Does a new building mark a new beginning? This is the first of two questions that the inauguration of the new Parliament premises invites us to consider. At the initial, concrete, level the inevitable answer is yes. Inevitable because, as a massive and literally concrete thing, the new building can impose its newness upon our senses in a preemptive way, pushing aside our memories of the old.
The Modi regime excels at managing this level of emphatic visibility — the level of the spectacular — and relates to its public almost entirely on this plane. Thus the new Parliament, too, is a spectacle designed to highlight the many ways that the Modi era breaks with the past. But a building — and especially one that houses our Parliament — is not only a thing of concrete. It also has a powerful symbolic dimension. Indeed, for a democracy, no building could claim greater symbolic value. At this abstract level, Parliament is the fundamental national symbol on which all political symbols rest. It is the imagined place where state power meets the sense of community, where coercion and consent are forged into the two sides of the coin called democracy. At this symbolic level as well, the ruling regime has brought decisive changes in the modes of popular governance.
The change that the regime’s opponents have found most difficult to grasp is the sense of empowerment that it has gifted to a significant section of citizens. The vague description is needed because this is a disparate collection of groups. It includes the vast majority of the Hindu upper castes, not all of whom define themselves by their community or caste, but who nevertheless belong to that demographic. Examples include technocrats and business people who like the decisive and bold way in which the government of the day operates, with a clear command structure and little regard for older institutional norms and procedures. It also includes a large section of upper OBCs as well as elite Dalits and Adivasis who no longer have any stakes in caste politics as practised by parties like the Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Bahujan Samaj Party, and perhaps even the Dravidian parties of the south. Another way of putting this is that the BJP-RSS combine has found ways to overcome the traditional divisions that defined vote banks — upper versus lower castes or rural versus urban, for example — including its success in recruiting at least some support across the entire class spectrum.
Superficial analyses of this sort are commonplace and endlessly debated. However, there is a growing consensus on the factor that underlies these political configurations. This is the fact that the Modi regime has transformed the modes and meanings of political representation itself. If every existing democracy today is representational in some form or another, then what Parliament ultimately represents is the idea of representation itself.
In a widely noted global trend that includes India, many democratic polities seem to have taken a turn towards authoritarian populism. Power is concentrated in a single supreme leader who is popular amongst a dominant segment of the population defined in religious, racial-ethnic or other cultural terms. This form of regime is invariably accompanied by the erosion of all the institutions that modern democracies have relied on. Rather than the active and important roles that they have traditionally performed, these institutions are transformed into passive conduits for the supreme leader’s agendas, and for conveying his/her largesse or wrath. Institutions that are crucial for the deliberative aspects of democracy such as the media, universities, the judiciary or the bureaucracy are especially targeted. Being the mother of all democratic institutions, Parliament cannot escape this process and must suffer sidelining or worse.
It can no longer be denied that this trend has accelerated in India over the past decade, even if it was begun by Indira Gandhi’s Congress regime of the 1970s. Along the lines of the controversial “direct cash transfers” advocated in the heyday of neoliberalism, there is now a direct transfer of legitimate political authority from the people to the leader. All the institutions that mediated, oversaw and regulated this transfer have receded into the background. The spectacle-based style of functioning is both a cause and a consequence of this trend. Every significant event or achievement, from Covid vaccination to the moon landing, must include the great leader in the frame.
There is thus an unequivocal answer to our initial question — the new Parliament building does indeed represent a new trend. The same is not true for the question that follows: Is this new trend good or bad? The answer depends on where you stand in relation to the ruling regime. Supporters have no problem with every major public event being staged as though it were a rajyabhisheka or coronation — in fact, they celebrate them. Nor are they concerned about deliberately induced institutional decay. On the other hand, our institutions don’t seem to have comparable devoted bhakts who will support and defend them.
Sociologists are professionally trained to be institution bhakts — not of this or that institution, but of the idea itself. As the crucial hinges that connect individuals to society in a durable way, institutions have historically served to magnify both the good and the bad that is in individuals and societies. Political struggles for change are about control over institutions and their modes of functioning.
Because of the peculiarities of our history, India at independence both inherited and devised a set of institutions not necessarily in keeping with the longer history of our society and its traditional structures of power and prejudice. Whether out of the high-mindedness of anti-colonial nationalism or the shrewd confidence that their own interests could be protected, the elite in power then chose to build institutions like our Parliament and Constitution around certain values. The new elite in power today wishes to build new institutions to align with their own values. The views of voters on these values will decide if our Parliament is a building or an institution.
The writer is a former teacher of Sociology, currently with the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru
