly because of his campaign of the trumped-up claims of the ‘Gujarat Model’ that combined high growth with high-decibel majoritarianism.87 It was a rare combination marked by the Gujarat riots. It

was this combination that made up the brand Modi. In popular perception, Modi delivered a combination of high growth with Hindutva, one supporting the other. One was acceptable only in combination with the other. The current crisis of the BJP and the challenge they will face in 2019 is precisely a breakdown of this combinatory postulation that they had projected. In the earlier moment too, the ‘India Shining’ campaign failed because the claims to development did not match the ground realities.

Pakoda Nationalism Modi began by claiming the ability to create two crore jobs per annum and thus began with the slogans of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Stand up India’ as an overarching policy frame.88 However, with the dip in the growth rates, jobless growth, and sustained agrarian crisis, the developmental claims can no longer sustain, and as a result, Hindutva too does not work. National integration through developmental means is considered a better alternative to sectional inclusion based on caste and religious identities. In other words, social groups, for instance, Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, are willing to look beyond their immediate identities if there is a promise to be included through massive developmental agenda. This also works because it helps in economic integration and mobility and also allows groups such as the Dalits to overcome the misrecognition and stigma attached with sectional mobilization. Dalits then can also claim to be citizens rather than ‘merely’ Dalits. However, if the developmental agenda does not allow for such integration, then these groups have no option or qualms about going back to heightened sectional identities. BJP made similar claims with regard to Muslims in Gujarat that they were better placed in comparison with the Muslims elsewhere, in spite of the criticism that the Modi regime was patently anti-minority.89 In such a context, any talk of separate Muslim interests looks anti-national because it betrays the universal benefits that development sets in. Thus, claims against Congress for appeasing Muslims looked more credible and also as

hampering development and weakening the nation. Therefore, the success of the Hindutva strategy depended on the ability of development to provide more universal-national opportunities for everyone irrespective of their specific cultural identities. Thus, communal polarization was also a response to the way it obstructs development, and therefore, a resurgent nation. It is only as part of this strategy that BJP can sustain an anti-Muslim or for that matter anti-Dalit rhetoric. Without development, the Hindutva nationalism looks like an empty claim. Worse, it looks like a deliberate ploy to divert attention. Suddenly, BJP’s strategy today can be projected as a diversionary strategy rather than as a legitimate nationalist assertion. Modi began by claiming that he is retaining the Congress-initiated Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Grant (MNREG) scheme as representative of the colossal failure of the Congress and making political fortunes by pushing people into perpetual poverty. MNREG, he claimed, symbolizes the failure of the agenda of Garbi Hatao initiated by Mrs Gandhi in the 1970s. Instead, what is needed is an imagination of a ‘New India’ where the youth are not dependent on doles but are asking for skill development and expanding opportunities. With the glaring failure to create either new skills or largescale employment Modi and his finance minister turned to recognize even making pakodas as a gainful employment. Mr Amit Shah even attempted to turn the argument against by claiming that a living by making pakodas is more dignified than by begging for the doles by the government. Can hyper-masculine claims of nationalism coexist with a programme for the youth to make a living by making pakodas?90 The problem with the current political regime under Narendra Modi is that it failed to make sense of this connection. It became a victim of its own claims. It too understood development and Hindutva as a two-pronged strategy where one needs to be used in lieu of the other; failing to understand one is dependent on the other. The reason even the demand for building the Ram Mandir does not seem to hold a similar appeal is that the Ram Mandir is symbolic of a resurgent India—New India, which means both a robust economic power and a culturally unified Hindu nation. A

Hindu nationalism with a faltering economy, in fact, reminds Hindus of the cultural inferiority they are often reminded of by the RSS. Claims of an ‘authentic’ and a glorious past can work only in tandem with high-end corporate growth, fast-paced urbanization, expanding infrastructure, global capital flows, and increasing employment opportunities.

Challenges of Technocratic Liberalism Since the current regime missed the link, they are faced with a political dead-end. The failure of the Modi regime is to understand that the economy needs a different set of policy frame from that of cultural assertion. Modi seems to have applied his experience in raising high-pitched cultural mobilization to that of the economy. Demonetization is a clear standout example of this bravado. BJP has also had much less experience in governance than street politics. Governance cannot be managed purely through electoral considerations. It needs a different set of parameters. Sometimes, it requires policy decisions that need to be considered independently. While populism successfully represents such a policy planning as elitist since it is dependent on the role of experts and fosters technocratic liberalism that caters the interests of tiny elite, while this undoubtedly has some purchase, it is also self-defeating as the populist-driven governance also has its own set of adverse impact on the promises populist leaders make. An example is the kind of debate under the UPA between the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), [CPI(M)] with regard to nuclear energy that almost brought down the government with the latter’s withdrawal of support. Such policy conflicts as the very nature of politics did not take institutional functioning seriously. Institutions in a democracy have a more refracted way of expressing public issues, though not in a direct manner as in street mobilization. It is the sheer complexity of liberal democracy that institutions look to be in conflict with the democratic aspirations, while issues such as separation of powers, federalism, independence of media and judiciary, and the autonomy of universities are

precisely modes of dealing with competing claims in a democracy that have no easy resolution. Easy resolution is sought to be replaced with moderate accommodation of interests, and here, the institutional arrangement seeks to play an important role. So the conflict between environmental concerns and livelihood needs plays out as a conflict between legislature and judiciary; or the conflict between global corporate capital and agrarian interests plays out as a conflict between Centre and the states. Dissent is a way of making sense of the inherent diversity of interests and competing claims. The current regime consistently worked against all of this in order to project a more robust and a decisive leadership—strongman—to contrast itself from the previous Congress regime. The wheel has turned a full circle. The same methods lead to a faltering economy, which in turn has made the cultural agenda and street mobilization look more vacuous. In course of time, it would be also become difficult to sustain the popularity and credibility of the leadership, which has been arduously built through media images.

Theorizing Populism in India

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ontemporary populism in India has changed the nature of public/political discourse by inaugurating new meanings and effects through an overdetermination of significations that has foregrounded the limits of what we generally understood as ‘progressive’ politics. The old distinctions between the Left and Right are being replaced by new kind of a meta-narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The process of creating the ‘other’ is achieved not merely through physical violence, coercion, and intimidation but through a sustained process of gaining consent to a moral discourse that combines the old narratives, given or prevalent moral and normative structure with new aspirations, anxieties, and social imaginaries. It carefully sutures the old with the new; it carefully shifts between two ends of the spectrum, sometimes claiming what we had earlier perceived as mutually exclusive practices. It fuses the polar opposites and produces new kinds of debinarized discourse. It attempts to change with continuity and opposition and mobility without disruptive politics. It replaces ideas of antagonism and contradiction with continuity and social harmony; it replaces the emphasis on rights and liberty with fraternity and community. It is therefore imperative to decide what is old and what is new in this discourse. What is populist and what is authoritarian? What is the social narrative behind the more visible modes of exclusion, violence, and criminalization of politics? Chantal Mouffe argued against a moral rejection or refutation of Rightwing populism. She argues that ‘the response of traditional parties to the rise of Right-wing populism has clearly contributed to exacerbating the

problem. This is why moral condemnation and the setting up of a “cordon sanitaire” have so often constituted the answer to the rise of Right-wing populist movements’.91 Instead, we need to analyse ‘its specificity and its causes’. ‘Moral condemnation’ of the right has to be replaced by an analysis of the ‘moral structure’ on which it builds its politics. As Muller puts it, ‘Populism, I suggest, is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world which places in opposition a morally pure and fully unified people against small minorities, elites in particular, who are placed outside the authentic people’.92 This idea of ‘fully unified people’, in the Indian context, refers to a unified Hindu society, while excluding the minority in the first instance; however, it also has to create a palpable unity within a diversified majority. It needs to develop a diversified strategy for a unified ideology. The diversity, internal to the authentic majority, needs to be recast into a unity. Differences of social location, conflict of interests, and structural contradictions have to be imbricated in terms of social harmony, community, fraternity, and continuity with change—a glorious past with an aspirational future. It aims for a change that is non-disruptive. Much of the analysis on populism has focused on the larger narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, largely ignoring how Right-wing populism attempts to maintain the unity of ‘us’, and how it produces an authentic majority that is essentially divided, in the Indian context across caste, region, language, culture, and lifestyles. It is here that Right-wing populism has introduced a new set of political discourses and practices, the tenability of which will inform us of the future of Right-wing populism in India. I will attempt to map these new set of practices and how they have worked themselves in order to produce a political, rather than a moral critique of Right-wing populism in India.

Limits of Progressive Politics First, Right-wing populism has managed to turn the traditional progressive political practices on their head. A critique is absorbed or resignified from

its original meaning. For instance, the reason for the defeat of the Congress, as largely argued, has been poor implementation of welfare policies, such as the NREGA. BJP began with a critique of poor implementation through a discourse on corruption but gradually resignified it into a critique of welfare itself and anger against growing economic inequalities leading to the election of the more pro-corporate government. Similarly, a critique of institutional crisis and the non-responsive character of the institutions leads to the adoption of strategies that further undermine institutions. It does not lead in a progressive and linear manner to a demand for more accountability but to further insularity. For instance, a critique against a slow judiciary and a corrupt police in India leads to the legitimization of a strategy or rather a policy of ‘encounters’ as recently announced by Yogi Adityanath.93 Here, it is instructive to observe how the Left-liberal critique of the class character of democratic institutions is usurped in legitimizing an aggressive state that in fact makes institutions further dysfunctional to the peril of those socially and economically weak and in targeting the religious minorities. A moral critique slips into a moral justification of the same set of practices.

Mass Participation Coexists with Authoritarianism Second, the old structure of politics is stitched to a new imagery, while in essence, it remains the same. The rise of Right-wing populism also emerged as a critique against technocratic liberalism and governance based on experts. The reasoning behind such a critique was the dominance of a small elite that blocks mass participation and thereby undermines the very essence of democracy. However, the rule of technocrats is replaced by demagoguery and the strongman phenomenon, which in essence only further undermines democratic ethos. As Mouffe observes, ‘Liberal theorists looked for other explanations to fit their rationalist approach, insisting for instance on the role of uneducated, lower-class voters, susceptible to being attracted by demagogues.’94 However, this is prevalent in other sections of the society too, including the middle class.95 It justifies the strongman phenomenon as a response against the rule of the elites, the

dynasty rule of the Congress, which will pave the way to the opening of the opportunities for mass participation. Strongman becomes a symbol against ‘consensus elites’, and therefore, ushers in an extra-institutional mobilization. Strongman phenomenon, therefore, coexists with extrainstitutional street violence. One justifies the other, and one cannot continue without the other. Demagoguery in India coexists with street violence and rioting. The latter become modes of mass participation and do not run into conflict with the overbearing insularity of authoritarian rule. It symbolizes order, discipline, and control of the old elites and religious minorities, and it implies public sanction, patronage, and impunity for the authentic majority. It fuses polar opposites between an authoritarian ruler and an extrainstitutional mobilization. In doing this, the old structure of patronage politics, the rule of few elites is resignified without changing the essence by not opening any new avenues for democratic participation. Here again, it stitches the critique built by Left-liberal discourses to the new kinds of extra-institutional mobilization. It builds on the fact that in India, the discourse of formal equality has spread without a commensurate change in the social and material conditions of various social groups.96 This inaugurates a different kind of social psychology.

Economic Elites versus Cultural Subalterns Third, Right-wing populists mobilize culture and passions and have a grasp over social psychology that many social groups are pushed into due to this precarious condition of being aware and being aspirational about the legitimacy of equal treatment but in the concrete struggle against routine incivility. Further, Right-wing populists also sympathize with the declining social power of dominant social groups that we earlier referred to as the ‘hurt pride’. The outbursts by Jats, Patidars, Marathas, Kapus, Kshatriyas, and other dominant castes is symptomatic of the anxieties that dominant castes undergo during social transformation. Left-liberals offer no alternative political agenda to any of these groups. Further, there are economically weak among the dominant castes. The conflicting interests

between these caste groups are replaced by mobility and unity. Reservations on the basis of an economic criterion, instead of caste, are a case in point. It allows for mobility without the stigma of caste. It is here that Right-wing populism is offering alternative ideas of social harmony, fraternal feelings, and community fellow feeling that ostensibly allow mobility for the subordinate groups and also empathize with the dominant groups and their declining social power. This is yet again an instance of attempting to fuse polar opposites into continuity. It partly recognizes that the economically poor among the dominant caste are also socially stigmatized. For instance, the poor among the Brahmins also suffer from a social stigma and therefore are not elites in a traditional sense of the term. They see a possibility of forging a unity between them based on their social experience of poverty. Economic elites are therefore pitched against cultural subalterns. This still leaves out the distance between them as castes and the fact that the nature of discrimination and social exclusion is markedly different. How these differences at one level are going to play out against a certain kind of commonality at another level is a continuing challenge for Right-wing populism in India. They have to stitch the ‘hurt pride’ of the dominant castes with the social stigma of the subaltern castes. The difficulty of such a mode or the socially conservative aspect of such an experiment is visible in the recent conflicts between Dalits and Marathas in Bima-Koregaon.

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 counternarrative 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

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ne of the 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?

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he 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 that 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 All this while, the AAP was focussing on issues related to everyday problems faced by the people. Kejriwal looked more honest in his intent and accepting of his miscalculation in resigning after just 49 days of his initial stint as the chief minister; the AAP had emerged as the first ‘regional party’ of Delhi. From the mohalla sabhas (public meetings) they organized during the run-up to elections in 2013, the party had cultivated a positive image among many urban poor. Taxi and auto drivers got relief, perhaps for the first time, from the culture of collecting haftas by the police. It is no surprise, then, that the urban poor—especially taxi and auto drivers—were upset when the AAP dissolved the government as they had benefited from the daily harassment with Kejriwal at the helm, but they did not seem to have second thoughts in giving him another chance. In contrast, Amit Shah’s strategy looked like a formula movie, and an attempt at cloning a strategy that he might have thought worked elsewhere. Lack of leadership and lack of local voices belonging to Delhi were clearly the standout factors in the misadventure of the BJP’s national leadership, which essentially derived its electoral strategy from its experience in Gujarat. The more affluent sections in Delhi also leaned towards the AAP— perhaps due to a disapproval of the ‘extremist agendas’ of the Hindu Right —including the Ghar Wapsi reconversion programme, the ‘love jihad’ campaign targeting Muslim-Hindu relationships, and the call for putting up statues of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse.5 The BJP and its allies have undermined the fact that Gandhi is still appropriated by the wellto-do sections of the Indian society, and more of an enigma with the lower classes. Finally, the spectacle created around the visit by the US President Barack Obama came across as shallow, not to mention the parting gift he delivered by raising the issue of growing intolerance, even as Modi made

claims of a warm personal friendship with ‘Barack’. The BJP looked like a different party now, and Modi’s abilities appeared more measured without the anti-Congress wave witnessed during the general elections. With Congress being a non-starter in this election, the vulnerability of the BJP’s electoral strategy was left exposed, allowing voters to focus on what had been delivered in the preceding months.

Higher Expectations and Stronger Demagogues In this cycle of growing expectations and the inability to deliver on them, it was Kejriwal’s turn to occupy a position (at least in Delhi) similar to what Modi had experienced earlier. The same questions were asked to Kejriwal in the months following the election. As the electorate seems more critical of Modi’s personality-centric politics—projected and accepted as showing decisiveness only a few months before the Delhi elections—his appearance in a suit, allegedly worth `10 lakh, was more a confirmation of selfadulation than a larger-than-life personality. But Kejriwal appears to have driven the internal dynamics of the AAP into a personality-centric mode without an effective second rung of leaders to follow up on his actions. What looks like a democratic tendency in picking new and unknown faces, as the AAP did in this election, may soon be perceived as the party’s inability to nurture effective and strong leaders. The AAP today is facing the same dilemmas that the BJP was dealing with for having made contradictory promises. The AAP had promised to regularize slums and make Delhi a real-estate haven, and a global city with sanitized urbanization. Personality-centric politics is the starting point and a signpost of eclipsing these contradictory dynamics, but as the elections have repeatedly proved, its resonance does not last for too long, and the gestation period is shortening dramatically with each passing election. For now, there is a break from the Modi-mania projected by the media, and in fact, relief from the media’s manufactured consent as the electorate seems to have read meanings of media images against the grain of what was being projected. Indian electorates seem to have learnt the art of rejection but there seems to

be little option for both the parties and the electorate after neo-liberal reforms to initiate any radical changes in the existing order. This lack of choice—due to the new consensus-elite across the parties—is being made good with the projection of personality cult and the phenomenon of demagoguery at one end and unleashing higher expectations and a newer imagination—best captured by the slogan, ‘New India’—at the other end. Electoral results in Delhi were a clear signpost of growing expectations based on large promises made by the parties and the growing discontent being attempted to be arrested and addressed through demagoguery and the cult of the strongman. How long will this hold and how the electorate approaches will be significant in the run-up to 2019?

Does Bihar Hold the Key to the Future of Indian Politics?

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lection results of Bihar had significance for national politics in general and the future of the BJP and Modi’s leadership in particular. Elections in Bihar were held in the context of a transition into a postMandal and post-liberalized Indian polity. To begin with, in the changing terrain of Indian politics, the anti-Congress wave that marked the general elections of 2014 and the assembly elections in Rajasthan and Chattisgarh are not the determining factor for the voting pattern in Bihar anymore. Further, the ‘Modi wave’ and the myth of the ‘Gujarat model’ appeared to be already on the wane, in light of Modi’s one-year rule, which has left a palpable gap between what was promised and projected and what has been delivered so far. The contest in Bihar reflected the tension between the anti-incumbency factor against the Nitish government, as against the demystification of the ‘Modi phenomenon’ and the pressures of electing and having the same party in the state as the centre to gain quick benefits and additional funds. Although the 1.25 crores development package announced by Modi has had a seemingly little impact on the voters, the ‘politics of hope’ and the demands of a new aspirational class emerging in Bihar held the capacity to generate a narrative in favour of big growth, development, and governance.

Growth versus Welfare

However, this narrative had to contend for space with a strong discourse on ‘social justice’ and empowerment that has been at the centre stage of politics in Bihar for more than three decades now. On one hand is the new idea of Bihar’s economy being integrated with the national and global capital flows that BJP has now come to represent under Modi’s leadership, while on the other is the pressing need to provide immediate social welfare policies relating to better education, health, and a robust Public Distribution System (PDS), along with the more visible ‘populist’ policies that the electorate expect. Nitish Kumar’s policies such as rejecting the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), obstructing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the retail sector, and populist policies such as providing bicycles and sanitary napkins to girl students continue to remain popular, along with a visible difference he made to providing security and making bureaucracy more accountable. It was a contest between fast growth, new infrastructure, and corporate capital flows that the BJP was promising in order to bring Bihar out of decades of slow growth and underdevelopment and an emphasis on a social welfare discourse, with a tinge of governance. The other major political process at the heart of Bihar’s elections is the evident contradiction between ‘newer forms of social fragmentation’ and the necessity of cobbling up a numerical majority to garner a majority of seats in the assembly.

Social Fragmentation versus Electoral Majority In most of the other states in India, new forms of social fragmentation among the OBCs, Dalits, and Muslims are still an emerging prospect; however, in Bihar, not only is this fragmentation evident but also has been playing a key role in electoral mobilization. New categories of EBC, Most Backward Classes (MBC) among the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and Mahadalits among Dalits and Pasmanda Muslims among the Muslim community have necessitated new kinds of strategies to hold these fragments together. In this sense, elections in Bihar will hold important clues for future elections in India as to how these fragments will play out,

and what they mean for the future of national parties such as the Congress and the BJP. On the one hand, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Janata Dal-United (JD-U) are pitching for the votes of Muslims and Yadavs (MY), along with the EBCs and the Mahadalits; on the other, Lalu Prasad has staked a claim to polarizing the electorate in announcing that this round of elections is a battle between the ‘forwards’ and the ‘backwards’. BJP was primarily hoping for the support of the upper castes, and among the Dalits, of that of the Paswans and the Musahars represented by Jitan Ram Manjhi, and expecting to split the Muslim vote with Asaduddin Owaisi joining the fray. In addition, the confidence of the BJP was reflected in gaining ground among the Yadavs by providing 30 seats to candidates from the Yadav caste, with Modi elevating them by referring to them as ‘Yaduvanshis’ and taking the silent support of a disgruntled Pappu Yadav. Along with these caste calculations, the BJP attempted to polarize the electorate along religious lines in not offering seats to Muslim candidates, and with Syed Shahnawaz Hussain missing from the campaign and with incidents such as those in Dadri. Further, along the caste lines, a larger polarization was being attempted to counter Lalu’s ‘forward’ versus ‘backward’ posturing with an announcement by the RSS chief that reservations along caste lines need to be relooked into and instead framed on economic grounds. While this can be seen as an attempt to consolidate the upper caste votes, it was also projected to consolidate the votes among the EBCs. This gave an opportunity to the Grand Alliance to project the NDA as an eventual threat to the very notion of reservation based on the quota system. However, what lent confidence to the RSS-BJP campaign was that this general statement against reservation does get nullified by the growing conflict on the ground essentially between the Yadavs and the Dalits, replacing the earlier articulation of the conflict with the upper castes. This, they believe, leaves Dalits with the sole choice of moving into the fold of the BJP since the JD(U) and RJD combine were viewed essentially as representatives of the dominant backward classes. It is intriguing to observe how political parties are staking claims to the support of a specific

social/caste group, yet can make announcements contrary to its interests. This is a part of new strategies that political parties are designing to counter and live up to the crosscurrents created by the deep social fragmentation that is now thickly part of the electoral skyline of Bihar.

Flexibilisation of Voting Patterns This makes mapping a pattern all the more difficult and allows for openended elections where almost all caste groups have a choice to vote across parties. It is a distinct possibility that a single caste group can vote for different parties in substantial measure. This ‘flexibilization’ would, in turn, make the role of the media and the election campaign an essential, and not a mere synthetic part of the electoral battle. Prime Minister Modi addressed not less than 20 rallies across Bihar, making it a unique contest between a prime minister and a chief minister. Here, leadership and individual personalities might have had some value in swaying the voters. Indian elections are complex with a maze of issues at work making it difficult to predict which of the issues gain ground sidelining others. It is even more difficult to provide a consistent explanation as to why specific issues gained ground leaving others behind. As we argued, Bihar had a range of issues, including the contest between ‘Bahari’ versus ‘Bihari’, need for growth versus social welfare, the autonomy of state versus the need to align with the centre to get more funds, and finally impending social fragmentation to gain new grounds versus conjuring up a majority. What did the results in Bihar tell us? Can the rise of populism under Narendra Modi forge a new kind of equivalence between disparate and contesting issues?

Nitish Was Bihar’s Mann Ki Baat The elections in Bihar were held at a transitory point where the electorate had ample opportunity to think and evaluate the ‘Gujarat Model’ of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine, based on their track record of the previous 18 months. The defeat of the BJP in Bihar opened up interesting

dimensions that need careful analysis in order to understand the complexities of electoral politics and the vagaries of democracy in India. First, the results clearly reflected the fact that the BJP’s strategy of combining high-intensity growth with low-intensity communalism had reached a dead end. While growth-talk was not delivering jobs and translating into welfare, the communally vitiated atmosphere on the ground was increasingly being seen as manufactured for electoral benefits (as was also the case with Delhi). The rhetoric of development and manufactured communal polarization seemed to have run its course. It was evident during the campaign that the electorate was not enamoured by the announcement of the `1.25 lakh crore package, which was seen more as creating a larger than life demonstrative/mediatized effect rather than being an authentic strategy to address the underdevelopment of Bihar. Similarly, incidents of communal violence such as those in Dadri failed to polarize the electorate along religious lines, partly reflecting the fact that Bihar hasn’t witnessed a communal riot since the Bhagalpur riots in 1984, and that the agenda of social justice was inclusiveness of, at least, the physical security of Muslims, if not their social or economic upliftment. By the last phases of the campaign, Shah’s reference to ‘celebrations in Pakistan’ seemed completely out of sync with the mood of the electorate. This, in a sense, was a repeat of what happened with the Delhi polls (as argued in the previous chapter), where the BJP attempted a similar strategy of using the rhetoric of development in combination with, as it appears, sparking riots and organizing attacks against churches.6 It did not work then, and it did not work now. This brings into relief the significant issue that economic upliftment has to be combined with cultural space and a democratic atmosphere of dialogue and dissent. The ‘Gujarat Model’, perhaps, undermines other kinds of democratic aspirations to mere business-like transactions.

‘Bihari’ versus ‘Bahari’

The second significant issue that the BJP’s defeat brings forth is the question of leadership and representation. The advantage the BJP has is that, while other parties have reached a saturation point in the way they can accommodate leaders of different social groups and castes, it is still a relatively young party in many states and has the advantage of expanding and providing representation to leaders from different social backgrounds. In a federal set-up, this ideally should have been a huge advantage but the way the BJP managed it by projecting Modi and a virtual non-entity like Amit Shah as leaders haven’t touched base with the bulk of the electorate. It has instead been seen more as undermining the local and state-level leadership—reflected in the Bihari-Bahari debate. The potency of national leaders has a substantial effect on the ground when backed by strong regional leadership. This was partly the reason for the decline of the Congress in many states. The BJP seems to be replicating its top-heavy organizational model. It became clear that the Modi-Shah brand of politics was attempting to undermine and take credit where the BJP met with success and distance and blame local leaders, where it bit the dust. This was evident in the way the BJP changed strategy mid-polls by changing hoardings with the Modi-Shah duo. This was the failed strategy it adopted in Delhi, where in anticipation of an adverse result, they began to project Kiran Bedi as a leader. At the root, one could argue that the BJP’s leadership was suffering from a lack of imagination and ideas. In the previous year, there have been no striking schemes or policy shifts from the current dispensation. It has dabbled in changing the names of roads, of schemes, including renaming the Planning Commission as Niti Aayog, but what it perhaps failed to realize was that it needed an alternative vision, a new set of ideas to reinvigorate the aspirations of the electorate. What the BJP had done so far was replicate the model that returned Modi to power three successive times in Gujarat. However, India is not Gujarat. It is too regionally diversified to fit into any given model of politics. Each state and region has a rich history. It is imperative to make sense of these local sensibilities but whether that is possible for a party—led by the RSS—that believes in creating a

homogenous-majoritarian polity is the moot point that will await intriguing answers in times to come.

Survival Instincts or Suicidal? The Nitish-led government in alliance with Lalu’s RJD survived for 18 months before Nitish Kumar decided to join back with the BJP.7 Nitish seems to have sensed a threat to his political survival in his partnership with the RJD that has a larger cadre base and also a social base. The dilemma for Nitish Kumar was to remain relevant as a leader coming from the Kurmi community that constitues not more than 8% of the population. As suggested above, Nitish survived this challenge by fragmenting the OBCs and Dalits into smaller units, thereby laying a claim to provide the leadership and new social opportunities. This, however, continued to leave him vulnerable with Lalu already occupying the mantle of social justice. This dilemma of Nitish is similar to that of Kejriwal who, being a CM of a small state like Delhi, had national ambitions. This tension got clearly reflected in the way AAP botched up their electoral chances in Punjab. Kejriwal could not have opted for another prominent leader like Navjyoth Singh Sidhu as he would become the CM of a much larger state. At one stage, Kejriwal projected himself as the possible CM candidate of Punjab but it looks like this did not go down well with the people of Punjab. A similar dilemma was also faced by Mayawati, who disallowed the expansion of BSP outside Uttar Pradesh, in spite of a robust Dalit movement in many parts of the country. She, perhaps, felt handicapped at dealing with Dalit leaders from other parts and to stake a claim to the national leadership of Dalits. This inability to expand, yet survive, is a classical dilemma of Indian politics. Nitish Kumar who left the NDA when Modi was announced as their prime ministerial candidate went back to the same arrangement within 18 months in the government with Sushil Modi of the BJP returning as the deputy CM. Nitish Kumar felt this would check the rise of Lalu and on the other hand would disallow BJP from making inroads into the social groups

that he represents, after the bifurcation of Dalits and OBCs into smaller units. Whether this will prove to be suicidal or turn out to be a survival instinct depends on how the numbers will play out in coming elections in Bihar and for Lok Sabha. But what remains pertinent for our understanding is the role micro aspects play beyond generalized considerations in Indian elections. Populism is a political template that attempts to galvanize and symbolize the fragments and reintegrate them into a larger political narrative—fragmentation and integration are two constant impulses of Indian politics.

Populism and Caste Calculus in Uttar Pradesh

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he question that should really interest us in the outcome of the Uttar Pradesh elections is how the open-ended, universal, and ‘empty categories’ intrinsic to populism are being wedded to clinical, constituency-wise, sub-caste calculations. On the one hand, the BJP grounded its campaign on slogans such as ‘sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ signalling a new kind of politics that rises above caste and religion; on the other, it was an open fact that its president Amit Shah was inviting new leaders into the party fold based on caste calculations. He invited former chief minister Kalyan Singh to include the Lodhs; union minister Anupriya Patel to attract the Kurmis, Rajbhars, Nishads, and Kushwahas; and UP BJP Keshav Prasad Maurya to woo the OBCs. In spite of this kind of a micro-calculation of including various kinds of smaller OBC and Dalit sub-castes, the BJP maintained a steadfast campaign that was based on a more universal appeal such as demonetization, which was supposed to mobilize the poor against the rich, cutting across castes. In an inverted logic, the party claimed to be above sectoral appeal by not offering a single ticket to the Muslims, in order to consolidate a more generic Hindu vote.8 The BJP would like to work with a system of representation where power sharing and participation are judged in terms of citizens as recipients of policies, not participants in the decision making.

Fragmentation and Fraternity

The most significant fact of BJP’s strategy was to combine the more universal ‘us versus them’ kind of divisions to create a new type of political language that operationalizes the old constituency-based identity politics infused with a new meaning. Through demonetization, it created a poor versus rich kind of binary, and by not offering tickets to Muslims, it created the old Hindu versus Muslim type of a polarization. Further, with its rhetoric against the Congress, it created the ‘past versus future’ kind of separation, with Narendra Modi projected as a decisive leader. In other words, BJP is setting a fresh agenda for the nation and designing new strategies to fight poverty. Within these broad rubrics, the BJP played the hard ball with minute caste calculations including the leaders of various non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. This new kind of combination acknowledges the inclusion of smaller castes beyond the old kind of patron-client relation. The smaller sub-castes were in a patron-client relation and dependent on the more powerful subcastes within both the Dalits and the OBCs. The BJP’s inclusion of smaller Dalit and OBC castes articulated the already existing discontent among the lesser- privileged castes. This certainly is a more inclusive politics, deepening the process of representation without acknowledging it, and thereby projecting it as if it was not based on mere caste calculations. However, in fact, it was providing new opportunities to those who were denied this previously. They were deepening the representation even as they denied this logic when it came to the Muslims, which allowed them to tone the caste-calculations in the Hindutva kind of imageries and rhetoric. It was Hindus being included and not merely Dalits or the OBCs. It was the lesser-privileged, poorer social groups being included, not merely castes. The BJP managed to further invert the old kind of communal polarization this time by raising the issue of triple talaq, which ostensibly meant to mobilize the cause of Muslim women. The party was attempting a double inversion: it was, on the one hand, ostracizing the Muslims while on the other, it was mobilizing the subordinate groups within the Muslims. It should not be a surprise if the BJP appeals to the Pasmanda Muslims during the next Lok Sabha elections

in UP. Its strategy was based on the limitations of the old kind of the social justice based on the larger categories of Dalit and the OBCs. It looks like both these categories would soon be of lesser relevance for active electoral mobilization. The intra-subaltern conflicts and differences are now in the open, also reflecting the fluidity or what we earlier referred to as ‘flexibilization of caste-based politics’.

Subalternation of the Right Nitish Kumar’s model discussed in the previous chapter, with regard to Bihar, was replicated by the BJP in UP. Caste groups today are fluid and can align with any party that can offer them representation. While SP and BSP became reduced to a single-caste parties that were attempting to add other castes to their kitty, the BJP was in this sense beyond caste, without being identified with any single caste. All those issues which the old kind of secular politics that became sectarian could not address, the BJP is articulating and giving a new spin. This precisely was the difference and the reason why the BJP lost in Bihar, in spite of following a similar strategy. Chief Minister and JD(U) president Nitish Kumar had sensed, as we mapped in the previous chapter, it early, and in the name of second generation social justice politics, started addressing this issue of intrasubaltern discrimination by reaching out to EBC (Extremely Backward Castes) and Maha Dalits (Most Backward Dalits). The BJP, despite best efforts, could not put in place a working coalition of these caste groups around Modi’s leadership. The more populist slogans of the BJP around development and projecting Modi as the strongman were subverted by the equally populist binary of ‘Bahari versus Bihari’ by Nitish Kumar’s campaign. Also, it was significant that Nitish belonged to a caste smaller in number but had greater credibility in Bihar. It was a trade-off that was seen as a win-win situation for both Nitish and Lalu. This was not possible in UP between SP and BSP, both due to leadership issues as well as the sharper conflict between the Yadavs and the Jatavs. The terrain of politics has moved to sharpen intra-

subaltern conflicts that needs a political articulation, which is what the SPBSP alliance sought to correct in their coming together for the by-polls in Uttar Pradesh. With this, they managed to wrest the safe bastion of Yogi in Gorakhpur.9 It is an irony of Indian democracy that more inclusion is being initiated by a party that is known to be socially conservative and politically authoritarian. The Hindutva politics in India, through UP, has signalled more subalternization of political representation. In no small measure, this was the decisive shift in the strategy of the BJP after electing Narendra Modi from an OBC background as its leader.

Telangana: The Question of Internal Colonization

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ormation of a separate state of Telangana in 2014 was a very difficult decision to take. It meant siding with a political group that was weaker in terms of money power and political presence. All the lobbying by the Joint Action Committee in the heyday of the Telangana movement could have been scuttled, even if not very easily. It needed an extraordinary sense of history and some sense of justice for the decision to be taken against a very powerful lobby run by the leaders of coastal Andhra. However, the lack of clarity on why Telangana was created and whether or not this was the best way to resolve the long-standing complaint of backwardness and ‘internal colonization’ is perhaps apparent in the manner in which the Congress party went about it once it decided to create a separate state of Telangana. Jairam Ramesh, in his book, Old Histories, New Geographies provides an account of how the decisions regarding the modalities of bifurcation came to be taken. While there is some acknowledgment that his party recognized the backwardness of Telangana, the process he narrates and the decisions that came to be taken do not, however, seem to be guided by the commitment to undoing a historical wrong. The decisions seem to have been taken by treating Telangana and coastal Andhra at par. What, then, was the pressure to form a separate state? This, in a sense, gets reflected in Ramesh’s concluding observation that, ‘In the successor state of Andhra Pradesh, I am still considered a villain and

in the state of Telangana, I am believed to have bent over backwards to appease Seemandhra sentiments’.10 This is a rather candid admission, which was reflected in the political fortunes of the Congress in the assembly elections in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014. The party was nearly wiped out in Andhra Pradesh and fared worse than expected in Telangana.

Demand for a Separate State The nuts and bolts narration in this book sheds light on how tenuous the situation was—even after a long period of consultations. There was a possibility that the decision could fail to come through at many stages, including when a Congress MP decided to use pepper spray to disturb the proceedings. Ramesh narrates quite a few interesting incidents where he had to convince his own party members, who were up in arms, both inside and outside Parliament. In one particular incident, BJP’s Venkaiah Naidu decided to move three or four amendments to the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill, 2014, in the Rajya Sabha. Ramesh writes, ‘My heart sank when I heard this. If these amendments were to pass, the government would be in a serious bind and we would have to go back to the Lok Sabha for approval. And there was no time for that’.11 He further sheds light on the various meetings that took place as part of the working of the GoM. The proceedings included debates on special status to Andhra Pradesh, role and powers of the governor, status of Hyderabad, education and Article 371-D, Polavaram dam and issues of displacement, managing water resources, and internal security concerns. Here, one gets a sense of the opposing concerns and claims and how the Group of Ministers (GoM) managed to arrive at a decision. Given the birth pangs that the formation of the state underwent, it is only imperative to ask if the issue of backwardness got addressed with the formation of Telangana. Did it meet the demands and expectations of the various social groups who

aspired for a smaller state? Do smaller states lead to more equality or even a better quality of life for the majority of population groups?

How Is Telangana Doing? The state was formed after a prolonged agitation and popular protest, largely as a fall out of the deep agrarian crisis, growing unemployment, and cultural denigration. We need to ask how Telangana is doing now. The most visible change has been in the situation regarding power supply. The power supply that was not only irregular but also contributed to the agrarian crisis has improved dramatically. Today, all villages get uninterrupted power supply to the households and for six hours for the agricultural purposes, which the new government has promised to increase to nine in the next few months and 24/7 free from 2018 onwards. The government, immediately after assuming power, announced a loan waiver up to `1 lakh per family. However, this was waived in instalments of 25% every six months. According to the farmers that I met in course of a survey, this has not really helped them to get rid of the loans, and instead, they continue to reel under debts as most of the waiver is being used to pay the interests and the principal amount is being repaid only partially in small amounts. Further, they pointed out that there is no policy for providing support price or subsidies on inputs such as fertilizers, and no compensation being provided for crop failure.

Agrarian Crisis Water continues to be a major problem in much of Telangana. Most of the projects are either contested in the water tribunal, or many of the pending ones have not been cleared or completed. The government has instead taken up the project called ‘Mission Kakatiya’ under which old lakes, ponds, and other water bodies that had dried up are re-dug, hoping that a good monsoon will fill them up. In a few districts, free borewells are being supplied but the ground water level is too low (in most cases bores go as deep as 800 metre to strike water). Similarly, under ‘Mission Bhagiratha’,

the Telengana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government has promised to provide tap water for every household. Labour and wages remain the other major problems in the agrarian sector. While wages have not risen for the landless after the formation of Telangana, farmers holding land continue to complain about the lack of the availability of labour making agriculture untenable. Many of the farmers now demand that the labour under the rural job scheme (MNREGA) needs to be shifted for agricultural purposes instead of other developmental activities, which they believe in any case, are not of much use. The policy of Re 1 per kg rice scheme with 6 kg of rice per person is a very effective scheme providing great relief to the BPL families. Along with the rice scheme, the government’s pension scheme is also popular in the rural hinterlands of Telangana. The new government has increased the pension amount from `200 to `1,000. In the last one year, after the formation of Telangana, close to 900 farmers have committed suicides, next only to Maharashtra where 2,568 farmers committed suicide. The agrarian crisis was the single most important reason why the demand for Telangana erupted. Questions need to be raised if it continues to be of priority for the new government. While it has disbursed a range of welfare-oriented policies (much of which are a continuation of the policies formulated by the previous Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s government), the agrarian crisis is yet to be averted and it needs some pressing and fast-paced steps from the government to stop further suicides.

Populist Policies Similarly, alongside the farmers are the Muslims, the other social group that remains marginalized in Telangana. Under the YSR government, Muslims were awarded 4% reservation as part of the OBC reservations. The TRS government has promised to enhance it to 12%. The Subramanium Committee, instituted in 2007, had identified 28 groups out of which 14 groups were made ineligible for reservation due to their superior social status, including sects such as Sheiks, Sayeeds, and Pathans.

These, in a sense, are perhaps the few communities that can afford higher education but having been denied the provision of reservation, we find almost 80% dropouts among Muslims. There is an impending need to provide educational loans and build social welfare hostels, which contributed in a big way towards improving literacy among the SC/STs. The most popular policy that has struck a chord among the Muslims is ‘Shaadi Mubarak’ where the government offers `50,000 to perform the marriage of girls from the economically weaker sections (the Hindu counterpart ‘Kalyana Laxmi’, with similar grant). Most of the Muslims continue to be self-employed and without landholding in the rural hinterlands of Telangana. They continue to live under conditions of social segregation, fear, and many a time are implicated in false cases of crime. Culturally, Telangana had a strong Sufi tradition, and even today, besides Muslims, a large number of Hindus visit dargahs. Perhaps, political parties such as the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) are not the best representatives of this tradition. It is a literal everyday tussle between the social and political worlds. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao performed Chandi Yaga at a whopping cost of ?7 crore. In order to balance his pro-Muslim policies, he has also appointed a Muslim as the deputy chief minister (CM). It is also a move to capture the space that the BJP-RSS combine has been laboriously building with manufactured issues of Charminar being built over the destruction of a temple and recalling the memory of Nizam’s rule and role of Razakars in wantonly using physical force against the Hindus. Smaller states like Telangana have given an immediate relief but the major issues remain the same as in any other state, including the issue of farmer suicides, jobless growth, and growing economic inequality between social groups and regions. Today in Telangana, farmers and students are the unhappy lot. Current TRS government has an ongoing conflict with the students of Osmania University who were the backbone of the struggle for a separate state. Smaller states have also weakened the federal set-up instead of strengthening it. It has led to a strong centre and weak states undermining their bargaining capacity depending on their financial clout

and the number of Members of parliament (MPs) they send to the parliament. This is true of Andhra Pradesh too that has been struggling for a ‘special status’. Smaller states work in halting the centralization of capital and wealth among a few castes, and it redistributes the wealth within the regional elite and creates nominal opportunities for the rural and urban poor. It shifts the hold from ‘internal colonization’ of one region over the other but seems to have no means of addressing more structural of issues. Why is it that in spite of colonization being questioned, it does not yield to an alternative model of development? The question of ‘internal colonization’ remains a very relevant issue in India since the days of reorganization of states.

Kashmir: Is It Also a Question of Internal Colonization?

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ashmir has remained in turmoil and simmering since the current regime under Mr Modi took over the reins in the centre. It remains central to the agenda and strategy of Hindutva in the rest of India. What has been the dominant mood in the valley under the current regime? And what has been the ‘Kashmir policy’ of the BJP? Why did the BJP align with a pro-separatist party such as the PDP and why did the alliance not last its full term? What was the nature of the hidden tension between the PDP and the BJP that eventually led to the dissolution of this unlikely coalition? In many senses, the mood in all these states tells us about the direction of democracy in India. In a survey, that I carried out in Kashmir Valley, after the coalition government of BJP-PDP took over, we found a few surprising opinions (add the details of the survey here). Jammu & Kashmir held assembly elections in November-December 2014, soon after the BJP formed the government at the centre in May. The elections witnessed an unprecedented turnout. The BJP swept Jammu region with 25 seats but failed to open its account in the Valley. Afterwards, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the BJP, most unlikely of partners, came together to set up a coalition government. In the Valley, the overwhelming agenda was to defeat the BJP, which the electorate succeeded in doing, with most BJP candidates losing their deposits. The post-poll BJP-PDP alliance, however, has been seen in far more pragmatic terms by the people of Kashmir. It is interesting that while a majority in the Valley sees the BJP as

a ‘Hindu’ party, they nevertheless think that Kashmir can benefit in terms of development and governance with the BJP in power. In fact, a majority said that having close ties with a party in power in the Centre would benefit the Valley. The stance is partly because the Valley has a Muslim majority, whose confidence in PDP and Mufti Sayeed as a ‘local person’, responsive to ‘local sentiments’, is strong. It is also partly the result of fatigue with militancy and a perceptible decline in pro-Pakistan sentiments.

Voices from the Valley The majority of those surveyed saw Pakistan as a ‘failed state’ and said that Kashmir could not afford to align its future with it. At the same time, however, most of them staunchly supported Article 370 and were confident that the BJP would not tamper with it. One middle-aged gentleman said, ‘Duniya ki koyi taqat Article 370 ko hata nahi sakthi. Jo ye hateyenge, us waqat inquilab ayega’ (No force in the world can remove Article 370. Whoever removes it will face an uprising.) Many said the force of the response to any attempt to remove Article 370 would be bloodier than 2008 when the Valley saw the violent ‘Ragdo Ragdo’ protest against allotment of land to Amarnath pilgrims. A surprising majority of respondents said that Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) might actually be necessary but that it should be restricted to border areas rather than used indiscriminately. Many expressed anguish about the relevance of the provision in Srinagar. Many of them said they felt a deep sense of ill treatment when they are repeatedly checked and asked for identity cards ‘in their own home’. The issue appears to be one more of dignity than of full-stinted support for militancy. (The mood-of-theelectorate survey, using a semi-structured questionnaire, was conducted across seven districts of Kashmir. Nearly 150 people, from students and vendors to professionals and businessmen, were interviewed over one week.) This, however, does not mean there is any decline in the support for azadi (freedom). Almost all the people we spoke to argue in favour of

azadi, which they translated as self-determination for Kashmir and Kashmiris. It had layered meanings and multiple articulations, including a desire for an ‘Islamic state’, especially among the youth, who have very little memory of the grand tradition of Kashmiriyat and composite lives with Pandits and other communities. For these young people, the Valley essentially belongs to Muslims, and they had very little knowledge of the Pandits or what they had suffered in the 1990s. A majority thought the Pandits represented India and the humiliation that comes with it. It was the older generation who said that Kashmir was incomplete without the Pandits, and, in fact, that education in the Valley had suffered after the Pandits left. From the survey, we gauged the essential mood in the Valley as one between pragmatic understanding and a deep sense of hurt and distance from ‘mainland’ India. While they see the need for development and for jobs for their young people and therefore, the advantage of moving closer to India, they also resent the way local people are treated. For instance, many respondents expressed anger and resentment against the hanging of Afzal Guru, arguing that it was patently wrong, that he was not a terrorist, and that his hanging and the refusal to return his body to the family violated the norms. Similarly, many respondents said that the release of Masrat Alam was justified, as he was not involved in terrorist activities but represented the popular mood of the Valley by organizing protest rallies. The ball, it seems, is now in the court of ‘mainland’ India. The Centre should have carefully treaded between these opposing sentiments in the Valley. It could do so by encouraging dialogue and putting an end to exceptional methods in the State. (The mood-of-the-electorate survey, using a semi-structured questionnaire, was conducted across seven districts of Kashmir. Nearly 150 people, from students and vendors to professionals and businessmen, were interviewed over one week.)

What Is BJP’s Kashmir Policy?

As stated earlier, Kashmir has remained in the headlines all through the Modi regime. It began with the killing of Burhan Wani, followed by surgical strikes in Uri (and Pathankot in neighbouring Punjab), the house arrest of Pervez Khurram, and increased stone pelting. It then moved on with the events of the video of a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawan being heckled and then the photos of a Kashmiri being tied to the jeep also going viral, finally culminating in the statement by the union home minister Rajnath Singh that the government will announce a policy frame for ‘final settlement’ of the Kashmir problem. If the issue survives and keeps hogging the headlines, will it be the contentious issue on which the BJP will fight the general elections in 2019? Kashmir is one issue that holds a pan-India appeal and a chronic crisis in the Valley and a growing threat of its secession from India will create the anxiety that can consolidate the support for the BJP. Kashmir is an emotive issue that has the potential to sideline all other issues including that of development, growing unemployment and inflation, dipping Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the agrarian crisis. It is an issue that combines nationalism with communalism. The media and the response from the government has gradually built a common sentiment that while India is tolerant and willing for a dialogue and also develop Kashmir, it is Kashmiris who are unreasonable, unrelenting, and intolerant, because the demand grows from a growing Islamic sentiment; rising stone pelting, growing militancy from across the border, a palpable support to it and early signs of a rising Wahhabism and Salafism replacing the more tolerant SufiKashmiriyat stand testimony for this.

Sufism to Salafism? In the popular imagination, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced development packages and inaugurated new roads, the topper in the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) was a Kashmiri a few years ago. and 14 of them got selected in 2017. Further, Modi seems to have made concerted efforts to extend a meaningful hand of friendship with Pakistan;

made friendly overtures by visiting his counterpart Nawaz Sharif’s family event; shook hands; spoke to him in international gatherings and even presented a shawl to his mother, which was reciprocated with a saree for Modi’s mother by Nawaz Sharif.12 In return, what we are getting back are militant attacks, sustained conspiracies, unrelenting Kashmiris refusing to dialogues—a tolerant India being repeatedly rejected and insulted by the Kashmiri leadership aided by Pakistan. The way leading postcolonial scholar Partha Chatterjee had been hounded and reprimanded for his argument—that tying up of a Kashmiri to the jeep is the ‘Gen Dyer’ moment of post-Independent India—is a case in point.13 Not many bothered to read the critique of Chatterjee of the Pakistani Army in the same article, and it remained willfully ignored. The conflict and the crisis are simmering even as more than 100 chapters of the Jammu and Kashmir study forums have been launched more than two years ago across India. These forums are being used to project a sustained version of how Kashmir was a Hindu land that witnessed mass conversions and has henceforth displaced the Pandits. This narrative eventually has the potential to recreate a consolidated Hindu sentiment that overlaps with hyper nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment across India.14 What then could be the permanent solution that the home minister Rajnath Singh was referring to?15

Hurriyat Ban? Could it mean banning of the Hurriyat? Or arrest of its leaders, including hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani? And an attempt to repeal Article 370? Or a repeal of Article 35(A)? If any of these steps were to be taken by the current dispensation, the Valley will erupt in unprecedented violence, dividing the nation vertically into those who wish to stand for an integrated India and those who wish to aid in weakening it. It is precisely around these issues that the BJP broke the alliance with the PDP. They argued that there is a growing radicalization in the valley and that the PDP is doing precious little.

In such a scenario, even the liberal constitutionalists would feel the pressure to stand by a dispensation—that is fighting a tough battle in Kashmir. Going in for a general election in such an atmosphere can only be best left to the imagination of the readers. Can Kashmir be handled differently? In my own survey that I elaborated on in the previous section, many responded by saying that there is nothing much left in Pakistan other than ‘bomb blasts’. There is much less support to the militancy in comparison with the 1990s, and many of them, especially the older generation, see militancy as eroding the social life while offering no palpable solution. However, many will have a problem with remaining as a part of India, but this is, however, on the issue of autonomy and dignity and not essentially on religious grounds. Religion plays a role to the point of becoming the medium and the matrix of the dissent and disenchantment in the Valley. When young men waive the flags of the terror group Islamic State (IS), it is more to create anxiety and hurt the sentiments in India than a belief in its ideology. This, however, does not mean the young Kashmiris do not have the potential to move towards making Kashmir a religiousfundamentalist/religious-nationalist demand from that of its current demand for self-determination. This, to a large extent, depends on how we engage with Kashmir and treat them as citizens and not subjects of a history denied.

Kashmiri Pandits: Precariats of Indian Democracy

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ashmiri Pandits have emerged as the new precariats of the Indian democracy. The proposal by the BJP to set up separate zones for Kashmiri Pandits to facilitate their return to the Valley is creating more anxiety than opportunities to heal old wounds.16 Although the PDP— BJP’s coalition partner in Jammu and Kashmir—initially supported the proposal, it eventually retracted from it, sensing the hostile reaction from Kashmiri Muslims and other political forces. There is an apprehension that rather than bringing the Pandits and the Muslims together, this move will create a situation like that in Palestine. It is against this perceived ploy that Hurriyat and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) called for a shutdown in the Valley on 11 April 2015. The shutdown is also seen as an objection to any renewed claim that India might make over Kashmir in the name of the Pandits. The 1990 displacement of Pandits is still a contested idea for many in the Valley. The Pandits feel it was mainly due to militants with silent support from the local Muslim population, who did not come forward to protect them even if they were not actively involved in the hate campaign. Kashmiri Muslims who debate this issue, however, feel that Pandits left of their own accord and contend that it was part of a planned move by then Governor Jagmohan, who ensured there was no significant threat to the minorities. The proof of this is cited in the perfectly ‘normal’ and safe lives that the Pandits who stayed back in the Valley lead, by which they mean as secure or insecure as that of the non-Pandit population.

Local Pandits versus Camp Pandits What the five-decade-long conflict in Kashmir has meant for the Pandits raises intriguing questions for India as a democracy. Despite being a minority in the Valley, they are considered part of the ‘majority’ in the rest of India. But this socially privileged group—both in religious and caste terms—continue to face hardship in living the lives of migrants. It is imperative to note that Kashmiri Pandits are no longer a homogeneous group that imagines a shared future together. It is widely perceived that those who were economically poor stayed back, and it was the well-off who could afford to migrate. Today, the Pandits are divided in the Valley between migrants who stay in camps and those who reside with the rest of the majority Muslim population in the towns and the villages. Pandits living in the camps are perhaps the worst-off, with little freedom to move around, and suffer from a sense of anxiety. They returned to the Valley as part of the prime minister’s relief and rehabilitation package, announced in 2008, to resettle them by offering jobs. However, local Muslims and Pandits who had stayed back treat them with suspicion. The resettled Pandits often refuse to make a distinction between the militants and the locals, since many who joined the ranks of the militants had come from villages and towns in Kashmir, and not from Pakistan. While the local Pandits feel that these migrants get benefits and privileges and they do not, Muslims believe that the majority Hindu population of India by and large harbours a false idea of Muslims in the Valley as being fundamentalists, and even terrorists. The local Pandits see the Pandits in the camps as part of that majority. The local Pandits feel that they are left with no narrative of their own, in spite of continuing to hold on to their Hindu identity and preserving the local temples, while those who migrated are counted as victims despite doing well for themselves. As a corrective measure, the state government in 2012 announced an employment package for the Pandits who chose not to leave the Valley. These endemic divisions within the community tell us about the effects of violence, militancy, and territorial rule, essentially

through extrajudicial mechanisms. The loss of a coherent narrative for the Pandit community that comes close to self-blame is a historical tragedy of no small proportion, which is what I referred to as ‘intractable symbolism’ in the ‘Introduction’.

Pandits Symbolize India In many senses, Pandits in the Valley camps have become the representatives of India and its army for many, and thereby sometimes attract the ire of the local Muslim population. It has been established that today, the divide between the Muslims and the Pandits is more political than religious. Many Pandits continue to believe that Muslims on a personal level are warm and friendly but are a ‘different lot’ at the level of the community. This idea of the community is essentially constructed through available political discourses, and in that Pandits in the Valley have positioned themselves against the majority Muslim population. They, therefore, believe that scrapping Article 370 would allow more Hindus to buy land in the Valley and change the demography of the place. Similarly, they perceive the Indian Army as being friendly to the Pandit population, especially those in the camps. This counter-narrative of the Pandit population continues to provide the support necessary for the statist discourse of exceptionalism, and Pandits remain the precarious symbols of why such strategies remain relevant.

Kashmiriyat to Radical Islamization In other words, Kashmiri Pandits constructed a discourse that is in opposition to the popular sentiments of the region—the hurts and grievances of the majority Muslim population. This, in turn, has triggered off a process of Islamization, only furthering the difference in identities and gradually smudging the gap between a political and a religious divide in the Valley. The majority Muslim population is visibly moving from a culture of Kashmiriyat to perceiving a need for an Islamic state, one with the implementation of Sharia and special status of Islam in the Valley.17 Radical

Islamization is perceptibly more pronounced among the younger generation of Kashmiri Muslims who have taken little interest in what the Pandits had to undergo. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the majority of youth, who have become the face of the protests in Kashmir, begin to believe that Pandits no longer belong there. The latest proposal by the BJP to create separate zones for Pandits might trigger a point of no-return for both communities. Much of Right-wing political mobilization remains in maintaining this enduring gap between communities and drawing the fault lines between ‘us versus them’. In this dependence of redrawing the political map in India, for Right-wing populists, Kashmiri Pandits are of the most significant symbolism. Suggesting the settlement of the Pandits in separate camps is a continuation of this deep-rooted populist strategy. The question that however remains unaddressed is whether populists are only building on the silent hiatus that existed all through Kashmir’s history, and were not being ‘invented’ by the populists. It is somewhat similar to debate after the Partition, as to whether the British constructed the enmity between the Hindus and the Muslims or built on the tensions and conflicts that had already existed between the communities. ‘Two Nation Theory’ did not emerge from the ‘Divide and Rule’, but it could well be the other way round, which calls for a more deep-rooted understanding of history rather than a political colouring of a difficult narrative. This complexity of the historical memory remains a strong source for populism in India.

Of What Value Is NOTA?

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odes of protest have been changing across the globe. Long-term protests have been replaced by short-term and explosive ones, and organized struggles by spontaneous and issue-based movements. To add to this is the provision of NOTA in India as part of the electoral process, that allows voters to protest by refusing to give their vote to any of the candidates seeking election. What type of a protest is NOTA? What purpose does it serve? NOTA was used for the first time in the 2013 assembly elections in five states—Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Madhya Pradesh— and later in the 2014 General Elections. It was introduced into the electoral process following the 2013 Supreme Court Directive in PUCL versus Union of India. The Supreme Court reasoned that the NOTA option would allow voters to express their discontent with the political parties and the candidates they put up and thus help cleanse the political system. According to a bench headed by then Chief Justice of India P. Sathasivam, ‘Negative voting will lead to a systemic change in polls and political parties will be forced to project clean candidates. If the right to vote is a statutory right, then the right to reject a candidate is a fundamental right of speech and expression under the Constitution’.18 Further, NOTA has been extended by the Supreme Court to the elections to the Rajya Sabha, refusing the Congress Party’s plea to stay it.19 NOTA has no electoral value in our system. Even if the maximum votes are polled in favour of NOTA, the candidate with the largest number of votes, which could theoretically even be just one vote, will still be declared

elected. The Supreme Court is of the opinion that despite NOTA not having an electoral value, it is still a very significant tool for citizens to express their discontent which will, in turn, it hopes, cleanse the system. It is also seen as a tool for the marginalized groups to highlight their issues that would not otherwise find space in the mainstream electoral discourse. For instance, women activists in Kerala campaigned for the use of NOTA if no women were fielded as candidates. Similarly, youth activists in Tamil Nadu campaigned for the use of NOTA as a protest against growing corruption. More recently, in the context of elections in Gujarat, parents threatened to vote NOTA as a protest against growing fee hikes in schools and colleges.20

Civil Disobedience or Liberal Constitutionalism? This rather unusual nature of protest that NOTA allows for raises interesting questions for us to understand the changes in Indian democracy, the way it is being perceived and practised. NOTA presents a paradox for Indian democracy. It signifies participation in the electoral process but also allows growing discontent with all that it entails—political parties, politicians, and their politics. This paradox between participation and discontent is important to understand in some detail to know how NOTA is being used and perceived by voters and by political representatives. What do the voters seem to trust in their willingness to vote, and what are they unhappy about in opting for NOTA? Who do they think will correct the maladies that they wish to highlight by choosing NOTA? NOTA is a provision for protest within the limits of liberal constitutionalism, unlike the other modes of protest, such as the boycott of elections that has been used mostly in conflict zones such as Kashmir, the Northeast or by the militant Left wing parties such as the Maoists in Central India. For instance, in the last elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the maximum number of voters who opted for NOTA was in the Banihal constituency (2,405 voters), followed by 1,641 voters in Bandipura, Kashmir. While the lowest use of NOTA was in Nubra assembly segment of Leh district. Further, the number of voters using NOTA option was higher in the assembly polls than in the

parliamentary elections of 2014. While 31,550 voters used NOTA in the Lok Sabha polls, 49,000 voters used it in the assembly elections. During the parliamentary elections, Udhampur-Doda constituency in Kashmir witnessed the highest number of voters who used NOTA, followed by Anantnag constituency, while Ladakh witnessed the lowest use of NOTA.

A Boycott of Polls or NOTA? What do we make of this pattern? Can NOTA become an effective alternative to boycott of polls in Kashmir and other conflict zones? Does providing the option of NOTA, therefore, strengthen the interest of the voters in Kashmir in the electoral process? Or does it provide too weak an option, given the insurmountable problems that people face in conflict zones or elsewhere? Does it not make more sense to empower NOTA by cancelling elections in constituencies where NOTA polls the highest votes, to be followed up by other deliberative processes to highlight the corrective measures to be put in place and to make the representative process more robust and effective? If such amendments to the electoral process are not to be made, then the Indian democracy will be more susceptible to the phenomenon of strongmen that we are currently witnessing, where voters are compelled to depend on individual personality cults to deliver where institutions are failing them. There will be more calls for ‘direct democracy’, undermining the representative process and relying more on bureaucratic interventions of unelected and self-appointed representatives, which could also include judicial overreach. Instead of expanding the efficacy of such provisions as NOTA, what we are witnessing are strategies such as the Gujarat Local Authorities Act (Amendment) 2009, where voting for the local bodies was sought to be made compulsory at the pain of penalty for not doing so. Thankfully, the Gujarat High Court stayed the legislation, arguing that ‘the right to vote itself provides the right to refrain from voting’.21 Instead of a deliberative process, such provisions seek to criminalize discontent and protest. And

without protest, as we have witnessed, liberal democracies are barely responsive and functional in our part of the world.

Towards 2019: Opposition Needs to Rally Behind Mayawati

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orakhpur by-elections have set the tone for 2019. The results are important not only for the SP and the BSP coming together but this alliance has also thrown up the feasibility of a united opposition and lent it credibility. However, the opposition lacks both a credible leader and a sustained narrative that makes the opposition more than merely antiModi solidarity. This is where the opposition needs to rally around Mayawati as the face of the opposition. This will offer both a credible leader and a narrative that has the potential to push the BJP on the back foot. A united opposition with Mayawati as the face offers a narrative of social justice with the possibility of electing a woman-Dalit leader for the first time as the possible Prime Minister of the country. Having Mayawati will negate the criticism that opposition is either merely an anti-Modi brigade or a mumbo-jumbo without any clear direction. Further, with Mayawati in opposition to Mr Modi, Modi would not make it a presidential kind of contest as he can no longer make a claim to belonging to a lower caste as against the dynasty-based entitlement of Rahul Gandhi or any other leader from the upper echelons on the society. Most importantly, this will rob Modi and his entourage of the oratory advantage by creating a strong rhetoric against the opposition, as any attack personal or otherwise will work against Modi. He will necessarily have to be guarded in the choice of his words or claims he makes. Consider the facts that while the story

against Manmohan Singh in the Gujarat elections might have earned Modi some brownie points even though it was a botched-up claim but hidden beneath it was a rhetoric against Muslims and also Lutyens Delhi.22 Contrast this with the rhetoric of Yogi in referring to the alliance of SP-BSP as one of ‘saap and chechunder’ clearly went against him. It made him look, whether intended or not, as casteist and undoubtedly helped ease the unity between backward classes and the Dalits.23 A strategy that Modi used when Mani Shankar Aiyer referred to him as Neech but which Modi extrapolated to mean Neech Jaatyi. Given the motor mouths in the BJP, it would be difficult for the BJP to hide the caste prejudices that exist amidst them. With Mayawati as the face of the opposition, Modi will be denied both the gift of the gab and the advantage he wishes to have in a Presidential kind of a contest.

Unity with a Face Further, projecting Mayawati will provide the Opposition a credible narrative for deepening democracy in supporting a Dalit leader. This will work to the advantage of various regional parties in consolidating the Dalit voters in their own states. Especially for the Congress, which often reminded of the respect it offered Ambedkar, including the fact that Nehru invited him to join the cabinet and head the Constitution-making process in spite of his differences with the Congress. This will be the second watershed moment for the national party that will go down in history for enabling the process of making a Dalit woman for the first time the Prime Minister of the country. This will, to some extent, also checkmate Amit Shah’s strategy of drawing on Dalit voters in different states. The Congress Party and Rahul Gandhi may not be a serious contender for the top post as the Congress may not get the required seats and for Rahul to head a government with a large coalition may not work to his advantage in emerging as a formidable leader. The Congress already has the precedent of Sonia Gandhi offering the post to Dr Manmohan Singh which in fact consolidated her hold over the Congress and blunted BJP’s criticism of a

‘foreigner’ taking over the reins. This move will, in all probability, have similar impact in making over the image of Rahul Gandhi as a leader with purpose and concern for social justice. For all other regional parties, including the Left accepting Mayawati as a leader will be far more feasible than any other leader. For the Left, this will provide them with the historical opportunity to prove to the Dalits their preparedness to work under the leadership of the Dalits, which has been a long-standing grouse of various Dalit groups against the Left. It will also provide the Left a credible reasoning for joining the opposition that they are currently hesitant about with the Congress at the helm of the affairs. Left-Dalit unity becomes a far more realistic programme with the Left actively supporting and campaigning for Mayawati as the leader of the opposition. For the various regional parties, Mayawati poses a far less of a challenge than any other leader. She has no presence in the states that regional parties would contest, unlike the Congress with whom they have a direct competition in many of the states. The key for the opposition unity this time around, unlike the previous times, needs a leader rather than look like a loose coalition of parties that would start bickering soon after forming the government. The memory of the Janata government after the Emergency and later in the 90s still haunts the coalition politics. A unity under a single leader with a strong social justice motive will also lend the necessary image of stable governance. Stability continues to be an important issue that opposition needs to factor in; otherwise Modi can well make it a strong point of his campaign and the electorate might prefer to give Modi a second chance rather than take a chance with an unstable government that would have impact on the economy and also a repeat of the ‘policy paralysis’ witnessed under The UPA-II. With the Telegu Desham Party (TDP) pulling out of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Yuvajana Shramika Rythu Congress (YSR Congress) moving the no-confidence motion, the possibility of an exodus from the NDA had gained momentum. Instead of a non-Congress and nonBJP alternative, that is far riskier in terms of electoral arithmetic, a unified opposition that many parties are looking for in order to get reprieve from

the current regime that has not hesitated to target the various regional leaders who have opposed the current regime stands a much better chance. Adversity can create its own set of opportunities—and the current impasse with grave threats to democracy itself with the undermining of institutional autonomy and opposition of every kind the alternative of rallying behind a more palpable alternative—makes it far more realistic. Indian democracy has been robust in terms of its political dynamism, which has not often translated into social mobility or cohesion between various castes and religious groups. While a united opposition rallying behind Mayawati may not as yet bridge that yawning gap between the political and social dimensions of democracy, it will nevertheless provide an entry point to revisit that question, and this alone can effectively counter an otherwise popular strategy of creating a unified Hindu nation that in essence means a halt to institutionalizing the lived diversity of India, which necessarily undermines the autonomy of the regional players and the diversity they represent.

BJP’s Strategy for 2019

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s we move closer to the next general election, BJP seems to be refashioning its strategy to gear up to the challenge of 2019 with a much-reduced credibility. For 2014, it employed a more Congressstyle accommodative politics within the larger grid of a populist strategy, creating a narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’—essentially to target the religious minorities and portray them as the outsiders. This was coupled with the credibility crisis facing the Congress. The party also had the advantage of Narendra Modi’s image, who at the time, was seen as a decisive leader who could deliver dramatic results. Many of these advantages are now on the wane. Modi is no longer considered infallible, even if his abilities to deliver are suspect. Congress— even if half-heartedly—is gaining momentum and finding a foothold in creating a narrative that can hold some interest. BJP realizes it cannot repeat the magic figures in much of north India, and also perhaps in the west. The initial strategy was to compensate the loss with some compensation in the east, spreading to Bengal and other parts of the northeastern states. Similarly, BJP wished to spread its hold in the southern states too. Both of these strategies proved to be non-starters.

Southern Sojourn BJP failed to gain credibility in the south. In Tamil Nadu, the fiasco that followed the death of J. Jayalalitha and the witch-hunting of Congress leaders hasn’t yielded much result. In Kerala, the presence of the RSS hasn’t converted into votes, and with the falling apart of the Hadiya case

after court intervention, BJP has failed to find an alternate entry point in the state. Though initially a relatively brighter spot, after the installation of the new coalition government, the political mood in Karnataka now seems to be uncertain. Andhra Pradesh boomeranged after BJP backtracked on special status. And Jaganmohan Reddy did not gain anything from his nonchalant padyatras. Nor did the silent launching of Pawan Kalyan to attract Kapu voters do much good. In fact, Telangana is the BJP’s only hope to get additional seats in the south, with a possible post-poll alliance with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi that wishes to stay close to the Centre to keep in check the rise of the Congress, which might impact the state assembly elections that are close to the Lok Sabha polls next year. BJP’s own organizational growth has remained stunted due to K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s deft management of minorities. He has also appropriated the symbolism of Hindu identity by performing yagnas and liberally funding Hindu temples in the state. The prospect of notching up even a simple majority looks to be a herculean task at the moment for the BJP. Going by the shift in its political discourse in the recent past, they seem to have decided to give up the old kind of accommodative politics in favour of a new kind of polarization— which involves more than othering of Muslims. What is new is that the BJP has given up on Dalit votes too. The BJP will continue to practice the policy of sub-dividing Dalits in order to gain votes of smaller Dalit sub-castes that have remained unrepresented.

New Political Cocktail Krishna Madiga, a robust Madiga leader from Telangana has been campaigning nation-wide to put the issue of subdivision of scheduled castes on the national agenda. This may yield some results, but more crucial seems to be the strategy of combining Dalits, Muslims, and Left-liberals as the new combined other.

The new narrative wishes to consolidate upper-caste and OBC votes rather than cater to a more loosely knit social engineering. BJP garnered just about 31% of votes in the previous general elections, and the party is of the view that in order to maintain that figure, it is more important to consolidate Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and OBC votes. In order to achieve this, it is beginning to draft a new narrative that is more explicitly critical of the Dalits, along with the Muslims. BhimaKoregaon was the first salvo they fired to consolidate this narrative. Further, the projected link between Dalits and jihad Islam is the next layer of this new polarization. As part of this, they have claimed that Jignesh Mevani received funding from Islamic groups and now, it is Rohith Vemula’s mother who is being condemned for allegedly receiving help from the IUML. These two layers are then being used to suggest links between jihadi Islamic groups, Dalits, and the Maoists to symbolize the Left. The recent claims of a possible Maoist attack being planned against Modi further reinforce such an implication. The Maoist and jihadi link has been mentioned in the case of the Bhima-Koregaon incident. All of these will be now be stitched to the Kashmiri separatists and militancy in the Valley. With the pulling out of the government in Jammu and Kashmir, BJP is attempting to entrench the image of Muslims as essentially being ungrateful and unreasonable in spite of the repeated attempts of the party to appease them—Modi offering development aid and visiting Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan, Kashmiris performing well in the UPSC (one of them even represented the Indian cricket team—another symbol of jingoistic nationalism), and the declaration of ceasefire during Ramzan. This, BJP feels, has set the stage to consolidate the sense of violation among the majority Hindus, alongside consolidating the upper-caste vote-bank by isolating the Dalits. Further, the party is projecting Rahul Gandhi as the representative figure of this new ‘historic block’ of Muslims, Dalits, and Maoists. Congress is being projected as being soft on Muslim fundamentalism, Dalit aggression, and a national threat from the Left-oriented political groups such as the

Maoists. These three groups, along with the Kashmiris represent the impending national security threat, tacitly supported by the Congress. BJP’s strategy hinges on the way in which the OBCs will vote. Changes in the reservation policy, as well as growing joblessness, have hurt the interests of OBCs. It is no secret that these groups are precariously located in terms of their relation to the Dalits at one end and the Muslims at the other. In the last three decades, OBCs have been at the forefront of regional parties, one of the core reasons for the Congress’ terminal decline in many of the northern states. With the saturation of leadership positions in the regional party, smaller groups among the OBCs have steadily moved to the BJP and remained a potent force. OBCs have become increasingly drawn into the communal anti-Muslim rhetoric for various reasons, including the need to fit into hyper-masculine claims that figuratively draw them closer to the way Kshatriyas self-represent themselves. Hyper-nationalist discourse allows space for these not so visible cultural traits to find a legitimate social narrative. The new political cocktail the BJP is preparing will now put to rest some confusion that had ensued among the Dalits with regard to finding representation in the BJP, but it will, for the same reason also consolidate the other end of the social spectrum behind the BJP, sidestepping the possible developmental failures of the current regime. One needs to understand this strategy of the BJP in light of their own sense of declining popularity among various traditional voters. Instead of an accommodative pitch that might not cut ice, more robust polarization might deliver the minimum that they are looking for to scrape through in 2019.

Part III

DALIT-BAHUJAN POLITICS

Introduction

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ne social group, apart from the Muslims, that suffered violent attacks under the current regime was that of the Dalits. Amartya Sen, in an interview on a television channel observed that, ‘Dalits and minorities have become victims of organized killing and the government has to take responsibility. Mobocracy and despotism make people live in fear. It is a terrible thing to happen, whether or not it affects the economy. The central issue is that of liberty and democracy.’1 Dalits came under sustained attack through a series of incidents that began with the suicide of a student, Rohith Vemula, in the University of Hyderabad in January 2016; later, in June 2016, seven Dalits were flogged in Una, Gujarat by alleged cow vigilantes for skinning a dead cow. In May 2017, UP’s Saharanpur Thakurs clashed with the Dalits, soon after Yogi was elected as the chief minister of the state. In January2018, at Bhima Koragaon, Marathas attacked a peaceful demonstration of the Dalits. In March 2018 came a UGC order tinkering with the Scheduled CasteScheduled Tribe (SC-ST) appointments in universities. After the Rohith Vemula incident where the Ambedkar Student’s Association (ASA) supported the cause of Kashmiris’ right to protest for their human rights, the issue of Dalit-Muslim unity gathered renewed interest and possibility. If secular-associational politics are to stall the creation of a majoritarian polity, then solidarity between various social groups, including the Dalits and Muslims, becomes an imperative. However, social dynamics in the post-independence period, census and enumeration, and modes of mobilization for elections have only re-

instituted popular prejudices of communities against each other. It is suggested in the essays in this section that majoritarianism in India is shaping, not only from the sustained mobilization by the Right but also due to what I refer to as ‘secular sectarianism’ practised by the Dalit-Bahujans, Muslims, Left, and other progressive sections of the society. The idea of fraternity that Ambedkar emphasized, alongside liberty and equality, seems to be in direct conflict with the kind of pragmatism that has come to signify the current protest politics. Pragmatism expressed as ‘violent indifference’ to other social groups, reduces everyone to, as Rohith Vemula observed in his letter, their ‘immediate identity’. This allows marginalized and subaltern social groups such as the Dalits to be available to be mobilized by the Right, even if the vision of the Right continues to reinforce a traditional hierarchical caste ordering. Such possibilities were witnessed during incidents following the arrest of the Dera Sacha leader for sexual assault. Similarly, incidents such as threats issued by the Vaishya community to the Dalit-Bahujan intellectual Kancha Illiah after he republished his booklet titled Vaishyas Are Social Smugglers2 did not garner the larger attention of the society. The question that needs to be debated is whether or not social mobility of subaltern groups like the Dalits will succeed in bringing forth a new ethic of fraternity, as against attempting to achieve mobility through pragmatism and Social Darwinism that disallows substantive distinction between the populism of the Right and oppositional politics of the subaltern. This also will throw light on how various segments of the subalterns will relate to each other, including the question of unity between the Left and the Dalits, which has been a longstanding one. Among the various questions of history that the Right has foregrounded, one of the issues that needs attention is what I refer to as the ‘Problem of Retrieval’. Is there a possibility of retrieving the philosophical aspects of ancient Indian philosophy without reducing all of it exclusively to its Brahmanic tradition? Brahamanism has been a social system that perpetuated social inequalities through scriptural sanction. Does a philosophy that emerged in such a social context of caste system get reduced or remain stagnant to that specific historical context, or is there a

way we could collectively retrieve certain aspects of the philosophy that continue to inform us about our past and present in a more meaningful way? Unlike the Greeks and other European philosophies that justified racial and gendered inequalities and continue to be studied separating them from those aspects, Indian philosophy did not get the attention it deserved and perhaps got reduced to the Brahamanic tradition, which in itself was an oriental reading of philosophy outside of Europe. Populist politics under the current regime foregrounded this aspect of retrieving ‘our own’ traditional-ancient knowledge systems; however, the issue was raised as not one of history or philosophy but one of a ‘glorious’ or even a ‘superior’ past. References ranging from advanced aerial technology in ancient India to various kinds of advanced medical practices were claimed in the course of the current rightwing populist regime. These were illegitimate claims for a legitimate cause. It will be of long-standing relevance in Indian politics as to how the populist project that wishes to create a new and authentic and a unified Hindu society will negotiate its past that was Brahmanical but perhaps cannot be reduced only to that.

After Rohith Vemula: Is the DalitMuslim Unity Sustainable?

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fter the dastardly attacks at Una, marked by the public assault of Dalits allegedly by vigilantes, a more promising unity between the Dalits and Muslims had emerged attempting to ameliorate common physical attacks.1 However, we need to introspect if this momentary unity has the potential to convert itself into a more sustainable one, which would signify a tectonic shift in Indian politics by arresting the unchecked rise of the far-Right politics. This unity is perhaps the best guarantee India has to make its democracy vibrant and inclusive. One needs to interrogate the nature of popular culture and public morality to get a clue as to whether or not this unity is sustainable and also to ask ourselves how to make it a more permanent feature of India’s mobilization history since this idea of the unity itself is not new. It has existed in the margins and repeatedly failed to become the cornerstone of democratic politics. In an extremely segregated and hierarchized society like ours, politics is more or less pragmatic, while the theory of politics is normative. The subaltern groups and those who mobilize and rule in their name hardly have the social gestation to construct a politics on formidable political principles but rather have to cater to the here and now of politics that changes faster than most of us imagine or are comfortable with. The generic pragmatism of the popular culture that is common to both the governing groups as well as the governed is, in fact, the glue for popular mobilization in India.

There are however moments such as Rohith Vemula’s death and attacks in Una that compel us sometimes to revisit the template of that pragmatism. Such moments of attempting to achieve a more sustainable basis for alternative politics have to repeatedly confront what is already instituted as part of our popular culture and public morality, which is fraught with prejudice, humiliation, stigma, and the eternal urge to escape them.

Pragmatism and Prejudice Gandhi is perhaps the best example to cite for such a phenomenon and why it is such an extensive part of our common sense that he emerged as an important figure in Indian history. The way we collectively evaluate politics and politicians is intriguing and eventually determines the political possibilities. Much of what Right-wing groups such as the BJP, RSS, and others do seem to have some sanction in this popular culture. It is intriguing to see how the BJP, which was vying for the Dalit votes in the elections in Gujarat and UP, had no compunction in arresting Jignesh, as a preventive detention, before Prime Minister Modi was to arrive in Gujarat to celebrate his birthday.2 Similarly, Amit Shah announced that the promise to deposit 15 lakh rupees in the accounts of the poor across the nation was merely an election jumlebaazi.3 In hierarchized societies like ours, political power has a unique place because it is believed to be the best guarantee against the vulnerability. Whether it is Dalits or the Muslims, they depend on political power, and therefore, they understand the compulsions that accompany the process of maintaining and gaining it. The very nature of even the oppositional politics has the unmistakable imprint of this pragmatism—whether it is Dalits demanding the post of the High priest of Tirupati or feminists demanding legal rights for the sex workers only manifest how politics has had a pragmatic turn. Much of this, of course, has to do with the failures of the ‘Congress kind of’ umbrella accommodation of conflicting social groups, the centrist nature of the polity they ushered in, and the failures of the Nehruvian-developmental state. Therefore, in evaluating politics, subaltern

social groups such as the Dalits, Muslims, OBCs, and others would work themselves within the limits of the prism of this pragmatism. They at times look more comfortable and forgiving towards the overt prejudice and bullying tactics of the far Right as against the covert discrimination that might continue within the Left and other forms of progressive politics. Left and progressive politics are gauged through more formidable public standards than the mainstream, and more so, Right-wing parties. The known devil is far better than an unknown one. BJP, therefore, can think of still appropriating Ambedkar in spite of Rohith Vemula’s death and attacks in Una. It is possible because they believe that resistance can be deincentivized, because memory in politics is short-lived, and because there is a need for mobility more than a need for resistance. It is in this context of a ‘compulsive pragmatism’ that has besieged Indian politics, more so in the last two decades, that we need to evaluate if the emergent Dalit-Muslim unity can ever become a more sustainable feature of Indian politics. The reality as it exists is that there are ensuing conflicts between the Dalits and the Muslims across the country. In India, there is the ‘problem of proximity’; the closer your living conditions, the more the incompatibility. This is not true just of Dalits and Muslims but also true of the relations between various sub-castes of the Dalits, between the Dalits and the OBCs, and between Dalits and the tribals. In a stigmatized society, the easy option to ameliorate one’s position is to distance oneself from that stigma and shift it to other vulnerable groups. By and large, Muslims have emerged as that permanent ‘other’, distancing and targeting them comes as a relief not merely to the casteHindus but also to the various subaltern social groups. It is, therefore, more plausible to forge a political unity to achieve political power between the Dalits and the Muslims but much more difficult to sustain it as a social phenomenon because prejudices are bound to re-emerge once the moment of crisis is overcome. Overcoming social prejudices needs a more sustained effort and electoral dynamics, and the perpetual crisis of the vulnerability rarely allows us that kind of social gestation it requires. The task of taking on social prejudices will continue to remain a political agenda that we seem

to have collectively abdicated, after the experiments that Gandhi took up during the anti-colonial struggle. Without a social agenda, there cannot possibly be anything that can be referred to as radical politics.

Electoral Politics and Compulsive Pragmatism Radical politics of all hues is under stress, and by and large, waning. Among a maze of reasons is also the fact that we have realized, at the turn of the century, that we actually never knew how to bring about radical social change and what we knew was abysmally little. Our ideals never matched our techniques, and the techniques we knew were swallowed by the imperatives of everyday life. All idealism seems to stop at the doorstep of pragmatism, not because we always collectively will that, but because nobody seems to have the keys to get past. Best of intentions and best of political mobilizations repeatedly pale into the horizon, and what remains is a faint memory of the glorious and somewhat heroic days. Memory is mostly the future we wish for rather than history as it happened. There is an impending need to comprehend the substance of why politics, including Dalit politics, that began with an exhaustive social agenda of overcoming caste prejudices, has taken a compulsively pragmatic turn, and why, as a result, social agenda has been supplanted by ‘pure politics’. Sociologist Hugo Gorringe in his recent book Panthers in Parliament makes one such attempt to understand the pragmatic turn and gives us a closer look at why political movements that begin in radical registers, with a sense of impatience towards questions of routine and insidious modes of injustice, are soon consumed by those very processes of routine and normalization. Gorringe offers a fine account of how the Liberation Panthers (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal) of Tamil Nadu led by Thirumavalavan converted itself in the 1990s into the Liberation Panther Party (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi-VCK), after decades of boycott of elections, as they believed that polls represented the same casteist practices as the rest of the social processes. However, they reverted their decision once they mobilized a

sizeable support among the Dalits of Tamil Nadu, in order to realize the dream of gaining political power to affect social change. In fact, this in many ways was what Ambedkar had also suggested to the Dalits that without seizing political power, overcoming caste discrimination would always remain a distant goal. However, whenever Dalits, including for instance the experiment of the BSP, have forged a political party, they seem to moderate their goals, minimize their strategies, and eventually lose their potential to mobilize. This is true of many other political mobilizations, and not just the Dalits. India Against Corruption movement, led by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal too exploded onto the social scene, and many well-meaning social activists and academics believed this was a turning point in Indian politics, only to be disappointed by the shape it took, especially after it converted into a political party. Gorringe lucidly explains how ‘social mobilization and protest is timeconsuming, risky, and costly’4 and cannot be self-sustaining for too long. Individuals involved tend to lose steam, energy, and also their determination. The enthusiasm for the ‘take-off’ phase of the movements gives way to stagnation, ideas become clichéd, and slogans begin to sound repetitive. In order to keep the issue alive against such odds, political movements become bureaucratic and depend heavily on front-ranking leaders. The leaders, in turn, become cautious not to lose their charisma and not to make big-time mistakes in their strategies; they also feel the compulsion to keep a distance from followers in order to manage the expectations and various conflicting demands. All of these, in turn, lead to disappointments, accusations, and defections and failure to encourage and nurture second-rank leaders. There is also the human element of insecurity and temptation to give into ‘image traps’ that the leaders are first given, then trapped into, and then virulently critiqued for. In this game of ‘rise and fall’, individuals seem to be cogs in the wheel with the very little capacity to maneuver the challenges of mass politics.

Pragmatism and Populism Gorringe’s account, in spite of his denial, almost sounds like there is an element of inevitability in the way protest politics in their attempts at institutionalization and mainstreaming are invariably prone to alienation, bureaucratization, compromise, de-radicalization, and co-option. Gorringe makes the best of attempts to provide for a sympathetic reading of the compulsions involved in forging and nurturing protest politics. Further, when a movement converts into a political party, there is the compelling need to enlarge its social base and mass support. In order to do that, it is understandable that they need to either dilute or neglect their core demands. BSP that began with core Dalit issues, spread to Bahujan, to include OBCs and Muslims, and finally ended up with the slogan of Sarvajan that ironically gave a significant place to Brahmins against whom it began its initial political mobilization. In due course, the party lost its ability to look as radical and maintain its mass appeal. The materiality of the symbolism of converting a vertical caste order into a horizontal one gives way to ‘empty symbolism’. It blurs the difference between the vertical and horizontal caste orders to end up with circular arguments as to how symbolism is itself the new radicalism. A stress on collective action and resistance can give way to negotiation and interest articulation. One might well argue about what the use of protest politics is, if it doesn’t, at some stage, serve the interests of the disadvantaged. Protest works around the question of justice that is universal, while interests are particular. Particularity always has the capacity to degenerate into sectarianism, but one might again always meaningfully ask, why should the disadvantaged carry the burden of the universal? Between the universalism of idealism and pragmatism of particularism, protest politics always tends to swing towards the latter, as universalism is more cognitive and particularism is more experiential in nature. Protest politics of various kinds, including those of the Left and revolutionary kind, have struggled to find a way out. Rigid idealism, as in the case of the Left,

tends to become dogmatic, while rugged pragmatism tends to become corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving. The fact that we have realized that we do not know what is radical change, much less how to usher in one, should serve as an occasion to begin some fresh thinking. We should ensure that such fresh thinking, if blocked by rugged pragmatism and the contingencies of the immediate agendas such as the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims, will remain at best momentary and at worst electoral slogans to conjure up a majority required for electoral success. Right-wing populism that is based on creating ‘us versus them’ kind of broad social divisions to consolidate an authentic Hindu unity found the emergent possibility of the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims to be perhaps the gravest challenge in the four years that they have ruled. In the events preceding Rohith Vemula’s suicide in the University of Hyderabad, the contentious issue was the support that ASA extended to some of the issues that concerned Kashmiri Muslims. This challenged the very core of the idea of nationalism as the Right understood. After the string of protests following Rohith’s death, the agenda of Dalit-Muslim unity came to the fore for a short while; however, as I tried to argue, long politics of various hues had taken a pragmatic turn for a socially radical agenda of this kind to fructify into anything substantial. The question that should interest us is what then is the link between the pragmatic turn in politics and the rise of Right-wing populism. How do pragmatism and populism feed on each other? Right-wing populism furthers the template of universal brotherhood, fraternity, and humanitarianism as the quintessential public morality, while aggressively pursuing sectarianism and pragmatism in its everyday politics. Politics of resistance whether that of the Dalits or the Left seem to survive and occupy the space created by the new pragmatic order undermining alternative ideals of equality and fraternity.

Dalit-Bahujans and Fraternity: From Ambedkar to Kancha Illiah

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olidarity between social groups and fraternal feelings are the foundations of a healthy democracy but electoral politics in India work themselves around competing claims. This is without looking for possible means of establishing cross-cultural and cross-caste alliances based on mutual empathy and inter-subjective understanding of the specific issues concerning the various social constituencies. The leading lights of the Dalit-Bahujan struggles in India, along with an unflinching emphasis on agitation and mobilization for self-determination, also lay thrust on solidarity and fraternity. Jyotiba Phule, in his celebrated essay Ghulamgiri, calls for a solidarity between all those involved in manual labour, which alone can bring about an ‘ethical self’ and scientific knowledge. His critique of Brahminism included the rejection of a knowledge system based purely on mental constructs. He was the first to establish a school for girls in 1851 and that included girls of all castes. Phule unequivocally argued that all women, including Brahmin women, made up his notion of shudraatishudra. He argued that subordination of women was a part of the larger process of the subordination of the shudraatishudras. Similarly, Phule was among the first to draw a similarity between the Shudras and the Blacks in America, preceding the more recent debate on ‘caste is race’. Phule’s essential critique of Brahmins was based on the potent hierarchical separation between mental and manual labour that the Brahminical philosophy put in place5 and further made the coming

together of various castes and overcoming caste-based differences and discrimination a herculean task.

Ambedkar on Fraternity Later, Ambedkar too forwarded a critique of the caste system based on its debilitating impact on civic ethos and fraternity between various social groups. Ambedkar identifies fraternity as a foundation of democracy. He, therefore, picked up the slogan of the French revolution, ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ as the guiding principle for the anti-caste struggles in India. He recognized caste-based discrimination even among the Shudras and argued in his much-quoted essay Annihilation of Caste that ‘each caste takes its pride and its consolidation in the fact that in the scale of castes it is above some other caste’. Ambedkar pointed out that ‘all are slaves of the caste system’6 and what it destroyed was what he variedly referred to as common culture, fellow feeling, associated mode of living, social cement, public spirit, cooperation, and solidarity. In this sense, he felt that ‘cultural revolution’ ought to precede political reform and economic revolution. Overcoming deep-seated prejudice is a precondition for development, and therefore, he believed that what Marx and communists missed out was that Indian social and economic order worked not through ‘division of labour’ but ‘division of labourers’. The future ideal society for Ambedkar has to be founded on substantive solidarity and deep-seated fraternal feelings in the society. He argued, ‘in an ideal society, there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free-points of contact with other modes of association’.7 He argued for ‘social endosmosis’ and a ‘conjointed communicative experience’8 and not exclusivists, experiences being privileged in order to make stronger political claims. Even such claims have to essentially realize the need to move towards more inter-subjective experiences to create a richer idea of the social. Today’s debates in Indian politics, more so the electoral politics and discourse on development, have left very little space for a productive

dialogue on how to enhance modes of solidarity and means of forging fraternity. This process of breakdown of all forms of shared spaces converges with the processes of individuation initiated by the global neoliberal economy. Instead, what marginalized social groups are facing is a choice between cultural assertion and economic dispossessions, such as the various subjugated castes in rural hinterlands, or a promise of economic integration with a precondition of cultural subjugation in the case of the Muslims. There cannot be any meaningful idea of development that does not contribute towards an enlarged idea of fellow feeling among the various social groups. Ideas of liberty and equality cannot be attained without promoting fraternity. Fraternity alone can provide a durable social base for justice. Initiating and strengthening fraternity needs a fresh political imagination. While interest-based mobilizations have achieved various degrees of success in providing mobility and better life-chances to hitherto marginalized social groups, we have collectively failed to overcome prejudices, as we argued with regard to the issue of Dalit-Muslim unity in the previous essay, and enrich trust and initiate a positive dialogue. The latter can be achieved not just through a discourse on liberty and equality but by progressively bringing varied cultural groups closer to each other. The emphasis on difference in modern democracies has to move towards commonality and commonness. Recognizing and reconciling with commonness is as important as legitimizing differences because celebrating commonness provides for a durable basis for dignity. The new discourse on development is providing for one such opportunity though without any sustained debate on the significance of fraternity. Development without fraternity would be a failed project. Taking a clue from Ambedkar, we need to lay priority on achieving a ‘cultural revolution’ which is best understood as finding roots for solidarity and fraternity, and not through either merely competing for identity claims or an empty rhetoric about development. However, both Right-wing populism and independent political struggles of resistance have emptied the spaces required for a productive dialogue, creating a unique and a rather spectacular convergence between Right-wing

populism, protest politics, and neoliberalism. Two glaring incidents that stood out as an instance of this were the mob violence mostly by DalitBahujan followers following the arrest of Ram Rahim, leader of Dera Sacha Sauda in Haryana and Punjab, who was accused of rape and the protests led by the Vaishya community demanding the arrest of the Dalit-Bahujan intellectual Kancha Illiah in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, for referring to Vaishyas as ‘social smugglers’.9 On either side of the divide, in both these incidents, fraternity suffered the casualty.

Dera Sacha Sauda The politics surrounding the violent upheaval in Haryana and Punjab following the conviction of the chief of the Dera Sachcha Sauda sect, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, for rape on 25 August 2017, brings forth some key issues that lie at the heart of Indian democracy.10 On the one hand were those who were baying for Ram Rahim’s conviction, insisting that the rule of law must be maintained and violent ‘mobs’ contained, and then, when that did not happen, squarely blamed the Haryana government, and specifically, chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar for the failure to stop the marauding ‘mobs’.11 On the other were those like Sakshi Maharaj—who continued to stand by the convicted Ram Rahim ‘because crores of people have faith in him and only two women had complained that he had raped them’.12 Similarly, Haryana minister Manish Grover said, ‘anger is natural on the part of Ram Rahim’s followers as they continue to be devoted to him’.13 The media, on its part, was crying hoarse against the BJP for both taking Ram Rahim’s support for electoral gains and for deliberately allowing his followers, who were predominantly Dalit-Bahujans, to congregate and unleash violence following his conviction.14 The Punjab and Haryana High Court, too, was of the view that the Haryana government let Panchkula burn for ‘political gains’. Amidst all these, we had tweets from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Ram Nath Kovind, and Vice President Venkaiah Naidu appealing for peace, without going into who was responsible for it all. The

BJP made it clear that it wouldn’t dismiss Khattar as it believed that he did the best he could in the given situation. The issue becomes complex if one considers the fact that the majority of Ram Rahim’s followers are Dalits, while those in the media, the judiciary, and others—calling out for strict action against the violent mob—belonged to the upper castes and class. There seems to have been a vertical divide between those supporting and those opposing Ram Rahim along caste and class lines. This divide raises a few serious issues. What do we do with the continued, unabated faith in the magical powers of Ram Rahim and the fact that there is still a large section of marginalized people that believed that he has done no wrong? Yet another issue that needs to be put on table is whether or not the caste-based following of Ram Rahim mattered in the way the media went about dealing with the case, including ordering seizure of the Dera’s property to pay for the costs of the damage caused by its followers.15 Is there a hidden or an assumed bias against a section of society, notwithstanding the crime committed by Ram Rahim? Would it not be true to state that other godmen have not been dealt with in a similar manner—for instance, Sri Sri Ravishankar when he encroached the banks of Yamuna river? Or previously, the Puttaparthi Sai Baba in Andhra Pradesh, who had cases of murder lodged against him but no action was ever taken?16 Politically, not long ago, the Jats were responsible for far worse mayhem in Haryana, when they came out demanding OBC status for the community. The violent mobs then had allegedly raped many women travelling on the highway. But neither were those cases investigated nor were there any convictions.17 The media, although it did raise the issue, did not pursue it to its logical conclusion. Since not many cases of corruption or violation of law, like that of Salman Khan in the hit-and-run case, reach their logical conclusion, would there be no truth in believing that in the Dera violence case, the proactive role of the media had something to do with the caste factor? It is a different matter that it is the same BJP government that allowed the Jats to go scot-free then, and has now allowed the Dalit followers of Ram Rahim to run riots. Street violence, it appears,

has been a mode of political mobilization by the BJP since the days of the Rath Yatra in the 1990s. Now, in Haryana, the BJP seemingly allowed the situation to go out of control possibly to placate the Dalit constituency. Would it not be legitimate for the BJP, even as we critique the street violence and loss of lives, to represent the faith, devotion, and concerns of the followers as a party involved in popular mobilization? Does democracy not compel them to carry and represent the voices of those who still refuse to believe that Ram Rahim has committed no wrong? Would a mass political party be wrong in representing their concerns, excluding the violence that was allowed to occur?

Fraternity to Violent Indifference Finally, in all of these, the missing question has been that of the women who filed the cases against being sexually assaulted, who must have taken the tremendous personal risk to come out and fight it out over more than 10 years. Who would be speaking on behalf of these women? Neither the BJP nor the Dalit followers who have reposed their faith in Ram Rahim paused to ask, who are these women who were assaulted, and what their caste and class might be. In competing representations, the victims seem to have become voiceless. Those two women must be again faced with the same mortal fear that they did all these years. Why has the issue of gender violence taken a backseat in all of this? Why are we not debating about how and why women fall prey to Ram Rahims? Electoral and popular politics come with sectarian mobilization, and in a highly stigmatized and hierarchical society like India, this sectarianism has turned into violent indifference towards those whom we don’t imagine belong to our immediate identity. Political parties continue to mobilize and stoke this violent indifference that has struck all sections of society. While the logic of identity politics empowers, it also overpowers and renders those without voice invisible. This mode of mobility with indifference allows valourization on the one hand, but erodes the very basis of collective action on the other.

‘Social Smugglers’ and ‘Argumentative Indians’ After the Dera Sacha Sauda incident, the next major incident with regards to the Dalit-Bahujans was a concerted attack on the well-known DalitBahujan intellectual Kancha Ilaiah, organized by the Arya Vaishya community all across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in 2017. Following this, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Mr Chandra Babu Naidu, toyed with the idea of banning his book titled Vaishyas Are Social Smugglers.18 A TDP legislator demanded he be hanged in public. The chief minister of Telangana had maintained a stoic silence on the issue. What has been even more disturbing is the eerie silence across the board on the threats that Ilaiah had received. There was a general indifference to the gravity of the issue. Ilaiah had offered a rare critique that includes the Ambanis, Adanis, and even Amit Shah as Baniyas who have accumulated wealth. In a sense, Ilaiah was providing a social narrative to an abstract political economy critique of growing inequalities in capitalism. It is caste that provides the matrix for accumulation, which is generally overlooked in the Left-liberal critiques of the processes of accumulation. In fact, this critique of Ilaiah gained a renewed significance since not many Left-liberals were able to stand up to the pressures of taking on the corporate, as witnessed in the crisis in the well-known journal Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) resulting in the ouster of its editor, known for his investigative journalism for publishing an article against the Adani group.19 In short, Illiah argued that many of these corporates gained wealth through the caste advantage they had and kept the wealth within their caste community. Thereby, he drew a similarity between smugglers who stole wealth out of the country and these industrialists were ‘social smugglers’ who stole and kept the wealth within their own community. Arya Vaishyas took objection to being referred to as social smugglers, instead of recognizing them as creators of wealth who contributed to the general well-being of the society. Soon after, there were calls for freedom of speech, by Ilaiah himself and others. We must however move a step further from this liberal rant to ask

ourselves—what is the social basis that is necessary to nurture an ethos of free speech and dialogue and a culture of debate for the ‘argumentative Indian’ to be alive and kicking? In Europe, free speech was an ideal that went along with a social democratic character of the state. The middle classes in Europe had a stake in free speech to preserve institutions in order to institutionalize rule of law and social equality. In India, in contrast, after neoliberal reforms, we have been looking for secularism without a welfare state, and free speech amidst growing social and economic inequalities. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes that till the 1970s, the displacement from ‘primitive accumulation’ was slower than the number of jobs created through industrialization and afterwards, it was the other way round. India is witnessing this process of mass displacement and fewer jobs being created leading to a social anomaly of the explosion of aspirations and implosion of opportunities. Middle classes and social elites from other so-called lower castes in India expanded with the onset of the neo-liberal order. Pervasive insecurity has become the hallmark of both the traditional caste-Hindu elites, like the Brahmins and Banias that Ilaiah is referring to, as much as the late entrants such as the Dalit-Bahujans and also the intermediary castes such as the Jats, Patels, Marathas, and others who have recently moved up the social and economic order and are facing threats from both neo-liberal order and demands for social and economic equality from below. Neo-liberalism’s singular ‘success’ has been in destroying the shared ethos that a social democratic welfare regime was putting in place, even if that was under the patronage of the dominant social elites. Social Darwinism became instituted along with political space for mobilizations for social mobility and equality. In such a scenario, we do not have social classes that have a deep conviction in free speech and dialogue as a necessary mode of social upliftment and preservation of democratic ethos.

Chanakya and Social Darwinism

This top-down process becomes further entwined with the bottom-up mobilization, especially by the Dalit-Bahujans, which is struggling to find a space and force its presence within this dominant narrative. Dalit-Bahujans do not have the social gestation necessary to lay a path outside the dominant pragmatic paradigm. They have, consciously and unconsciously, willinglyunwillingly become part of this ethos of social Darwinism, wanton indifference, and self-imposed ghettoization. The dormant or mezzanine social elites within the subaltern castes are struggling to preserve the mobility gained through a singular focus on representation against the unabated pressure of being displaced by the neoliberal economic order lead by the dominant castes at one end and new demands from smaller social groups, including the Dalit-Bahujan women, within the Dalit-Bahujans at the other end. In order to preserve this tenuous mobility and visibility achieved through relentless struggle against the Brahminical order, DalitBahujan politics has remained steadfast in protecting this space not only against intrusions from the dominant elites but also from other political fellow-travelers, including the Left and liberal discourses. They have been unsparing of alternative voices even from within the Dalit-Bahujan community. Scholars and public activists such as Gopal Guru and Anand Teltumbde too have been at the receiving end of their ire. Every criticism is equated with the attempts to pull down the mobility and block new and legitimate aspirations. The anxiety to preserve representation and social visibility achieved through reservations has cast a dark cloud on deliberative processes, including institutional arrangements that could be enabled for social empowerment. Universities such as Osmania today have 90% of Dalit-Bahujans as its students, while it has seen a sustained decline in its academic performance. It’s an intriguing coincidence that can be understood both in terms of abdication of responsibility to offer quality education by the caste-Hindu faculty and attacks on institutional arrangements as a target of mobilization by the Dalit-Bahujan student politics. To add further bitterness to this overcooked recipe was the rise of Rightwing Hindutva politics. While the Left-liberal politics was largely

circumscribed by a language of universal justice, Dalit-Bahujan politics grounded those norms of justice in a social narrative of caste. Hindutva politics today, in turn, is grounding the social processes in the imperative of emotions and human psychology. It is directly appealing and mobilizing the emotional-psychological traits, including that of fear, anxiety, anomie, envy, hatred, and alienation. There is a concerted effort to mobilize common emotions across castes and classes, directing them against the weaker social groups. Given the rampant insecurity and anxiety that have become a way of life, assaults come through as a symbolic and an emotional relief for a social life lived at the edge. The street violence has become a legitimate mode of political mobilization, as suggested earlier, whether it is by the Jats or the followers of the Dera chief. The purported violence and street mobilizations by the Arya Vaishays against Kancha Ilaiah is only a continuation of that process, which had gained currency under the current political dispensation. Let me conclude with an anecdote. After a talk I delivered on challenges to Dalit politics in Bangalore, a young Dalit activist walked up to me to say, ‘Every Dalit in this country will become a Chanakya and manipulate in such a way till they get what is due to them’. The universalisability of the imagery of Chanakya is symptomatic of the desperate times that have disallowed social gestation necessary for free speech and dialogue. There is a need to draw a new equivalence between fraternity, justice, identity, and mobility in opposition to Right-wing populism, Hindutva, and neoliberalism. What we have witnessed on the contrary is the shrinking social gestation and a pragmatic turn in politics that have allowed Right-wing populism to lay a claim to universal brotherhood, unity, and commonality of Hindus and an ostensibly humanitarian approach that is non-divisive and non-disruptive. While in effect it may turn out to be hegemonic in reinforcing social inequalities but in course of the political process, it will be difficult to critique it by social groups that have themselves abdicated the ideal of fraternity in pursuit of mobility

Unity between the Left and the Dalit-Bahujans

E

ven as the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims emerged as a contentious issue under the current regime, the long-standing issue that kept surfacing on the sidelines of the political drama over the last many years is that of the unity between the Left and the Dalit politics. There have been long-standing differences in viewpoints between both the political forces. While the Dalit-Bahujans find the Left essentially casteHindu in terms of who dominates and who they represent and find Dalits missing from leadership positions, the Left remained critical of the identitarian politics of the Dalits that have pushed for cultural valorization at the peril of neglecting redistributive issues. The future of Right-wing populism in particular and future of Indian democracy and the way they will play out in some measure depend on whether or not these two political forces come together, if not to merge but to engage in a more productive dialogue. Among others, one site where this tension is playing out in a full measure is the student politics in JNU. We have already discussed how JNU had come under attack under the current regime; however, on the sidelines of that conflict was the issue of Bahujan politics versus the Left. For the Left-democratic forces, the results of the JNU student elections in 2017 came as a relief with the Left unity winning all the posts to the central panel.20 However, the emerging story is more complex than a simple-minded celebration. The worrying part of the story is that while Left

unity helped win all the four posts in the central panel, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) still managed to come second on all the posts. Even more worrying is the growing rift between the students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities and the Left student organizations. Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) fared reasonably well and seems to have managed to poll most of the Dalit and OBC votes.

Anti-Intellectualism There was a range of sociological factors that stand common between the discourse of BAPSA and that of the ABVP. Both are steadfastly suspicious of the available institutional spaces. While the ABVP is critical of the open, socially transformative nature of institutions such as the JNU, the students of BAPSA are equally suspicious of the casteist nature of the institutional arrangements. The demand to reduce the viva voce marks to 15%, since the Dalit-Bahujan students believed that in many cases, there was a glaring gap between the marks they procured in the written as against the marks they got in viva, is a case in point.21 It is a different matter that the Left groups on campus have also fully supported the demand, a fact that BAPSA continues to ignore. Similarly, there is a streak of anti-intellectualism in both the ABVP and the BAPSA. Both are critical of the role faculty members play in the name of being progressive. While the ABVP feels that the Left-leaning faculty is ‘anti-national’, including being supportive of radical-Left politics, and are pro-Muslim and sexual minorities, support freedom for girl students, etc., the BAPSA feels faculty intellectualizes issues, ignoring the urgency of the need to provide wider representation to the students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities. For instance, antiintellectualism takes the shape of undue emphasis on English, and the importance given to maintaining quality and merit. Both suffer from the common feeling of being short-changed by the English-speaking secularprogressive intelligentsia.

Left and Leadership

Left student groups, on the other hand, have equally failed to be sensitive to the changing political discourse and the pressing need for representation being demanded by the Dalit-Bahujan students. Left politics on campus has steadily become election-centric over the years, and yielding any space to groups that do not speak the language they do is seen more as losing space than a political experiment worth carrying out. Fears of the Dalit-Bahujan communities that Left parties use them as cadre but do not allow them to assume leadership positions remain unaddressed. Meanwhile, it is intriguing to watch that those Dalit students that do get to leadership positions in the Left groups are perceived as being not ‘Dalit enough’ since they do not talk the identitarian language that groups such as the BAPSA are more oriented towards. The general complaint on the campus against the Left unions, not just of the BAPSA, is that they work at a distance, and most of the planning and strategization happens behind the scenes, without taking students into confidence. To Dalit-Bahujan students, this element of strategization comes across as brahminical manipulation. The split in the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) was due to such machinations.22 Left student leaders are often perceived as being less than transparent, less emotional and real, and hiding behind a cosmetic and sanitized Left-Radical discourse that fails to come across as organic. While the Left groups successfully transform very many students from privileged backgrounds to become more sympathetic to the cause of those coming from lesser backgrounds, including garnering support for reservations, they continue to fail to provide a sense of belonging to the Dalit-Bahujan communities. What should have been an open-ended political experiment is reduced to a debate on the size, support, and presence of student groups as a precondition to forge alliances. This calculative, pragmatic and instrumental way of negotiating historical anxieties has distanced and is gradually weakening the appeal of the Left student bodies on campus. There is an urgent need for the Left and DalitBahujan groups to strike a dialogue outside electoral calculations. In this, it is incumbent on the Left groups to take the first step, including listening to the alternative social logic of the Dalit-Bahujan groups.

The Dalit-Bahujan groups must realize that the identity of being a Dalit at the end of the day is an imposed identity and part of the Brahminical system they are struggling against. The more they reduce the Left students and faculty to their castes, the more they get reduced to being ‘only’ Dalits. To overcome this, Dalit-Bahujan groups must begin by recognizing the immense contribution that Left politics has made to provide them an enabling atmosphere on campus to gain self-confidence and to articulate an alternative discourse.23 Acknowledgment and celebration of these enabling spaces only broadens and does not weaken the Dalit-Bahujan discourse. Missing this historic opportunity will cost all those wishing to be part of the transformative process of restoring dignity to a majority of social groups. And this continues to be the essential difference with the Right-wing student body, the ABVP, which has been active in earlier instances in abusing Dalit faculty, vandalizing Ambedkar’s pictures, and also in physical violence.24 This common condition will not automatically lead to a unity between the Left and other political forces but it should also not lead to a competitive bargaining in making advances and forging alliances with the Right. Under the current regime, intriguingly, we have witnessed both the play out of social prejudices against the Dalits but also the moves of Dalits towards the Right. It only highlights the layered complexity in Indian politics that refuses to get straightjacketed, and this layered reality is a vibrant source on which Right-wing populism has worked itself.

Caste, Authenticity, and the Oriental Spirit

O

ne of the issues that repeatedly came up in the public discourse in the last four years is that of claiming an ‘authentic’ past. Authenticity is one of the central features of populism on the basis of which a core constituency is built. In this case, it is about an authentic Hindu who lays claim to a grand past. Prime Minister Modi announced at a science conclave that Indian civilization had the knowledge of plastic surgery in ancient times, and the imagery of Lord Ganesh is a clear example of this.25 Similarly, he began the practice of gifting the Bhagvat Gita to foreign dignitaries, though at other occasions, he claimed that the Constitution of India alone is his Bhagvat Gita that everyone else needs to follow.26 On the sidelines, RSS repeatedly claimed that the knowledge in the Vedas, Upanishads, and other ancient texts need to be appropriated in order to make a better meaning of life in modern times.27 The problem that remains is not the claim itself but the realization that many of these texts had reference to the Varna Ashrama Dharma and directly or indirectly justified a segregated caste order. The most controversial of these texts is that of Manusmriti that codified caste and gendered practices. Ambedkar had publicly burnt a copy of the Manusmriti as a symbol of protest against Hinduism, which is otherwise considered as one of the early legal texts that codified the ancient way of life. In fact, a statue of Manu was installed outside the High Court in Rajasthan.28

Manusmriti and Ancient Past The problem for the RSS is a long-standing one. It struggles with the question of how to create an authentic past with reference to such texts when they have references to the caste system and are rejected by the DalitBahujan. While on the other hand, rejection of ancient knowledge at times also symbolizes Eurocentrism and a bias to Western Enlightenment that refuses to acknowledge a different view of social and cultural life that stands in contrast or in opposition to its own legal-rational order. Secularprogressives in India did not sufficiently engage with this question, though much before them, Gandhi had attempted to do so by reinterpreting the ancient texts to contemporary imperatives. For instance, he argued that Bhagvat Gita was a text about peace and non-violence and war was a kind of symbolism that should not be read literally. Through this, he attempted to address the sensibilities of caste and justifications of violence within the limits of Hinduism and without questioning the way of life it presents.29 The other pertinent question that is relevant and will perhaps become more significant in times to come is whether or not ancient texts represented knowledge systems outside of Brahminic Hinduism and that it is only one variant or one possible interpretation, among many others. There needs to be more pronounced attempts both at the level of the episteme and also in a more direct political manner on how to renegotiate with ancient India. One such text in the recent past was Hegel’s India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts. This was an important book at a significant time. It makes some incisive points on how the Anglophone world has refused to, and continues to ignore, the contributions of ‘far-reaching philosophical systems’ that arose outside the so-called Western traditions. Hegel was one such philosopher, who, the authors of the book, argue suffered from the vices of his era, including that of racism, orientalism, chauvinism, religious bias, the pride of cultural superiority, and antisemitism. The authors, intriguingly, go a step further and argue that Hegel dismissed ‘Indian thought with acerbic contempt’ because ‘that which was most impressive to Hegel about Indian philosophy also posed a grave threat

to him’.30 It reminded him of the painful fact that a substantial part of his cutting-edge philosophy ‘culminated in no more than those precious insights already enjoyed by distant philosophers centuries before’.31 Hegel made great efforts to distinguish the construct of the Brahman—as the Absolute—from his own ‘philosophy of the emergence of the Absolute’. Three decades of postcolonial theory in India and elsewhere seems to have fructified in not only laying a claim to the rich traditions of Indian philosophy but also in mustering the courage to expose the possible lack of magnanimity of Western philosophers in acknowledging some of the contributions to the philosophical systems that could have preceded their own understanding and elaborations.

Authenticity and the Problem of Retrieval However, the more intractable problem could be one of what I would refer to as the ‘problem of retrieval’. If we continue to teach Greek philosophers, in spite of many of them lending active or tacit support to the system of slavery, or teach and read J.S.Mill as a philosopher of liberty, in spite of his racist attitude to those beyond the Western shores, what prevented us from retrieving the rich philosophical systems within what is being referred to as Indian philosophy. Why did Indian philosophy and systems of knowledge come to be undermined or equated to Brahminic Hinduism? In fact, the authors point out that, ‘for Hegel, (that) the oriental empire was yet to develop its rational objectivity of self-conscious substantiality, freedom, as also the condition of stable, organized law. Again, this presentation reduces the plurality of Indian history, religions, regimes, and politics to those captured in the mainstream of Brahminic Hinduism, which is a partial and misleading presentation of India’32 (p.77). The objective spirit for Hegel is, in essence, the evolution of the principle of subjectivity and self-conscious freedom, which the oriental spirit could not attain as caste divisions reduced the potential to achieve civic and legal regulations. If the plurality that the authors refer to signifies philosophical systems untouched by Brahminic Hinduism, there is a need to both pursue and retrieve those systems and also

find a possible explanation for why it did not happen, and Hegel perhaps is not alone in this. The book could certainly have been more enriching in addressing the ‘problem of retrieval’, keeping Hegel as the reference point. In a sense, the book under review makes an important beginning in this direction. There could be various entry points in framing Hegel’s engagement with Indian philosophy. The authors point out that ‘for decades, philosophers and historians from Karl Popper to Walter Kaufmann have suggested that “the Nazis got their racism from Hegel” or that Hegel contributes to “the formula for modern racism”. There is likely much truth in these views as well’.33 Hegel made dogmatic judgments not merely about India but also about Africa in claiming that, ‘Africa has no history and is therefore irrelevant to his comprehensive philosophy of world history’.34 Hegel’s critique of the oriental spirit having a static nature, emerged not merely from his racist prejudice but also his understanding of history being one with telos. In contrast, Ernesto Laclau points out that ‘history cannot be conceived therefore as an infinite advance towards an ultimate aim. History is rather a discontinuous succession of hegemonic formations that cannot be ordered by a script transcending their contingent historicity’.35 Eurocentrism and racism are closely linked to Hegelian teleology but I am not sure if we have made complete sense of this interface. Would making a fuller sense of this interface between an episteme, founded on the ideas of teleological history and universality as a pure ‘uncontaminated instance’ and the proposition regarding a stagnant oriental spirit allow us to reframe Hegelian philosophy in any meaningful sense? The authors, however, make a steadfast claim that ‘Indian thought really haunted Hegel somehow. In this reinterpretation, we argue that it represented a sort of nagging twin that he badly needed to shake off throughout the development of his philosophy.’36 The authors in their reinterpretation point out that Hegel distinguished his own philosophy from that of Indian philosophy around two definitive points. First, around the motif of freedom as against the omnipresent role of caste in all of Indian history, politics, art, religion and philosophy, and the second is the idea of insufficient mediation—dialectical and progressive—

as against the stasis of Indian thought. The subject-object relation holds the key to understanding the Hegelian approach to social and historical processes. For Hegel, the actions of the subject, in the ultimate analysis, have to be located, sutured to the objective conditions in which he/she lives in. Instead of understanding human action as a product of unrelated sources, as the authors lucidly explain, ‘for Hegel, what is essential is that all of these are manifold expressions of the character of a community of people, of their Spirit. That is, the linkages between these different (even ostensibly opposed) aspects of human life taken as a whole are, for Hegel, the key to understanding the whole, which the Phenomenology claims to fathom’.37 Thus, Hegel concludes that in a hierarchized society like India, where Brahmins dominate the rest through scriptural sanction, the philosophy they produced must be contaminated, stagnant, and undialectical. The process of history is to finally achieve complete self-knowledge, or in other words, complete social transparency of the historical processes. It is in this that the subject finally enjoys the essence of freedom. 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 selfreflection. 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

A

mong 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’.

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 topdown 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 Leftwing ‘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 osmosis 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 politicalrepresentative 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 topdown 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 reimagine 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 secularcitizen 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. Secularism, in essence, is the ability to forge friendships with unlikely social groups or the ability to express solidarity with strangers. It is, in a sense, the opposite of xenophobia, which means phobia of strangers. If the idea is to strike at the root of xenophobia and build friendships, and not merely tolerate the differences, then surely secularism needs to have a wider canvas than merely being obsessed with the way the state deals with the issue of religious differences. Even that role of the state has to be toned with the essential philosophical compass of how best to forge close-knit ties between different cultural groups—not merely religious but also caste, ethnic, regional, and linguistic, among others. All of these ties concern secularism as a social philosophy.

Secularism and Neo-liberalism The wider canvas in the context of India, and elsewhere too, should beg the question: Can we afford secular ethos in society without a welfare state? After the 1990s, India has been unsuccessfully struggling for a secular society with a neoliberal state that practically destroyed the legitimacy of any kind of shared ethos, supplanting it with an aggressive market-oriented competitive ethic. The decline of the Congress party and the rise of the Right wing, narrow nationalism in part overlaps with the rolling back of a welfare state replaced by a private ethic of individual responsibility and voluntary association. A welfare state is not merely about doles and subsidies, but a state policy formulated around universal welfare and protection of dignity where no individual or social group suffers the indignity of poverty, exclusion,

scarcity, or basic needs. The dismantling of the welfare state was in effect also the undoing of the secular ethos. Secularism was inbuilt in the idea that ‘basic’ needs such as education, health, and environment, among others are public goods that cannot be subjected to private trade and commerce. Economist Amartya Sen rightly pointed out that the problem of unemployment was not merely that of economic resources but that it is a question of lack of dignity, which cannot be provided for by council housing and a monthly stipend of the state. Can we, therefore, achieve secularism in society without a social democratic state?27 Further, if secularism is a social philosophy of thick friendships and cross-cultural bonds, then it has to be guided by compassion and not merely a policy of tolerance. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to this as an expansion of the ‘circle of concern’, which has to go beyond the immediate identity that we are born into.28 Such social concern has to be nurtured and made an integral part of the political culture of any nation. State policy here is not merely about how to avoid cultural and religious conflicts but also about how to nurture thick social bonds. The question of ethics has been left by the liberal-secular states to religion, schools, and family, which became foundational for Right-wing mobilization. Again, as Nussbaum points out, today we need to debate if the state too can mobilize secular ethics without leaving them to private institutions.29 For instance, it could well be within the reach of the state to formulate policies that make mixed neighbourhoods mandatory in urban housing schemes.30 The state could devise policies in accordance with population percentage to make it mandatory in government housing schemes for individuals from different religious, caste, and ethnic groups to cohabit. Similarly, the state can also make it mandatory in public/government and private educational institutions to admit a certain percentage of children from different religious and caste groups. Schools today have become havens of social isolation where children of similar economic and social backgrounds socialize, and they are deeply unaware of the kind of social diversity that exists outside their little worlds. The New Education Policy

partly began this process, though it recognized only the criterion of economic status and provided for 25% reserved seats for children from economically deprived backgrounds, even that have met with stiff resistance.

Beyond Minoritization Finally, secularism is not merely about the generosity of the majority communities; it also includes the responsibilities of minority communities towards collective living. The practices internal to minority communities are not merely issues that concern the minorities; they have ramifications on the way majority communities perceive, alter, and structure their relations with the minorities. This includes the question of inclusion and dignity of ‘minorities within minorities’, be it that of sub-castes within the scheduled castes, be it the question of gender, or of Pasmanda Muslims within the Muslim community. Denial of equal opportunities and justice to these internal minorities provides sufficient justification for the exclusion by the majority communities. Minorities cannot promote ‘selective secularism’. Similarly, minority social groups need to take responsibility not to merely protect their identities in an essentialized mode but need to strive to make positive claims as citizens. This includes not merely demanding an equal share in resources but also equal responsibility in speaking for all other marginalized social groups. In the case of India, Muslim social and political organizations need to learn to speak about the issues of the tribals, Dalits, and others. It is this voluntary apportioning of social responsibility that stalls the process of social ghettoization of the religious minorities in India. It is akin to anti-caste crusader Jyotiba Phule including even Brahmin women in his idea of shudrasthishudra and Dalit Panthers referring to all dispossessed as Dalits. It is also an expression of the ethics of compassion and solidarity with others beyond one’s own immediate identity by birth. Indian secularism has promoted ‘secular sectarianism’ of the minorities that have for long stopped imagining of collectives beyond themselves making

it easy for Right-wing politics to represent them as insular, closed, and inward-looking.31 Re-imagining secularism as a social philosophy of compassion and an act of friendship with strangers is an imperative pre-condition to guide the state policy. In turn, secularism, as a distinct social philosophy, holds clues to the possible ways in which future politics need to be reconstructed in India. The future of politics squarely lies on how far we can collectively restore and inform our institutional arrangements with deeper social roots.

Bringing Justice Back In

T

he workings of democracy are based on principles of justice. Recognition, redistribution, and representation are three distinct but inextricably linked dimensions of justice in the contemporary world. However, in the social and political dynamics, that we are currently witnessing in India, not only are these three different dimensions being pulled in different directions but are also actively undermining, blocking, and even cancelling out each other. By the 1980s, with a failing economy marred by the crisis in Balance of Payments (BOP), lack of political will to implement land reforms, marginal benefits reaching out due to pilferages in poverty alleviation programmes, collapse of primary education in the rural areas, and misrecognition created by progressive redistributive policies such as the reservations based on a quota system, the political landscape shifted from an emphasis on redistribution to the emergence of ‘politics of recognition’ that increasingly took the shape of identity politics. This was the phase where, for instance, Dalit politics shifted to a political discourse on claiming dignity against the caste-Hindu propaganda, against reservations being anti-merit, valourizing Dalit lifestyle issues such as beef eating, separate religious symbols and rituals, conversion, and a heightened rhetoric against dominant Brahmanical practices in a Hindu public sphere.This process, in a sense, culminated in the rise of political mobilization of Dalits as an independent social constituency that fructified in the phenomenon of the rise of the BSP. The BSP further strengthened the identity politics and claims to cultural recognition in taking up agenda such

as of establishing Ambedkar Parks and statues, and in the process, dropped economic agenda and even social agenda such as demanding free and compulsory primary education for all. In the current phase, the discourse further shifted from recognition to singular emphasis on representation. This is visible in strategies adopted by social activists such as Thirumavalan in TamilNadu arguing against conversions since it has the propensity of reducing the Dalits to a numerical minority in converting to Islam or Christianity, while remaining a sizeable majority is imperative to gain political power and representation for the Dalits, as we argued in some detail about Dalit Panthers in the previous section. Further, remaining within the Hindu fold was necessary to remain eligible to claim reservations for economic and educational opportunities. Not only did such strategies over a period of time lead to supplanting an active agenda for a separate cultural recognition outside the Hindu fold and issues of dignity and humiliation but also opened new avenues for renewed claims to Hindu identity and smudged the difference with far-Right Hindutva politics. It is in this context that one can make sense of the widening possibilities of BJP gaining support among the marginalized social groups such as the Dalits and the OBCs, with its preparedness to offer them political representation. Similarly, with the OBCs, certain sections within them had economic and political power/representation but were considered socially backward mainly due to poor educational qualifications and their absence from modern economy. While extending the provision of reservations through the OBC quota in the 1990s, in a sense, helped fight the misrecognition emerging from the policy of reservations, with OBCs making a more vigorous and unapologetic claim. It, however, also led to a phenomenon of traditional social elites such as the Jats, Rajputs, and the Marathas claiming the OBC status, and now Gujjars demanding the ST status. This once again blocked a process of internal redistribution of resources and economic opportunities within the OBCs as it happened within the various sub-castes within the Dalits.

This brought into light the question of ‘classes within castes’ and the possibility of reservations and representation turning into ‘weapons of the strong’ with relatively more marginalized social groups within the Dalits and the OBCs falling through the cracks. In the emergent scenario, it is perhaps the Muslims who have remained marginalized across all the three dimensions of justice, with very little economic and educational opportunities, remaining culturally stigmatized and ghettoized, and shrinking in political representation. The somewhat unprecedented victory of the BJP in the general elections brought to the fore the new possibility of winning elections without the support of the religious minorities signifying a new kind of ‘politics without minorities’. Even in a new state like Telangana, which has a sizeable population of Muslims, there is a drastic reduction in providing representation to the Muslims by all major political parties and not BJP alone.

Feminization of Labour At one end of the spectrum is the growth of inequalities being uneven in the sense of providing new economic opportunities for social groups that were kept out, reflected in phenomenon such as ‘feminization of labour’ and migration of marginalized social castes and classes to urban metropolitan cities from their traditional habitation in rural areas, and at the other end is the growing distress, displacement, dispossession, and impoverishment that has resulted in dependence on governmental schemes for subsistence living. Both these dynamics have contributed to a steady decline in the social mobilization and protest politics of the subaltern groups, reflected in the decline of the trade union movement of the workers and the farmers’ movements. The streets vacated by the subaltern have in turn been occupied by the newly emergent urban middle classes visible in street protests against urban crime and corruption. The newly emergent social elites among the Dalits and the OBCs constituting the new middle classes have also further extended their support to the neoliberal reforms and the language of growth

and governance, eclipsing the social and economic demands of the relatively marginalized social groups within them. The demands of realizing justice continue to require bringing together the three dimensions of redistribution, recognition, and representation into a new kind of alignment, without which there would be large sections of the population that would remain without basic economic capabilities, dignity, and an opportunity to represent themselves. The source and possibility of generating such alternative political strategies will continue to remain in defining what the future of politics will look like in India.

Mezzanine Elites and Alternative Political Strategies As we pointed out, interest in justice will make it imperative to raise new questions that have remained shrouded in the public discourse in India. One of the new phenomena gradually unfolding in Indian democracy is that of the underprivileged within dominant castes.32 This issue was undermined for long as there was no political language to articulate their interests. While on the one hand, we have the phenomenon of new social elites, as we have pointed out, emerging among the subaltern Dalit and OBC social groups, there is also issue of the disadvantaged among the more dominant castes such as the Patidars in Gujarat, Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka, Kapus in Andhra, Jats in Haryana, and finally, the question of the poor among the Brahmins in parallel. While Dalits and the OBCs are moving to the centre stage through a definitive impact in determining the contours of representation and political power, with a small section among the OBCs also having economic power, they remain socially backward and slighted. Those among the so-called forward castes, especially the Brahmins, have become politically less relevant and enjoy very little of economic power but continue to hold on to their social and cultural capital, in terms of education and ritual status. For instance, Brahmins have had all through disproportionate representation as public representatives, bureaucrats, and in various white-collared professions. It is this disproportionate share that marked them as elites who

needed to be dislodged from other caste groups to find mobility. However, a sizeable section of these dominant groups, including the Brahmins, have either been economically poor or have become impoverished due to the changing social dynamics. How do we characterize these social groups and assess their impact on processes of democratization? Both the new elites among the Dalit and OBCs and the disadvantaged sections of the so-called forward castes are not elites in the traditional sense of the term, either sociologically or historically. They are best typified as mezzanine elites. It is imperative to understand the dynamics internal to these mezzanine elites. Most of the Brahmins have migrated from the rural hinterlands to towns and cities. They either lost lands or sold them in order to keep up with the changing economic pressures. The traditional occupation of priesthood has become economically unviable and socially unprivileged. Other professions such as Ayurvedic doctors have also become unfeasible. A large section of Brahmins (it is estimated up to 13%) in smaller towns have no property and means for proper higher education. They are finding it difficult to get government jobs and often settle for small-time private jobs, and face financial difficulties that we often associate with the so-called lower castes. There are a number of cases of young men working as priests in local temples facing the difficulty of even finding a suitable bride, as parents are not prepared for such matches owing to lower income levels and uncertain futures. Further, young men of such families are ill-prepared to take up manual jobs as they find them demeaning.

Reverse Stigma? The old hierarchies continue to plague them, and they are also victims of ‘reverse stigma’ where doing an odd job is seen as a loss of earlier social status. They often face public ridicule, opening the wedge between the poor economic condition and continued self-claims of higher social status. Many of these families continue to practice the discriminatory caste-practices but now more in the private domain rather than in public.

For instance, they continue to be essentially vegetarians and believe in its superiority over a non-vegetarian diet. This, they believe, can continue as a cultural practice rather than a discriminatory practice because all other castes too have their own caste-based practices. The moot question is whether practices that symbolized discrimination in the past can acquire the character of a cultural practice. Can they be practised in the private domain without being scrutinized by public standards? There is a late realization among a few that what Brahmins are facing today is a ‘punishment’ for their past deeds. They are socially ‘injured’ and cannot imagine replicating the discrimination they stridently pursued in the past. They realize that the other castes need a share of opportunities and dignity that was denied to them for centuries. Further, they also seem to see the point that it is also not practically possible to discriminate castes that have gained political power and economic advantage over a period of time. There is also a loss of respect for ritual status and religious practices in the public domain. Fast-paced development has pushed religion to the backwaters of everyday social life. Other castes seem to be distinctly more united and organized in comparison to the Brahmins who are weak in terms of their capacity to socially and politically mobilize themselves. Many of these poor Brahmins now see good education as their only source of a good life. They feel that some kind of financial help and government schemes need to be launched in order to pull them out of their vulnerable economic position. Many, in fact, feel that poor Brahmins today need reservations and scholarships in order to qualify and pursue higher education. The government of Andhra Pradesh has announced a new scheme called ‘Vidya Bharathi’ in order to help Brahmins from poor families and Brahmin Parishad in Telangana.33 Other parties such as the YSR (Congress) have promised fee reimbursement. Even Mayawati was toying with 5% reservation for Brahmins from poorer backgrounds. New social and non-governmental organizations such as the Brahmin Parishad and Dhanwantri have been started in order to pursue welfare activities.34 When we are witnessing attacks against the Dalits and return of symbols such as the sanctity of the cow as a religious symbol and public lynching by

the Gau Rakhshaks, and they are being aggressively pursued symbolizing a counter-revolution, how do we negotiate with the vulnerabilities of the underprivileged sections of the dominant groups? Does it need to be debated as to how this phenomenon is different from the newly emerging elites among the subaltern caste groups? This ongoing fragmentation of social processes while signifying social change and emergent social equality at one level nevertheless raises at another level a set of questions about notions of equality itself.

Women and the Future of Democracy

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longside reworking on new social philosophy of solidarity and justice, and identifying new modes of discrimination, such as among the vulnerable among the dominant groups, the future of politics in India will also depend on locating and nurturing new agents of change who can contribute to reorganizing social life by identifying the hidden and not so visible hegemonic aspects of the everyday life. Women and the independence of their agency will be of great significance. There are already signposts of their emergence as a separate constituency, alongside religious and caste groups, for electoral mobilization. This will hold promise not only as the new element of democracy but also the capacity to democratize older actors and the modes of their mobilization. Indian democracy will also have to face up to new questions in the zone of emotions, intimacy, and the private, which have not generally remained at the core of what we understood by the imagination of democracy. Two such public debates that came to the core under the current regime was that of the demand for the prohibition of liquor and the problem of growing sexual harassment and violence against women.

Women as Free Spirits With the successful implementation of prohibition of liquor in Bihar soon after Nitish Kumar was appointed as the chief minister, not only has there been a break on growing alcoholism and a liquor-propelled political

economy but more importantly, what one is getting to witness in our democracy is the creation of women as a distinct constituency, with distinct demands of their own. Women have been active as voters all through postindependence history but rarely did they have distinct demands of their own, and more importantly, they were considered to be voting more around the preference of their families and male counterparts. It is perhaps for the first time that with a string of states, such as Kerala prohibiting liquor and Tamil Nadu considering the possibility that women are making their presence felt as a distinct constituency with demands and a viewpoint of their own. This would have a long-term impact on the way we understand the configurations of electoral politics alongside caste, religion, and region. Electoral politics was dominated by caste and religious configurations, and women were a sub-set subsumed under these larger social grids. Women were known to raise and mobilize issues such as price rise or occasionally led social struggles against sexual violence, which did not necessarily turn into the electoral constituency to impact the voting patterns. Even if women’s issues were addressed as a tokenism, they did not assume the proportion that they seem to be taking in the current phase. In Bihar, with the implementation of prohibition causing a revenue loss of up to `3,000 crore, women have put down a stamp of long-term impact on electoral politics by emerging as a relatively stable vote bank that would influence electoral outcomes in a decisive manner. This process began in Andhra Pradesh in 1992 with women leading the way and forcing the then government led by Telugu Desam Party under N.T.Rama Rao’s leadership to prohibit liquor. Women then had linked consumption of liquor with distress, debt, and domestic violence. They promised to vote for a party that would take this bold move. However, after a couple of years, prohibition was lifted, and the voice women had gathered frittered away. This process, in a somewhat quiet manner, is underway in places like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, which have been sites of various kinds of violence against women. In Haryana, if it’s the khap panchayats, in UP women were the worst affected during communal riots. Here, women began to speak across caste and religion and began to realize that either way, they

were the worst affected. Khap’s order of rape as a punishment for intercaste marriages or social boycott as legitimate punishments makes women belonging to both Hindu and Muslim communities the first victims of organized violence.35 If this ‘silent revolution’ fructifies, it would initiate a new kind of a dialogue on the religion and caste-based mobilizations and the way much of it is linked to the idea of community honour hinging on social and sexual control of women. This process is also visible in the way when the Supreme Court order asked for women to be allowed into the Shani temple, and the way RSS and other social organizations have supported this demand demonstrates the importance of not only the presence of women in public spaces but their critical role in electoral calculations. The issue of the entry of women in Shani temple would have some impact on an impending demand for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in the days to come. It would be interesting to wait and watch if women, especially from Muslim communities, would play a larger and distinct role in the way the debate on UCC will play out this time around, different from the days of Shah Bano.36 If women from across religions are able to muster a voice of their own, distinct from their community leaders, this might impact not only the way religion will come to be perceived in public spaces but also begin to raise larger questions about the interface between religion and gender cutting across religious divides, which in turn would have important fallout for the possibility of communal polarisation and the way we understand caste in times to come.

Caste and Gender In fact, as part of anti-caste mobilization, both Jyothiba Phule and Ambedkar always emphasized the inextricable link between caste and gender. As we had mentioned earlier too, both felt that much of caste is actually about gendered practices in order to gain control over the sexuality of the so-called lower caste women. Phule began school for both casteHindu women as well as Dalit and referred to both as shudraatishudra.37 Ambedkar too drew this link in arguing that it is only women and Dalits

who experience untouchability—Dalits in being spatially and socially ostracised and women during their menstrual cycles—are physically segregated from the rest of the family members.38 It is this vision that can now be possibly recovered from women emerging as a distinct constituency in electoral dynamics. For women’s issues to be foregrounded, it is imperative that caste and religious control is undermined. This tussle that was partial and sporadic might now assume more substantive and long-term proportions. Women as voters now cannot be delimited to mere populist measures of offering sewing machines and colour television sets but raise more substantive political-economy demands as a distinct electoral constituency. Alongside this, the impending issue of 33% reservation for women in parliament might assume more serious proportions, which would only further add a fillip to this process of a distinct politics. This, however, cannot be construed as a revolutionary step that is going to set aside caste and religion but what it can do is raise new issues and bring forth new frames as to how and why women of all castes, religions, and regions become victims of physical and sexual violence in cases of conflicts (one of which in the context of Dera Sacha Sauda, we discussed in the previous section). There is a distinct structure that works across these social configurations. This perspective in itself is a step forward in Indian democracy.

Love and Sexual Harassment The issue of sexual harassment is perhaps a constant under all political regimes. While there is no urban crime such as mugging that we often see in European cities, what remains unacceptably high in urban centres and public spaces in India is sexual violence against women. As a counter to the constant presence of sexual harassment in educational institutions, a few young women took the novel step of putting up the names of the alleged accused. They put up the names on the internet and in public domain for everyone to access. Those who put up the list referred to this as a method to

‘name and shame’ the accused in order to abate violence against women. Those who opposed such methods referred to it as ‘vigilante justice’. The new discourse of ‘naming and shaming’ had taken the social media and institutions by surprise, but it also seems to have very soon met with a dead end.39 Those who took the initiative to muster a list of the accused refuse to answer the question ‘what if’ there are the names of those who were not involved in harassment, and therefore, the question of evidence remains unanswered. Those questioning the list, including a section of known feminists, questioned the veracity of such a method of ‘naming and shaming’, and equated it with public lynching. One could further say, it amounts to a justification of collateral damage like those who suffer without conviction in much of the ‘war on terror’.40 Those who brought out the list, fine-tuned it, and brought out not only just a list of the accused but planned to bring out the nature of complaints, expand the meaning of harassment, and call for a public debate on how fear gets instilled in institutional spaces. While those opposed to the list at best were interested in how else to fine tune the institutional response and protect the already existing mechanisms that have been devised, such as the Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) in JNU. The stalemate, as it continued, sidestepped the question as to whether this debate can at all be settled without debating the larger context. Admittedly, there is an institutional crisis as much as there is a crisis of compassion and concern, in general, and not merely within the ambit of sexuality. One possible reason why this debate has raised the dust but not thrown any new light could be because the feminists who were raising the issue of harassment could have well worked within the very framework in which the accused seem to have defended themselves. It’s not without coincidence that neither has paused to ask what type of relations we are searching for. What would be a deeper idea of love wherein claims and counterclaims—jostling for space—cut both ways without any easy resolution but continue to nurture deeper affections, attachments, and an idea of longing and belongingness! It includes an idea of sharing and looking out for each other mutually, and a sense of fondness beyond a mere

sense of ownership, control, or self-glorification. The debate on harassment cannot be meaningfully continued without an accompanying debate on ideas of love, affection, and togetherness.

‘Fear of the Fall’ Are we collectively inhabiting in times best typified by what in another context Slavoj Zizek refers to as the ‘fear of falling in love’? What we instead have, according to him, is ‘precisely love without the fall, without falling in love, without this totally unpredictable dramatic encounter. And that’s what I find very sad. I think that today we are simply more and more afraid of this event or encounters. You encounter something which is totally contingent but the result of it if you accept it as an event is that your entire life changes.’41 The ‘fall’ requires losing one’s own self, it is an event of ‘pure contingency’. An event that refuses to remain contained but seamlessly spills over into a process that again as Alain Badiou in another context refers to as the ‘fidelity to the event’. Where the subjects, in this case, the lovers ‘interpret and explore an event without denying its eventual nature.’42 However, one needs to recognize that a deep relation ‘seems to hold together without guarantees or secure knowledge. It is unfolded or constructed through a series of interventions or inquiries. To take part in such a process is to believe, or guess, that there is something there to be unpacked or unfolded’.43 How do we counter power and fear with love and compassion? In an age of ‘hyper-recognition, anxiety, and anomie’, the politics of opposition, including those of the feminist variant, can possibly spread by internalizing these very features. The marked absence of debate on love and attachment by those questioning, as much as those being questioned, is a point worth pondering over. The courage to question ourselves as to what sustains love is necessary to understand what propels harassment and fear. There are no easy answers, but to suffer from a pervasive sense of the ‘fear of the fall’ is only to prevent oneself from even beginning to look for

the answers. It is complex because the relationship between love and fear is not one of the straight lines but rather a crooked one. As Bertrand Russel in his celebrated book on the Conquest of Happiness notes that it is intriguing that those who feel loved find love and those who suffer the ‘lack’ only further distance themselves and continue to suffer abject neglect. The Lacanian idea of lack is the lack of very ‘being’, lacking the very ability to desire.44 Politics without desire is to inscribe death or passivity over life. We have collectively succeeded in interrogating the ability of power to subsume love but failed to trust the ability of love in overcoming power. The new political spaces we inhabit have an immense symbolic potential to re-signify our practices and create their ‘uncanny double’. They implode from within and therein lays our failure to move beyond the stalemates we encounter. The crisis of gendered spaces is as much about our collective inability to love as it is about identifying power. Hundred years of the process of secularisation of social and personal relations, as Zygmunt Bauman observes, in his celebrated work titled In Search of Politics, has led to a situation of ending up only with contingent commitments and ad hoc bonds. The best we could achieve is the contractualization of relations, as a template for free and equal relations. However, while it takes two to enter a contract, it takes, as Bauman points out, only one to break it. The pervasive sense of uncertainty and insecurity within which we strike intimate relations has made them ‘free’ and porous. This has to be the collective context to debate how best to carry the fight against fear and harassment and to evaluate if the method of ‘naming and shaming’ cumulatively aids or debilitatingly blocks our search for the alternatives.

Anxiety, Anger, Anomie: Mobilizing Generation Next

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omething in modern life continues to exist without political articulation. While we try to subsume it under the known categories of caste, class, and gender, there is a pervasive excess that spills over and bleeds into everyday life. News and dailies routinely carry stories of child sex abuse, road rage, rape, murderous attacks, and suicides that are often reduced to individual psyche without an explanation in our collective existence. It could well be that the cause and effect of some of these phenomena seem to have become too circular to offer an explanation. Some of them that are relatively more visible include anxiety, boredom, alienation, anomie, stress, anger, and loneliness. These are related to issues of class, caste, and gender, as they are with urbanization, individuation, migration, and secularization but cannot be collapsed into them, and therefore need a novel political articulation to keep politics as an avocation relevant for the generation next. Boredom has become so omnipresent that it stares at us from the billboards of advertisers, selling anything from chocolate to condoms. It is the sheer repetitiveness of the everyday life from your daily chores to work and art and literature that it seems time has come to a standstill.45 There is a shrinking of interests and manufacture of an unmistakable ‘one-dimensional man’ that makes most interactions a routine or a protocol that burdens you rather than offering a sense of refreshment or refinement. One way is to come to terms with the repetitiveness of the everyday, perhaps as Gandhi

signified in his use of the ‘charkha’ that was not only to make us economically self-reliant but also socially self-sufficient. In order to be socially sustainable, we need to ask ourselves if we can escape the repetitive activities of the social order or in what ways we can refashion our social ecology in order to not feel repetitiveness as sheer boredom. Politics for the next generation has to involve what seem like deeply personal and bio-political issues, but in actuality, have a more intricate interface with other processes. For instance, boredom has a connection with the changing nature of work in the modern industry including information technology; it has links to shrinking interests and the gap between an emboldened imagination of intense relations and their elusive nature in the lived reality. Intensity and ideas of intimacy, in turn, are related to ‘liberation’ of women from the private, from tradition and the ritualistic socialization. Liberation of women in the earlier generation was problematized with its relation to sexuality, and we need to today link it to issues of intimacy, and love (as we discussed in the previous essay). Foregrounding issues of intimacy, emotions, and love will perhaps allow us to reframe the issue of gender as we understand it, and it will also provide us new issues that have escaped a more explicit political mobilization. What would that mobilization look like?

Space and Technology Closely linked is the deep sense of alienation in modern life that is a sense of organicity. Time seems to collapse into serialized moments each unto itself, refusing a sense of continuity and belongingness. Technology as visual and social media is intrusive and breaks down our relationship to the collective into a mediated experience and into titbits of information that we routinely feed on, only to move on to the next. While urban spaces inhabited with mediated interactions feel synthetic, there is no easy alternative in celebrating the local spaces and face-to-face interactions as being more authentic or more ethical; instead, they suffocate. Be it villages, suburbs, or small towns, life in the moffusil today seems burdened by

imposed hierarchies of collective identities. The irreducible choice is between that ‘of hierarchical collectives of the local and facelessness of the global’. In what meaningful way can spatiality and space be politicized for a new kind of ‘spatial politics’? Can moffusils be a distinct space for political location, including the feelings of being left behind, the burden of socially intrusive locality, repetitiveness, and life without a spirit of exploring the new and the unknown, among many other such issues? These are linked to the way these mofussil-centric spatial imaginations have become structured after globalization. Moffusils at one point in time were centres of trade and culture; today they suffer from a pervasive sense of having been ‘left behind’. While this has been mobilized by capital for bulldozing urbanization, including claims by former Finance Minister Mr P.Chidambarm, that by 2050, 80% of Indian population will inhabit the cities, in what another way can we politicize this sense of moffusils being the backwaters of social life?

‘Celibacy Syndrome’ Anomie is yet another dimension of the excess of social/political life. Finding meaning has become all the more difficult. Life has become one of a combination of uncertainty with predictability. The more we strive for a certainty, the more it seems to become predictable. It has always been a hard choice to balance freedom and stability or security, as it is between a comfortable life and a meaningful life. The collapse of shared concerns, especially after the neo-liberal reforms that we referred to in our discussion about fraternity in the previous pages, has made meaning-generating activity and civic communication a casualty. While the meaning of the spiritual kind has become untenable or may be unreachable, the meaning of the pragmatic kind has become too oppressive, banal, and suffocating. Modern life cannot even be assessed in its elementary sense without referring to stress—an inexplicable experience without a point of beginning or ending. It is simply a part of the being. It has, in fact, become a way of relating to the world around us.

‘Time poverty’ has become a thickly collective phenomenon that cuts across class and the rural-urban divide. Individuals, and not merely the corporate, are working many times more than the eight-hour equilibrium between work, rest, and leisure, yet anxiety and ‘fear of fall’ have become inescapable in our workplaces and institutional life. In Japan, today, the stress explodes itself in intensely dark ways, where the ‘celibacy syndrome’ is becoming a norm, which they refer to as ‘Sekkusu Shinu Shokogum’ (modernity seems to have organically delivered what Gandhi arduously pursued through his experiments in Brahmacharya).46 There is a visible ‘flight from human intimacy’. Work from a means of self-actualization is becoming a model of loss of the self. It only gets further complicated with life outside of work imagined without social security measures such as pension and care of the old and aging. It is, therefore, not strange that while in India, we dither from the retirement age being reduced, in France, they were on streets when the state asked workers to prolong and extend the age of retirement to 65 years. ‘Burnout’, a term not many of us had heard when we joined jobs, is now commonly understood as what leads to exhaustion, detachment, and feelings of ineffectiveness. ‘Time poverty’ is the afterlife of the way class differences work themselves. Can radical Left politics work in these new registers to recast class from its drab structural dimension to bring it into its more felt experiential dimension? Critical theorist Nancy Fraser incisively points out that ‘socialism is cognitively compelling but experientially remote.’47 Will bringing in issues such as anomie and ‘time poverty’ bring forth a dimension of class that can reinvigorate class politics related but different from the way we understood it all along? Can it also point to a different kind of class politics that can hold appeal to the majority—99% as the Occupy Movement in the US put it,48 cutting across differences between the petite bourgeoisie, and the working class, a difference the Left struggled to bring together—as part of radical politics?

‘Age of Anger’

Anger is yet another phenomenon that is present all around us, visible as road rage, growing crime, and violence and in the way multitudes erupt so naturally and spontaneously from the Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring to protests against Rohith Vemula’s suicide. Nobody organizes these protests; they are leaderless and erupt against something that we ‘feel’ is deeply wrong with the way our ‘society’ or ‘system’ works. The anger needs a trigger and many a time has no specific target. There is often, in Freud’s words, ‘transference’ of this anger unto anybody that we may find to be weak and vulnerable.49 It could be ‘Nirbhaya’, it could be an annoying small car driving next to a sport utility vehicle (SUV) or a shootout over a parking spot in an affluent south Delhi colony, or the regular shootouts in schools in the US. The ‘Age of Anger’ that we have collectively inhabited, as Pankaj Mishra pointed out in his recent book,50 is a mode of coping with the fast-paced changes that globalization has initiated. Is anger merely an after-effect of a structural feature of our times or a potential source for meaningful political mobilization? Can it be weaned away from anger against the weak and relative inequalities internal to caste and religious communities to more systemic aspects of modern life? Can this be an important dimension of ‘Left populism’, unlike what it has been so far contributing exclusively to the rise of Right-wing populism across the world? Finally, there is a vice-like grip of loneliness that is growing among the old and the young alike. We collectively inhabit an era of hyper-recognition. The more we are incapacitated of enjoying anonymity and solitary existence, the more we are vulnerable to the vagaries of loneliness.51 The spaciousness of anonymity that allows us to self-reflect is losing ground to the demands of finding a self in being recognized by the other. French philosopher Michel Foucault once observed that as we fail to externalize our ‘natural impulses’, we are prone to internalize them in murderous ways.52 There seems to be an inescapable circularity. The more we demand recognition and love, the less of it we find. How do we move back to an ‘original position’ of finding ourselves without being interrupted and contaminated by the outer world? Accumulated loneliness only makes us

collectively incapable of making the world a more secured home that we persistently aspire for. Homelessness and ‘nomads of the present’ that reside in the deeper recesses of individual lives mark our social spaces. Loneliness has become an epidemic, prompting the government of UK to start for the first time an exclusive Ministry of Loneliness.53 These phenomena put together add up incrementally to a social crisis that is failing to find a political language for itself. We seem to open the social spaces across social hierarchies, with, of course, an imprint of the hierarchies overlapping with the more generic spread. How do we retrieve the generalness of this crisis without slighting or clouding the known social hierarchies is an insurmountable challenge of our times. Future of politics and democracy might need to be radically recast and populism, as we are witnessing, can well be the initial and a preliminary signpost signifying an interregnum as Gramsci pointed out, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.54

India’s Oscillating Public Sphere

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ne of the intriguing aspects of the public sphere in India is its capacity to hold evidently self-contradictory practices and moments together, rather unproblematically. One such moment is the one under the current version of Right-wing populism where it appears that growing communal discourse, as part of the public discourse, is included in the political regime campaigns such as Love Jihad and Ghar Wapsi. While all of these stand for growing communal polarisation and religious intolerance, you have films such as PK and Bajrangi Bhaijan gaining astounding success at the box office.55 A film like PK offered not only an unabashed critique of the godmen but also depicted Hindu gods in a poor light, even if it was meant symbolically. Even as protests by Bajrang Dal and many other selffashioned Hindu outfits were on the increase, people have returned to the theatres in bigger numbers. Now, what explains this strange conjuncture between the growing popularity of a party such as the BJP and Narendra Modi—who, not long back, was symbolized as the ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’, a response to a polarised political campaign in the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Tripura and the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 that they won convincingly—and the success of a film that seems to take a dig at everything is what the politics of the moment seems to stand for. There is something that needs to be deciphered in the public culture of the nation, in order to understand what is in store for the future of democracy in India. Even as we are lamenting that social life and popular culture in India have grown increasingly intolerant and have become

majoritarian in nature, there is sufficient evidence that this phenomenon also has its own antidote in that very popular culture. The most obvious explanation offered in popular perception in order to explain this strange conjuncture is that possibly, Hindus are innately tolerant, and Hinduism is a ‘way of life’ that celebrates composite culture. If Hindus are becoming intolerant, then the reasons have to be sought in external social and political conditions and not in the way the religion is organized. Whatever might be the merits and demerits of this dominant understanding, it needs to be acknowledged that the public sphere in India —even as it is getting increasingly communalized and polarized—also shows traits of silent resistance to monolithic political constructions. This is more than evident in the way the strategy of VHP to build the statues of Godse across the nation has been rejected. The legacy of Gandhi continues to find resonance in the popular memory of the Hindus in India.

No Visible ‘Islamophobia’ While there might be growing distance and ‘othering’ of the Muslims, as it appears in the receding space in the public domain or spatial ghettoization of the Muslims in housing in urban metropolitan cities, there is also enough evidence to show that there is no visible ‘Islamophobia’ in India that resembles the kind of fear-psychosis visible in the US or Europe. Muslims are not made self-conscious or remain suspected outside the security discourse of the state. There might be more of cultural subjugation but not a collapse of a common sense view of an everyday Muslim visible at the marketplace. The kind of death of common sense that is visible in the way citizens in the West have responded to growing Islamophobia is not selfevident either in the smaller towns or rural hinterlands of much of India. The rise of far-Right wing groups or even BJP has been checkered and is never uniform. In fact, one could recall that BJP lost elections in UP soon after their campaign for building the Mandir in Ayodhya. What the Indian public sphere is witnessing instead is ‘contextual communalism’ that emerges from the complexities of its diversity and

political construction of communities in terms of being the majority and minority groups, wedded to the electoral processes and significance of political power linked to the discourses of nationalism. For instance, in course of an election, Muslims are offered candidature in constituencies where they constitute a sizeable portion of the electorate. The rationale being Muslims should and rather would vote en-block for a Muslim candidate making his/her candidature viable and bring in a winnability factor to their candidature. This is a legitimate way for them to gain political representation when they are in a numerical minority. However, this strategy of en-block voting is perceived by the majority community as ‘vote-bank’ politics and communal polarisation initiated by the minority community. Hindus, on the contrary, have been arguing for some time now that ‘if Muslims can vote en-block to a Muslim candidate what is wrong in Hindus voting en-block for a Hindu candidate’.56 The counter-argument to this by the Muslims is that Muslims are willing to vote for all political parties (except BJP)57 when they offer tickets to Hindu candidates, but Hindus are unwilling to vote for Muslim candidates, irrespective of the political party that offers them the ticket. This is the kind of a logjam that perpetuates contextual communalism, where while the minority community demands a level playing field, the majority community demands equalization and standardization of norms and procedures. The secular discourse of the last few decades seems to have failed in arresting the anxieties of the majority Hindu community, without which it would be rather difficult to imagine a shared public domain between different religious communities in India. The micro-dynamics of growing communally polarized political processes need to be foregrounded in order to imagine more shared public spaces. The success of the movie PK reminds us that the opportunity for this within the socio-cultural imaginaries of the majority Hindu community perhaps is not yet a lost cause.

Social Ethics of Violence and the Maoist Movement in India

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olitical mobilization all over the world is undergoing transformations. There are two major dimensions; first, is the general ‘decline in popular/progressive mobilization’ by various subaltern social groups. In India, for instance, an active farmer’s movement of the 1980s is replaced by a spate of farmer suicides all across the countryside. Similarly, there is a collapse of the worker’s movements and the emergence of demobilized social groups such as the migrants, urban poor, and the growing informal and unorganized sector. The streets vacated by the subaltern groups have been taken over by the middle classes mobilizing street protest around issues of crime, sexual violence, and corruption. Subaltern groups have either become invisible or moved to ‘contextual negotiation’ with governmental mechanisms of the state as against resistance. The second important change that is visible is that popular/progressive mobilizations took the shape of street protest and not ‘mere’ negotiation— explosive and episodic rather than sustained and organized. Any number of examples—beginning with the Occupy in the US, Arab Spring in the Middle East, Brazilian Spring in Latin America to India against Corruption in India—have all been short-term, single-issue based, and petered out making it difficult to explain what exactly has been their impact. Did they have any policy impact? Did they change the terms of the discourse of electoral politics? Did they create a new kind of political consciousness? There can be no definitive answers to these questions. In spite of the fact

that these movements were addressing the majority, ‘99% as against 1%’ and forged cross-class alliances and invented post-constituency-based mobilizations. Occupy in the US failed to shake up corporate capitalism and instead lead to the election of a more corporate-oriented Donald Trump. Arab Spring reinstituted the authoritarian regime of the Brotherhood, and India against Corruption brought back a resurgent Right wing BJP into power with a two-thirds majority. It is in this kind of a political milieu that Maoist politics in India have been swimming against the tide and continuing with the mobilization of the ‘basic classes’, including the landless poor and Adivasis of the rural hinterlands of India. The Maoist movement has been a sustained struggle for the last 50 years and is a struggle for the overthrow of the state and capitalism. It continues to speak in the language of an alternative model of development, redistribution of resources, and collective ownership and abolition of private property. The Maoist movement inhabits what has come to be referred to as the ‘Red Corridor’ from south to central and north of India, which Advani had famously referred to as ‘from Tirupati to Pashupati’. The previous prime minister, Mr Manmohan Singh, referred to it as the ‘greatest internal security threat’.58 It is in this context that the recent volume that I edited titled Revolutionary Violence versus Democracy: Narratives from India attempts to look into how and why Maoist politics sustain and whether their continued use of violently armed strategy is the best available means to bring about large-scale structural transformation. The first section of the book laid out the available justifications for a continued armed rebellion in India. It includes arguments of Maoist politics signifying an unflinching attempt to constitute an alternative social ethics of organizing society around collective as against competitive modes of existence, including the question that demands us to think of what inspires young Adivasis to be prepared for death as a way of living, sacrifice one’s own life for a better future for generations, and a trust in the altruism of the ‘human species’; a language that most of the mainstream politics has abdicated long back and looks at it at best as utopian and at worst as

infantile adventurism, reminding us of the Gramscian dictum ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.59 Maoist politics in this sense represents the revolutionary optimism of new possibilities, and as Gramsci would remind us—the uncertainty of politics ought to be comprehended in the context of new possibilities without slipping into cynicism.

Dialectical Materialism or Mechanical Idealism? Maoist politics highlights ‘structural violence’ in its use of direct physical violence. The hidden and routinized violence of the state and capital provide the political and moral justification for direct violence and the agenda of the violent overthrow of the State. While this may be true, does it not constrain itself into a paradigmatic imagination of the revolution ushered by French Revolution? Can there be no alternative way of imagining revolutions other than through forceful overthrow of the state? Did Marx and Engels also see the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism in societies that have democracies in place of authoritarian rule? What then can be the new equation between revolutions and democracies? One of the contributions in the volume argues that ‘no revolution so far has confirmed to basic Marxist scheme and is in sight of happening in future. Capitalism has creatively reconfigured itself and is flexible enough to do it because it does not care for ideological fidelity as the revolutionaries do. It is a paradox of the kind that the behaviour of bourgeoisie reflects dialectical materialism while that of proletarian revolutionaries, mechanical idealism’.60 Does ‘mechanical idealism’ signify commitment and sacrifice in the everyday functioning of the Maoist politics? Maoist politics working within the contours of popular democracies have invented newer strategies of insurrection. It is not merely about the overthrow of the state but the process of building revolutionary consciousness. One such strategy of the Maoist is that of kidnap. Maoist movement in India abducted bureaucrats, powerful political leaders, and public representatives as a symbolic protest against their ‘anti-people’ policies. In almost all of these, the Maoists released the hostages without

harming or killing them.61 The point was to highlight issues that were neglected by the state and the media. This they believed was one way of wedging open the corridors of power that were otherwise shut to the most deprived of social groups. In many such kidnaps, the Maoist movement and the issues they nurtured were thrown into the front pages and prime time of the electronic media. Maoists furthered demonstrated that the state was unwilling to respond to these issues in spite of violent reaction, reflecting the indifferent attitude of state officials. However, the moot question that remains to be answered is whether the human costs of the revolution justify the benefits it promises to usher in? Even if there is a political justification of violence, can we offer a moral justification given the human costs involved, including the uncertainty of a revolution succeeding in today’s context of militarily and technologically powerful states? Similarly, it is also important to understand if the Maoists have a single one-size-fits-all kind of insurrection, given the regional variations, including in culture and in political economy in a large country like India. Is there then a need for a post-Maoist strategy signifying variations that include experiments to forge an alliance with other nonclass, non-militant political mobilizations; contest elections; and democratize available institutions of representation? Similar is the need to highlight both the danger of the militarization of a political movement and the need to moderate violence and remain open to public criticism. The Maoist movement has time and again demonstrated the potential to go astray with their killings, including killing more of their own social base in whose name they mobilize against the ‘enemy class’. There is something in the sociology of armed movements that makes violence and weapons to control politics and ideologies.

‘Sandwich Theory’ and ‘Non-Sovereign Agency’ Finally, there are a large number of issues that the edited volume— Revolutionary Violence versus Democracy: Narratives from India— attempted to problematize with regard to the question of subaltern agency.

Can we equate the Party with the People? What type of agency does the subaltern—who is not directly part of the armed movement—wield in the contexts of armed movements? Can this kind of agency be referred to as ‘non-sovereign agency’, as against a simple-minded idea of a ‘sandwich theory’, where the subaltern is understood to be unwittingly caught between the state and the revolution? Similarly, it’s important to ask even those who are part of the militant movement if they participate because of the high idealism that the movement espouses or due to practical and immediate imperatives and contingencies that they find themselves in. If it is the latter, then how will it manifest itself in the workings of the Maoist politics? The contest between ‘revolutionary violence and democracy’ is an open-ended one with both raising pertinent issues that need to be mutually addressed, recasting them beyond a simple binary opposition constituted as one versus the other, notwithstanding the ongoing contestation that awaits not a closure but an inauguration of a new imagination of politics itself. Future of democracy in India will have to negotiate with this long-standing issue of the use of violence as a legitimate means by the subaltern groups. Even as we avoid a moralistic critique or dismissal of violence, similar to the way we need to avoid a moralistic rejection of the Right, we need to find new routes to connect the legitimacy of violent mobilizations to its more popular versions in articulating the limits and possibilities of democracy in India.

Notes and References Introduction: Populism and the Afterlife of Democracy 1 For the meaning of dialectics, refer to: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dialectic. This is an art of considering opposite theories to arrive at the truth. The Right performs this art of combining the opposite elements only at the level of performance or to produce a demonstrative effect. 2 Refer to: Jha, Dhirendra K., Shadow Armies: Fringe Organisations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2017. For a quick review of the book, refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/foot-soldiers-of-hindutva-cogs-in-thewheel/article19140540.ece 3 Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/RSS-chief-Mohan-Bhagwat-pitchesfor-review-of-reservation-policy/articleshow/49041309.cms. The RSS chief on more than one occasion called for the review of reservations to ascertain who needs what and for how long. 4 On the links between caste and communalism, refer to: Menon, Dilip. The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India. New Delhi: Navayana, 2005. 5 This partly explains the growing tensions between Dalits and Muslims across India. For a detailed report on the growing rift between the two communities, refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/uttar-pradesh/express-investigation-part-iii-dalitmuslim-divide-deepens-goes-rural 6 In a personal conversation with a young Kashmiri Pandit girl, when asked about their support to the RSS, she said, ‘What other option is there for us?’ In other words, even if they wish to see the subjugation and being pushed as becoming increasingly vulnerable, they are left with no other tangible option. 7 Rahul Pundita, a Kashmiri Pandit, in a television interview opposed the violence of the armed forces against the Muslims in the valley. On asked how could he do it in spite of himself being a victim of displacement, he said, ‘I lost my home, not my humanity.’ Refer to: Pundita, Rahul. Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. New Delhi: RHI, 2013.

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For information on the movement by the Marathas, refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/maratha-quota-rally-devendrafadnavis-dalit-reservation-3041577/ Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali had to convince the Rajput community that the movie does not hurt the pride of their community. Refer to: https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/padmavat-row-on-rajput-pride-anddistortion-of-history-heres-what-sanjay-leela-bhansali-has-to-say/1015404/ Rahul Gandhi famously argued that Mr Modi is never visible in presence of the poor. Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/north-east-india/modi-suit-boot-sarkar-rahulgandhi-meghalaya-bjp-5046510/ In the run up to the general elections of 2014, Modi said, ‘I do not want to become the PM, I want to be a Chowkidar’. Refer to: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/narendra-modi-bjp-jhansi-rally-prime-ministervs-chowkidar-423931-2013-10-25 Soon after demonetization, Prime Minister Modi demanded he be hung in public if the corrupt were not brought to justice in 50 days. Anna Hazare lead the movement demanding electoral reforms and a direct democracy. It is more than a coincidence that anti-corruption movements are often followed by the rise of the Right. Yogi Adityanath pursued an active policy of ‘encounter’ killing of the ‘criminals’; the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh justified the killing of the activists of SIMI in what looked like a staged encounter. In Bhopal, in March 2018, four rapists were paraded by the police where the public, including women, could slap, abuse, and lynch them. The police felt this was a more effective way of controlling the menace of sexual violence than producing them before the courts. Refer to: https://www.thequint.com/news/india/madhya-pradesh-rapeaccused-paraded-in-bhopal-slapped-by-crowd. I had referred to this phenomenon as the ‘Rightward Shift in Dalit Politics’, refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-a-rightward-shift-in-dalitpolitics/article6405607.ece Refer to: http://rss.org//Encyc/2016/3/14/rss-resolution-social-harmony.html The survey was conducted in December 2017 in Osmania University in Hyderabad and Telangana University in Nizamabad. I am thankful to Rajesh who helped with the necessary contacts and in providing important inputs during the survey. This survey was funded by the DSA programme at CPS, JNU. The Right also has made amendments to its activities in taking a lead to burning the Manusmriti in some universities, while claiming that its support for untouchability and varna system was a later addition by the Communists who wish to delegitimise Hindu

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society since they are ‘Western’ in their outlook. Many Dalit activists seemed to believe in this narrative of a past free of caste system. Earlier sociologists referred to this process as Sanskritization. Upgraded Shudra castes today are ruling elites in many parts of India, and therefore, resistance has always coexisted with assimilationist strategies. As I said earlier, this is reflected in blaming the Muslims for creating the caste system or the communists for wrongly entering caste-based practices in ancient scripts that did not originally have them. Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/politicswithout-opposition/article6482127.ece. Earlier, this was referred to as the Bharat versus India. Today, it is a more sharpened difference that overlaps with agrarian crisis at one end and dysfunctional liberal institutions at the other. Refer to: ://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/ambedkar-and-kanshi-ram-so-alike-yetso-different/article3405293.ece While RSS pracharaks claim the word ‘industry’ came from Indus valley signifying the ‘fact’ that Indus valley was the first industrialized society, Dalit-Bahujan intellectuals such as Illiah have claimed that the surname appa (like Yeddyurappa in Karnataka) comes from the ‘fact’ that they were the original inhabitants of the Harappan civilization. Both can be considered either as distortions of history or ‘creative assertion’ against a past that has remained denied. Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/distortion-of-history-a-terror-of-differentnature-historian/story-zlxAgC6bVFBkhlNaBy2ArO.html Gandhi attempted a similar method of politicizing the given location but with a transformative purpose, even though it had at times the effect of reinforcing hegemonic practices. Goodhart, David. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London: C.Hurst and Co., 2017. In Kerala, for instance, the growth of Left politics has to also do with the reforms initiated by Narayan Guru. The Left neither acknowledges nor takes those modes and spirit of socio-spiritual transformation. Refer to: https://www.guystanding.com/files/documents/The_Precariat_final_summary_GCPH_ Nov_11.pdf

Part I Introduction 1 Refer to: https://postcard.news/exposing-the-hypocrisy-of-the-award-wapsi-gang-anopen-letter-to-shabnam-hashmi/ Part I Populism And Authoritarianism

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Refer to: Alexander, Jefferey. Performance and Power. https://www.wiley.com/enus/Performance+and+Power-p-9780745655666 Refer to: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pulled-strings-and-got-away-says-lawyerwho-attacked-jnus-kanhaiya-kumar-1278475 In sociology, ‘deviance’ refers to any behaviour that challenges or lies outside the established social norms. Refer to: https://www.cliffsnotes.com/studyguides/sociology/deviance-crime-and-social-control/theories-of-deviance Refer to: https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/telengana-to-jnuattack-on-kanhaiya-kumar-invokes-dark-history-of-lawyer-led-goondaism116021800189_1.html (This article refers to lawyers’ attack on Dalits along with other attacks by lawyers under the current regime. The point is that there is a social location of those indulging in wanton acts of violence.) Cultural subalterns, non-English speaking, non-urban, first-generation learners from upper castes, among others. In the introduction, I have argued that lower castes and first-generation learners among upper castes from rural hinterlands can together constitute the new cultural subalterns. This refers to how perceptions matter more than empirical efficacy. Clear instances of this are popular beliefs about Muslims having more children and becoming a majority andthat there is more bigamy or polygamy among Muslims, while data shows otherwise. Refer to: https://thewire.in/politics/rss-claims-rapid-growth-muslimpopulation-simply-false Symbolic space refers to perceptions based on symbolism that are not necessarily empirical. Again, the example of Muslims can be invoked here. Popular statements such as ‘All Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims’. Please refer to: https://thewire.in/communalism/jaipur-hssf-fair-hindu-groups-love-jihad-gau-raksha Refer to: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Amartya-Sen-terms-demonetisationa-despotic-action/article16730675.ece Amartya Sen referred to demonetization as a disaster on economy of trust. Further reference: https://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/demonetisation-wasarbitrary-larry-summers/article20049323.ece Bauman, Zygmut. Search of Politics. London: Polity, 1997. It refers to birth-based identities, such as religion and caste. There is an ongoing demand from those involved in sex work and social activists to legalize sex work in order to provide them more legal rights and entitlements. Refer to: https://www.livemint.com/Politics/H8Xbgos8CjOYE57bcKppPL/Sexworkers-demand-legalization-of-prostitution.html Neo-liberal economy is also pushing forward the ideas of choice and autonomy as guiding principles in social and cultural life.

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Freedom, for instance; freedom of expression and civil liberties are being undermined in light of a growing sense of insecurity. 14 Modi broke down while his name was proposed as the Prime Minister. Refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/business/modi-breaks-down-in-parliamentpromises-to-live-up-to-expectations-2007063.html 15 Earlier discourses of equality referred to structural change in property relations and private property. Today, when we talk of equality, we do not refer to such large-scale structural change in property relations but relative mobility of social groups and individuals who experience better standard of living in comparison to their peers or their previous generation. For further reading on this change in the popular notions of equality, Refer to: Philips, Anna. Which Equality Matters. London: Polity Press, 1999. 16 Refer to: Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 17 Please refer to the below given article that draws a contrast between the idealism of Ambedkar and the shift pragmatism by Kanshi Ram in the context of Dalit politics. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/ambedkar-and-kanshi-ram-so-alike-yet-sodifferent/article3405293.ece. 18 Refer to: Brass, Paul. Politics of India Since Independence. Cambridge University Press, 1994. 19 ‘It’s a culture shock’, Kejriwal said when asked about the appropriateness of his dharna (protest) politics. Refer to: https://thediplomat.com/2014/02/kejriwal-resignation-failure-or-strategy/ 20 For an extended debate on the interface between politics and Brahmacharya in Gandhi, Refer to: Adams, Jad. Gandhi: The Naked Ambition. Quercus, 2011. 21 Mandela retired from an active public life wanting to spend time with family and friends. Refer to: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0602_040602_mandela.html 22 Bush as a post-retirement avocation took to painting. Refer to: http://www.culturaldamage.com/george-w-bush-painting-loss-power/ 23 Refer to: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/narendra-modi-the-leader-with-adifference/article4221755.ece His supporters hail him as ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’. 24 Refer to: ‘Trial By Fire’, India Today, 21 April 2018. He concludes the interview by saying, ‘Only a yogi or a sanyasi can deliver better result’. 25 Refer to: https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/bal-narendra-in-pics-comic-bookshows-fearless-young-narendra-modi-saving-drowning-boy-taking-on-crocodilesbullies-676841.html

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Refer to Yogi’s interview on the popular show Aap ki Adalathttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdqhzaH7qU It was alleged in 2004 that Ishrat Jahan was an LeT terrorist conspiring to kill Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat. Refer to: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/west/story/cbi-pulls-up-ib-officer-input-regarding-lifethreat-narendra-modi-let-india-today-165318-2013-06-02 For Yogi’s claim of an attempt on his life, refer to the interview on Aap ki Adalat: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3g403j Sanjiv Bhatt, a police officer, claimed he attended a meeting at which Mr Modi is alleged to have said that the Hindus should be allowed to vent their anger. Refer to: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-13170914 With regard to Yogi, in an undated video, he is heard saying, ‘If one Hindu is killed, we won’t go to the police, we’ll kill 10 Muslims’. Refer to: https://scroll.in/article/832168/hindutva-unmasked-yogi-adityanath-bjps-most-stridentface-will-be-its-chief-minister-in-up BJP leader Subramanian Swamy maintains the opinion that Muslims who do not acknowledge their Hindu ancestry should be stripped of their voting rights. Refer to: https://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/cursor/disenfranchise-the-jewser-muslims/ This is a statement made by French philosopher Michael Foucault. The complete quote: ‘The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.’ Refer to: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/22327-the-strategic-adversary-is-fascismthe-fascism-in-us-all Miller, James. The Passion of Michael Foucault. London: Anchor books, 1994. Hoess, Rudoplh. Commandant of Auschwitz. Phoenix, 2000. Hoess, Rudoplh. Commandant of Auschwitz. Phoenix, 2000. p. 21. Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/and-it-continues-kundan-shah-saeedmirza-join-award-wapsi/story-t7guKRzkGv7ZrsTY6vOMZJ.html Arun Jaitley’s statement. Refer to: https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tpnational/dadri-lynching-a-stray-incident-says-jaitley/article7830973.ece https://twitter.com/ANI/status/660739022852083712 Refer to: https://www.indiatoday.in/fyi/story/mahesh-sharma-bjp-mohammad-akhlaqravi-sisodia-bishada-345600-2016-10-08. Also https://newsclick.in/bjp-mla-dadriassures-ntpc-jobs-akhlaqs-killers Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/modi-critics-should-go-topakistan-remark-bjp-leader-giriraj-singh-files-application-for-bail/ Refer to: https://twitter.com/ANI/status/660739022852083712

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Refer to: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/ramayana-mahabharata-aretrue-accounts-of-the-periodnot-myths/291363 Refer to: http://www.firstpost.com/india/jnu-is-home-to-a-huge-anti-national-blockwhich-aims-to-disintegrate-india-rss-mouthpiece-2492774.html Refer to: https://www.quora.com/in/BJP-RSS-had-made-a-lot-of-noise-against-theMandal-Commission-but-they-used-the-OBC-classification-of-Narendra-Modi-toacknowledge-his-humble Refer to: https://www.livemint.com/Politics/uLX8WqkugNolvzV1D0tjiK/KanhaiyaKumar-sedition-case-SC-restricts-entry-to-Patiala.html Refer to: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/in-flip-flop-on-jnus-kanhaiya-kumar-bsbassi-says-circumstances-changed-1280384 Refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/bjp-mla-op-sharma-arrested-for-assault-atpatiala-house-court-gets-bail-2632500.html Refer to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJNWV1RvgL4. For D. Raja’s issue, refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/if-hes-a-patriot-d-raja-shoulddemand-communists-shoot-kill-his-daughter-bjps-h-raja/ Refer to: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-jnu-row-sting-video-shows-lawyersclaiming-they-thrashed-kanhaiya-for-3-hours-had-police-support-2181083 Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/thousands-of-liquorbottles-used-condoms-found-on-jnu-campus-every-day-bjp-mla/ Refer to: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/india-students-jnu-protest-narendramodi-bjp. Also refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/modi-saffronisation-ofeducation-rohit-vemula-hcu-crackdown-kanhaiya-kumar-umar-khalid-smriti-iraniabvp/story/1/11420.html Refer to: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-rss-struggles-to-find-680-saffronleaning-people-for-top-academic-posts-2075885 Refer to: http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY__Higher_education_in_India/$FILE/EY-higher-education-in-india.pdf Refer to: http://niasindiainchina.in/2016-12-01/indias-higher-education-standards-indecline/. Also refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/decline-indian-educationstandards-needs-stopped-president-pranab-1815525.html Refer to: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-overall-quality-of-education-in-India-sobad Refer to: https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/mhrd-grants-autonomy-to-62institutions-prakash-javadekar Refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/variety/jnu-compulsory-class-attendance-facultystudents-protest-vc/story/1/22246.html. Also refer to: https://thewire.in/education/fussattendance-view-jnu

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Refer to: http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-2/ivan-illich-ondeschooling. Original essay by Illich, refer to: http://www.ecobooks.com/books/deschooling.htm Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/sushma-swaraj-unga-speech-iits-andiims-pakistan-jaish-and-lashkar-4858313/ Refer to: http://www.area148.com/rohit-vemulas-death-who-is-responsible/ Refer to: https://www.berfrois.com/2016/11/marx-wondered-educate-educator/ For a more detailed reading, refer to: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/04/13/marx-and-engels-education Refer to: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suparnadutt/2017/11/07/one-year-later-indiasdemonetization-move-proves-too-costly-an-experiment/#7a9d5c3c378a Refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/simi-activists-encounter-in-bhopal-madhyapradesh-police-version-is-full-of-contradictions-3081902.html. Also refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/simi-activists-encounter-in-bhopal-bjp-lauds-policeopposition-seeks-deeper-probe-3082018.html Refer to: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/seeds-trump-s-victory-were-sownmoment-obama-won-ncna811891 On the controversy surrounding the film Padmaavat, refer to: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42048512; Refer to: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/muslim-hindu-couples-love-jihad-hitlist-facebook-interfaith-relationships-extremism-violence-a8325106.html On the marital rape issue, refer to: https://www.indiatoday.in/fyi/story/marital-rapedelhi-high-court-central-government-clarifies-sexual-abuse-rape-men-vunerable1033772-2017-08-29 Though the RSS intends to implement a universal policy of complete beef ban, the BJP often, due to electoral considerations, fails to pursue that kind of an absolute ban on beef. Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/no-beef-ban-in-meghalayaasserts-bjp-4899200 On the RSS battling for a country-wide beef ban, refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/mohan-bhagwat-bats-for-country-wide-beef-ban-saysrss-workers-in-power-will-work-towards-it-3376460.html For PM’s statement, refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/killingpeople-in-the-name-of-gau-bhakti-not-acceptable-pm-modi/storyXToseVqb3wNZBJwAeWb0sO.html For an analysis of pride and fear during the Nazi regime, refer to: http://wordpress.philau.edu/germany2012/2012/05/23/pride-or-fear-of-the-naziregime/ For Ambedkar’s views, refer to Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. Annihilation of Caste. Delhi: Critical Quest, 2000.

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Refer to: https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/modi-government-push-forinter-caste-marriages-offers-rs-2-5-lakh-for-marrying-dalit/962848/ Kerala Temple Board appointed six Dalits as priests of temples. Refer to: https://www.news18.com/news/india/breaking-tradition-kerala-temple-board-appointsdalits-as-priests-1537977.html On Una attacks, refer to: https://thewire.in/politics/dalits-gau-rakshak-asmita On Najeeb’s disappearance from JNU, refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/in-depth-look-at-the-jnu-student-najeebahmed-case/article18474400.ece On one such instance of use of fake news in Bengal, refer to: https://thewire.in/politics/bjp-fake-news-nupur-sharma For an instance of morphed videos, refer to: https://www.altnews.in/old-video-keralacirculates-muslim-assault-hindus/ Refer to: https://www.oneindia.com/india/india-slips-in-media-freedom-rankingunder-modi-report-2418749.html Refer to: https://thewire.in/culture/india-media-news-channels-reporters-pressfreedom Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/centre-wants-enquiry-againstallahabad-university-v-c/story-1rTTbe99aaJxo3tHBlHgKL.html For the VC’s side of the story, refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/allahabad-university-v-c-defends-self-againstallegations-of-irregularities/article22492079.ece Refer to: https://thewire.in/politics/bhim-army-chief-arrested-in-dalhousie Refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/variety/west-bengal-riots-mamata-banerjeecommunal-violence-asansol-riots-babul-supriyo/story/1/23207.html Also refer to: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2018/03/29/congress-mamatabarring-guv-riot-asansol-raniganj.html For mass violence with impunity under the BJP, refer to: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/74968/1/blogs.lse.ac.ukImpunity%20in%20India%20No%20reckoning%20with%20mass%20violence.pdf Refer to: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm For an introduction on the meaning and controversy surrounding Sigmund Freud’s idea of ‘Penis-Envy’, refer to: https://www.britannica.com/science/penis-envy Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/cycle-of-violence-in-keralastarted-by-rss-says-left/article19797727.ece Refer to: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-11-01/rise-illiberal-democracy Refer to: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/museum-of-memory-and-human-rights

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‘Liquid Modernity’ was coined by cultural sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Refer to his books by the same title. Refer to: http://factchecker.in/shashi-tharoor-says-bjp-renamed-23-congress-schemeshes-right-about-19/ Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/BSP-haathi-turns-intoGanesh/articleshow/1050578.cms Further refer to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJujtDwBVvs Refer to: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/primeminister-manmohan-singh-calls-for-revival-of-animal-spirit-ineconomy/articleshow/14435229.cms Refer to: https://www.deccanherald.com/content/661568/modis-overtures-bold.html. You may also refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/narendra-modi-in-goademonetisation-a-bold-move-pms-risks-have-rarely-let-him-down-3103408.html Commentators have argued that the Gujarat Model was essentially about ‘Crony Capitalism’. refer to: https://thewire.in/economy/gujarat-models-failure-explainseconomy-significant-factor-coming-elections. After giving tax incentives to the corporate, Gujarat was left with little funds for education and health. For this argument, refer to: https://thewire.in/economy/gujaratmodels-failure-explains-economy-significant-factor-coming-elections. Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister argued that not two crore, Modi regime did not manage to give even two lakh jobs. Refer to: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-modi-promised-2-crore-jobs-per-year-couldn-teven-provide-2-lakh-manmohan-singh-at-congress-plenary-2595001 Refer to Modi’s own claims regarding Muslims in Gujarat. Refer to: https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/narendra-modis-blog/revealing-statisticsfrom-the-sachar-report Refer to the first speech by Amit Shah after he became a member of the Rajya Sabha, claiming that making Pakoras is better than begging. Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/selling-pakoras-no-shame-likening-it-tobegging-is-says-amit-shah-in-his-1st-rajya-sabha-speech/articleshow/62796755.cms Mouffe, Chantall. On The Political. London: Routledge, 2005. p. 83. Müller, Jan-Werner. 23 September 2015. ‘Parsing Populism: Who is And Who is Not A Populist These Days?’ Refer to: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2050-5876.2015.00842.x On Yogi Adityanath’s encounter policy, refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/yogi-adityanath-on-up-police-encounters-thosewho-believe-in-language-of-gun-should-be-answered-in-same-way-5057006 Chantall. On The Political. In India, middle classes routinely endorsed the Emergency of 1975. They believe it led to more order, accountability, and a good work ethic.

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Reminds us of the caution Ambedkar offered in terms of perils of democracy that offered political equality with social inequalities. This contradiction that Ambedkar highlighted is now playing out through the strategies designed by Right-wing populists. 97 Goodhart, David. The Road to Somewhere. London: Hurst, 2017. p. 3 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., p. 6 101 De Souza, Ronald. 2002. `Emotional Truth’. Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Vol. 76, p. 247-275. Refer to: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4106969?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contnents 102 Within the discourse of demonetization, populists could imagine how a sense of belonging can come not merely by rights’ claim but that it is also possible through allowing citizens to become moral exemplars in suffering. 103 Jha, Prashant. How the BJP Wins. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2017. 104 de Sousa, Ronald and Morton, Adam. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes. Part II State(S) Of Democracy 1 Refer to my earlier piece on the changing response of the Indian voter: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-uncanny-indian-voter/article6281129.ece 2 For a report on the riots in Trilokpuri, refer to: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asiaindia-29828802 3 Refer to: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/02/12/manmohan-singh-narendram_n_9218724.html 4 For Ms Sitharaman’s comments, refer to: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/delhi-polls-bjp-vs-aapdebate-hits-a-new-low-as-nirmala-sitharaman-calls-arvind-kejriwal-achor/articleshow/46114405.cms 5 On Godse statues being unveiled, refer to: https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/india-s-first-statue-of-gandhi-killer-nathuramgodse-unveiled-by-hindu-mahasabha-in-meerut-262820.html 6 On the debate following attacks on churches in Delhi, refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/world/delhi-church-attacks-congress-questions-silencechristian-bjp-mlas-2088307.html 7 Refer to: https://www.livemint.com/Politics/YuTNcf8VFRjo8COtznAGjK/NitishKumar-resigns-as-Bihar-CM-says-not-possible-for-maha.html

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Refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/uttar-pradesh-polls-bjpmuslims/story/1/15688.html Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/uttar-pradesh-lok-sabha-bypollswhy-the-outcome-in-gorakhpur-and-phulpur-is-important/articleshow/63294118.cms Ramesh, Jairam. Old Histories, New Geographies. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, India, 2016. p.121. Ibid. p.27. Refer to: http://www.rediff.com/news/report/pix-modi-and-sharif-from-gifting-shawlsto-trading-barbs/20160926.htm For Partha Chatterjee’s article, refer to: https://thewire.in/government/general-dyerindian-army-kashmir Information on JK Study Forums gathered from personal sources. I collected documents that the forum published. It was reported by the individuals, involved with the forum that it was organized by the RSS. For Rajnath Singh’s idea of permanent solution, refer to: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/permanent-solution-tokashmir-issue-is-based-on-five-cs-rajnath-singh/articleshow/60460250.cms Refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/jammu-and-kashmir-pandits-exodus-coloniesfor-pandits-new-delhi-un-referendum/story/1/15291.html Refer to: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9055/radical-islamists-kashmir Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/10-things-to-know-about-nota-avoter-s-right-to-reject/story-SkX0EsDQbjG5e2sz0L5N9H.html Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/supreme-court-snubs-congress-onnota-wont-stay-when-it-suited-you-no-appeal-4781463/ Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/vadodara/parents-threaten-to-usenota-to-protest-fee-hike/articleshow/61801035.cms Refer to: http://www.livelaw.in/gujarat-high-court-halts-state-govt-s-move-to-makevoting-compulsory/ Refer to: https://www.livemint.com/Politics/0Da93mASPyNLtL71EaxKKM/Gujaratelections-Manmohan-Singh-wants-Modi-to-apologise-fo.html Refer to: https://m.dailyhunt.in/news/bangladesh/hindi/news+world+hindi-epapernewsworh/samp+chachundar+jaisi+hai+sp+bsp+ki+dosti+yogi+aadityanath-newsid82998369

Part III Introduction 1 Refer to: https://www.thelivemirror.com/dalits-minorities-become-victims-organisedkilling-amartya-sen/ 2 Illiah, Kancha. Post-Hindu India. New Delhi: SAGE, 2009.

Part III DALIT-BAHUJAN POLITICS 1 Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/gujarat-7-of-dalitfamily-beaten-up-for-skinning-dead-cow-2910054/ 2 Refer to: https://scroll.in/latest/816735/gujarat-dalit-leader-jignesh-mevani-detainedbefore-narendra-modis-arrival 3 Refer to: http://www.abplive.in/india-news/modiji-on-rs-15-lakh-returning-to-accountswas-a-political-jumla-amit-shah-to-abp-news-150752 4 Hugo, Gorringe. Panthers in Parliament. London: Oxford University Press, 2017. 5 Deshpande, Ghulamgiri Phule. Selected Writings of Jyotiba Phule. Delhi: Leftword Books, 2012. 6 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. Annihilation of Castes. India: Ssoft Group, 2014. p. 34. 7 Ibid. p. 45. 8 Ibid. p. 21. 9 Refer to: https://thewire.in/books/explaining-social-smuggling-angered-arya-vysyastwo-states 10 Refer to: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/08/26/dera-chief-convicted-of-rape-sentto-air-conditioned-jail-due-to-space-constraints_a_23186253/ 11 Refer to: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-panchkula-violence-ground-reporthow-haryana-police-failed-to-control-dera-sacha-sauda-mob-2540724 12 Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/gurmeet-ram-rahim-singh-dera-sachasauda-panchkula-haryana-punjab-sakshi-maharaj-bjp-4813602/ 13 Refer to: http://www.jantakareporter.com/india/sakshi-maharaj-ram-rahim/145092/ 14 Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/why-gurmeet-ram-rahim-sdera-became-a-dalit-citadel/story-cyw8dpwABem6CqIB7Ws5IJ.html 15 Refer to: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/seize-entire-property-of-ram-rahims-derasacha-sauda-furious-high-court-says-after-violence-1742075 16 Refer to: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/shootout-atputtaparthi/299264 17 Refer to: https://scroll.in/latest/853932/amicus-curiae-in-murthal-case-says-therewere-nine-rapes-during-the-jat-agitation-in-haryana 18 Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/statewill-proceed-legally-against-ilaiah-minister/article19718711.ece 19 Refer to: https://thewire.in/media/adani-group-slapps-epw-editor-job 20 Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/jnusu-poll-results-2017united-left-alliance-wins-all-four-seats/articleshow/60445655.cms 21 Refer to: http://www.aisa.in/wp-content/uploads/JNUSU-Note-On-VIVA-marksReduction.pdf

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Refer to: http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/sfi-dissolves-its-jnu-unit-triggersprotest/972892/ For an engaging debate on this issue, refer to: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2016/05/communist-ambedkarites-rift/ Refer to: https://www.thequint.com/news/politics/delhi-university-ramjas-college-notalone-abvp-has-history-of-violence-like-rohith-vemula-jnu-kanhaiya-kumar Refer to: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/indian-prime-ministergenetic-science-existed-ancient-times Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Narendra-Modi-gifts-Gita-toJapanese-emperor-takes-a-dig-at-secular-friends/articleshow/41530900.cms Also refer to: https://www.saddahaq.com/modi-gifts-bhagwat-gita-to-obama-receivesone-from-tulsi-gabbard Refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/india/gita-declared-national-book-taught-schoolsrss-ideologue-1652261.html Refer to: https://sabrangindia.in/article/why-did-dr-babasaheb-ambedkar-publiclyburn-manu-smruti-dec-25-1927 Refer to: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/96363-the-bhagavad-gitaaccording-to-gandhi Rathore, Akash Singh, ed. Hegel’s India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts. New Delhi: OUP, India, 2017. p. 80. Ibid. p. 80. Ibid. p. 77. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005. p. 226. Rathore, Akash Singh, ed. Hegel’s India: A Rinterpretation, with Texts. New Delhi: OUP, India, 2017. p. 4. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. pp. 10–11. Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/sc-judges-for-greatness-disciplineessential-in-class-and-in-sc-ram-madhav-5023627/ Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/rss-rewrites-history-dalits-created-byinvaders/story-eyBt99Y2XbICUbadzCsSkM.html Refer to: https://bharatabharati.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/2-distorting-indian-historya-marxist-monopoly-s-l-bhyrappa/

Part IV Introduction

1

Refer to: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/pm-modi-attacks-naamdarcongress-pitches-kaamdar-bjp-in-karnataka/story-5hsEuIneNK7dxDfBTNeM1M.html

Part IV The Future of Politics 1 Refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/narendra-modi-lok-sabha-parliament-congressbjp-rahul-gandhi/story/1/22242.html 2 Refer to: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/jawaharlal-nehru-sangh-parivar-congress-rsshindu-rashtra-secularism-foreign-policy-secularism/story/1/10870.html 3 Refer to: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/nehru-the-villain/292500 4 Refer to: http://www.ummid.com/news/2017/Novembr/08.11.2017/rss-new-found-loveof-sardar-patel.html 5 Refer to: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/we-are-neither-left-nor-right-butpractical/article5963724.ece 6 Rudoplh, Lloyd and Rudoplh, Sussane. Explaining Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. 7 Nino, Carlos. The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 8 Granville, Austin. Indian Constitution A Corner Stone. London: Oxford University Press, 1999. 9 Weiner, Myron. The Indian Paradox: Essays in Indian Politics (pb). New Delhi: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1989. 10 Frankel, R. Francine. India’s Political Economy: The Gradual Revolution 1947-2000. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. 11 Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2009. ‘A Critique of the Passive Revolution’. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 23, Issue No. 45/47, p. 2429–2433. 12 Jaffrellot, Chritophe. India’s Silent Revolution. USA: Columbia University Press, 1995. 13 Chatterjee, Partha. ‘The State’. In Oxford Companion to Indian Politics, edited by Niraja Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. 14 Khilnani, Sunil. ‘Long Hours After Midnight’, Outlook, Republic Day Issue. January, 2014. 15 Khilnani, Sunil. ‘Long Hours After Midnight’, Outlook, Republic Day Issue. January, 2014. 16 Refer to: https://www.livemint.com/Politics/7m5AIGWpYG65ZjvoukWm4L/Thebattle-for-deeper-democracy-has-begun-Ashutosh-Varshney.html 17 She offered 21 seats to Brahmins in the Parliamentary elections in 2014. Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/Mayawati-gives-50-tickets-to-brahminsMuslims/articleshow/32383320.cms

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Refer to: http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/mar/28 Rudolph, Lloyd and Rudolph, Sussane. Explaining Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rudolph, Lloyd and Rudolph, Sussane. Explaining Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Chatterjee, Partha. ‘The State’. In Oxford Companion to Indian Politics, edited by Niraja Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Refer to: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/modi-bats-for-dalitssays-even-he-was-a-victim-of-untouchability/citations/ Refer to: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/chaiwala-topm-modis-incredible-journey-from-poverty-to-power/modi-the-teaseller/slideshow/60717962.cmsGudavarthy, Ajay. ‘Campaign of Contradictions’. The Hindu, 8 May 2014. Chatterjee, Partha. 2012. ‘After Subaltern Studies’. Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 47, Issue No. 35, 01 Sep, 2012.. Teltumbde, Anand. Khairlanji. Chennai: Navayana Publications, 2012. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Refer to: http://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/ Further reading by Senhttps://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sen-development.html? mcubz=0 Refer to: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/08/12/martha-nussbaum-onemotions-ethics-and-literature/ Refer to: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/08/12/martha-nussbaum-onemotions-ethics-and-literature/ Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/sectarianism-of-the-secularbrigade/article6615446.ece Refer to: http://www.rediff.com/news/interview/this-neta-wants-reservations-for-theupper-caste-poor/20180504.htm Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/brahmin-parishad-toextend-health-cover-to-elderly-members/article19878225.ece Refer to: https://www.business-standard.com/article/politics/mayawati-demandsreservation-for-upper-caste-poor-116060400475_1.html Also refer to: https://countercurrents.org/2016/06/18/re-reading-dr-br-ambedkarsearliest-paper-on-caste-100-years-later/ Refer to: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Khap-panchayats-rape-order-of-2UP-sisters-echoes-in-UK/articleshow/48737641.cms

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Refer to: https://scroll.in/article/743201/the-shah-bano-effect-how-india-is-quietlymodernising-religious-law-even-without-a-uniform-civil-code 37 Phule and later Ambedkar considered the oppression of women in some sense similar to that of the Dalits. It, therefore, made sense to include caste-Hindu women in the fold of shudratishudra. https://www.forwardpress.in/2016/06/phule-. ambedkarite-ideology-and-legacy/ 38 Refer to: http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/8102/10/10_chapter%203.pdf Also refer to: http://ambedkarambeth.blogspot.com/2015/03/progress-for-society-ismeasured-by.html 39 Refer to: https://www.firstpost.com/living/metoo-campaign-to-raya-sarkars-list-howthe-feminist-movement-changed-in-2017-4278013.html 40 Refer to: https://kafila.online/2017/10/28/from-feminazi-to-savarna-rape-apologist-in24-hours/ 41 Refer to: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2nutst/slavoj_?i? ek_events_and_encounters_explain_our/ 42 Refer to: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/alain-badiou-truth-subjectivity-fidelity/ 43 Refer to: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/alain-badiou-truth-subjectivity-fidelity/ 44 Refer to: http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-aboutdesire/ 45 Refer to: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/24/why-are-we-so-bored 46 Gandhi believed that Brahmacharya, which refers to celibacy and an idea of selfcontrol and self-discipline, can be built through practising control over one’s senses. Practising abstinence from sex was an important mode of gaining self-control. In modern world, with decreasing levels of sex drive, due to stress and other factors, ‘celibacy syndrome’, ironically has emerged without ardous practices of self. 47 Fraser, Nancy. From Redistribution to Recognition?’ in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge, 1997. p.36. 48 Refer to: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/who-are-the-99percent/2011/08/25/gIQAt87jKL_blog.html?utm_term=.cd461b 49 Refer to: http://www.freudfile.org/psychoanalysis/transference.html 50 Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2017. 51 Refer to: http://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/the-world-is-sufferingfrom-an-epidemic-of-loneliness-5155086/ 52 Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. USA: Harvard University Press, 1999. p.217. 53 Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/why-does-the-uk-have-aminister-for-loneliness/article22537003.ece

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Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1973. Refer to: http://www.freepressjournal.in/entertainment/dangal-to-bajrangi-bhaijaantop-5-all-time-worldwide-grossing-indian-films/1236118 This is based on a survey I carried out in Telangana. Gudavarthy, Ajay. April 2014. ‘Muslims of Telengana: A Ground Report’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 17, Issue No. 49, 26 April 2014. Ibid. Refer to: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/indiascope/vis-a-vis/story/20060508sitaram-yechury-versus-lk-advani-785558-2006-05-08 Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1973. Gudavarthy, Ajay, ed. Revolutionary Violence versus Democracy. New Delhi: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2017. Refer to: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/Orissa-collectorkidnapped-by-Maoists/article15448073.ece