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The future of Indian politics

By Vamsi Vakulabharanam

This is probably the last chance for the liberal-left forces to counter the further progress of the Hindutva ideology.

THE GUJARAT elections have sent a chilling message to the non-Hindutva forces. It is that a ruling political party that uses the official state machinery and perpetrates violence on minority communities can still obtain a popular mandate without masquerading as liberal or centrist. What are the possible implications for the coalition Government at the Centre? For the past few years, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was said to be a coalition of forces that spanned a wide spectrum in terms of their secular leanings. It was widely felt that even if the BJP tried to push its own agenda, the other partners in the alliance would restrain it, thereby neutralising its extreme communal leanings. This optimism has finally been vanquished. The BJP has not only declared its hatred for the minority communities openly in Gujarat but it has also shown that the NDA partners do not matter in the ultimate analysis for its political calculations. There is a broad tendency that is noticeable already in Indian politics at this juncture that might be symptomatic of a new phase. The BJP no longer feels the need to hide behind the `moderate' face of Atal Behari Vajpayee in order to attract a broader base. It feels it can make its partners toe its line more aggressively than ever. The partners have also fallen in line largely with the implicit political calculation that they will otherwise perish in an increasingly communalised nation. If this tendency strengthens, what will be its effect on Indian politics? History of fascism from different contexts suggests that there is no inevitable outcome. The fascist tendency might strengthen and decimate the democratic forces. On the other hand, democratic forces could organise themselves better and counter the further march of fascism. The outcome will depend on how the consciousness of the popular masses is shaped and influenced by these fundamentally different broad-based coalitions.

I will present a real historical case where the fascist forces emerged out of a coalition of political parties and then decimated the democratic forces. I will look at how this defeat was made sense of by a critic from the democratic camp viz. Antonio Gramsci. It is well known that the Italian Fascist Party started off as a member of coalition Governments in the early 1920s before eventually taking over Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The argument that coalition Governments could not become fascist because the fascist tendency would be countervailed by non-fascist tendencies in a coalition used to be in vogue during those days in Italy too. Gramsci had a different way of making sense of coalitions. He argued that every coalitional government had the potential to become Caesarist. Caesarism here means either a powerful individual or a powerful ideological force emerging stronger and taking over political power from the hitherto existing equilibrium among the coalition of different interests. Gramsci argues that Caesarism could push political change in a progressive direction or a reactionary one depending on the configuration of the forces that prevail at that time. This phenomenon came to the fore in Italy around 1921-22 when Mussolini's party was still only a member of the coalition Government. It was only a matter of time before Mussolini became a full-fledged dictator and the fascist party became synonymous with the Italian state.

What happened to the Italian political parties that represented other interests during this period? Gramsci mentions the `fable of the beaver' to summarise what happened to them. When hunters try to trap the beaver to get one of its important organs to be used for medicinal purposes, it simply sheds that organ and runs away. Most of the parties in Italy fled from political fights after having surrendered their democratic credentials to the hunting fascists. The fascists physically decimated the only party, the Italian Communist Party, which stood up against them. A whole host of important leaders who put up resistance were either killed or imprisoned. Gramsci himself was imprisoned in 1926. He penned all his important reflections on the fascist phase while in prison under extreme censorship and persecution.

What are the parallels in the current Indian scenario with the Italian fascism of the early 1920s? It seems that the coalition Government is surely heading towards a phase wherein the BJP's political partners are made to look increasingly inconsequential. When the post-Godhra state-sponsored genocide unfolded in Gujarat, several of the BJP's allies openly asked for the sacking of the Modi Government. Among them were such influential political partners as the Telugu Desam Party and its leader, N. Chandrababu Naidu, the Trinamool Congress and its leader, Mamata Banerjee, the Samata Party, and to a lesser extent, even the DMK and its leader, M. Karunanidhi. The demand was denied on the basis that it was an internal matter of the BJP. Sangh Parivar groups such as the RSS and the VHP openly supported the Modi Government, and said the NDA allies had no business to interfere in the internal matters of the BJP. The NDA allies simply took the denial of the BJP lying down. At that juncture itself it was clear that the coalition that was supposed to counterbalance multiple contradictory forces was heading in one direction.

After the elections, when we read public announcements by the VHP's Praveen Togadia that there will be a Hindu Rashtra in another two years, it is clear that the tendency mentioned above is gathering momentum. Now that some more States are to go to the polls soon, there is an open search for Modi-like leaders in other parts of the country. Narendra Modi as an individual might not turn out to be extremely important in the years to come. But the ideology and praxis that he embodied during the Gujarat riots are going to signify an attractive model for other State units and even for the political party at the national level. But is this tendency inevitably going to spread across the country with the ultimate victory of the fascist forces? There is no reason to take recourse to such fatalism. However, the other outcomes in which democratic forces forge broad-based alliances to defeat fascist forces will not happen automatically. Now that the Gujarat case has shown us that violence of any degree is possible under the BJP regime, it is about time that various political parties shed their faith that in a civilised country people will not allow certain kinds of violence. Not only has such an episode of violence occurred, but it has been followed by a resounding victory. It is time that the sections of the liberal Indian middle class that have supported the BJP in the interests of political `stability', and have seen extraordinary `ability' in the leadership of Mr. Vajpayee, wake up to the darker side of his political party. It is not enough to perceive the party as consisting of certain intolerant elements that could be effectively controlled by moderates such as Mr. Vajpayee, but it is important to really understand that the moderate posturing of Mr. Vajpayee is simply the other side of the same coin that contains the fundamentalism of Mr. Modi. In any case, Mr. Vajpayee's moderate facade keeps slipping as has happened often in the past. The NDA allies must take stock of the situation and rise above their short-term political gains, otherwise it will be only a matter of time before they get effectively marginalised by the hardline Hindutva forces and end up in political wilderness, if not in prison.

Finally, this is probably the last chance for the liberal-left forces to counter the further progress of the Hindutva ideology. It is probably not enough to make electoral alliances and stop with that strategy. The moment is here to really organise from the grassroots level to shape the commonsense of the popular masses and if necessary even to intervene in the cultural spaces that have been so conveniently monopolised by the Hindutva groups in the name of religion. A lack of concerted effort on the part of these forces will only make the fable of the beaver come true in the Indian context too.

(The writer is Research Scholar, University of Massachusetts.)

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