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Terms of Trade | Is rancour the new radical?
The Opposition sees the protests as the advent of a new radicalism. The government believes they are nothing but a deep-rooted ploy to undermine its legitimacy.
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Imagery is an important part of politics, no matter of what form. Authoritarian regimes go out of their way to curate a certain image of rulers. This author found the best personal anecdote on this in a footnote in Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes. “The present writer, who saw Stalin’s embalmed body in the Red Square mausoleum before it was removed in 1961, can remember the shock of seeing a man so tiny and yet so all-powerful. Significantly, all films and photographs concealed the fact that he was only 5 ft 3 ins. tall”, he wrote.
Democracies too have their own share of powerful imagery. India is no exception. Indira Gandhi’s political resurrection after her crushing loss in the 1977 post-Emergency election is often equated with her riding an elephant to Belchhi, a village in Bihar without a motorable road during the monsoon, where Dalits had been massacred. The Emergency itself, which led to the first non-Congress government in India, to my mind, is best described by a chained George Fernandes being brought to court in what is known as the Baroda dynamite case. No photo exists of the famous anecdote about Jawaharlal Nehru telling an old woman who pulled his collar to ask what democracy had given her; a calm Nehru replied that she had won the right to pull the Prime Minister’s collar and ask him this question, an image which can give everybody who loves Indian democracy goosebumps. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to my generation of Indians, would always be remembered for the speech he gave while replying to the trust vote of his first 13-day government, which ended with his admission that he was going to tender his resignation to the president because he did not have a majority. One could go on giving more such examples.
I am talking about all this because we have been witnessing some extraordinary political imagery in the recent past. How many times has the Leader of Opposition been dragged by policemen and taken away from a protest in independent India? Rahul Gandhi has achieved this feat twice in the past few months. The first time, he was protesting outside the Prime Minister’s residence; the second time, he was on his way to the Election Commission of India’s office.
Have we entered a phase of deep-rooted legitimacy crisis for the government? Are India’s independent institutions facing an unprecedented trust deficit? Is Indian politics at a precipice of a new popular revolt?
These are extremely loaded questions. In this author’s opinion, they are best answered with hard empirical evidence rather than some self-proclaimed oracle claiming to read the tea leaves. The previous edition of this column articulated my take on the entire SIR controversy. In the best of Keynesian traditions, I will humbly change my opinion if the facts change.
This edition of the column is not meant to carve out an alibi for my previous views on the matter. It is meant to elaborate on what I think is an under-appreciated development in Indian politics, which, in some ways, is not limited to India. Previous instances of deep-rooted political change in India, such as the Emergency or the rise of the BJP as a political force to reckon with in the early 1990s, were accompanied by vanguardist movements pressing for socio-economic change. The Emergency was the culmination of a rising OBC assertion in the country, exploiting an economic crisis to force the Congress government of the day’s hand to suspend even basic democracy in the country. The authoritarian pivot caused a deep erosion in the Congress’s legitimacy. The rise of the BJP along with the Ram temple movement was the proverbial double whammy for the Congress as the BJP also took away large parts of its Hindu upper caste vote after the Congress had lost its OBC support consistently since the 1960s. At the core of both Mandal and Kamandal assertions in Indian politics was the belief that they were the majority and therefore entitled to capturing power. While Indira Gandhi’s Congress tried to retain the majority via economic palliatives – historian Srinath Raghavan rightly argues that our present-day political economy continues to be inspired by this idea – the arrangement could not survive economic cycle fluctuations where political populism must maintain a fine balance with macroeconomic stability. Gandhi’s turn towards populism was catalysed by a grim realisation that the planned economy model was nowhere close to achieving its objectives. Each of these streams was radical for their time, in keeping with Karl Marx’s view. “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter”, Marx writes. Mandal and Kamandal addressed the socio-religious reality, while the palliative/populist route acknowledged the new class reality. Of course, agitations over democratic rights -- against the State’s excesses on movements threatening the regime’s popularity and politics -- often happened simultaneously with peak precipitation.
Where does one place the current moment in India’s long-term political history? For sure, not allowing the Opposition leadership, or even common people, to protest on issues they feel about doesn’t help the cause of democracy. But it is equally difficult to make the case that the government’s siege on space for democratic protests is strategic or blatant rather than tactical. Even in terms of the wider social coalition which forms the core of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is difficult to say with confidence whether there has been attrition to reckon with. We must wait until the next round of the state elections early next year to answer this question.
Here is what I think is a workable take on the current situation.
One, the BJP, unlike the Congress of the 1950s and 1960s, is holding on to power with a much smaller popular support base. This makes even a relatively minor public discontent potentially attractive to the Opposition, allowing them to fancy their chances of dislodging the BJP without sincerely and continuously working to take away a large well-defined constituency from the BJP’s coalition via a social or economic programme.
Two, while the BJP has shown remarkable sensitivity to the larger political economy sentiment and embraced economic populism in the aftermath of its 2024 setback in failing to secure a majority of its own, its fetish for centralisation has created an objective ground for the Opposition to tag India’s independent institutions as nothing but bidding agents of the government. The Opposition, which has been struggling to find an effective economic or social differential to attack the BJP, has, from its perspective, rightly decided to throw the kitchen sink at the opportunity. Nobody else but the BJP is to blame for its predicament.
These two, put together, threaten to create a political environment in which political energy, both of the government and the Opposition, will increasingly get consumed in dissecting the legitimacy of the government rather than its strategy. Given the current global economic environment, India faces a structural shift towards more hostile economic situation compared to the largely benign climate – favourable external environment which created unequal upward mobility and also the tax base necessary to dole out palliatives – which existed in the last two and a half decades. To politically articulate the changed economic problem and cultivate a constituency around the proposed solutions, however, is a much more difficult thing to do. To be sure, this is not a problem facing India alone and we are witnessing similar things in large parts of the world. Left progressives are realising to their dismay that populism is not sufficient to retain power and the right-wingers are facing similar vulnerabilities vis-à-vis their political rhetoric as the economic squeeze sets in. Trends from Brazil to Hungary, and possibly the forthcoming US midterms, will support this theory.
This is exactly what makes the current wave of protests a troubling sign for Indian political economy. They seem symptomatic of growing unease in a cohort larger than those who have taken to extra-parliamentary protests, but they are unlikely to dent the larger political-economy dark clouds already beginning to form on the horizon. The Opposition would like to see the protests as the advent of a new radicalism. The government believes they are nothing but a deep-rooted ploy to undermine its legitimacy.
Lost in this debate is the absence of a broader economic or social mobilisation inspired by the idea of fundamentally realigning, or even reimagining, the political economy fault lines. Rancour is the new radical in our politics today, which is completely oblivious to the root of the matter undermining democracy. That threat is simple yet profound: the new economic storm of a fragmented world, along with AI disruption, will render democracy even more incapable of doing justice to its popular mandates.
(Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa)
