The Conceit of Social Justice Politics

PIETIES OF DEMOCRACY create their own taboos, and it takes a communicator who can afford the arguments, not just the accolades, to name them, shame them, and face the fusillade. In the unfolding summer thriller, as the predictability of the plot would have it, Narendra Modi continues to set the national conversation on what India means today and what it may look like tomorrow. The others, desperate ventriloquists and provincial fatalists, are interpreters of what they can’t comprehend: the meaning and methods of Modi, his easy access to the mass mind. When Modi says the Congress manifesto has the imprint of the Muslim League, it’s at first a rhetorical reference to division and disintegration; it is also another instance of breaking the taboos and tearing into the euphemisms politics-as-usual deploys to normalise something purely communal.

We all know that it is not a literal reading of the manifesto; still we are not spared the shock of fact-checking, as if a critical reading of any text is a violation. As if naming the unnamed and finding intentions between the words are bad politics—and a misreading. If society, no matter broken or unequal, is every party’s obvious paragraph in the manifesto, the recurring words that capture the spirit of a just society are ‘minority’ and ‘reservation’. After more than seven decades of independence, the invocation has retained its liberal quotient, as though change, in the popular perceptions of national identity and in the attitudes of modernity, is beyond the sociology of manifestos.

Still, the political urge for social justice can’t resist the conscience-soothing word ‘minority’ to reach out to Indian Muslims. That is what Congress, too, does in its manifesto. And this is what Modi, in his characteristic rhetorical brio, questions. It’s a fair game in the arena, unless the sanctimony police think otherwise.

What’s undeniable is the victimhood of Indian Muslims—and why they deserve justice more than any other community. Firstly, they are the victims of their own community leaders, the original beneficiaries of the ghettos fetish. A leadership that relies on archaic social norms and scriptural fear only wants a captive community and a political theology of separateness: the virtue is all about being different.

This difference is maintained through social regression in which the clergy and community leaders set the boundaries that limit not just the scope and nature of education but individual freedom itself. Aren’t Muslims the only community in India answerable to a leadership claiming copyright over their identity and freedom? To ask why is not Islamophobic but a rejection of the injustices in the practice of social justice.

Their political collaborators come from the left side of the social-justice argument, the usual suspects who have mastered the art of condescension. It is an art legitimised by the subversion of secularism. In the sociology of the left-of-centre, the persistence of the wretched worthy of uplift is a prerequisite for ideal secularism. Muslims, the captive community, fit the bill: their wretchedness, cultivated by politics and religion, only perpetuates the vote-rich ghettos, the mining of which has been an electoral vocation for Congress and other votaries of selective secularism. The euphemisms that pervade the social justice part of the Congress manifesto only reinforce the usefulness of this corrosive version of secularism. Communalisation of politics has the veneer of lofty intentions.

Modi dared to call the bluff. And by so doing, he has brought to the conversation the seamy side of social justice politics. Pioneered by Congress and weaponised by socialists with a core of casteism, the politics of social justice has already legitimised permanent reservations and communal appeasement as a necessary route to progress. What it has achieved is the social fraying of the republic. India may have barely survived the toxic kitsch of Mandalisation, but the ongoing industrialisation of minority politics has ceased to irritate the believers in the fairness of democracy—or the ethics of welfare. A million divisions are perpetrated on the country by the conceit of political altruism. And the Muslims are its victims.

Modi’s deconstruction of the Congress manifesto is a politically bold intervention because he, fully aware of the backlash from those who were fattened by the flawed agenda of social justice, shattered the euphemism to challenge the dogma of division. To read the prime minister’s commitment to the de-communalisation of development and welfare as a trait of Hindu majoritarianism is to endorse the social as well as cultural fragmentation of India. Indian Muslims deserve to be spared the politics of victimhood perpetuated by redundant ideologies and regressive theology.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

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