Rhetoric of political newness and Muslim politics

JULIEN LEVESQUE

IN recent years, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly invoked the notion of ‘New India’ to describe its policies. In a Times of India column on 30 May 2022, Home Minister Amit Shah defined New India as ‘resilient, strong, capable and atmanirbhar’ (self-reliant), adding that its ‘foundations have been laid by the PM’. The idea denotes a political project that the government seeks to bring about, but also rings of self-congratulatory triumphalism – New India is not only a goal towards which the government strives, but it is in the making in the here and now.

What does the project of New India entail? The themes of the Home Minister’s article remarkably illustrate what historian Ravinder Kaur has termed as the ‘capitalization of the nation-state’. It insists on the economy, arguing that India recovered tremendously well from the Covid crisis and lauding India’s rise in the ease of doing business ranking. Amit Shah depicts the government’s economic policy as an inclusive project, repeating the official slogan ‘Sab ka sath, sab ka vikas’ and listing schemes and packages supposed to have benefitted ‘all sections of society’.

The article also mentions India’s standing in the world of nations, praising the prime minister for making ‘the world realize the importance and significance of India’ – a search for global recognition in line with what Kaur describes as an aspiration to ‘cleanse the shame of colonial subjugation’. This assertion rests on a ‘deep focus on national security’: the minister invokes the defence budget, the acquisition of new armament like the Rafale fighter jet, and a tough stance on terrorism as signs that the nation now has a decisive and unwavering leader in the prime minister. In short, in Amit Shah’s words, the advent of New India is something Indians should celebrate as the country commemorates its 75 years of independence. New India is the moment when what the independence was supposed to bring finally becomes a reality. New India, the reader seems to be implicitly told, is the moment when you finally get a chance.

The rhetoric of New India thus addresses a dual audience: it tells the world of India’s readiness for investment, while telling Indians that a new dawn has come. Ravinder Kaur thus describes New India as ‘the popular name for the postreform, techno-friendly, high-consumption entrepreneurial nation’ which is meant to be ‘an income-generating asset’.

The current government, however, is not the first to talk of New India. At the time of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s new awakening, wishing the decolonial moment to see the triumph of democracy, with India as a moral leader among postcolonial states. Moreover, New India was to achieve prosperity through central planning and industrial development, led by rational engineers and technocrats. Yet despite the modernist character of Nehru’s post-independence project, it is interesting to note that a major book on the subject, Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, does not mention the expression at all.

The idea of New India took on a different meaning with the liberalization initiated in 1991, one that sought, precisely, to consign to the past what were now seen as the problems of the Nehruvian era – a slow and bureaucratic state that impeded economic growth. The exercise of branding India to the world as a new capitalist Eldorado thus began not with the Bharat Janata Party’s ascent to power in 2014 but in the 1990s, later reinforced by the BJP’s India Shining campaign in 2004 and the Congress’ focus on the benefits to the common man, the aam aadmi. What is so new, then, about New India?

The political rhetoric of newness – vowing to bring about a new society – is also a common theme beyond India. During the French Revolution, the ambition to transform society and its members, both morally and physically, was expressed as a need for ‘regeneration’. Historian Mona Ozouf, in her analysis of revolutionary educational projects, highlights two opposite views of regeneration. The first was idealistic and expressed a miraculous belief in the Revolution’s capacity to automatically transform people. The second saw the Revolution as a painstaking work to weed out the remnants of the previous order, thus justifying coercive policies against its ‘dubious members’.

The example of the French Revolution shows that the rhetoric of newness, in its association of the idea of regeneration with that of the creation of a new society and a ‘New Man’, comprised both an emancipatory and an illiberal understanding. The latter approach justified coercive and totalitarian measures, as well as the invention of myths, rituals, and beliefs that translated into new street names, a new calendar, and new monuments and costumes.

Bringing about newness also remained central to many 19th and 20th century political ideologies and utopias. Totalitarian regimes sought to bring about a ‘New Man’, a higher form of human: from Nazism’s quest of a master race to Mussolini’s uomo nuovo, to the Soviet New Man of a classless society. The communist vision of course differed from Nazism and Fascism in its emancipatory universalism. Yet the goal of moulding the human species to fit collective projects is also what sets these ideologies apart from liberalism and its focus on individual development. This detour through history reminds us that it is difficult to disconnect a rhetoric of political newness from potential liberticide tendencies.

And yet there have been multiple utopian visions in the subcontinent’s recent past that hoped for a new, liberated mankind. Some of these invoked spirituality. Take for instance Congress leader and Sanskrit scholar Sampurnanand, who spoke of a ‘new type of humanity’ in which the ‘new man will be conscious of those spiritual bonds which unite him with all that lives’ and will serve humanity. Or the Sindhi leader G.M. Sayed, who believed that Sindh had a spiritual message of peace to give to the world.

A few years after India’s independence, sociologist B.P. Mukerji contrasted the ideal of a New Man in Tagore’s thought – an ‘affirmative-creative type’, rational and emotionally rich – with Gandhi’s vision of a ‘moral man, ready to sacrifice his all for truth, simple, direct and pulsating with the lowliest of the lowly’. Mukerji pragmatically concluded that engineers, technocrats, and bureaucrats were certainly the type of the coming generation, as they were best in tune with Nehru’s central industrial planning.

The idea of New India thus builds on a long discursive heritage in which political projects sought the advent of a new society and a ‘New Man’. While the rhetoric of political newness may be driven by an ideal of universal liberation, it also carries the possibility of illiberalism and violent coercion. What characterizes today’s New India is not an emancipatory universalism but an assertive majoritarian nation-alism. In fact, much of the rhetoric of New India seems to celebrate the triumph of the Hindutva worldview.

In his speech on the inauguration of the Kashi-Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi, Prime Minister Modi celebrated India’s emergence from centuries of oppression, an oppression which had tainted Indians’ self-confidence. Casting Varanasi as India’s cultural capital, he summed up New India as the combination of heritage (virasat) and development (vikas).

The speech was punctuated by multiple Hindu references – mother Ganga and father Vishwanath, the rule of Shiva, and the recurring ‘Har har mahadev’. Yet the prime minister also addressed multiple constituencies, by mentioning the residents of Varanasi, the residents of UP, the people of South India. He also cited specific personalities, such as historical heroes of anti-colonial nationalism (Chandra Shekhar Azad), good Muslims (the shehnai player Bismillah Khan), and bad Muslims (the atrocities of Aurangzeb). The speech ended with an exhortation to economic nationalism, calling for citizens to participate in India’s quest for self-reliance and to set-up innovating start-ups.

Three aspects of the speech thus indicate the triumphalism of the Hindutva worldview: the normalization of Hindu references in a political speech; the official endorsement of a reading of history that portrays Muslim rule as a period of enslavement; and the absence of reference to non-Hindu communities as social groups that constitute the nation. This assertive Hindutva also fuels a will to galvanize the nation into economic activity. The political rhetoric of New India thus combines assertive majoritarian nationalism, Hindutva triumphalism, and competitive engagement with global capitalism. Where do Muslims fit in this imaginary and what room does it leave for their political representation?

In the aftermath of the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, many commentators drew attention to the BJP’s new strategy of reaching out to Pasmanda Muslims – that is, Muslims who belong to marginalized caste groups. The party appointed a single Muslim minister to its state cabinet, the 34-year-old Danish Ansari, with much talk of giving space to the Pasmanda.

Explicitly reaching out to Muslim voters goes counter to expectations from a party whose success has largely rested on the exclusion of Muslims, from the Ram Janmabhumi campaign of the 1980s to the polarizing measures of Modi’s second mandate such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Yet as commentators have noted, there are very practical reasons for the BJP to woo Pasmanda voters. While the electoral strategy of the BJP has so far mainly sought to consolidate the Hindu electorate by polarizing the debate (Hindu/national vs non-Hindu/anti-national), the Pasmanda rhetoric may help the BJP further divide Muslim voters and gain some support from them. Rumours suggest that the new strategy may have helped the BJP win in the 2022 UP elections, but there is no solid data to prove that wooing the Pasmanda helped the party gain greater Muslim support.

What the BJP’s appropriation of the Pasmanda rhetoric means may be more appropriately searched beyond sheer electoral strategizing. The BJP’s Pasmanda strategy seeks to revert the anti-Muslim image of the party and project it as the actual protector of the majority of Indian Muslims. Since the 1990s, the Pasmanda movements – with several prominent leader such as Ali Anwar – have challenged the authority of the dominant Muslim caste groups, the Ashraf. Their claim is that, as a group, Muslim leaders, who overwhelmingly hail of Ashraf background, insist on the political unity of Muslims to sustain their own dominant position.

The BJP now seeks to appropriate the Pasmanda rhetoric to its benefit as it portrays itself as protector of the marginalized Muslims. The BJP thus wants to posit itself as the saviour of Muslims from their own elites – a framework that was also invoked to justify the criminalization of the triple talaq in 2019. In this logic, Muslims are kept backward by their own religious and political elites, and the government’s responsibility is to free them from their domination.

For the BJP, what New India brings to Muslims is the end of a model that did not benefit most of them but only a self-serving dominant section who happened to be high caste. The BJP’s Pasmanda strategy thus allows the BJP to claim that Muslims, too, are entitled to a share of New India.

The BJP, of course, has long been decrying the Congress party’s minority politics as ‘pseudosecularism’ and ‘Muslim appeasement’. In its policy towards Muslims, the Congress party has historically relied on the Deobandi ulama gathered in the Jamiat-ul Ulama-i Hind (JUH), considering the latter organization as a legitimate (although not the sole) intermediary to speak to and for Muslims. The Congress also had its own Muslim political leaders – loyal, ‘nationalist’ (as opposed to communal) Muslims, sometimes derided as ‘sarkari Musalman’. The 1986 Shah Bano case marked a key symbolic and historical turning point in this relationship: it fuelled the argument of the Congress’ opponents, who claimed that the Congress’ minority politics did nothing but accommodate the demands of conser-vative elites. Arif Muhammad Khan, the governor of Kerala and one of the BJP’s key Muslim supporters today, broke away from the Congress at that time.

Yet the BJP’s induction of a few prominent Muslim figures did not follow a starkly different pattern in terms of their social origins. Overall, the BJP also mainly chose Ashraf Muslims as nominees for positions of power – and more than one among them had a Congress background. This is true for instance of the former minister and governor of Manipur, Najma Heptulla. An exception to
this is the long-time BJP stalwart Sikander Bakht, who did not come from an Ashraf background. Appropriating the Pasmanda rhetoric may perhaps help the BJP gain a façade of consistency – to woo Muslims without engaging in ‘Muslim appeasement’.

Whether the BJP’s appropriation of the Pasmanda rhetoric may lead to the rise of a new leadership remains to be seen. It would indeed be a paradoxical achievement if the BJP’s politics allowed for the formation of new prominent Muslim figures from a Pasmanda background. Some among the Pasmanda commentators, though rare, seem to fall for it and hope
that the BJP may be the solution to caste inequality among Muslims. An example is Faiyaz Ahmad Fyzie, whose opinions pieces in the Hindi and English press have taken on a clear pro-BJP hue in the past year.

However, the BJP’s discourse of a New India that would be inclusive for Pasmanda Muslims is somewhat dubious. The BJP’s history, its composition, and its ideological foundations make it hard to believe that the party would now act in favour of Muslims. There are countless examples of supporters, party members, and elected officials engaging in overt or subtle anti-Muslim rhetoric. Moreover, one cannot entirely ignore that most Muslim victims of Hindutva violence are also Pasmanda. Numerous recent events – from the Ram Navami violence to bulldozing drives in UP and Delhi – may also leave one sceptical of the BJP’s claim to work for Pasmanda Muslims.

If greater equality is to be achieve among Indian Muslims, what we may hope is that other political parties – the Congress but also Muslim parties like the AIMIM or the IUDF – accept the Pasmanda critique and act to counter caste-based inequalities in their own organizations. By not seriously addressing the Pasmanda critique, these parties have left a space for the BJP to thrust itself into. If such parties stop being blind to caste inequality and work to ensure a more equal access to party tickets and power positions on committees or at the head of organizations, a significant progress may be gained for the Pasmanda. For Muslim parties and organizations, this means that leaders must think about the extent to which their internal composition is socially representative of the Muslim population. This may also be a winning strategy for Muslim parties and organizations: greater internal inclusiveness is likely to reinforce the cohesiveness of Muslims as a political minority. What this may lead to is not New India, but a more extensive implementation of the foundational principles behind India’s independence movement and constitutional text – principles of equality, mutual respect, and secularism.

The present-day rhetoric of New India may thus present itself as the moment when most Muslims
(the Pasmandas) are finally ‘brought into the mainstream’ and get access to opportunities supposedly inaccessible to them earlier. There are numerous reasons, however, to be sceptical of its emancipatory potential for Indian Muslims, as it implies disowning many of the principles that have in fact been held by many Muslims as essential legal and institutional protections in the Indian Republic. Most significantly perhaps, New India implies the disappearance of Muslims as a minority and the continuance of Muslims lives as atomized citizens not in a capacity to weigh on the political process.