THE passing of a historical period is often accompanied by the apparent revival of its political vocabulary. The Cold War, for example, came to an end in the former Soviet Union amidst invocations of revolution and the people, words that could not previously have been uttered there without sounding either cynical or naïve. The colour revolutions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, however, with the new terminology of ‘transition’ and ‘emergence’ that came to characterize them, were not simply moments in the victorious career of liberalism or democracy. Indeed, they hollowed out these categories in much the same way as the revolutionary slogans of the Soviet past had been emptied of content, and in doing so made for anti-political forms of mobilization. Interesting about these movements, then, was their need for historical precedents whose political reality had been discarded.

Such mobilizations have become global, with popular protests against politics itself, and not merely governments, dominating the Occupy movements of the US and UK, the Tea Party in America, anti-corruption demonstrations in India or Turkey and, most spectacularly, the so-called Arab Spring. In all these cases, including that of Ukraine in the present, we see the emergence of popular or populist movements that, apart from their vocabulary, have little to do with the political parties or ideologies of the past. Their power might be so great as to unseat long established regimes in certain countries, but not forceful enough to create new political forms in their aftermath. What do these ‘revolutions’ tell us about the political imagination of our times? In the following pages I shall explore the historical vocabulary of popular mobilization as a global form, starting in the Middle East and concluding with India.

 

The Arab revolution’s greatest debt has been to its Eastern European predecessors, a debt that is now being repaid in the Ukraine, whose protests are frequently compared to the Middle East’s uprisings. While commentary on these revolts constantly refers to their radically unforeseen character, the analyses propounded don’t cease gesturing towards precedents and models that might make them historically comprehensible. If it isn’t a regional history of Arab rebellion against authority that is invoked, then we are offered an international one having to do with anti-monarchism, anti-colonialism or anti-capitalism. And in all this, our initial surprise at these extraordinary events is shunted aside as indicating nothing more than a deficit of knowledge about the societies and peoples involved in such uprisings. At most the previously unimaginable and, therefore, incalculable element in the Middle Eastern revolutions is reduced to a ‘spark’ that, in the acts of a Tunisian suicide or his Egyptian and other mimics, ended up setting the region on fire.

However accurate the genealogies proffered by analysts to make sense of these revolts, surely their surprise was due not to a lack of knowledge but to its irrelevance. For the events still unfolding before us in North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East are revolutionary not in any conventional sense, involving political parties, ideologies and historical utopias, but precisely because they lack such traditional political forms. Indeed, those most surprised by this revolutionary wave appear to have been the very people who made it possible. So if there is one sentiment that these men and women voice over and over again, it is wonder at their own transformation.

Most revolutionary about these events, in other words, might be the sudden fearlessness that took the Middle East’s protestors aback. And such fearlessness, I want to suggest, may have something to do with the absence there of a revolutionary politics in its traditional sense. Indeed, the enormous numbers involved in the internecine conflict following Mubarak’s ouster in Egypt, to say nothing about Syria’s civil war, shows that no ‘people’ can be said to exist in either country.

 

Of course it is true that revolutions in other times and places have also been marked by a sense of wonder, but the meaning and possibilities of its surprise have rarely been examined. Instead, commentary on the Left as much as the Right is dominated by the ‘logic’ of history, whose narrative of precedents and genealogies makes events calculable after the fact. And yet, this appeal to history often ends up denying the change that is its essence. For instance, demonstrations throughout the region have been marked by efforts to take back the state and re-appropriate its symbols. This was particularly the case in Egypt, with flags, anthems and slogans abundantly deployed by the protestors. But in the process these symbols of nation and state were also evacuated of their political content and joined up with explicitly civilian forms of celebration. Thus the sloganeering and revelry in Tahrir Square borrowed freely from the chants and other practices of football fans, including dancing and face painting.

And indeed, what could the old-fashioned words ‘people’ or ‘revolution’ mean in a post-Cold War global arena? The relatively superficial use made of such terms in the protests, then, might well suggest their attenuation as political categories. Such an interpretation becomes more convincing when we consider the remarkable forms of self-organization and indeed self-rule that suddenly emerged in the square after decades of centralized and oppressive government, none of which bore any similarity to traditional political forms.

 

By taking them over, the revolutions have in some ways given the old categories of Middle Eastern politics a new reality. So, for instance, the revolts imitating each other across the region have made Pan-Arabism into a popular reality for the first time, but only in a negative way, without any ideology to match. Even the solicitude for the nation displayed by Egyptians eager to do things like clean the streets of Cairo, absorbed such categories of the state into everyday practices and non-political forms. Similar were the creation of new relations between rich and poor, Christians and Muslims, even the people and the army – which was after all being seduced from its duty and in fact from the state by the protestors in Tahrir Square. Of course, many of these extraordinary phenomena have not survived the ‘Arab Spring’, but even so they illustrate both the power and the possibilities of action beyond the limits of our inherited politics.

In their still ambiguous and unformed reality, the region’s revolutions probably belong to a number of possible genealogies, of which one is surely provided by global Islam and its militant form in particular. In the wake of Arab nationalism and Marxism, after all, what other movement has possessed such a pan-Arab dimension? Add to this a decentralized and media-informed politics, though one with neither a party nor ideology to back it, and the comparison is complete. The Left in Europe and America has kept this comparison at bay, seeing it as being characteristic of a fear-mongering Right. My point in drawing it is not to claim that militancy remains a possibility in these rebellions, but instead to demonstrate that it has been overcome. What else do the protestors’ imitations of sacrificial and even suicidal practices across the region signify if not the occupation and indeed conquest of militant forms?

 

Even the inability or unwillingness of Islamists to dominate protests wherever they occur in the Middle East may be attributed to global militancy more than to a resurgence of secularism. For not only has Al-Qaeda provided the revolutions with their individualistic modes of organization and dissemination, it had already displaced the centralized parties and ideologies of old-fashioned Islamism at the forefront of Muslim protest globally. For even if they had been founded as early as the 1920s, Islamist parties are in effect Cold War organizations dominated by statist visions of order.

So the unexpected resistance from large sections of the populace to long established Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Ennahda in Tunisia cannot simply be understood by the equally long-standing historical narratives, either of a ‘fundamentalist’ plot to destroy democracy by the ballot box, or of the desire for dominance by a ‘liberal’ or ‘secular’ elite guaranteed by the army. Indeed, the emergence in both these countries of Salafism, an individualistic version of ‘fundamentalism’ that, unlike Islamism, is not defined by the desire for states or revolutions, demonstrates that Islam in public life has moved beyond the latter’s Cold War ideology.

These accounts, much in evidence since the removal of Egypt’s first post-revolutionary regime, tell us nothing about the intellectual collapse of Islamism as a Cold War ideology dedicated to the promulgation of a revolutionary state and its drift to liberal and indeed neo-liberal forms, as exhibited most clearly in Turkey. Similarly, it is evident that the ‘secularist’ opposition is no longer confined to a narrow elite. In Egypt, for example, that immense population, whose vehement opposition to the Brotherhood draws so much from the ‘Islamophobic’ narratives of Europe and America, includes any number of pious men and veiled women. Surely this curious situation cannot simply be attributed to ‘liberal’ propaganda but tells us something about the real fear of Islamism among many practising Muslims, as well, perhaps, as their consciousness of its intellectual and political decline. Might their extraordinarily violent hatred of the Brotherhood, then, derive in some part from a sense of betrayal at its failure to live up to its own myth of popular power?

 

The interruption of conventional historical narratives that defines so many of the struggles in the Middle East today have the effect of destabilizing the logic of western ‘intervention’ as well. For however violent, the action of coalition forces in Libya was marked by caution and uncertainty, betraying its lack of a clearly stated goal in an improbable and unpredictable situation. Rather than being characterized by mere deception regarding the control of Libyan politics or oil, therefore, the intervention was being forced by the dissonance of the revolts themselves into an experiment that is open to popular opinion and motivated by a desire to be on the right side of an unknown history. If nothing else the coalition has to demonstrate the continuing relevance of an ‘international community’ that seems to have been left out of the new politics emerging from the Middle East.

The historical logic that drew previous NATO-led interventions belonged either to the superpower politics of the Cold War, or to the resolution of conflicts that emerged in its wake. Vietnam, Korea and the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan are examples of intervention of the first kind, while Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo provide illustrations of the second. With Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror, of course, and even Libya today, outdated Cold War regimes are still being toppled, but now intervention has lost whatever realpolitik it once possessed. For if interventions in the past had sought to secure allies and markets for the West, without much concern for the democratic nature of the regime to be instituted, those in the present are dominated by grandiose visions like remaking the Middle East.

The abject failure of such impossible visions in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in a Libyan adventure that lacked both a grand vision and realpolitik. Characterized by uncertainty and experiment, intervention has become nothing more than a bad habit that is driven increasingly by non-political concerns like ‘humanitarianism’ at a time when international politics is itself in crisis. The same was true of intervention in the Balkans, of course, but there received ideas about religious and national states allowed for the making of dysfunctional new countries as wards of the international community. The difference with the revolts in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East is that they possess no conventional utopia or historical logic, serving instead as interruptions of received narratives that are transformative of politics both in the region and internationally.

 

National debate in India has been dominated over the past few years by just two issues: security and corruption. Both are marked by their malleability, with concerns about security shifting from terrorism to rape, and those about corruption moving easily between the criticism of individuals and institutions. Such issues are no longer in the control of political parties or the state, and are as likely to be used by them as against. For these problems are now consistently posed as those of governance, and can no longer be blamed only on treacherous castes, classes or communities within the body of citizens. Moreover the language of governance is dominated by the desire for equality as an undifferentiated and so universal good, rather than, say, justice as one that is based on discriminating between citizens.

 

The social movements that increasingly tend to give these undifferentiated issues their visibility often share their activists and forms of expression with one another. Candlelight vigils, for example, emerged in the 1990s to publicize the murder of young women like Jessica Lall and Priyadarshini Mattoo, whose assailants could evade justice because of their political connections. In the following decade such practices were extended to commemorate terrorist attacks, and today protests against both rape and corruption switch between the silent vigil and the angry demonstration as modes of expression. These largely middle class manifestations of discontent are also unprecedented, given the fact that political parties are largely absent in their organization.

Such novel forms of mobilization all date from the period of India’s economic liberalization, which created a new space for organization and debate in an increasingly mediatised civil society. But while they have dominated popular interest nationally, what goes unnoticed is how these debates still have little traction for regional politics, where the inequalities of caste, class and community continue to define both protest and voting patterns. There seems to be a widening gulf between politics at the state level, whose influence has been expanded by the steady devolution of power in the country, and at the Centre, which can no longer be held by single parties but only in large coalitions with several regional ones.

 

It is perhaps because a national, party based politics of the old-fashioned kind is in crisis, that mobilizations at the Centre are so concerned with recovering the nation as an undifferentiated and even anti-political idea. Such mobilizations are led, therefore, by social movements that are highly critical of party politics, setting governance against government in forms like the Jan Lokpal Bill, which seeks to make a ‘corrupt’ Parliament accountable to civil society beyond the electoral process, by giving extraordinary power to an ombudsman tasked with investigating every branch of government. After all, issues like corruption or security are so unexceptionable as to be universal, and therefore define the nation outside politics by excluding any substantive opposition, for who could argue in favour of them?

While both social movements and the political parties that seek their support proclaim their allegiance to the country’s founding fathers, the governance that preoccupies them does not belong to a national history. If anything it was the colonial state that sought to justify itself by the language of fair and competent administration. Since it was run by foreigners who did not depend on elections or ‘vote banks’, the administration was, by definition, thought to be impartial and non-political. And by the end of colonial rule the vocabulary of ‘development’ had come to lend additional legitimacy to an unaccountable bureaucracy, from where it has been inherited by equally unrepresentative international organizations and ‘global civil society’.

But as a global category, governance achieved its current status during the ‘post-ideological’ period following the Cold War. Premised on the retrenchment of the state, which was meant to outsource many of its former functions to private enterprise, NGOs and the institutions of civil society, governance redefined government as managerial oversight. In the form of ‘good governance’, then, management was promoted by international organizations like the UN, NATO, World Bank and the IMF, at least initially to manage the transition of post-Soviet societies to democracy and capitalism. Governance of this kind was explicitly anti-political, and meant to reduce the hold of a corrupt and tyrannical state upon its citizens. Yet, the social movements that emerged to oppose such states have been able, in spectacular cases like the colour revolutions of Eastern Europe or those of the Arab Spring more recently, to topple governments but not to form them. Given their distaste for party politics, it could not have been otherwise.

 

So it is remarkable that a social movement, ‘India Against Corruption’, has produced the Aam Aadmi Party, though we have yet to see if it is able to balance a social movement with institutional politics, or maybe transform one into the other. Certainly the party’s unexpected victory in the Delhi elections, and its resignation from office less than two months later, indicates its uncertainty about holding institutional power and the ‘dirtiness’ of the political deal making it involves. The precedent for this unwillingness to compromise one’s virtue was sought in the example of Gandhi, though more appropriate would have been Congress’s resignation of office in 1939, ostensibly because it was not consulted about India being taken into the Second World War. More important, however, might have been Nehru’s anxiety about his legislators being seduced by the perquisites of government and becoming invested in the perpetuation of colonial rule. But how real are such historical references?

 

The situation facing AAP may also be found in Hindutva, India’s first great social movement of the post-Cold War period. Achieving a massive mobilization in the media saturated civil society created by liberalization, Hindutva is propagated by a political party, the BJP, and apparently non-political organizations such as the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal, which together constitute the hybrid association of the Sangh Parivar. Rather than being merely conspiratorial, the secretive character of the RSS, for instance, serves to demonstrate its deliberate policy of working outside an arena defined by the institutions of parliamentary democracy, while still being part of a ‘family’ that includes a political party. Of course, it is this very form of ‘unelected’ or advisory power that the BJP criticizes in the Congress’s National Advisory Council, led by Sonia Gandhi and meant to serve as an ‘interface’ with civil society. Similarly, the Nehru-Gandhi family, whose ‘dynastic’ politics is also condemned, finds itself mirrored in the Hindu-populist family of the Sangh Parivar.

The difference, of course, has to do with the fact that Congress is not an ideological party, but in some ways still the ‘big tent’ of colonial times, attempting to bring many different interests together by a ‘corrupt’ politics of arbitration and deal making, rather than a set of collective ideals of the kind that had once been articulated by Gandhi. And despite its gradual decline, it is this politics of arbitration, itself rather congruent with that followed by the colonial state, that continues to provide all parties in India with their model of realpolitik. In this sense, the ‘dynastic’ character of the Congress, itself rather fitting for a society still organized around kinship and caste, is perfectly suited to a non-ideological party that places loyalty to a family above any homogenous vision of a political utopia. And yet we shall see that even the non-dynastic and therefore ideological BJP is being pulled in an anti-political direction, and not simply because it is forced to accept the Congress model of realpolitik in a context where no single party can hold the Centre.

By wrangling for control of the BJP, the RSS seems to have forsaken its traditional policy of secrecy and indirect influence. This either suggests that Hindutva as a social movement is being subordinated to a political party, or the reverse, both possibilities remaining open if the state is imagined to represent civil society in a managerial way. But more interesting than the shifting balance of power between the two, might be the fact that Hindutva has never possessed a theory of state. Unlike the vision of an Islamic state, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure, Hindutva has no alternative political model. And this is both its triumph as much as its tragedy, since the absence of such a model repeatedly casts Hindutva back into a social movement.

 

The BJP has struggled, with varying degrees of purpose and success, to free itself from Hindutva as a social movement, or rather to subordinate the latter to parliamentary politics. And today its vision of becoming normalized as India’s conservative party looks like it is about to be fulfilled by a leader who, ironically, is the man most associated with Hindutva as social a movement. Such are the paradoxes of populism! Will the BJP finally manage to absorb the social movement that gave rise to it, or will the latter’s attempt to recover the nation in non-political terms end up establishing a majority defined democracy against the Republic? For being a political category, the Republic is opposed to majority rule as a social form, meant as it is to create a public space in which majorities and minorities are made up of shifting and temporary interests, rather than the permanent demographic facts that populism on the Left as much as the Right relies upon.

 

The only parties that depend upon social movements in India today are the gigantic BJP on the one hand, and still very small AAP on the other. Although they are very different and even opposed to one another, it is instructive that both parties stake their reputations on governance rather than government. Does the devolution of power in India, and its consequent political fragmentation, suggest that the Centre can only hold in such anti-political ways? If it is to be hollowed out like this, and made to act as a guarantor for ‘national’ programmes of development and governance, then the Centre will have adopted its model of rule from the late colonial state, with the messy politics of caste, class or community playing itself out beyond the institutions of central power. Or at most it will have returned to the model of federalism that had been put forward in colonial times to obviate the demand for India’s partition. And perhaps it is this disavowed past that spurs the anxious invocations of nationalist history by both parties.

Is the national arena demarcated by the media fated to represent civil society, with the state serving as its agent in ensuring good governance under the watchful eye of a Lokpal or Vikas Purush? However fantastical this vision, it tells us something about the imperial imagination that Indian politicians are returning to in an effort to manage an increasingly decentralized country, one that for the moment seems governable only by large and unwieldy coalitions unknown in either the theory or history of democracy. Indeed AAP’s temporary hold over Delhi may in this context represent nothing less than the capital’s regionalization, its stewardship by a party with no national base representing the victorious march of devolution and provincial power in India. Whatever its political future, however, AAP might be the most original representative of the new movements that seem to be sweeping India today. And this is what makes its idea of nationality so interesting.

The ‘common man’ who owns the Aam Aadmi Party’s name is not an ‘empirical’ figure like the religious, caste or class majority whose interests are allegedly promoted by other parties, but instead a statistical ‘average’ made up of all Indians. In this way he is also rather different from the ‘99%’ of the Occupy movements, possessing no enemies defined by class or any other collective identity. Only corrupt individuals, especially if they happen to be politicians, are seen as enemies by AAP, while its friends are neither individuals nor collectives but the nation conceived of as an average. Anyone, in other words, can belong to the party, which is therefore explicitly ‘non-ideological’ in nature, and yet does not partake in the realpolitik whose model is set by Congress.

By abandoning the inherited categories of majority and minority, whether of caste, class or community, that have defined politics both on the Left and Right for decades now, AAP has also forsaken the idea of a supposedly empirical national ‘core’. The ‘people’ it represents, therefore, must recognize themselves as the instantiation of an empty abstraction, one that can never again be divided and must so exit the realm of politics.