By the time the new parliament convenes, one thing would have become clearer: Whether Narendra Modi is essentially an old-style politician under an extroverted modern gloss or a game-changer. Because an old-timer would be partisan to the core, defending the indefensible to the very logical end, that is, the loss of an argument and some political capital. If he is an original new phenomenon, one of a kind, or sui generis as the more scholarly people prefer to say, he would expel ‘Sadhvi’ Pragya Singh Thakur for her praise of Nathuram Godse. But then, he should have fired ‘Sadhvi’ Niranjan Jyoti in December 2014 when she made that “Ramzaade-versus-haraamzaade” comment in the run up to the Delhi assembly elections.
We need to think this through again, and think hard. Do we, the currently besieged and cornered minority of Indian liberals, even want the Pragya Thakur-Niranjan Jyoti stories to end that way, and this soon? Do we want it to end at all? A ‘sadhvi’ in the BJP’s visible rungs brings such solace to liberals. It is living proof that we are intellectually right and morally superior. And, most importantly, that we are losing. Poor us. Is there any future left for the Indian liberal with rise and rise of Narendra Modi? Why isn’t the rest of the world feeling sorry for us? How can we, such a small, brave but increasingly disenfranchised community of liberals, be expected to rectify the consequence of the stupidity of crores of voters? The future is lost, a mythical past is upon us, the barbarians are at the gates. Where is my ticket to an American campus or think-tank?
Even for a bout of self-flagellation, this sounds harsh. If Modi lacks the political wisdom to cut his losses early enough, it is his problem and not that of his critics. In fact, the longer he perpetuates this, the more the Indian Left-liberal will say, I told you so. From Niranjan Jyoti to Adityanath to Pragya Thakur, the new saffron-robes are welcome evidence of all our warnings gone unheeded. Just as Sadhvi Rithambara and Ashok Singhal were in the early 1990s, and Praveen Togadia and Pramod Muthalik in the interregnum. It would be such disappointment if Modi did the right thing now and sent the sadhvis home. He can’t deny us this living, walking and talking evidence for our unheeded warnings.
Credit must be given where it’s duly deserved, in this case to American liberal academic Steve Almond, whose 8 June 2012 article (‘Liberals are ruining America, I know because I am one’) in The New York Times originally triggered this central thought of liberal masochism, self-isolation, mourning or, in the more apt Indian usage, rona–dhona, or even better, in Punjabi, syaapa. Almond talked of how he briefly acquired liberal martyrdom in 2006 by resigning his teaching job at Boston College to protest the selection of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker. His biggest reward, he said, was an invitation to appear on an abusive Right-wing chat show on Fox News, and he thought then that he had paid his liberal dues by standing up to sour-mouthed, shouty anchor Sean Hannity.
By 2012, he said, he saw that action as less heroic. “I hadn’t spoken truth to power or caused anyone to reassess Secretary Rice’s record. I merely provided a few minutes of gladiatorial stimulation for Fox News. In seeking to assert my moral superiority, I enabled Hannity,” he wrote.
If you recall 2012 America, the Right-Left polarisation cut across society. But in 2014, six months into Modi’s reign, India had begun to sound quite similar. By summer 2019, it’s the ‘normal’ in our politics. Almond’s self-diagnosis seems to fit us too now. “This, to be blunt, is the tragic flaw of the American liberal,” he said. “We choose to see ourselves as innocent victims of an escalating Right-wing fanaticism. But too often we serve as willing accomplices… and to the resulting degradation of our civic discourse.” Then, turning the sword in his own belly, he said: “We do this, without even meaning to, by consuming conservative folly as mass entertainment.”
Sounds familiar? Think of all the delighted liberal chuckling in social media when the “illiterate Right” makes a fool of itself on Vedic science claims, if the prime minister misspells “strength” as “streanh”. So what did you expect, it gives the opportunity to ask from a pulpit that’s higher socially, though we’d think only morally.
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In India, the issue of marginalisation of the liberal classes is compounded by the deep-rooted, terminal elitism of the liberal. I have fretted for years that politically, our liberal constituency is shrinking because it had become, post-Independence, hyphenated with the Left. Our national ideology emerged from the freedom movement, which was very liberal. The Congress then was a political umbrella wide enough to give room to liberals of the Left as well as the Right, and also intellectual space for them to argue. Remember, Syama Prasad Mookerjee was even a member of Nehru’s cabinet, and Sardar Patel his deputy. Madan Mohan Malaviya had been Congress president for four terms. But over the next two decades, the Right was purged, artfully by Nehru and then crudely by his daughter.
India’s only truly liberal party, therefore, morphed into a Left-liberal party. You need to read Ramachandra Guha to learn more about it. But people of my generation do remember the ‘star’ symbol of C. Rajagopalachari’s Swatantra Party, where much of the old Congress Right collected and which once was a formidable opposition force, netting 44 Lok Sabha seats in 1967. That’s about what Congress got in 2014 and barely surpassed in 2019. Indira Gandhi destroyed it, and thereby India’s liberal Right, with her post-1969 “revolutionary” push.
This reduced liberalism to a Left monopoly as the Right merged into saffron. It lasted as long as Indian politics and popular mind were dominated by old, anti-imperialist, non-aligned, West-phobic ideas of the Cold War. But it did not have the flexibility to change with new realities as the Cold War ended, global power and economic equations were rewritten, and successive generations of aspirational, ambitious, impatient and post-ideological Indians rose.
I am not sure Dr Manmohan Singh quite looked at it this way, but post-1991, he was probably the only famous liberal of old times who thought it was time to delete the hyphenated Left. By the middle of 2009, with a bigger second mandate, he was winning this campaign of ideological correction. But he was defeated by the party’s embedded and parasitic pink immune system.
While Singh had the intellectual honesty to acknowledge, or to borrow the words of his political mentor Narasimha Rao, do “what to do when the ground under your feet is moving”, he failed to see the very formidable elitism underpinning this Left-liberalism. To be liberal, you had to be Left, and to be Left-liberal, your parents should have done very well, given you a Doon-Stephen’s-Oxbridge education, a Delhi Golf Club membership, and definitely a home in the capital’s Little Kremlins, Diplomatic Enclave and couple more neighbourhoods to its immediate south, in bequest. Singh and Rao didn’t check out on this, and failed.
That is why the liberals are back in their Lefty, but also elitist hole, or rather their ivory bunker, though Modi has immortalised the Khan Market metaphor now. Why bunker, not tower, we will just get to.
It is now an uchch–koti (superior) Brahminical club (I use that purely in its intellectual manifestation, not a Manuwadi one). ‘Outsiders’ are rejected. And so what if its ranks continue to shrink? A reminder was served on me some time back in a very exhaustive profile of me in a self-avowedly liberal publication that traced my apparent success over four decades and marvelled that I could get here despite being the son of a “minor bureaucrat from Haryana” and “lacking the eloquence” of my Oxbridge peers.
Now, the second is a fact, but the first an exaggeration. My late father, in fact, would have been quite flattered to be described as a minor bureaucrat. He slogged all his life to rise to become one, a gazetted officer, even if a day before his retirement, so he would also have the “power” to attest somebody’s certificates. He was mostly a clerk, or rather an assistant, despite his relatively high education. He struggled with money, with his tiny salary sent his children mostly to sarkari Hindi medium schools and colleges, but still made sure we bought two English and Hindi newspapers each, three magazines and listened to cricket commentary regularly, in English.
I say all this not to praise him, or to write belatedly an obit he was not famous, powerful or rich enough to deserve when he passed away in 1998, but to provide the sociological point of my larger argument.
I say this because I now believe that my parents’ generation (my father would have been 90 today) was not atypical of post-Independence liberal Indians, mostly Congress voters, who were willing to challenge earlier acceptance of elite domination with “Bhagwan teri maya, kahin dhoop kahin chhaya” resignation. They believed early enough that education in the English language would bring equality. Economic reform brought opportunity and then suddenly, it was no longer so life-and-death, that your parents should have done very well for you to be taken seriously.
That is the reality India’s elite liberals have failed to understand or embrace. In defining liberalism as an exclusive ‘Brahminical’ value of the intellectual, economic and academic upper crust, they have closed their doors to the enormously more numerous rest, as our ancestors had shut them out of Sanskrit scholarship and even math and science. If Mahabharata is a reality, so is the legend of Eklavya.
One of the most stirring speeches in defence of Indian secularism was made in 1996 by Ram Vilas Paswan, when Vajpayee’s short-lived government was seeking a confidence vote. How many Muslims came with Babur, he asked, and then answered, only forty. So how did they swell to crores? Because “people like us”, he said, Dalits and lower castes, were not allowed entry in your temples, “so we went to the mosques instead”.
This is precisely what today’s liberal elites have done to the tens of crores of rising, aspirational, post-ideological Indians, children of poorer parents like mine who beg, steal, borrow, scrounge, starve, deny themselves that pack of cigarettes to give us opportunity, if not houses in Shanti Niketan or Kautilya Marg or Golf Club memberships. Instead, Modi has embraced them and now enjoys power that no Indian prime minister has since Indira in 1971. These Indians are now coming, smashing the defences of the elite liberal ivory tower, or rather, bunker.
A version of this article first appeared as National Interest in December 2014.
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