Mainstream WeeklyWhat are the moral arguments and consequences of being political, or apolitical in contemporary India? While the two terms, political and apolitical, are semantically opposite, in practice they occur deeply entwined. The recent youth led Jantar Mantar protests in India are a good example. If the single issue protest against an examination leak morphed into widespread ridicule and opposition to the ruling dispensation, claims of being apolitical in the same protests turned out to be an under the table handshake with the same dispensation.
Let us start with the latter. Gitanjali Angmo, the spouse and associate of Sonam Wangchuk is reported to have said in an interview that “For us there is no opposition, there is no government. For us, parliament is the highest institute”. (India Today, 23 July). The published interview came with the title that termed the main opposition party’s protest outside Prime Minister’s residence, on the same issues for which Sonam Wangchuk was on hunger strike, as ‘insincere’.
Elsewhere in the published text she is reported saying “The movement has shown every political leader that they have to walk the talk. That they cannot gaslight anymore, or be insincere anymore”. In the interview she also criticises the ruling BJP for being neither Hindu, nor nationalist, the chief electoral and ideological planks of the party.
Ms Angmo appears to be equally mistrustful of the ruling and the opposition parties, and trying to keep equal distance from them. However, the very next day Sonam Wangchuk broke his 26 days old fast in the presence of two senior ministers of the government. He was seen taking food from hands of the two ministers, even while the main demand of the young protestors for the removal of the education minister, for which he had initiated his hunger strike, was not met.
The apolitical position of the type exemplified by Ms Angmo perceives itself a moral response to a situation in which both the ruling and the opposition parties are seen lacking credibility. Politics of all hues is seen driven by self-interest and a slugfest for influence and money. Even if this position is right about the immorality of electoral politicians in the country, the apolitical stance does not follow logically from it. The politics of being apolitical has been greatly encouraged by the neo-liberal turn of the liberal mode of governance in the late twentieth century. Furthermore, as neoliberalism is now fast morphing into neofascism in many countries, this stance actually amounts to sleepwalking into the arms neofascists.
Before getting into arguments for above conclusions, it is useful to clarify the semantics and practice of politics in liberal democracies. The science of politics, i.e. the discipline of political science, defines its subject matter as dealing with processes of public decision making. State is the most powerful public institution in all modern societies. It controls the legal coercive apparatuses, i.e. police, army and intelligence agencies. It collects 20 to 30 percent of the income of a society as taxes and spends it on activities it considers essential. By defining what is legal and illegal, the state frames public morality of the society. All actions and decisions of the state fall under the rubric of politics.
People accept the power of state over them partly under the threat of coercion, or partly out of free will if they consider the state to be legitimate. State legitimacy in democratic polities is ultimately based upon popular approval. Electoral politics is the mechanism of ensuring popular approval for state in the liberal mode of governance. Power over people through the people, is the functional loop of this mode of governance. As long as the constitutional arrangement of the Indian state remains liberal democratic, for any Indian to believe that they are indifferent to electoral politics, effectively amounts to accepting that they have no issues with the Indian state, i.e. they silently approve what the Indian state does.
While public decision-making in all modern societies is a prerogative of the state, the conception of the political is not bound solely to electoral politics. Many non-electoral activities like lobbying, formation of pressure groups, and popular mobilisations and agitations that aim to influence state policies are also considered political. The boundary between electoral and non-electoral politics in all polities is porous. In India in particular, many political parties vying for state power via elections have emerged from popular agitations; and the repertoire of activities of all political parties includes marches and agitations.
Given the enormity of power state enjoys over society, there exists a built-in asymmetry between the party in power, and parties opposed to it, whether in electoral politics, or otherwise. Only the ruling party is ultimately responsible for state policies and decisions. All parties may be equally corrupt, but the public immorality of the party in power has much greater influence on society, than that of other parties. The asymmetry between the status of the ruling party and the parties opposed to it means that the disapproval of the latter cannot be on the same grounds as that of the former.
A structural asymmetry requires asymmetric responses, which is actually seen in practice. Both Mr Wangchuk and young protestors at Jantar Mantar focused on the ruling party. For any ‘promise’, he needed the ruling party, because only it could promise anything. The Jantar Mantar youth on the other hand, targeted the ruling party for its arrogance and use of force against them. If such is the reality, then what is the point of claiming an equivalence between the ruling and opposition parties? All such claims are facile. Under the garb of a false equivalence, these work as an underhand approval for the party in power. Their politics resides in trying not to appear political.
Necessity and Choice of being Political and Apolitical
Despite the constitutional declaration of all Indians being equal, it is a fact of everyday life in India that there exists a clear ‘class’ division in access to the state. On the one hand are a significant number of Indians, who experience the Indian state as a naked, unvarnished power over them. This for example was the experience of Junaid Malik, a food volunteer at the recent CJP protest at Janer Manter, who was picked up by the Delhi police near a hospital without any warrant, was interrogated and carried in a vehicle incognito for hours, and was left by the roadside three hundred kilometers away. Many other ordinary Indians, who escape the experience of a Junaid, but happen to be poor and from marginal communities, rely upon elected politicians from village sarpanchs to members of the parliament, and their power brokers to access state services legally due to them as citizens. The latter could be as essential as accessing welfare schemes, and as critical as getting a police FIR registered against a crime.
Then, there is the other group of Indians who have relatively easy access to the Indian state. One part of this segment consists of socially dominant sections in rural and urban India. Almost the entire leadership of prominent political parties at different levels comes from this section. This section forms the most visibly active political force in the country. Elected positions for these people are a reward for their ‘investment’ in politics. They have no compunction in using their control over state resources for personal gain.
The other part of the second group consists of economically secure urban business and professional strata, who can access Indian state through non-political, bureaucratic and money-based channels. It is this strata, which most visibly claims to be apolitical.
Besides the above, like all societies India also has politically committed people among all strata of society, who voluntarily support different political parties without any quid pro quo.
The ethical value of a political, or an apolitical stance cannot be determined solely on the basis of assertions, the self-image and actions of those claiming to be political or apolitical. These are important. More important perhaps are their locations in the objective matrix of power and influence in Indian society. The poor and the marginal have little political influence. The state policies rarely reflect their interests, yet they do use what little opportunities they get in the liberal mode of governance to be political. Participation in elections and expressing support to political actors have direct practical consequences, and hence are partly a necessity for them. An apolitical stance on the other hand, may be coming from a position of privilege and convenience. A matter-of-fact acceptance of this reality at the least, has the virtue of being forthright. Justifying it on moral grounds is a joke.
Dialectical Twins: Neoliberal Consumer Citizens and Neo-Fascist Stormtroopers
The evolution of liberal mode of governance during the past few decades has on the one hand made an apolitical stance more appealing; on the other it has made it ethically impossible. Neoliberalism is a specific working ideology of capitalist states. It emerged in response to the crisis of capitalism in the US and western Europe in 1970s and then got adapted by many states including India. At its core is a reframing of the relationship between the state and citizens. It legitimises the state as provider of services, rather than a guarantor of public good, and conceives citizens as consumers of state services. The devaluation of public good in state policy makes it difficult for people to imagine themselves as agents of positive change. Instead, popular politics gets trapped in nationalist, racist and communal exhortations. Alongside this, the economically better off begin to see their relationship to the state in transactional terms. A demolarised and depoliticised citizenry is a natural byproduct of the neoliberal mode of governance.
Recent decades have seen the successful emergence of neo-fascist political formations in many countries. All modern societies have long had reactionary right-wing political formations which base themselves on religious, racial or national identities. Fascism attempts to combine these with populist authoritarianism. A political programme and ideology, however, does not become popular just because its votaries want it to be. The neoliberal disintegration of inclusive public sphere and class-based distress provides a viable social basis for neo-fascism to grow. Neo-fascism is dangerous to any form of democracy because of the support it is able to generate in a significant section of people. Once in power, it tries to keep its hold on state by selectively dismantling institutions of political contestation and suppressing safeguards to agitational politics available under the liberal mode of governance.
Even though neo-fascism is an ideological anti-thesis of liberalism, it is an outgrowth of the internal developments within the liberal mode of governance. Its seeds lie in the historical avoidance of radical programmes of equality, and compromises with privileges of money power, race, patriarchy, caste and communal organisations; the original sin of liberal governance everywhere. The internal contradictions of neo-liberalism provide it fertile ground. These basic facts are missed by liberal critics of neo-fascism, who limit themselves to exploring its genealogy and decrying its crimes, but refrain from exploring sources of its strength.
Neoliberalism is an attempt to bourgeois-fy all aspects of social life. State legitimacy under it is tied to its managerial efficiency, which also delegitimises political and ideological contestations. The self-image of being apolitical is a structural feature of neo-liberal citizenry. Neofascism enters the moral world of this citizenry through multiple channels. First, the value-less amorality of self-interest ends up accepting fascist immorality of white lies and violence as long as latter’s target is someone else. Second, it falls for the neo-fascist propaganda of presenting its authoritarianism as efficient management and an antidote to institutional dysfunction. Third, the very logic of self-interest implies that its possibilities be not jeopardised by any challenge to existing power structures.
None of the above imply that there are no contradictions between neoliberal citizenry and neofascism. Successes of neo-fascism raise new kinds of challenges to any claims of being apolitical. First, neo-fascism provides political support to a popular base which is aggressive and violent. These people do not subscribe the ‘live and let live’ motto of the liberal public sphere, in which citizens can be sure that their private affairs are a matter of their own choosing. Neo-liberal citizens minding their own business do not escape the heat. Second, neo-fascist regimes relish the aura of absolutist power. Even if one wishes to remain indifferent to them, their monopolisation of the public sphere means that escape is difficult. Consequently, the sphere of choices is split into either active or passive support for neo-fascism, or opposition. Remaining apolitical is not an option.
A dialectical and dynamic conception of social subjectivity shows that no outcome is pre-given to humans in society. Neofascist attacks on social commonsense can, and are responded to in diverse ways. In particular, the recent so-called ‘gen-Z’ protests in New Delhi showed that even if the social experience of a generation is largely limited to social media, it can successfully challenge neo-fascist propaganda through its independent discursive channels. Further, it can also defeat carefully crafted authoritarian structures on the street. The politics of being ‘apolitical’ defeats precisely such possibilities. Therein lies its real danger.
(Author: Sanjay Kumar teaches Physics at St Stephen’s College, Delhi)