ISLAMABAD: Democracy in India, one of the poorest countries in the world, suffered a setback in 2014 when Narendra Modi, a member of an alt-right Hindu organisation inspired by fascists and Nazis, was elected prime minister.
Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, in his article appeared in The New York Times, said two years after his election, Modi became India’s most powerful leader and appears to be an opportunistic manipulator of disaffection with little to offer apart from the pornography of power and a bogus fantasy of machismo.
Like Donald Trump, Modi rose to power demonising ethnic-religious minorities, immigrants and the establishment media, and boasting about the size of a body part.
BR Ambedkar, the main framer of India’s constitution, warned in the 1950s that democracy in India was “only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic”. Now the top dressing is being hosed away. Under Modi’s rule, India’s Hindu nationalists, a fringe outfit for much of the country’s existence, have swiftly occupied the state, staffing chief institutions with loyalists while intimidating non-state actors like non-governmental organisations (NGOs), journalists, writers and artists.
To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre: If the truth remains cloaked in the motherland, in the colonies it stands naked. Before Trump’s election in America exposed the failures of democracy, they had been revealed in Modi’s India. Most disturbing, in both places, the alt-rightists were enabled by the conceits, follies and collusion of impeccably mainstream individuals and institutions.
In the case of India, the role of institutional rot – venal legislators, a mendacious media – and the elites’ moral and intellectual truancy is clear. To see it, one only has to remember that Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, was accused of supervising mass murder and gang rapes of Muslims – and consequently was barred from travel to the United States for nearly a decade.
Modi’s ascent, like that of many demagogues today, was preordained by the garish dreams of power, wealth and glory that colonised many minds in the age of globalisation.
The fervent rhetoric about private wealth-creation and its trickle-down benefits openly mocked, and eventually stigmatised, India’s founding ideals of egalitarian and collective welfare. It is this extraordinary historical reversal, and its slick agents, that must be investigated in order to understand the incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time, said the author. Social and political life in India, America and Europe was drastically remade by neo-liberal economism in recent decades, under, as the legal scholar David Kennedy has argued, the administration of a professional global class of hidden persuaders and status-seekers.
One of the first signs of this change in India was a proliferation of American-style think tanks, sponsored by big business as eager as ever to influence political decision-making and military spending. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.
Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economist who claims to be the intellectual father of India’s economic liberalisation, argued in 2013 that the poor celebrate inequality, and with the poise of a Marie Antoinette, advised malnourished families in India to consume “more milk and fruits”. Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think tank, took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organisation (WHO) had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism”.
The sheer potential of India’s market – 1.2 billion consumers, many of them young – bred intoxicating illusions among businesspeople, investment consultants and financial journalists. Never mind that it was the extraction of natural resources, cheap labour and foreign capital inflows, rather than high productivity or innovation, that was fuelling India’s economy. Or that economic growth, of the uneven and jobless kind, was creating what the economists Jean DrŠze and Amartya Sen have called “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa”.
Many foreign journalists reporting on globalising India had a knack for parachuting only into islands like ‘tech-y Bangalore’, from where the world perhaps does look flat. Their delusion was deepened by India’s own, chauvinistic, media: the country’s leading business daily, The Economic Times, even had a regular feature called “Global Indian Takeover”. Described with enough Ayn Randian clichés about ambition and striving, every slumdog looks like a budding millionaire.
Indifferent to poverty and inequality, and immune to evidence or irony, India’s largely corporate-owned press and television revelled in the fame and wealth of corporate magnates and of cricket and Bollywood stars. All the while they stoked hatred against Kashmiri separatists and Pakistan.
But in 2010 corruption scandals began to expose India’s government – headed then by technocrats trained at Oxford, Harvard Business School and the World Bank – as both venal and inept. Modi and his hawkish Twitter account emerged into national politics just as growth faltered and many frustrated aspirers and also-rans started to think of the promise of widespread enrichment as an elaborate hoax.
He noticed that they were venting against flailing political representatives and their apparent cronies among news-gatherers. He accordingly packaged himself as an efficient executive, exploiting Indians’ great esteem for technocratic managerialism. (“Mein Kampf” is a perennial bestseller in India, Hitler being seen as an exemplary nationalist-cum-people-manager).
More important, Modi grasped then, as astutely as Trump does now, the terrible political potency of ressentiment. Positioning himself in the gap between the self-righteous beneficiaries of globalisation and irascible masses, he claimed to be the son of a modest tea vendor who had dared to challenge the corrupt old dynasties of quasi-foreign liberals.
