The massive victory of the BJP which was mandated by almost a quarter of the Indian electorate in 2014 has had two major political impacts. Firstly, ideology has asserted itself on the plane of Indian politics. Notwithstanding Hindutva’s grossly exclusionary, communalist and proto-fascist moorings, it has asserted itself on a popular scale.
Unlike the time when it was propelled by leaders of the brigade from the top, it seems to have acquired a popular acceptance and is part of daily conversation and debate among the masses. The credit for this, for obvious reasons, goes to the BJP media/IT cell, the RSS’ foot soldiers and the tone and tenor of the Modi-Shah duo. But the organic reception it has received has roots in precarious condition of the working population.
The informal economy which accounts for 93 per cent of the workforce is largely unrepresented by unions or any other form of wage-bargaining organisations rooted in politics. A massive chunk of this workforce is situated in urban and semi-urban areas which has been a happy hunting ground for the BJP.
Critics point out that these Indians are organisationally amorphous and politically passive, are not aware of the fact that they tend to acquire voter cards from localities with relative ease. For local political peddlers, not to be mistaken for cadres, this section appears to be of immense value. Estranged as they are from family and society where one could imagine some maneuvering of a political agency, albeit subject to caste and class considerations, they become degraded satraps of the local peddlers.
In places where they are what one can call ‘sons of the soil’ their wages are metaphorically worth only ‘soil’. Industrial and mercantile cities had witnessed accumulation of capital by the self-employed middle classes in the post-1991 phase not at the cost of labour in terms of extracting surplus value in the industrial proletarian sense, as the former involved personalised and semi-personalised contractual relationship with the employee. The precariousness was further compounded by shifting business and operational forms of such organisations resulting in layoffs, wage delays, long and often terminal unemployment.
Unlike layoffs in unionised units whose repercussions would be demonstrated on streets and adorn newspaper headlines, the misery of casual workers would manifest in petty crimes and alcoholism. This drudgery has found in Hindutva not the opium, as Marx would have it, because they already had religion, but a very original political sense which also panders to millennial goals – akhanda bharat, hindu rashtra, so on and so forth. However, it should not be mistakenly assumed that these millennial goals had takers because of their incredulity or the vocal rendition of peddlers, but because the other political group, the organised Left, had failed to approach them with their own set of millennial goals – a classless, communist society based on labour’s subordination of capital.
Hindutva has had an effect that can be compared to a social balm which could ease, if not eradicate the pains of socio-economic uprooting. The best measure of this could be the ease with which the informal sector drank the hemlock of demonetisation in the belief that this temporary pain would take India closer to one of the many millennial goals. A dialectical understanding would not allude this to their passivity the but potential to be active participants in an ideologically charged political discourse, which could be red as well.
The second change that the BJP has brought about is a complete non-ideological opposition or front which is currently in the incubator. Although the rhetoric of secularism is high on the part of the opposition, important issues of caste discrimination and class oppression are not even in the background. Even secular rhetoric is subject to opportunistic subversion, aptly demonstrated by Rahul Gandhi’s marathon temple visits in Gujarat and not even a passing mention of Muslims during his entire poll campaign.
Worst of all was the Lingayat card played cunningly in Karnataka. Instead of focusing on the same AHINDA anagram (Muslims, backward classes and Dalits), Siddaramaiah tried to bank upon the long-standing demand of separate religion status to be accorded to the Lingayats, a politically and economically dominant community. The attempt was to strategically carve up a strong BJP support base and undercut the Hindutva momentum. This was not to happen as the ministers who led the movement, barring one, lost in their own constituencies and the elections at best seemed a perverse bourgeois affair where the fulcrum of politics was the economically and socially dominant community and a complete disregard of real issues.
What followed was the murder of democracy, not because the Governor invited BJP to stake claim first, but political parties against whom the people gave the mandate came up to form the government. Although parliamentary models allow for post-poll coalitions as happened in Britain recently where the Tories bereft of a majority held the hand of the reactionary DUP, they adversely affect the system in two ways – the verdict of the people, no matter how reactionary it is, loses its relevance, and secondly, any scope for progressive radicalism is blunted as politics is made subservient to opportunist coalitions pandering to the interests of rotating ministers and their coteries.
Another alternative in the offing – that of a federal front – is even more undemocratic as it is based on the one-party opposition formula. The idea first mooted by Mamata Banerjee was based on the premise of doing away with a multiparty competition and assert near hegemony in her own turf. The failure of her party in Tripura to act as a credible opposition to the Left followed by the massive victory of the BJP led her to propose this formula which was not aimed at stopping the BJP but asserting her near hegemonic dominance in Bengal through a route legitimised under the rubric of ‘one-party opposition’.
Indian politics is in for tumultuous times but whatever be the outcome, the first casualty will be democracy.
The writer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of International Relations, South Asian University.