Let the Centre Hold

THIS IS A CURIOUS INTERREGNUM in world history. From the rise of Trump­ism in the US, Netanyahu in Israel, Orbán in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey to the gains made by the right in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Greece and France, we are seeing a striking rise in the popularity of populism, predicated on a resentment of globalisation, immigration and cosmopolitanism, and topped off by the cultural grammar of hyper-nationalism. The mere existence of groups like QAnon in America, or the neo- Nazi ‘Third Path’ in Germany would have been unthinkable even as recently as the end of the Cold War. When Francis Fukuyama wrote of ‘the end of history’ and the world waxed eloquent about the victory of liberal democracy as the time-sanctified supreme form of social, political and economic organisation, few anticipat­ed the destructive potential of the backlash to the very consensus that was seen as the harbinger of global prosperity.

The trends that became apparent in the second decade of the century were reaffirmed in the atavism of the Covid-19 pandem­ic—when the time came for the world to stand in solidarity and co­operate to overcome a truly global health emergency, what we saw instead were tribalist, chest-thumping proclamations prioritising sovereignty over multilateral cooperation, all meant to play to domestic audiences. Countries rushed to procure and hoard pro­tective equipment, medications and vaccines, vastly in excess of their own population’s needs, leaving the less fortunate to fend for themselves. Remember also the assertion of xenophobic English nationalism underpinning Brexit, or the backlash against immi­grants in many parts of the West, the very part of the world that had championed human freedoms and given birth to multicul­turalism. Parties and leaders, combining nationalist fervour with popular prejudices, have made nationalism the default model of national self-definition. It is a far cry from the centrist heydays of Clinton and Blair, who veered their parties closer to where their op­ponents had been in order to reassure voters that they had moved away from ideological extremism. Today it comes as no surprise that liberal centrism—inclusive, non-judgemental and accommo­dative—is in decline in most parts of the world, while ideological extremes are precisely where many politicians believe their voters wish them to go.

Western critics decry liberal centrism for having ‘left people behind’. More severely, its denouncers on the left argue that the ‘centrist’ approach to governance has historical ties to imperial­ism and colonialism, harbouring scepticism towards democracy and workers’ rights while serving as a guise for capitalist exploita­tion. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, several democra­cies that arose in the aftermath of the Cold War have undergone a significant shift towards majoritarian regimes. In these countries, political opposition is vilified; independent media, civil society and impartial judicial systems have been stripped of their power; and the leadership’s primary goal is to defy external pressures to adopt Western principles of political diversity, government openness and acceptance of dissenters and minority groups. While the ‘old democracies’ still have plenty of room for centrism—Macron in France, the recently elected Starmer in the UK, Scholz in Germany and even the shaky Biden in the US being prime examples—a look at the ‘newer democracies’ of Europe confirms that we are far from the golden age of political centrism.

It is in this strained global context that I turn to India. Indian politics has long been consensually centrist. The Indian Na­tional Congress (INC), the liberal nationalist movement that dominated Indian politics for several decades, was a ‘big tent’ party that found room for all political tendencies, ranging from Marxian to feudal, within it, and still struck a golden mean. It was first challenged from the left by vigorous communist and socialist parties and then gradually from the right, by two dis­similar parties, the pro-free-market Swatantra and the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Both disappeared, for different reasons, in the 1970s, merging into larger centrist formations, but the Jana Sangh re-emerged in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BJP then embarked on a steady rise in its electoral fortunes on a platform of Hindu revivalism and an end to the ‘appeasement’ of minorities. In 1996 it formed a short-lived minority govern­ment that collapsed in 13 days. In 1998 it returned to power at the head of a coalition of 26 mostly regional parties, and stayed in power till 2004. In 2014 it won an emphatic majority at the polls, which it repeated in 2019, and lost in 2024 (though it remained in power at the head of a coalition). Since 2014 it has embarked on a mission to reshape India in its own image—assertively Hindu, socially conservative, culturally reactionary, and economically a curious admixture of welfare populism and crony capitalism. (It is called ‘rightwing’ by commentators, but not all its beliefs qualify as ‘rightwing’ in the world’s understanding of that term.) At any rate, it governs India from a standpoint that, in departing from previously well-established norms, is anything but centrist.

BJP tends to attack its critics in other parties under the umbrella-term formulation of ‘left-liberal’. That omits one section, the centrists—and those are the people like me who are liberal but not leftist. They do not comfortably fit into the paradigm of either the cultural right or the economic left. I am myself an ex­ample of this, because I was a supporter of the Swatantra Party in my student days, because of its free-market economic views and social liberalism, then after its demise found no vehicle for my own ideas and remained outside the party system until the post-liberalisation period created a Congress very different from the statist Congress that I had opposed in the 1970s and early 1980s. I am comfortable with my understanding of Hinduism, which is capacious, inclusive, and accepting of difference, and resistant to the allure of Hindutva, which is more dogmatic and narrow in its views. I have no problem with many conservative economic ini­tiatives, and find myself on the right wing of Congress when it comes to economic policies, while remaining a strong advocate of social justice mea­sures. I am confident that the time will come when we will evolve a group of centrists in the country who are truly liberal in social and economic matters (and therefore not ‘leftwing’), while re­fusing to identify with the so-called cul­tural right, its social conservatism and its intolerance of minorities.

Since 2014, however, polarisation has increased substantively in India, and from public discourse to dinner-table conversa­tions the greys have given way to Manichean blacks and whites. Extremes have come to the fore on both sides; there is marked intolerance of each other. The marriage of BJP’s Hindu national­ism or ‘Hindutva’ with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cult of personality has given birth to a brand of politics I call Moditva. Moditva’s route to populism, based on a vilification of the reli­gious ‘other’ and a lionisation of ethnic nationalism, has struck at the very heart of the Indian consensus built around the classic centrism of Congress. Though INC has witnessed considerable erosion in its strength and numbers in recent years, including several breakaway factions in different Indian states, most con­tinued to adhere to its essential convictions—that there was room for everyone in the national consensus and that a multiplicity of ideas of India should be enabled to flourish.

One could, of course, argue that polarisation is merely a natu­ral consequence of the pushes and pulls that are inevitable in a democratic polity. But the Indian discourse has taken on extreme hues that imperil both democracy and centrism, with the centrist Opposition denounced as ‘anti-national’, critics being urged to “go to Pakistan”, and the prime minister repeatedly calling for a “Congress-muktBharat”(Congress-freeIndia). InOctober2023therul­ing partyeven issued a social media meme depicting Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as the demon-king Ravana, the embodiment of evil whom the blessed god-king Rama had to destroy. Can centrism even be possible amid such a venomous political discourse, when opposition to the ruling party is literally demonised?

The Overton Window of political mobilisation (in other words, what is considered acceptable in the political arena) has become more vengeful, driven by resentment and an obsession with expiating past wrongs. Social media has emerged as an important tool through which the political benefits of this polarisation are reaped. The prime minister’s ob­sessive attention to self-promotion— public relations optics, advertising and the spreading of fake news as a means of government propaganda—has be­come a key feature of Indian public life, while objective journalism is at a low ebb, with many mainstream media houses cajoled or cudgelled into craven submission. Incendiary WhatsApp forwards have been known to pro­voke violence in multiple instances, and most of these cases have involved stereotyping or vilification of Indian Muslims, who regularly find them­selves under fire in Modi’s ‘new India’, notably during the recent election campaign.

This polarisation is deliberate, orchestrated and has been a long time in the making. The 1990s was when these events came to a head: while the boons of liberalisation created an emerging middle class that anchored India’s growth story, the successful stir for reservations in government jobs for ‘backward classes’ marked a democratic deepening through a pronounced increase in the participation of the subaltern, and the politics of religious identity reached its zenith with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindutva fanatics. The growth of India’s middle class led to rising support for polarising Hindu nationalist nar­ratives, and years of coalition government created a ‘leadership anxiety’ that turned to Modi’s strongman persona for succour.

Moditva scores as an avatar of development, epitomised by India’s rapid progress in infrastructure development (highway construction and airport renovation are visible evidence of this) and the creation of a high-tech ‘India Stack’ in digitalisation that has turned Indians into internet users and experts at transferring money from their mobile phones. But it still seeks votes, and promotes political mobilisation, on a politics of bigotry, preju­dice and overt Hindu chauvinism. To its credit, the motley Op­position has not flocked to the other extreme itself. Instead, 26 Opposition parties have converged into a centrist group­ing, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, or I.N.D.I.A., to take on the ruling party. They constitute a formidable Opposition in Parliament and at the hustings.

This is all the more necessary since, with the concentration of power since 2014, polarisation is being employed to attack the pillars of Indian democracy—its institutions. The highest levels of our autonomous institutions, from financial regulators like the Reserve Bank to structures of accountability like the Central Information Commission, and even hitherto sacrosanct bodies like the Election Commission, have witnessed a striking dilu­tion of their independence. The judiciary and even the free press are widely perceived as insufficiently clear of the government’s influence. Think-tanks have had their sources of funding slashed and their motives put under the microscope; harassment by tax officials is often the preferred route to rein in dissident voices. The Nehruvian Parliament of old was premised on a reverence for institutions and institution-building. The erosion we see today of that legacy is manifest in routine disruptions of Parliament (sometimes engineered by the ruling party itself!), skewed cover­age of parliamentary debates, unwillingness to discuss issues of national importance (the border dispute with China and ethnic violence in Manipur being standout instances in recent times), and the comfort that the ruling party seems to find in passing Bills amid the din. One saw how pitiful a situation this is by the fact of the Opposition tabling a no-confidence motion just to get the prime minister to speak in Parliament on a burning issue he has preferred to remain silent on.

As long as Modi remains dominant, dissenting voices within the ruling party are not heard in public, though many mutter sotto voce that they are not happy about these developments. Given that, in addition to the vocal and visible Hindu chauvinists in the party, BJP includes a smattering of technocrats and former bureaucrats whose instinct would normally be to govern from the centre, one could well ask if it might be possible to create broad agreement between them and the Opposition. But in the Indian political context today, electoral logic prevents any of the positive forces in BJP who lean towards centrism from jumping ship. In other democracies it is possible to hear centrist voices in more than one party, but the few in BJP are either muffled or silent, pre­ferring to stay on the ‘winning side’ or biding their time for more propitious circumstances. Mercifully there are no ‘extremists’ in the Opposition who might deter the emergence of a progressive centre. But the national polarisation has gone so far that the very prospect of cooperating with BJP is anathema to the rest.

IN THEIR 2023 BOOK THE CIVIC BARGAIN: HOW Democracy Survives, Josiah Ober and Brook Manville argue that democracies that survive in the longer term do so be­cause of their adeptness at negotiating a civic bargain—a political pact about who is a citizen, how decisions are made, and the distribution of responsibilities and entitlements. For India, that civic bargain was always centrist—embedded in the Constitution’s commitment to balance the sanctity of indi­vidual rights with the attachment to communal norms, social justice and collective progress. The Moditva-directed change in the nature of political discourse, threatening the rights of citizens of other faiths to consider themselves as Indian as any Hindu, undermines that compact, for it dubs any accommo­dation of minorities or attempt to reach out across the aisle as ‘vote-bank politics’ and ‘appeasement’, and any dissent as ‘anti-national’. The disdain for a centrist Opposition has made the creation of political common ground suspect, thereby stiffening the challenge of reviving centrism.

Where then, in this age of polarisation, does Indian centrism find the space to define itself?

This is where one must take refuge in the past. The chair­man of the Indian Constitution’s Drafting Committee, BR Ambedkar, was deeply perceptive of the conflicts that could mar the Indian constitutional project he was launching. In the contestation between the wielders of power and the drafters of law, Ambedkar carved a triumphant place for enabling change through democracy and legislation. He birthed the concept that helped anchor Indian centrism—‘constitutional morality’. Ambedkar realised that it “is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.” It was “a commitment to constitutional means, to its processes and structures, alongside a commitment to free speech, scrutiny of public action [and] legal limitations on the exercise of power”. In his view, constitutional morality could only be realised through an administration which is in tune with the spirit of the Constitution, and through the cultivation of constitutional values among the masses. This constitutional view of centrism assumed that it is not merely neither-this-nor-that, nor is it avoidance of activist politics. It rejects the extremes of ideological excesses on both sides but actively pursues an engaged middle course. Of course, as the saying goes, the risk of being middle-of-the-road is that you could be run over by traffic from either side. For Ambedkar it was a constitutional duty to defeat the forces of feudalism, casteism, bigotry and parochialism. This was centrism as action—‘radical centrism’, if you like.

To note the application of this uniquely Indian spirit of centrism, you have to look no further than the Directive Principles of State Policy—an unusual feature of the Indian Constitution not found else­where. The principles confirmed that “whoever captures power will not be free to do what he likes with it”. Beyond being ‘directive’ in that sense, they also acknowledged that reform and social transformation (though radical in na­ture) can be successful only through in­cremental steps. Accepting that reform has to be both top-down and bottom-up, the Constitution infused the idea of Indianness, so brilliantly articulated by Jawaharlal Nehru and his acolytes, with an extra dimension through Ambed­kar’s lens of social justice for those who had been oppressed and marginalised for millennia. Political scientists Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz called India an example of the ‘state-nation’ model, in contrast to the Euro­pean nation-state model. While a nation-state aligned the boundar­ies of the state and nation, a state-nation allowed for a multiplicity of ‘imagined communities’ to coexist beneath a single democratic roof by recognising that citizens can have multiple, overlapping identities that need not detract from a larger sense of national unity. Thus emerged the civic nationalism of the Constitution, which occupied the centre by balancing the rights of the individual (as championed by the West) and the rights of the community (flow­ing from the Indian attachment to communal norms).

Given that the ‘state-nation’ predicates national allegiance on val­ues and not on religious or ethnic identity, India’s very foundation is amenable to centrism. Unlike European nation-states of the 19th century, the only commitment Indians need to make to qualify as Indian is an allegiance to the values enshrined in a markedly liberal Constitution. The spirit of accommodating the idiosyncrasies of the plethora of identities Indians have is in itself centrist. Thus, progres­sive centrism is embedded into the anchorage of our constitutional democracy, the revival of which is complementary to democratic revival in a polarised India.

Similarly, the construction of an Indian nation­alism capable of surviving the vagaries of a hostile and uncertain post-colonial world included taking the ‘middle path’ too. Neither did India choose to lose itself in reveries of past greatness and glorifying everything pre-colonial, nor did it choose to reject its heritage entirely and conform to the Western ideal of what a nation should look like. Today’s BJP nativism, tracing every modern achievement to an imagined Vedic precursor in ancient India and asserting that everything worth celebrating in hu­man civilisation had already been an­ticipated by our Hindu forebears, has moved far from that consensual centre.

The centrist understanding of the Indian project is all the more necessary because too many scholars and com­mentators have remained impervious to the contribution a centrist approach added to our nationalist imagination. Any roadmap to revive progressive cen­trism in India must be sensitive to the cultural, socio-economic and political specificities that make the Indian con­text unique. For instance, India does not strictly abide by the European political spectrum of ‘left’, ‘right’, and ‘centre’. Many Western outlets refer to BJP as the ‘Hindu rightwing’ when, in fact, the ba­sis of much of their claims to economic glory has been their strengthening of the welfare schemes introduced by the Congress government (leading one Indian journalist to call Modi’s BJP the ‘Hindutva left’!). Those seeking to resuscitate the centre must first coalesce on what that project means for them before they chart out how to garner popular sentiment for it.

In India, the centre will also have to tilt slightly leftward be­cause of our very large population of poor people, marginalised communities and minorities, who need the government’s help. Making policy choices in a democracy with a majority of poor voters living below $2 a day predisposes electable politicians to focus on the needs of the poor. While we proudly enjoy the fruits of economic liberalisation, we must also be sure to make the distri­bution of those fruits a primary priority. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government did so in the form of redistribu­tion of enhanced government revenues, with an eye on those who were excluded from the direct benefits of liberalisation. A liberal economy with an emphasis on social justice is, in essence, centrist. A strong and credible foreign policy with a robust national secu­rity capacity is centrist. An emphasis on pluralism and inclusion of all, and a rejection of majoritarianism and communal bigotry, is centrist. It is high time we forged a consensus to revive that progressive centrism in India.

India is a country that is much more than the sum of its parts—where citizens can dis­agree on everything, as long as they agree on the ground rules of how to disagree. In these lines lie the seeds of reviving progressive centrism in India: the promotion of consensus, a moderat­ing constitutional influence through the restora­tion of checks and balances in our institutions, a pluralist ethos, and free media and civil society. It is to that kind of political centrism—to paraphrase Tagore—that we must let our country awake.

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