India’s Landmark Election

There are numerous reasons why the 2014 general elections to India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, constituted a post-independence landmark event. But the most important is that it signifies for the first time ever the replacement of the Indian National Congress by the Hindutva-motivated Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the central point of reference of the Indian polity. Add to this a Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who as Chief Minister of Gujarat state in February-March 2002 oversaw (and for many was directly implicated in) the eruption and prolongation of one of the worst anti-Muslim pogroms since independence. If India is as secular and democratic as so many liberals make it out to be then that alone should have permanently disqualified him from reaching where he now has. In the absence of class mobilizational politics by the left, Modi’s promise of better development and governance proved highly attractive. Over the last two decades there has been some ‘transformation’ of class politics but it has been by and for the right. Of the various processes whose complex interweaving has most shaped the Indian polity over the last three decades – the forward march of Hindutva and of the intermediate castes, Dalit affirmation, Muslim ferment, regional assertions – the one with the most explicit class referent is the emergence of the misnamed but growing ‘middle class’. Currently comprising the top 15 to 20 per cent of the 1.2 billion population, this is not a median category providing a social buffer for the dominant classes as in the West, but an elite category of mass proportions. And it has provided the most important base for the rise of reactionary right-wing politics, whether practised by the Congress or by the BJP. The ascent of Modi and the BJP is the culmination of a process going on since at least the late eighties with a neoliberal turn in the economy being accompanied by the rise of a Hindutva-influenced consolidation of ‘common sense’ socially and a stronger authoritarian inflection politically. These developments have all been normalized and now set the limits of the ‘acceptable’ range of mainstream discourse on what policies and practices should be followed at the central and provincial levels

India's paradigmatic communal violence

What is referred to as communalism--intolerance and tensions between religious communities--would seem to be part of a worldwide phenomenon of religious resurgence and the rise of religio-political movements and groups of all kinds, amidst an even broader emergence, over the last three decades, of various kinds of cultural exclusivisms. Capitalist modernity is characterised by the permanence of change, of constant flux. The devastation of older values, ways of life and forms of belonging (even if these were relatively recently acquired) is traumatic. These costs are compensated for and made more bearable by the promise of collective amelioration and better times--by the notion of steady and cumulative progress The advent of neoliberalism has seen still further transformations, greater social disorientation, loss of dignity and male self-respect, creating fertile ground for the rise of all kinds of aggressive self-assertions, religious or ethnic, that can serve as some form of consolation and whose affirmations (the more negative forms of identity politics) are a balm for social despair. It is the failed promise of modernity, both in its current neoliberal version and in its previous socialist version, that has led to the cultural intolerances of today whose forms vary geographically, preceded as they have been by different histories, rooted in different combinations of the old and the new. When the present is unsatisfactory and the future looks bleak it is the unchangeable past that appears to provide a source of security and certainty