India’s political civil war: The clash of narratives

In on-going discussions of soft power, friends often ask how the dominant, Left-Liberal Congress-sponsored narrative about India is so durable. They wonder how it continues to rule not only mainstream media, but also academics, diplomacy, culture, arts, literature, and other domains of soft power, even when the UPA is out of power at the Centre and the Congress routed in most states in India.

The explanation that the Congress ruled nearly sixty of the seventy years of post-independent India is not entirely adequate. Actually, even after the manifest failures of Congress-style socialism and secularism, their idea of India is prevalent not only in India, but in many parts of the world. The reason for its depth and tenacity is that it is rather more insidious than historical. The fact is that this idea of India is a continuation of the older colonial narrative, easily supported by current Anglophone and Anglocentric neo-colonial stereotypes, is not understood by many.

In this narrative, much of the glory of ancient India is a myth, propped up by right-wing, Hindu nationalist fantasies of a lost golden age, which is itself an Orientalist invention. The neo-Ambedkarite debunking of ancient India as caste-ridden, oppressive, and, therefore, fit for rejection, is one vital plank. This unyielding opposition to any positive reconsideration of classical India is crucial to the modernist-Marxist-secularist agenda. It helps perpetually to divide Hindus between the guilty savarnas and the outraged avarnas, that latter constantly in need of reverse discrimination, if not appeasement.

Then there is the minority constituency to cater to. Here the argument advanced that the Hindu majority is unfit to assume power. That’s why Hindu deities, festivals, practices, texts are ridiculed or undermined at every opportunity. Numerically significant Muslims and the theologically well-equipped Christians are discouraged from joining the majoritarian formation led by Narendra Modi. Instead, they are constantly provoked and bamboozled to criticise the ruling dispensation. Minority resentment and insecurity must be stoked by highlighting, even fabricating, atrocities against them thus demonising the majority as perpetrators of violence and hatred against the weak and defenceless sections of society.

The entire history of India must be seen as one endless series of foreign conquests, with little native resistance or spine, let alone a coherent cultural, social, economic, or political order. India is thus projected as a weak state which should not aspire to greatness either domestically or internationally. It should remain a second-rate power, part of some larger alliance led by one superpower or other. Any assertion or will to power is castigated as jingoistic sabre-rattling, dangerous to national security and threatening to peace in the neighbourhood.

India as a weak, divided country, with a fragmented society, internally contradicted polity, controversial history, and confused self-identity, would be easier to rule by people who claim to be its guardians by virtue of not belonging to any group, region, language, or community. Essentially outsiders, they gather around them representatives of various interest groups and power brokers, distributing the largesse of office in proportion to their supporters’ efficacy or utility. This non-patriotic alliance of opportunists has only one binding glue: their own selfish interest to retain power at all costs.

When we feel bad about ourselves and our past, when we have little hope for the future, then our Left-Liberal elites are happy. Because they can tell us that only they can keep this rag-tag, divided nation, with its unwashed, benighted masses, together. That is why I have been arguing that the battle that we face as a nation is not only between two political formations or ideologies, but also between two ideas of India itself.

One is informed by idealism, hope, and the prospect of greatness. The other stokes our fears, resentments, doubts, confusions, and insecurities. The rise of Narendra Modi is threatening to the opposition precisely because he has unleashed the power of the people to think, dream, and hope to create a better India for themselves and the future generations. Modi is the great disrupter of the dominant narrative of India as a backward, unfortunate, divided, abused and abusive society in need of a motley crew of modernist protectors who have no deep passion or connection with Indian civilisation.

But even if the BJP, led by a strong, visionary leader like Modi, wins another term in 2019, the actual work to reform the country and change the dominant narrative will not be easy. For that better governance with less governmentality, steady economic growth, corruption-free systems, real empowerment of the common people, in addition to defence and diplomatic ascendancy are imperative. All these can lead to a true Indian renaissance in which India’s real soft power, cultural and spiritual, can benignly spread across the world, as in the days of yore.

The author is a poet and professor at JNU. Views expressed are personal.