Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: When the sound of politics is shrill

In Maharashtra, there have been incidents of violence on the language issue after a government circular sought to make Hindi mandatory in primary schools. It was rolled back subsequently, but not before it created space for estranged Sena cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray to re-unite and pose as “saviours” of the supposedly re-endangered “Marathi Manoos”. Meanwhile, the Devendra Fadnavis dispensation has passed a law that paints an alarmist picture of a state overrun by “urban Naxals”.

The Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill uses cloudy language and extra-large definitions as it purports to, as CM Fadnavis said in the Assembly, rescue the state’s youth from those “provoking people for armed revolt to demolish democracy, Parliament and institutions”. The bill has rightly raised apprehensions about the government using the law to criminalise dissent. The new law will be in line with Fadnavis’s remarks earlier on the Maharashtra polls, which tarred and demonised the entire Opposition: The election was a contest, he said, not between parties, but between “forces of nationalism” and “forces of anarchy”.

In Bihar, in a controversial departure from the past, the Election Commission’s exercise for updating and cleaning up electoral rolls, the ongoing Special Intensive Revision, casts the onus on large swathes of undocumented voters to prove their citizenship, sparking legitimate and widespread fears of disenfranchisement. At the same time, a spate of incidents of murder in the state have made “law and order” a talking point again, at least among the politicians, including one prominent ally of the ruling BJP.

Whether or not Bihar sees a revival of the nasty and brutish motif of “jungle raj” — this time, in a role reversal, with the RJD using it to hit back at the JD(U)-BJP – combined with the very real voter anxieties stirred by the EC, the ground is fertile for an apocalyptic clamour ahead of a crucial election.

What is common to Maharashtra and Bihar is a politics that makes fear its currency, and in which simple solutions are presented to complex challenges. These feature zero-sum games and us-versus-them scenarios, which demonise the opponent and create conditions that are ripe for “saviours”, draconian laws and the strong-armed state. The rhetoric of apocalypse is a conversation cul-de-sac, a dead-end for democratic debate.

In Maharashtra, therefore, the Thackerays raising the pitch on the language issue and the Fadnavis government arming itself with wider powers threatens civil liberties and narrows the space for a policy and politics that aims at re-energising the state’s growth momentum. In Bihar, the costs of an apocalyptic politics around “law and order” and “disenfranchisement” — as legitimate as the concerns are about the modalities and consequences of the EC’s exercise — are higher.

For all its hard-won accomplishments, Bihar’s turnaround story, scripted and steered by Nitish Kumar for two decades, has hit a long plateau, and Nitish himself is a waning presence. The state desperately needs a sober search for ideas on the way forward.

It’s not just Maharashtra and Bihar. A politics that trades on spectres and scenarios of the end of the world as we know it, and fantasies of rebuilding on a wiped out slate, no matter what it takes, is in fashion. At the national Centre, the Narendra Modi-led BJP, even as it taps into the aspirations of a changing electorate, has excelled at framing stories of fall and rise.

Read between the lines, and in the Modi government’s telling, any attempt to change requires destruction of the old order. The Congress-Left “eco-system” must be felled and flattened, and New India must rise from the ashes of the old. It will be a country that is radically reconstituted and rearranged, with a grand temple in Ayodhya and without Article 370, with One Election, One Language, One Civil Code (and One Party, One Leader). The fantasy of total destruction and erasure of the old is intrinsic to the BJP’s version of apocalyptic politics, and its vision of the new.

The politics of Modi’s main challenger, Rahul Gandhi, is also apocalyptic, but an evocative or resonant vision of the new utopia seems to be missing in it. That is one reason why his war cries of “Constitution in danger” and “Democracy under siege” and his exhortations for rooting out the existing system, which he paints as irredeemably authoritarian and corrupt, haven’t got much voter buy-in. Gandhi paints himself as a crusader, and raises the pitch, but falls short in offering a compelling or even clear vision of an alternative.

Despite their differences, however, the politics of both Modi and Gandhi does the same disservice: The painting of the apocalypse rules out a conversation with the political opponent, let alone treating them with respect and reciprocity. If the opponent is the enemy — in CM Fadnavis’s language, a “force of anarchy” — anything goes, it would seem, in terms of how they can be treated.

At its core, apocalyptic politics is an abdication of democratic humility, and of the responsibility to explore and negotiate the middle ground in a country of great diversities. It sets the stage for conspiracy theories and conduct unconstrained by the rules of the game, one that does not abide by even the small and basic conventions and courtesies. It leads to deepening polarisation and a divided polity.

Of course, there can also be value in apocalyptic thinking — sociologists have pointed out that when used by environmentalists, or anti-nuclear activists, or the oppressed, it can help open up possibilities of a new and better world. But when deployed by the powerful, it ends up closing options.

It obscures the fact that there are multiple paths to reach goals, and many possibilities to tweak and change the system from within. It distracts attention from the difficult work of politics that is waiting to be taken up — beyond the all-or-nothing options that are being propagated.

Till next week,
Vandita