Rise of the Right and fall of the Left in India
From the mid1980s, therefore, India has seen the rise of the Right and the fall of the Centre-Left/Left. However, the Right’s ascendancy has less to do with economics (unlike Rajagopalachari’s pro-market Swatantra party of the 1960s) than with being “patr
The presence of towering left-leaning personalities like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and others in the Congress led to the party being generally perceived to be leftof-centre in its ideological orientation, although it also had in its ranks prominent rightists, like Madan Mohan Malaviya, Lala Lalpat Rai, Vallabhbhai Patel and others.
However, the nearly even balance between the Left and the Right was disturbed when Mahatma Gandhi chose Nehru as his successor (although Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was his original choice) and, even more drastically, when Gandhi was assassinated by a right-wing ideologue. After that tragedy, the Right lost its footing in India and the centre-left under Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad and others gained ascendance. That didn’t mean that the Right faded away, because there still remained influential Congressmen like K.M. Munshi, Purshottamdas Tandon and others who were unapologetic about their rightist leanings.
As much is evident from Nehru’s observation that “Tandon, for whom I have the greatest affection and respect, is continually delivering speeches which seem to me to be opposed to the basic principles of the Congress … communalism has invaded the minds and hearts of those who were pillars of the Congress in the past”.
Notwithstanding this lament, the Congress never seemed to be in any serious trouble about its progressive centre-left position in the Indian scene. It had a dominant say not only in politics, but also in the academic and cultural institutions.
The Right, in contrast, represented in the political and social field mainly by the Jana Sangh, the earlier avatar of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was a marginal force. Few gave it any chance of rising any further. Instead, it was the Left which dreamed of replacing the Congress as a pan-Indian force. If this perception has now been turned upside down, the reason is the faux pas committed by the Congress when it imprudently overturned the Supreme Court’s judgment on the Shah Bano affair on alimony to a divorced Muslim woman in the mid-1980s, at the behest of Muslim fundamentalists in the Congress and outside. For the BJP, it was a godsend because the negation of the apex court’s pro-secular verdict confirmed the saffron brotherhood’s longstanding charge of Muslim “appeasement” by the Congress.
The latter’s misstep seemed to substantiate the belief that Nehru’s trueblue secularism had been distorted by his cynical successors, to whom the concept was not about keeping the state apart from religion, but using it to pamper the minorities, the Congress’s traditional “vote bank”. Since that blunder by the Congress, the BJP has improved its position by leaps and bounds, while the 134-year-old Grand Old Party has gone steadily downhill. Today, both the Centre-Left, represented by the Congress, and the Left, have reached rock-bottom in Parliament, with the Congress with 52 MPs no longer being in a position to claim Leader of the Opposition status, while the Communists, represented by the CPI and the CPI(M), with five seats between them, are in danger of losing their status as national parties.
From the mid-1980s, therefore, India has seen the rise of the Right and the fall of the Centre-Left/Left. However, the Right’s ascendancy has less to do with economics (unlike Rajagopalachari’s promarket Swatantra party of the 1960s) than with being “patriots, who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity or religion”, as Francis Fukuyama says in his book, Identity.
The BJP’s right-wing politics, therefore, is closer to the fascism of Adolf Hitler than to the conservatism of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. The crux of such politics is the propagation of the cause of Hindu rashtra or nation, which has been the dream of BJP’s ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since 1925, when the Hindu supremacist organization was formed. Not surprisingly, the BJP’s success in the recent general election was based on jingoism directed at Pakistan and anti-Muslim tactics like dividing Indian citizens into “Bajrang Balis” or Hindus and “Alis” or Muslims, with the BJP tilting in favour of the former.