> End of arrogance - The Hour of the Untamed Cosmopolitan
> ASHIS NANDY, Social Scientist
> From Tehelka Magazine,
> Vol 6, Issue 21,
> May 30, 2009
> http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Ne300509the_hour.asp
>
> Ashis Nandy (born 1937) is an Indian political psychologist and social
> theorist and a leading social, cultural and political critics in
> contemporary times. A trained sociologist and clinical psychologist,
> his field covers a vast area of thinking such as public conscience,
> political psychology, mass violence, nationalism and culture.
>
> Bred on radical diversity and an epic culture, the voter makes a
> reckoning of Narendra Modi, Prakash Karat, Mayawati and the politics
> of excess
>
> AFTER ALMOST two decades, in many ways, the election of 2009 was a
> normal election. No overriding consideration drove the voting across
> the country. Diverse configurations in diverse places determined the
> fate of different candidates and parties. Different regions had
> different logic even within a given state. Still, underlying the
> diversity there were some common themes.
>
> First, I think people were looking for ways to lower the temperature
> of politics. High-pitched politics has reigned in our polity for
> nearly 15 years now. My suspicion is people were a bit tired of this.
> For example, the past two elections showed that in Uttar Pradesh, only
> one percent of the electorate was interested in Ram Janmabhoomi. The
> BJP probably played down the issue this year because their internal
> assessment showed the same thing. Except in West Bengal, nowhere did
> the election involve an emotional arousal of the kind we have come to
> routinely expect.
>
> There are reasons for this. In our society, we live with radical
> diversities — diversity that is not based on tamed forms of
> difference. The US is a perfect example of tamed diversity. You get
> every kind of food and dress and cultural activity in America. You
> think you are very cosmopolitan if you can distinguish Huaiyang food
> from Schezwan food, or South Korean ballet from Beijing opera, or Ming
> dynasty china from Han dynasty china in a museum. This is diversity
> that is permissible, legitimate, tamed.
>
> Radical diversity is when you tolerate and live with people who
> challenge some of the very basic axioms of your political life. Like
> most of South Asia, Indians have an old capacity to live with such
> diversity. A powerful example is Sajjad Lone contesting the election
> this year. Nobody objected that a secessionist wants to take an oath
> of allegiance to the Constitution. Everyone spoke of it glowingly. I
> consider that a tolerance for radical diversity. In such a society,
> all excesses are ultimately checkmated.
>
> In India, we live in a country where the gods are imperfect and the
> demons are never fully demonic. I call this an ‘epic culture’ because
> an epic is not complete without either the gods or the demons. They
> make the story together. This is a part of our consciousness, and
> ultimately, I think it influences our public life. People go up to a
> point with their grievance, then get tired of it. They realise that to
> go further is a dangerous thing because it destroys the basic
> algorithm of your life. They say, enough is enough, let us go back to
> a normal life. This election represents something of that
> consciousness. We probably need this kind of interregnum in politics.
> They have a soothing effect on our public life. This is what most
> Indians feel.
>
> The second underlying theme is that people were searching for a sort
> of minimum decency. Negative campaigns, excessively personal attacks,
> hostile slogans — all of this seemed to upset the voter. When the BJP
> and the Left targeted Manmohan Singh, making him the butt of jokes and
> accusations, Singh became a hero for the very qualities people joked
> about. His weakness, his absence of a political base, his
> susceptibility to pressures of the Congress high command — instead of
> looking like liabilities, these things suddenly began to look like a
> marker of a genteel type of politics. I think that paid dividends.
> Contrasted with their shrill opponents, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s
> conduct too paid dividends.
>
> (I asked a waiter at the India International Centre in Delhi what he
> felt about the election results. “It’s been very good,” he said. Was
> he a Congress supporter, I asked him. “It’s not that, sahib,” he
> replied. “That Sardarji is a good man. He is educated, he is not a
> thief, and he is a newcomer to politics. Still, they got after him,
> calling him weak and scared. Who can enjoy watching that? I am just
> happy that this election result has shown there is a god watching
> above.” I quote the waiter verbatim because I think the idea of “a god
> above” might have been a consideration with many other people as
> well.)
>
> THE THIRD and interlinked theme this election was the voter’s desire
> to bring down the arrogant. The way Mayawati has lost, in what was
> once thought an inelastic support base, points to something very
> significant. Many people did not like the way she threw her weight
> around; her ostentation; the dozens of statues she is erecting in her
> likeness, her assumption that even if she did nothing to serve it
> further, history was waiting for her. Others did not like Narendra
> Modi. Yet others, Prakash Karat. Arrogance of style. Arrogance of
> ambition. The arrogance of neglecting the people. All of this was
> punished by the voter.
>
> Narendra Modi has marginalised all possible opposition within the BJP,
> and sidelined the RSS, Bajrang Dal and VHP. They cannot really muddy
> things for him easily anymore. He is a man looking for power and he
> has used and discarded them. He has a solid support base in West
> Gujarat and among middle-class Gujaratis, so there is no question of
> him fading away, but this election doubts have been planted about his
> capacity to emerge as a pan-Indian leader. He was billed as a star
> campaigner for the BJP, but the Indian voter has sent back a strong
> message scaling him down.
>
> Controversial leaders rarely make it to the top job in India. Modi is
> determined not to talk of communities, determined not to apologise or
> even make a gesture towards the Muslim community to atone for the sins
> of Gujarat 2002. His refrain is that he is the leader of
> five-and-a-halfcrore Gujaratis, implying he is also the leader of
> Muslims. But this election should teach him some lessons in humility
> and modesty. It should give him some access to the language of
> politics in India. He will learn his lesson. Indian politics has
> taught humility to lots of people from Indira Gandhi to Mayawati. It
> will teach humility to Narendra Modi also.
>
> Unfortunately, there is a big similarity between Prakash Karat and
> Narendra Modi — however unpleasant that thought might be. They are
> both men who do not understand the wisdom of accommodation and cannot
> stomach the dilution of ideology.
>
> Like Modi and Mayawati, this election has scaled down the arrogance of
> Prakash Karat, but the debacle of the Left Front points to a deeper
> malaise.
>
> IN BENGAL, the party had been in power too long. In a society like
> ours, when any political party is on an ascendant, all gangs, thugs
> and extortionists gravitate towards that party. In UP, this mafia
> element was first attached to the Congress; then it moved to the BJP;
> then the SP; then the BSP, mirroring their rising political graphs. In
> Bengal, 32 years into power, all anti-social elements had become
> entrenched within the CPM. The party’s coercive might was enormous. In
> village after village, people from other parties were prevented from
> campaigning. That arrogance and control has not loosened very much,
> but it has started to crack. In the long run, I think Prakash Karat
> has done a lot of good to Bengal. These three decades of continuous
> rule had rotted the system to the core. If you miss power once in a
> while — however bad the Opposition may be — it keeps people and
> parties on their toes.
>
> (For instance, I believe it is good the BJP got a shot at winning
> power at the Centre one time. Not only did it limber up the Congress,
> it also allowed the BJP to get a sense that it can come to power if it
> gets its formulas right. This is very important to keep the rabid
> fringe like VHP, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena in check. When you have
> legitimate power, you don’t have to use street power. You rein them in
> because it’s counter-productive and you want respectability.)
>
> But criminality and arrogance is not the only reason for the Left
> Front’s rout in Bengal and Kerala. The trouble is, their kind of
> Leninism has not survived anywhere in the world except in Cuba, Bengal
> and Kerala. Chandan Mitra would add tartly, “And the People’s Republic
> of Jawaharlal Nehru University.” This ideology has such an Edwardian
> ring to it, I am surprised it even captivated so many in India. The
> point is, this sense of a vanguard of the proletariat, this whole
> position is protected by middle-class activists. This is why despite
> 32 years in power, the truth is that the kind of revolutionary changes
> in social structures that have swept across India have not even
> touched West Bengal. Everything there is still controlled by the upper
> castes, and in some senses, it is the most casteist society in India.
> West Bengal is one state in India, for instance, where you cannot even
> dream of having a dalit chief minister. In contrast, in south India,
> the whole thing has opened up. So much new energy has been released.
> But has Bengal produced an AR Rahman? Or his guru, Illayaraja? Genius
> flowering from the bottom of society. Such release of energy from the
> non-brahminic castes has absolutely no parallel in Bengal.
>
> There are similarities between Karat and Modi — however unpleasant
> that thought might be
> There is little hope that the churn of this defeat will bring in any
> fresh thought into Marxism in Bengal. It cannot, because this is the
> last remnant of a colonial culture. That is why our Marxists are
> locked into their textbooks. That is why they haven’t picked up
> anything from Latin American Marxism or European Marxism, that is why
> there has been no new indigenous innovation.
>
> In such an intellectual world, rethinking comes through only two
> things: death and retirement. Once people start retiring and dying, a
> new generation will come in. Then it will be easy. They will just not
> bother with what has gone before. Ideas like this die out of neglect
> and carelessness, not through dramatic confrontation.
>
> The other important trend this election has thrown up, is the return
> of support to larger national level parties. One could read this as
> the start of a significant course correction. With the extreme
> proliferation of smaller parties and interest groups, perhaps the
> fragmentation of electoral power has stopped yielding dividends.
>
> The interesting thing is, though the pitch has been scaled down, one
> cannot read this election result as a post-Mandal era of politics.
> Many of the Congress’ traditional vote banks — the dalits and Muslims
> in UP, for instance — had moved away from the Congress to more
> ‘specialist parties’: the dalits moved to the BSP, the Muslims to
> Mulayam Singh. In Bihar, they moved towards Lalu. The attraction of
> these parties was that, being smaller, they were much more captive to
> the demands of their vote base. In a large, national party like the
> Congress, others’ demands checkmated your demands. Ironically, the
> movement back towards the Congress is a sign that the specialist
> parties like SP and BSP have become too big and bloated with ambition,
> and so less responsive to their vote banks. In effect, the Congress is
> now the new small party trying to build a new support base. People
> feel it might be more responsive to their needs.
>
> There are other reasons why it would be premature to read this
> election as a post-Mandal era. In India, except in very small, modern,
> urban pockets, the unit of mobility is not the individual; the unit of
> mobility is caste. The lowest common denominator for any party
> decision on their choice of candidates is caste — all other
> considerations of aptitude and intention come after that. In fact, we
> cannot reach a post- Mandal era of politics yet because entering
> politics from the periphery is still a very crucial instrument in
> Indian politics.
>
> In effect, the Congress is now the new small party trying to build a
> new support base
> Some of the parties lay less emphasis on it because their
> constituencies have arrived in the mainstream. The Marathas, Patels,
> Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Jats. Yadavs too talk less about it because
> they have just arrived. Perhaps, with Nitish Kumar, Kurmis too will
> feel more secure. But there are still hundreds of communities who are
> not well represented. Now that the big communities have organised
> themselves and reaped the benefits, the smaller ones want a slice of
> the pie. Just as the Kammas emerged in the 1970s and 1980s through
> NTR, the Kapus have emerged this election through Chiranjeevi. These
> are much smaller communities. Earlier, they would have voted under
> larger umbrellas. Now they think they can carve out a smaller, more
> targeted domain or space in the political arena.
>
> Recently, the Gujjars began to lobby violently for Scheduled Tribe
> status — as if a mere Parliamentary decree can turn a group into a
> tribe. This sort of misuse, battles for quotas, unreasonable demands
> for affirmative action, and other forms of vote bank wheeling-dealing
> will continue to happen. But in the long run, all of this will be good
> for India.
>
> As representations in the system give different communities larger
> space, everybody’s stake in the democratic system will increase. In
> the long run, there will be so many crosscutting configurations, the
> problem will take care of itself. There is a big difference between
> caste groups angling for 35 or 40 Lok Sabha seats like Mulayam or
> Lalu, and a caste group contesting for eight or ten. Chiranjeevi, for
> instance, just has four or five seats. The scale is going down because
> we have already accommodated a lot of people. The next generation will
> not face this. They will inherit a much more inclusive world.
>
> FINALLY, a last word on arrogance. The Left parties may have been
> defeated this election, but the leftist impulse is intact in our
> society. In fact, it is an imperative. It would be a big mistake if
> the UPA saw this victory as a mandate for unbridled liberalisation.
> Some care for the bottom of the society, some belief that the poor
> should be a priority focus is vital for this society to survive and
> retain its idea of itself as a humane society. You cannot pay Rs
> 12,000 for a meal for two people in a five-star hotel and come out and
> throw Rs 10 to a boy competing with a dog for the garbage and think
> you have done your duty. Neither can you wait 200 years for the
> so-called trickle down effect that never comes.
>
> It is no accident that the real factor that won the UPA this election
> is its NREGA scheme and loan waiver for farmers. Even if 90 percent of
> this money is pilfered, it permeates into the countryside. Not all of
> the corruption is in Delhi and Bhubaneswar. A lot of the siphoning
> happens lower down the chain. Even those who rob, must spend. This
> boosts the local economy. This pays electoral dividends. India’s poor
> always vote. That is India’s best checkmate for arrogance.
>