The Politics of Alarmism

TURNING THE NATION into a disputed piece of emotion is an old rhetorical trope during elec­tions. Fight for the national soul is what we call the politician’s stump struggle to retrieve patrio­tism from the squandered legacies of power. Its most familiar practitioners in the 21st century come from provinces throbbing with resentment and nativism, and they make a return journey to the glorious past a prerequisite for greatness.

It’s the Right that usually wins the argument against the betrayed nation and its elected collaborators. Brexit-struck Britain and Trumpified America are the perfect case studies of how the nation of the mind becomes a destina­tion worthy of an uprising against the present wretched­ness. Brexiteers are not disillusioned time-travellers wailing over the lost imperium; they are patriots who find the interconnected destinies of a globalised world an assault on sovereignty.

Trumpism, too, is a revolt against the Establishment, even if the kitsch of grievance is its aesthetics. It’s more of a movement than a party’s progress, for its core is not defined by rage against the liberal leanings of the Democrats or a celebration of Republican values. It’s all about one man, angry and aggrieved, portraying himself as the ultimate nationalist promising, like vintage Brexiteers, to take back control. To make America great again, you need a landscape of shattered ideals. In revolutionary politics, heavens are built on hell, beginning with Milton’s Satan, and peaking with Trump.

Both Brexit and Trumpism are truncated legacies today. The inheri­tors of Brexit have failed in managing the vote for national sovereignty; what they have achieved are economic stagna­tion and political instability. If Brexit marked English conservatism’s boldest statement on Englishness, it’s conservatives’ paucity of imagination that characterises post-Brexit politics. The struggle for the national soul has become a struggle against political mortality.

And Trump’s surge in ratings has not resulted in solidi­fying Trumpism. In his first coming, Middle America’s disillusionment with the traditional parties added to the outsider’s appeal. Once in power, his success in foreign policy and economy was overshadowed by his personal style. In defeat, he became the highest apostle of conspiracy in presidential history. As his second coming looks inevita­ble, Trump plays the raging bull, still. Trumpism is unlikely to survive Trump.

What these tricky projects in national restoration bring out is the divide between popular sentiment and political re­alism. The struggle for the national soul ends up as the flawed politics of redemp­tion. The death of the original ideal is followed by the rise of false restorers of the nation.

Come to the Indian story and the pattern breaks, even as the battle for the national soul enters its second decade. In 2014, Narendra Modi turned a General Election into a referendum on national restoration. He never saw himself as one of them, just another prime ministerial candidate whose horizon doesn’t extend beyond the next five years. He didn’t tap into Hindu grievance; no temple figured in his stump speeches. Modi won the election as India’s moderniser and the nation’s rebuilder, and he didn’t seek his muses from a mythicised past. He conversed with the future.

It is the cultural argument that the Right usually loses, but for Modi, it’s not even an argument. It’s a state of be­ing. He never felt the need of a Hindu adjective to take his modernisation project to his most stable constituency: India’s poor. India’s cultural ancestry didn’t require con­stant reminders, and it was a dispute only for those who were still steeped in the indoctrinations of the original nation builders. Modi has not finished dismantling the edifices that restrict the nation, and that is why, in 2024, his battle is for the consolidation of the nation restored.

The alternative is an alliance that needs the clutches of an acronym to underline its Indianness. When they cry Endangered India, they essentially mean the loss of an India that indulged the culture of corruption and cronyism, sub-nationalism and hereditary power—an India where the highlights of the secular ideal are minority ghettos and national inhibition. Each member of the grand alliance represents an India that is far removed from the impulses and attitudes of a society built on merit and modernity.

Their cry for Endangered India gets intellectual endorsements, and that is hardly surprising at a time when dissent is in search of a cause, when tor­tured conscience needs an appropriate context. Which perhaps explains why invocation of an undeclared Emergen­cy comes naturally to a section of the dissenting class. It’s as lazy and ahis­torical as deploying the word Fascism to protest any manifestation of intoler­ance or violence of ideas. Such casual recourse to darker histories diminishes memories of dehumanisation. The shared alarmism of Undeclared Emer­gency trivialises India’s most brazen breach of constitutionalism.

Fictionalisation of a popular leader is not dissent; it’s an evasion that feeds the conscience. India is an electoral autocracy for those who misread con­viction politics as practised by Modi, exuding strength and determination. He is his own High Command, and he fights for his belief: power alone brings change. That itself is a huge cultural shift in a country that puts a moral premium on the struggle for power, which has been made inferior to the struggle against power.

Those who charge Modi’s India with extra-constitutionalism mistake adherence for absolutism. Take the abrogation of Article 370, still cited by some as a majoritar­ian transgression. Why can’t we read it as a case of ruthless constitutionalism for the higher cause of national integra­tion? If India is going to have a Uniform Civil Code soon, it can only be about living up to the ideals of constitutional equality. Compromised institutions? In India judges are selected by judges. An opposition chief minister singled out for investigation and confinement? Can’t we instead tell the more compelling story of the evolutionary arc of AAP’s apolitical politics? Of how a movement born in the romance of Gandhian resistance has become a confederacy of the corrupt? Looks like Endangered India has a different set of stakeholders, and Modi is certainly not one of them.

Maybe it’s no longer a battle for the national soul. Hasn’t that battle already been won? And the winner still enjoys the biggest vote of trust in a democracy because power has only intensified the campaign for the future. Thankfully, the India of the past is just an acronym.

2024 Electionsabsolutismalarmismconvictioncultural shiftGeneral election 2024ideologyNarendar Modipolitical power