The period between summer and the rainy season is vacation time. It’s a time of visits and discussions. People renew friendships and themselves through conversations, which combine dialogue, debate and gossip. The topic inevitably turns to politics. And the discussions on politics have been deeply reflective this season. The debates have become more drawing-room affairs, as public spaces for difference are drying up.
One of the debates was on the present regime. It revealed three things: first, there is a clear-cut difference between short-term and long-term discussions. The short term has a sense of immediacy. Narendra Modi comes out an iconic figure. The long term is more ambiguous, and one senses that, in a deep and fundamental way, the regime has little sense of the future. It has captured history in which the future, as an imagination, is open to democratic possibility.
The debate reveals the fate of words, and the fate of words is critical for democracy. Democracy itself has become a jaded term, but possibly the most jaded word today is the idea of the opposition. The concept of opposition has become a lukewarm term. It expresses immediate negation, but lacks a deeper sense of philosophy. As a philosopher friend reflected, the idea of the opposition has little sense of the power of dissent and the availability of eccentricity. The opposition, as one sees it today, is a listless term.
One has to accept that the Congress has been a source of disappointment. As a party today, it has little sense of history, little sense of memory and no sense of inventiveness for the future. The Congress, as someone put it, sounds like yesterday’s newspaper. It has almost become a piece of nostalgia. Under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi it had vigour and intensity. Under today’s leadership, it is almost a listless entity.
The bigger casualty is the idea of opposition itself. It has lost its playfulness and plurality. It is the idea of the opposition that the future must revive. The opposition needs to challenge the BJP along the following grounds. One can see it as a set of dualisms.
Firstly, there is a distinction between a sense of civilisation and the aridity of the nation-state. Whether it was the national movement or the Nehruvian regime, there was always a sense of India as a civilisation, as a value framework. The Non-Aligned Movement embodied such an idea, but today the country has been reduced to a nation-state. It is obsessed with infrastructure and security as a system and is virtually panopticising itself.
One consequence of this is that the current regime has no notion of peace. Its literacy on peace ends with progress and security. It is here that civil society must enter and create new possibilities of conversation, negotiation and friendship.
The Dalai Lama is a wonderful example of this. Even as Tibet has been subject to powerful harassment at a genocidal level, he can still say: "I am concerned about China at a civilisational level. It needs to unravel itself."
The second dualism that haunts the current regime is the distinction between imagination and ideology. The regime’s policy sounds like a dry textbook. It needs a new imagination to invent the future as an alternative, as a set of competing possibilities, as a celebration of difference. The future is a dream of possibility that the regime has not been able to absorb. It has become an anathema and the politically current has become politically impoverished.
One witnesses this in the decline of the university. The Prime Minister felt that the educational system must challenge its Macaulayite genes. But the bureaucratisation of the university has made the system more Macaulayite than before. Dissent is unavailable to inmates of the system because it is doubly anti-national.
The third dualism that haunts the regime is the distinction between monocrop and plurality. Democracy in India is too frozen around terms like margin and minority. Both of them have become empty as they have become more official. One needs a new conversation between the tribal, the craft and the agricultural imagination. Here, a planning commission becomes an attempt to create a monocrop of culture. Plurality needs a playfulness, a sense of the future that the regime lacks.
One is reminded of the advice of scholars like Johan Galtung and Robert Jungk, who suggested that future studies be taught to children. Future studies and children’s fiction become invitations to the imagination that this regime desperately needs. Caught in an ideology and political correctness, the regime has lost its sense of reality. It is wedged between the three ideologies of patriarchy, patriotism and the aridity of policy.
History has been traumatised, and only the future remains as a democratic alternative. Civil society, which has been ignored in this context, desperately needs to enter to create alternative notions of India. The regime follows official lines when policy must reach out for the vernacular.
It is in this context that one needs a new inventiveness. As a friend of mine put it, a teacher who invents a children’s magazine is probably more futuristic. One needs a combination of myth and fable, prognostics and history to create the humus for the dream of alternatives. The availability of eccentricity and difference creates the promise of an opposition as a different kind of landscape, playfully celebrating difference. The future, in that sense, has to become a mode of healing: a past that is traumatised and a present amputated.
One example of this would be new notions of peace. India needs to go beyond the idea of security and borders. It has to see peace not just as the cessation of war but as a holism of alternatives, a celebration of everydayness. Peace, in that sense, becomes a philosophical and political challenge—a dream of alternatives which is not currently available.
When one thinks of the future, one is struck by the regime’s aridity. It has been too committed to ideology when ideology has become narrow and provincial. An African author once said that the future is a different country where we will behave differently. The current regime needs a different country to dream differently.
Only then can democracy be reinvented as an imagination, as an alternative, as a playful way of healing current fractures and traumas. The future is something that civil society must claim. It is a challenge to the craftsmanship of governance.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)