Many have described Modi’s following in India as a kind of a cult. But the anti-Modi camp too is like a cult—the cult of the loser, caught in a loop. Its raison d’être of anti-Modism seems to be riddled with self-goals and self-harm, encoded and unstoppable.
Recall, then, the oft-repeated observation that the Opposition has no agenda of its own and survives purely on opposing Modi. The thing is, this lack cannot simply be fixed by adding a “positive agenda” (jobs, welfare). Even if they do add one, it does not catch on, does not become a narrative. The Opposition is caught in a negative spiral, a jinxed situation.
In fact, there is no ‘space’ for a positive agenda. Even a cursory glance makes it clear that it has been ‘filled up’ or supplanted by their own emotional unravelling and doomsday prophecies.
The ‘positive agenda’ is substituted and displaced by the following: “Everything is over”, this is the “death of democracy”, that, at best, this is an “electoral autocracy”. In 2014, soon after Modi’s victory, we heard hushed voices delivering the doomsday prediction: “They” are not going to hold elections in 2019. It was again repeated—“They” will not hold elections in 2024.
Remember the story of the shepherd and the tiger? The shepherd cries out, “Tiger, tiger!” The villagers turn up to save the sheep, only to find that it was a prank, that there is no tiger.
One day, though, the tiger actually comes. The shepherd cries out, “Tiger, tiger!” This time, nobody arrives and the tiger kills the sheep.
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Pitfalls of doomsday prophecies
Doomsday blackmail does not work and even has negative returns. On the one hand, their doomsday predictions force the anti-Modi camp to take up the agenda of ‘Save Democracy’ and ‘Save Constitution’. But on the other hand, their self-righteous veneration of democracy and the Constitution has come to block them from any real engagement with politics and its social determinations. They forget the difference between being the self-appointed guardians of India’s democracy and people regarding them as such.
Just declaring oneself on the side of the Good (democracy, Constitution, justice), does not entitle one to anything. Virtue-signalling is counter-productive when you have not earned the right to be virtuous. In their powerlessness, the doomsayers resemble the wilfully clueless nawabs in Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khiladi. Naturally, they end up denouncing the masses as brainwashed by the corporate media, godi media, and so on — as though things like corporate media are new, as if Noam Chomsky never wrote about it for decades.
The attachment to the doomsday blackmail creates blind spots. For example, they do not want to hear that “everything is not over”. We know that Modi’s regime is still based on around 37 per cent of the vote share. The left-of-centre space is bigger than the right-of-centre space. That internal dissension within the BJP and the government bureaucracy may be imminent.
While they might not deny these massive chinks in Modi’s armour, the anti-Modi camp is psychologically ill-disposed to operationalise and build on them. What we have is a variation on the proverb, “The emperor has no clothes”.
Secondly, when this camp says that there is “no level-playing field” and democracy is in danger, they are not wrong. The use of the enforcement agencies is appallingly dictatorial and sinister. But they seem to be complaining about it from a place of lazy entitlement, as though they are too timid to overcome all these “enormous obstacles”. It is as though they expected the Modi regime to act otherwise and provide them a level-playing field! The Opposition is not willing to step up its game.
The message they send is that they are not ready to battle it out and are just looking for an easy way back to power. Perhaps Mamata Banerjee’s 2021 victory in the Bengal state elections stands out here as a shining example of a dogged fight, inspiring others to take the opposition seriously. Then, there are figures such as Chandrasekhar Azad, Jignesh Mewani, and Kanhaiya Kumar— all self-made and extremely promising leaders who have risen from the bottom. They are, however, quietly sidelined by the alliance of virtue-signalling nawabs. Azad’s decision to fight in the Nagina Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh is highly inspiring. It is there, if at all anywhere, that the spirit of Shaheen Bagh might be in sight.
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Beyond left-wing melancholia
In 1931, as fascism was gathering steam in Germany, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin identified the equivalent of our “Shatranji nawabs” — what he called “left-wing melancholics” who love to caress empty forms and live in the world of shadows. Perhaps a contemporary mirror image exists in what the American right-wing calls “Trump-deranged liberals”.
Such “melancholics” readily substitute reality for empty gestures, messy power politics for hollow symbolism, such as Rahul Gandhi’s innocent coming-of-age yatras. They will not, for example, take a leaf from Indira Gandhi’s “controversial” ability to manage and contain the RSS from the inside. But they will go on and on complaining about the “RSS hand”, “BJP as washing machine”, “Amit Shah’s Chankaya niti”, and so on— all from the outside, as virtuous onlookers. Sometimes I wonder if the Left attracts a particular character-type: virtuous and spineless!
They have lost the ability to unpack things and understand real-time activity from the inside. They “relate” to reality only through condensed opaque terms.
For example, Rahul Gandhi will want to focus on the OBC question and the caste census. Very good. But this does not translate into Congress policy at the grassroots level.
Further, they abandon the battle in the lower courts and only focus on the rarefied realms of the higher constitutional courts. The over-reliance on the higher judiciary has made the fight to “save democracy” less and less consequential, less and less politically meaningful. They would rather garner global liberal sympathy and somehow look for shortcuts to come back to power than do something on the ground here.
They want “fascism” gone by just declaring their intentions and doling out gyan to the masses. They want to issue firmans and knowledge-fiats and just announce that democracy is in danger and the masses must rally behind them.
The anti-Modi camp cannot survive without the looming imagined figure of Modi — ever-winning and all-powerful, the Great Dictator! They cannot let go of this figure because they have spawned an entire world of their own around it.
It is a case of reverse over-identification — an excessive fixation on an imagined absolute power, when power is not all that absolute at all. It is a closed loop that tightens with each turn, a syndrome.
In 2014, saddened by the kind of loser campaign the “seculars” were running, I wrote a piece titled “How not to fight Modi”. I lost friends for saying that such a campaign will surely bring Modi to power. That time I did not realise that 10 years down the line I would be proven right — with the proviso that the anti-Modi camp would have metamorphosed into a loser cult, so exasperatingly set on the path of self-destruction.
Saroj Giri is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Delhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)