The Asian Age, June 08, 2016
Re-reading Mathura
by Shiv Visvanathan
The Mathura episode is being seen in isolation... We have powerful political movements within a 300-mile radius of New Delhi. They seek utopia and their symbolic world creates a different politics.
In my childhood, one of the most cherished films was by top Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. His Rashomon was something we all saw — it was a mark of our literacy and our cosmopolitanism. It dealt with an incident told through three different eyes, three different perspectives. As each of the narrators took over, one saw a different world and one realised how storytelling varies with the eye of the storyteller. One also understood it was not as if one narrative was false and the other true, all had equal claims to veracity. It was a childhood recognition of the complexity of storytelling: “Rashomon” became a code word for a deeper, more variegated understanding of the world. Rashomon is now almost a forgotten classic, yet its relevance is clear every day. There are stories that need a compulsive retelling from another perspective.
A major event this past week was the violence in Mathura that killed at least 24 people, with the newspapers saying it was a clash between the police and a group calling itself Swadheen Bharat Subhash Sena, Reports said the police was trying to evict them from public land, and that two police officers lost their lives in the violence. What was a simple narrative at the headline level, however, opens up a Pandora’s box of possibilities.
The media had two basic approaches. One, a secular perspective, dominant among most journalists, seeing it as a series of seedy events, efforts by a group of people to grab public land. Ram Vriksh Yadav is remembered as a key disciple of Baba Jai Guru Dev, a revered person with a huge amount of ashram property. A struggle for succession turns into a struggle for property, and the political economy of real estate leads to the “land grab”. Violence follows, and as the police tries to evict Ram Vriksh Yadav, he and his followers die. The narrative is simple, the details fascinating. What is emphasised is how a 280-acre plot belonging to the state horticultural department is usurped as a personal jagir. The usual insinuations follow: deep connections to those in power. Between the political economy of land and a strict secular interpretation of religious or pseudo-religious movements, the narrative treats events as acts of violence and corruption. In this, the Mathura violence is a simple law and order problem.
But there is a second view, presented mostly by police officers and security analysts. The emphasis here is on intelligence and internal security, and the threat religious movements using national icons and religious symbols pose to law and order and security. Police officers note how Uttar Pradesh is a volatile state, and ask why local intelligence officials were unaware of the extent of arms and ammunition, including hand grenades, that the movement had. UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has said the police went unprepared for violence. The police and security officials also see this as an intelligence failure but add that it lends a touch of irony to Mr Yadav’s efforts to modernise the state’s police. They see it more as a failure of governance, claiming mere technology and publicity cannot substitute for the failure in intelligence-gathering. They also warn of the dangers of communal conflagrations, and hint political links with such groups might have a dangerous fallout.
In reviewing both these perspectives, one is reminded of the Rashomon effect. Is a third narrative possible, which blends this data in a different way? One is tempted to ask if after the secular journalist and the intelligence analyst, a marginal anthropologist can offer an alternative scenario?
Anthropology, while open to the materiality of economics, also deals with symbols, with ideas as constructs. It takes people seriously. Political economy is important, but the symbolic world possesses its own grammar and power. It also defines and determines behaviour in the real world.
Let us now re-read the narratives in this context.
The journalists cite fascinating details. They remind us Ram Vriksh Yadav was a follower of Baba Gurudev, who visualised himself as Subhash Chandra Bose. The spectre of Subhash haunts the movement, yet in a bid to sanitise Bose, the journalists forget he still has political uses, and not just in West Bengal. Bose represents that eternal non-Gandhian, non-Nehruvian alternative for India. Ram Vriksh Yadav, like Jai Gurudev, uses Bose as a symbol. Many of his demands seem silly, yet they are wishlists, dreams of marginal groups who find it hard to relate to mainstream middle-class politics. One can’t just dismiss these demands. There is a context and logic: such dreams as political movements are what anthropologists call millennial movements. They mark early Christianity and tribal movements battling colonialism and modernity. They often sound like underground irrational eruptions from the shadowy side of religion. The works of Francis Yates and Peter Worsley have captured them beautifully.
It’s time we took such millennial groups more seriously in India. I remember a defence expert telling me the Chinese Communist Party is more threatened by movements like Falun Gong than its political opponents. The Mathura episode is being seen in isolation. But just map the area. A year ago we had reports of trouble from an ashram in Hisar, where an imagination engineer, Rampal, had set up a movement. The ashram was so powerfully equipped that it took armed police several days to occupy it. Rampal was portrayed as a great bhakt of Hanuman and Kabir. Close to the ashram is Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan’s Dera Sacha Sauda. Think of Asaram Bapu in Jodhpur and Baba Ram Dev in Hardwar. In each, we have powerful political movements, all within a 300-mile radius of New Delhi. Each speaks a millennial lingo, not using standard symbols. Each is lower-middle class, each is a sub-state to the RSS’ broad votebank. While the RSS is committed to the state, these movements can cut away. They speak the language of community tied by archaic symbols seeking greater access to opportunity. They seek utopia, and their symbolic world creates a different style of politics.
The news, seen in isolation, reveals some patterns. The presence of so many groups should raise curiosity about the Indian’s symbolic world, and how symbols are being used more in marginal politics. Are we narrowing the imagination? Perhaps the media needs to hire a few anthropologists.
The writer is a professor at Jindal Law School
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Showing posts with label middle-class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label middle-class. Show all posts
June 09, 2016
July 04, 2014
India - The 'Emerging' Middle Class: Role in the 2014 General Elections | Ravinder Kaur
Economic and Political weekly, Vol - XLIX No. 26-27, June 28, 2014
The 'Emerging' Middle Class: Role in the 2014 General Elections
by Ravinder Kaur
This article is a look at the subtext of the transition from the politics represented by the United Progressive Alliance government to that represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party. On another level, an ethnographic reading of the voters' mood before the polls in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh showed calm confidence and clarity in looking at the choices before them; few of them were emotional about the step they were about to take. Narendra Modi's catchy slogans were on the lips of many but this was no motional wave; it was more like contracting a new service provider to see whether he would deliver.
Ravinder Kaur (ravinder.iitd@gmail.com) is at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi.
Beyond the immediate nitty-gritty of the Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic Alliance’s (BJP-NDA) spectacular win in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it is important to understand the socio-economic changes that help explain this outcome and what it means for the future. Was it simply the acute mismanagement of the economy by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II or the numerous scams that blighted it that turned the tide in favour of Narendra Modi’s BJP? Or was it the general sense of dissatisfaction beginning with the mass protests (not yet movements) against corruption or gender crime? Or was it, as some have termed it, the modern, imaginative and thorough “marketing” of Modi that was successful in seducing the middle-class voter? More importantly, did Modi’s promises to revive the economy, build infrastructure, create jobs, root out corruption, i e, deliver a reversal of jobless growth, resonate with large sections of the population?
Before I address the subtext of the transition from the politics represented by the UPA to those represented by the BJP, I present an ethnographic reading of the voters’ mood based on a trip I undertook in a small swathe of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) in early May. Proceeding from Patna, taking in a rally by Modi and Paswan, another one by Nitish Kumar and a short meeting with Laloo Prasad Yadav, and then continuing on to Varanasi and Allahabad, sitting in at rallies addressed by Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son Akhilesh Yadav, stopping in homes in villages, small towns, at shops and dhabas (highway eateries) along the way, I formed a sense of how people of diverse socio-economic, caste and religious backgrounds were thinking about the elections. One of the things that unequivocally stood out was the pervasive “name recognition” that Modi had managed to achieve. In these areas, dominated by Yadavs, Muslims, Jatavs, Thakurs, brahmins, Bhumihars and other caste identities, people may not have known the various parties or even party symbols but they knew that one name – Modi. It was interesting, though, that many older or illiterate persons knew only the symbols and had no clue of party names and knowledge of the kamal (lotus, the BJP’s symbol) was especially pervasive.
Knowing Modi
They had heard of him; they had heard of the success of development in Gujarat (it is interesting to see how impressions are formed – our drivers on the trip including a Muslim from Varanasi stated that they had driven in Gujarat and that the roads were much better and that they did not have to pay ghoos (bribe) for road tax; others we met had gone to Gujarat as migrant workers and had come back with money in hand and they wanted him to work his magic in their state too. They wanted change – of that they were very sure – and at this point of time, the possibility of change was represented only by someone called Narendra Modi. As one man said, “ab ki baar roti palatni hai” (we have to flip the chapati this time).
The other big takeaway from these travels was the conspicuously missing figure of the Congress Party. Here, where regional parties such as Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party (SP), Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) (JD-U), and Laloo’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) have dominated the scene, together with a BJP presence alongside, the Congress had been losing ground steadily. Yet, for a national party, its lack of presence was palpably noticeable. Not a single individual mentioned the Congress being anywhere in the reckoning and it seemed almost natural. Apart from one village and the shop fronts of a small town, one did not see the Congress symbol of the hand anywhere. Defeat for the Congress was in the air even before the election began and its lacklustre campaign reflected that the party too had accepted it.
Seeking a New ‘Service Provider’
Economic circumstances seemed to have improved in the areas of Bihar and UP we travelled in. Pakka houses were being built next to the original kachcha ones. Motorcycles, rather than bicycles (the shift is a crucial indicator of changing aspirations) stood in or near most homes, testifying to a measure of economic improvement. The majority of the people were well-clothed apart from one settlement of extremely backward castes (EBCs) in Bihar where children ran naked, either due to the heat or lack of clothing. Most people were confident and talked easily about various topics; there was especially a confidence about one’s power and right to vote governments in and out. Modi too was to be tested; if he did not perform he too would be out. Thus despite the feeling that people had got sucked in by the Gujarat model propaganda, the voter citizen was nuanced in why she or he was willing to give him her vote this time. They claimed that change was needed and that they would wait and see how he performed “kuch kar ke dikhayenge ya nahin” (will he do something) and if, down the line, they were not happy with his performance then, they would try out the next party or person the next time.
At one level, it was the calm confidence and the immense clarity with which people were looking at the choices before them; few of them were emotional about the step they were about to take. Yes, Modi’s catchy slogans were on the lips of many, even schoolchildren, “Is baar, Modi Sarkar” “Har har Modi, ghar ghar Modi”; but this was no emotional wave; it was more like contracting a new service provider to see whether he would deliver. Were the appearance of enthusiasm something to go by, then at a Arvind Kejriwal (chief of the Aam Aadmi Party-AAP) rally outside Varanasi, we saw the equal enthusiasm with which schoolchildren ran around having a field day with jhadus (broom, AAP’s symbol); it was merriment on a hot summer day, reminding me of quidditich games from the Harry Potter novels.
But going back to the voters, clarity was reflected in people’s understanding of the difference between an election for Parliament and choosing a government at the centre and the legislative assembly elections or choosing who would rule the state. In Bihar, Nitish had clearly established a sound track record of developmental improvements, the effects of which had percolated down to the local level. There was no bad mouthing of Nitish; yet people were very clear that they were not going to vote for him in the general election. Most said they would bring him back in the assembly elections. It seemed that the Muslims preferred to go back to a corrupt out-on-bail Laloo over voting for a Nitish whose government had been in partnership with the BJP. Hindus of several castes were upset with Nitish for having detached himself from the BJP.
Despite this clear understanding of the distinction between national and state level elections, it was not as if only this logic prevailed. In Bhadohi in UP, where the candidate was a brahmin woman, Seema Mishra, the Muslims were voting for her because she was the SP candidate while most Hindus made it clear that had the candidate not been this particular one they would rather have voted for Modi. The woman’s father had been a three time MLA and was known to be very responsive to his constituency. People argued that it was she and her family who would be there for them in time of need. Rationality demanded that they support a candidate whose family they had had experience with over their desire to vote for Modi. And, of course, it goes without saying that in this landscape of predominantly caste-based voting, the brahmins would find a brahmin candidate acceptable over and above a “Hindu” candidate of the Hindu party, the BJP. The Modi wave, however, triumphed, and the candidate lost.
Not the Same Old
Yes, Hindu consolidation did take place even among some dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) (the dalits of Gautam Budh Nagar near Greater Noida were overwhelmingly favouring Modi and the BJP with a transparently expressed support for a “Hindu” party – an identity that would likely afford higher social status to upwardly mobile groups) but as we saw from the Bhadohi election, the Hindu vote too remains fragmented by caste, class and region. The election results show that the Muslim vote in these areas did consolidate against the BJP; yet, the arguments here too were interesting and not bland ones of a unilateral fear of Modi.
Despite a BJP leader having declared that all those who did not vote for Modi would be sent to Pakistan and an atmosphere of fear having been generated, a Muslim family I talked to in Saidabad outside Allahabad gave a different perspective. The man had a barber’s shop while the women of the family were engaged in rolling beedis at home and a son was away working in Malaysia. The large joint family was eager to talk politics and the man said “Why should we be afraid of Modi? He cannot throw us out of this country – we are as much citizens here.” Without being asked, he continued “we will try him out, why not?” Although his views might simply have been bravado and a way to deflect the question about who he and his family would vote for, the important point was that he was completely aware of the details of the discourse around “Muslims and Modi” during these elections.
The women claimed that everyone these days was educated and everyone would go out to vote. In another Hindu-Muslim village about 60 km from Allahabad, as I was chatting with Muslim men and women, a group of young boys listened avidly to our conversation. It turned out that they too were extremely knowledgeable of the politics of this election; on being asked how, they said they read newspapers, watched television and listened to elders talking politics. They also felt Modi would be the winner. Most people would hesitantly remark, not wanting to give away their own preference, that there was a Modi hawa (wave). A taxi driver in Delhi was far more explicit “Modi ko PM banana hai” (we must make Modi the PM) which made me recall that months back in my local market I had noticed a booth being set up distributing materials which said “Modi for PM” – the campaign machinery thus extending down to the micro-level. A Muslim from Varanasi told me that he would not vote for Modi and that Muslims would not vote for Modi as he represented a communal party and was tainted by the Gujarat riots. But at the same time he added that if anyone could transform Varanasi from the slum and gutter it had become, it was Modi. Thus there was trepidation in the Muslim camp and yet at the same time the hope for economic betterment and opportunities.
Women Too
In a small town in Ara, Bihar, as I chatted with women tending to their shops selling home-made mithais (sweets), a woman informed me that she had been deserted by her husband and that he had remarried. Reconciled to her fate, she had returned to her parental home and was given a room to live in and earned her own living. She said that she had two daughters who were both now married. She belonged to the Madheshi caste (honey collectors) and said that she had made her own decision in the polls (voting had already taken place in this location). A similar neighbouring shop had a family consisting of a man, his wife and a young daughter at work. The daughter, speaking for the mother indicated that her parents might have voted differently. Talking with many families, it was apparent that while the women may listen to the men, they were no longer following a patriarchal diktat; voting this time was the outcome of discussion in the family. But what was most heartening in this and many other locations was seeing many, many bright-eyed girls in school uniforms. A Muslim woman in village Kharchana near Allahabad claimed that daughters of the village did not vote and that they would vote in their in-law’s villages. Thus both social adulthood and political citizenship, it seemed, came only after marriage for some women.
Another noticeable change alongside was that the dais at many a political rally now had women seated among the male politicians. While at one rally, the candidate was the woman herself, in many others they held other political positions and spoke in support of the candidate, pointing to the greater participation of women in active politics, signalling a “coming out of purdah” in these parts.
Purdah or the face veil itself was surprisingly far less visible in these parts of Bihar and eastern UP; women mixed freely in shops, roads and villages even though the men still grabbed the public speaking role. In a shop near Hajipur outside Patna (Ram Vilas Paswan’s constituency), I chatted with two Hindu women who were running a beauty parlour plus a tailoring shop. Despite being entrepreneurs and earners the two sisters-in-law (their husbands being brothers) were shy and said that their husbands who were away working in Mumbai would guide them as to who to vote for. But they too had heard of this man, Modi. Muslim women at Mulayam’s rally strongly voiced their opinions on the forthcoming elections; feeling constrained about having to vote for a non-performing Mulayam, they demanded jobs for their daughters.
Emerging Middle Class
The parts we travelled in – winding our way from Patna to Varanasi, passing through Buxar and Ara with a side trip to Allahabad – and the people we stopped to talk to could be sociologically characterised as being dominated by what I will call the “emerging middle class”, one among several layers of the middle class. Rahul Gandhi too thought he was targeting this particular class when he characterised them as the NRMBs – Not Rich, Not Middle Class, Not Below the Poverty Line” – but it seems he got the sociology of it all wrong. This class, indeed, is one of India’s “middle classes” and perhaps the hungriest for change and a secure future. Being a striving class, holding on dearly to its newly gained status of being not-poor and preventing a slide back down into the ignominious BPL (below poverty line) category, explains many of its choices and strategies. Incidentally, the size of the emerging (or new) middle class has been growing since Rajiv Gandhi’s time in the 1980s, swelling further in the last 15 years.
This class is providing, demographically speaking, one-third to nearly half of India’s current population. And a very substantial proportion, about 30%, of the voting age population is below 30 years of age. Having newly gained some sort of education, the hope for a non-rural, non-agricultural future, with a desire for jobs or entrepreneurial opportunities – whether in the private or the public sector – is key to this demographic. Taking loans from parents or from other sources, its youngsters are willing to set up small enterprises, hoping to find success and economic stability. This is also a generation that believes in flaunting material possessions such as decent clothes, motorbikes and reasonably upmarket cell phones. Its young men and women everywhere were carefully groomed, displaying an assertion of choice and identity.
Claim to Being Middle Class
The key character of this class is that it is middle class by “self-ascription” – they are middle class because they imagine a middle class life and identity for themselves. They read Modi’s message of development – achhe din aane waale hain (good days are going to follow) – as opening the door to writing their own secure middle class future. In place after place, one heard that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) wages are too low for the men who can find daily jobs that earn them much more; this partly explains the higher participation rates of women in the programme. Additionally, those who got the work were expected to put in few hours if any at all; the number of people on fake muster rolls has risen steadily in the later phases of the programme. The MGNREGA work is welcome as additional income but not at the cost of real incomes or social status. The rural elite who capture the programme distribute patronage and siphon off a significant amount of the funds without toiling in the sun while building nothing. The emerging middle class is not a catchment for this programme. It wants to be seen doing something economically and socially more meaningful. Thus the Congress’s strategy to capture the vote of this class was deeply flawed – the promise of various in-principle rights with weak delivery mechanisms did less to lure citizens than Modi’s messaging of the success of the Gujarat growth model.
Modi’s Vote Bank
Was this the class that voted for Modi? And if so, how can one characterise it better? It is obvious that such a class (and perhaps the rung immediately above it) has begun to cut across caste, region, religion and ethnicity. On the one hand, reservations have unsettled past caste-class equations and led to the rise of significant middle classes among dalits, lower OBCs, north-eastern hill tribals and other ethnic groups. On the other, smallholders among upper castes have seen economic decline and joined the ranks of the less secure – some social scientists are calling the newly economically insecure individuals and social groups a “precariat” – those who lead economically precarious lives. In India, where the formal sector of the economy constitutes barely 10%, one could argue that anyone without inherited wealth or a bankable education would be part of the precariat – cutting across various social divisions.
This precariat middle class, which includes the emerging middle class, employs several strategies of birthing, educating and marrying progeny in its efforts to climb higher up the class ladder. Having firmly joined the ranks of what demographers call “replacement level fertility” or two children per family, the smaller-sized family has become its mantra. Reflecting its “look away from agriculture and towards towns and cities” policy, this class prefers a family of one or no daughters. Hence, it is a class that sex selects avidly, especially in the northern and central parts of the country but increasingly and worryingly so, even in parts of the south and the east. Its family composition choices over the last two decades have resulted in a crash in the child sex ratio, resulting in large numbers of “missing girls”. Finding sons as a more viable economic proposition than daughters, the emerging middle class invests heavily in the former’s education, even if they show less promise. Daughters “water the other’s garden” so the less invested in them the better. A girl should get enough education to ensure, with the help of a generous dowry, the “purchase” of a good groom who would reward the family with valuable social connections.
Having no daughters and only sons is even more helpful to an emerging middle class family as it would minimise outflows and maximise inflows of wealth and consolidate the family’s economic fortunes and position in the middle class. If lucky enough to have a son or sons as first births, such families rarely seek a daughter, putting an immediate stop on further child-bearing. In such families, a single daughter might be endured while two would not be tolerated and modern technologies are quickly resorted to ensure the desired and correct sex composition of progeny. Rural to urban migration is also key to this class’s upward mobility strategies. Jobs and marriages are both oriented towards migration to peri-urban or urban locations and social capital becomes the important factor to this movement. The recent re-districting in many states has added to the diversity of urban spaces which are the natural habitat of the emerging middle class.
The social conservatism of this class is matched by its political and religious conservatism. Members of this class are likely to have active religious lives – visiting temples, holding havans (making offerings into a consecrated fire) and celebrating multifarious fasts and feasts – all with the express goal of securing family fortunes, economic and personal, from being buffeted by economic or social shocks. Hence the immense proliferation of astrological rings on men’s fingers and the sprouting of numerous small shrines in and around neighbourhoods and settlements, increasing contributions to neighbourhood temples, and the rising frequency of participation in religious yatras (pilgrimages). It is a class that yearns for the well packaged and easily consumable religious and philosophical wisdom of the Ramdevs (Baba Ramdev, the yoga guru) and other maudlin religious leaders.
Politically, Modi’s appeal for this class has lain in his promise of a brighter economic future and socio-economic security (the “stable” middle class too has been suffering in an economy in which education does not guarantee their children decent jobs). As consumers of nationalism, the new middle class – many of whose members would be aiming for the lower tiers of the armed forces – find an appeal in Modi’s strongman stance on foreign relations – that he would safeguard the nation and be able to fulfil the promise of competing economically with China. (As a Delhi taxi driver said to me, “Modi won’t put up with severed heads of Indian soldiers unlike the former defence minister Antony, and Pakistan and China won’t want to mess with him”.) Further, he would ensure an Anna Hazare type of corruption-free, morally upright governance. His technocratic model of development thus appeals across the broad spectrum of the middle classes but faces opposition from a minority of the middle class intelligentsia, schooled either in elite non-engineering educational institutions or outside the country. The social scientist has as yet little idea of how the emerging middle class thinks of the lofty ideals of secularism and gender rights which have long taken root among the upper middle classes. It finds it easy to accept the logic of an uncritical majoritarianism in various matters. It is a class that is struggling to find the right balance between embracing middle class morality and the comfort zone of being a consumer citizen – goals which were earlier beyond its reach. Modi’s promises point to a road map towards both.
It is important, however, to underline that social classes are always in flux as they mould themselves away from those below them and towards those above them. Economically comfortable classes become socially more progressive through self-reflexivity and education. Classes are thus the products of their embedding in material conditions but individual members belonging to a class are not simply prisoners of these conditions but actively engage in fluid imaginaries of being middle class, which vary with where they stand at a particular juncture. Generational shifts are central to new imaginaries and we are certainly in the midst of one. Marx’s comment on the conservatism of the middle class failed to realise its Janus-like character – in fact it combines both conservative and liberal tendencies within its multiple folds. Much of the social character of the emerging and lower middle classes does not appeal to the urban intelligentsia schooled in western education; the latter are fearful of their power to shift the political balance towards what the BJP represented in the past. What this fear misses out on are the checks provided, not so much by our much depleted institutions, but by the creative ways in which new generations populating the bulging emerging middle class engage with the India handed down to them. In doing so, they will want more and not less freedom.
The 'Emerging' Middle Class: Role in the 2014 General Elections
by Ravinder Kaur
This article is a look at the subtext of the transition from the politics represented by the United Progressive Alliance government to that represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party. On another level, an ethnographic reading of the voters' mood before the polls in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh showed calm confidence and clarity in looking at the choices before them; few of them were emotional about the step they were about to take. Narendra Modi's catchy slogans were on the lips of many but this was no motional wave; it was more like contracting a new service provider to see whether he would deliver.
Ravinder Kaur (ravinder.iitd@gmail.com) is at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi.
Beyond the immediate nitty-gritty of the Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic Alliance’s (BJP-NDA) spectacular win in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it is important to understand the socio-economic changes that help explain this outcome and what it means for the future. Was it simply the acute mismanagement of the economy by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II or the numerous scams that blighted it that turned the tide in favour of Narendra Modi’s BJP? Or was it the general sense of dissatisfaction beginning with the mass protests (not yet movements) against corruption or gender crime? Or was it, as some have termed it, the modern, imaginative and thorough “marketing” of Modi that was successful in seducing the middle-class voter? More importantly, did Modi’s promises to revive the economy, build infrastructure, create jobs, root out corruption, i e, deliver a reversal of jobless growth, resonate with large sections of the population?
Before I address the subtext of the transition from the politics represented by the UPA to those represented by the BJP, I present an ethnographic reading of the voters’ mood based on a trip I undertook in a small swathe of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) in early May. Proceeding from Patna, taking in a rally by Modi and Paswan, another one by Nitish Kumar and a short meeting with Laloo Prasad Yadav, and then continuing on to Varanasi and Allahabad, sitting in at rallies addressed by Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son Akhilesh Yadav, stopping in homes in villages, small towns, at shops and dhabas (highway eateries) along the way, I formed a sense of how people of diverse socio-economic, caste and religious backgrounds were thinking about the elections. One of the things that unequivocally stood out was the pervasive “name recognition” that Modi had managed to achieve. In these areas, dominated by Yadavs, Muslims, Jatavs, Thakurs, brahmins, Bhumihars and other caste identities, people may not have known the various parties or even party symbols but they knew that one name – Modi. It was interesting, though, that many older or illiterate persons knew only the symbols and had no clue of party names and knowledge of the kamal (lotus, the BJP’s symbol) was especially pervasive.
Knowing Modi
They had heard of him; they had heard of the success of development in Gujarat (it is interesting to see how impressions are formed – our drivers on the trip including a Muslim from Varanasi stated that they had driven in Gujarat and that the roads were much better and that they did not have to pay ghoos (bribe) for road tax; others we met had gone to Gujarat as migrant workers and had come back with money in hand and they wanted him to work his magic in their state too. They wanted change – of that they were very sure – and at this point of time, the possibility of change was represented only by someone called Narendra Modi. As one man said, “ab ki baar roti palatni hai” (we have to flip the chapati this time).
The other big takeaway from these travels was the conspicuously missing figure of the Congress Party. Here, where regional parties such as Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party (SP), Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) (JD-U), and Laloo’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) have dominated the scene, together with a BJP presence alongside, the Congress had been losing ground steadily. Yet, for a national party, its lack of presence was palpably noticeable. Not a single individual mentioned the Congress being anywhere in the reckoning and it seemed almost natural. Apart from one village and the shop fronts of a small town, one did not see the Congress symbol of the hand anywhere. Defeat for the Congress was in the air even before the election began and its lacklustre campaign reflected that the party too had accepted it.
Seeking a New ‘Service Provider’
Economic circumstances seemed to have improved in the areas of Bihar and UP we travelled in. Pakka houses were being built next to the original kachcha ones. Motorcycles, rather than bicycles (the shift is a crucial indicator of changing aspirations) stood in or near most homes, testifying to a measure of economic improvement. The majority of the people were well-clothed apart from one settlement of extremely backward castes (EBCs) in Bihar where children ran naked, either due to the heat or lack of clothing. Most people were confident and talked easily about various topics; there was especially a confidence about one’s power and right to vote governments in and out. Modi too was to be tested; if he did not perform he too would be out. Thus despite the feeling that people had got sucked in by the Gujarat model propaganda, the voter citizen was nuanced in why she or he was willing to give him her vote this time. They claimed that change was needed and that they would wait and see how he performed “kuch kar ke dikhayenge ya nahin” (will he do something) and if, down the line, they were not happy with his performance then, they would try out the next party or person the next time.
At one level, it was the calm confidence and the immense clarity with which people were looking at the choices before them; few of them were emotional about the step they were about to take. Yes, Modi’s catchy slogans were on the lips of many, even schoolchildren, “Is baar, Modi Sarkar” “Har har Modi, ghar ghar Modi”; but this was no emotional wave; it was more like contracting a new service provider to see whether he would deliver. Were the appearance of enthusiasm something to go by, then at a Arvind Kejriwal (chief of the Aam Aadmi Party-AAP) rally outside Varanasi, we saw the equal enthusiasm with which schoolchildren ran around having a field day with jhadus (broom, AAP’s symbol); it was merriment on a hot summer day, reminding me of quidditich games from the Harry Potter novels.
But going back to the voters, clarity was reflected in people’s understanding of the difference between an election for Parliament and choosing a government at the centre and the legislative assembly elections or choosing who would rule the state. In Bihar, Nitish had clearly established a sound track record of developmental improvements, the effects of which had percolated down to the local level. There was no bad mouthing of Nitish; yet people were very clear that they were not going to vote for him in the general election. Most said they would bring him back in the assembly elections. It seemed that the Muslims preferred to go back to a corrupt out-on-bail Laloo over voting for a Nitish whose government had been in partnership with the BJP. Hindus of several castes were upset with Nitish for having detached himself from the BJP.
Despite this clear understanding of the distinction between national and state level elections, it was not as if only this logic prevailed. In Bhadohi in UP, where the candidate was a brahmin woman, Seema Mishra, the Muslims were voting for her because she was the SP candidate while most Hindus made it clear that had the candidate not been this particular one they would rather have voted for Modi. The woman’s father had been a three time MLA and was known to be very responsive to his constituency. People argued that it was she and her family who would be there for them in time of need. Rationality demanded that they support a candidate whose family they had had experience with over their desire to vote for Modi. And, of course, it goes without saying that in this landscape of predominantly caste-based voting, the brahmins would find a brahmin candidate acceptable over and above a “Hindu” candidate of the Hindu party, the BJP. The Modi wave, however, triumphed, and the candidate lost.
Not the Same Old
Yes, Hindu consolidation did take place even among some dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) (the dalits of Gautam Budh Nagar near Greater Noida were overwhelmingly favouring Modi and the BJP with a transparently expressed support for a “Hindu” party – an identity that would likely afford higher social status to upwardly mobile groups) but as we saw from the Bhadohi election, the Hindu vote too remains fragmented by caste, class and region. The election results show that the Muslim vote in these areas did consolidate against the BJP; yet, the arguments here too were interesting and not bland ones of a unilateral fear of Modi.
Despite a BJP leader having declared that all those who did not vote for Modi would be sent to Pakistan and an atmosphere of fear having been generated, a Muslim family I talked to in Saidabad outside Allahabad gave a different perspective. The man had a barber’s shop while the women of the family were engaged in rolling beedis at home and a son was away working in Malaysia. The large joint family was eager to talk politics and the man said “Why should we be afraid of Modi? He cannot throw us out of this country – we are as much citizens here.” Without being asked, he continued “we will try him out, why not?” Although his views might simply have been bravado and a way to deflect the question about who he and his family would vote for, the important point was that he was completely aware of the details of the discourse around “Muslims and Modi” during these elections.
The women claimed that everyone these days was educated and everyone would go out to vote. In another Hindu-Muslim village about 60 km from Allahabad, as I was chatting with Muslim men and women, a group of young boys listened avidly to our conversation. It turned out that they too were extremely knowledgeable of the politics of this election; on being asked how, they said they read newspapers, watched television and listened to elders talking politics. They also felt Modi would be the winner. Most people would hesitantly remark, not wanting to give away their own preference, that there was a Modi hawa (wave). A taxi driver in Delhi was far more explicit “Modi ko PM banana hai” (we must make Modi the PM) which made me recall that months back in my local market I had noticed a booth being set up distributing materials which said “Modi for PM” – the campaign machinery thus extending down to the micro-level. A Muslim from Varanasi told me that he would not vote for Modi and that Muslims would not vote for Modi as he represented a communal party and was tainted by the Gujarat riots. But at the same time he added that if anyone could transform Varanasi from the slum and gutter it had become, it was Modi. Thus there was trepidation in the Muslim camp and yet at the same time the hope for economic betterment and opportunities.
Women Too
In a small town in Ara, Bihar, as I chatted with women tending to their shops selling home-made mithais (sweets), a woman informed me that she had been deserted by her husband and that he had remarried. Reconciled to her fate, she had returned to her parental home and was given a room to live in and earned her own living. She said that she had two daughters who were both now married. She belonged to the Madheshi caste (honey collectors) and said that she had made her own decision in the polls (voting had already taken place in this location). A similar neighbouring shop had a family consisting of a man, his wife and a young daughter at work. The daughter, speaking for the mother indicated that her parents might have voted differently. Talking with many families, it was apparent that while the women may listen to the men, they were no longer following a patriarchal diktat; voting this time was the outcome of discussion in the family. But what was most heartening in this and many other locations was seeing many, many bright-eyed girls in school uniforms. A Muslim woman in village Kharchana near Allahabad claimed that daughters of the village did not vote and that they would vote in their in-law’s villages. Thus both social adulthood and political citizenship, it seemed, came only after marriage for some women.
Another noticeable change alongside was that the dais at many a political rally now had women seated among the male politicians. While at one rally, the candidate was the woman herself, in many others they held other political positions and spoke in support of the candidate, pointing to the greater participation of women in active politics, signalling a “coming out of purdah” in these parts.
Purdah or the face veil itself was surprisingly far less visible in these parts of Bihar and eastern UP; women mixed freely in shops, roads and villages even though the men still grabbed the public speaking role. In a shop near Hajipur outside Patna (Ram Vilas Paswan’s constituency), I chatted with two Hindu women who were running a beauty parlour plus a tailoring shop. Despite being entrepreneurs and earners the two sisters-in-law (their husbands being brothers) were shy and said that their husbands who were away working in Mumbai would guide them as to who to vote for. But they too had heard of this man, Modi. Muslim women at Mulayam’s rally strongly voiced their opinions on the forthcoming elections; feeling constrained about having to vote for a non-performing Mulayam, they demanded jobs for their daughters.
Emerging Middle Class
The parts we travelled in – winding our way from Patna to Varanasi, passing through Buxar and Ara with a side trip to Allahabad – and the people we stopped to talk to could be sociologically characterised as being dominated by what I will call the “emerging middle class”, one among several layers of the middle class. Rahul Gandhi too thought he was targeting this particular class when he characterised them as the NRMBs – Not Rich, Not Middle Class, Not Below the Poverty Line” – but it seems he got the sociology of it all wrong. This class, indeed, is one of India’s “middle classes” and perhaps the hungriest for change and a secure future. Being a striving class, holding on dearly to its newly gained status of being not-poor and preventing a slide back down into the ignominious BPL (below poverty line) category, explains many of its choices and strategies. Incidentally, the size of the emerging (or new) middle class has been growing since Rajiv Gandhi’s time in the 1980s, swelling further in the last 15 years.
This class is providing, demographically speaking, one-third to nearly half of India’s current population. And a very substantial proportion, about 30%, of the voting age population is below 30 years of age. Having newly gained some sort of education, the hope for a non-rural, non-agricultural future, with a desire for jobs or entrepreneurial opportunities – whether in the private or the public sector – is key to this demographic. Taking loans from parents or from other sources, its youngsters are willing to set up small enterprises, hoping to find success and economic stability. This is also a generation that believes in flaunting material possessions such as decent clothes, motorbikes and reasonably upmarket cell phones. Its young men and women everywhere were carefully groomed, displaying an assertion of choice and identity.
Claim to Being Middle Class
The key character of this class is that it is middle class by “self-ascription” – they are middle class because they imagine a middle class life and identity for themselves. They read Modi’s message of development – achhe din aane waale hain (good days are going to follow) – as opening the door to writing their own secure middle class future. In place after place, one heard that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) wages are too low for the men who can find daily jobs that earn them much more; this partly explains the higher participation rates of women in the programme. Additionally, those who got the work were expected to put in few hours if any at all; the number of people on fake muster rolls has risen steadily in the later phases of the programme. The MGNREGA work is welcome as additional income but not at the cost of real incomes or social status. The rural elite who capture the programme distribute patronage and siphon off a significant amount of the funds without toiling in the sun while building nothing. The emerging middle class is not a catchment for this programme. It wants to be seen doing something economically and socially more meaningful. Thus the Congress’s strategy to capture the vote of this class was deeply flawed – the promise of various in-principle rights with weak delivery mechanisms did less to lure citizens than Modi’s messaging of the success of the Gujarat growth model.
Modi’s Vote Bank
Was this the class that voted for Modi? And if so, how can one characterise it better? It is obvious that such a class (and perhaps the rung immediately above it) has begun to cut across caste, region, religion and ethnicity. On the one hand, reservations have unsettled past caste-class equations and led to the rise of significant middle classes among dalits, lower OBCs, north-eastern hill tribals and other ethnic groups. On the other, smallholders among upper castes have seen economic decline and joined the ranks of the less secure – some social scientists are calling the newly economically insecure individuals and social groups a “precariat” – those who lead economically precarious lives. In India, where the formal sector of the economy constitutes barely 10%, one could argue that anyone without inherited wealth or a bankable education would be part of the precariat – cutting across various social divisions.
This precariat middle class, which includes the emerging middle class, employs several strategies of birthing, educating and marrying progeny in its efforts to climb higher up the class ladder. Having firmly joined the ranks of what demographers call “replacement level fertility” or two children per family, the smaller-sized family has become its mantra. Reflecting its “look away from agriculture and towards towns and cities” policy, this class prefers a family of one or no daughters. Hence, it is a class that sex selects avidly, especially in the northern and central parts of the country but increasingly and worryingly so, even in parts of the south and the east. Its family composition choices over the last two decades have resulted in a crash in the child sex ratio, resulting in large numbers of “missing girls”. Finding sons as a more viable economic proposition than daughters, the emerging middle class invests heavily in the former’s education, even if they show less promise. Daughters “water the other’s garden” so the less invested in them the better. A girl should get enough education to ensure, with the help of a generous dowry, the “purchase” of a good groom who would reward the family with valuable social connections.
Having no daughters and only sons is even more helpful to an emerging middle class family as it would minimise outflows and maximise inflows of wealth and consolidate the family’s economic fortunes and position in the middle class. If lucky enough to have a son or sons as first births, such families rarely seek a daughter, putting an immediate stop on further child-bearing. In such families, a single daughter might be endured while two would not be tolerated and modern technologies are quickly resorted to ensure the desired and correct sex composition of progeny. Rural to urban migration is also key to this class’s upward mobility strategies. Jobs and marriages are both oriented towards migration to peri-urban or urban locations and social capital becomes the important factor to this movement. The recent re-districting in many states has added to the diversity of urban spaces which are the natural habitat of the emerging middle class.
The social conservatism of this class is matched by its political and religious conservatism. Members of this class are likely to have active religious lives – visiting temples, holding havans (making offerings into a consecrated fire) and celebrating multifarious fasts and feasts – all with the express goal of securing family fortunes, economic and personal, from being buffeted by economic or social shocks. Hence the immense proliferation of astrological rings on men’s fingers and the sprouting of numerous small shrines in and around neighbourhoods and settlements, increasing contributions to neighbourhood temples, and the rising frequency of participation in religious yatras (pilgrimages). It is a class that yearns for the well packaged and easily consumable religious and philosophical wisdom of the Ramdevs (Baba Ramdev, the yoga guru) and other maudlin religious leaders.
Politically, Modi’s appeal for this class has lain in his promise of a brighter economic future and socio-economic security (the “stable” middle class too has been suffering in an economy in which education does not guarantee their children decent jobs). As consumers of nationalism, the new middle class – many of whose members would be aiming for the lower tiers of the armed forces – find an appeal in Modi’s strongman stance on foreign relations – that he would safeguard the nation and be able to fulfil the promise of competing economically with China. (As a Delhi taxi driver said to me, “Modi won’t put up with severed heads of Indian soldiers unlike the former defence minister Antony, and Pakistan and China won’t want to mess with him”.) Further, he would ensure an Anna Hazare type of corruption-free, morally upright governance. His technocratic model of development thus appeals across the broad spectrum of the middle classes but faces opposition from a minority of the middle class intelligentsia, schooled either in elite non-engineering educational institutions or outside the country. The social scientist has as yet little idea of how the emerging middle class thinks of the lofty ideals of secularism and gender rights which have long taken root among the upper middle classes. It finds it easy to accept the logic of an uncritical majoritarianism in various matters. It is a class that is struggling to find the right balance between embracing middle class morality and the comfort zone of being a consumer citizen – goals which were earlier beyond its reach. Modi’s promises point to a road map towards both.
It is important, however, to underline that social classes are always in flux as they mould themselves away from those below them and towards those above them. Economically comfortable classes become socially more progressive through self-reflexivity and education. Classes are thus the products of their embedding in material conditions but individual members belonging to a class are not simply prisoners of these conditions but actively engage in fluid imaginaries of being middle class, which vary with where they stand at a particular juncture. Generational shifts are central to new imaginaries and we are certainly in the midst of one. Marx’s comment on the conservatism of the middle class failed to realise its Janus-like character – in fact it combines both conservative and liberal tendencies within its multiple folds. Much of the social character of the emerging and lower middle classes does not appeal to the urban intelligentsia schooled in western education; the latter are fearful of their power to shift the political balance towards what the BJP represented in the past. What this fear misses out on are the checks provided, not so much by our much depleted institutions, but by the creative ways in which new generations populating the bulging emerging middle class engage with the India handed down to them. In doing so, they will want more and not less freedom.
March 29, 2014
India: Modi of the middle class | Christophe Jaffrelot
Indian Express
Modi of the middle class
He appeals to an urban class with eroding caste identities, increasing religiosity. Tweet This
Written by Christophe Jaffrelot | March 24, 2014 9:55 am
Modi is able to rally around the party what he calls a ‘neo-middle class’, made up of newcomers to the urban economy. Modi is able to rally around the party what he calls a ‘neo-middle class’, made up of newcomers to the urban economy.
He appeals to an urban class with eroding caste identities, increasing religiosity.
The negative reasons why the middle class “votes for Modi” are most obvious. There is a total rejection of the UPA regime, because of corruption and dynastic politics. There is also a fatigue with the government’s style of leadership and distrust vis-à-vis its policies. In spite of the fact that the middle class has benefited from Manmohanomics more than any other social group, it resents his inability to make growth sustainable (growth has declined in all emerging countries, including China, but that’s no reason for not blaming the government) and to counter the erosion of the rupee, which makes life so much more complicated abroad.
The “positive” reasons are more interesting. First, a section of the middle class perceives Narendra Modi as a super-CEO. One of his biographers, Nirendra Dev, points out that he “functions like a modern day CEO laying emphasis on the outcome and often allegedly putting the rules and normal norms in the backburner” (Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth, 2012).
to help us personalise your reading experience.
This image relies on a whole set of beliefs: he is less a politician than a manager (an assumption harking back to his past career as an organisation man, a pracharak) and he is for the liberalisation of the economy (didn’t he claim that he would transform Gujarat into “the SEZ of India” as early as 2007?). This last quality has affinities with the middle class’s trust in the private sector to modernise the economy. The upper layer of this class already lives in new towns where education, health, security, water, electricity etc are privatised.
If the middle class wants a super-CEO at the helm of India, it is also because it does not valorise parliamentary democracy as much as before, compared to a more managerial decision-making process. In 2008, the CSDS survey on the State of Democracy in South Asia showed that in India, 51 per cent of the respondents from the “elite” “strongly agreed” and 29 per cent “agreed” with the proposition: “All major decisions about the country should be taken by experts rather than politicians”. Among interviewees from the “mass”, 29 per cent “strongly agreed” and 22 per cent “agreed”, probably because they were not prepared to undermine one of their main assets: numbers.
Five years later, the popularity of democracy among the middle class has probably eroded further. The aggregated data that the CSDS has just made public show that, as a whole, satisfaction with the working of democracy has declined from 55 per cent to 46 per cent, a clear reflection of the impact of corruption and the criminalisation of politics, which affect almost equally all the political forces that have governed a state for some time.
There is also a caste element in the middle class’s affinities with Modi. He is perceived to be opposed to reservations, a preoccupation among the merit-oriented middle class ever since the Mandal moment. Reluctance towards reservations is common in the BJP, but it is naturally more remarkable in the case of Modi, given his OBC background.
For the upper caste middle class, he demonstrates that OBCs can succeed in life without positive discrimination and can even reject this policy as counterproductive. This assimilation of Modi into anti-reservationism has something to do with the fact that he comes from the state where the first massive anti-quota movement took place in the 1980s, while he was at the helm of the RSS in the state as prant pracharak — before becoming organising secretary of the state BJP in 1987.
Last but not least, the political culture of the Hindu middle class is more and more imbued with ethno-religious connotations. This development has resulted from the need to compensate with some religiosity an increasingly pervasive form of materialism that has crept in after years of high growth rate. But it also reflects the influence of years of Hindutva politics and the fear of Islamism, especially after the terrorist attacks of the last decade.
Modi, who, before becoming an RSS full-timer, is said to have been a “world renouncer” for some time in the Himalayas and who has always been closely associated with religious movements like the Swaminarayan sect, embodies the “Hindu hriday samrat” who can protect India from Pakistan and the majority community from “the fifth columnists”, as is evident from the 2002 killings.
But Modi’s appeal for the middle class is not sufficient to win the general elections. The BJP has learnt this lesson from its defeat of 2004, when it got the vote of the “shining Indians” (in 2009, the rich voted for the Congress more than for the BJP). Modi is able to rally around the party what he calls a “neo-middle class”, which is made up of newcomers to the urban economy. In Gujarat, OBCs are voting for the BJP in semi-urban and urban contexts while those who live in villages support the Congress.
These urban OBCs are former peasants who have migrated to the city or who have been incorporated in the rapid process of urbanisation that Gujarat has been undergoing. In this process, their caste identity has been eroded. Their joining the neo-middle class is related to their work in a factory, a sweatshop in the informal sector, as a chaiwala (à la Slumdog Millionaire) or as a driver (like the key character in Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger). They may not earn much since the wages of the labourers are very low in Gujarat, but at least they have jobs (since the unemployment rate — perhaps correlatively — is also very low), and they have hopes of a brighter future. The “neo-middle class” is an aspiring category.
This group is imbued with forms of intense Hindu religiosity. This is true not just of Gujarat. Everywhere in India, plebeians who experience some upward social mobility, especially when they come from “a low-caste background, adhere more strongly to the ritualistic forms of Hindu practice” (Middle-Class Moralities: Everyday Struggle over Belonging and Prestige in India, M. Saavala, 2010). Saavala attributes this attitude to a new form of Sanskritisation. In Gujarat, it has developed at the expense of caste-oriented identities.
Can this Gujarat “model” be replicated elsewhere? In other words, will caste identities be submerged in a new sense of belonging to a “neo-middle class” among the urban OBCs, who may then identify with Modi-the-former-chaiwala, who promises jobs? And will Hindu majoritarianism prevail more, further eroding caste divisions? This is one of the main questions for analysts of the coming general elections. Urbanisation may indeed play a key role for the first time.
Not only because of the socio-economic changes it implies, but also because of its cultural impact, since this process also results in less religious syncretism and more exposure to Hindu nationalist propaganda. In a village, Hindus and Muslims who have been neighbours for centuries share rituals and beliefs, even if they do not mix. Hindus would go to Muslim shrines (including dargahs) to benefit from the “baraka (powers)” of the Sufi saint, and vice versa. In cities, these practices are less likely to take place, not only because of a more individualistic lifestyle, but also because of the ghettoisation process that diminishes the chances of interaction.
Second, city dwellers are easily targeted by ideological messages and images. Politics is on television, on the internet, on mobile phones, and those who know how to use these new media have an advantage. But even if caste identities are not submerged by the brand of Moditva that has worked in Gujarat, Modi will probably be able to cash in on his OBC background in parts of the Hindi belt.
The writer is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/ CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London, Princeton Global Scholar and non-resident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Modi of the middle class
He appeals to an urban class with eroding caste identities, increasing religiosity. Tweet This
Written by Christophe Jaffrelot | March 24, 2014 9:55 am
Modi is able to rally around the party what he calls a ‘neo-middle class’, made up of newcomers to the urban economy. Modi is able to rally around the party what he calls a ‘neo-middle class’, made up of newcomers to the urban economy.
He appeals to an urban class with eroding caste identities, increasing religiosity.
The negative reasons why the middle class “votes for Modi” are most obvious. There is a total rejection of the UPA regime, because of corruption and dynastic politics. There is also a fatigue with the government’s style of leadership and distrust vis-à-vis its policies. In spite of the fact that the middle class has benefited from Manmohanomics more than any other social group, it resents his inability to make growth sustainable (growth has declined in all emerging countries, including China, but that’s no reason for not blaming the government) and to counter the erosion of the rupee, which makes life so much more complicated abroad.
The “positive” reasons are more interesting. First, a section of the middle class perceives Narendra Modi as a super-CEO. One of his biographers, Nirendra Dev, points out that he “functions like a modern day CEO laying emphasis on the outcome and often allegedly putting the rules and normal norms in the backburner” (Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth, 2012).
to help us personalise your reading experience.
This image relies on a whole set of beliefs: he is less a politician than a manager (an assumption harking back to his past career as an organisation man, a pracharak) and he is for the liberalisation of the economy (didn’t he claim that he would transform Gujarat into “the SEZ of India” as early as 2007?). This last quality has affinities with the middle class’s trust in the private sector to modernise the economy. The upper layer of this class already lives in new towns where education, health, security, water, electricity etc are privatised.
If the middle class wants a super-CEO at the helm of India, it is also because it does not valorise parliamentary democracy as much as before, compared to a more managerial decision-making process. In 2008, the CSDS survey on the State of Democracy in South Asia showed that in India, 51 per cent of the respondents from the “elite” “strongly agreed” and 29 per cent “agreed” with the proposition: “All major decisions about the country should be taken by experts rather than politicians”. Among interviewees from the “mass”, 29 per cent “strongly agreed” and 22 per cent “agreed”, probably because they were not prepared to undermine one of their main assets: numbers.
Five years later, the popularity of democracy among the middle class has probably eroded further. The aggregated data that the CSDS has just made public show that, as a whole, satisfaction with the working of democracy has declined from 55 per cent to 46 per cent, a clear reflection of the impact of corruption and the criminalisation of politics, which affect almost equally all the political forces that have governed a state for some time.
There is also a caste element in the middle class’s affinities with Modi. He is perceived to be opposed to reservations, a preoccupation among the merit-oriented middle class ever since the Mandal moment. Reluctance towards reservations is common in the BJP, but it is naturally more remarkable in the case of Modi, given his OBC background.
For the upper caste middle class, he demonstrates that OBCs can succeed in life without positive discrimination and can even reject this policy as counterproductive. This assimilation of Modi into anti-reservationism has something to do with the fact that he comes from the state where the first massive anti-quota movement took place in the 1980s, while he was at the helm of the RSS in the state as prant pracharak — before becoming organising secretary of the state BJP in 1987.
Last but not least, the political culture of the Hindu middle class is more and more imbued with ethno-religious connotations. This development has resulted from the need to compensate with some religiosity an increasingly pervasive form of materialism that has crept in after years of high growth rate. But it also reflects the influence of years of Hindutva politics and the fear of Islamism, especially after the terrorist attacks of the last decade.
Modi, who, before becoming an RSS full-timer, is said to have been a “world renouncer” for some time in the Himalayas and who has always been closely associated with religious movements like the Swaminarayan sect, embodies the “Hindu hriday samrat” who can protect India from Pakistan and the majority community from “the fifth columnists”, as is evident from the 2002 killings.
But Modi’s appeal for the middle class is not sufficient to win the general elections. The BJP has learnt this lesson from its defeat of 2004, when it got the vote of the “shining Indians” (in 2009, the rich voted for the Congress more than for the BJP). Modi is able to rally around the party what he calls a “neo-middle class”, which is made up of newcomers to the urban economy. In Gujarat, OBCs are voting for the BJP in semi-urban and urban contexts while those who live in villages support the Congress.
These urban OBCs are former peasants who have migrated to the city or who have been incorporated in the rapid process of urbanisation that Gujarat has been undergoing. In this process, their caste identity has been eroded. Their joining the neo-middle class is related to their work in a factory, a sweatshop in the informal sector, as a chaiwala (à la Slumdog Millionaire) or as a driver (like the key character in Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger). They may not earn much since the wages of the labourers are very low in Gujarat, but at least they have jobs (since the unemployment rate — perhaps correlatively — is also very low), and they have hopes of a brighter future. The “neo-middle class” is an aspiring category.
This group is imbued with forms of intense Hindu religiosity. This is true not just of Gujarat. Everywhere in India, plebeians who experience some upward social mobility, especially when they come from “a low-caste background, adhere more strongly to the ritualistic forms of Hindu practice” (Middle-Class Moralities: Everyday Struggle over Belonging and Prestige in India, M. Saavala, 2010). Saavala attributes this attitude to a new form of Sanskritisation. In Gujarat, it has developed at the expense of caste-oriented identities.
Can this Gujarat “model” be replicated elsewhere? In other words, will caste identities be submerged in a new sense of belonging to a “neo-middle class” among the urban OBCs, who may then identify with Modi-the-former-chaiwala, who promises jobs? And will Hindu majoritarianism prevail more, further eroding caste divisions? This is one of the main questions for analysts of the coming general elections. Urbanisation may indeed play a key role for the first time.
Not only because of the socio-economic changes it implies, but also because of its cultural impact, since this process also results in less religious syncretism and more exposure to Hindu nationalist propaganda. In a village, Hindus and Muslims who have been neighbours for centuries share rituals and beliefs, even if they do not mix. Hindus would go to Muslim shrines (including dargahs) to benefit from the “baraka (powers)” of the Sufi saint, and vice versa. In cities, these practices are less likely to take place, not only because of a more individualistic lifestyle, but also because of the ghettoisation process that diminishes the chances of interaction.
Second, city dwellers are easily targeted by ideological messages and images. Politics is on television, on the internet, on mobile phones, and those who know how to use these new media have an advantage. But even if caste identities are not submerged by the brand of Moditva that has worked in Gujarat, Modi will probably be able to cash in on his OBC background in parts of the Hindi belt.
The writer is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/ CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London, Princeton Global Scholar and non-resident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
April 18, 2013
How the support of the neo-middle class has been crucial to Modi's rise (Christophe Jaffrelot)
The Indian Express, April 17 2013
A class of his own
by Christophe Jaffrelot
How the support of the neo-middle class has been crucial to Modi's rise
In December, Narendra Modi won the Gujarat election with the support, not only of the middle class, but also of what the state BJP called the "neo-middle class'' in its manifesto. According to the CSDS pre-electoral survey, not only did 57.4 per cent of the richest voters go the BJP way, but 54.2 per cent of the middle income bracket voters also did the same (against 28 and 34.4 per cent for the Congress respectively — which got the vote of the poor). This neo-middle class is made of aspiring groups that tend to change their political colour after migrating to an urban milieu. The shift is particularly striking in the case of the OBCs: while the Kolis vote more for the Congress when they are in a rural context (53 per cent), they move to the BJP the moment they join a semi urban constituency (that is, one with 25 to 75 per cent of urban voters) — 65 per cent of them do so. This shift is even more dramatic when the upwardly mobile OBCs end up in a city.
Rural constituencies of Gujarat are the only places where more voters support the Congress, while semi-urban and urban constituencies are almost fully behind the BJP. But the urban/rural divide is a proxy for class. What the above data shows is simply that caste identities — and caste-related political cultures — are submerged by class considerations when formerly rural groups come to the city, hoping to join the lower middle class. Their new ethos — or at least their aspirations — make them turn to Modi's BJP and its promise of jobs in the name of "development".
The propensity of the neo-middle class to support Modi's BJP in Gujarat can be easily explained without even factoring in the communal element (although it is arguably more developed in the urban context, notably because of recurring riots). The BJP of Gujarat simply paid more attention to the material interests of the urban middle class than to any other group, as is evident from its election manifesto. Among the relevant items of this carefully drafted document, one can cite the promise to construct 50 lakh houses, the increase of the age limit for entry into government jobs from 25 to 28, English medium schools, Rs 2,000 crore for flyovers and underpasses in cities, the building of mono rail in places other than Ahmedabad (where the project has already been planned) and insurance schemes. These are, typically, promises aiming at wooing the urban middle class.
But there's no need to further scrutinise pre-electoral promises. The actual polarisation of Gujarat's society speaks for itself. Modi's policy, over the last 10 years, has benefited the urban middle class more than anybody else. If Gujarat ranks only 11th out of 23 states in terms of the human development index, it's because groups in rural Gujarat continue to lag behind. Indeed, Gujarat is a case of social polarisation with the new rich in the cities and most of the groups that are at the receiving end concentrated in the villages. There, the number of families below the poverty line has jumped from 23.39 lakh in 2000 to 30.49 lakh in July 2012, according to the rural development commissioner. Unsurprisingly, 9 lakh of the 11 lakh houses without electricity, according to the Gujarat 2011 census, are in rural areas. In terms of education, the excellent report of the NGO, Pratham, shows that rural Gujarat was lagging behind states like Haryana.
Dalits and Adivasis (11.3 and 16.5 per cent of the state population, respectively) are particularly affected. For instance, the percentage of tribal underweight children (0-5 years old) is much higher in Gujarat than the tribal average at the national level (64.5 per cent compared to 54.5 per cent). The under-five mortality rate of tribal children is also much higher. Similarly, the percentage of Dalit participation in the NREGA programme is three times less in Gujarat (7.83 per cent) than in India at large (22.67 per cent). In fact, development has meant socio-economic polarisation, because Gujarat is a typical case of growth without development for all. The Gujarat chapter of the India Human Development Report of 2011 concluded that "the high growth rate achieved by the state over the years has not percolated to the marginalised sections of society, particularly STs and SCs, to help improve their human development outcomes".
That the middle class cares only for its interests is fair enough. But over the last two years, it has seemed that it was more and more concerned by corruption and the criminalisaton of politics — evident from the Anna Hazare movement which, arguably, was driven by the middle class.
Here, the record of Gujarat suggests a paradox. In this state, the middle class supports the BJP government in spite of uneven indicators in terms of the rule of law and a number of tainted former members of the government on the radar screen of the judiciary. Today, five Gujarat-based police officials — including senior IPS officers — are behind bars, waiting for their trial in Mumbai. They've been accused of being responsible for at least one of the many alleged fake encounters that have taken place in the years 2003-2006 in Gujarat. The most famous of these cases are those regarding Sohrabuddin, his wife Kauser bi and their friend Tulsiram Prajapati.
The CBI, in its chargesheet, named Amit Shah, the then minister of state for home, as the kingpin of the conspiracy. He was arrested in 2010, spent over three months in jail and, while on bail, was not allowed to return to Gujarat, lest he interfere with the investigators. He came back two months before the last state elections, was re-elected and, by all accounts, has again become a close aide of the chief minister. Maya Kodnani, also a former member of the state government, has been convicted for involvement in the 2002 violence in Ahmedabad. The Supreme Court has ordered the transfer of several cases to Maharashtra "to preserve the integrity of the trial".
BJP president Rajnath Singh has not only inducted Narendra Modi into the party's apex decision-making bodies, the parliamentary board and central election committee, but he has also appointed Amit Shah as one of the general secretaries of the party. And among the new national council members from Gujarat, figures also Babubhai Katara, a former BJP MP from Dahod who had been arrested in 2007 for human trafficking and was suspended from the party.
In this context, L.K. Advani has lectured his colleagues to ensure that the BJP remained "a party with a difference". But was it because the middle class cares for political cleanliness?
The writer is a senior research fellow at CERI, Sciences Po, Paris and professor of Indian politics and society at the King's India Institute, London, and non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace
A class of his own
by Christophe Jaffrelot
How the support of the neo-middle class has been crucial to Modi's rise
In December, Narendra Modi won the Gujarat election with the support, not only of the middle class, but also of what the state BJP called the "neo-middle class'' in its manifesto. According to the CSDS pre-electoral survey, not only did 57.4 per cent of the richest voters go the BJP way, but 54.2 per cent of the middle income bracket voters also did the same (against 28 and 34.4 per cent for the Congress respectively — which got the vote of the poor). This neo-middle class is made of aspiring groups that tend to change their political colour after migrating to an urban milieu. The shift is particularly striking in the case of the OBCs: while the Kolis vote more for the Congress when they are in a rural context (53 per cent), they move to the BJP the moment they join a semi urban constituency (that is, one with 25 to 75 per cent of urban voters) — 65 per cent of them do so. This shift is even more dramatic when the upwardly mobile OBCs end up in a city.
Rural constituencies of Gujarat are the only places where more voters support the Congress, while semi-urban and urban constituencies are almost fully behind the BJP. But the urban/rural divide is a proxy for class. What the above data shows is simply that caste identities — and caste-related political cultures — are submerged by class considerations when formerly rural groups come to the city, hoping to join the lower middle class. Their new ethos — or at least their aspirations — make them turn to Modi's BJP and its promise of jobs in the name of "development".
The propensity of the neo-middle class to support Modi's BJP in Gujarat can be easily explained without even factoring in the communal element (although it is arguably more developed in the urban context, notably because of recurring riots). The BJP of Gujarat simply paid more attention to the material interests of the urban middle class than to any other group, as is evident from its election manifesto. Among the relevant items of this carefully drafted document, one can cite the promise to construct 50 lakh houses, the increase of the age limit for entry into government jobs from 25 to 28, English medium schools, Rs 2,000 crore for flyovers and underpasses in cities, the building of mono rail in places other than Ahmedabad (where the project has already been planned) and insurance schemes. These are, typically, promises aiming at wooing the urban middle class.
But there's no need to further scrutinise pre-electoral promises. The actual polarisation of Gujarat's society speaks for itself. Modi's policy, over the last 10 years, has benefited the urban middle class more than anybody else. If Gujarat ranks only 11th out of 23 states in terms of the human development index, it's because groups in rural Gujarat continue to lag behind. Indeed, Gujarat is a case of social polarisation with the new rich in the cities and most of the groups that are at the receiving end concentrated in the villages. There, the number of families below the poverty line has jumped from 23.39 lakh in 2000 to 30.49 lakh in July 2012, according to the rural development commissioner. Unsurprisingly, 9 lakh of the 11 lakh houses without electricity, according to the Gujarat 2011 census, are in rural areas. In terms of education, the excellent report of the NGO, Pratham, shows that rural Gujarat was lagging behind states like Haryana.
Dalits and Adivasis (11.3 and 16.5 per cent of the state population, respectively) are particularly affected. For instance, the percentage of tribal underweight children (0-5 years old) is much higher in Gujarat than the tribal average at the national level (64.5 per cent compared to 54.5 per cent). The under-five mortality rate of tribal children is also much higher. Similarly, the percentage of Dalit participation in the NREGA programme is three times less in Gujarat (7.83 per cent) than in India at large (22.67 per cent). In fact, development has meant socio-economic polarisation, because Gujarat is a typical case of growth without development for all. The Gujarat chapter of the India Human Development Report of 2011 concluded that "the high growth rate achieved by the state over the years has not percolated to the marginalised sections of society, particularly STs and SCs, to help improve their human development outcomes".
That the middle class cares only for its interests is fair enough. But over the last two years, it has seemed that it was more and more concerned by corruption and the criminalisaton of politics — evident from the Anna Hazare movement which, arguably, was driven by the middle class.
Here, the record of Gujarat suggests a paradox. In this state, the middle class supports the BJP government in spite of uneven indicators in terms of the rule of law and a number of tainted former members of the government on the radar screen of the judiciary. Today, five Gujarat-based police officials — including senior IPS officers — are behind bars, waiting for their trial in Mumbai. They've been accused of being responsible for at least one of the many alleged fake encounters that have taken place in the years 2003-2006 in Gujarat. The most famous of these cases are those regarding Sohrabuddin, his wife Kauser bi and their friend Tulsiram Prajapati.
The CBI, in its chargesheet, named Amit Shah, the then minister of state for home, as the kingpin of the conspiracy. He was arrested in 2010, spent over three months in jail and, while on bail, was not allowed to return to Gujarat, lest he interfere with the investigators. He came back two months before the last state elections, was re-elected and, by all accounts, has again become a close aide of the chief minister. Maya Kodnani, also a former member of the state government, has been convicted for involvement in the 2002 violence in Ahmedabad. The Supreme Court has ordered the transfer of several cases to Maharashtra "to preserve the integrity of the trial".
BJP president Rajnath Singh has not only inducted Narendra Modi into the party's apex decision-making bodies, the parliamentary board and central election committee, but he has also appointed Amit Shah as one of the general secretaries of the party. And among the new national council members from Gujarat, figures also Babubhai Katara, a former BJP MP from Dahod who had been arrested in 2007 for human trafficking and was suspended from the party.
In this context, L.K. Advani has lectured his colleagues to ensure that the BJP remained "a party with a difference". But was it because the middle class cares for political cleanliness?
The writer is a senior research fellow at CERI, Sciences Po, Paris and professor of Indian politics and society at the King's India Institute, London, and non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace
April 16, 2013
“Middle Class Wants Nation-State To Be Run Like A Company” Outlook Interviews Christophe Jaffrelot
Outlook Magazine | Apr 22, 2013
interview
“Middle Class Wants Nation-State To Be Run Like A Company”
The eminent political scientist and India-watcher took some questions from Outlook
Outlook Interviews Christophe Jaffrelot
Political scientist and India-watcher Christophe Jaffrelot took some questions from Outlook. Excerpts:
On the rising power of corporates: The rising power of the business community makes sense in post-1991 liberalized India. While it suffered from clear opprobrium under the Nehruvian pattern, the private sector has become the role model in India—like elsewhere. Middle class people may even think that the nation-state should be managed like a company, that it would perform more effectively if the country's leaders went only by meritocratic values—which would put reservations into question for instance. Interestingly, this discourse downplays the role of the private sector in corruption cases. The guilty men are the politicians who take money more than those who give.
On Narendra Modi and big business: Narendra Modi needed to embark on an alternative repertoire after the 2002 pogrom and he chose “development”. For that, he needed the money of the private sector and he has been able to attract huge investments (not as much as he claims though) by changing the rules of the game. The decision-making process has become very quick indeed—and has resulted in a form of proximity between capitalists and a BJP politician that only Pramod Mahajan had developed to such an extent before. More importantly, Gujarat’s exchequer is suffering, but that is not what hits headlines—the Nano plant did!
“The urban elite is tired of ‘a country of 5,00,000 villages’ and wants to project its modern face instead.”
On why politicians seek corporate platforms: This is the "shining India" syndrome. The ruling class is urban and middle class oriented, even when it comes from some low extraction. Incidentally, the Dalit leaders are not hugely different because they are products of the reservations. Since 1991 the gap between Bharat and India (to use Charan Singh's words) is widening. The urban elite is tired of "a-country-of-500,000-villages" and wants to project its modern face instead. This is also the best way to "sale" India abroad: the soft power on which New Delhi can capitalise is located in Bangalore, not in the tribal belt of Chhattisgarh. But the elite ignore more than 50% of the country at their own cost. In 2004, the BJP was punished by the voters because of such miscalculations. And more importantly, you cannot really develop a rural country by not investing more in agriculture—or letting this kind of investment to the private sector. Can Reliance build irrigation canals, in the end? Not in Saurashtra
On the perils of trying to manufacture a US-style Presidential contest between Modi and Rahul Gandhi: This personalization of politics is not specific to the US. It developed in Europe in the context of parliamentary systems. See what happened in UK under Thatcher and Blair? See Merkel in Germany. This is the age of communication when a political party hardly exists if it cannot project a face. It will remain anonymous if its has no family name—this is an additional factor to dynastic politics by the way. The last state elections are a case in pojnt. In Gujarat, it was Modi vs. Who? Nobody on the Congress side. And Modi was a marketing genius when he gave masks of his face to every Gujarati who wanted to identify with him to that extent—plus the NaMo Channel and the 3 D holographs...
On the world outside Delhi and Mumbai: The India shinning syndrome of the early 2000s continues to prevail because the middle class runs the show (where are the Charan Singhs of rural India today?), be they congressmen or BJPwallahs. And, yes, they may face strong opposition from villagers. But urbanization is making progress and money plays also an even larger role in politics—so they my get away with it… and let the red corridor grow. The question mark that remains pertains to the state parties: will they endorse non-middle class interests, and get the upper hand? A Third Front of that kind cannot be ruled out today.
On the greater role being played by India Inc in making laws and political activity in recent years: Democracy is affected when money plays a major role in the electoral arena and helps to suppress dissenting voices, like in the US. It also affects democracy when paid news become THE news. Regarding laws, we could mention several instances. I would mention only one: the RTI Act. Although it is a great achievement, the law makers have excluded the private sector from its purview and this is definitely making some Indians more equals than others. Hopefully the Indian judiciary will resist this kind of trend.
An edited, shorter version of this appears in print
interview
“Middle Class Wants Nation-State To Be Run Like A Company”
The eminent political scientist and India-watcher took some questions from Outlook
Outlook Interviews Christophe Jaffrelot
Political scientist and India-watcher Christophe Jaffrelot took some questions from Outlook. Excerpts:
On the rising power of corporates: The rising power of the business community makes sense in post-1991 liberalized India. While it suffered from clear opprobrium under the Nehruvian pattern, the private sector has become the role model in India—like elsewhere. Middle class people may even think that the nation-state should be managed like a company, that it would perform more effectively if the country's leaders went only by meritocratic values—which would put reservations into question for instance. Interestingly, this discourse downplays the role of the private sector in corruption cases. The guilty men are the politicians who take money more than those who give.
On Narendra Modi and big business: Narendra Modi needed to embark on an alternative repertoire after the 2002 pogrom and he chose “development”. For that, he needed the money of the private sector and he has been able to attract huge investments (not as much as he claims though) by changing the rules of the game. The decision-making process has become very quick indeed—and has resulted in a form of proximity between capitalists and a BJP politician that only Pramod Mahajan had developed to such an extent before. More importantly, Gujarat’s exchequer is suffering, but that is not what hits headlines—the Nano plant did!
“The urban elite is tired of ‘a country of 5,00,000 villages’ and wants to project its modern face instead.”
On why politicians seek corporate platforms: This is the "shining India" syndrome. The ruling class is urban and middle class oriented, even when it comes from some low extraction. Incidentally, the Dalit leaders are not hugely different because they are products of the reservations. Since 1991 the gap between Bharat and India (to use Charan Singh's words) is widening. The urban elite is tired of "a-country-of-500,000-villages" and wants to project its modern face instead. This is also the best way to "sale" India abroad: the soft power on which New Delhi can capitalise is located in Bangalore, not in the tribal belt of Chhattisgarh. But the elite ignore more than 50% of the country at their own cost. In 2004, the BJP was punished by the voters because of such miscalculations. And more importantly, you cannot really develop a rural country by not investing more in agriculture—or letting this kind of investment to the private sector. Can Reliance build irrigation canals, in the end? Not in Saurashtra
On the perils of trying to manufacture a US-style Presidential contest between Modi and Rahul Gandhi: This personalization of politics is not specific to the US. It developed in Europe in the context of parliamentary systems. See what happened in UK under Thatcher and Blair? See Merkel in Germany. This is the age of communication when a political party hardly exists if it cannot project a face. It will remain anonymous if its has no family name—this is an additional factor to dynastic politics by the way. The last state elections are a case in pojnt. In Gujarat, it was Modi vs. Who? Nobody on the Congress side. And Modi was a marketing genius when he gave masks of his face to every Gujarati who wanted to identify with him to that extent—plus the NaMo Channel and the 3 D holographs...
On the world outside Delhi and Mumbai: The India shinning syndrome of the early 2000s continues to prevail because the middle class runs the show (where are the Charan Singhs of rural India today?), be they congressmen or BJPwallahs. And, yes, they may face strong opposition from villagers. But urbanization is making progress and money plays also an even larger role in politics—so they my get away with it… and let the red corridor grow. The question mark that remains pertains to the state parties: will they endorse non-middle class interests, and get the upper hand? A Third Front of that kind cannot be ruled out today.
On the greater role being played by India Inc in making laws and political activity in recent years: Democracy is affected when money plays a major role in the electoral arena and helps to suppress dissenting voices, like in the US. It also affects democracy when paid news become THE news. Regarding laws, we could mention several instances. I would mention only one: the RTI Act. Although it is a great achievement, the law makers have excluded the private sector from its purview and this is definitely making some Indians more equals than others. Hopefully the Indian judiciary will resist this kind of trend.
An edited, shorter version of this appears in print
October 29, 2012
Book Review: Sunila Kale on Menon Women of the Hindu Right
Kalyani Devaki Menon. Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 224 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4196-9.
Reviewed by Sunila Kale (University of Washington International Studies Department)
Published on H-Asia (May, 2011)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Kale on Menon Women of the Hindu Right
In Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, Kalyani Devaki Menon provides us with a rich ethnographic account of the mechanisms, tactics, and ideologies by which Hindu nationalist organizations build their support among Indian women in the communities in and around India’s national capital, Delhi. The subject matter continues to be timely, for despite the sidelining of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party from the center stage of national politics in India, Hindu nationalism in its cultural, social, as well as political variants continues to thrive in India.[1] The focus in this book on women is equally welcome as part of a larger body of scholarship that seeks to disaggregate the Hindu nationalist movement to understand how its various constituents operate alongside and sometimes against each other.
Menon conducted a year-long ethnography among individuals working in the Delhi chapters of several Hindu nationalist organizations: the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the women’s organization directly linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; the Durga Vahini and Matri Shakti, women’s organizations related to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad; the Mahila Morcha, the women’s affiliate of the Bharatiya Janata Party; and Sewa Bharati, a social service organization that in Delhi concentrates mostly on providing educational and vocational training to Delhi’s poor urban communities. Her sustained interactions with forty-five women and ten men in the movement take her from ordinary chapter meetings to specialized retreats and nationalist rallies full of incendiary speeches. Her ethnography among her mostly middle-class and upper-caste participants attends to “the everyday constructions of ideology and politics through which activists garner support at the grassroots level.” To this end, she looks at how individual members and organizations use “history, religion, politics, and social work to articulate the everyday fears, desires, needs, and interests of diverse groups with the movements goals” (p. 5).
While Menon is interested in the pluralism of the Hindu nationalist movement itself, a quality that rests at the heart of the movement’s “expansionary strategies” (p. 5), her potentially more significant contribution is the examination of moments when individuals become what she calls “dissonant subjects,” transgressing the norms of the movement. In these moments, Menon sees an opportunity to examine “everyday acts that complicate our analysis of Hindu nationalist subjects” (p. 3), in particular the ability of movement leaders and movement structures to variously overlook, discipline, or incorporate dissonance. Menon engages these theoretical issues of Hindu nationalism’s pluralism and the role of dissonant subjects in her introductory chapter. The subsequent chapters are organized around the movement’s uses of historical narratives, the language of fear, a twinning of religious and political duty, volunteerism, and the use of games and fun. These are all examples of the common practices by which movement leaders inspire new recruits and instill a normative agenda, and Menon provides a valuable ethnographic snapshot of these everyday acts.
Menon notes that at times the normative emphasis among these women’s organizations is distinct from hegemonic Hindu nationalist discourses. Menon argues that it is through an accommodation of ideological or normative pluralism that the movement has been able to grow substantially among Indian women, as well as among other groups who might otherwise be alienated by rigidly enforced hegemonic and patriarchal norms. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Menon’s analysis in chapter 1, where she takes up the subject of “everyday histories.” For example, in most dominant Hindu nationalist narratives, the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji is valorized as the epitome of a righteous Hindu ruler and the progenitor of the modern Hindu nation. However, Menon finds that among the women of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the figure of Jijabai, Shivaji’s mother, is the generative force for a newly awakened Hindu politics in the early seventeenth century, an “architect of the Hindu Nation” (p. 47). The stories that circulate around Jijabai underscore the central role of motherhood for Menon’s interlocutors, one that allows individual women to make a deep impact on public, political events through the private choices they make for themselves, and most importantly, for their children.
In chapters 2 and 3, Menon interrogates the uses of fear and insecurity in the garnering of new recruits and the justification of certain kinds of social work. For example, in one conversation with a member of Sewa Bharati, we hear the position that the Hindu nationalist movement’s education outreach among Delhi’s lower-income communities is essential to countering the threats that conversion poses from minority religions, particularly Christianity. In the subsequent chapter, Menon examines the productive uses made of fears of Pakistan during the Kargil war. In her analysis of the speeches of female ascetics like Sadhvi Rithambara, Menon argues that it is “their dual status as renouncers and as women that makes these sadhvis such effective voices for the values, morals, and politics of the movement” (p. 82).
While chapter 3 draws from her fieldwork experiences at rallies and other significant occasions, Menon’s book is strongest and most illuminating when it takes us into the everyday world of work and play. In chapter 4, Menon presents material from her fieldwork among women in social service organizations. In the first part of the chapter Menon accompanies two VHP social workers in their volunteer time in the obstetric and gynecology unit of one of Delhi’s government hospitals. The two women play critical mediating roles for the largely poor, illiterate, and inexperienced patient population seeking prenatal attention. They routinely serve as stenographers, helping patients to input information for hospital registration, and in some cases they function as triage nurses, determining which patients require attention and which will most likely be sent home by the hospital staff. Here we get a more grounded sense of the vital social work that is done by individuals and organizations of the Hindu Right and how this work connects to the expansion of the movement among new communities.
Chapter 5 shifts the focus to a singular event, a weekend retreat, or shivir, organized by the Rashtra Sevika Samiti with the imperative to recruit new members. Organized games and play, physical exercises and drills, lectures, prayer, and patriotic songs structure the day’s activities, all with the aim to position new recruits “toward the cultural politics of the movement” (p. 131). Games and play are particularly apt strategies to “disseminate these ideas because they are able to convey Hindu nationalist constructions of history, politics, and morality without raising the hackles of those who might otherwise disagree with them” (p. 155).
Menon gives us a very good sense of the ideology and practices of the organizations and individuals with whom she interacts. There are a few places, however, where the reader might have wished for additional or perhaps different kinds of information to make sense of the larger argument. Among the occasions in which members of the Hindu nationalist movement become dissonant subjects we have the opening vignette, in which Ela, a volunteer in Sewa Bharati, expresses the opinion that “it is meaningless” to build a temple to Ram “on the blood of so many Indians” (p. 1). This views sits at odds with Ela’s own family history in the RSS, her own long-standing association with Sewa Bharati, and the focal nature of the efforts to build a temple at the former site of the Babri Masjid for the Hindu nationalist movement over the last several decades. Similarly, we hear that another Hindu nationalist, Vimla, doubts the authenticity of female renunciates, who merely “have to look spiritual” (p. 102) to be granted a life of wealth and luxury. Again, given sadhvis’ privileged position of deference and authority in the movement, and their importance to some of the arguments of Menon’s book, Vimla’s views seem jarring.
Menon’s focus on dissonance in the introductory chapter of the book alerts the reader to pay closer attention to the narratives of such moments, and her theoretical survey of this concept is valuable and provocative. However, as the book unfolds, its rich ethnographic documentation geared toward “dissonance” is not supplemented by a continued engagement with this vital idea. While episodes of dissonance like the ones described above are inherently interesting, there seems to be less rigorous pursuit of the questions surrounding these moments: How do individuals themselves understand their transgression of the movement’s norms? Are there potentially more radical consequences to this dissonance? Could such moments of dissonance constitute the germ for a potential subversion of hegemonic positions? Menon’s book comes at a time when the broad swath of the Hindu Right is in a moment of reinvention, and this work is therefore timely and important in this context. It is an important contribution to the discussion of Hindu nationalism, and its emphasis on the everyday practices of nationalist organizations helps to clarify the movement’s expansion outside of its early upper-caste and middle-class support base into lower-caste and lower-class communities and especially through gender as both a dissonant and a resonant category of experience for members of the Hindu Right. Menon has given us a rich view of women in the Hindu Right of northern India, and whatever questions she leaves unanswered are perhaps stimulants for new research agendas.
Note
[1]. In the 2009 Indian parliamentary elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party won 116 seats, enough to secure its position as the second largest political party after the centrist Indian National Congress, which won 206 seats. The BJP has a substantial political following in a number of state governments as well. Among the most populous states where it functions either as the sole party in power or as a coalition partner are Gujarat, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Sunila Kale. Review of Menon, Kalyani Devaki, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. May, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29835
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviewed by Sunila Kale (University of Washington International Studies Department)
Published on H-Asia (May, 2011)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Kale on Menon Women of the Hindu Right
In Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, Kalyani Devaki Menon provides us with a rich ethnographic account of the mechanisms, tactics, and ideologies by which Hindu nationalist organizations build their support among Indian women in the communities in and around India’s national capital, Delhi. The subject matter continues to be timely, for despite the sidelining of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party from the center stage of national politics in India, Hindu nationalism in its cultural, social, as well as political variants continues to thrive in India.[1] The focus in this book on women is equally welcome as part of a larger body of scholarship that seeks to disaggregate the Hindu nationalist movement to understand how its various constituents operate alongside and sometimes against each other.
Menon conducted a year-long ethnography among individuals working in the Delhi chapters of several Hindu nationalist organizations: the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the women’s organization directly linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; the Durga Vahini and Matri Shakti, women’s organizations related to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad; the Mahila Morcha, the women’s affiliate of the Bharatiya Janata Party; and Sewa Bharati, a social service organization that in Delhi concentrates mostly on providing educational and vocational training to Delhi’s poor urban communities. Her sustained interactions with forty-five women and ten men in the movement take her from ordinary chapter meetings to specialized retreats and nationalist rallies full of incendiary speeches. Her ethnography among her mostly middle-class and upper-caste participants attends to “the everyday constructions of ideology and politics through which activists garner support at the grassroots level.” To this end, she looks at how individual members and organizations use “history, religion, politics, and social work to articulate the everyday fears, desires, needs, and interests of diverse groups with the movements goals” (p. 5).
While Menon is interested in the pluralism of the Hindu nationalist movement itself, a quality that rests at the heart of the movement’s “expansionary strategies” (p. 5), her potentially more significant contribution is the examination of moments when individuals become what she calls “dissonant subjects,” transgressing the norms of the movement. In these moments, Menon sees an opportunity to examine “everyday acts that complicate our analysis of Hindu nationalist subjects” (p. 3), in particular the ability of movement leaders and movement structures to variously overlook, discipline, or incorporate dissonance. Menon engages these theoretical issues of Hindu nationalism’s pluralism and the role of dissonant subjects in her introductory chapter. The subsequent chapters are organized around the movement’s uses of historical narratives, the language of fear, a twinning of religious and political duty, volunteerism, and the use of games and fun. These are all examples of the common practices by which movement leaders inspire new recruits and instill a normative agenda, and Menon provides a valuable ethnographic snapshot of these everyday acts.
Menon notes that at times the normative emphasis among these women’s organizations is distinct from hegemonic Hindu nationalist discourses. Menon argues that it is through an accommodation of ideological or normative pluralism that the movement has been able to grow substantially among Indian women, as well as among other groups who might otherwise be alienated by rigidly enforced hegemonic and patriarchal norms. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Menon’s analysis in chapter 1, where she takes up the subject of “everyday histories.” For example, in most dominant Hindu nationalist narratives, the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji is valorized as the epitome of a righteous Hindu ruler and the progenitor of the modern Hindu nation. However, Menon finds that among the women of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the figure of Jijabai, Shivaji’s mother, is the generative force for a newly awakened Hindu politics in the early seventeenth century, an “architect of the Hindu Nation” (p. 47). The stories that circulate around Jijabai underscore the central role of motherhood for Menon’s interlocutors, one that allows individual women to make a deep impact on public, political events through the private choices they make for themselves, and most importantly, for their children.
In chapters 2 and 3, Menon interrogates the uses of fear and insecurity in the garnering of new recruits and the justification of certain kinds of social work. For example, in one conversation with a member of Sewa Bharati, we hear the position that the Hindu nationalist movement’s education outreach among Delhi’s lower-income communities is essential to countering the threats that conversion poses from minority religions, particularly Christianity. In the subsequent chapter, Menon examines the productive uses made of fears of Pakistan during the Kargil war. In her analysis of the speeches of female ascetics like Sadhvi Rithambara, Menon argues that it is “their dual status as renouncers and as women that makes these sadhvis such effective voices for the values, morals, and politics of the movement” (p. 82).
While chapter 3 draws from her fieldwork experiences at rallies and other significant occasions, Menon’s book is strongest and most illuminating when it takes us into the everyday world of work and play. In chapter 4, Menon presents material from her fieldwork among women in social service organizations. In the first part of the chapter Menon accompanies two VHP social workers in their volunteer time in the obstetric and gynecology unit of one of Delhi’s government hospitals. The two women play critical mediating roles for the largely poor, illiterate, and inexperienced patient population seeking prenatal attention. They routinely serve as stenographers, helping patients to input information for hospital registration, and in some cases they function as triage nurses, determining which patients require attention and which will most likely be sent home by the hospital staff. Here we get a more grounded sense of the vital social work that is done by individuals and organizations of the Hindu Right and how this work connects to the expansion of the movement among new communities.
Chapter 5 shifts the focus to a singular event, a weekend retreat, or shivir, organized by the Rashtra Sevika Samiti with the imperative to recruit new members. Organized games and play, physical exercises and drills, lectures, prayer, and patriotic songs structure the day’s activities, all with the aim to position new recruits “toward the cultural politics of the movement” (p. 131). Games and play are particularly apt strategies to “disseminate these ideas because they are able to convey Hindu nationalist constructions of history, politics, and morality without raising the hackles of those who might otherwise disagree with them” (p. 155).
Menon gives us a very good sense of the ideology and practices of the organizations and individuals with whom she interacts. There are a few places, however, where the reader might have wished for additional or perhaps different kinds of information to make sense of the larger argument. Among the occasions in which members of the Hindu nationalist movement become dissonant subjects we have the opening vignette, in which Ela, a volunteer in Sewa Bharati, expresses the opinion that “it is meaningless” to build a temple to Ram “on the blood of so many Indians” (p. 1). This views sits at odds with Ela’s own family history in the RSS, her own long-standing association with Sewa Bharati, and the focal nature of the efforts to build a temple at the former site of the Babri Masjid for the Hindu nationalist movement over the last several decades. Similarly, we hear that another Hindu nationalist, Vimla, doubts the authenticity of female renunciates, who merely “have to look spiritual” (p. 102) to be granted a life of wealth and luxury. Again, given sadhvis’ privileged position of deference and authority in the movement, and their importance to some of the arguments of Menon’s book, Vimla’s views seem jarring.
Menon’s focus on dissonance in the introductory chapter of the book alerts the reader to pay closer attention to the narratives of such moments, and her theoretical survey of this concept is valuable and provocative. However, as the book unfolds, its rich ethnographic documentation geared toward “dissonance” is not supplemented by a continued engagement with this vital idea. While episodes of dissonance like the ones described above are inherently interesting, there seems to be less rigorous pursuit of the questions surrounding these moments: How do individuals themselves understand their transgression of the movement’s norms? Are there potentially more radical consequences to this dissonance? Could such moments of dissonance constitute the germ for a potential subversion of hegemonic positions? Menon’s book comes at a time when the broad swath of the Hindu Right is in a moment of reinvention, and this work is therefore timely and important in this context. It is an important contribution to the discussion of Hindu nationalism, and its emphasis on the everyday practices of nationalist organizations helps to clarify the movement’s expansion outside of its early upper-caste and middle-class support base into lower-caste and lower-class communities and especially through gender as both a dissonant and a resonant category of experience for members of the Hindu Right. Menon has given us a rich view of women in the Hindu Right of northern India, and whatever questions she leaves unanswered are perhaps stimulants for new research agendas.
Note
[1]. In the 2009 Indian parliamentary elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party won 116 seats, enough to secure its position as the second largest political party after the centrist Indian National Congress, which won 206 seats. The BJP has a substantial political following in a number of state governments as well. Among the most populous states where it functions either as the sole party in power or as a coalition partner are Gujarat, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Sunila Kale. Review of Menon, Kalyani Devaki, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. May, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29835
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
December 09, 2011
Does RSS, BJP opposition to foreign investment in retail have to do with their trader base ?
From: The Telegraph, December 1 , 2011
Packaged in Nagpur, resold in BJP store
RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
New Delhi, Nov. 30: Nagpur is running the backend operations of the BJP as far as retail is concerned, giving new shelf life to faces that were in cold storage during the Atal-Advani era.
One such figure was on display today when the BJP fielded Murli Manohar Joshi to address the media this afternoon. Joshi is not just the prime mover behind the party’s adjournment motion against FDI in multi-brand retail but he is also its most consistent “swadeshi” face that he often masked when the NDA was in power.
Today, Joshi drew his importance from the fact that had he not vetted the BJP’s 2009 manifesto, an “oversight” that “crept” into the NDA’s governance agenda before the 2004 elections might have haunted it now.
The physics professor — who drafted the BJP’s economic resolutions in the years before Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani accepted the reality of reforms — quoted from the 2009 manifesto to “prove” that the party was against retail FDI. He also referred to the NDA’s vision document of 2004 that waxed eloquent about “swadeshi”.
Asked about another 2004 document — the NDA’s development and governance agenda — Joshi feigned ignorance. It stated that if re-elected, the BJP and its allies intended to allow FDI in retail.
If Joshi’s advance to the forefront reflected the reach of the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, the statement of another BJP leader, so far considered pro-reform, suggested how retail has become a holy cow.
“I am for foreign investments even in touch-me-not areas like defence and media. But I will draw the line at retail because it is an idea whose time has not come,” the articulate leader said, playing on Victor Hugo’s line that Manmohan Singh had given wide currency to while pushing reforms.
The BJP leader cited the reasons: domestic manufacturing might be adversely impacted; self-employment will suffer; a consolidated market might restrict consumers’ choices; and “too much” was being made of the argument that only foreign retailers can develop cold chains.
However, this leader, like the others taking up cudgels against retail FDI, couldn’t back the objections with empirical evidence. After plodding for days, the only supporting study a BJP source dug out was titled “The cause and consequences of WalMart’s growth” by Emek Basker, an economics professor of Missouri University.
The RSS’s clout was in evidence elsewhere, too. BJP president Nitin Gadkari — he was bowled over by Pranab Mukherjee’s luncheon outreach to him before the winter session and felt that it was time to pursue reform-related legislation in a “spirit of consensus” — today extended the party’s “whole-hearted support” to a national bandh retail traders and trade unions have called on Thursday.
“There was pressure from Nagpur,” a source said. The Sangh directed its progenies like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh to participate in the December 1 bandh and asked the BJP to support it “from the sidelines” if it didn’t wish to overtly associate itself with it.
Even then, the BMS chief Girish Awasthi suspected the BJP’s motives. “Their leaders are dodgy on reforms,” he said. “Watch, they’ll vote for the pension bill. This retail business, they are against it because they are on the side of the big domestic retail chains. Our heart bleeds for the kiosk vendors and the small shopkeepers.”
Deepak Pradeep Sharma, the SJM convener, boasted that if Joshi junked the retail bit from the 2009 manifesto, it was “because of our signature campaign”.
Not that the swadeshi lobby had dropped its posturing when Vajpayee was in power. A source said that when Vajpayee — backed by Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra —flagged retail FDI at a cabinet meeting, the proposal was shouted down.
But the dispensation then tried to work around the obstacles. “Vajpayee suspended the decision but those with an appetite for reforms managed to place it in the 2004 manifesto,” the sources said.
The Sangh’s eagerness to stick by the trading community reflects its inability to reach out to new constituencies. Even at the Anna Hazare campaign in Delhi, many of the people who turned up at the fast venue were traders – a turnout that was immediately sought to be tied to the Sangh.
The BJP leadership also appears to be only too willing to ride piggyback on this support base. With the race to be the prime ministerial candidate still wide open, no one seems to be in a mood to take a stand that may not go down well with the Sangh, without whose support their hopes for the top job will be dashed.
“We cannot afford to lose the backing of the middle-level businessmen and the small traders, they are our backbone. Industry is not our core constituency,” a BJP leader said.
Six months ago, when the BJP’s economics cell had invited industry representatives to speak on retail FDI, the battlelines were visible. The younger members, especially a vocal and telegenic spokesperson, attacked the speakers when they spoke in favour of it.
The older ones associated closely with the Vajpayee dispensation had to quell tempers. “Later we told the hot-heads ‘what kind of a signal do you want to send about a party that positions itself as the Congress’s only national alternative? That the BJP is a dinosaur?’” a participant recalled.
The answer to that question will have to wait until the BJP figures out who runs its operations, both backend and frontend.
Packaged in Nagpur, resold in BJP store
RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
New Delhi, Nov. 30: Nagpur is running the backend operations of the BJP as far as retail is concerned, giving new shelf life to faces that were in cold storage during the Atal-Advani era.
One such figure was on display today when the BJP fielded Murli Manohar Joshi to address the media this afternoon. Joshi is not just the prime mover behind the party’s adjournment motion against FDI in multi-brand retail but he is also its most consistent “swadeshi” face that he often masked when the NDA was in power.
Today, Joshi drew his importance from the fact that had he not vetted the BJP’s 2009 manifesto, an “oversight” that “crept” into the NDA’s governance agenda before the 2004 elections might have haunted it now.
The physics professor — who drafted the BJP’s economic resolutions in the years before Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani accepted the reality of reforms — quoted from the 2009 manifesto to “prove” that the party was against retail FDI. He also referred to the NDA’s vision document of 2004 that waxed eloquent about “swadeshi”.
Asked about another 2004 document — the NDA’s development and governance agenda — Joshi feigned ignorance. It stated that if re-elected, the BJP and its allies intended to allow FDI in retail.
If Joshi’s advance to the forefront reflected the reach of the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, the statement of another BJP leader, so far considered pro-reform, suggested how retail has become a holy cow.
“I am for foreign investments even in touch-me-not areas like defence and media. But I will draw the line at retail because it is an idea whose time has not come,” the articulate leader said, playing on Victor Hugo’s line that Manmohan Singh had given wide currency to while pushing reforms.
The BJP leader cited the reasons: domestic manufacturing might be adversely impacted; self-employment will suffer; a consolidated market might restrict consumers’ choices; and “too much” was being made of the argument that only foreign retailers can develop cold chains.
However, this leader, like the others taking up cudgels against retail FDI, couldn’t back the objections with empirical evidence. After plodding for days, the only supporting study a BJP source dug out was titled “The cause and consequences of WalMart’s growth” by Emek Basker, an economics professor of Missouri University.
The RSS’s clout was in evidence elsewhere, too. BJP president Nitin Gadkari — he was bowled over by Pranab Mukherjee’s luncheon outreach to him before the winter session and felt that it was time to pursue reform-related legislation in a “spirit of consensus” — today extended the party’s “whole-hearted support” to a national bandh retail traders and trade unions have called on Thursday.
“There was pressure from Nagpur,” a source said. The Sangh directed its progenies like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh to participate in the December 1 bandh and asked the BJP to support it “from the sidelines” if it didn’t wish to overtly associate itself with it.
Even then, the BMS chief Girish Awasthi suspected the BJP’s motives. “Their leaders are dodgy on reforms,” he said. “Watch, they’ll vote for the pension bill. This retail business, they are against it because they are on the side of the big domestic retail chains. Our heart bleeds for the kiosk vendors and the small shopkeepers.”
Deepak Pradeep Sharma, the SJM convener, boasted that if Joshi junked the retail bit from the 2009 manifesto, it was “because of our signature campaign”.
Not that the swadeshi lobby had dropped its posturing when Vajpayee was in power. A source said that when Vajpayee — backed by Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra —flagged retail FDI at a cabinet meeting, the proposal was shouted down.
But the dispensation then tried to work around the obstacles. “Vajpayee suspended the decision but those with an appetite for reforms managed to place it in the 2004 manifesto,” the sources said.
The Sangh’s eagerness to stick by the trading community reflects its inability to reach out to new constituencies. Even at the Anna Hazare campaign in Delhi, many of the people who turned up at the fast venue were traders – a turnout that was immediately sought to be tied to the Sangh.
The BJP leadership also appears to be only too willing to ride piggyback on this support base. With the race to be the prime ministerial candidate still wide open, no one seems to be in a mood to take a stand that may not go down well with the Sangh, without whose support their hopes for the top job will be dashed.
“We cannot afford to lose the backing of the middle-level businessmen and the small traders, they are our backbone. Industry is not our core constituency,” a BJP leader said.
Six months ago, when the BJP’s economics cell had invited industry representatives to speak on retail FDI, the battlelines were visible. The younger members, especially a vocal and telegenic spokesperson, attacked the speakers when they spoke in favour of it.
The older ones associated closely with the Vajpayee dispensation had to quell tempers. “Later we told the hot-heads ‘what kind of a signal do you want to send about a party that positions itself as the Congress’s only national alternative? That the BJP is a dinosaur?’” a participant recalled.
The answer to that question will have to wait until the BJP figures out who runs its operations, both backend and frontend.
September 07, 2011
Kancha Ilaiah on Anna’s social fascism
From: Deccan Chronicle
September 7, 2011
The recent happenings in Delhi around the issue of the Lokpal Bill have been celebrated by the media as people’s victory, pinned down on Team Anna Hazare. But the majority of the “masses” of this country, living in institutional caste and class enclosures, are not yet part of the “civil society” that the victorious group was talking about.
The so-called anti-corruption movement, therefore, needs to be examined from a multi-dimensional perspective. For example, I see it as a modern Manuvaadi Leviathan’s victory. Manu’s modern disciples walked into the Ramlila Maidan to celebrate the rise of a modern Levia-than, decorated in Gandhi topi.
This 21st century “social” Leviathan walked into the maidan as the enemy of corruption, but he sought to set aside the Constitution (maybe because it was drafted under the chairmanship of a dalit) and throw overboard the supremacy of Parliament that came into existence to dismantle the fascist social structures that existed for centuries in the form of Varna Dharma. Vande Mataram was its slogan and the national flag (not its own flag) became the symbol of its street power.
Social fascism becomes the reality of a civil society that constructs a moral basis of its own. A middle class like the Indian one, which has erected strong caste enclosures around itself, looks for morality to serve its own interests. Corruption in general becomes a buzzword of condemnation within its day-to-day discourse, despite the fact that it lives with corrupt practices on a daily basis. For example, a middle-class government or NGO functionary does not hesitate to take Rs 1 lakh or more as salary, plus thousands of rupees of honorarium and sitting fees, but that same person would treat a chaprasi, who works for a Rs 5,000 monthly salary, as corrupt if he/she asks for Rs 200 for extra work.
The civil society that led the anti-corruption crusade also does not see corporate houses paying hundreds of crores of bribe money as corruption, but, a minister, an MP or a government official, who takes such bribe money is seen as corrupt because the corporate houses are still in the hands of “their people”, while the political and bureaucratic positions are slipping into the hands of people who are “corrupt by birth”.
Take, for example, A. Raja and Kanimozhi. They are treated as corrupt but the corporate houses that gave kickbacks and took huge contracts at throwaway prices are not treated as corrupt. The same corporate houses and their media boxes have been mobilising civil society of Gandhi topi into maidans to fight corruption.
In an unethical capitalist market like ours, whoever takes more space in English TV channels can portray themselves as clean. That very media can become a source of mobilisation of mobs to define corruption as they want. Any other mode of defining corruption is treated as illiterate rhetoric.
If the chant of Vande Mataram has the power to empower civil society, it also has the power to destabilise democratic institutions that gave life to the poorest of the poor and the lower castes, particularly India’s Muslims.
The high moral ground on which the Hindu middle class stands is a breeding ground for social fascism. The poor and lower castes have fought huge battles to checkmate saffron social fascists in the last 20 years. Now the same forces have come to occupy centrestage wearing the Gandhi topi.
I wish all those who came to Ramlila Maidan in Gandhi topi would also send their children to schools in Gandhi’s dress code.
But back home they prefer suits and boots for their children who go to a St. Mary or St. Peter’s, and not to a Mahatma Gandhi or a St. Hazare school. Corruption is not just economic practice; it is also cultural practice. Social fascism does not want us to see that inter-linkage, though it knows that such linkage exists.
Social fascism always lives in duplicity. It uses Sanskrit as its temple language, Hindi for maidan speeches and English as its office language. Hypo-crisy is its innate cultural being. It pretends to be simple in public life but its dining table has to have all items that the corporate market supplies with brand names.
Team Anna does not think that the Indian corporate houses are corrupt because they are supplying all the cameras that show them as crusaders out there in the new avatar of Gandhi. The social fascist ideology treats corruption as a one-way process. Any process of flow of money to the poor and lower castes in the Indian context is treated as a process of corruption or economic waste. But de-ployment of market prices by monopoly traders that acquire huge margins of profits, without subjecting themselves to state regulations, is not treated as corruption.
Take, for example, all Bollywood heroes and heroines who joined the anti-corruption bandwagon — most are people who evaded taxes. Team Anna believes that the agendas that have the potential to establish equa-lity among people or at least change the basic life of the oppressed masses need not exist in the national discourse at all. The nation is being shown in the image of Bharat Mata who controlled and manipulated the consciousness of oppressed people for decades, and that image is being shown to the others, minute by minute, 24×7, making them shiver.
Fascism now lives in pucca houses and democracy has been sent to a shed. Social fascism treats hierarchical ordering of the society as natural. Any economic redistributive mechanism put in place by the state or a civil society organisation is treated as corrupt and unethical. When corruption is seen through the glasses of this upper caste middle class, it appears to them that it has a legal solution and that legality is crafted in its own terms. It doesn’t want to understand that the dharma of the oppressor has always worked against the interest of the oppressed.
Social fascism emerges when a nation is in a deep crisis of moral confidence. It formulates itself in the layers of civil society and moves on to occupy the portals of political power. This happened in many countries — Germany, Italy and so on. In all countries where social fascism emerged victorious, it emanated from the fold of middle class that asserts a high moral ground for itself. That high moral ground generally gets established around the theory that it is non-corrupt.
Kancha Ilaiah is director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad
September 7, 2011
The recent happenings in Delhi around the issue of the Lokpal Bill have been celebrated by the media as people’s victory, pinned down on Team Anna Hazare. But the majority of the “masses” of this country, living in institutional caste and class enclosures, are not yet part of the “civil society” that the victorious group was talking about.
The so-called anti-corruption movement, therefore, needs to be examined from a multi-dimensional perspective. For example, I see it as a modern Manuvaadi Leviathan’s victory. Manu’s modern disciples walked into the Ramlila Maidan to celebrate the rise of a modern Levia-than, decorated in Gandhi topi.
This 21st century “social” Leviathan walked into the maidan as the enemy of corruption, but he sought to set aside the Constitution (maybe because it was drafted under the chairmanship of a dalit) and throw overboard the supremacy of Parliament that came into existence to dismantle the fascist social structures that existed for centuries in the form of Varna Dharma. Vande Mataram was its slogan and the national flag (not its own flag) became the symbol of its street power.
Social fascism becomes the reality of a civil society that constructs a moral basis of its own. A middle class like the Indian one, which has erected strong caste enclosures around itself, looks for morality to serve its own interests. Corruption in general becomes a buzzword of condemnation within its day-to-day discourse, despite the fact that it lives with corrupt practices on a daily basis. For example, a middle-class government or NGO functionary does not hesitate to take Rs 1 lakh or more as salary, plus thousands of rupees of honorarium and sitting fees, but that same person would treat a chaprasi, who works for a Rs 5,000 monthly salary, as corrupt if he/she asks for Rs 200 for extra work.
The civil society that led the anti-corruption crusade also does not see corporate houses paying hundreds of crores of bribe money as corruption, but, a minister, an MP or a government official, who takes such bribe money is seen as corrupt because the corporate houses are still in the hands of “their people”, while the political and bureaucratic positions are slipping into the hands of people who are “corrupt by birth”.
Take, for example, A. Raja and Kanimozhi. They are treated as corrupt but the corporate houses that gave kickbacks and took huge contracts at throwaway prices are not treated as corrupt. The same corporate houses and their media boxes have been mobilising civil society of Gandhi topi into maidans to fight corruption.
In an unethical capitalist market like ours, whoever takes more space in English TV channels can portray themselves as clean. That very media can become a source of mobilisation of mobs to define corruption as they want. Any other mode of defining corruption is treated as illiterate rhetoric.
If the chant of Vande Mataram has the power to empower civil society, it also has the power to destabilise democratic institutions that gave life to the poorest of the poor and the lower castes, particularly India’s Muslims.
The high moral ground on which the Hindu middle class stands is a breeding ground for social fascism. The poor and lower castes have fought huge battles to checkmate saffron social fascists in the last 20 years. Now the same forces have come to occupy centrestage wearing the Gandhi topi.
I wish all those who came to Ramlila Maidan in Gandhi topi would also send their children to schools in Gandhi’s dress code.
But back home they prefer suits and boots for their children who go to a St. Mary or St. Peter’s, and not to a Mahatma Gandhi or a St. Hazare school. Corruption is not just economic practice; it is also cultural practice. Social fascism does not want us to see that inter-linkage, though it knows that such linkage exists.
Social fascism always lives in duplicity. It uses Sanskrit as its temple language, Hindi for maidan speeches and English as its office language. Hypo-crisy is its innate cultural being. It pretends to be simple in public life but its dining table has to have all items that the corporate market supplies with brand names.
Team Anna does not think that the Indian corporate houses are corrupt because they are supplying all the cameras that show them as crusaders out there in the new avatar of Gandhi. The social fascist ideology treats corruption as a one-way process. Any process of flow of money to the poor and lower castes in the Indian context is treated as a process of corruption or economic waste. But de-ployment of market prices by monopoly traders that acquire huge margins of profits, without subjecting themselves to state regulations, is not treated as corruption.
Take, for example, all Bollywood heroes and heroines who joined the anti-corruption bandwagon — most are people who evaded taxes. Team Anna believes that the agendas that have the potential to establish equa-lity among people or at least change the basic life of the oppressed masses need not exist in the national discourse at all. The nation is being shown in the image of Bharat Mata who controlled and manipulated the consciousness of oppressed people for decades, and that image is being shown to the others, minute by minute, 24×7, making them shiver.
Fascism now lives in pucca houses and democracy has been sent to a shed. Social fascism treats hierarchical ordering of the society as natural. Any economic redistributive mechanism put in place by the state or a civil society organisation is treated as corrupt and unethical. When corruption is seen through the glasses of this upper caste middle class, it appears to them that it has a legal solution and that legality is crafted in its own terms. It doesn’t want to understand that the dharma of the oppressor has always worked against the interest of the oppressed.
Social fascism emerges when a nation is in a deep crisis of moral confidence. It formulates itself in the layers of civil society and moves on to occupy the portals of political power. This happened in many countries — Germany, Italy and so on. In all countries where social fascism emerged victorious, it emanated from the fold of middle class that asserts a high moral ground for itself. That high moral ground generally gets established around the theory that it is non-corrupt.
Kancha Ilaiah is director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad
September 10, 2009
Ram Temple Cake: The Sangh has entered the pores of India's Middle Class
Picture by Harsh Kapoor from a Defence Colony Bakery, on 2nd September 2009, New Delhi. Copyleft.
July 09, 2009
New Delhi's Akshardham Temple: Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes
The Economic and Political Weekly, 27 June 2009
Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi
by Sanjay Srivastava
A presentation of an ethnography of the relationship between urban spaces, new cultures of consumption, the state, and the making of middle class identities in India. Firstly, the discussion explores the making of new urban spaces by focusing upon the Akshardham Temple complex on the banks of the Yamuna river in Delhi. Surrounded by a network of flyovers, highways, toll-ways, and residential developments, the complex is designed as a hi-tech religious and nationalist theme park. The Delhi government-sponsored bhagidari (sharing) scheme that brings together representatives of the Residents’ Welfare Associations, Market Traders Associations, and key government officials at periodically organised workshops forms the second site of focus.
Full Text at: http://www.epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/13679.pdf
Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi
by Sanjay Srivastava
A presentation of an ethnography of the relationship between urban spaces, new cultures of consumption, the state, and the making of middle class identities in India. Firstly, the discussion explores the making of new urban spaces by focusing upon the Akshardham Temple complex on the banks of the Yamuna river in Delhi. Surrounded by a network of flyovers, highways, toll-ways, and residential developments, the complex is designed as a hi-tech religious and nationalist theme park. The Delhi government-sponsored bhagidari (sharing) scheme that brings together representatives of the Residents’ Welfare Associations, Market Traders Associations, and key government officials at periodically organised workshops forms the second site of focus.
Full Text at: http://www.epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/13679.pdf
June 13, 2008
Text of the Op-Ed by Ashis Nandy that drew the wrath of the Gujarat authorities
(Posted below is the text of the article by Professor Ashis Nandy, that led to the Gujarat authorities to file a court case against prof. Nandy and the Times of India
The Times of India
LEADER ARTICLE:
Blame The Middle Class
8 Jan 2008, 0000 hrs IST,
by Ashis Nandy
Now that the dust has settled over the Gujarat elections, we can afford to defy the pundits and admit that, even if Narendra Modi had lost the last elections, it would not have made much difference to the culture of Gujarat politics. Modi had already done his job. Most of the state's urban middle class would have remained mired in its inane versions of communalism and parochialism and the VHP and the Bajrang Dal would have continued to set the tone of state politics. Forty years of dedicated propaganda does pay dividends, electorally and socially.
The Hindus and the Muslims of the state — once bonded so conspicuously by language, culture and commerce — have met the demands of both V D Savarkar and M A Jinnah. They now face each other as two hostile nations. The handful of Gujarati social and political activists who resist the trend are seen not as dissenters but as treacherous troublemakers who should be silenced by any means, including surveillance, censorship and direct violence. As a result, Gujarati cities, particularly its educational institutions are turning cultural deserts. Gujarat has already disowned the Indian Constitution and the state apparatus has adjusted to the change.
The Congress, the main opposition party, has no effective leader. Nor does it represent any threat to the mainstream politics of Gujarat. The days of grass-roots leaders like Jhinabhai Darji are past and a large section of the party now consists of Hindu nationalists. The national leadership of the party does not have the courage to confront Modi over 2002, given its abominable record of 1984.
The Left is virtually non-existent in Gujarat. Whatever minor presence it once had among intellectuals and trade unionists is now a vague memory. The state has disowned Gandhi, too; Gandhian politics arouses derision in middle-class Gujarat. Except for a few valiant old-timers, Gandhians have made peace with their conscience by withdrawing from the public domain. Gandhi himself has been given a saintly, Hindu nationalist status and shelved. Even the Gujarati translations of his Complete Works have been stealthily distorted to conform to the Hindu nationalist agenda.
Gujarati Muslims too are "adjusting" to their new station. Denied justice and proper compensation, and as second-class citizens in their home state, they have to depend on voluntary efforts and donor agencies. The state's refusal to provide relief has been partly met by voluntary groups having fundamentalist sympathies. They supply aid but insist that the beneficiaries give up Gujarati and take to Urdu, adopt veil, and send their children to madrassas. Events like the desecration of Wali Gujarati's grave have pushed one of India's culturally richest, most diverse, vernacular Islamic traditions to the wall. Future generations will as gratefully acknowledge the sangh parivar's contribution to the growth of radical Islam in India as this generation remembers with gratitude the handsome contribution of Rajiv Gandhi and his cohorts to Sikh militancy.
The secularist dogma of many fighting the sangh parivar has not helped matters. Even those who have benefited from secular lawyers and activists relate to secular ideologies instrumentally. They neither understand them nor respect them. The victims still derive solace from their religions and, when under attack, they cling more passionately to faith. Indeed, shallow ideologies of secularism have simultaneously broken the back of Gandhism and discouraged the emergence of figures like Ali Shariatis, Desmond Tutus and the Dalai Lama — persons who can give suffering a new voice audible to the poor and the powerless and make a creative intervention possible from within worldviews accessible to the people.
Finally, Gujarat's spectacular development has underwritten the de-civilising process. One of the worst-kept secrets of our times is that dramatic development almost always has an authoritarian tail. Post-World War II Asia too has had its love affair with developmental despotism and the censorship, surveillance and thought control that go with it. The East Asian tigers have all been maneaters most of the time. Gujarat has now chosen to join the pack. Development in the state now justifies amorality, abridgement of freedom, and collapse of social ethics.
Is there life after Modi? Is it possible to look beyond the 35 years of rioting that began in 1969 and ended in 2002? Prima facie, the answer is "no". We can only wait for a new generation that will, out of sheer self-interest and tiredness, learn to live with each other. In the meanwhile, we have to wait patiently but not passively to keep values alive, hoping that at some point will come a modicum of remorse and a search for atonement and that ultimately Gujarati traditions will triumph over the culture of the state's urban middle class.
Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt blood, for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance and coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the media and education, which have become hate factories in recent times. And they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who, at a safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist, bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.
The writer is a political psychologist.
The Times of India
LEADER ARTICLE:
Blame The Middle Class
8 Jan 2008, 0000 hrs IST,
by Ashis Nandy
Now that the dust has settled over the Gujarat elections, we can afford to defy the pundits and admit that, even if Narendra Modi had lost the last elections, it would not have made much difference to the culture of Gujarat politics. Modi had already done his job. Most of the state's urban middle class would have remained mired in its inane versions of communalism and parochialism and the VHP and the Bajrang Dal would have continued to set the tone of state politics. Forty years of dedicated propaganda does pay dividends, electorally and socially.
The Hindus and the Muslims of the state — once bonded so conspicuously by language, culture and commerce — have met the demands of both V D Savarkar and M A Jinnah. They now face each other as two hostile nations. The handful of Gujarati social and political activists who resist the trend are seen not as dissenters but as treacherous troublemakers who should be silenced by any means, including surveillance, censorship and direct violence. As a result, Gujarati cities, particularly its educational institutions are turning cultural deserts. Gujarat has already disowned the Indian Constitution and the state apparatus has adjusted to the change.
The Congress, the main opposition party, has no effective leader. Nor does it represent any threat to the mainstream politics of Gujarat. The days of grass-roots leaders like Jhinabhai Darji are past and a large section of the party now consists of Hindu nationalists. The national leadership of the party does not have the courage to confront Modi over 2002, given its abominable record of 1984.
The Left is virtually non-existent in Gujarat. Whatever minor presence it once had among intellectuals and trade unionists is now a vague memory. The state has disowned Gandhi, too; Gandhian politics arouses derision in middle-class Gujarat. Except for a few valiant old-timers, Gandhians have made peace with their conscience by withdrawing from the public domain. Gandhi himself has been given a saintly, Hindu nationalist status and shelved. Even the Gujarati translations of his Complete Works have been stealthily distorted to conform to the Hindu nationalist agenda.
Gujarati Muslims too are "adjusting" to their new station. Denied justice and proper compensation, and as second-class citizens in their home state, they have to depend on voluntary efforts and donor agencies. The state's refusal to provide relief has been partly met by voluntary groups having fundamentalist sympathies. They supply aid but insist that the beneficiaries give up Gujarati and take to Urdu, adopt veil, and send their children to madrassas. Events like the desecration of Wali Gujarati's grave have pushed one of India's culturally richest, most diverse, vernacular Islamic traditions to the wall. Future generations will as gratefully acknowledge the sangh parivar's contribution to the growth of radical Islam in India as this generation remembers with gratitude the handsome contribution of Rajiv Gandhi and his cohorts to Sikh militancy.
The secularist dogma of many fighting the sangh parivar has not helped matters. Even those who have benefited from secular lawyers and activists relate to secular ideologies instrumentally. They neither understand them nor respect them. The victims still derive solace from their religions and, when under attack, they cling more passionately to faith. Indeed, shallow ideologies of secularism have simultaneously broken the back of Gandhism and discouraged the emergence of figures like Ali Shariatis, Desmond Tutus and the Dalai Lama — persons who can give suffering a new voice audible to the poor and the powerless and make a creative intervention possible from within worldviews accessible to the people.
Finally, Gujarat's spectacular development has underwritten the de-civilising process. One of the worst-kept secrets of our times is that dramatic development almost always has an authoritarian tail. Post-World War II Asia too has had its love affair with developmental despotism and the censorship, surveillance and thought control that go with it. The East Asian tigers have all been maneaters most of the time. Gujarat has now chosen to join the pack. Development in the state now justifies amorality, abridgement of freedom, and collapse of social ethics.
Is there life after Modi? Is it possible to look beyond the 35 years of rioting that began in 1969 and ended in 2002? Prima facie, the answer is "no". We can only wait for a new generation that will, out of sheer self-interest and tiredness, learn to live with each other. In the meanwhile, we have to wait patiently but not passively to keep values alive, hoping that at some point will come a modicum of remorse and a search for atonement and that ultimately Gujarati traditions will triumph over the culture of the state's urban middle class.
Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt blood, for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance and coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the media and education, which have become hate factories in recent times. And they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who, at a safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist, bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.
The writer is a political psychologist.
March 20, 2008
Rush hour of the gods
Meera Nanda
Today's generation of middle class Indians are discarding the secular-humanist version of Hinduism that appealed to an earlier generation of elites and opting for a more overt religiosity. Meera Nanda asks what lies behind the Hinduisation of the Indian public sphere.
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