By Vinay Bhat, TwoCircles.net,
The 2014 general elections in India have perhaps seen one of the longest lead-ups towards it. In the age of mass corporate media, keeping a story alive in between the lulls of other hysteria becomes critical. So it is no surprise that a large portion of this credit goes to the BJP’s projected PM candidate – Narendra Modi. The Savarna middle class including the likes of Shashi Tharoor in India often fantasizes about a presidential form of Government in India. And projecting this election as a personality war between Modi and the Gandhi scion from the Congress does well to satisfy this urge. So there are the “secular” Pandits who argue that the issue with the BJP is Modi and that he must be stopped at all costs. Then there are the right-wing Sanghis challenging the capabilities of a Rahul Gandhi. What perhaps the intelligentsia is missing is that these two characters are symptoms of the larger malaise within these parties.
1947 saw the British, Congress and Muslim league foisting a nation on the vast majority of people residing within the boundaries of what is now the Indian Union. The Congress has now ruled the greater part of the past 66 years. The seventies saw an anti-incumbency wave giving rise eventually to the next largest national party the BJP. Since the late 80s neither of these two national parties has gone past the 272+ mark in the Lok Sabha elections to form a non-coalition government at the center. If you combine the other fact that the combined vote share of these two parties across the nation has consistently been less than half since the early 90s, the notion of a national party itself seems defunct and an antiquated idea.
There is a long list of states that have now been consistently kicking these two national parties out of their conscience – from East to West and from South to North, the mandates have been increasingly regional. The rise of regional parties over the last three decades or so has been a reaction to not only strong anti-Congress sentiments but in many ways a strong anti-Delhi sentiment – the fountainhead of Indian nationalism. A population that is divided on caste and communal lines can only be understood and catered to by a structure that deals with local dynamics and is not governed by diktats of a central big brother. If the discontent with Congress’s recent decision on bifurcating Andhra Pradesh is anything to go by, the coming years will see further decimation of those under the influence of machinations taking place in Delhi.
Regional and communitarian aspirations unique to individual identities in a divided society are invariably sacrificed at the altar of the nation. The Indian population has become increasingly aware of this. The number of undented states now remains very small. Regional forces in these states have been unable to galvanize resources due to strong dominant caste forces still aligning with the Brahmanical national parties. Strong socio-political movements that fight this Brahmanical order will be needed to dislodge these last bastions of power. Regional political forces have been at the forefront of these types of movements in the past and have been instrumental in punching holes into the already vacuous national ideal.
A Congress hoading in Patna against Forbesganj police firing
Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi are representations of this national ideal. The national ideal is one that binds the elite (read Savarna population) of the Indian union in balanced harmony. There are public feuds every election on which section of this elite gets a bite of power in the center but it is generally accepted that it is better for power to rotate between these polar forces vs. decentralization of power to meet the Constitution’s federal ideals. Both Modi and Gandhi talk of a landmass with a homogenizing ideal. The terms maybe different and the elite would want us believe that there is an ongoing battle – Bharat vs. India. Careful inspection reveals that these are but two sides of the same coin – an instrument to confound. The real battle is Bharat-India combine vs. the idea of an egalitarian equal society, the Indian vs the “other”. It is the battle of the whole vs. the piece parts.