(Illustration: Saurabh Singh)
GENERAL ELECTIONS IN India have their own rhythm and tempo. In some, campaigning is languid and marked by torpor (2009 is an example) while in others, new ideas dominate (such as vikas in 2014). To give another example, the 2019 election was about welfarism and extension of vikas, and the opposition’s efforts to make corruption an issue fell by the wayside. What marks out the current exercise? Is there a singular idea that stands out in the din and noise of the long, seven-phased, campaign?
In a word: nationalism.
On May 7, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a rally at Dhar, in Madhya Pradesh, that he needed 400 seats in Lok Sabha to prevent Congress from bringing back Article 370—the Constitutional provision that gave a special status to Jammu and Kashmir—and also putting a “Babri lock” on the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. By all accounts, his audience was receptive to what he said.
One could dismiss this as mere election rhetoric in what observers say is increasingly a polarised election. But this is too simple an assertion: even after all attempts by the opposition to ‘localise’ elections to specific, constituency by constituency issues, the larger narrative about nationalism refuses to die down. There are two ways to look at nationalism as a theme in these elections.
The first perspective—which many in the opposition think is right—is that it is just dumb mistakes on their part that gives the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a chance to keep nationalism “alive” as an issue. The statement made by Sam Pitroda on May 8 where he referred to Indians in different parts of the country as resembling Chinese, Arabs, Africans and whites is a case in point. Within no time there was outrage at his words and by the end of the day, Pitroda had called it quits from Congress and the party hoped the matter would die down. But scarcely had the Pitroda controversy died that the very next day, on May 9, the party’s senior leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, reasserted the same statement in different language.
Apart from the racial undertones of these statements, it is the assertion that there are distinct regional identities that override the national identity that riles a very large number of voters. The claim—even if not made directly—is that there are no “Indians” but only an agglomeration of distinct and even conflicting identities, which is clearly at odds with how Indians think. The fact that these assertions are made by the members of a party that was involved in India’s freedom struggle makes them all the more incongruous. Were this not the 21st century and the fact that an overwhelming number of Indians see themselves as Indians and not in regional terms, the statements made by these leaders would come close to what colonial administrators and thinkers like Sir John Strachey and John Robert Seeley said about India.
There is, of course, political logic to what the opposition has tried to do in the past decade. This should not be surprising given the course of politics since 2014. After the stunning victory of BJP in the parliamentary elections in 2014, the idea—floated by ‘secular intellectuals’ and those who consider themselves as standard bearers of Indian democracy—was that state-by-state and regional strategies were necessary if BJP were to be dislodged from power in New Delhi. This was dubbed the “federal strategy”.
Much of this was couched in terms of ‘federalism’, an idea that has two very different interpretations in political theory. In India, the expression implies the constitutional division of powers between the Centre and the states. By design, the Centre has greater powers: the Constitution was crafted at a time when the country had witnessed a painful division. But this ‘upper hand’ for the Centre had a limit: a large dose of governance was placed in the hands of the states as it was understood that certain public goods—such as law and order, public health and sanitation, among others—could effectively be provided only by states. This understanding of federalism as a division of public good providing jurisdictions is the mainstream understanding of federalism in India.
But there is another interpretation, based on the idea of “separation of loyalties”, one that goes back to European thinkers like Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant, Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville, that has altogether dangerous consequences for India. It is not surprising that three states— with a history of separatism—continue to champion federalism in India. It is not difficult to see that it is this second interpretation of federalism that underpins large sections of regional politics in India.
It is no secret that since 2014, BJP has lost multiple state elections or has been forced to play second fiddle to regional parties when it comes to forming governments in states. But the very same electorate gives a thumping majority to BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the parliamentary level
Influential intellectuals, powerful voices in the opposition and, in many cases, regional elites, have tried their level best to make a case for this kind of federalism as an antidote to nationalism in Indian politics. But it is interesting to note that these efforts have not borne fruit. It is no secret that since 2014, BJP has lost multiple state elections or has been forced to play second fiddle to regional parties when it comes to forming governments in states. But the very same electorate gives a thumping majority to BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the parliamentary level. This goes well with the first interpretation of federalism as a mere division of responsibilities for public goods. Voters want a strong Centre to take care of issues such as national security, integrity of the country and other things that are only possible with strong leadership at the Centre. They want state governments that can deliver the goods that are needed at the local level.
In contrast, the strategy of the opposition—based on the desire to capture power at the Centre—is based on accentuating differences at the level of states. This way a coalition of parties that acquire power in their own states on the basis of such divisions can join hands and form a government at the Centre.
This is where nationalism comes in their way. There is now a sufficiently thick layer of Indians, who continue to live, work and thrive in their home states, but believe in the idea of a strong centralised Indian state. One can demonise this section by saying that it is ‘hoodwinked by Hindutva magic’ or that it is ‘communal’ or by any other expression. But it is worth asking: why has this class of people voted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power, back-to-back, for two terms? There are rational, dispassionate, answers to this question. But India’s intellectuals and the political forces they champion refuse to even consider this question as a valid one.
There was a period in India’s history—the two decades from 1990 to 2010—when political fragmentation in Parliament had become a near-constant. This was mistaken by the Opposition as a systemic feature with the constant claim in the academic literature that where the Constitution had failed ‘Indian federalism’, the political choices of India’s ‘peoples’—not people—had given it lasting form. 2024 shows how misplaced and erroneous these assertions are. Education, migration for work, India’s rising economic strength and its emergence as a power in its own right have placed hard upper limits on this pernicious idea of federalism.
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