Many of this column’s readers will be reading this edition around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be inaugurating India’s new parliament building. Lest there is any confusion, this author believes that the Central Vista project of redoing the physical infrastructure that is the seat of power of the Indian state is a much-needed upgrade. At the same time, it will be naïve to believe that the current regime has not given a political undertone to the project.
The political imagery of the prime minister inaugurating the new parliament must be seen along with various other images of him signifying a rejuvenation of the Indian state under the current government’s tenure. They include things such as the prime minister speaking to large audiences in (even if orchestrated) public events in high-income countries, flagging off of new-age infra such as Vande Bharat trains and newly built highways, and last but not the least, inaugurating overhauled and newly-built sites of Hindu pilgrimages such as the Kashi Vishwanath corridor and the reconstruction work at Kedarnath. Of course, the biggest image in the last category, Modi inaugurating the Ram temple at Ayodhya, is yet to come, and it will come before the 2024 general elections.
Each of these politically motivated optics causes of a lot of heartburn to the left-liberal end of the political spectrum in India, which despite the BJP’s electoral dominance, continues to be a voice to reckon with in India’s public discourse. The running refrain of this lot seems to be that such optics are aimed at either creating a hype out of nothing extraordinary (mostly for infrastructure projects) or shifting the public imagery of state power decisively towards the Hindu right (referring to the overt display of religiosity by the prime minister). While there is an element of truth to such claims, especially of the latter variety, this week’s column will try and argue that the political optics of such acts are not as important as the left-liberal critiques assume, in determining the BJP’s larger political fortunes.
This phenomenon is best explained by a crude paraphrasing of one of India’s most eminent historians Ranajit Guha’s essay dealing with the historiography of colonial India. In Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Guha, who passed away last month, argued that the colonial state was based on dominance without hegemony, since coercion, not persuasion, was the main route through which political control was exercised.
Large parts of India’s population, especially from the perspective of a parliamentary majority, do not find the BJP’s political imagery selling the prime minister as a perfect amalgamation of Hindutva, India’s growing soft-power and claims of an unprecedented overhaul of India’s infrastructure prowess, as repulsive as the left-liberal voices do. Their lack of anger about such optics, perhaps even an appreciation for them, however, does not mean that they will vote for the BJP for eternity. This is what puts the BJP in a unique situation of being in a position of hegemony (for its ideological worldview and its political imagery) without political dominance (read always winning elections).
At the crux of the BJP’s Hindutva doctrine is the assertion that the so-called western understanding of secularism forces a wrong separation of the ‘church and the state’ and India being a civilizational state has every right to fuse its religious heritage into all activities of the state. While our founding fathers were successful in ensuring that India did not adopt a theocratic model of state like Pakistan, the actual debate, at least in terms of political praxis was far from settled even during the early years of independence. One of the best examples of this difference can be seen in a disagreement between Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajendra Prasad over the latter’s decision to participate in the inauguration of the newly constructed Somnath temple in Gujarat.
“My dear Rajendra Babu, I am greatly worried about the Somnath affair. As I feared, it is assuming a certain political importance. Indeed, references have been made to it internationally also. In criticism of our policy in regard to it, we are asked how a secular Government such as ours can associate itself with such a ceremony which is, in addition, revivalist in character. Questions are being put to me in Parliament and I am replying to them saying that Government has nothing to do with it and those persons who are connected in any way are functioning entirely in their personal capacity,” Nehru wrote in a letter to Prasad on April 22, 1951, making clear that he did not approve of the constitutional head of state participating in a religious function. Prasad saw nothing wrong in his participation.
One can legitimately argue that the Nehru-Prasad debate over public display of religious affiliation has been settled more in favour of Prasad than Nehru with even Nehru’s great-grandchildren making it a point to visit religious places – of course, they are not the only ones who do it – as part of their election campaign. It is a little rich to believe that a debate that Nehru could not win will be won by a bunch of left-liberal intellectuals.
To be sure, one can argue that the settlement of this debate has not happened on similar lines across the country. The fact that chief ministers of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are, by and large, rationalists if not outright atheists suggests that refusal to partake in public display or religiosity is not a liability in the Dravidian landmass of the country as it is in other parts of India. The BJP’s failure to win the recent Karnataka elections despite a shrill Hindutva campaign is yet another proof of this fact. But it is feasible for a party to win a parliamentary majority in India without winning in the south.
Does a hegemonic status for India of India being inseparable from the notion of Hindutva mean that the BJP has a permanent insurance in the rest of the country? Nothing could be further from the truth. The primacy of Hindutva rhetoric in the BJP’s political polemics notwithstanding, its top brass, especially the prime minister, is well aware of the fact that a hegemonic status for its cultural nationalism is not enough to win elections for the party. This is especially true for ensuring that the have-nots (to avoid technical debates on whether or not they are to be counted as the poor) continue to vote for the BJP in large numbers. It is this realisation, more than anything else, that has led to the current BJP government steering clear of investing completely in a Reagan-Thatcher-style economic policy framework, despite many pundits predicting this course when Narendra Modi won a parliamentary majority in 2014. The last edition of this column elaborated on this fact by arguing that the BJP continues to be electorally vulnerable to promises of income support programmes by opposition parties in the states.
Does this mean that the BJP’s sustained investment in the cultural nationalism optics is inconsequential for the larger trajectory of India’s political evolution? Not really. The best way to understand the BJP’s, and its ideological parent the RSS’s, cultural nationalism push in the public and intellectual realm is to see this as part of a carefully orchestrated plan to purge the old elite consensus which still has a semblance of Nehru’s worldview with an idea which sees nothing wrong in redrawing constitutional contours with the brush of majoritarianism. For better or worse (depending on how one sees it) this will change the institutional construct of India as we have known it since 1947.
The only point this column wants to make is that the eventual success or failure of this project will be decided by politics on the material condition of the masses rather than polemics on the cultural politics of the BJP. Old-school Marxists will agree that this is nothing but a reiteration of the primacy of economic base over superstructure argument.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.
The views expressed are personal
