Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Looking back and forward at Indian politics' that was published in Newsband

Looking back and forward at Indian politics

The most interesting happening in 2014 was the victory of Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha elections and emergence of Narendra Modi as India’s Prime Minister. He is the man who appears to be openly contemptuous of minorities and authoritarian in style.

In the past Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi won because of caste coalitions assembled by it in different parts of the country to which they added votes that accrued to them personally. Whenever and wherever these coalitions wavered or cracked – in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s, in Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s, in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the late 1980s – the party was summarily removed from power, either temporarily or permanently, and no genie could paper over the cracks.

If economic issues matter to Indian voters, why have they failed to throw up a single party that represents the economic interests of the poor, for these would appear to require, at the very least, an institutional overhaul of the existing system? It is striking that the poor who vote – and those who champion their interests – seem to accept that our basic social infrastructure is essentially un-reformable. It is obvious that the economic reform contemplated by the socialists cannot come about unless there is a revolution. That seizure of power must be by the proletariat.

The original sin of the Nehruvian nation building programme was its failure to reform colonial mechanisms of government so as to make it minimally accountable to the citizenry. This inevitably begat social exclusion and we are living with its consequences to this day. There is a straight line that can be drawn from Nehru to Modi and that line has nothing to do with secularism and even less with “socialism”. It can be defined as paternalism, the belief that the poor must be kept in their place and that the institutions of the state must be insulated from them except for the five yearly carnival of elections.

It is perfectly true that the extent of Modi’s victory is less decisive than it seems: with only 31 percent of the vote (out of a turnout of roughly 66 percent), the BJP’s share compares unfavorably with previous Congress majorities based on 40 percent or more of the vote from a turnout of anything between 55 to 65 percent.

Manmohan Singh was a weak prime minister, undercut by the Gandhis, unwilling and unable to assert his authority. Manmohan Singh presided over a corrupt and kleptocratic government. It is worth pointing out that this is the typical bureaucrat’s pattern of behaviour. Narsimha Rao’s venality is excused for he served the rich well.

As for the Gandhis, they have failed entirely to realize that no member of the family since, well, Indira Gandhi, has ever had the ability to add significantly to the party vote – not Rajiv, and certainly not Sonia or Rahul Gandhi. In other words, the Congress, in order to win elections, has to build caste coalitions and actually do something, or be seen to be doing something, for the poor while in power. Rahul Gandhi’s near comic lack of understanding of how politics in India actually works seems bound to prolong the party’s history of shooting itself in the foot.

As for the Aam Aadmi Party, it was welcoming all and sundry into its ranks after its success in Delhi. Yet the AAP is still there, still standing, if considerably battered and bowed. Only Arvind Kejriwal needs to reinvent AAP as a social democratic party of the kind India has never had.

Lastly, most Indian voted for Hindutva ideology. Be sure that Hindutva will not turn into fascism. Its ideology and votaries have little in common with Nazis and blackshirts in Germany and Italy of the 1920s and 30s. Now to the ideology of Hindutva has been added what it lacked so far: an authoritarian, demagogic personality. Obviously, if an Indian fascism does take root and flourish, its methods and targets will be different from those of Italy and Germany.