India’s political, geographical and cultural nature requires top-down leadership to create a national pattern; movements emerging from below are likely to stay local, bounded by India’s well-rehearsed diversities of language, religion, caste and regional identity. India’s size makes it hard for local movements to coalesce. This creates an important role – perhaps a need – for figurehead leaders, even if they are largely symbolic. In fact, it helps if they are symbolic, because it widens their potential appeal. India’s diversity means that large socio-political alliances are almost always oppositional; it is easier to assemble large followings by being against things than being for things. Large followings are more likely to form in times of stress or moral clarity, when there is something obvious to oppose.
Truly national leaders are therefore rare in India. In the twentieth century there were perhaps only two: M.K. Gandhi and J.P. Narayan. The Mahatma had the satanic British to oppose, and JP the autocratic Indira. The present century has just found its first such leader in Narendra Modi, who could set himself against the UPA-II government that had been overtaken by inflation, mired in scandal and clinging to blatant minoritism. It is too early to admit him to such august company, but the national forces and moral factors that created Gandhi and JP have had a hand in creating Modi too.
There are, however, significant differences that may permanently deny Modi a similar standing. He is in office, whereas the others never endured the sullying effects of true political responsibility. There is a danger that he might simply join the list of those, like Sheikh Mujib or Barack Obama, who looked much more impressive as rebel outsiders. He has also achieved his eminence on only one poll, in which he was awarded 31 per cent of the vote on a 66 per cent turnout, i.e. around one in five voting Indians. He will need to improve on that if he is to attain an equivalent exalted status. In his favour, meanwhile, is his very evident ability in matters of organization. This may put substance to his vision and allow him a more worldly kind of success, and may yet make him a great leader.
No one should doubt the formidable difficulties that political organization in India presents. It was largely a result of a long process of trial and error and a series of historical accidents that the pre-independence Congress found solutions to the kind of problems that India imposes, and it took about seven decades for a second national party to emerge with a coherent popular programme and a charismatic leader. Those decades saw India’s founding political institution decline from idealism into cynicism, and Modi’s election, on at least the economic level, augurs a return to centre-ground pragmatism.
Does the Modi victory change anything? Yes, very much so, and in two important areas. In the short term it represents a break with the policies and politics of the last 30 years. But it also opens up some new potential avenues in the future of Indian democracy, and allows a new retrospective analysis of the recent past. Till 2014, the main view was that India was a fractured polity, coping with its own disparities in a hand-to-mouth manner, condemned to limp from coalition to coalition, a nation without a clear mind of its own. Now clarity has been restored in a way that has not been in evidence for decades; some say since 1984, some 1977. The telling difference now is that those two moments of apparent unity, one anti-Indira and one pro-Rajiv, is that they were both moments of crisis. The 2014 verdict has been calmer and much more reflective. No deaths, no disasters, no dictatorship, but perhaps a moment of realization – that the debate over social equity had moved from static redistribution to dynamic empowerment. From handing out fish to handing out fishing rods.
How permanent this change, in both outlook and alignment, might prove to be remains unknown, but assuming for a moment that it is at least durable for a decade or so, we can discern a new shape to the political history of independent India.
(Extracted with the permission of Hachette India)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roderick Matthews is a freelance writer who specialises in Indian history. Born in 1956, he studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, and has written articles and reviews for a number of British and Indian publications. His great-grandfather, George Jennings, was Principal of Muir Central College in Allahabad and tutored the young Jawaharlal Nehru through his Harrow entrance exams. Roderick has his own website at historydetox.com. His first book, The Flaws in the Jewel: Challenging the Myths of British India, was published in 2010.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the mythical Indian rope trick, the rope stands straight up because of the fakir’s will. India’s democracy is much the same. Some observers have found it hard to see how it could support itself, and many have expected it to fall. When India shook off the chains of colonial rule in 1947, predictions abounded on how long it would take for the world’s largest democracy to fall apart. Yet, more than 60 years and 16 general elections later, and through conflict, poverty, wars, famines, natural disasters, communal riots and separatist movements, nothing has stopped the Indian juggernaut from rolling on. Amid the chaos of 800 million voters and more than 8,000 candidates, the 2014 mandate marked yet another turn in India’s continuing tryst with democracy. In exploring what it has taken for the country to overcome challenges, both external and internal, Matthews argues that India’s constitutional foundations have allowed the nation to become the bedrock of democracy in the modern world.