INDIA’S POLITICAL JOURNEY
When India became independent in 1947, it was a very poor and unequal nation. There was a need for both economic growth and fairer distribution of income and wealth, but socialist economics could not raise people’s material level at a time when greater expectations and aspirations were emerging. Even though Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, was rightly suspicious about foreign investment leading to loss of Indian self-determination and self-sufficiency, the alternative of self-sufficient development and a nonaligned foreign policy did not work. Shashi Tharoor comments, “It is sadly impossible to quantify the economic losses inflicted on India over four decades of entrepreneurs frittering away their energies in queuing for licenses rather than manufacturing products, paying bribes instead of hiring workers, wooing politicians instead of understanding consumers, and getting things done through bureaucrats rather than doing things for themselves.”
The Nehru Era and Its Aftermath
Throughout British colonial occupation, India remained largely a society in which local rulers were powerful. The British were able to control India through a series of alliances with local and regional rulers that exercised military control. After independence, the Congress Party, founded by Gandhi to end British rule, took power after independence and embraced socialist values and institutions under Nehru and his successors. In the 1980s, the egalitarian ideology and tolerant cultural outlook that had prevailed after independence started giving way to the Hindu nationalism of the BJP, which marginalized the Congress Party and created space for neoliberal capitalism. The Hindu nationalist movement is masculine, rigid, and authoritarian in outlook.
As the moment of India’s independence approached in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister gave his famous “Tryst with Destiny” speech before the Constituent Assembly. Nehru emphasized that Indian people had a not-to-be-squandered opportunity to bring the nation’s soul back to life. His belief that their destiny was intertwined with that of humanity and his dedication to the ideal of diversity within unity indicated the humane and tolerant path along which believed the national destiny could be fulfilled. Pluralism was the thread around which Nehru tried to create Indian citizens, and that his task was to achieve “unity in diversity.” Nehru’s idea of India was based on four pillars: building democratic institutions, resolute secularism, a non-aligned foreign policy, and socialist Although the first two pillars enabled India to survive as a nation and the third enhanced India’s international standing, the fourth, socialist economics was an abject failure.
Despite Nehru’s indispensable vision of plural India, the political system has become more fragmented and consciousness of division along religious, regional, caste, linguistic, and ethnic lines has increased. And Nehru’s hope that class differences would be overcome has not been fulfilled. At the political level, like the Liberal Democratic Party that ruled postwar Japan continuously for almost 40 years, the Congress Party’s nearly complete domination of post-independence politics and its inclusion of many diverse ideologies and outlooks under its umbrella inhibited the development of an effective multi-party democratic system. It was not just the entrepreneurial interests that were pushed to the side and underrepresented within the Congress Party; rural people, in particular the peasantry whose interests Gandhi understood and partially advocated were also left in the cold.
Gandhi recognized the need for roots and valued India’s villages, its cultural foundation. In his communitarian vision, people are interdependent and equality means having all the community’s resources available in order to realize one’s full potential as a unique human being. His economic ideal was to decentralize production within largely self-sufficient communities. In bridging the gaps between traditional rural communities and an urban and diverse nation, he was offering village people a place at the nation’s table. Although he downplayed the benefits of entering the modern world, he did anticipate a desirable future for India in his commitments to voluntary simplicity, decentralized living, appropriate technology, and anarchist politics.
Over time, the postwar social and cultural distance grew between educated, urban elites and the masses of people. The English-speaking elite, imitating the British colonizers, was isolated from the rest of the country. By the 21st century, communication between the urban elite who lived in their own hermetic universe and the vast majority facing deprivation and an uncertain existence was minimal. People of high status were far removed from the language, religion, and culture of ordinary people, lacked sympathy toward them, and had little interest in their lives. Their reference point was the West, whose materialism and permissiveness attracted them. What Gandhi had feared and hoped to overcome as far back as 1916 had come true: India’s educated people were becoming “foreigners in their own land,” unable to speak to the “heart of the nation.”
The Ascendance of Hindu Nationalism
The government officials, managers, and professionals that comprised the urban elites had long been the object of rage on the part of the less privileged, but Modi was the first politician to exploit such fiery emotions with his attacks on hereditary privilege and emphasis on meritocracy. Huge numbers of people, aware of the nearly unbridgeable gap between seductive democratic ideals and their own powerlessness and squalor felt injured, weak, inadequate, and envious due to the treatment they receive from higher-status people within a rigid hierarchy.
The sense of abandonment on the part of the disadvantaged increased as India embraced global capitalism in the 1990s and American-style individualism began making inroads. Electronic contact with the Western world led to dreams of wealth and goods while inequality, corruption and nepotism increased. Such dissatisfaction and the desire of entrepreneurs to unleash India’s economic potential led to the first BJP-led government from 1998 to 2004 and to neoliberal economic policies nationwide.
The BJP channeled economic inequality and the discontents it produced into assertions of Hindu cultural identity and increasing fanaticism and violence. Christophe Jaffrelot, a leading scholar of Hindu nationalism, sees the unbridling of darker forces as due to shifts in class. The RSS is the highly organized and disciplined paramilitary group that has effectively promoted Hindu nationalism through the BJP. The Hindu nationalist movement nurtured Modi and supplied him with his ideology. Based on an extreme form of nationalism, the RSS valorizes cultural rather than racial unity. Since its origin in the 1920s, it has been upper class and is still led by such elite members today, even though Modi himself has risen from relatively humble origins.
Jaffrelot notes that the BJP under the banner of Hindu nationalism has been effective in securing the votes of the disadvantaged sectors of society through strategies that resemble those of rightwing populist movements throughout the world today. The BJP encourages outcast and lower-caste people to assert their common Hindu identity while downplaying the importance of social and economic forces that keep them in subjection. As a result, they vote against their own economic interest.
Modi’s overall strategy has been to flatter the pride of Hindus opposed to secularism, Western influence, and the Muslim minority by pushing the idea of a majoritarian Hindu Republic of India. We can hear echoes of President Trump in the United States who appealed to poor white people’s resentments against people of color, immigrants, and Muslims. This strategy is in the playbook of all the political strongmen who combine a masculine, nationalist outlook with the appearance of a rightwing populist political and economic agenda.
Modi has soothed the anxieties of middle-class Indians by building up a strong state that is increasingly assertive as symbolized by his posturing with nuclear weapons in order to project might and a tough posture toward Pakistan. Gandhi’s nonviolence has totally vanished from the scene. This masculine orientation has included air strikes against terrorist camps in Pakistan and the recent rescinding of Article 370 which allowed a separate constitution and the right to oversee administration for two states in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir.
The Indian state has taken on the appearance of a progressive, rational, centralized, and unified state which gratifies the need of middle-class Indians for a positive self-image in relation to the West. They look down on the lower classes whom they view as backward, irrational, and premodern. In their view, the people embedded in rural communities and the recent arrivals from the countryside are believers in myths and legends; their way of life is, from their modern standpoint, based on little more than superstition.
In India Calling, an informative and highly positive account of 2010 India, Anand Giridharadas, a second-generation Indian American writes that after two generations, Nehru’s idea of India’s soul finding utterance was achieved. For the first time, lower-echelon people were gaining the financial security that makes true freedom possible, and it was possible to refuse to know one’s place, whether geographical, temporal, or tribal, which meant being without roots and reinventing oneself. The aristocrats’ terrible oppression of the common masses that led them to nearly doubt their own humanity was finally starting to end. And the development of individualism and the freedom to choose one’s life, were improving Indian life, thereby making clear why aspiring and successful entrepreneurs would support Modi’s election in 2014 under the banner of neoliberalism. However, the emergence of brutal capitalism in some states and the rise of Hindu fanaticism indicated that violence was just around the bend.
Modi’s appeal also reflects the worldwide trend of rightwing populism and its Indian cousin, Hindu identity politics. When he won an impressive reelection victory in 2019, Modi said, “This is a victory of India’s poor, its farmers, its workers.” After the BJP suffered some losses in state elections and Modi was criticized for being too close to big business, he renounced limited government by initiating welfare policies such as providing cheap cooking gas connections, banning high-value currency notes, going after wealthy tax defaulters, giving health care coverage to more than 150 million low-income families, and providing 11 billion dollars a year for helping small farmers get out of debt. Appealing to all strata of religious Hindu society opposed to secularism, Western influence, and the Muslim minority, he has promoted the idea of a Hindu Republic of India along the lines of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, the neighboring Islam-dominant states.
Leftwing Critics of Hindu Nationalism: Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy
Pankaj Mishra writes for many leading liberal or leftwing media in the West such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. He was born into an impoverished landing-owning family in northern India and now lives in both India and London. One of his most influential works, From the Ruins of Empire (2012) deals with the first generation of Asian thinkers who took up the struggle against colonial domination and assisted in the political awakening of Asia.
Mishra considers Hindu nationalism a hypernationalist political movement extolling religious revival and racial-religious revenge, a trend which began in 19th-century Russia that has flourished in Putin’s Russia today as well as in pre-World-War II Japan and in Shinzo Abe’s Japan. He warns: “Certainly, the ruling classes of wannabe superpowers have spawned a complex force: the ideology of anti-imperialist imperialism, which, forming an axis with the modern state and media and nuclear technology, can make Islamic fundamentalists seem toothless. One can only hope that India’s democratic institutions are strong enough to constrain yet another wounded elite from breaking out for geopolitical and military manhood.”
His outlook is reminiscent of postcolonialism, since he centers powerless non-Western people excluded by the dominant voices in his work, while advocating their viewpoints and interests. What distinguishes him from Arundhati Roy, another Indian leftwing voice with a worldwide following is his immersion in intellectual history and awareness of far-ranging cultural and political debates. In this way he attempts to keep alive the flame of humanism and idealism at a time when critical leftwing voices are on the defensive in rapidly industrializing countries like China, India, and Brazil as well as in the US, Japan, and much of Europe.
Arundhati Roy has written the highly acclaimed novel, The God of Small Things plus numerous essays strongly critical of the Indian establishment and government, the Hindu far right, rapacious corporate capitalism, US foreign policy, and the politics of foreign NGOs and human rights organizations. Instead of treating such issues in Mishra’s erudite intellectual manner, she visits the actual sites where depredations are carried out and vividly evokes the pain of the exploited and the oppressed. Her exhaustive research and expression of intense moral outrage are aimed at provoking a response from a largely indifferent public. The causes she has supported include low-caste, outcast, and indigenous opposition to dams destroying their habitats and lives, the organized mass slaughter of Muslims, crimes against outcast groups, military violation of Kashmiri people’s most basic rights, and the “transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights” by NGOs and foundations.
Her crusade against injustice is not only to stop those in power from lying and killing but also to get the media to stop covering them up in order to prevent such outrages from continuing. Like Mishra, she has been accused of indulging in anger and harsh criticism, while not providing realistic recommendations and solutions. Her critics ask, What should take the place of capitalist modernization, a globalized economy, and electoral democracy? Is the way of life of premodern peoples really superior to that of industrial societies? Is a market economy fundamentally inimical to genuine democracy?
Such criticisms raise the question whether politics as the art of the possible has given way to moral absolutism in the work of Mishra and Roy. And if so, is this the result of neoliberal capitalism’s ability to foreclose all challenges to its legitimacy and power, together with the disappearance of social groups that have the credibility and strength to effectively weaken and ultimately displace it? The Hindu nationalist regime is the equivalent of the Iranian clerical regime. But people of a more liberal and inclusive spiritual orientation can help diminish the suffering of disadvantaged groups.
Culture, Women, and Indian Identity
Many unresolved issues of Indian identity derive from the colonial period. And some of the most intense issues involve women. Middle-class men are often proud that Indian women are not acting in a spoiled and selfish manner like Western women and retain their Indian culture. They see feminism as an alien Western import. Within Hindu nationalism, despite praise of strong Indian women, they still believe women belong in the home as wives, mothers, and the guardians of tradition. But the economic liberalization of the 1990s led to cultural change as investment by Western companies brought about many new job opportunities for Indian women in the cities. And the penetration of the Western media with its sexually explicit content gave young women a chance to explore modern options for sexual expression in their lives.
The social consequences have been described by the feminist scholar Alka Kurian, Conservative Indians feel threatened as women with education, financial means, and professional skills no longer unthinkingly accept traditional gender expectations. As sexual violence increases, the government restricts women’s movement and insists on policing their behavior instead of combating sexism and misogyny and guaranteeing that women are safe when they are out in public.
Against this backdrop, the feminist movement has taken off. In 2012, the gang rape and brutal murder of a young urban woman set off protests across the nation and an explosion of women’s anger. Although this horrible event was a major catalyst, it occurred within a larger context of women’s activism. Kurian summarizes: “The earliest campaigns — the 2003 Blank Noise Project against eve-teasing, the 2009 Pink Chaddi (underwear) movement against moral policing and the 2011 SlutWalk protest against victim-blaming — were limited in their scope but set the tone for this new mode of protest. Campaigns such as the 2011 Why Loiter project on women’s right to public spaces, the 2015 Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage) movement against sexist curfew rules in student halls and the 2017 BekhaufAzadi (Freedom without Fear) March resonated with a much larger number of women, turning this social media-led phenomenon into a true feminist movement.”
Although such feminist activism has been ongoing for two decades, there is no country in the world more dangerous for women than India, according to the Thompson Reuters Foundation. Physical abuse of married women, unpunished rapes, and aborting of female fetuses are rampant. The frustrations among young women over such continuing gender inequality and violence are growing all the time. Women’s protests can only be expected to increase in this explosive situation until the promoters of aggressive masculinity lose their political dominance and the entrenched resistance to women’s participation in the public sphere dissolves.
This ferment in gender relations is having an impact on India’s identity dilemmas, since Indian feminists have avoided slavishly following their Western sisters, while nonviolently dissenting against the patriarchal and militarist aspects of Hindu nationalism. In December 2019, Muslim women in a working class area of Delhi spearheaded the Shaheen Bagh movement to protest the new citizenship laws that discriminated against Muslims and disproportionately affected women because they often lack citizenship papers in their own name. Art, literature, music, interfaith gatherings, and preparing meals together have been some of the vehicles for the Shaheen Bagh movement to get across its message. In addition to spurring protest among women in the rest of the country, their nonviolent approach and novel strategy has enabled them to effectively criticize the government’s Hindu nationalist policies. Without centralized leadership, women have resisted in the name of the Indian flag, national anthem and the Constitution, the symbols of India as a secular and pluralist democracy, a country where people are both Muslim and Indian.
Kurian views the Shaheen Bagh movement as part of fourth-wave feminism which is committed to the freedom of all people, not just women. Therefore it is opposed to discrimination on the basis of caste and class as well as religion and has similar attitudes to women’s protest movements in Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong, and other parts of the world. In this regard, fourth-wave feminism has gone beyond the #MeToo movement by taking a stand against all human rights violations, not only those against women. Its outlook is universal, and, in its Indian versions, it has asserted solidarity with not only women but all people across the artificial boundary of the nation as it contests the narrowly patriarchal and chauvinistic interpretations of Hindu culture upheld by nationalists. Its insistence on horizontal rather than vertical relations among groups violates the Hindu nationalist concept of identity at its very foundation.
India’s Possibilities
The rightwing populism that thrives in India today is a variation on a theme that is common to many other nations facing large-scale resentment of government bureaucrats and unresponsive elites. Yet politicians like Modi who fan the flames of people’s anger and promise to rectify the situation have made alliances with business and military elites so that the hostility is directed not against dominant groups but against powerless minorities. The Indian variation appeals to fears based on class, religion, and gender: minorities need to be put in their place and their aspirations for equality squashed. They are the source of India’s problems, the ones who contaminate the pure Hindu nation.
Government attracts many people who want power. Only a popular upsurge can counteract the tendency of those in authority to concentrate power at the level of the nation rather than the locality and to promote national self-assertion at the expense of global solidarity. This popular awakening in India would involve a return to ancient spiritual wisdom that has been practiced only by a minority of people until now. It would be complemented by the ecological awareness of indigenous peoples and the recovery of such awareness by rural people. A largely decentralized economy, partially resembling what Gandhi proposed, would feature the village community with electronic connections to the outside world.
Overcoming the division between city and country, bureaucrats and farmers will depend on inner growth as well as structural changes in the economy. Otherwise, the trend toward bigness and centralized power will continue and people who feel powerless will be susceptible to Hindu nationalist appeals. Such personal transformation ought to be accompanied by community development and the establishment of bonds and connections among people whose lives depend on each other. The catalyst for change is likely to be the environmental crisis which will render futile the quest for greater power over nature and over other humans.
At this point, the simpler lives of indigenous people will evoke a new respect, and women will also play a far more significant role in the public sphere. Indian feminism is critically important as the masculine values of power and domination lose credibility in the face of environmental destruction that uproots everyone’s life. When countries like India modernize they are first oriented toward the more powerful nations of the West, but as modernization continues, there is a desire to recover older cultural values as a source of a more authentic identity. In India, this has taken the form of Hindu nationalism based on an intolerant and chauvinistic interpretation of Hinduism.
But what if the spirituality of Tagore is put in its place? Tagore was a true cosmopolitan who loved and treasured India’s spiritual wisdom and its local and ecologically oriented ways of life.
