In 'New' India Conversation is the Key

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In 'New' India Conversation is the Key

(Also published on thewire.in)

A very close and old friend of mine nudged me on the facebook, let’s celebrate! We are extremely thick as friends and poles apart as political beings. Friendship, nonetheless, thrives in both spaces of emotions and mutual care as well as in shrills of dissent and disagreements. I told him I will watch him from a distance while he celebrates.

This is a personal anecdote. It can be easily rubbished as an unnecessary piece of information. The aggregate of such anecdotes does not collectively transform into structures of macro-level ‘dialogues’ or actionable points of political engagements. But there is at least one value in sharing this anecdote. At least, the way I see it.

This value is in recognising how politics is now dissolved in the everyday blood of ‘new India’. Two things have happened simultaneously. A ‘new India’ has come to the fore, of course, at the rubbles of the simmering discontents of the ‘old India’. And equally, at the same time, a new language, grammar, and a set of reference points of organising politics have emerged which channelizes the older discontent but qualitatively lays new ground rules for ‘doing’ politics.

To an extent, it can be emphatically said that the everyday political views and the new structural change of doing politics have dissolved into each other. This can be best understood by a simple ‘fact’ that it was Modi who was fighting the elections on 542 seats, and it was him who won on 300 plus seats. Local has dissolved into the central. Candidates have become meaningless. The leader, the techniques of mobilisation, and the mass – these are the only constituents of the new politics.

If politics has restructured our everyday lives through 24x7 channels and group message forwards, then we need to understand and question the nature of this new everyday. It is clear that amongst people ‘political faith’ has replaced ‘political wisdom’. I am not being dismissive in saying that people have lost wisdom. I am, in fact, saying that the dissolution of the ‘voter’ into the ‘leader’ (wearing Modi mask is the best visual and psychological example of this) has turned faith itself into a form of wisdom.

The justification of this mergence comes from the way the faith in one man is represented in the multiple fabric of reason, ranging from development to that of nationalism, from toilets to Pakistan, from cylinder to surgical. Suffering has acquired a new meaning of sacrifice as people legitimised demonetisation as a necessary cleansing ‘yagya’. Those who are critical of this mergence – people like the current author – must find a way to disentangle them again. But those who support the merger of the man and the mass must also question themselves: Are they willing to go to such an extent that they lose their social and political selfhood and identity? Do they want to cease existing as an independent entity? Do they forever want to breathe from under the mask? Are they happy to let their faith become the fulcrum of logic and reason?

These are not new questions. But the downpour of opinion pieces in the media in the last few days has not adequately addressed them. By and large, the energy and drama are still confined to the ‘cause and effect’ framework, for which the institutional, older forms of analysis are used. For instance, the opposition needed to present a united face – is an argument repetitively told by analysts. In any analysis, as long as the tug-of-war is simply restricted to Modi and his opposition, we will continue missing the wood for the forest.

It is often said that in electoral battles people are the ultimate judge. They give the verdict, which is acceptable to all. This election was therefore not between political parties. It was between Modi and the people. And, people have brought him back. So, anyone who is trying to understand his return must put people back into the centre of analysis.

We definitely need to question the power. We need to keep questioning the leader and the machinery. But we also need to question those who sustained that power. If voters have decided to merge themselves in their leader – then in the act of questioning the leader, those dissoluble voters are also to be questioned. There is no point in losing steam over why and how the opposition failed. By not doing so, I would also refuse to provide fodder to the gloating meme industry of the richest political party in Asia that is demonising, satirising, and infantilising the opposition. Not that I hold soft corner for any opposition political party in particular but I would not do so because I do hold belief in the idea of ‘opposition’ and its role in politics.

The story of this election is not the defeat of the opposition but the victory of the ruling dispensation. The story we need to tell must therefore address this victory. It is, of course, difficult to keep them separate but necessary to move forward and make sense of the new change.

For instance, the hair-splitting exercise of opinion-makers and politicised anchors is centred around proving that the opposition had no narrative. Fair enough, let's accept that for a while. But the question is: Do we need to reduce politics to the creation and dissemination of narratives alone? Are we content with narrativizing our politics? Isn’t it exactly what the ruling dispensation kept harping on in its attack on the opposition? Should we be complicit in that agenda by raising the same question? The reasoning of victory or defeat based upon ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ narrative/leader should be the first thing to be discarded.

Narratives sustain on tropes and imageries. In the world we are living, these imageries are in turn created and circulated through controlling a massive machinery of media, paid news, memes industry, mysterious broadcasting platforms, and ‘direct’ communication through ‘scripted’ texts. The strength of the strong narrative relies on the excessive use of money required to do all these. It flourishes on the covert use of live broadcast of meditation, captured overtly by unseen cameras. Those who talk of narratives alone must answer if they want the opposition to become the mirror image of the ruling dispensation? The opposition, of course, should create their own narrative, a different one, but through what process, is the key question. Media, money and marketing is the echo-chamber of narrative making. We must ask, if we need narratives or actual good politics?

Good politics, in contrast, is an outcome of sustained processes and deliberate attempts at institution making. Processes based on legal frameworks of progressive, inclusive, and egalitarian values, for instance, promise to bring fundamental social and economic change. Institutions secure the endurance of such processes.

Narratives mask the ability to interrogate processes. The creation of political faith represented in statements such as ‘who is the alternative’ is based upon the power of the narrative created around the invincibility or inevitability of one person. People forget to question the control of institutions and subversion of processes. A simple example would suffice: to what degree the swach bharat abhiyan has changed the fate of manual scavengers and sweepers across the country? How many schools were set-up for the children of these ‘dirty workers’ who would (eventually) break free from the curse of being seen as ‘social dirt’. This is the question which the masked voters should ponder upon without getting into any what-aboutery.

Of course, institutions can and do rot. But the way to build new institutions is not through resorting to scoot and run construction of narratives. We can keep praising the construction of the winning narratives for how much we want because victory often manages to secure applaud from numerous quarters. But we would lose sight of the decimation of institutions, which is the other side of the winnability mantra. The conscious supporters must ask to themselves that while securing the victory for their leader, did they feel the loss of the credibility of some of the prime institutions of the country? Have they completely stopped believing in the institutions entrusted to preserve fairness and justice? Institutions which they might need in the future?

A lot of people may ask: Is there any point in repeating all these when we live in the age of post-truth? Once again, we should not be dismissive of the intellect of the masked supporters. A lot of supporters of the current dispensation know about the existence of various fact-checking websites. They also visit those websites. Some of them even accept their credibility. But in the last instance, the faith in one leader trumps over falsehoods peddled by that same leader. Lies are accepted as lies but their implications are neglected. What is the relevance then of calling something fake when fake itself has become the new real? What is the point in reminding that facts are constantly being distorted – when distortion itself has become the believable mode of communication?

The answers to these are not known yet but are not non-existing either. The process to find the answers lies in the conversations with whom we do not agree. I do not aspire to change my friend. I aspire him to acknowledge more concretely, more clearly, and more logically, why he believes in what he does believe in. Conversation is the key – not to change in any mercenary or missionary fashion but to sow the seeds of questioning. If politics is now dissolved in the everyday machinery of faith and wisdom, then such conversations have to become part of our everyday.