Pointers to right-wing social engineering

Published : Nov 21, 2018 16:19 IST

In the run-up to the general election in 2014, there were a number of books hailing Narendra Modi, then the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate. If some books lauded the alleged development of Gujarat under him, others painted a halo around him by boasting that he had even bested a crocodile as a youth! Now with general election 2019 round the corner, another book on Modi, this time focusing on the changing discourse and dialectics over the past four years, has just been released in New Delhi. And if it is a sign of things to come, the ruling dispensation is in for a rough ride.

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Prof Prabhat Patnaik presents the book to Prof Manoranjan Mohanty.

India After Modi: Populism and the Right, authored by Prof Ajay Gudavarthy, Associate Professor in the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, at Jawaharlal Nehru University,  points to the social engineering attempted by the right wing and where the Left failed to take the lead.

At the book launch in front of a packed house in the School of Social Sciences, Prof Prabhat Patnaik, who did the honours, drew attention to the emerging solidarity between farmers and labourers, something not seen for many decades. He felt that India was going through a grave, although unspoken, agrarian crisis. “There is a lot of anger in the farmers. You go to the villages of Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere, the farmers’ angst is to be seen. Add to that the massive unemployment and the anger of the labour class,” he said. Also present were Prof Manoranjan Mohanty and Prof Manoj Jha.

  India After Modi (published by Bloomsbury) talks of vertical solidarity and horizontal fragmentation that the right wing is attempting in the in the caste hierarchy in the majority community. Realising that those beyond the dvija category had to be part of the socio-economic growth, the BJP sought to unite those left out of the reservation cake. As said by Prof Gudavarthy, “The Right has encroached on the discourse of equality, dignity, recognition and representation.”

Conceding that the “othering” of Muslims in particular and the minorities in general was almost complete, RJD MP Prof Manoj Jha stated, “It is becoming difficult to give tickets to Muslim candidates even from the seats where liberal Muslim candidates usually won in the past.” He was alluding to Prof Guduvarthy’s claim about the permanent othering of the largest minority community.

Interestingly, he pointed out that “the Right is pro-corporate but anti-modern”, referring to claims of scientific discoveries allegedly talked of in the Vedas. The author also pointed out the Right’s ability to be both present and absent when it came to issues of engineering social violence. As he has written in the book, “The Right has been accused of spreading lies, fabricating evidence, manipulating, sparking and organising violence, igniting riots, and lynching. Violence has an underlying social narrative that is meant to generate consent and consensus for the overt violence. The Right distances itself from the event even as it might be lending support.”

The author concluded, “Diversity is the guarantee for democracy in India. The more we differ, the more can discuss and debate. The premise of the book is that the Left has a critique of capitalism but has none of modernity. The Right has a critique of modernity, but none of capitalism.”

 

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