UP polls and the end of India’s (un)civil war

Reams of newsprint and hours of TV prime time have been expended on analysing threadbare the importance of BJP’s resounding victory in BJP, followed by Yogi Adityanath’s assumption of the Chief Ministership of Uttar Pradesh. But one unforeseen, even less-noticed, outcome is that these momentous events may signal the end of India’s (un)civil war.

This war, luckily mostly only a war of words, has been fiercely fought for twenty-five years. We might trace its start to the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. More than any other, it was this cataclysmic incident that posed an unprecedented challenge to the dominant Secularist-Left-Liberal (SLL) narrative that had occupied a hegemonic position in India’s public sphere since Independence. At the forefront of the contest on the other side were the RSS karyakartas, backed by the huge, if not so visible, support system of the Sangh Parivar. 

Scores of books, hundreds of articles, and relentless media and political campaigns later, it seemed that the foreign-educated SLL generals had outsmarted their khaki-short clad desi counterparts, and the innumerable Macaulayite and Marxist sepoys of the former outflanked and outmanoeuvred their ill-equipped bhagva-zhanda waving rivals on the ground. After all, the SLLs controlled not just the media, but the universities; they also had a stranglehold on major research institutions and funding bodies. 

Their patrons in Parliament ensured that they were well shielded from too much scrutiny of government authorities when they bent the rules. SLLs were also enviably well networked with partners and sponsors overseas in prestigious universities, so that they always had visiting and publishing opportunities abroad. The whole system worked like a well-oiled engine, almost a post-colonial extension of an intellectual East India Company. The gains were very real— jobs, promotions, appointments, extensions, and in several cases, tenure in first-world universities. Few dared to interrogate SLL power, let alone defy their writ.

Even as late as last year, when the fracas over nationalism broke out in JNU, SLLs seemed to have the upper hand. Despite the Narendra Modi-led spectacular Parliamentary march of BJP in 2014, SLLs were still seemingly sitting pretty, though somewhat self-deludingly. They rallied international support, continued to shout slogans on campuses and streets, pontificate on the media, and write blistering op-eds attacking the elected government and painting it in the worst possible light. Their arrogance, ignorance, and poverty of ideas were appalling, but few dared to tell them all that the only shield they had from complete exposure and discomfiture was the fig-leaf of accumulated conceit and past privilege or the gossamer-thin carapace of conceit and snobbery. Were these to be stripped away, they would have nowhere to hide.

Now, it would appear, that day has actually come. Yogi Adityanath is the very opposite of whatever the SLLs uphold as the model of a democratically elected people’s representative, let alone the leader of India’s most populous state. A man of the saffron-hued cloth, a religious head of a peetham, he is anathema to all that SLLs stand for. No wonder, when his name was announced as Chief Minister, SLLs had a complete meltdown. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, a nation-wide corybantic of vituperation and slander. The gyrations and fulminations of SLL high-priests notwithstanding, the Yogi went about his work calmly and decisively, shutting down illegal slaughterhouses, banning sirens and lal-battis on official cars, instituting a new regime of cleanliness in government offices, and introducing shaleenta (decency) to the conduct officials. Lessons in democratic governance indeed for his now chastened if not silenced critics? At the national level, it may be premature to gloat; moreover, hubris is nearly always fatal. But the BJP juggernaut does appear unstoppable. The Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine seems to have mastered the complex algorithms of Indian electoral battles. They are now the “machine,” to use a term borrowed from the unbeatable Democratic political organisation that dominated Chicago politics for nearly fifty years. 

Has India’s (un)civil war ended with Hindutva’s comprehensive victory? Have SLLs been thoroughly and decisively worsted? From their continuing bluster, it would appear that they are shell-shocked, still in denial. There’s hardly a public acknowledgement of how wrong they were, how mistaken in their grand pronouncements on Indian polity and culture. Why don’t they gracefully admit defeat, try to learn the hard lessons that India is trying to teach them? Why do they persist in displaying their cultural illiteracy and irrelevance?

Perhaps, they are merely hastening their own departure from the national centre-stage. Staring at two unenviable, even odious, options is uncomfortable: either to turn tail or become turncoats. The latter would certainly be more expedient; very few who have enjoyed the narcotic of power know how to handle its loss. They will face severe withdrawal symptoms; after all, time itself turns enemy, becoming an interminable burden to those who end up on the rubbish heaps of history.

For the other side, nothing less than a brave new narrative of India is demanded. While it is the worst of times for the SLLs, do the best of times for Hindutvavadis guarantee that the latter will rise to the occasion? Will they deliver something more convincing, more enduring, and more satisfying than the feeble alternative attempted during NDA 1.0? What is required is not only to let go of that failed experiment at Hindutva disguised as liberalism, but also not to return to Sarvarkarism either.

What we need is not to go back, but forward to something new, what Sri Aurobindo called “new creation” in Foundations of Indian Culture. It includes and exceeds what was attempted thus far. The times demand nothing less than that; we must not fail India this time.

The author is  poet and professor at JNU, Delhi.