The BJP sweep in the state-level
elections in India last week is, quite possibly, a foreshadowing of what is to
come in the national election next spring. The confidence of my lefty friends
that Narendra Modi will not be the next Indian prime minister may have been
more wishful than realistic. With that in mind, I wanted to write a few lines
on the prospect of Narendra Modi as PM.
We should be clear-eyed
about what the BJP revival means, and what it does not mean. It does not mean a
new wave of Hindutva and anti-Muslim bigotry. Antipathy towards Muslims has not
gone away – far from it – but there has been no spike, no reprise of the hysteria
of the early 1990s, with its bizarre ‘chariot rides’ and spectacular vandalism.
The recent ‘riot’ in Muzaffarnagar was reprehensible, but it was nothing like
the carnage in Bombay in 1992 and Gujarat ten years later. The BJP victories
are about other, more prosaic things: the economic slowdown, the glamor that
Narendra Modi has acquired as the messiah of corporate India, and above all the
dismal performance of the UPA government. Had Manmohan Singh stepped down after
his first term in office, he might justifiably have been remembered as an
effective prime minister who had followed through on a coherent agenda of
governance. But in his second term, Manmohan has become something between a
joke and a sad apparition: a man asleep at the wheel, or not even behind the
wheel. The responsibility for this state of affairs is mostly Sonia Gandhi’s, who
has done to Manmohan what Putin did to Medvedev, but that simply underlines the
reality that the PM is not responsible even for his own disappearance.
Meanwhile, the Gandhi family has offered nothing of substance except corruption
and arrogance, hounding a bureaucrat who blew the whistle on shady land deals
and trying to preserve the status of Parliament as a safe-house for criminals.
The BJP is just as corrupt and high-handed, but has the advantage of being in
the opposition.
Given Manmohan Singh’s vanishing
act, the climate is right for a new politics of omnipresence, i.e., an emphasis
on personal leadership. So we have Rahul Gandhi versus Narendra Modi, which is
arguably a presidential rather than parliamentary confrontation, consistent
with the Indian middle class’ aesthetic preference for America over Britain. In
that confrontation, Rahul Gandhi is at a disadvantage, because although he has
had more than enough time in the limelight to establish himself as ‘leadership material,’
he has been either too lazy or too unintelligent to do so. It is, I think, the
former. What Rahul says – about criminals in Parliament, about the Muzaffarnagar
atrocity – suggests the existence of insight and even principles, but they also
suggest a terrible lack of consistency and organization. Modi, on the other
hand, is nothing if not focused and organized: a man who knows what he wants
and leaves no doubts about his seriousness. He will never win a majority of
votes in an all-India election, but given the uninspiring opposition, he might
win just enough to be the dominant figure in a new governing coalition.
Modi appears to fulfil a
long-standing fantasy of a segment of the Indian population – the urban middle
class – that, while beleaguered by the rise of subaltern and semi-subaltern
voters, still retains the power to articulate the template of national
leadership. What this class has wanted since the turn of the last century is a
particular type of man at the head of the nation: a man capable of the
well-informed, clear-eyed, rational and decisive use of violence. That
capability, after all, is at the heart of the liberal nation-state that emerged
from Bismarck’s Europe. In India, the ‘man’ who best represented this ideal in
the PMO was Mrs. Indira Gandhi, but Vajpayee, Nehru and even Shastri came
close.
Modi’s apparent proximity to this model of statesmanship
is misleading. He is fundamentally a provincial man, without the worldly
education and historical awareness required to represent or even understand the
national interest in the world. His amply-demonstrated capacity for violence is
suited not to the calibrated deployment of naval squadrons but to
street-fighting, i.e., to the petty viciousness of domestic politics and
organized rioting. Even his style – the garish fancy-dress, the gratified
acceptance of the worship of supplicants – is easily recognizable as the aesthetic
of provincial politics in India, reminiscent of southern film-star politicians,
Mayawati’s pink elephants, and Mamata Banerjee’s zeal in covering Calcutta
with posters and billboards of herself.
In thirty years of Left Front rule in West Bengal, Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya never became so omnipresent in the public eye, but they were liberal, middle-class politicians. (There were images of Mrs. Gandhi everywhere in Calcutta in the 1970s, but they were mostly cartoons drawn by the communists. Now, of course, cartoonists and communists are both visited by the police.) Mamata, Mayawati, Modi and the Southern gods represent what might be called a subaltern take on fascism. It’s not the real – i.e., 'European' – thing, either as fascism or as liberal democracy, although it has elements of both. Modi as PM would be just as prone to triggering fits of nervous laughter as Mamata Banerjee has shown herself to be. But even subaltern fascism must be taken seriously as a dangerous political product.
In thirty years of Left Front rule in West Bengal, Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya never became so omnipresent in the public eye, but they were liberal, middle-class politicians. (There were images of Mrs. Gandhi everywhere in Calcutta in the 1970s, but they were mostly cartoons drawn by the communists. Now, of course, cartoonists and communists are both visited by the police.) Mamata, Mayawati, Modi and the Southern gods represent what might be called a subaltern take on fascism. It’s not the real – i.e., 'European' – thing, either as fascism or as liberal democracy, although it has elements of both. Modi as PM would be just as prone to triggering fits of nervous laughter as Mamata Banerjee has shown herself to be. But even subaltern fascism must be taken seriously as a dangerous political product.
The biggest difference between Modi
and Mamata, obviously, is Modi’s barely disguised hatred of Muslims. This is not necessarily his best selling point, but many voters who
are uncomfortable with it have learned to accept it as an incidental
imperfection in an otherwise desirable package of right-wing economic policies. Many
more take for granted that being anti-Muslim is the core of right-wing
nationalist ideology in India. Yet right-wing Indian political thought has a
long, parallel history that is not anti-Muslim.
We can trace that history not only to Benoy Sarkar and more problematically,
Subhas Bose (who was both of the left and of the right), but as far back as
the essayist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, who was Bankim’s contemporary. Bhudeb was a self-identified
conservative; his views on the Hindu family, Indian womanhood, caste, and the
relationship between society and the individual were consistently reactionary, although not anti-modern. Indian nationhood was real
and distinctive, he argued, and sought to recover and conserve the distinctions. Like
Bankim, he was uneasy about Muslims: their extra-Indian enthusiasms were too
evident for his liking. But he also insisted that Hindus and Indian Muslims
belonged to a single moral and social world, that Indian Muslims had more
intimate bonds with Hindus than they did with Arabs, Iranians and Turks, and
that Islam would become progressively indigenized in India until Muslims were
no more alien than Jains and Sikhs. In this, he preemptively rejected a basic
premise of Savarkar’s Hindutva: the notion that India was the exclusive punyabhumi or sanctified homeland of
some religious communities but not others.
Bhudeb’s Hindu conservatism did not prevent him from teaching in a madrasa, and from regarding the ulema with deep empathy and respect. He recognized the social and political divides between Hindus and Muslims in his own time, but pinned the blame firmly on Orientalist scholarship (history in particular). He placed the major responsibility for bridging the divide upon his fellow-Hindus, who were, he recognized, already the economically and politically dominant community. In this, he foreshadowed Benoy Sarkar, although unlike Sarkar, Bhudeb wrote at a time when the ins and outs of Indian nationhood were still falling into place.
Bhudeb’s Hindu conservatism did not prevent him from teaching in a madrasa, and from regarding the ulema with deep empathy and respect. He recognized the social and political divides between Hindus and Muslims in his own time, but pinned the blame firmly on Orientalist scholarship (history in particular). He placed the major responsibility for bridging the divide upon his fellow-Hindus, who were, he recognized, already the economically and politically dominant community. In this, he foreshadowed Benoy Sarkar, although unlike Sarkar, Bhudeb wrote at a time when the ins and outs of Indian nationhood were still falling into place.
What Bhudeb, Benoy Sarkar and
Subhas Bose acknowledged, and Bankim, Savarkar and Golwakar did not, is that an
Indian nationalism that is anti-Muslim at heart is fundamentally
self-defeating; it cannot be otherwise. No state that excludes, demonizes or
discriminates against thirty percent or even twelve percent of its population
can be stable, peaceful or effective, especially when twelve percent adds up
to well over a hundred million people. Such a country will remain at war with
itself and crippled by that war. And that war is precisely the sort of provincial, primitive use of rusty swords and tridents that sustains a
politician like Narendra Modi. It features secular citizens slipping into a rhetoric of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in casual conversation, landlords rejecting
prospective tenants because they are Muslim, of harassment by the police of a man
with the temerity to marry a Hindu woman, ‘encounter killings’ of college
students, and the occasional pogrom. It is far removed from the grand visions
of global strategy that the Indian national elite has entertained since Bankim
turned Krishna into Bismarck. The irony of the middle class’ willingness to
embrace a small-time bigot like the murkhya-mantri of Gujarat is precisely that
it diminishes its own pursuit of the global big time: a place in the sun,
credible and projectable power. It reduces would-be giants
to dwarfs. India with Modi as prime minister will probably not be Nazi
Germany, but it will be a small-town circus complete with animals and clowns, in which jackals imagine they are lions (from the Gir Forest, naturally).
December 8, 2013
