Creative Commons

In August 2015, New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road was renamed APJ Abdul Kalam Road by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. On the surface, this was done because Aurangzeb wasn’t a very nice man – or so goes most of popular Indian history. Of special note are his policies that supposedly discriminated against non-Muslims and his support for puritanical religion: a special tax on non-Muslims, temple destruction banning music and so on. So terrible is Aurangzeb’s image in modern India that not only Hindutva ideologues but even liberals and some left-wingers came out in support of the renaming.

Now, after Aurangzeb, the BJP has set its sights on Akbar Road, another street in Lutyens’ Delhi. On Tuesday, VK Singh, minister of state for external affairs, publicly demanded it be renamed Maharana Pratap Singh Road, after the Sisodia ruler of Mewar who was defeated by Akbar’s forces in 1576 at the Battle of Haldighati. Singh isn’t alone. The BJP chief minister of Haryana ML Khattar and Member of Parliament Subramanian Swamy have backed him, as has the party's national spokesperson, Shaina Chudasama – who, in a rush of enthusiasm, declared that Akbar was like Hitler.

Aurangzeb and his great-grandfather Jalaluddin Akbar are the Cain and Abel of popular Mughal history. Even while Aurangzeb is reviled, his great-grand father Akbar shines through as an embodiment of the Idea of India: a broad-minded, catholic ruler who united the large parts of the subcontinent under one flag and also happened to be Muslim. It was a Nehruvian jackpot. That even Akbar is now being targeted shows just how far to the Right India has moved. From now, practically no Muslim can stake a firm claim to be a part of the country’s historical pantheon – not even if you were one of the country's most powerful emperors in all of its history.

Secular pin-up boy
Akbar made alliances with Hindu Rajputs, who were the backbone of his army – even at Haldighati, Akbar entrusted his forces to a Rajput, Man Singh (who has his own Delhi road). He had a Khatri, Todar Mal, for his finance minister, whose revenue system more than anything, ensured that the Mughals ruled for three centuries. Theological debates were organised by the emperor at a time when religious-driven prejudice was so strong that most Indians wouldn’t even so much as touch each other for fear of losing their jati and "upper" castes thought most of their countrymen subhuman. Jalaluddin, it seems, even left formal Islam, founding a religion called the Deen-e-Ilahi, angering the Muslim clergy – a grudge held till today by conservative Muslims.

The clamour to rename Aurangzeb Road was pinned on the man being a tyrant. However, in spite of these spades of liberalness, why is Akbar in the cross-hairs today?

The answer is simple: the powerful demand to strike out Akbar Road shows rather clearly that the move to rename Aurangzeb Road had very little to do with the character of Aurangzeb itself. While modern scholarship has shown that the colonial binary between Akbar and Aurangzeb was a false one, making cardboard cut-outs of complex historical figures and administrative systems, at the end of the day, in the public sphere, Akbar or Aurangzeb really doesn’t matter: any Muslim ruler simply has no place in the popular historical imagination as an Indian anymore.

Othering Akbar
It is important to note that revulsion for Akbar isn’t a one-off thing popping up now with a few leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is actually rather widespread and in keeping up with the overall rise of Savarkarite Hindutva nationalism, which treats Muslims as permanent outsiders to the Indian nation. The internet abounds with narratives of Akbar which, contrary to all historical evidence, treats him as a religious tyrant. Even worse, Ekta Kapoor, the storyteller laureate of Hindi-speaking India, has produced a television show which has an out-and-out negative portrayal of Jalaluddin.

Most worryingly, Akbar has been a political untouchable since 1947. For a person of his stature and power, surprisingly little of Akbar is seen on the street. India loves to name public works after Hindu rulers such as Shivaji and, of course, Pratap but Akbar, a man many times more powerful than both of them combined, is conspicuous by his absence. India has no roads, roundabouts, airports or museums named after Akbar; no equestrian statues of a man who was the most powerful sovereign in the world during his time. (The Akbar Road at the centre of this debate is a name bestowed by the British, who made sure that their new capital city embedded the historical memory of the seven cities of Delhi.)

Maharana Pratap, on the other hand, is well remembered. Kolkata has a park named after him, Mumbai a chowk and Lucknow a road. Udaipur has its Maharana Pratap Airport and Delhi’s interstate bus terminal is named after the Rana. Equestrian statues of Pratap abound across India, with one even making it to Parliament – one of only three medieval rulers to be so feted (the other two being Ranjit Singh and Shivaji). This when Pratap was the ruler of a tiny principality and was rather easily defeated by Akbar – a man whose empire had a massive impact on not only the rest of the Mughals and the British Raj but even the modern Indian state.

Towards a Hindu Pakistan
While Akbar and Aurangzeb are attacked for their faults – an easy enough thing to do given how different modern values are from medieval times – Pratap is let off. Temple destruction is a hot topic of debate but untouchability and caste is silently forgotten. Tsunamis of uninformed outrage crash onto the internet over the Mughal treatment of Hindus but there is pin-drop silence on the Rajput treatment of Dalits. If one is objective about using 21st century values to judge 16th century potentates, no one will come out smelling of roses.

In the end, the personal qualities of the icons India choses is hardly the matter here – it is their religious community. India is simply hurtling towards becoming a mirror image of Pakistan. Pakistan’s Muslim nationalism disallows it from accepting non-Muslims into its popular historical pantheon. The country literary begins its history from the time Islam enters Sindh and excises great rulers such as Ranjit Singh of Lahore as well as its rich Buddhist pre-Islamic past. Bhagat Singh, a man claimed by almost the entire political spectrum in India, struggles to get even a square named after himself in the very Pakistani city where he gave up his life struggling against colonialism.

Increasingly, Akbar is now to India what Bhagat Singh is to Pakistan – a remarkably admirable historical figure struggling to be remembered simply because he happens to have been born into the wrong religious community.

This article was first published on Scroll.in

There is always the danger of reading too much into the politics of a single constituency, and extrapolating it to the state or the country. Yet the result of the Kanthi Dakshin (Contai South) bye-poll, declared on Friday, is startling not because the Trinamool Congress won handsomely – that was always expected – but for the fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party came in second, comfortably.

From 9% of the vote share, the BJP near quadrupled its vote share to 31%. The Left Front on the other hand, plummeted from 34% to 10%. This, in less than one year, as the previous election had been held last May. The bye-poll was necessitated after the seat fell vacant when the previous MLA, Dibyendu Adhikari, was elected to the Lok Sabha in November.

While the Left has been declining in West Bengal for some time, the Kanthi Dakshin result might be the clearest red flag on how bad things are for the communists in the state. Given this result, it is all but inevitable that the BJP would now take up the mantle of the state’s principal Opposition, even if its current strength in the Assembly stands at just three seats out of 294.
 

Losing the narrative

East Midnapore, the district in which Kanthi Dakshin is located, is where the first stirrings arose against the decades-old rule of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the state. In 2008, the Trinamool Congress, backed by the Nandigram land agitation, defeated the Left Front in the panchayat election. Nandigram is also located in East Midnapore. Yet, even as the Left lost power in Midnapore as well as West Bengal, in 2011, it still maintained a hold in the area. In the 2016 Assembly elections, it managed to get 34% of the vote there. Yet, so dismal were its future prospects that five months after that election, its most popular face in the region, Lakshman Seth, left the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – and joined the BJP.

What is true for Midnapore is true for the rest of West Bengal. For the past year, the BJP has monopolised the Opposition space, using Hindutva to attack the Mamata Banerjee administration. While the BJP scarcely has any organisational strength in Bengal, it has managed to control the narrative at the national level, which has then filtered down to the state. This includes social media as well as television news coverage on Hindi-language channels such as Zee News, seen to be close to the BJP.
 

Lacklustre Left

While the Left is obviously unable to compete with the much larger BJP in the media space, even on the ground, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) faces organisational collapse, with its party machinery either under attack by the Trinamool, or in many cases having simply switched sides to Banerjee’s party.
The Left has also been in a spot since the land agitation movements of Singur and Nandigram.

Given its role in forcibly taking away farm land for industry in order to force West Bengal out of its industrial stagnation, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ceded the Left space to the Trinamool Congress. The Left itself had come to power in West Bengal on the issue of land rights in 1977, and its extensive land reforms ensured that it ruled the state for an uninterrupted 34 years.

Even now, the land rights movement in West Bengal remains extremely strong with an agitation breaking out in Bhangar, near Kolkata, in January, in which two people protesting against a power sub-station project were killed in police firing.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal is also affected by the national paralysis of the Left. Given that its communist ideology has lost lustre nationally and globally, the party in Bengal is struggling to attract young cadre. For instance, at its 20th Party Congress in 2012, only 4% of the delegates were below 40 years of age.
 

Don’t count the BJP’s chickens yet

The direct beneficiary of the Left’s decline has been the BJP. It won 31% of the vote in Kanthi Dakshin with barely any organisation in the area or even a relatable state leader. In fact, it had to depend largely on the muscle power of Lakshman Seth, the former Communist Party of India (Marxist) member, who is alleged to have directed the Nandigram violence of 2007.

However, while the bye-poll verdict portends the rise of the BJP as the state’s main Opposition, it is also a sign of the saffron party’s limitations in West Bengal. Till now, the BJP has fed off the Left’s decline. In Kanthi Dakshin, this has meant taking in former Communist Party of India (Marxist) leaders, and profiting from a low Muslim population in the area to reach a vote share of 31%. While this might help it in the short run, without any party machinery or leaders of its own, the BJP is a long way off from harassing the Trinamool Congress, which still retains a strong grip on West Bengal.

Courtesy: Scroll.in
 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, is a landmark document. It accorded all humans the same rights – the first time in history that this had ever happened.

Or well, that was the idea at least. In the real world, it’s a bit different. Take Article 18 of the charter that describes the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It explicitly states, “this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief” – a tenet India does not subscribe to.

In fact, far from recognising a right to convert, the Indian state and powerful Hindutva groups use the bogey of so-called forced conversions to harass minorities (mainly Christians in this case). On Sunday, for example, the Madhya Pradesh police arrested three Christians for allegedly trying to convert Hindus. Last Friday, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a vigilante group headed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath, raided a church, accusing members of converting people. Astonishingly, the police promised an investigation not against the Hindu Yuva Vahini, for harassing a church, but against the church itself, reported the Hindustan Times.

Even while Christian congregations are attacked by raising the bogey of conversion, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh boasts openly about conversion of Christians to Hinduism. In Jharkhand, the RSS aims to make whole blocks “Christianity free” and recently converted 53 families to Hinduism.
 

Legal discrimination

This religious discrimination isn’t a one-off event. It is, in fact, enshrined in law. Five states across the Indian Union ban conversion in all but name. In Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh the process of conversion is regulated to such a Kafkaesque degree that it is impossible to carry out – which was precisely the motive of the motive of the framers of the law.

In September, 2014, for example, the Madhya Pradesh police had arrested four Dalits for converting to Islam. The four men had decided to change their religion driven by the caste system – a move perfectly in consonance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, indeed, common sense. Yet, they broke the law by not taking the permission of the Madhya Pradesh state government.

As per the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act (a suitably Orwellian name for a law that actually curbs religious freedom), for a person to change his faith he needs the permission of the state administration. Even as the BJP-controlled state government booked them, the wider Sangh Parivar sprung into action putting pressure on their community (their crops were burnt and a social boycott instituted) and eventually forcing them to convert back to Hinduism.

In effect, then, apostasy from Hinduism is practically disallowed in Madhya Pradesh. The law as well as majoritarian groups will make sure it never happens.

How did things get so bad in secular India?
 

Secular clamps on freedom of religion

There were no anti-conversion laws in British India. After Independence, the Lok Sabha debated two bills that sought to curb conversions, the Indian Conversion (Regulation and Registration) Bill of 1954, and, six years later, the Backward Communities (Religious Protection) Bill. While both bills had wide support, Nehru, playing his usual role as the one-man vanguard of Indian progressivism, saw that both were eventually binned.

Predicting the repressions such laws could engender, Nehru argued with remarkable prescience that these laws, “will not help very much in suppressing the evil methods [of gaining converts], but might very well be the cause of great harassment to a large number of people. Also, we have to take into consideration that, however carefully you define these matters, you cannot find really proper phraseology for them. The major evils of coercion and deception can be dealt with under the general law. It may be difficult to obtain proof but so is it difficult to obtain proof in the case of many other offences, but to suggest that there should be a licensing system for propagating a faith is not proper. It would lead in its wake to the police having too large a power of interference.”

Foiled at the Union level, anti-conversion laws had greater success in the states. In 1967, Orissa, then ruled by the right-wing Swatantra Party, became the first state to enact a “Freedom of Religion” Law. Madhya Pradesh followed suit the next year, with Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh following with similar legislation. Chhattisgarh inherited Madhya Pradesh’s law when the state was partitioned. Arunachal Pradesh also has an anti-conversion law on its books, but since the rules for the act haven’t been framed, it remains a dead letter. The Rajasthan Assembly has already passed an anti-conversion bill that awaits the President’s assent to be made into law. Interestingly, the laws in Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh were promulgated by Congress governments, which shows how similarly the two big parties in India view this matter.

All these state laws are remarkably similar in scope. None of the laws directly ban conversion. Instead they ban conversions by means of “force, allurement, inducement or fraud” – but of course they leave these terms quite undefined, which gives the administration and its agents almost draconian powers.
 

What is a forced conversion?

For example, “force” also includes the “threat of divine displeasure”. So, farcically, if a missionary informs a person that only Christians are allowed entry into heaven – a core part of the faith – that could also be construed as “force”. This interpretation of “force” was upheld by the Orissa High Court in Yulitha Hyde v. State of Orissa. It held that the “threat of divine displeasure numbs the mental faculty; more so of an undeveloped mind and the actions of such a person thereafter, are not free and according to conscience”.

Note how the court infantalises its citizens here, calling their very minds “underdeveloped”.

Again, “inducement” or “allurement” is defined broadly to include “the offer of any gift or gratification, either in cash or in kind and shall also include the grant of any benefit, either pecuniary or otherwise” (Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967). This problematic definition was even noted by the High Court of Orissa in Yulitha Hyde vs State of Orissa and called out for its extremely wide scope. For example, any charitable work carried out by a religious organisation could come under a “grant of benefit”, as would free education or healthcare. Unfortunately, in Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh (1977), the Supreme Court struck down the Orissa High Court’s ruling and upheld this vague definition.

To really see how absurd these laws are, one needs to come to “fraud”. Since none of these laws care to define what it is, theoretically, almost any religious tenet not matching scientific fact could be fraud. So, a person preaching that “Adam was the first man on earth” could be committing fraud since their is no way to prove that in the material world. On paper, fraud could even be applied to the RSS if they propagate the tenets of Hinduism. But of course, given the majoritarian attitude of the state administration, the law is almost never used in cases of conversion to Hinduism.

Two of these acts – Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat – take the Big Brother state to absurd lengths. Both require the person converting to take the permission of the state government. That Narendra Modi and Shivraj Chauhan think that citizens need the permission of the government in order to think their thoughts and adopt beliefs or ideas is an extremely disturbing development – one that strikes a particularly large nail into the coffin of Indian progressivism.
 

Caste and conversion

When these laws first came out in Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, they were immediately challenged in the courts. Matters eventually reached the Supreme Court in 1977, where in the landmark case, Stanislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, the court held that conversion, per se, is not a fundamental right under Article 25 and can be regulated by the state.

Like in the case of the India’s many beef laws, this was a disappointing stand taken by the Supreme Court, ignoring the global consensus as well as the crucial role of conversion in combatting caste in India. Bhimrao Ambedkar had for almost all his life advocated conversion for Dalit emancipation, in the end himself converting to Buddhism in 1956 along with lakhs of others. Ironically, while Ambedkar had the freedom to advocate conversion in colonial India, a free India would probably severely censure or even jail him today.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

We live in a disorienting world. In West Asia, the Islamic State uses displays of cruelty and religious fanaticism as a propaganda tool. In large swathes of Europe, far right nationalism is rearing its head for the first time since after the defeat of fascism in World War II. The world’s only superpower, meanwhile, has a president elected to office on an explicit programme of racial and religious bigotry, attacking Muslims and non-White Americans in his campaign speeches.

And, of course, closer home in India, the ideology of Hindutva, which considers India to be a “Hindu nation”, grows ever stronger, assaulting Muslims and Dalits in its wake.

In his new book, intellectual Pankaj Mishra tries to explain this fury enveloping the world. Titled Age of Anger: A History of the Present, the work traces traces today’s discontentment to the rapid changes of the 18th century, when modernity was shaped.
You say that the enlightenment gave rise to some “irresistible ideals: a rationalistic, egalitarian and universalising society in which men shaped their own lives”. So why do so many people disagree with the way in which you see the enlightenment? You’ve shown it to be a very positive thing. So how are, say, Islamists looking at it differently? Why do they disagree?

Well, I am not sympathetic to their critique and I am not sure that they’re directly critiquing the Enlightenment rather than the consequences of the kind of thinking introduced by the Enlightenment philosophers in the late 18th century. And let’s be careful here: many of the consequences weren’t anticipated by these philosophers themselves.

What they were talking about was a polity. And for them a polity was the church and then the monarchy. And they thought individuals could use reason since there had been enough scientific breakthroughs, enough revelations about the nature of reality out there. They did not need intermediaries like the church to tell us what to think about the world, what to think about reality. We could use our individual reason to construct our own worlds essentially and shape society. That was the fundamental message they had. They had no idea what would happen in the 19th century.

What happened in the 19th century was something very different: large nation-states came into being, the process of industrialisation started, the use of individual reason expanded, science took off, all kind of new technologies came into being, and large political and economic webs were built.

The Islamist critique of that would be: too much responsibility for shaping the world was placed upon the extremely fallible minds and sensibilities of the human individual. That this was going against centuries of custom, tradition and history. Human beings had always been seen as being very frail and weak creatures who needed some kind of constraint and that was the role of traditional religion.

Religion reminded humans being of the severe limitations that life imposes on everyone. Whereas the promise of freedom and emancipation sets off all kinds of unpredictable processes that result in actually more oppression and more pain.

So that would be or has been the modern critique of the Enlightenment – which is shared by a pretty broad spectrum of people, not just the Islamists. Mahatma Gandhi himself voiced many of these critiques of modern science, modern industry and the modern nation-state. You have to remember that Rabindranath Tagore himself expressed those critiques. So we also have to look at these other critics of Enlightenment rationalism.

You go into some detail in describing Savarkar in the book. In many ways, a very good argument could be made that Savarkar was a rationalist. He said Hindus should eat beef, for example. How does a Savarkar then map to the more modern forms of Indian conservatism? How do you go from Savarkar to the current-day gau rakshak?

I think Savarkar is essentially a child of Enlightenment rationalism despite all the claims made for an unbroken Hindu tradition. The important thing to note about the Savarkar variety of Hindu nationalism is that it is deeply European and deeply modern. Which was one reason why Gandhi was so opposed to it. He said this was the rule of Englishmen with the English in his book Hind Swaraj.

So Savarkar does not partake of a critique of the Enlightenment. He, in fact, in very much a product of 19th century Europe, which advances Enlightenment rationalism in unexpected directions. He starts to think of a national community of like-minded individuals. He starts to think of a past which can be recruited by the present, that can be deployed politically. Savarkar subscribes to everyone of these political tendencies which are elaborated most prominently by [Giuseppe] Mazzini. So he comes out of that particular tradition.

So this whole reverence for figures and symbols from the past which the gau rakshak seems to manifest is a total 19th century fantasy. People did not think of the past in that way before that century. The past was very deliberately enlisted into a nationalist project. Every nationalist – and I write this in the book – had made some sort of a claim upon the past, made some sort of connection.

We are now looking at history as a series of ruptures and new beginnings. In Savarkar’s case, the rupture would be the Muslim invasion of India. That’s also the case for [VS] Naipaul. That was the big rupture that violates the wholeness of the Hindu past. And now we are invested in a new beginning, which is the revival of Hindu glory.

This whole way of looking at time, of looking at human agency and identity is a product of the European 19th century. And that’s where Savarkar should be placed. I think we spend too much time comparing him to the Germans and the Italians of the 1930s. I think we should go back and look at the 19th century more closely. And also look at Savarkar – which I’ve done in the book – together with various other tendencies such as Zionism.

But it’s not only Savarkar who’s doing this, right? There’s a whole galaxy of Indian leaders, right from Nehru to Jinnah, taking off from the Enlightenment. In your book, you quote Dostoyevsky, who underlined a tragic dilemma: of a society that assimilates European ways through every pore only to realise it could never be truly European. Is there anything that can be done to break this dilemma?

The short answer would be a pessimistic one: that there is no way to break this. Because once we make that original break from pre-modern/rural/traditional society, break away from belief in god, from belief in a horizon that was defined by transcendental authorities, once you stop living in that world, then you are condemned to finding substitute gods. And the national community and the nation state has been that substitute god or transcendental authority for hundreds and millions of people for the last two hundred years.

And one reason it endures – even though in many ways the nation state has lost its sovereign power after being undermined by globalisation – is that as an emotional and psychological symbol, and as a way to define the transcendental horizon, the nation state is still unbeatable. So once we make that basic move away from the pre-modern modes of life into this modern, industrialised, urbanised mode of existence, we have basically embarked on a journey where there’s no turning back. There’s no breaking out of that.

Where do you situate Modi on this scale?
I think Modi is an interesting case. He’s not only someone who incarnates the tendencies that we identify with Savarkar – who is a model for Modi – but also mirrors many contemporary tendencies which one can identify with a sort of aspirational neoliberalism. The man from nowhere who makes it big: that’s the story that Modi has tried to sell about himself. That he’s the son of a chaiwallah who has overcome all kinds of adversity including violent, vicious attacks from the country’s English-speaking elites who wanted to bring him down but failed. And he has overcome all these challenges to become who he is. And he invites his followers to do the same.

So, in that sense, he not only is a Hindu nationalist in the old manner of thinking of India as primarily a country of Hindus and as a community of Hindus which needs to define itself very carefully by excluding various foreigners, but also someone who is in tune with the ideological trends of the last 30 years, which place a lot of premium on individual ambition and empowerment, not just collective endeavour. So he is a very curious and irresistible mix, as it turns out, of certain collectivist notions of salvation with a kind of intensified individualism.

You used a very interesting phrase there: “aspirational neoliberalism”. In the book, you use another term, “neoliberal individualism”. In my opinion, you take a negative opinion of this sort of individualism. Could you tell us what “neoliberal individualism” is, how is it different from, say, Enlightenment individualism and why are you taking a negative view of it.

Individualism really is synonymous with modernity, which is all about individual autonomy and reason. The most important difference is that the previous forms of individualism had certain constraining factors. There would be religion, the nation state, the larger collective.

When [Alexis de] Tocqueville goes to America and begins to describe individualism at work in the world’s first democratic society, he is aware that all of this is made possible because religion is a very important factor. There are many intermediate institutions there to mediate between individuals and the larger reality of society. So these factors were extremely important for individualism to actually work properly.

What neoliberal individualism proposes, though, is essentially that we don’t actually need these intermediaries. It buys into a kind of extreme libertarian fantasy of the kind we see people like Peter Theil [co-founder of PayPal and vocal Trump supporter] expressing. They’re saying, “we don’t need government”, “we don’t need collective endeavour of any kind”, “we don’t really need notions of collective welfare, general welfare or common good”.

They believe individuals pursuing their self-interest can create a common good. And the marketplace would be where these individual desires and needs could be miraculously harmonised. So it’s a kind of mysticism, really, neoliberal individualism. It basically argues that we don’t need any constraining factors. We do not need any intermediate institutions of the kind Tocqueville argued for in America. Neoliberal individualism says, all we really need is individual initiative, individual energy, individual dynamism and, of course, individual aspiration. So this is how neoliberal individualism is different from previous forms of individualism.

It is interesting that you mention Peter Theil, a major supporter of Trump. Is neoliberal individualism then powering Trump?
Well, no. That’s the thing. There are many contradictory elements in this mix. To go back to Modi, he comes from a party which has as part of its extended family the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. The Manch believes in Swadeshi but Modi wants to attract foreign investment.

I think we have to start thinking of a world where archaisms, modernity, post-modernity all exist simultaneously yet differently. You can think of it as different territories. Trump can therefore mobilise a whole lot of disaffected individuals who have believed in the neoliberal ideology and have felt themselves victimised by various technocratic elites and attract a figure like Theil, who claims to be a libertarian, and at the same believe that economic protectionism is the way to go.

I think there are many different contradictory tendencies that have come together to produce events or personalities like Donald Trump and Modi. I think if we were to follow this old analytic method of either/or we would miss many of these contradictory aspects of modern politics and economics. In the same way, Erdoğan mixed in neoliberalism with Islamism and Putin mixed in Orthodox Christianity with Russian Eurasianism. There are all kinds of mixtures on offer.

The central argument being that they correspond to the acute, inner divisions of human beings. Of people wanting individual power, expansion and at the same time wanting identity, longing and a sense of community. So this is, in a way, a little snapshot of where we are – a kind of endless transition.
 

Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra, Juggernaut Books.

While there is little clarity on the effect of the raids conducted by the India Army across the Line of Control on September 29, the political debate that the event set off has taken on a life of its own. Both the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress are trying hard to limit the political gains the Bharatiya Janata Party will able to earn from this. The response of the BJP to this – supported by some sections of the media – has been a call to not politicise the surgical strikes.

Of course, what this misses out is the BJP’s own efforts to politicise the operation, apparently with an eye to the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections. More fundamentally, this line of argument ignores the fact that it is the job of politicians in a democracy to, well, politicise things. Debating and discussing public issues allows the Indian people to claim a stake in policy and acts as a check on the government’s power.
 

BJP takes credit

The September 29 raids were not the first time the Indian Army has crossed the Line of Control but it was the first time the Union government had openly admitted to doing so. One possible motivation was to embarrass Pakistan and send a very public message that its support to terror would have consequences. Of course, the announcement also undoubtedly helps the BJP in its domestic politics – a benefit the Congress could never claim, given that it remained silent about the army raids during its administration.

In Uttar Pradesh, which goes to polls soon, the BJP state party president has already announced that Prime Minister Narendra Modi might be going to Lucknow to celebrate the festival of Vijaydashami, making sure to mention that “the government is deserving of all accolades for responding strongly to threats by Pakistan”. A report in the Hindu mentions that the party feels an “overarching sentiment of nationalism could mediate some of the caste equations that have gone awry recently”.

Already, posters across Uttar Pradesh celebrate the surgical strikes and categorically credit the Bharatiya Janata Party for it. The BJP’s earlier argument that the army’s actions remain above politics has been discarded, it seems.

Given these moves by the BJP, it natural that the Opposition will also move in to try and stake a position on the surgical strikes. In fact, to try and deprecate this competitive politics in a democracy by calling it “politicisation” misunderstands the very nature of democracy where competition between parties drives public good. In a free society, debate and discussion acts like sunlight, helping to disinfect any rot that might set into the system. The hustle and bustle of politics in a democracy might look unseemly but it keeps governments on the right path and acts as a check on tyranny.
 

Politicisation is democracy

The checks and balances of democratic politics apply to all function of a government – including defence. In fact, given how important defence is, it might even be said it is applicable especially to defence. In a democracy such as India, the armed forces are firmly under civilian control. The Indian Army reports to the Union government, which in turn serves at the pleasure of an elected parliament. In other words, the army reports to politicians.

To argue that defence policy should not be politicised is a curious position to take. Given that politicians are making defence policy in the first place, the matter is a political one right from the start. An argument to oppose politicisation is therefore a rather thinly veiled appeal to basically place the Union government beyond reproach.

The people of India have, against many odds, managed to create and sustain a functioning democracy. Critiquing every function of the government – including the Army – is a necessary ingredient to make this democratic system work. Many Indians who feel the need to have a system where the army cannot be questioned, should first look across the country’s western border.

In Pakistan, this is exactly the system that is in place, with the army growing to be so powerful as to conduct multiple coups against civilians governments. Even today, with a civilian government in place, it is widely understood that defence policy is conducted solely by the Pakistani Army and the federal government has little role to play in it. Pakistanis would, in fact, give an arm and a leg to be able to “politicise” their defence policy and take it out of the hands of their generals. Indians who wish for politicians to not question the army and its actions should be careful what they wish for.

This article was first published on Scroll.in