India 2015: Magic,Modi,and Arundhati Roy

Abstract

This article looks at the debate about Dr B. R. Ambedkar and (Mahatma) M. K. Gandhi, as launched in a recent essay by Arundhati Roy, in the light of the rise of the Hindu rightist/revivalist party, BJP, under the current Indian Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi.

Someone has done black magic on Narendra Modi, claimed Madhu Purnima Kishwar in an interview on 10 December 2014 (Gopinath, 2014). This was a surprising statement, given that Modi is the current Prime Minister of India, the man who almost single-handedly fuelled the Hindu-Rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to around 30 per cent vote-share in the 2012 General Elections, which gave him an overwhelming two-thirds majority in the main house of the Indian Parliament. It was also a surprising statement, given that Madhu Kishwar is an important educationist and feminist, founder of a major women’s rights journal, and evidently not the sort of person who believes in black magic. But the most surprising thing about the statement was that Kishwar belongs to a small group of intellectuals who had joined large and loud swathes of the Indian middle and upper classes in endorsing Modi just a year back, much to the horror of many of her erstwhile and radical companions.

Kishwar has not written off Modi; she still believes in the man who, she claims, did an excellent job as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, before he became the Prime Minister of India. But she is disappointed, among other things, by his appointment of a high school-educated ex-model as the minister for education and human resources. The minister, Kishwar argues with good reason, knows very little about education and will exert a detrimental influence in the field. Other intellectual supporters of Modi, such as senior editor Arun Shourie, have also expressed unease about the way he has shaped his national government and/or at some of the statements made by Modi’s ministers and MPs (Agencies, 2014).

This trend is not reflected in international coverage of Modi. After being persona non grata in countries like the United States for years, because of his alleged but unproved complicity in the Gujarat riots, Modi has become the blue-eyed boy of the liberal press in the West. He has signed major defence and nuclear trade agreements with France and Russia, revitalized trade with the US, and in general been very accommodating to big capital at a time when international, and particularly Western, economies are anaemic and looking for fresh infusions from the non-West. Modi has done so consciously and rigorously, spending much of his first year in power making international trips and meeting big capitalists: in November 2014, he was estimated to have spent less than three days in his office in Delhi. This aspect of his performance does not worry his supporters, like Kishwar and Shourie, who largely believe in the need to “develop” India.

What worries them is the domestic aspect. While Modi is working hard to sell India abroad, he has been making noises — or allowing his MPs and leaders to make noises — that jar on the ears of his intellectual supporters. These include the claim that India had the first aeroplane, three thousand (or more) years ago, which was flown by Lord Rama, since the Indian epic Ramayana mentions flying vehicles. Or that ancient India had plastic surgery because, as the ancient texts reveal, the god Ganesha had his head cut off by his father, Shiva, and replaced by the head of a baby elephant. The list is long, and has Modi’s tacit and, at times, spoken support (Rahman, 2014). This is compounded by the appointment of ministers who seem to have a very lop-sided idea of the contemporary world: the ex-model minister who gets Kishwar’s goat, for instance, reportedly thinks that a five-day course at Yale gave her “a degree from Yale University” (Lakshmi, 2014). And finally, there are disturbing eruptions of moral policing by some of Modi’s supporters, who want women to dress and authors to talk in certain ways, and so forth, which Modi clearly prefers not to comment on (Nazakat, 2014; Sudhir, 2013).

It is this contradiction that a few of Modi’s intellectual supporters are finding hard to resolve: why is there such a gulf between their hero’s international performance and his national performance? He seems to be doing everything right, at least by their standards, at the international level, and he seems to be making strangely provincial noises — or allowing his people to make them — nationally. Internationally, India is successfully cultivating an image as a country of the future — open to development and investment — and nationally there is talk of pseudo-science and pseudo-education that at least Modi’s more intelligent metropolitan supporters find hard to stomach.

It is here that we need to factor in Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize winner and author of many radical political texts, in order to understand what is happening. Arundhati Roy’s first (and, to date, last) novel, The God of Small Things (1997), was a brilliant debut, and it has been read — as the title urges us to do — along radical lines. Coming in the 1990s, when small things were big in radical circles and ecological thinkers like Timothy Morton (2010) had not yet started critiquing the rhetoric of “smallness” from within, The God of Small Things said everything that we wanted to hear about size, sex, and deity. Only Bad Capital believed in bigness in those days, with Stalin and his motley successors being long buried on the Left. Real radicals were busy fighting big dams, for instance, and Roy was soon involved in one such fight in India. From that moment onwards, she consistently unfolded the politics of the title of her novel. Both at the national and international levels, she spoke up — and wrote, often with much thought and always with polemic brilliance — against big capital, and its crony politicians.

If there is one person, who represents the antithesis of everything that Modi seems to stand for in India today, it is Roy. Modi is for international capital, big business, huge developmental projects, full exploitation (without too much concern for environmental factors) of natural resources, increasing urbanization, little or no compromise with the low-caste Maoist/Leftist movements in India, and greater militarization. Roy is for small projects, rural focus, compromises with radical (mostly low-caste) revolts, controlled capital, state responsibilities, environmentalism, and at least a degree of demilitarization. Marxist is the last designation one would apply to Modi; it remains the handiest one when discussing Roy’s politics.

But this is not a rigid schema. Modi comes from the Hindu Right; the BJP has traditionally been a caste-and-capital-friendly party which, in its previous avatars, predates the Independence of India in 1947. Roy comes from a Marxism-influenced Leftist tradition, which also predates the independence of India. The two have seldom seen eye to eye. But, of the two, it appears that it is Modi’s brand of the Hindu Right that has “re-branded” the most in recent decades. One simple way to access this is to look at the relationship that Modi and Roy have to the “father of the nation”, Mahatma Gandhi.

Modi belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), not just the BJP. The latter is a somewhat varied political party containing conservative, liberal, neo-liberal, and reactionary elements. The RSS is a far more cohesive and a clearly modern-reactionary “Hindu” organization, patterned on early twentieth-century fascist groups, replete with uniforms, physical training camps, and a highly slanted ideology of Hinduness, rooted, at least partly, in real and imaginary historical grievances. As Pankaj Mishra puts it in a recent article in The Guardian, the RSS is

a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founder’s belief that Nazi Germany had manifested “race pride at its highest” by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the votaries of Hindutva, or “Hinduness”. (Mishra, 2014, n.p.)

The RSS had never liked Mahatma Gandhi, considered too “soft”; actually the assassins of Gandhi originally owed allegiance to the Hindu Mahasabha, which grew into the RSS. The RSS has also never hidden its dislike of Gandhi, and only half-hidden its appreciation of Gandhi’s murderers.

The Radical Left in India never liked Gandhi either. While their dislike seldom assumed the proportion that it assumed on the Hindu Right, it was nevertheless as relentless in an ideological sense. While the Hindu Right saw Gandhi as “compromising” with Muslims and — though this was said less openly — diluting caste hierarchies, the Radical Left saw Gandhi as subscribing too easily to an upper caste discourse in order to “emancipate” the downtrodden castes and classes. In their view, Gandhi was a weak reformist, who finally wanted to tinker with the status quo, and was not a revolutionary. Interestingly, the Hindu Right also saw Gandhi as a “weak” leader — not willing to purge and revitalize India with the heroism of blood and iron that they believed in.

Does Modi share these views today? It is difficult to say what Modi really believes — a consummate politician, he plays his cards close to his chest, which he flaunts as being “broad” and manly — but we do know that he claims to consider Gandhi one of his three main influences. While he has systematically tried to erase the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru’s stature as a founder of secular India, he has also just as systematically tried to bask in the glory of Gandhi’s legacy, despite his own obvious links to the RSS. He has surprisingly left out the founding RSS ideologues from his list of the three Indian leaders who influence him. He has far less surprisingly also left out the greatest of low-caste leaders, the radical and brilliant “Untouchable” behind the Indian constitution, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.

Roy has a different song to sing: she has adopted Ambedkar and posited him, well in keeping with the Leftist tradition, against Gandhi. In her long introduction, “The Doctor and the Saint” (2014) to Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936/2014), she largely portrays Gandhi as a consummate politician, who hid his political contradictions behind the mantle of mahatma-hood, never faced up entirely to his caste prejudices and colour biases (including against Africans), and mostly tried to reform the Hindu status quo without challenging it. She celebrates Ambedkar as the far more radical voice, and as a thinker who saw — something that Gandhi would never concede — that caste-based exploitation is at the core of Hinduism and hence cannot be fixed from within. Gandhi, on the other hand, as she highlights with reference to his writing, had trouble accepting inter-caste marriage and inter-caste dining — caste rules, as the word “untouchability” highlights at its most extreme, control and/or prohibit both — while also, at times, especially later in his career, accepting both at a personal level. Roy has problems with many other aspects of Gandhi’s politics too — and these are aspects that have traditionally been criticized or held up to ridicule by committed Leftists in India — but, for the purview of this essay, we will stick to the central matter of caste.

Given the way that such criticism of Gandhi has been lurking on the radical Left for decades, Roy’s views shocked only a few in India; they seem to have shocked many more in the West. Even Left-leaning publications like the Guardian and the Observer obviously found such views startling enough to warrant a long interview-based article by Andrew Anthony (2014), titled “Arundhati Roy: Goddess of Big Ideas”. Anthony is clearly in two minds about Roy. But it is not just Roy’s rejection of Gandhi that bothers him. What really bothers him is Roy’s (at times sweeping) critique of a certain liberal definition of development — in other words, whether Anthony is aware of it or not, the version promoted by Modi. True, Anthony’s understanding of capitalism is rather shaky, as is revealed in statements like “[y]ou could easily get the idea, for example, that arms-dealing was a function of capitalism — yet there is no mention [by Roy] of Russia (the biggest arms exporter) or China (the third biggest)” (2014: n.p.). Being the thorough student of Marx that she is, Roy, it need hardly be added, would never suggest that Russia or China is not a major cog of “capitalism”. But then Anthony quotes the British Asian writer Aatish Taseer to make a point that, while again it tallies with what Modi’s supporters say about Roy, has to be considered:

I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty […] The people who get her into the streets [i.e. in protest] are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions. (Taseer, 2011, quoted in Anthony, 2014, n.p.)

Is this true?

Yes, the so-called new middle classes are often the people who support Modi and want India to “develop” as quickly as possible: for them, it means faster trains, more industries, cars and malls, greater urbanization, and less tolerance for all those millions — farmers in the hinterland or aborigines in the forests being encroached by capital — who are obstinately refusing to “evolve”. Yes, many of these “new middle classes” are among the more fragile in India — but no, usually they have not emerged from the “most dire” conditions. Their fragility is not due to the conditions — bad at times, but not dire — from which they have emerged. Their fragility is due to the deficiencies of the social welfare net and the immense chasm that separates their “bad” conditions from really dire ones in India. The social welfare net that exists in India is pitched at such a low level that only the poor can take advantage of it. The rich, obviously, do not need it. But the new middle classes do not have that sort of money; at the same time, they want a higher level of care, education, health, et cetera, than what the poor are willing to put up with. Hence, their fragility — exacerbated by the fact that the chasm that separates their conditions from truly dire ones in India is unbridgeable. A Black Hole stares them in the face. It is this Black Hole that is inhabited by the lowest of the low in India, and that the “new middle classes” live in perpetual fear of being sucked into.

The Indians still mired in “dire conditions” are mostly from the lowest castes, the untouchable castes and, in some parts of India, aboriginal backgrounds. Taseer and Anthony cannot even begin to imagine those conditions. The fact that a working democracy has enabled some “middling” castes to move up and even enabled a handful of low caste leaders to gain power is misleading. Modi, for instance, does not belong to a high caste; but neither does he belong to the lowest. Caste mobility is not altogether new in India. On the other hand, the caste system is a homeostatic system — it allows some mobility but maintains its nature intact, partly by allowing controlled mobility within the system.

This, of course, is at the core of the difference between Gandhi and Ambedkar, and Roy does not fully see it in her essay. It is difficult for her to do so, especially now when the Hindu Right (many leaders associated with Modi) is openly defending the caste system. The Hindu Right has two arguments: first, the caste system was a working and unoppressive organization of society and, second, the oppressive aspects of the caste system are a consequence of Islamic invasions. While the second point is total rubbish — as Ambedkar stressed, the oppression of the caste system is rooted in the Hindu scriptures — the first point is worth a thought, as it is partly correct. The caste system was not unoppressive, but it was a working system. It worked wonderfully well. It would not have survived so long if it hadn’t.

This is a controversial statement on the Left, and even on the Right in the West. But it needs to be made. In order to understand it, we need to look at the two ways in which societies organize themselves: they organize by positing specificity or universality. Hinduism — or Brahminism, which was, correctly to my mind, Ambedkar’s preferred version of caste-dominated Hinduism — was not a universal religion: it was based, as is the case with early Judaism and many other beliefs, on birth and given social position. As against this, we have universal religions — like Christianity and Islam — which are based on a definition of universal humanity. In Brahminism, one is born a Brahmin or a Shudra. It cannot be escaped. In Christianity or Islam, anyone can be Christian or Muslim.

The advantage of particularity-based conceptualizations is that they do not proselytize — which means that they do not force people to become “human” like them. They are unlikely to wage crusades and jihads. The disadvantage is that they create a class of exploited people within the system, and this class is rigidly maintained in place. A system like Brahminism does not need slavery, because it has Untouchability. The advantage of universality-based conceptualizations is that they allow every human being the same access to power, at least in theory. The disadvantage is that they proselytize — in a bid to make other human beings see the light — and hence they always run the risk of waging crusades and jihads. Hence, one cannot simply dismiss the “caste system” — at least not if, like Gandhi, one was born into the higher echelons of class and caste. One can see it, as Gandhi did and as Modi supporters usually do, as a system of stability. To breach inter-caste rules is to create needless disturbances in the view of such people — Gandhi’s writings reflect this, as they seem to display a complex mix of philosophical objections to the caste system and habitual as well as political compromise with it.

Let us take a woman who is a feminist in a patriarchal society. One would need to be a particularly stupid woman not to be a feminist in a male-dominated society. There is nothing surprising in it. What is surprising — and needed — is a man who is a feminist in such a society. This is part of Roy’s grouse against Gandhi — she wants him to be the upper-caste leader who was radically anti-caste and instead she finds him vacillating on the issue at times. No wonder, she prefers Ambedkar. But it is not surprising that Ambedkar is radically anti-caste: he was born an Untouchable. Just as one needs to be an unintelligent woman not to be a feminist in a male-dominated society, one needs to be a rather stupid Untouchable not to be anti-caste in a casteist society. And Ambedkar was a brilliant man.

The problem remains unresolved: is it fair to blame Gandhi for being only reformist within the confines of his social and intellectual formation? One can, of course, find a (very) few upper caste writers and thinkers who were far more anti-caste than Gandhi. But in every case — and Roy can be included here — they ended up talking to a small cosmopolitan audience. One of the things even his detractors have to credit Gandhi with is that he managed to get across to a huge, and a hugely varied, section of India. Taseer does seem to have a point here: Roy seems to be speaking to an elite. But wait a moment! She is also speaking up for the lowest of the low in India — the people who actually live in the dire conditions which Taseer generously bestows on the new middle classes. She is speaking up for forest dwellers, as they would be called by many of Modi’s supporters. She is speaking up for Untouchables and for farmers in the rural hinterland who have been committing suicide by the thousands under the new strictures of liberalizing India.

However, the urban–rural divide is slightly misleading; it has seldom existed as a binary opposition, except in some remote regions of India. Instead, over much of mainland India, from at least the early medieval period onwards, there existed three levels of commerce between villages, taluk-towns (which can be considered provincial “headquarter” towns in a particular region, usually catering to a number of adjoining villages), and imperial or regal cities. A section of the elite of the villages went to the taluk-towns, sometimes to work for years, sometimes for commerce or litigation, et cetera. Often, these people returned to the villages, and had children growing up there. There was a similar commerce between the taluk-towns and the imperial cities. These were, largely, networks of the prosperous classes, but they existed and structured social and political relations. It is only in recent years, starting with the British phase, that the gap between cities/towns and villages widened so much that these classes, increasingly, abandoned their ancestral villages for urban centres. Here again, the movement is largely between villages and taluk-towns, and then between taluk-towns and metropolitan cities. While the villages around Delhi might send people to Delhi, most Bihari villagers go to taluk-towns in Bihar, not to Delhi or Calcutta. The same situation exists in other Indian states too.

So what we have is Roy, as metro-cosmopolitan a person as possible, speaking up largely from metropolitan spaces for people who are metaphorically and actually so far out in the margins that they cannot be seen at times — not least by national polity. She is not speaking for the taluk-towns and the taluk-town-driven “new middle classes” — many of them from the “middling” castes but seldom from the lowest — moving into the metropolises today. She is speaking up for, let’s say, the sub-subalterns. Interestingly, people like Roy — and her cosmopolitan supporters — do not interact with these sub-subalterns on a daily basis, unless it is to do them some good. It is the taluk-types who do — often in order to make the money that they need to get out of their bad (not dire) conditions, and to calm the paranoia born of the Black Hole staring them in the face. Even the roving capital of metropolitan entrepreneurs, who (unlike many metropolitan intellectuals, such as Roy) often support Modi’s “developmental” agenda, impacts on the sub-subalterns and their spaces and lifestyles via the intermediary taluk middle and lower middle classes. For these taluk classes, the sub-subalterns are mostly opportunity — or hindrance. The taluk-types usually cannot understand — no, they will not hear — Roy and people like her. They can understand — and of course hear, given his oratorical habits — Modi and his “developmental” agenda.

Actually, in order to understand the rise of Modi, one needs to look at the taluk-types. (Grown up and educated in the taluk-town of Gaya, I am one of them, and I do not use the term derogatorily.) Modi may be the front-figure of the Hindu Right, but he is primarily the mouthpiece of these taluk-types. He speaks to them; he speaks like them. Like them, he feels threatened by the Maoist insurgencies in the hinterland — which affect places like Gaya much more than metropolises like Delhi, or even metropolitan satellites, like beach/hill-stations in Kerala and the Himalayas. Like them, he is impatient to “develop” India — that is, make sure that the taluk-towns have the roads that can be congested by the flashy new cars that the new middle classes are aspiring to buy or have just bought. Like them, he speaks a language of pseudo-science and pseudo-education, not outright religion — no matter what his cosmopolitan critics might think of it. Like them — and like Gandhi — he will only tinker with the caste system from within Brahminized Hinduism.

The taluk tone has been rising in Indian politics over the past three decades — Laloo Prasad, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayavati, and at least half the leaders of the regional parties that have ruled Indian states and supported national coalitions since the 1980s. However, it is Modi who, for the first time, has managed to give the “taluk” tone a confident pan-national presence, aided partly by the national grid of the RSS and the fact that his state, Gujarat, has been an economic powerhouse in India for decades now. Modi is the superman of the taluk classes, smashing the living daylights — often with vague ideas and tall promises — out of the metro-cosmopolitan types, best symbolized in his ineffective Congress opponent, Rahul Gandhi. Unable to speak English fluently/confidently or have the social ease or the global exposure or the sophisticated education of the metro-cosmopolitans, the taluk-types have long gone about with simmering resentment. And their numbers have been rising, even infiltrating the strongholds of the metro-cosmopolitans — not just Delhi but also New York. Modi has come to redeem them. Gandhi was probably the only major Indian politician who saw this resentment, or its possibility. He couched his language — and his position, among other matters — on caste, accordingly. Like the taluk-intellectual, he allowed himself a wide expanse of ambivalence — between what was said now and then, between what was uttered and done, and so on. This ambivalence is crucial to the survival of the taluk-type. Sandwiched as he is between the (“undesirable” but immediate) dire straits of sub-subalternity and the (“desirable” but remote) crisp peaks of metropolitanism, Modi is one of them. No wonder he has adopted Gandhi, who either was one of them or, what is more likely, tried to encompass them in his pan-national vision. This is something that Ambedkar would not see — what option did he have as a thinking Untouchable? — and Roy cannot see.

Interestingly, even Modi’s metro-cosmopolitan supporters — like Madhu Kishwar and Shourie — cannot really see this. That is why Kishwar spots contradictions in Modi’s international and national posturing and speaks of black magic. They do not see that, internationally, Modi speaks to Big Capital, but nationally he speaks to and as a taluk-town person. That is why, for better or worse, Modi – by this name or another – is the “future of India”, not Arundhati Roy.