Notes from Indian Elections, 2019: Discussion at Center for Policy Research

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On 27th May 2019, Center for Policy Research (New Delhi) hosted a discussion on the recently concluded General Elections of India, 2019 hosted by Yamini Aiyar. It is very insightful and presents many points that are missed out in the regular discourse. You can watch the video here:

Center for Policy Research

Here, I have made some notes from the discussion between panelists based on the points they make respectively.

Yogendra Yadav (soical activist, psephologist and politician)

  • Post the results, many of us seem to want to elect a new people
  • Do not conflate consequences with intentions of people – the distinction between the two is the space for politics

What Voter is saying

  • Care for this country – strength, pride – trust Modi more than anyone else to bring it about
  • Don’t like negativity about Modi
  • Don’t take my caste for granted
  • More frightened by coalitions than by Modi
  • Voting not for the self, but for the nation
  • More voting for ideological reasons

Intentions

  • Voting for PM
  • Anxiety about future of country
  • Resentment against minorities
  • Aspirations

Causes – beyond the voter’s control

  • Modi – cult + will to power + ambitions synchronized into one persons
  • Money
  • Media
  • Machine –

Consequences

  • Electoral authoritarianism, more concentration of power – decline of institutions
  • Non-theocratic majoritarianism
  • Public being mobilized to destroy the republic
  • Still lot of space for creative politics – understand intentions and respond

Space for politics

  • Recovery of nationalism – should not be surrendered
  • Religion – recover its inclusive language
  • Culture and language – speak to ordinary people in how they understand the world

Other comments:

  • the idea of NYAY (Congress manifesto point) reached only those who would pay for it, not those who would benefit from it,
  • manifesto was not about getting back power at all,
  • complete inability to respond to Pulwama,
  • no response to unemployment, demonization
  • Nationalism and Hindutva presented as the same thing to the voter
  • Foundation of BJP is the fraudulence of Indian secularism
  • Complete deracinated nature of Indian elite
  • What has India’s secularism done in response to 1992?
  • Nationalism may be a good thing – can be used against Modi
  • Beyond a point, media and propaganda can work against Modi
  • Respond positively to aspirations, not merely what is wrong with Modi

Vandita Mishra (journalist)

  • A hunger for power even after getting power
  • Telling multiple stories – Hindutva, rashtra (hit, pratishtha, suraksha), schemes (not necessarily get them but learnt through media), TINA
  • From citizen to beneficiary to voter – (came to entitlement, rather than empowerment)
  • Coming together of government and organization (RSS)
  • Reinforced narrative dominance

Other Comments:

  1. Modi makes both his supporters and his opponents intellectually lazy
  2. Distortions of social justice and secularism have to be corrected

Tariq Thachil (academic and political scientist)

  • BJP machinery built over a long period of time
  • Need to win large majorities without actually offering broad representations
  • Pure Modi, one man election (4M with Modi at the center)? Is that true?
  • Does it trump economic issues?
  • Motivated reasoning of voters? away from failures towards leaders
  • BJP or Modi attachment? Is BJP’s partisanship expressed as loyalty to Modi?
  • Perhaps Modi complements Money, Media and Machinery?
  • Is mobilization creating a leader effect or vice versa?
  • 2018 – 74% of all income of political parties, 98% of electoral bonds, 99.8% of it more than 10L – money helps mobilization, and projects winnability

Other Comments:

  • Lots of stuff happening at the same time
  • In some places, Muslims supporting BJP in large numbers

Shekhar Gupta (journalist)

  • Modi’s rise is a phenomenon, not a fraud on India
  • 2004 – BJP got 9 seats less than INC – TMC, TDP and others didnt want to go with BJP due to Gujarat but attributed to failure of India Shining – convenient explanation
  • 2009 – Credit given to Mrs. Gandhi – loan waiver, MNREGA – not to Manmohan Singh
  • Where poor are 30% – INC strike rate 68%, 70% are poor – INC strike rate around 30%
  • Growth was there but it went away
  • Congress and its durbar undermined UPA 2
  • 2019 – Modi got away with saying that nothing happened before 2014
  • Much happened – roads, airports, handling of GFC, Satyam handled much better than ILFS
  • Nobody from Congress said anything about UPA achievements but only about Indira and Sonia Gandhi
  • Manmohan Singh’s every speech went viral at all times – people remember him as a decent man who did something good
  • Responsibility of keeping India secular has been outsourced to 15% of its populations
  • Dalits are no longer with Mayawati anymore – miscoordiation of alliance
  • Most op-eds don’t go anywhere
  • People have been defeated despite money – Chandrababu Naidu
  • Voter in this country does not trust the Congress Schemes at all
  • JAM trinity works for a lot of people
  • Journalists and commentators either chose not to see or ignored the delivery of schemes without bribes
  • Biggest caste vote-bank in India – upper caste
  • Caste based parties leave a lot of OBCs behind – except Yadavs and Dalits
  • Congress’ lack of commitment, intellect and its arrogance
  • Chaikidaar Chor Hai – not taken well
  • Rahul Gandhi elite – video circulated by BJP
  • Modi is now elite but people see it that he has earned it
  • Congress does not understand India’s poverty anymore
  • The nature of poverty in India has changed – no longer like Indira’s time

G Sampath (journalist)

Sheer structural inequality of this election

  • financial,
  • human resources (premised on money),
  • media,
  • institutional (EC),
  • communication (premised on preceding 4)

Strategic patterns

  • late campaign start for INC,
  • no answer to BJP’s bogus nationalism – not even engaged with it, where was INC’s nationalism that let to India’s independence
  • presidential election without a candidate
  • no story offered by opposition – no narrative of leader, performance

Are we becoming a managed democracy?

Other Comments:

  • Difference between how Modi approaches Hindutva (instrumental, not ideological) and how RSS deploys it (ideological)
  • Modi may have done a lot of damage to BJP as an organization and its workings
  • After Modi – If not Modi, who?

Questions and Answers Session

Center for Policy Research

From Ideological Pragmatism to Hindutva : A Hypothesis of 2019 Elections

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Pragmatism as a governing ‘logic’ post 1970s

Elections till 2014 including the ones that Congress lost, were fought on atleast the rhetoric of Nehruvian ideas of liberal democracy, progressive social reform and economic development. Simultaneously, since the Emergency, India has seen ‘pragmatism’, both in economic and social policy, as a governing ‘logic’ used by successive governments to push a patchwork of reforms – a multitude of temporary props to assuage public protests, mitigate crises and stabilize a crumbling system – with rather myopic policy frameworks while leaving myriad discordant conflicts for the future.

Neither Congress nor non-Congress regimes explicitly claimed to any ideological political framework in this period – an ambiguity which suited them in electoral strategy and post-election alliances. While pragmatism gave more room for maneuver, both to Congress and non-Congress governments, it lacked a coherent ideology to combat a new opponent which it has found in the form of Hindutva. In political terms, pragmatism is not an ideology and it can never counter any ideology while it may be a condition for maintaining it.

Hindutva as the governing ethic post 2014

That ideological ambiguity has summarily changed with the 2019 elections, but it didn’t happen abruptly. The governing political ideology of India started undergoing a change starting in the 1970s with the conflicts surrounding the Emergency, Mandal Commission and Babri Masjid demolition. 2019 elections mark a completion of that change. The last five years were, in a way, a launch pad to a new ideological formation – Hindutva – as the governing ethic by the BJP. In many ways, the ideological assertion of Hindutva in India’s political system is testimony to the catastrophically flawed nature of post-Nehruvian pragmatism that was ideologically hollow by design.

While it does not have much to differentiate itself from the Congress in terms of the economy, BJP has shown that there is much more outside the economy that it can make people care about. In a way, its 2014 campaign was very much in the vein of ‘pragmatism’ of preceding elections – promise of jobs, low inflation, and no corruption – while Hindutva remained in the background. The ideological divide between the Congress and BJP wasn’t as big a factor then as it was in 2019. The recently concluded elections were not fought on the old – who is more pragmatic – terms. There was a clear ideological divide and BJP did not shy away from underlining it.

What the last five years show is, if the framing of pragmatism is devoid of ideological underpinnings, intentionally or otherwise, it becomes vulnerable to criticism, even subjugation, from another doctrine ready to take the space. The 2019 elections were the first to have been fought on a wholly and radically different ideological plank of Hindutva, with explicit condemnation of Nehruvian liberal democracy.

All the Congress had to offer in response was its own version of Hindutva, justified in the language of ideological pragmatism – it didn’t even try to been seen defending the Nehruvian ideology, content in claiming ownership to Nehru’s legacy. That does not mean that the ideology of Nehruvian liberalism had all answers to India’s problems, just that its policy prescriptions was grounded in solid ideological framework.

Political necessity of opposition’s ideological framework

Being the propagator of the governing ideology, BJP could only commit “errors” – it could never be fundamentally wrong in the way its ideologically shaky opponents could. Moreover, in politics, the point is not to avoid all the errors but to be able to justify it – this needs an ideology. BJP could justify anything within its ideological doctrine – from demonetization to mob lynchings. Congress and the opposition needs to realize that the new common sense about social and political norms have changed, heavily influenced by the ideological preferences of the BJP. The Indian National Congress has to atleast attempt to provide a new common sense.

Frankly speaking, the opposition never tried to decisively dislodge the emerging hegemonic force of Hindutva – they only tried to get around it. What the opposition offered was not a counter-ideology but a pragmatic bend of the prevailing Hindutva doctrine in a less fundamental direction. Calls for pragmatism cannot stand without an accompanying doctrine. Without an ideological framework, a pragmatism can always be framed as ideologically bankrupt. BJP did just that, on every occasion it could. Opposition’s pleas to the pragmatism of Indian voters had no robust ideological underpinning. Successful as it might have been in previous elections, it was seen as an incoherent and defensive response.

If Congress wants to stop Hindutva from achieving hegemony, it has to now fulfill the political necessity of an alternative ideological doctrine in response to BJP’s own ideological assertions. Without an ideological force behind the opposition, Hindutva will become the default governing doctrine of Indian politics. Any subsequent pragmatism thereafter will be forced to abstract from that new common sense, just like pre-2014 pragmatism abstracted from the default of Nehruvian liberalism.

Conclusion

For the opposition to offer anything substantial as a challenge, it has to develop a robust new common sense, based not on pragmatic interpretation of the prevailing views of Hindutva but on ideological coherence of its counter-narrative and exemplar governance where it presently holds power. The unchallenged political sway that the Hindutva doctrine has acquired over Indian politics will gradually seep into constitutional institutions, civil society, academic and research institutions etc. The challenge therefore is to answer the political necessity of a cogent ideology which can provide foundations for pragmatic governance.