People in the country are amidst the deep absurdity that was once pointed out by Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus in his famous novels 'The Stranger' and 'The Myth of the Sisyphus'. The young man in 'The Stranger' refuses to express any emotions or distress towards the funeral of his mother under the pretext that life is meaningless. The Greek legend 'Sisyphus' was damned due to his repeated efforts to push a boulder against a hill. The struggle against the dominant was accepted as impossible and unnatural. The politics in the country is passing through an absurdity that good politics is meaningless and defeating the leviathan is unbelievable. Absurdity is a state of mind where preposterous views become the source of political mobilisations in society. In this article, I try to trace how absurdity has infiltrated and survived in politics in India.
During the Second World War, the consensus in the colonies was gaining momentum that the source of economic distress is imperialism. National freedom struggles became mass movements due to the consensus over economic drain by the colonizer states. This led to the adoption of constitutional framework to liquidate the concentrated wealth through economic planning into various industrial sectors. Many argue that the sentiments against colonial imperialism strengthened the constitutional democracy in India. The masses imagined the state as an enumerator of economic redistribution after independence. The political power through electoral politics was expected to keep checks and balances on the economic redistribution. The belief in redistribution kept the Congress at the helm of political power for the first two decades. Many call it Congress System or One-Party Dominance System (OPDS). This was the time where the socially forward castes and numerically large castes reoriented the politics of distribution in their favour. The numerically large castes chased the political prowess in the legislatures and socially forward won the cultural supremacy in the public sphere.
The Green Revolution benefitted the political powerful feudal castes and converted marginal farmers and peasants into agricultural labourers or construction workers in unorganised sectors. The large tracts of grazing lands of pastoral shepherds became the private forest or the extended agricultural land of the beneficiaries of the public policies. The local artisans were left to struggle in the waves of globalisation. Accumulation of land in few hands forced many small and medium manufacturing communities to withdraw from the rural economies. The speculation that narrowing the gap between the urban and the rural would integrate the economy, in fact, led to erasing of the importance of minor stakeholders in the market. The market emerged as monopoly of the politically effective and culturally superior castes in India. The markups on the products further suppressed the economic assertion of the numerically insignificant communities. This made the trifling communities assert for reservation as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) under the banner of Mandal Commission in the 80s that further met with a vehement opposition from the forward castes.
The reservation for OBCs received the green signal during the tenure of V. P. Singh, a prime minister belonging to the OBC communities. Still, even today, there are 269 nomadic and Denotified Communities yet to be brought under the constitutional provisions to safeguard their rights. The politics that centred around redistribution since Independence shifted to populism after 1990s.
The advent of globalisation came to nurture the identity crisis of these scattered and leaderless communities into a political identity. They made the departure from the feudal-clientele relationship in the villages to the contractor-worker on the construction sites and the sub-urban areas. The right-wing economics, which sought refuge under Congress politics for some time now wanted a public platform to proliferate openly. It wanted a political party system that would not disown it. The faceless transient labourers were in search of identity in post-globalisation politics. They could not emerge as caste identity due to the lack of social capital and political patronage. The broader Hindu identity under multi-cultural and multi-lingual set-up was more convenient as well as resilient for them. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to publicly represent the broader Hindu identity which Congress was reluctant to politicise. The workers who entered into the cities at the beginning of globalisation were disenchanted with the feudal politics in the villages and were ready to checkmate it.
The Left failed to tap the demographic change among the landless workers entering into industrial areas. This has immensely caused to diminish the relevance of the Left politics in cities. The narrative that OBCs are the foot soldiers of Hindutva politics of BJP created animosity between them and non-OBCs. It also gained currency in academics across university campuses. The landed gentry remained stuck to the Congress, while faceless labourers marching from the hinterlands to the urban centres came under BJP's foothold. This is how the two-party system, represented by the two national parties, got their vote-banks. The gangplank of globalisation further brought the regional political parties under their alliances and outwitted the regional opposition to the national politics.
The liberal and capitalist political economies tend to manufacture conducive two-party system to consolidate transformation during the times of anti-incumbency against the incumbent political regime. The pre-poll and post-poll coalitions, along with defections, is populism that electoral politics has invented to appropriate political power in liberal democracies.
The global economic crisis followed by the Covid-19 pandemic has once again brought the politics of redistribution to the electoral politics amidst the Lok Sabha polls 2024. Congress is seen forcefully pitching for caste census in its election campaigns to re-allocate the wealth. The centrality of the caste and class, in its language, seems to encroach in vote-base of the Ambedkarite and Communist parties. This has also alarmed Congress' cadres to shift their loyalties towards the ruling party. Time will determine whether this is an ideological populism or commitment.
The BJP reassures socio-economic development through its various guarantees after comfortably completing two terms. When Congress emphasises the historical marginalities, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urges the voters to express trust towards his politics. Francis Fukuyama, in his famous thesis 'End of History,' justified the capabilities of the liberal democracies and argued that historical experiences would fail to shape ideological consciousness in the globalised society. The generations after 90s propelled to consume that history has ended and ideologies are utopian. The post-independence redistribution boasted of the equitable re-distribution of material resources to the masses whereas the post-globalisation distribution guarantees allocation of funds to ensure the supply of goods and services to citizens. Therefore, it would be important to witness whether history would shape the trust or trust will erase history.
The consensus over redistribution that masses showcased during anti-colonial struggles and immediately after the independence has taken a backseat in the recent past. The feud to secure more benefits from affirmative actions and social justice escalates rivalry among socially and economically weaker sections of the society. In such battles, political society privileges electorally significant communities and overlooks the picayune. State politics is in such a situation where populism blossoms over the absurdity and the Stranger derecognises the Sisyphus.
(Dr. Nawoo Varak is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Government College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Khandola, Marcela, Goa.)