What Is to Be Done?
The Opposition's Last Chance to Stop India's Rightward Tilt
There now seems to be general recognition about the praxis the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), via the state it controls, is pursuing.
In Sikkim in 2024, the then-president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shri J.P. Nadda, had explicitly pronounced “goodbye to regional parties” and admonished that they had to come to the “mainstream” and that the “mainstream is BJP“.
All that is in line with the ruthless ways in which, through the last decade, the ruling BJP has systematically either co-opted, or split or simply destroyed out of sight a plethora of regional political formations in state after state.
Pointless here to offer the litany of a count, since this phenomenon has received wide coverage in public forums.
The recent defeats of the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu and of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal (however grotesquely manipulated) cannot but have emboldened the rampaging right-wing to conclude that the time has come to make the final push towards achieving a unitary state, with only the Congress left to be demolished.
In passing, the Indian National Congress is the only political force that has never aligned with the BJP in any shape or form at any level of governance – an ideological fact that justly alarms the right-wing which has otherwise got the better of all others at one time or the other.
The refusal of the grand old party, however, to declare its own demise for now is therefore a conundrum that the right-wing must tackle in ways supplementary to outright electoral victories (however those victories are managed).
(You may have noticed that it is the Indian National Congress that continues to remain the chief target of attack in Shri Modi’s tireless polemics – a dead give-away that he knows the Congress to be at bottom the chief antagonist of the communal right-wing and the most likely to offer challenge to it at the level of Union government-formation despite its many predicaments.)
The obvious course to obviate the pitfalls of such a regressive eventuality is to obtain a two-thirds legislative majority in both houses of parliament – a circumstance that can then make it possible for the Modi government to pass Bills to effect such structural/systemic transformations as will hasten the project of dismantling multi-party democracy, installing the scheme of a single nation-wide election a template that it thinks likely to keep the BJP permanently in office, free to administer the realm without the bother of answering to the citizen for five long years, rid of accountability to hustings now and again.
Such legislative/constitutional transformation would enable the right-wing to ensure this permanence in state power by instituting a delimitation exercise as would guarantee its electoral victories through the mechanism of congenial electoral constituencies.
Once that goal is achieved, the day could finally come (with the grace of Lord Ram) when the “secular, socialist, democratic Republic”, anathema to the RSS, will yield Constitutional validity to a theocracy.
Now while the right-wing is clear about both its desired telos and the political and legislative moves required to achieve it, confusion seems to afflict the opposition, such as it is.
The old question that Lenin had posed in 1905 about how to combat Tsarist Russia of the time (“what is to be done?” he had asked of his comrades) seems again relevant in our own historical moment.
There are on the one hand learned theorists who do not seem to subscribe to the fear that a fascist takeover is a probability in India, and thus invite us to “re-imagine” (that so tiresomely overused academic cliche, done to death in high-falutin seminars) a spectrum of civic/political concepts, rather than simply plead for “unity” among political forces convincingly opposed to the totalitarian right-wing in a sort of nervous and parvenu reflex.
This scholarly course is ostensibly to first arrive at an educated understanding of the current situation before committing ourselves to some unsubtle misadventure (that might lead to something worse than fascism?).
Even after the marauding right-wing is now in power in some 22 states of the republic (sic), they continue to hold the view that the most telling defeat of the Centrist BJP can come only from regional political forces.
Let us concur: the downfall of regional political forces one after the other is indeed a mortal blow to the “basic” constitutional structure of federalism, and of the ideal of a democratic culture that ought to run deep in town and hinterland.
Looking at what Marx variously called the “concrete” and “objective constraints of history” as we write, however, the question begs itself: should we not now aim to retrieve a Centre that in the first place determines in large measure whether or not democracy flourishes in town and hinterland as well?
Alas that there is no evidence in hand that might suggest that regional forces at present are in any position to re-forge a clout that might yield the sort of political consolidation that happened, however briefly at both times, in 1977 and 1989.
A less fashionable view argues that the onus must once again be on the Indian National Congress to provide the anchor to organise the many down-and-out political formations into a new, credible front, informed by a clearly enunciated body of principles and a sustained course of political action.
Many, including those not habitually favourable to the grand old party, concede in private that although Rahul Gandhi’s ascendance may at first have seemed farcical, he has been a willing learner, both in ideological terms and in terms of how to refurbish the Congress into a fighting street force.
Some in the Left aver, even if sheepishly in private, that he it is who is doing the work of the Left for now.
That the weather-beaten and astute Mallikarjun Kharge remains not just in ceremonial place in the party but an active and credible influence rather adds to the social profile and predilections of the new Congress, now boldly and repeatedly evident in Rahul Gandhi’s public averments.
This alternate, unsubtle view seems impelled by the conviction that if the right-wing is not defeated in the general elections of 2029, all our re-imaginings may have come to a fascist naught; and that the Congress must bear the onus of marshalling the consolidated challenge to that probability.
Such proposed unity of secular/democratic forces (and please let us not play educated ducks and drakes with what the word ‘secular’ means) of course needs must be rooted in a clearly formulated ideological draft, both in terms of the espoused principles and the scheme of mass actions to be adopted over the next two-and-a-half years.
In the main the right-wing has achieved over the last decade or more astonishingly deleterious success in sidelining such issues as:
—of livelihood, in an economic regime brazenly captive to burgeoning billionaires hand-in-glove with the executive,
—of brazen mendacity, first disclosed in the matter of the electoral bonds scheme, and now, after the shameful shenanigans pertaining to the various entrance and other examinations, even where it concerns public offerings made to the central informing symbol of RSS politics, the Ram Temple at Ayodhya,
—of spawning a political culture wherein elected representatives can be bought and blackmailed into compliance, making the integrity of a party system a cruel joke at the expense of “we the people” who have the illusion that the first loyalty of these representatives owes to those who elect them,
—of institutional probity and accountability, as state agencies one after the other have come to be subservient to right-wing ideologues and their straps in governance,
—of a Goebbelsian reformulation of the contents and pedagogic practices of education in schools, colleges, universities,
—of a fourth estate become an executive handmaiden, with one or two honourable exceptions,
—of avenues of gainful employment for the populace, and dignified working conditions and just remuneration for wage labour and farm economies,
—of the blatant disregard of constitutional injunctions in the matter of citizens’ equal rights, be it in the practices of law enforcement, religious freedom and the right to dissent,
—of the sanctity of legislative norms and democratic principles, inside and outside parliament and assemblies,
—of the need to return the control of the bulk of national wealth to public institutions, and to effect the redistribution of incomes to reduce the appalling inequalities of earnings, unprecedented worldwide, as enshrined in the Directive Principles of State Policy,
—of the need for a health care system that at all times at state cost ensures the availability of medical requirements to the last child, woman and man standing, at pain of punishment to malingering professionals and institutions,
—of the mortally imperative need to incorporate 180 million or so Indian Muslim citizens back into the provisions and prerogatives of the Constitution, and to punish those who stand in the way,
—of pursuing a foreign policy that does not shame the honour and independence of the nation.
The fallout of the last decade or more has left us with little to imagine, not to speak of re-imagine. Wretchedly, fine theoretical print had best yielded to the hugely obvious features of the milieu.
Let us not shy away from the crude fact that the Third Reich and the militarist Zionists continue to be the idols of vast sections of the ruling elite, and that the task of reclaiming democracy cannot wait on languid subtleties.
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