Books
PLURIVERSE: A Post-Development Dictionary
edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria and Alberto Acosta. Tulika Books, Delhi, 2019.Pluriverse is an invitation to decolonization and to a critique of development and its monumental destructiveness. In many ways this book is an exorcism of the black magic around words like security, development, progress and the genocidal yet seductive impetus implicit in them. In mythic terms, an alternative can be born when a demon is defeated. Then critique is followed by construct, and movements and social sciences almost reverentially, like obstetricians, deliver a new offering of life-giving concepts: respect for Earth, plurality. The word post-development is a masonic sign from the margins announcing the new era with dreams of new forms of living. The post-development dictionary evokes The Encyclopaedists searching for a new world, evoking it in new words, where word and world signal a new meaning. It is a world of the future, a dream of alternatives hatched around a Thesaurus of words and concepts. The future today begins as a cottage industry of dissenters, or a network of civil society collecting the gossip of alternatives across continents, a beehive of futuristic dreams sensing the future is already here.
The first thing that is clear is the rhetoric of change, especially the umbilical cosmos within which words are nurtured, is different. The trumpet call is no longer revolution within its smell of death and violence. The keyword is transformation as an invitation to the making of a different world. Instead of revolution with its stillborn monstrosities, one anticipates ‘a democracy radicalizing itself’, rewriting itself from the idea of the body to an invocation of the earth, hinting at life and living in an earth democracy.
The ritual begins when shaman, scholar and trickster look at a keyword – Developmentalism – as an ideology, a dream, a disease, and examine its symptoms. In its commitment to progress, its resistance to environmental regulation post-development assumes new reciprocity between North and South, and a playful transcendence of that idiot dichotomy that haunted us, the eerie divides between red and green. It goes beyond the formal civics of technology transfers and talks of dialogue, an exchange of carnivalesque ideas which evoke, what Raimundo Panikkar calls ‘new rhythms of being’. Here North meets South, when North discovers the South of minorities, margins and women within itself. The North is no longer a lens to confront the South, but South becomes a mirror where the North re-reads itself and out of that reciprocity, a world called the Pluriverse is born.
When concepts turn genocidal, one needs what the scientist C.V. Seshadri called ‘A-don’t-use-me dictionary’, a thesaurus of words like commodity, linearity, universalism, globalism, expertize, GDP, growth, magical words which have become the stigmata of the future. It attacks the monotheism called Anthropocentrism, which pitted humanity against nature. This attitude also sustained the festering dualism between mind and body, masculine and feminine, civilized versus barbarian, artificial pairs which mutilated social science thinking. It was an invidious world where, as Ivan Illich pointed out, modern colonial capitalism demeaned forms of knowing such as care giving or non-western forms of law, science and economics.
The post-development dictionary is a search for languages, concepts, thought experiments that can de-panopticonize thought in current day society. It is an accompaniment to the Environmental Justice Atlas cataloguing conflicts against land grabs, oil wars, genetically engineered plantations, the ecological collapse that our media fails to record or register. The book is desperately necessary giving the failure of an effete left and assertiveness and asperationalism of a machismo right which sees the refugee and the migrant scapegoat as roots of the economic problem.
The Post-Development Dictionary – going beyond its ancestor, Wolfgang Sach’s The Development Dictionary – sees the alternative worlds beyond the failure of the two 20th century models – liberal representative democracy and state socialism. It examines intermediate solutions and false promises, especially the idea of sustainable development sadly encoiled by the python called Corporate Social Responsibility. As the introduction remarks the ‘mantra of sustainability was swallowed up by capitalism and emptied of ecological content.’ It provides an exploration of intermediate concepts, which fail even as placebos, ideas like the bioeconomy, a green revolution for Africa or the agendas of sustainable development. It explores the attempts of economic growth to acquire a new sanctity through a green halo of environmental economies. It elucidates the politics of such approaches revealing their attempts to create a false consensus around superficial solutions. It does so not to question these efforts but attempts to show that technomanagerialism needs to be embedded in fundamental socio-cultural transformation. A mere dream of innovation chains is not a way out of the crisis.
The core of the book lists out initiatives to reinterpret indigenous worldviews, religious traditions to provide a critique of current everydayness. A Pluriverse is an array of alternative solutions that can coexist together while they cannot be managerialized by one overarching policy. The narrow idea of global governance meets an anarchy, a plurality of solutions that can relate to each other. Hospitality challenges uniformity in the construction of discourses. The book is an expose of ‘intermediate concepts’, the fake news of social science where capitalism and state invent intermediate concepts to appropriate the radical power of these initiatives. It lists out a range of them from climate smart agriculture, the circular economy, and lifeboat ethics, concepts that the agribusiness economy uses to delay transitions in the transformation of food systems. The wisdom is simple, ‘By strengthening local economies, food miles can be reduced while at the same time enhancing farmer’s sovereignty and farmer’s control over food systems.’ Climate Smart Agriculture is an Orwellian trick to rebrand agribusiness to promote business as usual. The spread of fake news is not just in the domain of politics but is factually employed to blunt alternative practices.
Ecomodernism is another such concept where technology anchors salvation by allegedly breaking free from biological resources and natural cycles. ‘Peasants, pastoralists, forest dwellers and fishing communities who directly rely on the ecosystems they inhabit are cast as environmental villains destroying an otherwise unspoiled nature.’ One witnesses such tactics especially from think tanks which attack the strategies of environmental movements. A classic example is the work of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, California, that systematically attacks environmental groups arguing against nuclear energy. They have transformed post-environmentalism into an anti-environmental movement seeking to maintain affluent lifestyles. The power of these think tanks should not be underestimated, given their impact on media, even on reputed scientific journals like Nature.
In fact, one witnesses a commoditization of the crisis, where environmental services are traded. Nature is traded through environmental token; for example, power plants in Europe would offset green house gas emissions by colonizing the photosynthetic capacity of tracts of land in Latin America, Africa or Asia. The pretext of preventing ecological degradation elsewhere, while firms continue to pollute, creates a machine for perpetrating colonial mythologies.
Business knows the obvious fact that colonialism is not dead as long as minds can be colonialized. The litany of corrupted terms ranges from efficiency to geo-engineering, where technological fixes substitute for change in lifestyles. The seductive power of technology underlies all these concepts which work as promissory notes diverting one from the struggle for justice. Words acquire an oxymoronic character as they attempt to resolve contradictory interests. Yet they have a seductive power as they offer quick solutions to the desperate. Sustainability, Green Economy and Transhumanism lead this don’t-use-me list of neo-toxic terms capped by Garrett Hardin’s advocacy of lifeboat ethics, which denies aid to the poor, the malnourished, arguing that refusal to save human lives is a part of the systematic rationality of a society. The list is enormous as one travels from neo-extractionism and smart cities creating a bastardization of language and meaning that needs to be unravelled. Pluriverse, in that sense, is a fascinating linguistic analysis of the Orwellian vocabularies of neo-capitalism. Underlying it also is a critique of the ontology of problem solving where all social and environmental processes are framed as being solvable through technological fixes. Activists, in search of alternatives, must examine the post truth status of these words pretending to be sacraments, iconic of technocratic salvation.
The middle half of the book seeks to counter such initiatives with the language of movements, a new folklore of alternative possibilities from Ubuntu to Agaciro. The vernacular returns to challenge techno-universalism with a vengeance. Words that had lost their magic during decolonization now return to redeem the world in which they had been embedded. One wishes there was a broader exploration of each word as a life world, subjecting it to a politics of reverie, a focused mediation that captured the primordial resonances of such a term. There is a difference one must grasp between lived terms and concepts. For example, Rights is what you ‘measure’ like well-being, but dignity is what you feel like a skin around you. One has to be cautious that such words do not get tamed into antiseptic concepts, losing their polyphonic resonance.
One of the intriguing aspects of the dictionary is the way it brings cultural resonances together: the African idea of Ubuntu, the Illichian idea of conviviality to show how the weaving of the music of nature and culture creates an overture of creative possibilities. What began as hunches, develop into possibilities, evolve as experiments like ecovillages. Recipe, formula, anecdote, and theory combine to make the book a treasure trove of wisdom. It creates an outline and leaves it open to one’s sense of justice and alternative to weave a different world. The basis is community. By locating oneself in communities, one invents the accompaniments for it. Livelihoods, technology, nature all resonate with communities. It is a handbook for a pragmatic activist mind that wants to make the utopian workable. By creating concepts that insert themselves between cosmology and constitutionalism, the global tapestry of alternatives creates hope as a horizon, a heuristic and a hypothesis, inviting citizens to dream and live differently.
Shiv Visvanathan
social science nomad
POST-GROWTH THINKING IN INDIA: Towards Sustainable, Egalitarian Alternatives edited by Julien-Francois Gerber and Rajeswari S. Raina. Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2018.
WHAT a difference a word can make! Back in 2014, a symposium titled ‘Growth, Green Growth or Degrowth?’ was held in Delhi, which then formed the basis for this edited volume. But by replacing these terms with ‘Post-Growth’ in the book title, the editors signal to us that the scope of the book is far bigger than any of them. Beyond just a critique of growth or green growth, or promotion of degrowth – an idea that, on the face of it, seems a misfit in a ‘poor’ country like India – the volume also tries to move the debate towards more radical (and interesting) ways of thinking about development.
The collection of essays is like a jigsaw puzzle. The picture that emerges is (naturally) full of overlaps, contradictions and holes. Not all of the pieces even belong to the same picture, while some are (to push the analogy further) manuals for puzzle solving rather than jigsaw pieces themselves. Nevertheless, the exercise of puzzling them out enriches our understanding of both what this picture of alternative development thinking might be and what changes are required in our thinking to complete it.
Some authors recommend ‘fixing’ conventional growth. Kanchan Chopra sticks to GDP growth as the primary goal of development policy, and focuses on ‘corrections’ or marginal changes required to make this growth green. This allows the author to actually mathematically model the impacts of different environmental policies on the economy of a state and to conclude that ‘the cost of going green’ is a ‘negligible’ fraction of the state’s GDP. Admittedly, even these marginal changes are being contradicted by state and federal policies. More importantly, the trade-off is still being posed in terms of GDP. Chopra then proposes some indicators to supplement GDP, related to inequality of incomes and carbon footprint. Perhaps the supplementary indicators could come first and the model could throw light on what happens to them under such green growth policies.
Jayati Ghosh also begins with a comprehensive critique of GDP as the indicator of well-being, reviews alternatives such as Daly’s Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare or the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Social Progress Index. But the author then states that in countries like India where the development project is far from complete and millions live in dire poverty, expansion of the incomes of the masses is essential, which in turn requires GDP growth in the aggregate! The focus then slips back to making growth more inclusive.
What is it about our understanding of the society-economy-ecology relationships that keeps us believing in growth theory and capitalism? Sukumar Muralidharan leads us through the series of slippages in the evolution of neoclassical economics, including the separation of economics from ethics (Walras), the ‘naturalness’ of inequality and therefore the narrows focus on trickle down and win-win improvements (Pareto), and the refusal to address externalities and social costs (in spite of Kapp’s efforts). Aditya Nigam leads us through similar slippages in socialist theory that also ‘partook of the fundamental assumptions’ driving ‘productivism-as-progress’. The reduction of culturally grounded livelihood systems to purely economic concepts of land, labour and production was accepted as inevitable (even if painful) by Marx. Separating humanity from nature and reducing nature to raw material meant that the source of ‘surplus value’ for Marx was only ‘unpaid labour’, ignoring the ‘unpaid ecological costs’ of production.
Why have these slippages occurred? Is there a common root? Mansoor Khan provides an intriguing analysis linking fossil energy and capitalism. He argues that the root of surplus is the energy return on energy invested (EROEI), that settled agriculture had a significant EROEI allowing the development of complex societies, but that it was the tapping of fossil fuels with a much higher EROEI (up to 50:1) that led to the dramatic growth of the economy (and population) of the last few centuries. Conversely, as we run out of sources of high EROEI, we will have to scale back the economy or perish. Even renewables are not a complete solution because of their much lower EROEI, low energy density, land requirements, intermittency, etc. But even while economic production follows EROEI, capitalism and financial markets seem to be operating in a world of their own. Surplus value, stored as money, is given the ‘right’ (through capitalist social relations) to seek further and increasing return, initially as simple interest, then compound interest, and then a variety of steps (allowing speculation in the share market, fractional reserve banking, removal of the gold standard, creation of ‘leveraged’ financial products, options, and derivatives, etc.).
While Khan presents a form of energy determinism, I would argue for a more co-evolutionary perspective, and say that capitalism not only allows the appropriation of surplus (created especially by fossil energy) by those who own financial capital, but legitimizes the constant expectation of unrealistic returns to capital, and thereby blinds us to the short-lived nature and massive environmental impacts of fossil energy.
What kind of a future should we then aim for? Bagaria and Asthana outline ‘universal human values’ that should underpin such a future. Helena Norberg-Hodge makes an impassioned plea for localization, using the example of Ladakh to argue that integration into the wider economy and polity is the root cause of all ills that entered an idyllic pre-industrial society. Ashish Kothari presents the most comprehensive statement of what a radically different future might look like: an alternative economy consisting of decentralized production and consumption with a limited role for private capital, an alternative politics consisting of participatory (rather than representative) democracy, and alternative social relations that are free from inequities of caste, class, gender and race.
There is much to agree and disagree in the volume, some digressions or dead-ends, and some unfulfilled expectations about concrete strategies for getting to the desirable future that we all want. But as Joan Martinez-Alier says in the epilogue, the volume shows that ‘post-growth, meaning an economy and society geared to the needs of humans and non-humans, has Indian roots’, and Gerber and Raina have to be thanked for challenging us to fill in the other gaps in the puzzle.
Sharachchandra Lele
Centre for Environment & Development, ATREE, Bengaluru
HIMALAYAN HISTORIES: Economy, Polity, Religious Traditions by Chetan Singh. Permanent Black, Delhi, 2018.
THE book contains 14 essays written by the author over the last few years on different aspects of the history of the Western Himalaya (contemporary Himachal Pradesh). The introduction dwells upon the spatial and temporal dimensions of regional studies. The author emphasizes the fact that regional histories chose to ‘particularize national developments to accommodate provincial sensibilities.’ The two narratives, nationalist and regional, and even the resistant provincial ones, are invariably interconnected. The author reminds us that regional histories too are accounts of dominant elites and the historian has to take cognizance of local hierarchies and interrogate the assumptions of regional narratives and ask who is being represented and whose voice is being muffled. Since power relations are also tempered by ecology, a regional history is the story of how people make a living from a particular piece of earth, acquire it and perceive it. This book chooses to do precisely this through essays that focus on different dimensions of ecology to show how people make sense of their piece of the mountains.
The second chapter, ‘Defining Spaces, Constituting Identity’, explores different disciplinary perspectives on the Himalayan mountains – the concept of Zomia, anthropological approaches to oral traditions, geography’s environmental determinism, sociology’s indifference to history and argues for cross-fertilization of theory for pertinent long-term narratives. The third chapter, ‘Defining Community: Territory and Transformation in the Western Himalaya’, delineates how community identities are contingent and invoke both the Little and the Great Traditions. An important point made here is that pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial governmentalities have not undermined the local community, which continues to make its presence felt with respect to administrative policies and interventions. The fourth chapter on ‘Geography, Religion and Hegemony: Constructing the State’ in the Western Himalaya, reiterates the interplay between the local in the autochthonous belief systems and the broader Sanskritic and Brahmanical structures. This process produces an organization that connects folk deities, peasant clans and formal state structures.
The sixth essay on ‘Myth, Legend and Folklore’ in Himalayan society explores various myths and legends in the context of Kullu and Bashahr. Here too, the local Himalayan and Brahmanical traditions are at work weaving together different strands to create a cosmos and world order that is in tune with both. In the section on ‘Territory, Social Order and Intermediate Legends’, the Mahasu legend is examined in its specific context, but the story is also about shifting territorialities and their formalization, sometimes through the invocation of distant landscapes, like that of Delhi and Kashmir. Collective memory thus carries within its fold many histories and it is this continuous interpretation that constructs present historical identities. An exploration of the dum or customary rebellion, in the colonial period, provides an insight into communitarian forms of organization. Interestingly, the ‘dum’ was not a form of transgression but a reassertion of tradition. It was solemn and invoked local gods and belief in clan loyalties.
The next set of three essays study agro-pastoral practices and pastoralism in detail. Mountain societies are mobile because they utilize different locales on a seasonal basis. This was the organizing principle followed by the hill people, who depend on a variety of resources for their livelihoods. Colonial rule, because of its concerns with revenue and its desire for stable sedentary populations, refused to recognize this aspect. The Gaddi, a well known transhumant pastoralist group whose homeland is Bhramaur (Chamba), are both peasant and pastoralist and are organized into lineages and caste-like groups (three). It was pastoralism however, that defined the Gaddi, and colonial rule with its forest policy made access to grasslands and fodder increasingly difficult. Yet, the Gaddi negotiated between mountain peasant and state skilfully Julien-Francois Gerber.
The fencing of the forest, disincentives for pastoralism and encouragement to extend cultivation also had a detrimental effect on pastoral traders of the mountains. The trader pastoralists of Kinnaur (the upper reaches) lived between two worlds – of the Indo-Aryan agriculturist and the Tibeto-Burman pastoralist. They moved seamlessly between the Buddhist and Hindu cultural traditions but were deeply affected by the closing of the Tibetan border after the Indochina war. Their nomadism continues but in an attenuated form. Another essay looks at diverse forms of polyandry and customary rights of inheritance and landownership found in the Western Himalaya and links them to labour and natural resource utilization. Colonial modernity eroded and dismantled this way of living that was organically fashioned by mountain peoples through the centuries.
The author explores the concept of Zomia (the ability of peripheral uplands to escape domination by any state) in the context of the Western Himalaya. He finds that state control may have been weak, but located in transitory zones, Himalayan borderlands (Ladakh and Kinnaur), were thresholds in a regulated wilderness. They were well adapted to commerce and exchange, used writing, practiced Buddhism and had an established hierarchy for their gods. Their adaptation to modernity increased ethnic consciousness, but not individualism.
In the last essay, Chetan Singh examines an interesting aspect of contemporary Himachal which is that (in spite of high growth) it remains the least urbanized state in India (p. 55). Though British encouragement and support for hill stations led to the establishment of urban centres like Shimla, these towns were alien, parasitical and oppressive for local residents. They were neither British nor Indian and certainly not Himalayan.
Himalayan Histories is an essential read for those interested in mountain ecologies and systems. Chetan Singh highlights different aspects of hill society and scrupulously eschews generalizing statements about Himachali cultures. Though one understands this in terms of method, the disaggregated fragment(s) leave one dissatisfied with regard to the interconnections that facilitate the constitution of the region as Himachal Pradesh.
Vasudha Pande
Department of History, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi
IDEOLOGY AND IDENTITY: The Changing Party Systems of India by Pradeep K. Chhibber and Rahul Verma. Oxford University Press, New York, 2018.
THE book under review examines two pertinent questions of contemporary Indian politics which have emerged with the return of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with a full majority government since the 2014 General Election: what are the causes of the rise of the BJP in Indian politics, and what are the likely consequences of that rise? These questions are intertwined with each other in such a way that the answer to one supplements the other. The result of the 2014 General Election is the background around which these questions have been framed in the book; therefore, it becomes quintessential to recall the verdict of the said election to properly understand the context of the book.
The result of the 2014 General Election has been unique in many ways. It ended the era of coalition governments where a non-Congress party, i.e. the BJP, secured an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time. Apart from this, the grand old party of Indian politics, the Indian National Congress (INC) was decimated in a way that it even failed to secure the requisite number of seats to be recognized as the official opposition party in the Lok Sabha. This tectonic shift in Indian politics, it has been argued by the authors of this book, has resulted in the changing of the party system of India, where Indian politics has now entered an era of the fourth party system.
Earlier, some scholars of Indian politics (Yogendra Yadav 1999, Suhash Palshikar 2004, Oliver Heath and Yogendra Yadav 2010) defined India’s party system in three phases – the era of Congress domination (1952-67), the era of Congress-Opposition (1967-89) and the era of Coalitions (1989-afterward). The era of Congress domination (the first party system) was the period of the ‘Congress System’, when the opposition could not grow from outside of the Congress party because the frontal organizations of this party used to act as opposition to the government. The era of Congress-Opposition (the second party system) was the period when the opposition to the Congress party emerged due to the consolidation of regional and socialist parties. The era of coalitions (third party system) has been the period when the party system initially witnessed huge fragmentation along caste and communal lines, but later emerged to consolidate around two groups – the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). In this system, coalition governments have been sine qua non since no single party was able to gain an absolute majority in Parliament.
The upturning of the previous pattern of elections in 2014, when the BJP secured an absolute majority in Parliament and the Congress party was decimated to a historical low, it has been argued, ushered in the fourth phase with the BJP emerging as the ‘system defining’ party. Henceforth the BJP would be the main contender of political power and a future opposition would be built by keeping this party in mind. Another way of looking at it would be that the BJP would now define the ‘Idea of India’ which includes social, economic and foreign policies. What norms and values would be taken into consideration while redefining the social, economic and foreign policies of India is the subject of intense debate. Therefore, the change in the party system of India has also become a contentious issue.
The authors argue that an important feature of this new party system is a systematic change in the voting behaviour of people. This systematic change in the voting behaviour is an outcome of ideological polarization of elites as well as masses in India, as a result of which there is a gradual shift from identity based voting to ideological voting. It is this systematic change in the voting behaviour that is the main reason behind the rise of the BJP in Indian politics. To prove this proposition, the authors drift away from the conventional Eurocentric understanding of ideology that is defined as left-right and liberal-authoritarian, and attempt to redefine ideology in the Indian context. In this exercise, they rely on the debates of Indian intellectual traditions and argue that the politics of statism and the politics of recognition are the two main attributes of the Indian nation-state around which polarization of opinion of the Indian elites has historically taken place. The former refers to the debate which centres around the issue of state’s role in transforming social traditions through dominating society, regulating social norms and redistributing private property; and the latter refers to the debate which is around the state’s role of accommodating various social groups such as scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, backward castes, Muslims and other religious minorities through the affirmative action policies.
To provide empirical evidence that historical polarization of the opinion of India’s elites around the ‘politics of statism’ and the ‘politics of recognition’ has also penetrated to the masses, the authors rely primarily on the survey data of the National Election Study (NES), CSDS. The former has been measured around issues related to the entry of the state into social and religious practices, and the presence of the state in the economy, whereas the latter has been measured around issues related to reservation and redistributive policies. The authors have conducted some experiential surveys as well. The authors use this survey data as evidence to support the proposition of rise of ideological voting in India, but such exercise fails to provide satisfactory answers to questions related to the shifting of voters of some castes/communities along with the switching of alliances by their respective leaders. Besides, for understanding the contents of the Indian ideology, the authors over rely on the ideas of India’s old elites (popularly known as forefathers of modern India) and by doing so, they not only leave out the role of present day elites including political leaders in shaping public opinion but also limit them just as the transmitter of the ideas of old elites in the masses. However, in this exercise, the authors miss the point how present day political leaders, across party lines, invoke the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, among others, for mass mobilization; and how they make untenable promises for gaining popular support.
The role of socio-political mobilization of the subaltern castes in shaping public opinion in India has been missed out in the book; and hence, the analysis of why voters of the lower and upper castes, with conflicting interests, voted together to bring the BJP to power in the recent elections, is inadequate. The politics of the northeastern states where the BJP has made heavy inroads after the 2014 General Election is also barely mentioned in the book. It is silent on the question of why the BJP has a strong presence in some regions of the country and not in others. An answer to such a question would have the potential to solve the puzzle of why the lower castes supported the BJP along with the upper castes.
Besides providing strong statistical analysis and a graphic presentation of the data, Ideology and Identity draws references from Indian intellectual traditions, which makes it more readable for a wider audience. The reliance on Indian intellectual tradition gives the impression that the book attempts to establish a dialogue between Indian political science, heavily dominated by the study of intellectual and philosophical traditions, and the West that has shifted to quantitative data analysis and ethnographic studies. It is precisely this exercise that makes the book an interesting read for both Indian and western audiences, especially those readers who seek to understand recent developments in Indian politics.
Arvind Kumar
PhD Scholar, Department of Politics & IR, Royal Holloway, University of London
2019: How Modi Won India by Rajdeep Sardesai. HarperCollins Publishers, Noida, 2019.
GENERAL elections are a way of celebrating democracy where citizens exercise their sovereign right to choose a political regime for the next five years. In spite of the familiarity of vigilant citizens with political developments in India, Sardesai’s gripping narrative, built around the events that preceded and surrounded the general elections of 2019 in India, is eminently readable. Indeed, owing to the attractive narration of events, colourful anecdotes, all the necessary statistics and facts, insights into the personalities of leaders and the functioning of political parties, this oeuvre reads like a good play. Of course, the centre stage is occupied by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ably supported by Amit Shah the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The Modi-Shah duo after taking full advantage of the vulnerabilities of an opposition in disarray, handled the massive and well-oiled electoral machine at their disposal to ensure an emphatic BJP victory in 2019 for a second consecutive term. In a nutshell, nine factors including messaging, marketing, mobile, middle class, millennial, (anti-) Muslim majoritarianism, ‘muscular’ nationalism, Masood Azhar, mahagathbandhan (grand alliance); two Ws – welfarism and WhatsApp – and ubiquitous GK for garib kisan capture the essence of the entire narrative.
After reflecting on developments such as the emergence of new aspirational classes that have witnessed material advance in a changing India, a divided opposition, the enigmatic leadership of Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, and left wing undergraduate radicalism, Sardesai argues that they provided no substitute for Modi’s no-nonsense patriotism. Modi’s aggressive stance towards terrorism and Pakistan aroused the nationalist sentiments of people, especially after 41 soldiers of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed in Pulwama in a terrorist attack launched by Pakistan based terrorist outfit, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), on 14 February 2019. As a retaliatory measure, the Indian Air Force (IAF) launched swift air strikes into Pakistani territory in Balakot to destroy JeM terrorist camps in the early morning hours of 26 February. Such air strikes not only bolstered people’s faith in Modi’s firm leadership and patriotic credentials, but also underscored the need to enhance national security. Modi’s tireless effort to address 134 election rallies across the country, with his remarkable oratorical skills, and Shah’s workmanship of addressing minute organizational details, and his control over the propaganda machine, literally wiped out the opposition.
While offering a candid assessment of the modus operandi of the Modi-Shah duo, Sardesai graphically sheds light on how seasoned leaders such as L.K. Advani, M.M. Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie were sidelined within the BJP. Arun Shourie’s rather bitter remark on Modi’s personality synthesizing a dark triad, i.e. ‘narcissistic, remorseless and Machiavellian’, and the statement by Sardesai a little later that Modi cannot forget or forgive easily, do offer an insight into Modi’s personality. What is more, Sushma Swaraj, who was the stalwart opposition leader of the BJP in Parliament before the rise of Modi, also played a subdued role in Modi’s cabinet post-2014.
Sardesai does not refrain from referring to criminal charges against Shah and Yogi Adityanath. Likewise, Ajit Doval, another lieutenant of Modi, and his defence of police and intelligence officers charged with extra-judicial killings in Gujarat, are mentioned. The ascent of all these leaders signifies the rise of political Hindutva where leaders are keen on deploying aggressive Hinduism as a political weapon to seize and capture state power. Sardesai contends that the Sangh Parivar in general and its majoritarianism has a distinctly discernible anti-Muslim streak. Besides, hatred for the Nehru-Gandhi family and attempts to malign Jawaharlal Nehru at the slightest opportunity appear conspicuous.
Sardesai acknowledges the significance of a few good initiatives taken by the Modi regime such as providing gas connections, constructing toilets, making bank accounts inclusive, cheap housing loans, and life insurance scheme. Such initiatives and their constant advertisement through social media had a significant impact on voters. Moreover, the skilful manipulation of the media by the BJP to ensure that the opposition looked foolish and Modi great paid dividends. The text is harsh but fair on the role of Rahul Gandhi as President of the Congress party. Although Congress kept losing states, its multiple victories in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, prior to the general elections of 2019, had given hope to a divided opposition.
There was ample scope for the opposition parties to build a consensus around issues including the adverse impact of demonetization, flaws in the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Kathua rape in Kashmir, mob lynching’s by cow vigilantes groups, the treatment of minorities and the marginalized, and also the collapse of the opportunistic alliance between the BJP and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir that led to Governor’s rule. However, Sardesai is quite serene in demonstrating how several opposition leaders including Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam Singh, Chandrababu Naidu, Sharad Pawar and Rahul Gandhi failed to put together a collective opposition to stem the Modi wave.
Sardesai’s text leaves the citizen with many worrying questions. Debates around secularism have been a regular feature of life in India including the alleged differences between communal and secular or pseudo-secular forces. The BJP now appears to have taken steps towards transforming India into a Hindu state, which has further eroded its secular character. The deteriorating state of the economy, its mismanagement during the last six years, the erosion of autonomy of practically all statutory institutions including the Election Commission of India and the Supreme Court, and their sanctity, have narrowed the space between the state and civil society.
As events have unfolding after the 2019 elections, developments like the abrogation of Article 370 on Jammu and Kashmir, a favourable judicial verdict for the majority on the issue of Ram Mandir, and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are changing the character of India fundamentally. Considering this, Sardesai’s text is indeed a mirror from which one can view political developments in a changing India.
Rajen Harshé
Founder and former Vice Chancellor of the Central University of Allahabad
FREEDOM, CIVILITY, COMMERCE: Contemporary Media and the Public by Sukumar Muralidharan. Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon, 2019.
A work such as this one, that sets out to examine the foundational premise and normative framework of contemporary media, is rare precisely because media professionals seldom have had the time, inclination or scholarship to do so. Whether by happenstance or design, Sukumar Muralidharan’s career path – as practitioner, academic and the South Asia programme manager for the International Federation of Journalists – has brought him up close and personal, not just with the newsroom and the classroom, but also the shop floor. As the author, now a professor of journalism, puts it: ‘This book is in part about experience and impressions gathered over two decades as a journalist and roughly seven years spent in press freedom campaigns…’
All this does not necessarily render the book an easy, seamless read. The three broad themes of freedom, civility and commerce that make up its title are loosely set in the context of the interlinked triad of Nation, State and Civil Society in ways that sometimes border on the unwieldy. But such authorial liberties taken with structure have their strengths too. They allow the author to analyze, historicize, and even ruminate upon, his themes. It also gives him leeway to take unexpected detours into relatively unexplored terrains, such as he does in an illuminating chapter titled, ‘Satire – the Power of Laughter and the Laughter of Power’, on the assault on the Charlie Hebdo office in January 2015.
While commonly viewed as an egregious attack launched by radical Muslims on the media and the right to free speech, Muralidharan complicates the frame by recognizing that while ‘satire is an effective solvent for dogma’ it can also get ‘mired in a theology of its own’, a theology bearing often the marks of racism and Islamophobia. The Charlie Hebdo episode, Muralidharan argues, illustrates how difficult, even futile, it is to establish a firm benchmark for the exercise of free speech. The reader is taken back to an idea that begins this book – the idea of civility, defined as ‘respect for another’s dignity’. Civility is not often recognized as an important element in understanding the media, but Muralidharan sees it as central: without civility, uncertainty reigns over the limits of free speech, as it did in the Charlie Hebdo instance.
Throughout the book, the author attempts to link what is happening within the eco-system of the Indian media with international developments. Theories and philosophies of freedom of speech propounded by scholars from across the world and through the centuries are reassessed; and developments such as the Facebook’s insidious role in the Trump election, revisited. The broad focus, however, remains firmly on the Indian scenario.
The role of the media in building the nationalist discourse in India is critically analyzed in an early chapter, right from the days when the ‘idea of an all-India nation state’ was ‘imagined in English print’. The use of the English language was not unique to India; most nationalist stirrings in the erstwhile colonies ‘were articulated in the language of the imperial power, in a borrowed vocabulary of rights’. But there is also no denying the ‘revolutionary vernacular thrust’ of print capitalism – in Benedict Anderson’s words – and in fact the British colonialists reserved their most repressive laws, like the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, to suppress regional language newspapers.
In post-independence India, the media were required to buttress the hegemony of the new state, with its promise of ensuring equality for all and delivering social well-being to all. But the script soon ran aground in the face of the various cataclysms that rocked Indian society along lines of caste, class and religion, most specifically during the turbulent, riot-marked years of the Mandal-Mandir agitations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The newspapers of the day inevitably contributed to these fissures, not just through communally charged and caste-biased reporting, but also by significant silences and omissions. The Khairlanji massacre may never have emerged in public knowledge were it not for Dalit editors and reporters; the social exclusion of Muslims has always been under-reported and it took the Sachar committee to set the record straight. Muralidharan does well to highlight the consequence of such amnesia: ‘Persistent states of inequality which the media does not pay serious attention to, often contribute to outbreaks of violence in which the victims of inequality themselves become prime targets.’ The recent history of vigilante attacks on Muslims is a prime example.
The Indian state, having emerged from the bloodied chaos of Partition, was seized by a strong fear of ‘public disorder’ and quickly assumed shades of authoritarianism, a theme Muralidharan goes on to examine. Within weeks of the Constitution coming into force, its guarantee of freedom of expression was tested in the Supreme Court in two cases involving press freedom, Romesh Thapar v the State of Madras and Brij Bhushan v State of Delhi. Together they triggered the first amendment to the Constitution that imposed ‘reasonable restrictions’ on the right to free speech. This was to be followed over the years by a long string of curtailments through repressive legal enactments and executive orders, both at the central and state levels. The draconian charge of sedition, in particular, made an early entry and was freely used against individual journalists working in the print and television space. When online media came along, sections of Information Technology Act came to be deployed in the same instrumentalist, repressive way. The misuse persuaded the Supreme Court, in Shreya Singhal v Union of India, to strike down the loosely worded Section 66A of India’s Information Technology Act – yet, as in Kashmir which saw the longest internet shutdown in the world, this by no means ended the regime of state-imposed internet repression.
The internet media and its role in fuelling the two ‘civil society’ mobilizations in India – the anti-corruption protests of 2011 and the public outrage over the Delhi gang rape of 2012 – intrigued Muralidharan enough to provoke an inquiry into the distinctive nature of such media use. While internet media appear to escape the process of ‘domestication’ that beset print and broadcast media – the first through the ‘power of advertising’ the second through the ‘legally enforced monopoly of the state’ – the truth, he argues, is more complicated. The seemingly limitless boundaries of dissent set by Google ultimately conforms to the foreign policy objectives of the US State Department; the manner the 2016 US presidential election verdict was determined by a tide of false news spread by ‘botnets’, indicate the limits of internet freedom. So to the question of whether the internet media will help in deepening democratic discourse, Muralidharan’s answer in unequivocal: their liberatory potential is not just a mirage but may well lead to ‘a harsh new dystopia’.
The last three chapters of the book are discrete if interlinked essays on the market, the continuing stranglehold of advertising, and the nature of journalism in India today. Some interesting insights emerge – including a possible answer to the FAQ: what explains the success of the Arnab Goswami model of journalism? Television news content is based on the advertising rupee, and if a news programme, deficient though it may be in basic civility, can deliver high value audiences to advertisers, that is all that matters to them. The broader, and disturbing, point here is that the ‘elite discourse in India’, as shaped by the media, is marked by ‘intolerance of complexity, impatience with institutional processes… and a willingness to impose authoritarian solutions.’
Money determined not just the contours of chat shows and the nature of reporting (the phenomenon of paid news), it sought to influence the appointments of ministers (Niira Radia recordings); create new media empires (the Reliance Group’s takeover of Network 18); and form governments (the 2014 general election saw the BJP, spend an unprecedented INR 50 billion to build the image of its unstoppable prime ministerial candidate). Meanwhile, corporatized managements suppressed trade unionism and ensured, through their influence on government policy, the hollowing out of protective legislation like the Working Journalists Act.
There is no euphemistic way to say this: sustainable independent journalism is on the verge of extinction. As Muralidharan observes, just recovering the ground that has been lost will take years of arduous struggle. Today, even such a struggle seems unlikely.
Pamela Philipose
Public Editor, ‘The Wire’
* Pamela Philipose is the author of Media’s Shifting Terrain: Five Years that Transformed the Way India Communicates. Orient BlackSwan, 2019.
