In the autobiography of electoral democracies, everyone is
a citizen, because everyone has a vote. However, as fifty years of the critique
of modernity has taught us, citizenship is a state of being, a specific
identity, within which, are immanent the various regimes of power that make up
the modern nation-state. The citizen internalizes the legal framework of the
rule of property and lives it as ‘civic’ sense. S/he stands in a queue,
drives in a lane, pays her taxes, has a ‘work-ethic’, throws garbage in bins,
and participates as an isolated individual in the social life of the homogenized
community of the nation. Peoples that fail to live up to these standards are,
therefore, ‘incomplete’ citizens. They are in a process of perpetual ‘transition’
from a pre-modern state to the fullness of nationhood.
However, even these ‘transitional’ nations reproduce these
founding myths in their own political histories. In India, till the 1990s, the self-image
of the secular state obliterated its ambiguous and chaotic beginnings. Nehruvian-socialism
– a mythic bogeyman created by its post-liberalisation critics – took some time
to emerge, and it had less to do with our first Prime Minister than the overall
political projects unleashed in newly decolonized states across the world – overtly
or covertly backed by the Soviet Union. The Nehruvian elite – if one could use
that term – was a product of that global political atmosphere. It had a clear modernizing
impulse derived from enlightenment discourse, but overdetermined by the
experiments with egalitarianism and planning in the USSR.
As is well known, this ‘modernising’ process was not an uncontested
outcome of the national movement and therefore was driven ‘top-down’ by the
state. Even if it was well-intentioned, its class-character meant, it was always going
to be half-hearted. Planning was aimed at creating the conditions for the
expansion of the national-bourgeoisie and to supplement it with state-run
industries, where the incubation period for future profits was going to be
long. The more radical part of this project – land reforms – was never
implemented and whatever gains were made by peasants were hard-fought victories
through ‘left’ democratic movements.
What is relevant for us, is the kind of identities it
produced. The ‘model’ citizen in the ‘Nehruvian’ project – taken further and
crystallised by his daughter – was the secular/rationalist/nationalist
individual who was opposed to ‘superstition’ (read religious rituals), believed
in science, was committed to ‘humanism’ and was keen to develop a purely Indian
high culture (classical music, aestheticized handicrafts, art-house cinema,
modern art, etc.). This project was executed through the building of new state
institutions – each with its own regime of power – through which, the modern ‘normal’
was created.
In hindsight, it is remarkable, how small this Nehruvian
elite turned out to be, even though it held complete sway in the discursive
imaginary of the nation-state. It was mostly populated by those who had access
to the machinery of state-power – bureaucrats, urban politicians, lawyers, university
teachers, doctors, engineers, and other allied groups who were directly
involved in constructing the edifice of the Nehruvian state. They populated
India’s new ‘civil’ society.
Those at the margin were themselves heterogenous in class
and caste terms. Some were wealthy, such as the trading classes and castes, and
rich farmers and rural landowners from dominant castes. Their access to the
state was routed through the local and regional politician (this formed the
backbone of the Jan Sangh and the later ‘Janata’ socialists). They retained
traditional cultural practices and everyday rituals, which had to be hidden
away in the confines of the home and the family, because the Nehruvian state
looked down upon them. While ‘national’ culture got increasingly
prototyped, the disapproval of the state caused the culture of the trader and the
landlord to become increasingly fragmented and disaggregated. This was to later
have significant repercussions in the cultural life of the nation as ‘Nehruvian-socialism’
was systematically dismantled in the 1990s.
There were also the poor and the dispossessed – poor peasants, agricultural
labourers, urban factory workers, adivasis, etc. Their access to the state was
again mediated by the local politician – often someone with a criminal record –
who led agitations that yielded specific and contingent concessions from the
state. They formed various fragmented agglomerations of what Partha Chatterjee
has termed ‘political society’. The Nehruvian state set up an entire
bureaucratic machinery – modeled in form on the skeleton left behind by the
British – to ‘modernise’ the poor. This involved their enumeration through
censuses, creating a corpus of knowledge about them, building roads, setting up
schools, clinics, banks, and other disciplinary institutions, overseen
by the BDO and other babus.
This project to build
state-capitalism could have continued, but for the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the emergence of a unipolar world. By the mid-80s two things had happened –
the Reagan-Thatcher era had got entrenched and Gorbachov had brought about
glasnost and perestroika. Indira Gandhi – who had already started privatizing and
creating the grounds for a consumer revolution – was assassinated and her son
decided to take India to the 21st century. Rajiv Gandhi was the
first to start talking about targeting subsidies and reducing the fiscal
deficit and the Rao-Manmohan reforms were a continuation of what he had
actively set in motion.
The ‘Nehruvian’ elite fully backed this process, as it saw
the world change around it. The dominance of leftists in the academic world
waned as the collapse of the socialist world, in the early 90s, undermined the global
prestige of Marxism as a theoretical system. The media – especially the
business media – became vocal votaries of market reforms and public culture valorized
the act of making money.
The first gainers of this process were the trading classes –
people who were already imbricated in the marketplace. Liberalisation was, essentially,
the privatization of natural resources, finance and economic rights. Access to
government and politics enhanced access to these resources and rights. No
wonder, then, that liberalization caused a massive growth in corruption and black
money. It showed up in the rise in consumption of fine articles and luxuries
and in a real estate boom.
Traders, land-owners, corrupt politicians and babus,
suddenly became rich and the cultural space turned upside-down. Till the
mid-80s, the culture of the trading classes and landowners was pushed out of
public spaces and hidden inside homes. Since, it did not get any institutional
space, it could not get homogenized or ‘normalised’. From the mid-80s, as
money-making became socially acceptable and prestigious, these hitherto marginalized
affluent groups began to assert their culture in the public space. The problem,
however, was that they did not have any prototype for propagating it.
The culture of the rich (wrongly called the nouveau-riche
since they were always wealthy) developed a peculiar speculary relationship
with popular art – especially Bollywood cinema and the newly emerging world of
Hindi soap operas. There were a few broad common contours of the culture of the
trading classes – (a) everyday religious rituals (involving worship, fasting,
attire, marking the body, etc.), (b) hierarchically arranged joint family, (c) inequality
and rigidity in gender roles (d) belief in social (caste and class) hierarchy
and (e) respect for authority.
All of these, were in direct contradistinction to the
structural elements of the secular-rationalist national culture of the
Nehruvian elite, which had developed into a homogenized ideology,
which made it identifiably ‘modern’. In contrast, the culture of the trading
classes could not be institutionalized or normalized, and therefore it could
only position itself as ‘tradition’.
It should come as no surprise that the one of the earliest homogenized form
of this culture is the Ram mandir movement, that took its contemporary form in
the late 1980s. It found its iconography in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan, so much
so that the serials stars became part of the movement, participated in rallies
and were later elected to Parliament. The Ram movement, was much an assertion
of ‘tradition’ as its invention. It made large sections of those marginalized by
the discursive practices of the Nehruvian state, find a manufactured common
cause with each other. It became a proxy for the grievances and the newfound
confidence of these groups.
Even the more secular aspects of everyday culture –
clothing, speech, body-language – built upon, and, in turn, influenced, the prototypes provided by
Bollywood in the 1990s. Significant amongst these are films like Hum Aapke
Hain Kaun (made tax-free by the Rao government as it
propagated good ‘family’ values), Maine Pyar Kiya (the foreign returned
hero falls in love with the demure girl) and later the K-serials, such as Kahani
Ghar Ghar Ki and Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, both of which valorized
the businessman’s joint family setup. The angry young man, who fought the rich
bania, the criminal smuggler and the corrupt official, gave way to the suave
young man who was going to inherit the family business.
The modern cultural institutions of the rich of the 1990s
and the 2000s, were based on re-invented traditions – karwa chauth, navratra,
eggless Tuesdays. These went hand-in-hand, with young wives from joint families
appearing in malls, in the incongruous combination of mehendi and minidress. Designer
clothes, expensive cars, Italian taps in designer bathrooms, vegetarian sushi
are all elements of this new modernity. It is modern because it is homogenous
and normalized and propagated through institutions and state apparatuses. It is
this modern ideology that we know as Hindutva today. It is represented as much
by the saffron clad political sadhu who wants to build the Ram mandir as the
vrat-keeping, miniskirt clad young bride in a shopping mall.
Yet, this is a modernity that poses itself as tradition. And,
not just any tradition, but a tradition that has been suppressed and
subjugated. This modernity has its own narrative of victimhood, that stretches
right back to the coming of the Muslim ‘invaders’. The narrative acquires its
own history, but it has one problem – it lacks the resources of institutional
scholarship that have created the narrative of the nation state across the
world. No wonder, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, we have witnessed the war over
history writing in India.
This war over History would, most probably, have been lost
by the new moneyed elite, had it not been for the emergence of smart phones and
social media. WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter have done more in just a few years
to manufacture history than what history textbooks could do over the past few
decades. It has entirely disrupted the process of political mobilization,
rendering old forms of political practice entirely redundant.
However, till now, we have only looked at the affluent
groups who were culturally marginalized by the Nehruvian state, and who re-invented and re-packaged the ‘tradition’ of Hindutva to assert their cultural hegemony, as the
post-liberalisation world gave them increased social and political authority. Vajpayee
and later, Modi were clearly their ideal choices for leading the nation. But,
it would be wrong to believe that Modi’s rise and dominance is simply a product
of the hegemony of the modern ideology of Hindutva.
To understand this, we need to talk about the invisibles –
people who are not captured in any official statistic, nor in any analysis.
These are the victims of liberalization – the hundreds of millions of people
who have been pauperized by the expansion of the market in the past 25 years. These
are the destitute and the indebted, people who have not had any regular
employment for years on end. These are the people who turn up for MNREGA jobs
or are willing to do a full day’s work for 20 rupees. These are the people who
live off the entrails collected from the village butcher. These are the people
who turn up in the stories done by well-meaning reporters about the lives of
drought affected farmers, expect that this is how the farmers live, all through
the year, drought or no drought.
These people – mostly coming from poorer Dalits and the most
backward castes – are outside the pale of the official economy. Demonetisation
did not affect them, because they have never seen a 500 or 1000 rupee note.
They are not part of those who the middle-class considers to be poor – drivers,
maids, hawkers, labourers, plumbers. They are people who don’t have land or
work and only become visible when they appear on city streets as beggars and vagrants.
This is the second wave of people, who are against both the
old Nehruvian elite and the new moneyed elite. For them, Narendra Modi is a saviour of the poor – a gareebon ka maseeha. He is not only pro-rich, but by playing the
gamble of demonetization, he has positioned himself as being anti-rich. The
Modi BJP’s victory in state after state, post-demonetisation has less to do
with Hindutva and much more to do with this anti-rich image. That is the reason
why journalists, pollsters and analysts underestimated the scale of Modi’s
victory in UP. They encountered a huge number of ‘silent’ voters, who have been
traditionally slotted as BSP voters – they are the poorest of the poor, who are wary of speaking their mind lest
they be persecuted later. For the first time in its history, exit polls
underestimated the BJP’s performance, because the poor, underprivileged ‘silent’
voter backed Narendra Modi.
It is not clear that Modi himself understands this fully. The
selection of Adityanath as chief minister, suggests the BJP has erroneously attributed
the UP victory to Hindutva and polarization. Yet, Narendra Modi instinctively
knows that his best bet is to play the anti-rich card. It is going to increasingly
inform his governmental and political strategies. In the absence of any
concrete economic programme, an anti-rich rightwing populism is likely to find
more concrete articulation. It will seek an enemy and the modern ideology of
Hindutva already provides an enemy character – the Muslim, the secular and the
liberal. But, the new moneyed elite will not escape the wrath of this
lower-class populism, because its defining characteristic will be its anti-rich
platform. We will, therefore, see the dismantling of the entrenched structure of
the BJP as a party, because it is populated by the new elite. We should not be
surprised if IT officials go after the new rich, even if they owe allegiance to
the sangh parivar (we have already seen that happen in Delhi, where the state
RSS chief’s home and offices have been raided).
In short, this is the second wave, of Hindutva. It is an
anti-rich populist Hindutva, which will disenfranchise its original
practitioners. The only form it can take is of fascism, of the kind the world
saw on the streets of Germany and Italy, some eighty years ago.
