“There is stability at last,” boardroom and drawing room chatter concluded, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the 16 general election under the leadership of Narendra Modi in May 2014. “After 30 years of coalition and minority governments, here is one with an absolute majority, under a decisive leader.”
Some mourned and many celebrated it as the fall of the Nehruvian republic; others dismissed it as a mere fluke that signified nothing in the long term. What is clear, however, is the fact that a political tradition that believes India is a Hindu nation has touched a significant milestone by winning a majority of its own. It aligned as a junior partner in the Jayaprakash Narayan movement in the 1970s and scraped off the stain of its association with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi; it became leader of India’s anti-Congress coalition by the turn of the century; and, in 2014, has reduced alliance partners to dependency status.
Evident political trends of 2014 suggest an attempt to write a new social contract for India that is in tune with the Sangh Parivar ideology. The core of this strategy is to undo a social contract that the Congress and its allies including the Left had shaped in response to the severe stress that market-driven growth had brought upon the vulnerable social groups of India through the 1990s. Primarily, it meant generous redistribution of the fruits of growth as welfare schemes, special focus on Dalits, religious minorities and tribals and being more accommodative to their political aspirations.
Modi as PM has articulated his ideas of progress in civilisational terms when he repeatedly spoke of a civilisation that is “coming out of 1200 years of slavery”, counting Muslims as foreign invaders. The highly-polished slogans — ‘ sabka saath, sabka vikaas ’ and ‘appeasement of none, justice for all’ — are not faulty at the first glance, but the contradictions emerge when one tries to square them with the policies of the government in the first seven months.
Modi’s doctrine of progress in civilisational terms has proposed a new social contract in which the minorities and Dalits have limited or no place in political power. In Parliament, State Assemblies and councils of ministers at the centre and states, the Muslims’ representation has become negligible; for the first time in India, there is not a single Muslim MP in the leading party of the ruling coalition. In Maharashtra and Haryana, where the BJP has won with considerable support from the Dalits, not a single member of the community is a cabinet minister. This way, the proposed social contract suggests development not as a participatory process but as a centralised one.
At the policy level, by reducing plan and non-plan expenditure on welfare schemes in a surreptitious manner, the government has dismantled the terms of engagement between the toiling, deprived millions and the aspiring millions who have opportunities. What makes it all even more problematic is the government’s reluctance to explain its thinking, and its highly centralised administrative mechanism that has virtually dismantled the cabinet system of governance, closing all options for conflicting interest groups within the Indian society to negotiate among themselves.
Democracy has been about the rights of the people, but the Modi model has turned it into a discussion on the duties of the citizens, points out political scientist Zoya Hasan. As a result, the Clean India campaign is not about the citizen’s right to have a clean environment, but about his duty to keep it clean, devoid of any reference to how the state policies may be affecting it.
The new social contract thus offers development as a centralised and apolitical process disconnected from representation, participation and equity, where the citizens’ duties are emphasised at the cost of rights. Civilisation has been repeatedly invoked to sustain this narrative.
At the macro level, in 2014, this political narrative seems to have won some public approval as repeated election victories of the BJP indicate. But public support is not necessarily an approval of the new social contract that is only being unveiled subsequently and gradually; and victories could be more a success of the style and substance of Modi’s campaign tactics. Hyperboles, half-truths and undeliverable promises have a built a castle of dreams in 2014. 2015 could be the year of awakening.
While Modi has questioned many a fundamental premise of politics, as the year draws to a close, no alternative narrative to his politics is on offer. There has been some coordination among opposition parties in Parliament, but no blueprint of a national discourse has emerged that could challenge Hindutva 2.0, which is a combination of religious nationalism and market economy, unlike its earlier version that was unable to reconcile its inward-looking cultural obsessions with the aspirations of a globalised middle class. In Bihar, all social justice parties that champion the cause of the lower castes and the Congress have joined hands. This is the only experiment in challenging Modi. The alliance of the JDU, the RJD and the Congress made some impact in the by-polls to the State Assembly that followed the BJP sweep of the state in the Parliament elections, but its long-term sustainability remains an open question. Therefore, 2014 ends with the non-BJP political space in India crying out loud for a leader and a narrative.
Meanwhile, suppressed aspirations, ignored grievances, and incited passions have not disappeared in 2014 despite the grand narrative of Modi’s civilisational project. In fact, many of them have been caused by Modi’s narrative. There have been enough reminders against complacency in 2014: Bodoland militants massacred Muslims in Assam; Maoist violence has continued; Hindutva groups have turned aggressive; and Islamist groups, despite a failure to mount any spectacular terror strikes save a bomb blast in a train in Chennai in May, are far from weakened.
Therefore, the stability plank that has been touted as the defining turn of politics in 2014 has far too many rebellions and insurgencies made invisible by its glittering promises or suppressed under its steamroller. When promises are matched against delivery, and hope gives way to scepticism, the real durability of the new social contract will be tested.
