Lapses in laps

22 November 2019

#PolityParadigm

The temptation to switch off from social media, to not pen any thing for a week was a mix of virtue and necessity. In times like this, when one has a purposive and poised power mongering as a seasonal flavour, a switch off like this could lead you to becoming a novice, like going back to the starting point, not offering you the luxury of where to begin again, or to start off from where you left!

I took the time to go back and see and reconnect with all the events that have shaped us. It helped that the traveling also rekindled memories of other days around those events, meeting old acquaintances was a vista opener, and I came back with three  cornerstone observations about India under Mr Modi.

Firstly, JNU is a big time distracter, used repeatedly to divert the focus away from scrutiny of more pressing matters. So we have the latest round of scrutiny that reveals how JNU was a gathering host of freeloaders, of folks who are semi retired and stipend sucking, drawing on honest tax payer revenue to afford a urban nest of sylvan surroundings, where walled off from reality, they discuss and deliberate on theories long discarded by the real world outside. No wonder the politics of JNU continue to be left leaning, socialist and utopian, espousing stuff like right to education for all, where sons of washermen and daughters of the hoi polloi can hold their own against the original claimants to this entitled land and its resources. 

In Mumbai, there is an unwritten rule about tenancy, where the ownership grants not just parking rights, but a whole host of privileges in cooperative housing societies. In Maximum City, Mahalaxmi ( wealth) is the new caste order, the touchable and the untouchable are deigned by it, reined by it! If one looks at the underbelly of the city and the creme de la creme, it is fascinating to see how this classicism of the ‘haves’ and the have-nots operates for every microcosm of this humming beehive of humans. The venality with which turf defence operates is only transcended when genius forces barriers down on those rare occasions, and when it does, that genius is sought to be quickly co-opted and buried in the existing web of status quo.

So if you were to see how JNU is and how Mumbai operates, you find that under Mr Modi the consolidation of the right wing has been an undiluted success. The forerunner to the decline of the support socialism had once in our country was when the Congress first leaned on it for votes in the name of ‘Garibi Hatao’ which was an Indira Gandhi master stroke on the eve of her 1971 electoral victory. What Mr Modi’s lasting legacy as a political animal is going to be, is transforming the electoral landscape where the politics of the poor, politics of the ‘left behind’ and the politics of inclusion, as a left of centre option is forever decimated and burnt to the ground. The lack of political backing for JNU students other than the effete Left Communist parties reveals how Mr Modi has commandeered the situation. This is the biggest change India has seen from 1970s to now, that in 50 years, we have seen such a narrative transformation from an India where Hollywood show cased poverty and hope to now revelling in glitz and gaiety!

Of course, now no one talks of those WhatsApp forwards condemning the concessions MPs enjoy, the freebies that they get from cheap food to air travel and LPG gas connections, even as the ordinary folk have been exhorted to give up subsidies! So if you see Mr Modi’s manoeuvring, he has led us to this ‘walden’ where we see only thorns and twigs for us, and we don’t mind the pricks and barbs that we suffer, even as we go around in circles.

The second key issue of the polity is the shift to a clearly religiously mandated one. We see this couched as majoritarianism, as a kind of retributive justice for long suffering Hinduism, whereas we have actually been avuncular toward a foundational shift in our nation state. India started by an attempt to restrain and rein in ‘Hindu patriarchy’ by introduction of the Hindu Code by Dr BR Ambedkar, the passing of the Hindu Marriage Act and our  constitutional view on restraining religious obscurantism was far more pronounced with regard to Hinduism in what historians at that time noted as a continuation of a colonial slant. We had seen with British Viceroys action on ‘Suttee’ on ‘Thugs’ and reform within Hinduism led by Arya Samaj, by the forging of apparently modernist and rational Anglicanism with Vedic philosophy as Dayananda’s Anglo-Vedic (DAV) movement. Gender rights and more importantly reproductive rights for women are far more advanced under law in India than they are in the USA, even though social evils like manual scavenging and bonded labour co-exist with such egalitarianism as universal suffrage, sponsored women’s education, unfettered rules for controlling child bearing and birth, access for scholarships and educational training in elite institutions denoted by caste! But we can see how over the decades, affirmative action is now spun into a ‘votebank politics’ narrative, where the ‘unreserved’ general castes and forwardly mobile Hindu communities have hardened their view against reservation, with the government offering on the eve of the last general election a uniform 10% reservation to the ‘unreserved’ in government institutions for education and vocation! We know the EWS is the new euphemism for the now disadvantaged general category of Hindus, who are finding it difficult due to underserved capacity in higher education and government employment to get berths for themselves.

Yet, in a damning statistical point, we see that under the Modi regime, the visibility of the ‘reserved categories’ has only gone down…(https://theprint.in/india/governance/of-89-secretaries-in-modi-govt-there-are-just-3-sts-1-dalit-and-no-obcs/271543/)

(https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/only-four-among-85-secretaries-from-sc-st-communities-government/590509/) Of course, I don’t suggest that the representation was better off during the UPA regime or Congress era, but today’s narrative control does not offer this perspective at all of how disadvantaged actually the ‘reserved category’ of castes is in higher posts and positions, that their representation is at odds with their population, that it is actually more like lip service, this social upliftment strategy based on ‘reservation’.

So caste has returned to the narrative in a very different manner, consolidating the hold traditional upper castes have had in Hinduism for the last millennia and a half. Despite the protestations of scholars about ‘varna’ being a vocation based segregation and not an ‘apartheid’ by birth, we know what was meant and what has translated into reality of rigid social stratification. If there is any pull for ‘Love Jihad’ or for other ‘conversion’ strategies in Independent India, it is this elephant in the room, of caste based denial of equal opportunity, and not only is it distorting our human resources potential, but also destroying the necessary social cohesion that a modern society sorely needs. But here again, the ‘Brahmin’ narrative appears to have won. The role of the cow as the defender of Brahminism is something which Savarkar foresaw when he denounced the cow in no uncertain terms. Savarkar for all his religious zeal was actually quite a votary for reform, asking Hindus to eat meat, asking them to treat the cow as nothing more than a beast of domestic use, and to end caste based society that decided opportunities at birth. So we can see how cleverly we have used Savarkar, even suggesting a Bharat Ratna for him, while cleverly burying away his core ideologies for ‘Hindutva’ as a transformation of Hindu society. The gains that India had achieved in her affirmative efforts and rights based movements which appeared to have reached a turning point under UPA regime, through schemes offering employment, information, education, land reform and more for marginalised and the disadvantaged, has been arrested and now efforts are on to whittle down those legislations and schemes to show the ‘reserved castes’ their place in the Hindu scheme of things.

India has always operated through schemes and schisms. If you see it as a universal battle between entitled and the rest, or elite and the left over, you cannot be far wrong. What has happened in less than half a decade under Mr Modi is how political legitimacy has descended on this type of politics. How the very social base that was used to further the cause of egalitarianism has been used to turn against itself, and to reverse their gains. As a political analyst, I can say that India is like Sri Lanka’s recent vote of Sinhala consolidation leading to the victory of a Rajapakshe for the Presidency, now a politically consolidated base for this kind of politics. This revisionist reductionist and socially obscurantist scheme is at clear odds with what is the requirement for a polity in the modern era. And we are deftly managing this using the concept of a secular Constitution, of a Supreme and Independent Judiciary, and most importantly a Democratic Polity based on universal suffrage!

Italy under Mussolini did see economic recovery, did see relatively speedier growth and brief prosperity before the WWII plunged her society and nationhood into a crises which saw her set back by three decades. I use Italy, because Nagpur based RSS ideology leans heavily on Italian political strategists, thinkers and ideologues. What is disturbing is that similar kind of retractive decisions, India is yet to see economic returns. Few Indians will actually say that they were well off under the UPA than they are now under Mr Modi, and most will accept the WhatsApp theories of how the whole liberal economic world has ganged up to promote a narrative of economic crises for India under him. But equally even die hard Modi supporters will hedge their bets on India’s economic prospects. Ultimately, economic performance is what embellishes political legacies. The lapses in laps of this economic journey are seen to be allowing China to further the gap between her and India, and while we can shift goal posts and proclaim new victory targets, it is unlikely to redeem ourselves unless we are in the end able to see a ‘podium finish’!