The Current Regime Has Subverted Democratic And Federal Principles: Ajay Gudavarthy

Ajay Gudavarthy is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and his areas of interest include political theory, contemporary political movements, civil society and democracy, post-colonial theory and populism. Prior to teaching at JNU, he also taught at the National Law School, Bengaluru, from 2003 to 2006, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Modern South Asian Studies, Tubingen University, Germany, in 2015. His most recent books include India after Modi: Populism and the Right (Bloomsbury, 2018) and (ed) Secular Sectarianism: Limits of Subaltern Politics (Sage, 2019). He is currently working on Democracy and Revolutionary Violence, which will be published by Sage, and writes regularly for various news dailies including The Hindu, Telegraph, The Wire, and Newsclick. In an exclusive interview with Abhish K Bose, he compares the current period with that of Emergency and the various strategies adopted by the RSS for the furtherance of their political existence. Excerpts from the interview.

Abhish K Bose: The Emergency is the darkest period of Indian democracy. Those who protested against Emergency were considered heroes. However, those who resist the incumbent BJP government’s anti-democratic measures are considered anti-national. During Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, the media, and judiciary did not sustain damages similar to now. The functioning of opposition parties has been affected like never before. Over the course of the past four decades or more, dictatorial propensity got legitimacy and all important institutions in India were wrecked. Can we expect the resurgence of a JP-like movement to cleanse Indian politics and its institutions? Even if such a movement is effective, who will lead it?

Gudavarthy: The context of the Emergency was vastly different from current times. When JP led the movement for ‘total revolution’, the social and political forces that aligned with him were rank outsiders to political power and power-elite circles. They were relatively marginalised to dominant political imagination, including organisations like the Jan Sangh. Who are the ‘outsiders’ today? Narendra Modi rode to power with the optics of being an ‘outsider’ to ‘Lutyens Delhi’ and with a projected rhetoric of an anti-elitist discourse. The crisis we are facing today is that the victimiser is claiming to be the victim; those serving the corporate interests project themselves to be anti-elitist and saviours of local culture and idiom. Opposition parties cannot claim to be the ‘outsiders’, they were in power for way too long. Today, we do have protest movements but they are local, regional and issue-specific movements, like the farmers, students, social organisations for common school system, and many others. They played a key role during the Karnataka assembly elections of 2023. But there is no political force that can either represent all of them or bring them together into a common platform. Bharat Jodo Yatra by Rahul Gandhi came close to such a movement and we could see that there was a groundswell for the yatra, but it did not articulate any concrete demands or an alternative social vision.

People are invested in democracy in India and we can see a steady rise in voter turnout, which is close to 70 per cent in most assembly elections. But more participation is unable to guarantee governments that respect institutions and constitutionalism. The
caste and class character of institutions in India has distanced them from popular imagination and they are not owned or trusted by the people, which is what is bringing the convergence between democracy and illiberality. Greater participation is converting or converging into a greater majoritarian thrust. The tenuous relation between democracy and liberalism, as the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe suggested, is breaking down. We will need a new vision of social inclusion and solidarity for institutions to get back on their feet.

Abhish K Bose: The strategy of the RSS is to adorn the garb of the saviours of the larger Hindu majority community members, and they attempt to inculcate hatred amongst the liberal Hindu community members against Muslims and Christians. The RSS aims to absorb the liberal Hindus into its camp thereby manufacturing antagonism against the minority religious community. Will the RSS succeed in this venture in the long term? In this context, we need to see whether the liberal texture and the character of Hindu religion sustain or give away.

Gudavarthy: Hinduism is a porous religion that can be both rigid and dialogic simultaneously. It can be marked by continued caste atrocities but also respect dissent and diversity. A recent survey by the Pew Research Centre in New York titled Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (2021) observed that most Indians, cutting across religion and caste (close to 70 per cent) supported diversity and tolerance as important for sustaining democracy, but the same lot also strongly believed in living separately and in segregation from other castes and religions. Indians value liberal and inclusive values in abstract and sequestered living in the concrete. The survey referred to this as ‘living together, separately’. Politically we are still an open society; culturally we are becoming more exclusivists. We desire political democracy with social hierarchies.

The current mobilisation by the RSS is located in this tension between open democracy and closed social hierarchies; the ‘Liberal Hindu’ is torn between these two drives. How does he preserve his exclusive culture and cultural superiority with the discourse of modern institutions? The success of the RSS is very partial and has not assumed hegemonic proportions. Which way will the Liberal Hindu tilt will depend on how counter-narratives and alternative social visions allow the continuation of caste and religion as culture and a ‘way of life’, yet make more space for tolerance and breaking down rigid hierarchies and social exclusions. Culture has both a sense of belonging and prejudice. They cohabit together. Our challenge in undoing what the RSS did is to allow more space for culture and less space for prejudice. This will require new social experiments. We have had a robust history of such experiments, from Bhakti to Sufism to Gandhi. We need to find ways of renewing them for the current imperatives.

Abhish K Bose: The RSS works for the banishment of diversity and the realisation of uniformity. The federal nature of the Indian political system which separates power to the states needs to be nullified to bring a unitary centre to actualise uniformity. Through the introduction of Goods and Services Tax (GST), they infringed on the financial powers of the state which is a curtailment of the federal authority of the state. Is infringement into the federal system enunciated in the constitution as one among the means to realise their goals?

Gudavarthy: Federalism was envisaged by the Constitution makers to accommodate both cultural/linguistic diversity as well as conflict of interests between industrial and agrarian capital. The Centre was to be represented by national parties that advocated heavy industrialisation and later the expansion of the service sector, while states through the formation of the regional parties protected the agrarian interests. However, after the neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, autonomy of the states and the decreasing share of agriculture had already adversely impacted the federal set-up. GST was only the next logical step of economic reforms introduced by Manmohan Singh and it was on the agenda of the Congress party too. With regard to the economic policy and the model of development, there is hardly any difference between the political parties; they are all part of the ‘neoliberal consensus’, with or without federalism.

Further, the BJP and the RSS championed the formation of smaller states with regard to Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh. Formation of smaller states was seen to be democratic and allowed for the development of backward regions but they also allowed for greater centralisation and powers to the centre and weaker states. Small states with less number of MPs will have less bargaining capacity. This is clearly visible in the neglect of the Northeastern region. The BJP and the RSS subverted democratic and federal principles at one end by appropriating them, and at the other end, by undermining them through the frame of ‘one nation, one market’. The crisis is at both ends of the spectrum. Autonomy to the states and federalism will only work when that translates into competing models of development, otherwise even states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh formed in the name of the tribals hardly benefitted them, and Telangana, formed in the name of underdevelopment, hardly ushered any new job opportunities for its youth. Economic reforms had already destroyed the essence of federalism; BJP-RSS are undermining the remaining vestiges of federal political dynamics.

Abhish K Bose: The decision of the Narendra Modi government to reserve jobs for the economically weaker sections of the upper caste was a supposed move to render the constitution irrelevant. Thus a segment that comprises five per cent of the population gets 10 per cent reservations in the jobs torpedoing the very spirit of the constitution, whose cardinal feature is to ensure equality for all segments of society? What are your views on this?

Gudavarthy: Constitutional expert Mohan Gopal refers to EWS as introducing a system of apartheid by disallowing the economically weak among the scheduled castes and the OBCs from availing the provisions. In effect, it is for the economically weak of the upper castes, while the provisions of identifying the OBCs do not preclude or exclude people of any varna/caste. All castes, including the dominant castes, if they fall under the criterion of social backwardness could be listed as an OBC. Even Brahmins, if they meet the eligibility, could be included in the list of the OBCs, just the way many castes in Vysya community (including PM Modi’s Teli caste) were included in the OBC list.

Further, the cap of Rs 8 lakh per annum income (with no specific reason offered, except that this is the cap for availing OBC reservations too) to be eligible to be economically weak, perhaps, includes 80 per cent (or more) among the upper castes. The real problem is that we have no data and the policy itself has been formulated on the basis of a persistent perception that the poor among the upper castes lose out, which is partly true. We need caste census not only for the OBCs, but also for the dominant castes to know how much percentage is poor. In doing this, we need to avoid the poverty versus caste kind of debate. Caste is discrimination, poverty is ‘only’ or ‘merely’ about deprivation is an unhealthy equation being drawn by both Dalit-Bahujan scholars and those on the Left. Poverty can be equally debilitating and produce challenges to one’s sense of self.

Whether providing separate reservations is the best way out for such a social constituency could be debated, but the point of the EWS is not so much to benefit the poor among the dominant castes, but to hit out at caste-based reservations and gradually create a public opinion for reservations on the basis of the economic criterion. The RSS also sees a continuation of reservations as a hindrance to common Hindu consciousness and identity. It is a mistaken belief that if you disallow caste benefits, then caste differences would melt away. The RSS locates caste system through caste-based benefits. The RSS does next to nothing to fight caste-based prejudices but wishes to build a unified Hindu Rasthra. As I pointed out earlier, the RSS is arguing to instantiate caste and religion as culture or a ‘way of life’ without fighting the prejudices internal to that way of life. It is this inherent tension in their vision that necessitates so much dependence on creating fear and violence.

Abhish K Bose: A worrisome trend is the monopolisation of Indian politics by market forces. According to the statistics, the elite one per cent of the population possesses 21.7 per cent of the total income pointing to the transition of India to an oligarchy. A major proportion of the assets are concentrated in the hands of a few business groups. Is Indian politics now controlled by the likes of Adani and Ambani, and the right-wing BJP in power makes it easy for the big businesses to control the politics of the country in the direction dictated by the oligarchs? Will this new phenomenon get explicit when the government increasingly excludes social welfare schemes from its priority?

Gudavarthy: There is an attempt to shift the dynamics towards a convergence between monopoly capitalism and majoritarian polity in the global context of the shift that financial capitalism brought in the processes of accumulation from exploitation to expropriation. As David Harvey and Nancy Fraser have suggested the shift to expropriation is the new ‘primitive accumulation’ under capitalism. This economic logic has an inherent tendency to create the political dynamics of generating ‘surplus populations’ that have variedly been referred to as ‘cannibal capitalism’, as the rise of ‘disaster capitalism’, found in the shift from ‘biopolitics’ to ‘necropolitics’.

However, we are living in strange times where neoliberalism has lost its legitimacy and ‘popular appeal’ (found in the narrative growth will benefit all) but with no emergent alternatives, just as Wendy Brown says that democracy has become the most legitimate idea when it has lost all its potential for a definition and has become a ‘footloose concept’. We are also living in times that critical theorist Alain Badiou refers to as when ‘capitalism has become shapeless’. It can exist in democracies as much as authoritarian regimes. The proximity and unprecedented rise to prominence of Adani and Ambani have to be made sense of in the context of these global shifts. Anthropologist Jan Breman had summed it up long back that the ‘Gujarat model’ referred to a combination of ‘lumpen capital’, ‘social Darwinism’ and ‘predatory state’. India has moved dangerously close to a phenomenon of mass violence and rampant exclusion in light of these dynamics. India’s political economy is both uncivil and violent. One has to only visit workers in the informal sector or migrants in the brick kilns to realise the nature of extra-economic force being routinely used to generate profits. This is as true of gig workers in the urban areas.

The institutionalised violence is hanging by the thread of what I earlier referred to the openness of political democracy and imperatives of electoral mobilisation. The electoral engineering that completes the story. It is the pressures of electoral politics that has kept open the thrust of transactional welfarism. The nature of welfarism is itself pushing in greater dependence and vulnerability and creating a vicious cycle of basic survival strategies and mechanisms. This augments well for a majoritarian mobilisation. Political democracy may not be able to take the weight of predatory political economy and cultural impoverishment for way too long. One has to wait and watch if populist mobilisation holds the capacity to turn around the situation.

Abhish K Bose: In Indian society, electoral mobilisation is furthered and won by stimulating emotional issues such as religion, language, caste and parochial thinking, whereas development and improvement in human development indexes were sidelined. How long this will continue and is there any chance of cessation of this trend in the foreseeable future?

Gudavarthy: I don’t think we should brush aside issues related to caste and religion or issues that we identify as emotional. The current regime through projects such Kasi Viswanath corridor is linking cultural issues to those of development. In fact, much of social policy under the current regime has a cultural/emotive framing of developmental/economic issues. They have linked nationalism to the global branding of India as an investment hub. Such a neat separation between what you refer to as ‘parochial’ and development is what has been blocked by the mobilisational strategies of the current regime.

The deep sense of belonging through culture, community, religion and civilisational discourse has been hooked into neoliberalism, nationalism and even authoritarianism. People support the regime for the cultural sense of belonging it offers, the regime in turn ‘interprets’ and ‘represents’ as a consent for illiberal authoritarianism, and also violence and Islamophobia. But in reality, there is a gap between the two. The regime is making an illegitimate use of legitimate consent.

Culture has its own significance and cannot be juxtaposed in a simple-minded way against development. People may prefer to go with cultural issues over developmental ones and we cannot grudge them for it. Those wanting to oppose should ‘expose’ the tensions and inconsistencies of the current regime to show how the inclusive sense of Hindu identity and campaigns such as sab ka saath, sab ka vikas are not consistent with economic dispossession and ethics of superiority and exclusion. One could ask were the migrants who walked thousands of kilometres not Hindus? What needs to be resisted is the conversion of cultural belonging into toxic majoritarianism but those opposing the regime often collapse the two.

Abhish K Bose: In a carefully calibrated new move, the RSS is focusing on the Dalits, OBCs, Adivasis and other marginalised sections of the Indian society by catering to their interests, and began mobilising these communities which were relegated as outcastes by the RSS based on their Chaturvarna concept. Is this tactful deviation from the Chaturvarna concept of segregating people on the basis of caste, compelled by electoral exigencies rather than a change in their belief system? What will be the result of this change in the RSS strategy?

Gudavarthy: RSS has changed its strategy and not its belief system. They continue to believe in hierarchy and control, purity and pollution, and regulating society through fear; but they do realise the spread of democratic consciousness, new aspirational demands, and imperatives of electoral calculation. The shift in the strategy is a significant one. Today, Brahmins do not claim superiority or vouch by Manusmriti, but practice superiority through segregation. In Bengaluru, for instance, Brahmins have advertised for an apartment meant exclusively for the Brahmins. Is this return to the ancient system of agrahara or a legitimate urge to preserve and follow one’s own culture, traditions, and rituals within the private domain?

Political philosopher, Akeel Bilgrami, in a recent write-up, argues that Gandhi’s defence of varna was to defend the ethics of collective living and co-responsibility. Prof Bilgrami makes a poignant point that Gandhi attempted to resist hierarchy not through liberal apparatus and modern market, but from within culture and ‘tradition’. In other words, undoing hierarchy should not disturb collective living to be replaced by modern (European) alienation and individuation.

Further, as I referred earlier, the Pew Research survey suggests this sense of segregation exists cutting across castes and religions. This process of culturalisation of caste and religion is the new mode of preserving social hierarchies, but all that more complex and difficult to protest against. Caste hierarchy and religious segregation also works at the level of intention, psychology and habits. Well-known journalist P Sainath did a series of write-ups in The Hindu with the title of ‘Glass War’ wherein he narrates how wayside dhabas in Andhra Pradesh were following a two glass policy―one for caste Hindus and the other for Dalits. When Dalits protested the discrimination, the dhaba moved to the policy of using disposable glasses. Modern technology and market make naming discrimination all that more difficult which, in fact, creates a greater sense of ‘moral injury’. Surface level civility creates ‘control of the soul’, as French philosopher Foucault identified.

Dalits and OBCs are responding to culturalisation of caste due to recognition of their life-world and added to it is the fact that the BJP has provided better representation to lower-end OBCs and Dalits. Further, they are sharpening the differences between Dalits/OBCs and religious minorities. They are weaponising cultural inclusion through communal polarisation. This is a non-disruptive way of re-inscribing social hierarchies that is drawing consent from below. It is appropriating a logic inherent to ‘graded inequalities’ and something even Ambedkar did not completely reflect upon, except for forewarning us about the possibilities of a counter-revolution.

Abhish K Bose: The Hindutva of the RSS is trying to appropriate legendary figures such as Ambedkar by abjuring his fervent criticism of the caste system. They are trying to separate Ambedkar who criticised caste from their own presentation of him to suit their needs. They also wanted to erase the memories of iconic figures of India’s past for perpetuating their interests. Will they succeed in their attempts?

Gudavarthy: Ambedkar was tireless in his critique of Hinduism and proclaimed not to die a Hindu. But the audacity of the Right allows them to appropriate not only Ambedkar but also Bhagat Singh who happened to write, ‘Why I am an Atheist?’ Appropriation is a way of disarming and discarding the relevance of such thinkers. RSS has absolute clarity in their strategy of making such thinkers irrelevant by appropriating them. Once they gain better social hegemony, one would gradually see a process of eclipsing them. Ambedkar’s and other Dalit writings have already been dropped as part of NEP in Karnataka.

However, such an appropriation is also being made possible because nobody seems to either think or believe in the ‘annihilation of caste’ as a viable strategy. Once reservations are linked to caste and religion, one cannot disown SS claims to oppose the reservations that it blocks the process of overcoming caste! Appropriation of Ambedkar has also been made possible through the identitarian turn in Dalit-Bahujan politics and disproportionate importance of what I refer to as the ‘mezzanine elites’ within the Dalit-Bahujans (upwardly mobile English-speaking urban middle classes in Dalit-Bahujans) and it is their interests that have come to be seen as anti-caste politics. Mezzanine elites within the Dalit-Bahujans have no clear economic programme of redistributive politics or a social agenda against dominant culture. They are a distinct class looking for greater opportunities within the existing system. They articulate demands that suit their class position. They demand reservations in the private sector, but do not question jobless growth; they demand English education in government schools without asking for a public education system. Demand for representation without accompanying demands for recognition or redistribution can easily be appropriated by the BJP and the RSS. Dalit scholars do not question the history of Ram Janamabhoomi, instead they are demanding the first priest of the temple in Ayodhya be a Dalit. The RSS, in the next decade or so, may well have a Dalit or an OBC sarsanchalak. RSS has a long-term agenda; Dalit-Bahujans are moved by short-term representational benefits given the extent of social marginalisation they faced. They are unable to find ways of combining legitimate demands for representation with collective demands for greater redistributive benefits for the least advantage among the Dalits and the lower-end OBCs.

Abhish K Bose: Could you explain the hold the RSS exercised over the BJP to leaders such as Narendra Modi and Amit Shah and compare them to the old generation leaders such as A B Vajpayee or L K Advani? Has the RSS influence over the present leaders increased or decreased over the past years?

Gudavarthy: The RSS is a semi-secretive organisation and it is difficult to assess such things. But going by a recent report in The Caravan magazine (October 2022), Modi managed to sideline the RSS leadership for the first time and he has made the RSS cadre resource-rich. What one could say instead is that Modi carried out much of the agenda the RSS had set for itself. Without Constitutional changes, Modi managed through the electoral process and personal popularity to implement the agenda. Either way, the RSS has been mainstreamed during the current regime. The RSS has learnt to implement its agenda by internally subverting democratic process, rather than throwing an external challenge by subverting the Constitutional means. The real question is how long can it hold on to such a majority. If it does not hold, what means could possibly be adopted and what would the BJP and the RSS look like after Modi? The current regime has not only undermined the democratic institutions, but also the processes within the BJP. In the end that might prove to be detrimental to the onward march of the Rightwing politics in India.