In A Suitable Boy,
Vikram Seth writes with affection of a placid India's first general election in
1951, and the egalitarian spirit it momentarily bestowed on an electorate
deeply riven by class and caste: "the great washed and unwashed public,
sceptical and gullible", but all "endowed with universal adult
suffrage". India's 16th general election this month, held against a
background of economic jolts and titanic corruption scandals, and tainted by
the nastiest campaign yet, announces a new turbulent phase for the country –
arguably, the most sinister since its independence from British rule in 1947.
Back then, it would have been inconceivable that a figure such as Narendra
Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat accused, along with his
closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in
his state in 2002 to extrajudicial killings, and barred from entering the US,
may occupy India's highest political office.
Modi is a lifelong
member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindu
nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose
founder's belief that Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its
highest" by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the
votaries of Hindutva, or "Hinduness". In 1948, a former member of the
RSS murdered Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. The outfit, traditionally
dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has led many vicious assaults on minorities. A
notorious executioner of dozens of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 crowed that he
had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman and
extracted her foetus. Modi himself described the relief camps housing tens of
thousands of displaced Muslims as "child-breeding centres".
Such rhetoric has helped
Modi sweep one election after another in Gujarat. A senior American diplomat
described him, in cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, as an "insular, distrustful
person" who "reigns by fear and intimidation"; his neo-Hindu
devotees on Facebook and Twitter continue to render the air mephitic with hate
and malice, populating the paranoid world of both have-nots and haves with
fresh enemies – "terrorists", "jihadis", "Pakistani
agents", "pseudo-secularists", "sickulars",
"socialists" and "commies". Modi's own electoral strategy
as prime ministerial candidate, however, has been more polished, despite his
appeals, both dog-whistled and overt, to Hindu solidarity against menacing
aliens and outsiders, such as the Italian-born leader of the Congress party,
Sonia Gandhi, Bangladeshi "infiltrators" and those who eat the holy
cow.
Modi exhorts his largely
young supporters – more than two-thirds of India's population is under the age
of 35 – to join a revolution that will destroy the corrupt old political order
and uproot its moral and ideological foundations while buttressing the
essential framework, the market economy, of a glorious New India. In an
apparently ungovernable country, where many revere the author of Mein Kampf for
his tremendous will to power and organisation, he has shrewdly deployed the
idioms of management, national security and civilisational glory.
Boasting of his 56-inch
chest, Modi has replaced Mahatma Gandhi, the icon of non-violence, with
Vivekananda, the 19th-century Hindu revivalist who was obsessed with making
Indians a "manly" nation. Vivekananda's garlanded statue or portrait
is as ubiquitous in Modi's public appearances as his dandyish pastel
waistcoats. But Modi is never less convincing than when he presents himself as
a humble tea-vendor, the son-of-the-soil challenger to the Congress's haughty
dynasts. His record as chief minister is predominantly distinguished by the
transfer – through privatisation or outright gifts – of national resources to
the country's biggest corporations. His closest allies – India's biggest
businessmen – have accordingly enlisted their mainstream media outlets into the
cult of Modi as decisive administrator; dissenting journalists have been
removed or silenced.
Not long after India's
first full-scale pogrom in 2002, leading corporate bosses, ranging from the
suave Ratan Tata to Mukesh Ambani, the owner of a 27-storey residence, began to
pave Modi's ascent to respectability and power. The stars of Bollywood fell
(literally) at the feet of Modi. In recent months, liberal-minded columnists
and journalists have joined their logrolling rightwing compatriots in
certifying Modi as a "moderate" developmentalist. The Columbia
University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who insists that he intellectually fathered
India's economic reforms in 1991, and Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound,
have volunteered passionate exonerations of the man they consider India's
saviour.
Bhagwati, once a fervent
supporter of outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh, has even publicly applied
for an advisory position with Modi's government. It may be because the nearly
double-digit economic growth of recent years that Ivy League economists like
him – India's own version of Chile's Chicago Boys and Russia's Harvard Boys –
instigated and championed turns out to have been based primarily on extraction
of natural resources, cheap labour and foreign capital inflows rather than high
productivity and innovation, or indeed the brick-and-mortar ventures that
fuelled China's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. "The bulk of India's
aggregate growth," the World Bank's chief economist Kaushik Basu warns,
"is occurring through a disproportionate rise in the incomes at the upper
end of the income ladder." Thus, it has left largely undisturbed the country's
shameful ratios – 43% of all Indian children below the age of five are
undernourished, and 48% stunted; nearly half of Indian women of childbearing
age are anaemic, and more than half of all Indians still defecate in the open.
Absurdly uneven and
jobless economic growth has led to what Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze call
"islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa". The failure
to generate stable employment – 1m new jobs are required every month – for an
increasingly urban and atomised population, or to allay the severe inequalities
of opportunity as well as income, created, well before the recent economic
setbacks, a large simmering reservoir of rage and frustration. Many Indians,
neglected by the state, which spends less proportionately on health and
education than Malawi, and spurned by private industry, which prefers cheap
contract labour, invest their hopes in notions of free enterprise and
individual initiative. However, old and new hierarchies of class, caste and
education restrict most of them to the ranks of the unwashed. As the Wall
Street Journal admitted, India is not "overflowing with Horatio Alger
stories". Balram Halwai, the entrepreneur from rural India in Aravind
Adiga's Man Booker-winning novel The White Tiger, who finds in murder and theft
the quickest route to business success and self-confidence in the metropolis,
and Mumbai's social-Darwinist slum-dwellers in Katherine Boo's Behind the
Beautiful Forevers point to an intensified dialectic in India today: cruel
exclusion and even more brutal self-empowerment.
Such extensive moral
squalor may bewilder those who expected India to conform, however gradually and
imperfectly, to a western ideal of liberal democracy and capitalism. But those
scandalised by the lure of an indigenised fascism in the country billed as the
"world's largest democracy" should know: this was not the work of a
day, or of a few "extremists". It has been in the making for years.
"Democracy in India," BR Ambedkar, the main framer of India's
constitution, warned in the 1950s, "is only a top dressing on an Indian
soil, which is essentially undemocratic." Ambedkar saw democracy in India
as a promise of justice and dignity to the country's despised and impoverished
millions, which could only be realised through intense political struggle. For
more than two decades that possibility has faced a pincer movement: a form of
global capitalism that can only enrich a small minority and a xenophobic
nationalism that handily identifies fresh scapegoats for large-scale socio-economic
failure and frustration.
In many ways, Modi and
his rabble – tycoons, neo-Hindu techies, and outright fanatics – are perfect
mascots for the changes that have transformed India since the early 1990s: the
liberalisation of the country's economy, and the destruction by Modi's
compatriots of the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Long before the
killings in Gujarat, Indian security forces enjoyed what amounted to a licence
to kill, torture and rape in the border regions of Kashmir and the north-east;
a similar infrastructure of repression was installed in central India after
forest-dwelling tribal peoples revolted against the nexus of mining
corporations and the state. The government's plan to spy on internet and phone
connections makes the NSA's surveillance look highly responsible. Muslims have
been imprisoned for years without trial on the flimsiest suspicion of
"terrorism"; one of them, a Kashmiri, who had only circumstantial
evidence against him, was rushed to the gallows last year, denied even the
customary last meeting with his kin, in order to satisfy, as the supreme court
put it, "the collective conscience of the people".
"People who were
not born then," Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities of the
period before another apparently abrupt collapse of liberal values, "will
find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving
faster than a cavalry camel … But in those days, no one knew what it was moving
towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was
below, between what was moving forward and what backward." One symptom of
this widespread confusion in Musil's novel is the Viennese elite's weird
ambivalence about the crimes of a brutal murderer called Moosbrugger. Certainly,
figuring out what was above and what was below is harder for the parachuting
foreign journalists who alighted upon a new idea of India as an economic
"powerhouse" and the many "rising" Indians in a generation
born after economic liberalisation in 1991, who are seduced by Modi's promise
of the utopia of consumerism – one in which skyscrapers, expressways, bullet
trains and shopping malls proliferate (and from which such eyesores as the poor
are excluded).
People who were born
before 1991, and did not know what time was moving towards, might be forgiven
for feeling nostalgia for the simpler days of postcolonial idealism and
hopefulness – those that Seth evokes in A Suitable Boy. Set in the 1950s, the
novel brims with optimism about the world's most audacious experiment in
democracy, endorsing the Nehruvian "idea of India" that seems
flexible enough to accommodate formerly untouchable Hindus (Dalits) and Muslims
as well as the middle-class intelligentsia. The novel's affable anglophone
characters radiate the assumption that the sectarian passions that blighted
India during its partition in 1947 will be defused, secular progress through
science and reason will eventually manifest itself, and an enlightened
leadership will usher a near-destitute people into active citizenship and
economic prosperity.
India's first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, appears in the novel as an effective one-man buffer
against Hindu chauvinism. "The thought of India as a Hindu state, with its
minorities treated as second-class citizens, sickened him." In Nehru's own
vision, grand projects such as big dams and factories would bring India's
superstitious masses out of their benighted rural habitats and propel them into
first-world affluence and rationality. The Harrow- and Cambridge-educated
Indian leader had inherited from British colonials at least part of their
civilising mission, turning it into a national project to catch up with the
industrialised west. "I was eager and anxious," Nehru wrote of India,
"to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of
modernity." Even the "uninteresting" peasant, whose
"limited outlook" induced in him a "feeling of overwhelming pity
and a sense of ever-impending tragedy" was to be present at what he called
India's "tryst with destiny".
That long attempt by
India's ruling class to give the country the "garb of modernity" has
produced, in its sixth decade, effects entirely unanticipated by Nehru or
anyone else: intense politicisation and fierce contests for power together with
violence, fragmentation and chaos, and a concomitant longing for authoritarian
control. Modi's image as an exponent of discipline and order is built on both
the successes and failures of the ancien regime. He offers top-down
modernisation, but without modernity: bullet trains without the culture of
criticism, managerial efficiency without the guarantee of equal rights. And
this streamlined design for a new India immediately entices those well-off
Indians who have long regarded democracy as a nuisance, recoiled from the
destitute masses, and idolised technocratic, if despotic, "doers"
like the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew.
But then the Nehruvian
assumption that economic growth plotted and supervised by a wise technocracy
would also bring about social change was also profoundly undemocratic and
self-serving. Seth's novel, along with much anglophone literature, seems, in
retrospect, to have uncritically reproduced the establishment ideology of
English-speaking and overwhelmingly upper-caste Hindus who gained most from
state-planned economic growth: the Indian middle class employed in the public
sector, civil servants, scientists and monopolist industrialists. This ruling
class's rhetoric of socialism disguised its nearly complete monopoly of power.
As DR Nagaraj, one of postcolonial India's finest minds, pointed out, "the
institutions of capitalism, science and technology were taken over by the upper
castes". Even today, businessmen, bureaucrats, scientists, writers in
English, academics, thinktankers, newspaper editors, columnists and TV anchors
are disproportionately drawn from among the Hindu upper-castes. And, as Sen has
often lamented, their "breathtakingly conservative" outlook is to be
blamed for the meagre investment in health and education – essential
requirements for an equitable society as well as sustained economic growth –
that put India behind even disaster-prone China in human development indexes,
and now makes it trail Bangladesh.
Dynastic politics froze
the Congress party into a network of patronage, delaying the empowerment of the
underprivileged Indians who routinely gave it landslide victories. Nehru may
have thought of political power as a function of moral responsibility. But his
insecure daughter, Indira Gandhi, consumed by Nixon-calibre paranoia, turned
politics into a game of self-aggrandisement, arresting opposition leaders and
suspending fundamental rights in 1975 during a nationwide "state of
emergency". She supported Sikh fundamentalists in Punjab (who eventually
turned against her) and rigged elections in Muslim-majority Kashmir. In the
1980s, the Congress party, facing a fragmenting voter base, cynically resorted
to stoking Hindu nationalism. After Indira Gandhi's assassination by her
bodyguards in 1984, Congress politicians led lynch mobs against Sikhs, killing
more than 3,000 civilians. Three months later, her son Rajiv Gandhi won
elections with a landslide. Then, in another eerie prefiguring of Modi's
methods, Gandhi, a former pilot obsessed with computers, tried to combine
technocratic rule with soft Hindutva.
The Bharatiya Janata
party (BJP), a political offshoot of the RSS that Nehru had successfully
banished into the political wilderness, turned out to be much better at this
kind of thing. In 1990, its leader LK Advani rode a "chariot"
(actually a rigged-up Toyota flatbed truck) across India in a Hindu supremacist
campaign against the mosque in Ayodhya. The wildfire of anti-Muslim violence
across the country reaped immediate electoral dividends. (In old photos, Modi
appears atop the chariot as Advani's hawk-eyed understudy). Another BJP
chieftain ventured to hoist the Indian tricolour in insurgent Kashmir. (Again,
the bearded man photographed helping his doddery senior taunt curfew-bound
Kashmiris turns out to be the young Modi.) Following a few more massacres, the
BJP was in power in 1998, conducting nuclear tests and fast-tracking the
programme of economic liberalisation started by the Congress after a severe financial
crisis in 1991.
The Hindu nationalists
had a ready consumer base for their blend of chauvinism and marketisation. With
India's politics and economy reaching an impasse, which forced many of their
relatives to emmigrate to the US, and the Congress facing decline, many
powerful Indians were seeking fresh political representatives and a new
self-legitimising ideology in the late 1980s and 90s. This quest was fulfilled
by, first, both the post-cold war dogma of free markets and then an openly
rightwing political party that was prepared to go further than the Congress in
developing close relations with the US (and Israel, which, once shunned, is now
India's second-biggest arms supplier after Russia). You can only marvel today
at the swiftness with which the old illusions of an over-regulated economy were
replaced by the fantasies of an unregulated one.
According to the new
wisdom – new to India, if already worn out and discredited in Latin America –
all governments needed to do was get out of the way of buoyant and autonomous
entrepreneurs and stop subsidising the poor and the lazy (in a risible
self-contradiction these Indian promoters of minimalist governance also
clamoured for a big militarised state apparatus to fight and intimidate
neighbours and stifle domestic insurgencies). The long complex experience of
strong European as well as east Asian economies – active state intervention in
markets and support to strategic industries, long periods of economic
nationalism, investments in health and education – was elided in a new
triumphalist global history of free markets. Its promise of instant and
widespread affluence seemed to have been manufactured especially for gormless
journalists and columnists. Still, in the last decade, neoliberalism became the
common sense of many Indians who were merely aspiring as well as those who had
already made it – the only elite ideology after Nehruvian nation-building to
have achieved a high degree of pan-Indian consent, if not total hegemony. The
old official rhetoric of egalitarian and shared futures gave way to the media's
celebrations of private wealth-creation – embodied today by Ambani's 27-storey
private residence in a city where a majority lives in slums – and a
proliferation of Ayn Randian cliches about ambition, willpower and striving.
Nehru's programme of
national self-strengthening had included, along with such ideals as secularism,
socialism and non-alignment, a deep-rooted suspicion of American foreign policy
and economic doctrines. In a stunning coup, India's postcolonial project was
taken over, as Octavio Paz once wrote of the Mexican revolution, "by a
capitalist class made in the image and likeness of US capitalism and dependent
upon it". A new book by Anita Raghavan, The Billionaire's Apprentice: The
Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund,
reveals how well-placed men such as Rajat Gupta, the investment banker recently
convicted for insider trading in New York, expedited close links between
American and Indian political and business leaders.
India's upper-caste
elite transcended party lines in their impassioned courting of likely American
partners. In 2008, an American diplomat in Delhi was given an exclusive preview
by a Congress party factotum of two chests containing $25m in cash – money to
bribe members of parliament into voting for a nuclear deal with the US.
Visiting the White House later that year, Singh blurted out to George W Bush,
probably resigned by then to being the most despised American president in
history, that "the people of India love you deeply". In a
conversation disclosed by WikiLeaks, Arun Jaitley, a senior leader of the BJP
who is tipped to be finance minister in Modi's government, urged American
diplomats in Delhi to see his party's anti-Muslim rhetoric as
"opportunistic", a mere "talking point" and to take more
seriously his own professional and emotional links with the US.
A transnational elite of
rightwing Indians based in the US helped circulate an impression of an
irresistibly "emerging giant" – the title of a book by Arvind
Panagariya, a New-York-based economist and another aspiring adviser to Modi.
Very quickly, the delusional notion that India was, as Foreign Affairs
proclaimed on its cover in 2006, a "roaring capitalist success-story"
assumed an extraordinary persuasive power. In India itself, a handful of
corporate acquisitions – such as Tata's of Jaguar and Corus – stoked exorbitant
fantasies of an imminent "Global Indian Takeover" (the title of a
regular feature once in India's leading business daily, the Economic Times).
Rent-seekers in a shadow intellectual economy – thinktank-sailors, bloggers and
Twitterbots – as well as academics perched on corporate-endowed chairs recited
the mantra of privatisation and deregulation in tune. Nostrums from the
Reagan-Thatcher era – the primary source of ideological self-indoctrination for
many Americanised Indians – about "labour flexibility" were endlessly
regurgitated, even though a vast majority of the workforce in India – more than
90% – toils in the unorganised or "informal" sector. Bhagwati, for
instance, hailed Bangladesh for its superb labour relations a few months before
the collapse of the Rana Plaza in Dhaka; he also speculated that the poor
"celebrate" inequality, and, with Marie Antoinette-ish serenity,
advised malnourished families to consume "more milk and fruits".
Confronted with the World Health Organisation's extensive evidence about
malnutrition in India, Panagariya, ardent patron of the emerging giant, argued
that Indian children are genetically underweight.
This pitiless American
free-marketeering wasn't the only extraordinary mutation of Indian political
and economic discourse. By 1993, when A Suitable Boy was published, the
single-party democracy it describes had long been under siege from low-caste
groups and a rising Hindu-nationalist middle class. (Sunil Khilnani's The Idea
of India, the most eloquent defence and elaboration of India's foundational
ideology, now seems another posthumous tribute to it.) India after Indira
Gandhi increasingly failed to respect the Nehruvian elite's coordinates of
progress and order. Indian democracy, it turned out, had seemed stable only
because political participation was severely limited, and upper-caste Hindus
effectively ran the country. The arrival of low-caste Hindus in mass politics
in the 1980s, with their representatives demanding their own share of the
spoils of power, put the first strains on the old patrimonial system.
Upper-caste panic initially helped swell the ranks of the BJP, but even greater
shifts caused by accelerating economic growth after 1991 have fragmented even relatively
recent political formations based on caste and religion.
Rapid urbanisation and
decline of agriculture created a large mass of the working poor exposed to
ruthless exploitation in the unorganised sector. Connected to their homes in
the hinterland through the flow of remittances, investment, culture and ideas,
these migrants from rural areas were steadily politically awakened with the
help of print literacy, electronic media, job mobility and, most importantly,
mobile phones (subscribers grew from 45 million in 2002 to almost a billion in
2012). The Congress, though instrumentally social-welfarist while in power,
failed to respond to this electorally consequential blurring of rural and urban
borderlines, and the heightened desires for recognition and dignity as well as
for rapid inclusion into global modernity. Even the BJP, which had fed on
upper-caste paranoia, had been struggling under its ageing leaders to respond
to an increasingly demanding mass of voters after its initial success in the
1990s, until Modi reinvented himself as a messiah of development, and quickly
found enlarged constituencies – among haves as well as have-nots – for his
blend of xenophobia and populism.
A wave of political
disaffection has also deposited democratic social movements and dedicated
individuals across the country. Groups both within and outside the government,
such as those that successfully lobbied for the groundbreaking Right to
Information Act, are outlining the possibilities of what John Keane calls
"monitory democracy". India's many activist networks – for the rights
of women, Dalits, peasants and indigenous communities – or issue-based
campaigns, such as those against big dams and nuclear power plants, steer clear
of timeworn ideas of national security, economic development, technocratic
management, whether articulated by the Nehruvians or the neo-Hindus. In a major
environment referendum last year, residents of small tribal hamlets in a remote
part of eastern India voted to reject bauxite mining in their habitats. Growing
demands across India for autonomy and bottom-up governance confirm that Modi is
merely offering old – and soured – lassi in new bottles with his version of
top-down modernisation.
Modi, however, has
opportunely timed his attempt to occupy the commanding heights of the Indian
state vacated by the Congress. The structural problems of India's globalised
economy have dramatically slowed its growth since 2011, terminating the
euphoria over the Global Indian Takeover. Corruption scandals involving the
sale of billions of dollars' worth of national resources such as mines,
forests, land, water and telecom spectrums have revealed that crony capitalism
and rent-seeking were the real engines of India's economy. The beneficiaries of
the phenomenon identified by Arundhati Roy as "gush-up" have soared
into a transnational oligarchy, putting the bulk of their investments abroad
and snapping up, together with Chinese and Russian plutocrats, real estate in
London, New York and Singapore. Meanwhile, those made to wait unconscionably
long for "trickle-down" – people with dramatically raised but mostly
unfulfillable aspirations – have become vulnerable to demagogues promising
national regeneration. It is this tiger of unfocused fury, spawned by global capitalism
in the "underdeveloped" world, that Modi has sought to ride from
Gujarat to New Delhi.
"Even in the
darkest of times," Hannah Arendt once wrote, "we have the right to
expect some illumination." The most prominent Indian institutions and
individuals have rarely obliged, even as the darkness of the country's
atrocity-rich borderlands moved into the heartland. Some of the most respected
commentators, who are often eloquent in their defence of the right to free
speech of famous writers, maintained a careful silence about the government's
routine strangling of the internet and mobile networks in Kashmir. Even the
liberal newspaper the Hindu prominently featured a journalist who retailed, as
an investigation in Caravan revealed, false accusations of terrorism against
innocent citizens. (The virtues of intelligence, courage and integrity are
manifested more commonly in small periodicals such as Caravan and Economic and
Political Weekly, or independent websites such as Kafila.org and Scroll.in.)
The owners of the country's largest English-language newspaper, the Times of
India, which has lurched from tedium to decadence within a few years, have
innovated a revenue-stream called "paid news". Unctuously lobbing
softballs at Modi, the prophets of electronic media seem, on other occasions,
to have copied their paranoid inquisitorial style from Glenn Beck and Rush
Limbaugh. Santosh Desai, one of contemporary India's most astute observers,
correctly points out that the "intolerance that one sees from a large
section of society is in some way a product of a 'televisionised' India. The
pent-up feelings of resentment and entitlement have rushed out and get both
tacit and explicit support from television."
A spate of
corporate-sponsored literary festivals did not compensate for the missing
culture of debate and reflection in the press. The frothy glamour of these events
may have helped obscure the deeper intellectual and cultural churning in India
today, the emergence of writers and artists from unconventional class and caste
backgrounds, and the renewed attention to BR Ambedkar, the bracing Dalit
thinker obscured by upper-caste iconographies. The probing work of, among
others, such documentary film-makers as Anand Patwardhan (Jai Bhim Comrade),
Rahul Roy (Till We Meet Again), Rakesh Sharma (Final Solution) and Sanjay Kak
(Red-Ant Dream), and members of the Raqs Media Collective outlines a modernist
counterculture in the making.
But the case of
Bollywood shows how the unravelling of the earliest nation-building project can
do away with the stories and images through which many people imagined
themselves to be part of a larger whole, and leave only tawdriness in its
place. Popular Hindi cinema degenerated alarmingly in the 1980s. Slicker now,
and craftily aware of its non-resident Indian audience, it has become an
expression of consumer nationalism and middle-class self-regard; Amitabh
Bachchan, the "angry young man" who enunciated a widely felt
victimhood during a high point of corruption and inflation in the 1970s,
metamorphosed into an avuncular endorser of luxury brands. A search for
authenticity, and linguistic vivacity, has led film-makers back to the rural
hinterland in such films as Gangs of Wasseypur, Peepli Live and Ishqiya, whose
flaws are somewhat redeemed by their scrupulous avoidance of Indians sporting
Hermès bags or driving Ferraris. Some recent breakthroughs such as Anand
Gandhi's Ship of Theseus and Dibakar Banerji's Costa-Gavras-inspired Shanghai
gesture to the cinema of crisis pioneered by Asian, African and Latin American
film-makers. But India's many film industries have yet to produce anything that
matches Jia Zhangke's unsentimental evocations of China's past and present, the
acute examination of middle-class pathologies in Kleber Mendonça Filho's
Neighbouring Sounds, or Nuri Bilge Ceylan's delicate portrait of the sterile
secularist intellectual in Uzak.
The long artistic
drought results partly from the confusion and bewilderment of an older,
entrenched elite, the main producers, until recently, of mainstream culture.
With their prerogative to rule and interpret India pilfered by the
"unwashed" and the "gullible", the anglophones have been
struggling to grasp the eruption of mass politics in India, its new centrifugal
thrust, and the nature of the challenge posed by many apparently illiberal
individuals and movements. It is easy for them to denounce India's evidently
uncouth retailers of caste and religious identity as embodiments of, in Salman
Rushdie's words, "Caligulan barbarity"; or to mock Chetan Bhagat, the
bestselling author of novels for young adults and champion tweeter, for boasting
of his "selfie" with Modi. Those pied-pipering the young into
Modi-mania nevertheless possess the occult power to fulfil the deeper needs of
their needy followers. They can compile vivid ideological collages – made of
fragments of modernity, glimpses of utopia and renovated pieces of a forgotten
past. It is in the "mythological thrillers" and positive-thinking
fictions – the most popular literary genres in India today – that a post-1991
generation that doesn't even know it is lost fleetingly but thrillingly recognises
itself.
In a conventional
liberal perspective, these works may seem like hotchpotches, full of absurd
contradictions that confound the "above" with the "below",
the "forward" with the "backward". Modi, for instance,
consistently mixes up dates and historical events, exposing an abysmal
ignorance of the past of the country he hopes to lead into a glorious future.
Yet his lusty hatred of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty excites many young Indians
weaned on the neo-liberal opiates about aspiration and merit. And he combines
his historical revisionism and Hindu nationalism with a revolutionary futurism.
He knows that resonant sentiments, images, and symbols – Vivekananda plus
holograms and Modi masks – rather than rational argument or accurate history
galvanise individuals. Vigorously aestheticising mass politics, and mesmerising
the restless young, he has emerged as the new India's canniest artist.
But, as Walter Benjamin
pointed out, rallies, parades and grand monuments do not secure the masses
their rights; they give them no more than the chance to express themselves, and
noisily identify with an alluring leader and his party. It seems predictable
that Modi will gratify only a few with his ambitious rescheduling of India's
tryst with destiny. Though many exasperated Indians see Modi as bearing the
long-awaited fruits of the globalised economy, he actually embodies its
inevitable dysfunction. He resembles the European and Japanese demagogues of
the early 20th century who responded to the many crises of liberalism and
democracy – and of thwarted nation-building and modernisation – by merging
corporate and political power, and exhorting communal unity before internal and
external threats. But Modi belongs also to the dark days of the early 21st
century.
His ostensibly
gratuitous assault on Muslims – already India's most depressed and demoralised
minority – was another example of what the social anthropologist Arjun
Appadurai calls "a vast worldwide Malthusian correction, which works
through the idioms of minoritisation and ethnicisation but is functionally
geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalisation, minus the
inconvenient noise of its losers". Certainly, the new horizons of desire
and fear opened up by global capitalism do not favour democracy or human
rights. Other strongmen who supervised the bloody purges of economically
enervated and unproductive people were also ruthless majoritarians, consecrated
by big election victories. The crony-capitalist regimes of Thaksin Shinawatra
in Thailand and Vladimir Putin in Russia were inaugurated by ferocious
offensives against ethnic minorities. The electorally bountiful pogrom in
Gujarat in 2002, too, now seems an early initiation ritual for Modi's India.
The difficulty of
assessing his personal culpability in the killings and rapes of 2002 is the
same difficulty that Musil identifies with Moosbrugger in his novel: how to
measure the crimes, however immense, of individuals against a universal
breakdown of values and the normalisation of violence and injustice. "If
mankind could dream collectively," Musil writes, "it would dream
Moosbrugger." There is little cause yet for such despair in India, where
the aggrieved fantasy of authoritarianism will have to reckon with the
gathering energies below; the great potential of the country's underprivileged
and voiceless peoples still lies untapped. But for now some Indians have
dreamed collectively, and they have dreamed a man accused of mass murder.
