No, it isn’t change for Rs 1,000 or Rs 500 notes. It’s the reason why a post-ideological majority is turning insurgent
Donald Trump’s victory is seen to confirm a trend seen worldwide, of the political Right returning to power, sweeping away the Left and along with it a lot of the liberal ideas which had grown bipartisan acceptance. In America, it was free markets, trade and immigration; in Europe it was the decline of nationalism. For us in India, religion was a purely personal thing until a leader was elected; once elected to power, every leader spoke to each community as her own and political correctness defined all public discourse. Now that has changed.
It isn’t, however, ideologically linear. India, Britain (Brexit), the US, Argentina and Brazil conform to the rightward surge which, it is widely presumed, will shortly consume Italy, France and maybe even Venezuela where Hugo Chavez’s successor deals with rebellion against soon-to-be four-figure inflation. Most of southern and Latin America, as Ruchir Sharma notes in his latest The Rise and Fall of Nations, has shifted from Left to Right. Colombia’s referendum has rejected a peace deal with FARC guerrillas, finding their own Right wing government not Right enough. Shinzo Abe’s popularity continues to surge in Japan on the east as does the still rising power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Asia’s western edge.
A Right surge sweeping out old Left, and in fact even centrist Right, therefore, is a persuasive line. But then how do you explain the rise of a most Left-Liberal Justin Trudeau in Canada; nutty, supposedly Leftist Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines; rising discontent and defiance of the reign of the Right in South Korea in the same geography; and even the rise of the socialist Alexis Tsipras in Greece, defying what would otherwise be an unarguably pan-European trend.
See how this has played out in India post-2014. The states the BJP won immediately after the general elections, Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand confirmed the same trend. But what happened then in Delhi, Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala? The first two, the BJP (or Indian Right) fancied winning on form, but were routed instead. In the next two, they failed to make any impact, unable to even repeat their general election vote share. In West Bengal, in fact, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, in most ways Left of the CPI(M), won. And in the last, while the BJP didn’t matter, and the Congress (UDF) was itself deeply Left-of-centre, the real Communists won.
It leaves us all very mixed up and confused. What is the voter telling us she likes? It is change, of course, but not change in the old-fashioned sense which we used to call anti-incumbency. If that were the case, why would the Right-wing governments of Britain and Colombia lose referendums while there is no counter-surge of the Left? Similarly, if it is unstoppable rise of the Right, how does Arvind Kejriwal’s very juvenile (literally, in vintage, not as a value judgement) party break this momentum in Delhi, threatens to do so in Punjab and looms large in Goa and Gujarat, all states with old, loyal vote banks of well-established parties? Similarly, how does Mr Trump then hijack the Republican Party?
We need to look for answers beyond the familiar ideological constructs. First of all, it is evident that the change the voter wants isn’t just of the government, but a change of established ideas, ideals and thought processes. It doesn’t matter whether it goes left to right, the other way around, or swings further away in the same direction. The voter wants a complete change in the manifesto because of three reasons: One, she feels confident enough to take risks, try something adventurous. Second, a quarter century of growth, globalisation and hyper-connectivity have raised aspirations, and those in small towns or villages now don’t just aspire to migrate to the booming cities they envy but also want the boom to come to where they are. And finally, they are simply bored with old politics. They want to check out something new, new ideas, leaders, and yet revive some old, fading passions.
Nationalism is the most dominant of these. Its fading has so far been celebrated on both moderate sides of the ideological divide. But, just like religion, nationalism is among the oldest passions of mankind and is fighting back. Smart leaders — Mr Trump is the latest — have seen this. Packaged with ultra-populism and the appeal of a domineering, even narcissistic individual at the top who lives by his own rules rather than established ones, even of his own party, it is an unbeatable force. An outsider as an insurgent leader, is just the change that a bored, insurgent voter wants.
As results of the April-May 2014 elections came in, I had written that this is the verdict of a new, youthful, post-ideological, I-don’t-owe-you-nothing electorate. There was a reasonable counter to this: How can you say this when India has voted in its first government of the Right with its own majority?
The answer then, with a leap of faith, was that probably India wasn’t voting for ideological change but rebelling against the Congress party’s cynical, patronising povertarianism, as also the hypocrisy of its ruling family to not wield power directly or even let their appointee function. Nobody voted at that point for gau-raksha, end of strategic restraint with Pakistan, or against triple-talaq. None of these was on the BJP’s agenda. Now we have evidence in global trends.
People breaking out of old loyalties is explained in countries like India by the rise of a youth that’s dumping politics rooted in grievances of the past and moving into an aspirational future. In developed countries where the population, contrarily, is ageing, there is a new grievance: Over the glorious past lost to globalisation and growth, bulk of whose benefits have gone to the “undeserving and wrong” people, especially the immigrants. The response in both cases, is the same: Radical change, and rejection of everything that reeks of old establishment. This is why Narendra Modi rules the BJP as no one has ever done and Mr Kejriwal is vacuum-cleaning the Congress party’s vote banks. And of course, Trump voters are probably more thrilled he has trounced the Republican establishment, even more than his Democratic rival.