The thing that really jumps out from the BJP’s 17 months’ service to the nation is this: the party has lowered the political bar so much that the old awful is the new pretty okay.
There’s nothing like egregiously bad political behaviour to make people grateful for just the regular old bad political behaviour. We’re now inclined to think that if you finish a meal or look at a cow without getting lynched, that’s a job well done. If the government hasn’t thrown a public tantrum about someone’s disagreement with it, we’re doing well. If the head of an institution hasn’t equated the Prime Minister to God, we still have some critical distance. If an argument doesn’t consist of telling people to go to Pakistan, things are rosy. If you haven’t been tossed into jail for checking into a hotel room, then hurrah. If a leader hasn’t threatened to behead another leader, it’s a good day.
This lowered bar is a double-edged sword. On the upside, it’s so low that even civil society, famously apathetic, has found the stomach to raise hell about it. The backlash from a range of India’s artists, writers, scientists, academics, thinkers, and filmmakers, has been spontaneous, widespread, and effective. The central government reacted first with contempt, then with fury, then with embarrassment. When Shah Rukh Khan was accused of being anti-national, ordinary fans rose as one single-minded sea, effortlessly swamping all the other silly little concerns on social media, like the Bihar elections. Something like the start of a citizens’ movement — peaceful, vocal, and more importantly, relentless — has shoehorned citizen concerns into national and international headlines. Much as Arun Jaitley would like to dismiss this movement as ‘manufactured’, whatever that means, it has gained a critical mass that can no longer be ignored.
Good for civil society. But we need to remember that it is, in that highly overused word, unprecedented. Political mobilisation has always been a matter of life and death for the poor, but the Indian middle class and elite have let the Congress and other governments get away with murder, literally and metaphorically, for decades. Politics, we seem to feel, is best left to politicians. Unfortunately, politicians only check and balance each other when their interests diverge; when those interests converge, they close ranks against the people. By and large the people have sucked this up, muttering darkly perhaps, but choosing to wait and speak via the ballot box. The people’s current departure from this formula has taken the Modi government so much by surprise that various leaders—with typical childishness—have called it an attempt to destabilise the government, and a sign of disrespect for the mandate it won. Rattled, the BJP retreated to familiar campaigning ground in Bihar: the nakedly communal, featuring a lot of cows.
The people have also taken themselves by surprise, both protagonists and sympathisers. Social media is ringing with self-congratulatory woohoos. When an individual gesture gains effective traction, it’s easy to feel a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration. It’s nice to feel that the government that you cannot warm up to, or have cooled off of, will at least be called to account; that you can be the thorn in its side when the need arises.
But here’s the downside to the lowered bar of political expectation: it’s possible to leave the bar where it is, and go back to ignoring the other misdemeanours of this and future governments. For now the Congress has left a large oppositional vacuum that citizens are trying to fill in whatever small ways are possible. But when and if the Congress comes back to power — and it might look awfully attractive one day — we shouldn’t forget its own consistent venal failure to stand up to social and cultural bullies. If the BJP is trying to rewrite books today, the Congress has clothed its own bans behind a rather flexible kind of secularism in the past. If the BJP is being rightly hauled over the coals today, the Congress was not hauled over them enough in all the incidents of censorship, bullying rioting and vigilantism that have incrementally fed the enormous empowerment of those forces today.
It is brainless to dismiss today’s protests — those against the government as well as those in its defence — on the grounds that they haven’t happened before. But it would be even more brainless if, having finally found its political mojo, the middle class and elite were to drop their guard once their concerns have been addressed, either by this government or by the next. Democratic governments thrive on — to use Anand Patwardhan’s phrase — the ‘eternal vigilance’ of the citizenry.
For now the vigilance is so ripe that I swear, if I hear the word ‘tolerance’ one more time, I’m going to hit someone.
There’s nothing like egregiously bad political behaviour to make people grateful for just the regular old bad political behaviour. We’re now inclined to think that if you finish a meal or look at a cow without getting lynched, that’s a job well done. If the government hasn’t thrown a public tantrum about someone’s disagreement with it, we’re doing well. If the head of an institution hasn’t equated the Prime Minister to God, we still have some critical distance. If an argument doesn’t consist of telling people to go to Pakistan, things are rosy. If you haven’t been tossed into jail for checking into a hotel room, then hurrah. If a leader hasn’t threatened to behead another leader, it’s a good day.
This lowered bar is a double-edged sword. On the upside, it’s so low that even civil society, famously apathetic, has found the stomach to raise hell about it. The backlash from a range of India’s artists, writers, scientists, academics, thinkers, and filmmakers, has been spontaneous, widespread, and effective. The central government reacted first with contempt, then with fury, then with embarrassment. When Shah Rukh Khan was accused of being anti-national, ordinary fans rose as one single-minded sea, effortlessly swamping all the other silly little concerns on social media, like the Bihar elections. Something like the start of a citizens’ movement — peaceful, vocal, and more importantly, relentless — has shoehorned citizen concerns into national and international headlines. Much as Arun Jaitley would like to dismiss this movement as ‘manufactured’, whatever that means, it has gained a critical mass that can no longer be ignored.
Good for civil society. But we need to remember that it is, in that highly overused word, unprecedented. Political mobilisation has always been a matter of life and death for the poor, but the Indian middle class and elite have let the Congress and other governments get away with murder, literally and metaphorically, for decades. Politics, we seem to feel, is best left to politicians. Unfortunately, politicians only check and balance each other when their interests diverge; when those interests converge, they close ranks against the people. By and large the people have sucked this up, muttering darkly perhaps, but choosing to wait and speak via the ballot box. The people’s current departure from this formula has taken the Modi government so much by surprise that various leaders—with typical childishness—have called it an attempt to destabilise the government, and a sign of disrespect for the mandate it won. Rattled, the BJP retreated to familiar campaigning ground in Bihar: the nakedly communal, featuring a lot of cows.
The people have also taken themselves by surprise, both protagonists and sympathisers. Social media is ringing with self-congratulatory woohoos. When an individual gesture gains effective traction, it’s easy to feel a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration. It’s nice to feel that the government that you cannot warm up to, or have cooled off of, will at least be called to account; that you can be the thorn in its side when the need arises.
But here’s the downside to the lowered bar of political expectation: it’s possible to leave the bar where it is, and go back to ignoring the other misdemeanours of this and future governments. For now the Congress has left a large oppositional vacuum that citizens are trying to fill in whatever small ways are possible. But when and if the Congress comes back to power — and it might look awfully attractive one day — we shouldn’t forget its own consistent venal failure to stand up to social and cultural bullies. If the BJP is trying to rewrite books today, the Congress has clothed its own bans behind a rather flexible kind of secularism in the past. If the BJP is being rightly hauled over the coals today, the Congress was not hauled over them enough in all the incidents of censorship, bullying rioting and vigilantism that have incrementally fed the enormous empowerment of those forces today.
It is brainless to dismiss today’s protests — those against the government as well as those in its defence — on the grounds that they haven’t happened before. But it would be even more brainless if, having finally found its political mojo, the middle class and elite were to drop their guard once their concerns have been addressed, either by this government or by the next. Democratic governments thrive on — to use Anand Patwardhan’s phrase — the ‘eternal vigilance’ of the citizenry.
For now the vigilance is so ripe that I swear, if I hear the word ‘tolerance’ one more time, I’m going to hit someone.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
