A century is a long time for an institution to survive. Such longevity gives it respectability and a sense of history. It provides it a genealogy and history. But the past can become an embarrassment as we move to the future. The politics of ideology, marginality and economy can be fraught with misunderstanding.
In any ordinary sense, the political right and left should be easy to differentiate in India. But as we move from the clarity of the 1940s to the ambiguity of the 2020s, this analysis becomes difficult. This article is an attempt to understand why the politics of left and right is failing in India. And why it makes a travesty of Indian history in the process.
Two institutions radically different from each other celebrate their 100th anniversaries this year. The first is the Communist Party of India, which today is almost a shadow-like figure. The second is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is moving like a juggernaut. How does one think about the 100-year legacy of two such organisations?
One of the biggest threats to the storyteller is the confusion of categories. The characters remain the same, but the grammar of the narrative alters. Memory has a way of challenging such narratives. The battle between the left and the right has always been seen as zero-sum struggle. But today, the two ends of the spectrum seem to be part of a wider ecology of adjustment. One sees this manifest in different ways.
Let’s begin with the stereotypes. Both the organisations are markedly ideological. Usually, the left speaks the language of political economy and human rights; the right speaks the language of market and conservatism. But these are categories from the 19th century. The politics of the 21st century, while democratic, has been increasingly confusing—left and right have become a mish-mash.
One of the most powerful examples is the decline of the CPI(M), which emerged from the CPI, and the rise of Mamata Banerjee in Bengal. Banerjee changed the grammar of the game by reducing politics to violence. She equated victory with violence and slowly hammered out leftist domains of violence into rightist criminality. There was little to choose in the identity of character. Politics became a farce as the logic of violence took over.
The left and the right in India have played ideology as a brand game. The left has tried to identify with socialism, equality etc. All of which has been reduced to the language of affirmative action. The language of politics is one of the major symptoms where the decline of left and right as ideologies have become obvious. Welfare and well-being, rather than sounding the manifests of the West, have almost become footnotes.
The confusion is compounded by politicians changing party affiliations. Activists today switch ideologies as if they were advertisements. There is no sense of loyalty or commitment to beliefs and ideologies.
Contributing to this affliction is the category of the nation-state. The nation-state, even if it began by questioning coloniality, lost its sense of pluralism as nationalism became the monologue. As a result, socialism and nation-state became monologic and the consequence was the impoverishment of politics.
But one of the biggest problems today is the politics of memory. The pre-Emergency period marked the period of the left and the right. But today’s voter does not seem to care. For her, the left and the right seem equivalent entry points.
The left today has become a fact of nostalgia. Language has contributed to this in a different way. The left spoke the language of inequality—seeking justice, rights and greater entitlements. But the way we construct these today is different. The left spoke the language of the marginal and the nomadic. Today, both the left and right speak the ordinary language of the common man, even though the common man transcends ideologies. When we call Modi the chaiwallah we don’t know whether he is representing the language of left or right.
As a result of innovations of language, left and right have both become marginal categories. The Centre is captured by people who prefer mixes to singular choices. Maybe the nature of politics is changing and democracy wants to go beyond ideologies and brand names. It wants to speak the language of open-ended politics. This may be the reason that even the most colourful in politics today are ideologically the most colourless.
Let us look at the language of politics. When we confront North and South India, we realise that the South still claims ideology. But when we look at the empirical politics, we realise a deeper competitive politics. Religion and politics have become competitive events. For example, the positions political parties took on Sabarimala temple entry varied vastly from the positions that would have marked the positions they took on caste earlier.
There is a confusion we have not been able to capture. One sees it in a deeper way in ecology. Ecology was once dualistic in terms of the politics of red and green—red advocated the politics of marginality, green advocated organicity. They became two ‘styles of ecology’, rather than clear-cut ideologies themselves. One sees this with groups dealing with tribal identity. Whether it is Manipur or Chhotanagpur, one sees populism rather than action anchored in ideological beliefs. Identity politics has created the mash. Most tribal groups—except the ones displaced by dams or development projects—speak the language of centrist politics.
Consider economics, too. What were once categories of the left—welfare, equity—are part of ordinary discourse today. Such properties no longer mark the ideology of the West. Welfare and well-being today belong to the general economy of thought.
The politics of the left and right has become tragedies of democratic India. What one needs is a new history of politics and new way of inventing democracy where liberty, justice, equality find new variants—a new diversity that should not merely be along quantitative criterions. One hopes the feminists, the ecologically minded and some of the new movements would make democracy more inventive and imaginative. Otherwise, ideology as a lived world has little space in today’s politics except in the politics of authoritarianism.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)