IN recorded histories of violence, the victim and the offender are rarely fixed and unambiguous entities. They have often switched roles while victimhood comes to inform the psychological make-up of both. The perpetrator justifies his act on account of some past experiences of injustices, real or perceived; the victim carries it as an existential reality.

When it comes to the poor, the relationship is rather one sided. In histories of modern capitalism, they have rarely been able to alter the state of their structural disparity. The poor, interestingly, do not even get to be counted as the ‘victim’ for they do not bear a clear, ethnic marker – no collective memory or narratives of oppression. This is further complicated by the everydayness of violence that the poor face, less of spectacle, and therefore normalized. What is the sense of victimization that the poor carry among themselves, and against whom, and how do they express when they desire to?

Politics of the poor materializes in the abject conditions of their existence – precarity and humiliation combined – yet varies in its form and expression. The result of the 2019 general elections, in my opinion, was one such in which the poor made a clear choice with a rationality of its own. Amongst those witness to this pronouncedly right wing shift in the Indian polity, the resounding victory of the NDA was received with disbelief and despair. A range of explanations filled the columns of newspapers and talk shows. For the admirers, PM Modi had acquired a cultic status – endowed with charisma and resoluteness that proved to be the killer. The opponents, the conscientious but tiny counter public, attributed the victory to the aggressive display of jingoism and Muslim stigmatization combined with mobilization of big money and corporate interest.

The election data marshaled in the form of opinion and exit polls and surveys, disaggregated along different social indices, focused on how the mandate drew support from palpably all segments of the electorate – rural/urban, male/female, lower/upper caste, and high and low income groups. Most of these accounts addressed the immediate, turning elections into a singular event, invoking the oft-repeated phrase, ‘every election is different.’ The elections, however, are also a moment, a context for the expression of contesting aspirations, new social alliances and reconfiguration of the old ones. A longue duree view, plausibly, takes us much deeper into cognition.

 

My departure point here is triggered by a lingering question: why did the poor vote the way they did? Post-poll surveys indicate that the BJP remains overwhelmingly a choice for the affluent, but its increasing popularity among the poorest is also striking. The 2014 elections announced the arrival of the middle classes as key political actors that analysts believed, was central to the success of the BJP. Their proportionate turnout on the polling day outscored all other income groups, which in itself was an astonishing story for the urban affluent classes that over the years had lost interest in the political process.

The middle classes’ preference for the right could easily be explained as aligned to the growth in their size during the globalization era, its preference for a more market driven economic agenda, its proximity to exclusive nationalism and its distaste for the marginal and the impoverished. What was missed, however, in the 2014 analysis was the slow but steady turn of the poorest towards the NDA, from 16% to 24% between 2009-2014. Come 2019, the shift of the poor towards the Hindutva politics was more pronounced, more than 36% among them now turning out to vote for the BJP alone. In fact, among all income groups, the ruling party made most significant gains among the country’s most distressed (12% over 2014), a feat incredulous for many.¹

This political behaviour of the poor of India was most intriguing given the situation that the regime was increasingly being seen as pro-capital, with little compassion for the poor. Activists working on the ground complained of the receding allocations to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme that, in the past, was credited for arresting labour migration and pulling millions out of abject poverty. The demonetization of 1000 and 500 rupee notes, that the PM announced with the stated intent to unearth unaccounted money and counterfeit currency, came to coppers. Nearly five million job losses, much of it from the informal sector, coincided with the period following the measure. In times of economic slowdown, retrenchments and low prices for agricultural produce, and increased incidents of farmers’ suicide, India’s billionaire wealth increased by 4891 billion rupees with 17 new entrants in the club.

 

In the last decade or so, there is much talk about India’s achievements in reducing absolute poverty. A UN report affirmed that beginning from year 2005-06, the poverty rates had nearly halved over a period of 10 years. At the same time, however, inequality seems to have climbed insurmountable folds resulting in far-reaching social and political consequences.

There is a significant rise in the middle class, much of it now populated by the historically excluded groups and communities. But again, a disaggregated analysis notes that much of this swelling is in the category of lower middle class with a daily per capita expenditure between two to four dollars a day. The free market economy flooded the market with consumer options, but has also introduced new kinds of classificatory practices that the elites consciously indulge in to draw a line of separation. Besides, there is increasing informalization of work. All this adds to the precariousness of life that the poor face today.

 

If the sob stories are assumed to be amplified and opinionated, there is a broader consensus on the fact that the period between 2014 to 2019 saw virtually no radical transformation in the material life of the poor. What then accounts for this, all so significant turn, in the politics of the poor? Desperation to find a ready answer brings us to utilitarian rationalism, with which the apologists of the regime instantly concur. The achievements of the ruling dispensation in reaching out to the most impoverished, often a leaf out of the election manifesto, are catalogued. Thus, Ujjawala (LPG connection in BPL households), toilets, rural electrification, cash transfer to sections of the peasantry – an assortment of welfare schemes is supposed to have struck a chord amongst the poorest.

However, the actual effectiveness of these initiatives in garnering votes remains fiercely contested. Barely, 1% of the respondents in CSDS-Lokniti Post-poll Survey identified welfare schemes as determinant of their voting choices. However, I am suspicious of this theory for an entirely different reason. Is the poor’s political consciousness so acquiescent, supple and greed-driven, regardless of history, ideology and politics that they readily fall for allurements offered from time to time?

There is also a false consciousness thesis – the assumption that the poor acted on their own, but fundamentally against their own interest. Ironical as it may sound, this thesis attributes a degree of innocence, as much as ignorance, to the poor’s exercise of choice. Propaganda, a cocktail of truth and falsehood, is primarily to be blamed, as per this postulate. Thus xenophobia and war hysteria – drawn from old school fascism – swung the labouring classes in favour of Modi.

 

The opposition strategy was supposedly to draw the voters’ attention to the ‘real issues’ – unemployment, the decimation of the informal economy through demonetization, agrarian distress and indebtedness or the GST implementation that hit small businesses. Accordingly, the elections supposedly symbolized a struggle between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, the material and the metaphysical. Eventually, the latter outscored all others – so the thesis goes.

Looking beyond these binaries forces us to shift our analysis from the prism of data crunches, predictions and outcomes, towards the social and political process that have unfolded over a period of time. Thus, what do the poor look for when they vote? And has that need, whether manufactured or authentic, changed over the years? To grasp the political praxis of the poor is imperative for a counter politics to emerge.

Classified in terms of their material location, the poor as a category appears to be innocent of its sociality – the markers of language, caste, religion or ethnicity. In the real world, however, they all come to play, often cumulatively, to define the life chances of the impoverished. In India, the probability of a person turning out to be at the margins of economy intensifies manifold if he or she belongs to a scheduled tribe, a scheduled caste, Muslim or an OBC household. The poor in India are thus not an abstract economic entity, but assumes definite social identity, in fact barriers that restrict his/her chances to compete for resources, both material and symbolic.

 

Caught in a deeply entrenched social hierarchy that allows virtually no room for mobility, and tormented by an economic order that augments inequality, what political imaginary are there for the poor to rest their hopes in? Conventionally, in India and elsewhere, three streams of politics have competed to offer ameliorative strategies and accordingly mobilized the impoverished masses. Each proposed a utopia, an idea of justice beyond the limited aim to acquire state power.

The liberal-democrats, best represented by the post-independent Congress, offered a heady mix of developmentalism converged with nationalism that promised to pull the vast majority of former subjects out of their penurious state. Command economy, mega developmental projects, and enhanced productivity was the cure-all formula. Partial success notwithstanding, the promise of distributive justice remained as vacuous as it sounded, as the party and its leaders busied themselves in balancing competing class interests.

The Marxists appeared unswerving in battling accumulation, and armed with a theory of class struggle, were instrumental in propelling working class movements. However, it left those in the informal sector, the mainstay of Indian economy, high and dry. A rudimentary class framework reduced a whole range of extra-economic exploitative relations marked by caste, religion or even gender at the most, as auxiliary concerns. There were significant victories, but the costs proved to be steep.

Mobilizations aimed at transformative changes sought sacrifice, and the poor, after initial signs of attraction, preferred to remain bystanders rather than the vanguard. Anthropologist James Scott has termed revolution a dream of the middle class intelligentsia, while what interests the ‘subordinate classes’ most is in ‘working the system to their minimum advantage.’ The poor desired improvement in their immediate lot, the revolutionaries offered an illusionary moon.

 

In its glorious phase, the plank of social justice held out immense hope for the poor. It primarily addressed status deprivation and caste stigmatization, and the poor who largely filled the ranks of lower caste groups, found in it a more comprehensible answer to their woes. In its early conceptualization, social justice promised a blend of both, recognition and redistribution. The poor sought liberation from their everyday humiliation and deprivation.

On account of the commonality of their origins, the new set of leaders appeared more intimate, their idiom more endearing to the poor. But their hope turned into despair, as justice got confined to representation. Material outcome of the politics of symbolism rarely reached the most distressed. In fact, it advanced the relatively better off resulting in the sharpening of intra-group inequality. For the vast majority of India’s poor, there was little improvement in their perilous existence.

A weariness with the politics of the past draws the poor to the politics of Hindutva. The phenomenon is not typical to India. A look around finds parallel in the resurgence of the conservative right in countries of Europe and Americas. In England, since the last three elections, the Conservatives advanced more strongly among the working class than Labour. In Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential elections, the economic anxieties of the white working class voters are believed to have played a significant role. The victory of Bolsonaro, the Brazilian right wing presidential candidate, is attributed to his rising popularity in the working class urban neighbourhood which traditionally aligned with his opponents, the Workers Party.

In times of uncertainty, this new nationalist fervour produces enemies from within as much as from without. While the Muslim serves as the enemy external to the Hindu nation, drawing maximum hatred, there are imaginary enemies within as well – the Khan Market gang, Lutyens’ elite, Nehru and the secularists, the award wapsi gang, JNU intellectuals and the tukde tukde group. Unlike the Muslim, the latter set of nemeses lack clear ethnic markers, and therefore are spared of individualized violence.

For the poor, the Muslim is a competitor in the labour market while this imaginary elite, the exploiter and recipient of undeserved privileges. It is this catharsis that explains the new turn in the politics of the poor. This politics also offers an imaginary horizontal comradeship in the Hindu nation that serves as a new utopia. At once, the impoverished, the subaltern, the wretched – people without history come to assume the commanding position in politics as equal and empowered members of the cultural nation. This is their quest for dignity, for justice horribly distorted and for a life free of cynical hypocrisy of the past.

Whether it is the supposedly uncouth Trump, the butt of liberal jokes or a Modi laced with the rags to riches story, the poor finds in them a biography similar to theirs, one which by accident of birth, was forever banished. We learn from Freud that what is repressed often comes back in a distorted form, in politics what was repressed from the imaginary of the poor today returns back in the form of right wing triumphalism and populism.

 

Footnote:

1. Sanjay Kumar and Pranav Gupta, ‘Where did the BJP Get its Votes From in 2019?’ Live Mint, 3 June 2019 url https://www.livemint. com/politics/news/where-did-the-bjp-get-its-votes-from-in-2019-1559547933995.html