Opinion After June 4, two questions: Who and what won?

Sense of uncertainty about the ultimate built into Indic religions, flexibility of asymmetric federalism offer necessary space to accommodate regional diversity and build an inclusive nation

Nationising is the process of crafting a nation out of a loosely affiliated people, drawing on their norms, values, collective memories and deeply held beliefs, linked to religion. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

Subrata Mitra

May 31, 2024 06:57 PM IST First published on: May 31, 2024 at 07:15 AM IST

Once the sound and fury of the campaign has died down, votes are cast and counted, the electoral dénouement will converge on two critical questions: “Who won?” and “what won?” The first is answered simply in most democracies. Counting agencies do their job, and the loser’s consent seals the result as legitimate and final. That said, the process, as the fiasco that followed the last presidential election in the United States, is not necessarily seamless. However, in India, the issues that could complicate the final tally are filtered out beforehand by an alert judiciary and hyper-active Election Commission. Going by past precedents, the losers in India’s electoral game have usually conceded defeat quickly and gracefully. So, on June 4, one can expect a smooth and unproblematic regime continuity, or for that matter, a radical transition.

The answer to the other question — “what won?” — is much more complicated. Exactly what does a mandate consist of? Parties issue manifestos and in the heat of the battle, candidates make tall promises. None of this is binding on the winners. However, political parties do not want simply an episodic win. They want long-term success at the hustings and therefore, to hold on to their clientele. One clue to prognosticate the winner’s potential policy choice is to watch the subliminal message that underpins campaigns, and tease out of this triggers that have shaped the voters’ choice. What the country is in for would become clearer once detailed data from exit polls are available. However, at this point of time, the highly acrimonious and polarising campaign that we have seen, points in the direction of one vital issue. What kind of “nation” will the winners have as the domain of their authority, and how they might try to take ownership of it to assure their long-term prospects.

The media, both domestic and foreign, have been rife with speculation on this very issue. One such report from the press in Pakistan — always deeply concerned about the status of secularism in India — will suffice to gauge the mood that prevails. Daily Times (May 23) believes that a third term for Modi means that “the real winner in the so-called secular state would be bigotry… Indian voters would scream out their preference for vigilante identity over the ideals of modern India.” Prime Minister Modi has vehemently denied the allegation of discrimination against Muslims, pointing to the fact that social and economic vulnerability and not religion has been the basis of the allocation of welfare. He has said categorically “the day I do Hindu-Muslim, I will be unworthy of public life” (IE, May 15) But, in life as in politics, perception is all. The argument that the Bharatiya Janata Party stands for the whole of Bharat and not any specific caste or religion-based vote bank does not appear to have reached its mark. That makes “nationising” India — pulling together the diverse fragments of the huge population into one nation — the most salient issue for the winners on June 4. The is a much bigger challenge than security, welfare or the economy — all of which have acquired a sense of bipartisan consensus and as such, autonomy from the regime in power.

A nation is a moral community, based on a shared sense of good and evil. Nationising is the process of crafting a nation out of a loosely affiliated people, drawing on their norms, values, collective memories and deeply held beliefs, linked to religion. One thinks of the early years of Gandhi — not yet a Mahatma — freshly back in India from South Africa, trying to discover the commonality that described the essence of the Indian nation. Nationising was for him a heuristic process, seeking to build an authentic normative core, linked to religion. The idea that religion was to be treated as personal faith and as such a private matter, came from societies like Great Britain or the United States where the church is “established”, and forms the ontological foundation of the modern state. This fact does not appear to have registered on the minds of the first generation of Indian leaders, traumatised by the partition of the country on the ground of religion.

Leaders of India today face a cruel dilemma. Too close an identification with the culture and norms of any specific community can alienate the rest of the population. On the other hand, ignoring the religiosity of the majority, or for that matter, minorities for whom religion is essential to their identity, can lead to a legitimacy deficit or worse, causing their thwarted agency to find expression in ways not exactly desirable. This fact that the country is up against this dilemma is missed both by Hindu nationalists and their critics in the liberal media, for entirely different reasons. The former see nationising as unproblematic, and the latter consider the fuss over the “nation” detrimental to the vaunted secularism of the country.

Has nationising of India still got a chance to succeed? The vigorous culture of contestation ingrained in the collective mindset of India, general constituencies as opposed to proportional representation that make short-term coalitions and intense bargaining imperative, smooth running of general elections, and the admirable dexterity of the Indian judiciary which excels at the art of balancing the letter of the law and collective belief, are assets that an imaginative leadership can draw on. Significantly, the RSS appears to be signalling the need for inclusion and moderation. Most of all, the sense of uncertainty about the ultimate built into Indic religions, and the flexibility of India’s asymmetric federalism offer the necessary space to accommodate regional diversity and thus build an inclusive nation. There is no other way around it.

The writer is emeritus professor, Heidelberg University