Making Sense of Modi's India

Introduction

I

n a few months, Narendra Modi will have completed two years in office. Vowing to build a ‘new’ India, he came to power with a massive mandate after a bitterly fought election in May 2014. His idea of an India ideologically and culturally different from the post-independent Nehruvian one has been endlessly debated. But it remains a big conundrum with no clarity as to what his big alternative vision is.

So, where’s India headed under Modi?

For an answer, it is important, first, to grasp the profound meaning of the 2014 verdict, which, many believe, has not been fully understood. It is true that at one level the vote was against a bumbling, ‘corrupt’ and leaderless Congress, but at a deeper level it was also a comprehensive repudiation of the concept of a benign, tolerant and liberal India in favour of a majoritarian and economically laissez-faire nation unencumbered by ‘soft’ Nehruvian baggage. But nearly two years later, the country remains precariously poised at a point where, having voted for a decisive break with the past, it is still waiting expectantly to be led to the new promised land.

There’s growing scepticism as to whether Modi really has a new long-term vision; whether the talk of a ‘new’ India is simply a sales pitch. As a slogan, ‘new’ India has a nice ring, but slogans, however seductive, are no substitute for a philosophical vision.

This book is an attempt, with the help of Modi’s supporters and critics alike, to analyse the Modi ‘phenomenon’, the factors behind it, and what it means for the future of India. Such a debate is important at a time when there are deep and legitimate concerns about the future of secularism amid calls for a redefinition of traditional notions of nationhood.

ISSUES AT STAKE

Here is a flavour of the issues raised in this volume.

Meghnad Desai draws on the history of European nationalism to analyse the nature of Hindu nationalist resurgence. And though a supporter of Modi’s ‘development’ pledge, he shares concerns about his Hindutva baggage. R. Jagannathan, also a Modi supporter, tries to figure out his vision and what he represents. Is Modi really the man we see on the tin? ‘What is he like as a person as opposed to his airbrushed image? What does he really believe in as opposed to what he has said after becoming prime minister of India? What is his economics about?’ he asks. His answers to these and a series of other questions he raises add up to an intriguing portrait of a man who remains an enigma as much to his critics as to his admirers.

Gyanendra Pandey examines Modi’s development agenda in the light of the new global fashion that insists on development, ‘sought at times in spite of the people, often against the interests of the poor and unprivileged: working people, the underemployed and unemployed’. And he worries that this development model is now being sought to be imposed on India’s poor and marginalized sections, which are presented as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ and which ‘must be drawn into our time – the time of development – however great the cost’.

Making sense of the ‘real’ character of the RSS has been one of the most hotly debated issues of our time; and it has assumed a new urgency in view of Modi’s RSS roots and the perception that his government is being remote-controlled by Mohan Bhagwat. The RSS’s insistence that it is simply a social and cultural organization with no political agenda has long been questioned, but there is no consensus on the real nature of the beast, with the academia and the commentariat deeply divided over whether it can be characterized as a fascist organization.

In a trenchant analysis, Radhika Desai declares her impatience with the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that have tended to characterize the debate and what she calls the ‘tediously earnest discussions of the founding ideas of the Hindutva ideologues’ that have prevented academics such as Christophe Jaffrelot from designating the RSS as a fascist organization. Drawing on the history of European fascism and her own close study of the RSS doctrine and its pattern of behaviour, she has no doubt that it is fascist in tooth and claw. The entire Sangh Parivar, including the BJP, represents well-recognized ‘fascist’ tendencies dressed up in democratic posturing, she argues.

Faisal Devji casts a critical eye on the secularism-versus-communalism debate in which a ‘secular’ Congress and ‘communal’ BJP are portrayed as representing the opposite ends of Indian politics. He finds such a discourse ‘too superficial’ and unhelpful in understanding the nature of Indian polity, which is often marked by ‘greater continuity between parties … than is usually recognized to be the case’. It is in the light of such ‘continuities’ that he analyses the implications of the Modi victory and throws up some intriguing questions.

Zoya Hasan looks at the causes and implications of the Congress collapse and warns that any attempt by the Congress leadership to ‘reshape itself as pale saffron in a bid to mimic the winner will only help to legitimize the right-wing political discourse, while failing to pick up the electoral dividends from this competitive wooing of the Hindu vote’. Krishna Ananth, in his critique of the decline of the Left, calls for a root-and-branch overhaul of its blinkered ideological programme and flawed tactics if it is serious about making itself relevant again in national politics.

Shruti Kapila warns that the personality cult being sought to be built around Modi, which, far from making any attempt to discourage, he is actively promoting, could come to haunt the BJP besides producing ‘unforeseen consequences’ for Indian democracy. Sudheendra Kulkarni, a former BJP activist who knows the Sangh Parivar inside out, warns against its ‘anti-Muslim and anti-minorities propaganda’ and criticizes Modi for not reining it in. But, ultimately, he believes that compulsions of power and Modi’s political instincts for survival would force him to ‘distance’ his government from such elements and ‘actively curb’ them. ‘Modi is an astute politician and he knows that alienating a large section of the Indian population would create problems for his premiership – especially for his desire to win a second term in 2019,’ he writes.

But will he?

The role of the media, owned by big corporates, in promoting Modi has come under close scrutiny. There is a perception that, to use L.K. Advani’s memorable phrase from the Emergency, the media seems only too eager to ‘crawl’ when ‘asked to simply bend’.

But Sevanti Ninan, one of India’s more sober media commentators, has a more nuanced take on it. She questions the ‘catch-all’ media label used to describe ‘a technologically diverse universe of communication’, and the tendency, then, to ascribe to it ‘a common behaviour pattern … as in, the media is turning right, or turning saffron, or enabling the ascent of Narendra Modi’. ‘But is there a pattern, and is it consistent?’ she asks in a closely argued analysis of the rapidly changing complexion of the Indian media. She finds much of the debate too simplistic which, according to her, ignores an understanding of the increasingly complex media environment.

Modi’s forays into foreign policy and his bid to raise India’s profile in the international arena have impressed many, but he has also been accused of using foreign policy to project India as a ‘Hindu power’ with his nationalistic – ‘Hindu pride’ – narrative, especially in his pitch to Indian expats abroad. Andrew Whitehead, a former BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) correspondent in Delhi, offers an insight into how the West views the new Indian prime minister. Modi, he says, has ‘got off to a good start’ and is seen in most Western capitals as a leader who ‘wants to strike a new, more positive note in his country’s engagement with Western powers’ and ‘needs to be met halfway’. But this is combined with ‘an anxiety about the BJP’s at times stridently assertive religion-based nationalism’. ‘If Barack Obama has delivered the choicest of tributes, he has also voiced anxieties about communal tension and violence in India,’ he writes, alluding to the US President’s remarks on his visit to India in January 2015 on the Sangh Parivar’s hate campaigns against Muslims and Christians.

Finally, what is the view from across the border in Pakistan? And what do Indian expats other than Modi’s supporters in Manhattan and Wembley make of the ‘new’ India in the making? Beena Sarwar and Rashmee Roshan Lall provide refreshingly candid perspectives that might make interesting reading for many newly nationalist Indians.

Arguably, independent India has seldom been as politically and culturally polarized as it is today. Recent months have seen an alarming rise in hate speech, shrill Hindu nationalistic rhetoric, attacks on dissenting writers and academics (renowned rationalist thinker M.M. Kalburgi was shot dead for his views on idol worship and Hindu rituals, prompting many eminent writers to return their Sahitya Akademi awards) and controversies around beef eating and ‘Hindu sensitivities’.

Clearly, the emerging face of Modi’s ‘new’ India is not looking pretty. Maybe it is a passing phase; but at the moment it is hard to be too optimistic.

Over to the debate.

India as a Hindu Nation – and Other Ideas of India

Meghnad Desai

Meghnad Desai is emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics and author of The Rediscovery of India and Development and Nationhood.

T

he Bharatiya Janata Party’s triumph in the 2014 general elections, securing a majority in the Lok Sabha on its own (a ‘first’ for any party since 1984), was an event of transformational significance. Narendra Modi has changed expectations about India and generated a new mood of optimism. But, given his RSS background and BJP’s political proclivities, it is very likely that during his rule the old idea of India – the Nehruvian idea of secular India which has been hegemonic so far – will be challenged. It is early to say what precise form this will take. But it is, perhaps, time to open up the debate around the idea of India’s nationhood. What makes India a nation?

THE IDEA OF A NATION

The idea of nationhood is of recent origin. One can date it from sometime after the French Revolution. Johann Gottfried von Herder, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, was the first to explicitly speak of a nation as a ‘folk’ or a homogeneous community. Debates since then have raged as to what constitutes a nation, and what is the explanation for nationalism’s appeal.

Its origin and appeal have invited many explanations from scholars. Just to take three of my former London School of Economics (LSE) colleagues who wrote on nationalism. Ernest Gellner, hailed as one of the most ‘vigorous’ European intellectuals of his time, argued that nationalism is a product of modernity and industrial capitalism. Historian Elie Kedourie, a trenchant critic of British support for Arab nationalism, thought of nationalism as a dangerous epidemic which has done untold harm to the world. Anthony Smith, regarded as one of the pioneers of ‘nationalism studies’, holds the view that a nation has to have primordial roots to be a nation.

A nation can be defined by a common language, a religion, a racial or ethnic identity and a common history. A nation has to have the idea that it is timeless. Its origins have to be in the distant past and if the nation is a subject nation at the moment of fashioning its identity, there has to be the notion that at the beginning was a ‘golden age’ from which the nation has declined to its present plight. But the idea requires nationalists to believe that the nation will rise again and become powerful.

Hindu Mahasabha leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (popularly known as Veer Savarkar), who coined the term Hindutva, was the first Hindu nationalist to characterize the events of 1857 as the Indian War of Independence. But the fact is that the 1857 rebels did not so much fight for an Indian nation as for restoration of the Mughal Empire. The rebellion of 1857 was confined very much to what later came to be dubbed BIMARU states comprising Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Punjab, Bombay (then the capital of Bombay Presidency), and much of south India remained uninvolved though scattered local revolts have since been documented and are much prized. It was after the collapse of the 1857 rebellion that the idea of India as a nation with its destiny independent of any past kingdom or Empire took shape.

As a latecomer to the arena of nations, India faced special problems defining its nationhood. National consciousness began to appear in the nineteenth century among the products of recently introduced Western education. Thus, the first characteristic of the Indian idea of a nation was that it was reactive to foreign rule.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, for the first time in its long history, India was united in a single administrative entity – British India. It was then that India’s borders were determined. This is why India’s borders, both before and after its Partition in 1947, have British names: Durand Line, McMahon Line and Radcliffe Line. British India was bound together by an administrative iron frame, a rail network and a postal and telegraph system. The many princely states were beholden to the British viceroy in a paramountcy arrangement. The three Presidency centres of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were centres of recruitment of the elite who would shape the various ideas of India. The task of the first generation of nationalists was easy. The unity of Indians was defined by a common enemy, the British. At the time, though, they did not imagine themselves as an independent nation. They demanded to be treated as much as possible on par with other subjects of the Crown as Victoria’s Declaration, hailed as Magna Carta of India by Surendranath Banerjea, a distinguished progressive political leader, had promised.

Here began the first of the many fissures of the definition of Indian nationhood. Who were they demanding the rights for, and why did they deserve them? The westernized elite argued that they had imbibed the best of British values of conservative Edmund Burke and libertarian John Stuart Mill, and thus qualified as well-educated subjects to compete for public service.

But there was another strand which wanted to restore Indian pride in the face of British attempts, especially by the clergy, to humiliate them, which included denigrating their religion. This led to a movement to revive and reform Hindu religion. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, favoured going back to the Vedic roots of Hinduism. Rammohun Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, on the other hand, opted for a Unitarian Church–style monotheistic model for reforming Hinduism. Swami Vivekananda, revered as the ‘patriotic saint’, is credited with introducing Hinduism to the world – stressing the message of the Upanishads. The differences between Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, leading figures in the freedom movement, illustrate two rival approaches to Indian nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century.

ISLAM–CHRISTIANITY DIVIDE

Unlike their relationship with Hindus, the British had a more complicated relationship with Muslims. The antagonism between Christians and Muslims had existed since the Crusades, if not before that. In Europe, the threat of the Ottoman Empire remained potent till the Battle of Lepanto when a coalition of southern European Catholic states defeated its forces on 7 October 1571. Yet, things were changing. Just before 1857, the British had gone to the aid of the Ottoman Empire to fight the Russian threat in the Crimean War. Even so, the fright that 1857 gave to the British was blamed on Muslims.

The first cautious Muslim overture to the British to recover from the humiliation caused by the collapse of the rebellion was made by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the nineteenth-century philosopher and social reformer who later founded Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) to promote Western-style modern education among Muslims. Like the westernized Hindu and Parsi elite, he wanted Muslims to remain loyal to the British and exercise patience in dealing with them. As a modernizer, he kept his appeal free from any hint of Islamic revivalism. But there was also a more combative strand of religious opposition to British rule represented by the Deoband and the Barelvi religious establishments. They did not want any accommodation by way of jobs or favours. They also did not subscribe to the idea of a nation but only of the Dar al-Islam (literally meaning, house or abode of peace) as a whole.

The British never defined themselves as a nation but as loyal subjects of a kingdom divided by class and religion. They viewed India and, indeed, their other colonies in the same way. In the first concessions to Indian loyalists’ demand for a say in governance, they granted limited representation to a certain class of citizens under the Indian Councils Act of 1909 but, at the same time, they created a special dispensation for Muslims, causing further hiatus in Hindu–Muslim relations. However, at the historic joint session of the Congress and Muslim League in Lucknow in 1916, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was a member of both parties, succeeded in reconciling their differences on the issue through what is known as the ‘Lucknow Pact’, earning him the title of ‘the ambassador of Hindu–Muslim Unity’ courtesy Sarojini Naidu.

GANDHI’S APPROACH

Gandhi had begun as a loyalist of the British Empire and argued his case for the rights of indentured workers in South Africa on the basis of Victoria’s Declaration. It was after Jallianwala Bagh that he changed his stance. He launched the Khilafat movement which brought together Muslims and Hindus under one umbrella to argue for redressing Muslim grievances while mobilizing Hindus with the promise of Swaraj within one year. Rejecting the 1919 government proposals aimed at expanding Indian participation in the colonial administration – a follow-up to the 1909 reforms – Gandhi launched a non-violent non-cooperation movement. But after a violent incident in Chauri Chaura, Uttar Pradesh, in 1922, he suspended the movement despite having failed to deliver on his promise.

From then on, Muslims became antagonistic towards Gandhi and the Congress. Only a tiny minority of ‘nationalist Muslims’ remained with the Congress. The Lucknow Pact was dead, and Jinnah left the Congress.

Gandhi preached an ecumenical approach to politics and waged his battles with the British using a religious idiom. He forged a consensus between the Gokhale and Tilak approaches – modern liberal and constitutional but imbued with a religious idiom. Gandhi’s Hinduism was milder than Tilak’s. His goal was to drive the British out with a mass movement led by the Congress. Congress insisted on its hegemony as the only party the British should negotiate with. The British ignored this demand and legislated the Government of India Act of 1935 which was to lead to Dominion status. There was no agreement, however, on reconciling Hindu–Muslim differences. When elections were held in 1937, the idea of Congress hegemony suffered a huge blow. The Congress failed to win Muslim seats though the Muslim League did not do well either. In the 1946 elections, the Muslim League won almost all the Muslim seats across India. The final result after ten years of many British missions and parleys was the Partition of British India into two entities, India and Pakistan.

CRISIS OF INDIAN NATIONHOOD

Until 1947, the idea of India that was promoted was aimed