India: The 'Discreet Charm' of the BJP | Sumanta Banerjee

From: Economic and Political Weekly, June 14, 2014

With the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh parivar's poster boy in power at the centre, India seems to be heading for a political order in which the social psyche will be marked by the following three traits: (i) thick-skinned insensitivity to problems that are outside one's own domain of immediate, or group interests; (ii) herd mentality of sticking together to defend those interests through a variety of mental shortcuts; and (iii) smooth-skinned hypocrisy to demonstrate one's respectability.

Finally, the Sangh parivar’s poster boy has made it. In the electoral market of a multilayered public demand, and a multi-cornered contest, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could sell Narendra Modi as the sole winnable candidate by launching an advertising campaign which projected him as a consumer item that appealed to the various layers. He charmed his way from his traditional Hindu conservative base in the cow-belt to the new urban generation of careerist youth, from the aspirant middle classes to the profit-seeking corporate sector, which were all mesmerised by the buzzwords “Gujarat model”, “development”, “governance”. Will Modi’s shelf life last beyond the next five-year period, during which he will have to cope with the demands made by these various competitive layers of the BJP’s vote bank, for their respective pound of flesh? Will his opponents succeed in mounting an effective resistance – both on the floors of the house and in the streets – to dislodge the BJP government in the next Lok Sabha elections?

It is also necessary to remind the Modi-maniacs that their leader has gained the support of only about 32% of the total electorate – and that also concentrated in certain areas of central and western India. The rest of the 68% who did not vote for Modi were divided along different political loyalties, and could not be brought together under a unified opposition canopy that could have swept away the “Modi wave”. But while blaming the first-past-the-post system as an imperfect mechanism for failing to represent and do justice to the actual constellation of opinions at the ground level, let us not underestimate the tenacity of the Sangh parivar’s political outfit, the BJP, and its foot soldiers in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in making use of this same system to reach its goal. It had unitedly (unlike its political opponents) followed a game plan of steadily making its way into Parliament, with the ultimate objective of capturing power.

Parliamentary Voyage

Let us look at the Sangh parivar’s historical tally in parliamentary elections. Right from the first general elections in 1952, when its then political wing, the Jana Sangh, won three seats, it managed to increase its number to 22 in 1971-72. In the years that followed, the Jana Sangh rode piggyback upon the anti-Congress coalition politics that was initiated by Jayaprakash Narayan, and the anti-Emergency underground campaign during 1975-77. In the 1977 general elections, it joined the anti-Congress alliance of the Janata Party (which swept the polls by winning 298 out of 542 seats) and won 93 seats in the Lok Sabha – a dramatic leap from its earlier performance – making it the largest component in the Janata coalition. But the Jana Sangh’s umbilical cord with its parent RSS became a bone of contention in the Janata Party, with the socialists and ex-Congress members demanding that the Jana Sangh should give up its “double membership”. The internal bickering within the Janata government led to its fall. After the failure of a series of experiments in opportunist alliances to form a government at the centre, the seventh general elections in early January 1980 brought back the Indira Gandhi-led Congress to power. The Janata Party won only 31 seats, out of which the Jana Sangh’s share was 16 – a climb down from its tally of 93 in 1977. Following this defeat, the Sangh parivar elders decided on a new stratagem.

In April 1980, they gave their political outfit a facelift by renaming it as BJP – an amalgam of its old Jana Sangh members and a few deserters from the defeated Janata Party. The new party claimed that it was the authentic representative of the ideas of both, the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan and the Jana Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhaya – thus trying to bring within its folds a larger following. Its electoral ambitions were however frustrated with the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, on the sympathy wave of which Rajiv Gandhi rode to power in Delhi that year. The BJP managed to win only two seats in the new Lok Sabha – a throwback to 1952. But thanks to the Congress government’s dismal record (marked by the Bofors’ pay-off scandal), the opposition could again knock together an alliance, win the 1989 elections and form the National Front government. As in the post-Emergency scenario, during the 1989 elections again, the BJP jumped on the anti-Congress bandwagon, and won 86 seats. Since then, there has been no looking back. Even after the 1991 elections which brought back the Congress to power – again on another sympathy wave following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination – the BJP increased its tally to 120 seats.

In 1996, its number went up to 161 in the Lok Sabha, but its efforts to form a government were frustrated by two successive United Fronts which took over the reins with Congress support. The BJP’s next opportunity to capture power in Delhi following a mid-term poll in 1998 – which gave it 182 seats in the Lok Sabha – ran into foul weather, when after 13 months, its Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had to give up after losing majority. But it came back with a vengeance in the elections which took place a year later. It had in the meanwhile struck up alliances with a number of regional parties, which enabled it to gain 296 seats under the umbrella of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), while retaining its own 182 members, and form a government at the centre. It survived for five years, but its record was tarnished by the BJP-run state government sponsored massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and by exposures of corruption at the centre which gave the lie to the BJP propaganda of a “Shining India”.

It faced a humiliating defeat in the 2004 elections, when the number of its seats was reduced to 138, and then further to 116 in the 2009 Lok Sabha. Its phenomenal turnaround within five years – in capturing power at the centre as a single party without the need for depending on its partners in a nominal NDA – speaks of a changing configuration of sociopolitical forces in India during the recent past, as well as the BJP’s ability to manipulate them in its favour. This history of the ups and downs in the journey of the BJP deserves serious examination by political ideologues and commentators, economists and sociologists, as well as ground-level activists of political parties and social movements.

BJP’s Odyssey – a la Luis Bunuel

But apart from that sociopolitical analysis, there can also be an alternative cultural perspective that may be useful for understanding BJP’s political odyssey. In the history of political changes, at times, creative writers had interpreted the changes in a more meaningful way than that provided by contemporary combatants on behalf of one political perspective or another. Poets, dramatists, novelists – who were described by Shelley as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” – had often come up with allegories that had been more prescient than all the political columns in newspapers. I am trying to understand BJP’s electoral quest for power, in terms of a parallel literary discourse that I find in two such allegories – one in the form of a film, and another as a play.

Let me start with the film – which is known as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, made by the eminent and controversial director Luis Bunuel in 1972, satirising the pursuit of power by the Western upper-middle classes. The Sangh parivar’s electoral journey over the last half a century to reach the portals of the Indian Parliament as guests, and today as hosts, resembles the itinerary of the characters in Bunuel’s film – a coterie of ambitious and unscrupulous couples seeking positions of guests or hosts, in the five-star dining ambience of Paris. Their longing for a convivial space to be together, is a metaphor for the nouveau-riche bourgeoisie’s search for sharing power at the top. Bunuel exposes their mendacity (in hiding their crimes), and snobbery and prejudices (against their menials) behind their “discreet charm”, through sequences of dinner parties which somehow or other always get interrupted. One couple hosts a dinner, where the guests arrive, but they themselves are not prepared (remember the BJP’s abortive experiments in 1996-98?). They then go to an eating joint, but find themselves being refused whatever they order (remember the BJP’s humiliating experiences after the 2002 killings in Gujarat, when for some time it was looked down upon as an “untouchable” in Indian politics?). This is followed by a series of similar lunch and dinner parties, which never fructify – just as the BJP’s electoral adventures in the years that followed till 2014. The bourgeoisie in Bunuel’s film is an assortment of respectable looking dubious characters – a gun-toting diplomat from a Latin American banana republic, two French couples who make money by dealing in drug-trafficking with the help of this diplomat, a minister who orders his police to release them after they are caught. They look like anticipatory parodies of the present-day politician-smuggler-criminal cabal of our Indian nouveau-riche classes who, among others have brought Modi to power.

In Bunuel’s film, the main narrative of the search for a dining space (a metaphor for political power) by the French bourgeois couples and their friends, runs parallel to another narrative – their fears and sense of insecurity that are depicted in a number of dream sequences in the film, where these paranoid characters feel scared of being punished for their various nefarious activities. They suffer from nightmares of being killed by unidentified assassins, or arrested by the police. They remind us today of their counterparts among the present BJP leaders and Members of Parliament (MPs), many among whom face criminal and corruption charges, and who should fear punishment. But unlike Bunuel’s film which ends with the characters walking silently along a deserted road towards an uncertain destination, the present Indian political scenario begins with the triumphant arrival of these BJP MPs at their destination along a road crowded with a phalanx of supporters ranging from big business houses of the Tatas, Ambanis and Adanis to intellectuals like Jagdish Bhagwati, Meghnad Desai and Andre Beteille, from the urban jet set to the rural farmers.

However, behind the “discreet charm” that is exuded today by a triumphant BJP and its prime minister, who is making the right noises to impress his domestic constituency and the global community, there looms large the shadow of the nightmarish record of violent communal polarisation that the party and its Sangh parivar parents had introduced in Indian politics – beginning from the pre-Independence period, moving on to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 under the leadership of the supposedly moderate Lal Krishna Advani which led to one of the worst communal riots after Independence, and then on to the genocide in Gujarat in 2002 under the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s patronage. But these riots and the nightmares that continue to haunt their victims are being discreetly glossed over by the new government with a package of populist illusive promises of jobs for the youth, and firm assurances of profit for the corporate sector investors. In an economy marked by the squeezing out of the traditional manufacturing sector by the newfangled high-tech service industries, Modi’s utopia of development may turn out to be a dystopia filled with well-skilled zombies manning those industries, and the laid-off and retrenched workers from the manufacturing sector joining the lumpen-proletariat and filling up the ranks of the Sangh parivar’s foot soldiers to suppress all protest.

Metamorphosing Indian Culture

In a more insidious way, the BJP government may concentrate on its long-term strategy of mutating the pluralistic ethos of our society into a hegemonic order of Hindu nationalism (epitomised by the slogan of “Hindu Rashtra”). As during Murli Manohar Joshi’s stewardship of the human resource development ministry in the previous NDA regime, the present minister may also get institutions like the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) rewrite history textbooks for students with a distinct bias in favour of Hindutva, and pick up academics of the Sangh parivar to head research institutions like the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla and other such centres for higher studies to prevent independent-minded scholars from researching in topics that do not suit Modi’s agenda. At the ground level, now that the BJP is in power, its foot soldiers and moral police will enjoy full liberty to suppress all expressions of dissent in the cultural arena (whether by forcing the banning of books, or vandalising exhibitions of paintings, or disrupting musical and theatrical performances – destructive acts which were allowed even by Congress-ruled governments in Maharashtra and Delhi during the last several decades).

In fact, the assault had begun even before Modi’s swearing in. In BJP-ruled Goa, a 31-year-old engineer, Devu Chodankar, was booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, and the Information Technology Act, for his comment on Facebook (during the run-up to the Lok Sabha campaign) that a “holocaust” would follow if Modi became the prime minister (IANS report, 24 May 2014). In Bangalore, on May 25, a 24-year-old MBA student, Syed Waqas, was arrested on the charge of circulating derogatory MMSes against the prime minister-designate Narendra Modi (The Hindu, 26 May 2014). The new central government’s message is clear. Any citizen challenging the prime minister can be hauled up under some provision or other of the various draconian laws that decorate our statute book.

Curiously, however, despite this notorious record of the Sangh parivar’s violent suppression of dissent – whether in the public arena, or in the academic world (e g, the ransacking of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune in January 2004 after the publication of James Laine’s book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India), and in the cultural venue (e g, vandalisation of M F Husain’s painting exhibitions) – quite a number of well-known intellectuals, both inside India and abroad, have fallen for the “discreet charm” of the personality of Narendra Modi, who is a dedicated member of the stridently Hindu nationalist RSS. Meghnad Desai, the Labour Party peer from London is all for Modi, hoping that he will provide a “decisive leadership”. The eminent economist Jagdish Bhagwati is publicly craving for the position of Modi’s advisor (The Times of India, 26 April 2014). What is even more disappointing is the statement (made on 25 April 2014) by a liberal-humanist sociologist like Andre Beteille, who expressed the hope that the BJP should come to power. One can understand their frustration with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s failures. But how can one explain their switching over to the BJP – and that also to Narendra Modi of all persons?

Epidemic of ‘Rhinocerosis’ – a la Eugene Ionesco

Let me try to explain this acquiescence by our intellectuals in the BJP’s game plan, through another literary allegory. It is a play called The Rhinoceros, written by Eugene Ionesco in 1959. It explores the mentality of those who succumb to fascist authoritarianism by rationalising their choice. The play begins with a scene where the hero sits with his friend in a café, when suddenly they spot a rhinoceros in the street. At first they dismiss it as a hallucination. But soon, news comes pouring from all parts of the town of the sight of more rhinos. It turns out to be a new epidemic called “rhinocerosis”, where people are willingly turning themselves into rhinos (like the name of the disease rhyming with it – “cirrhosis”, which is brought about by the willingness of addicts to alcohol). At the end, in the rhino-populated town, only two human beings remain – the hero and his lover. In the last scene, even his lover decides to turn herself into a rhino. She defends her decision, by arguing that the rhinoceros has a beautiful smooth skin and erect horns, among other virtues! As she deserts him to join the family of rhinos, the hero is left alone in his room. He picks up a mirror, looks at his face in it, and says: “I want to remain human”.

Needless to say, Ionesco was describing a social psyche that is manipulated by the ruling powers into accepting a single homogeneous political order – where all citizens should look the same. He chose the symbol of rhinoceros to represent three major traits of such a social psyche – (i) thick-skinned insensitivity to problems that are outside their own domain of immediate, or group interests; (ii) herd mentality of sticking together to defend those interests through a variety of mental shortcuts; and (iii) smooth-skinned hypocrisy to demonstrate their respectability. Under this order, individuals are persuaded to think what the others are thinking (which is shaped by the media and other means of pressure), say the same things, and justify why the change is necessary.

Thanks to the verdict given by one-third of our voters under a skewed electoral system, we may be heading for such a political order. While ensuring obfuscation of past misdeeds (like the 2002 Gujarat riots), the BJP is training the middle-class youth into a thick-skinned generation of selfish careerists, gathering the other classes into a herd with the idea of a unitary Indian identity (marked by the symbols of Hindutva and based on a glorious past – again harking back to the Hindu heroes of Indian history), and employing the smooth-skinned economists and bureaucrats to implement the neo-liberal model of development, which Modi had dangled as a carrot to woo the voters. But the rest of the voters, who are in the majority, can still be protected from the epidemic of “rhinocerosis” – if only the liberal, secular and left forces get their act together.

Sumanta Banerjee (suman5ban@yahoo.com) is a long-time contributor to EPW and is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (1980).