Moditva and the Shrinking of the Liberal Space

OF LIFE, LETTERS AND POLITICSEconomic & Political Weekly january 5, 20089Moditva and the Shrinking of the Liberal SpaceGPDIn his election campaign, Narendra Modi provided a celebration of the anti-political in the highly urbanised state of Gujarat. The Congress, even in its use of the vernacular, showed how inept a party it was. But the worrying message from the elections is a collective failure to find a strategy for combating Hindu chauvinism.To nobody’s surprise except the psephologists and the liberals Modi won hands down in the Gujarat poll. It cannot be denied that it has been a breathtaking performance against the background of the 2002 pogrom and the subsequent campaigns against it. The Gujarat voter for reasons best known to himhas decided to stay with Modi. To be sure, most of these campaigns against Modi were outside Gujarat. There was no movement against the pogrom worth the name in Gujarat or in Gujarati. If there was one, we non-Gujaratis never got to learn about it. The result is that Modi is chief minister of Gujarat for the third time in a row.Nobody seems sure of whose victory it has been, Modi’s or BJP’s. If you watched on December 23, as dutifully as we did, the endless discussions among New Delhi’s elite and, of course, the politicians of various hues, on the umpteen television channels, you would have been impressed by the number of times this question was raised. There were of course no more than three options: one, it was Modi’s triumph, two, it wasBJP’s, three, it wasBJP’s and Modi’s. Fairly straightforward formula-tions if you asked us. The effort was some-how to separate Modi from the BJP. Modi is more dynamic and more flamboyant than anyBJP leader. But he is a BJP man and had been a Sangh pracharak before joining the parliamentary game. Every-body knew this. Why should then anybody raise the question is a mystery. But there you are. A goodTV presence consists in making a trite question or observation sound profound, except that in this case it did not sound like anything at all. At bestit sounded like a tired comment that people make when asked to say something profound in about 30 seconds.One, perhaps the only, good thing about this election was the collective failure of all exit polls and pre-election surveys. These analysts have invented phenomena like anti-incumbency. This term insists that like the overexposure of a TV star, the politicians and people just get tired ofseeing the same face too often. Their choices are not political. Politics is no criteria and thank god for it. Exposure is.Forour anti-political middle class, in-cumbency is a god-given tool. Use it and throw politics out. Modi’s government is not the first government to have won a third term. The Congress has done so any number of times. Maharashtra has been ruled by Congressmen all these years except for once in 1994-99. West Bengal has been ruled by the Left Front for over three decades. Nobody should be surprised if it wins the state yet again in spite of Nandi-gram. There are, of course, political rea-sons as to why parties win or lose elec-tions. Incumbency is not one of them. There is nothing political about incum-bency. Our learned commentators and their willing victims swallow these non-political explanations as if they provide a kind of a new paradigm shift. They probably heave a sigh of relief when they hear something so non-political and intel-lectually seductive.Anti-politicalA new hero is born in Ahmedabad. To see him as a saviour is the current fashion. The violence of 2002 is forgotten. That is certainly the case as far as the well-to-do middle class urban votes of western India are concerned. Gujarat is a highly urbanised state. Seventy-eight of its 182 constituencies are urban or semi-urban. Depoliticisation of this area has been a resounding success. Modi has achieved that.The Modi slogan thistimewas,“I am not corrupt nor is anyone else under my dispensation” (‘Hun khatonathiane khavo deta nathi’). That in these days and times the sloganthat an entire state was corruption-free is believed is a measure of Modi’s charisma. There is also a com-fortable and anti-political belief that “these” politicians under Modi are kept out of the largesse. The western Indian middle class isalmostpathologically GPD (gpdesh@vsnl.com)is a well-known com-mentator on literary and political affairs.

MANOHAR