The first thing one notices about the Lok Sabha election, in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has secured a phenomenal victory , is that elections are no longer a game of chance. Majoritarian politics has robbed elections of a sense of contestation. The Election Commission as an institution has been emasculated. The plurality of politics that kept India alive has been lost to the univocality of choice, all focused around one man, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is almost as if India held a presidential election, while pretending to be overtly parliamentary. One man’s presence justified the power of propaganda, but also vitiated the plural sense of India. The whole election was held on one question: do we vote ‘yes’’ or ‘no’ for Mr. Modi? This created a reductive politics where a simplistic idea of the nation state and its security destroyed the sheer diversity of issues that locality and region raised.
Identifying with Modi
Mr. Modi’s victory is a result of three triangular forces. The first is the creation of a majoritarian society. The second is the ‘Hinduisation’ of this society. The third is that this majority is committed to middle-class aspirations.
A vote for Mr. Modi is a message that needs to be interpreted. It is a vote that says he speaks to the aspirations of the common man; he speaks the language of mobility, expectation; he represents the middle-class dream of success. On the other hand, the Congress, which was mouthing the language of socialism and secularism, has literally become a voice in the wilderness.
Small town India feels there is a Modi in all of them. They feel Mr. Modi is them, he is accessible. There is no distance between him and the masses. Mr. Modi, by projecting himself to be like them, allows the hitherto alienated small town to feel a part of power politics. Mr. Modi’s success is a vindication of his small-town gambit. As chaiwala and chowkidar he played to the sentimentalism of middle-urban India. This election is an act of symbolic empowerment, where a sense of familiarity and identification with a leader literally became a sense of empowerment. Small-town India’s sense of aspiration, and its resentment against another leader and family, has propelled Mr. Modi to power once again. His campaign was an act of genius.
In terms of numbers, Mr. Modi has outperformed himself. This proves that BJP president Amit Shah is India’s best psephologist; that BJP is today the biggest party in the country. As an organisation and an imagination, the BJP has become the colossus it dreamt of.
Lost in a new India
Other parties caught in an outdated ideologism did not understand this. In its campaign, the Congress talked of the Nyuntam Aay Yojana as a leftover of socialism. The liberals and the Marxists have now discovered their ultimate irrelevance. They hang around like Rip Van Winkles who do not recognise the society outside. An outdated language and an outdated politics have confirmed their irrelevance to this new, aspirational India. In fact, the only things that seem to work are demagoguery and populism, not programmes or ideologies. Mr. Modi and Mr. Shah are welcomed like street heroes with a sense of realpolitik, while Congress president Rahul Gandhi seems to be an outdated exercise in table manners. The Assembly results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh deceived the Congress to believe that it is a party that is relevant again, but it now seems to be a party that makes little sense. Only the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the YSR Congress Party were able to retain their hold in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, respectively. Each is equally adept at the populism game.
Simplification of democracy
This election showed us that politics is not about values, ideology and ethics. It is a display of instrumentalism that merely says, in this life of alienation, Mr. Modi works, and works for us. India is not saying there is no alternative; it is saying, we want no alternative. Alternatives create controversy and disorder, but a univocal choice for Mr. Modi shows that democracy has simplified itself. In this age of uncertainty, it has gone for the rudimentary. There is a laziness to politics we need to grasp. What is clear-cut is India’s refusal to look at the complexity of politics. When you have a Charles Lamb, why do you need a Shakespeare? Instead, democracy is reduced to a fixed choice questionnaire.
We need to understand the new construction of politics which pushes ideology to the margins, which thinks individual aspiration has a poetry that collective justice does not. Mr. Modi grasps this. The ubiquitousness of Mr. Modi and his accessibility at the level of ideas create a symbolic sense of a new imagined community. When Pragya Singh Thakur wins after her statement on Nathuram Godse during the 150th year of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, one senses change in the Indian imagination. It is as if Gandhi as an imagination is over.
Voting for a myth
It is a symbolic politics of a new India that is tired of being called backward, Third World. It is an India which loves the aphrodisiac of the nation state and is convinced that Mr. Modi is a problem-solver. Mr. Modi realised that more than material guarantees, contemporary India needed symbolic plumbing, a rush of confidence, an inflation of masculinity, and a set of simplistic formulas which magically promise a new flat land where Indians can compete on equal terms. The vote for Mr. Modi is a vote for a new myth, and one must realise that social psychologists and psephologists are not used to myth-making. It is this symbolic politics which became the idea of India that our country voted for. Political analysts read the elections like a complex chess game when it had been whittled down to Chinese checkers. The simpler the move, the more devastating the success. Mr. Modi won because he understands the rules of the game.
It is a lesson his opponents with their illusions of politics might find difficult to grasp. Mr. Modi has outfoxed the Opposition. He was in tune with the aspirations and anxieties of the people. He understood that mass psychology went beyond party definitions and old categories. He sensed that if the entire nation is fed the right history, it could tectonically shift to the right. Leftism and liberalism feel like nostalgia at this moment. The sadness or the celebration begins now. The Opposition has to rethink, reinvent and regroup. A new battle for the idea of India begins today.
Shiv Visvanathan is a member of the Compost heap, a group of academics and activists working on alternative imaginations
