When the streets talk

May 26, 2004

What have we to learn from the recently-concluded elections in the world's largest democracy? How can a party like the BJP, so popular over the last decade, lose an election when supposedly the economy of India was growing at the enviable rate of eight per cent annually.

The BJP, confident that it could not lose, launched its campaign with the slogan, "India Shinning," reference to India's own "silicon valley," its information technology leadership of the world in software design, and its appeal to the Hindu cultural nationalists to "feel good."

When the BJP came to power and sought to revitalise the fervour of Hinduvta, they were riding the crest of a wave that was similarly being felt by many throughout the entire world. In a piece titled "Big-up we-self," this is how I described it then:

"...The need to continuously extend and deepen markets has transformed the world into a global village. The nation state with all its attendant laws, regulations and barriers is now viewed as a hindrance.

"The objective necessity for capitalist expansion and capitalist accumulation, which translates into this demand for a global village, brings to the fore the counter of new levels of people's demands and fight-back for political and cultural sovereignty and ethnic distinction; the very opposite to the idea of all the world's peoples being reduced by economic necessities to a general, sickening sameness, to a common cultural denomination within a global village dominated by North American technology and American commercialisation. That is the general tendency today...

"That kind of absurdity serves to foster ethnic nationalism, the emotional cry to re-establish without any doubt who we are, the crucial need, as the youths say today, to "big-up we-self," so evident throughout the world and which must be addressed by any serious progressive party today.

"A cultural policy is an essential requirement; no moral judgments are to be made against ethnic nationalists. To do so is to engage in religion, not politics. Politics must come to terms with people's genuine fears, concerns and aspirations.

"The politics, however, must determine how we intervene in these various social milieus in order to transform their vision unto a more positive world view. The lesson for all and sundry is that the universal lies within the specific and vice-versa..."

That piece provided an analytical understanding of the rise of ethnic nationalism throughout but at the same time posed the absolute necessity for the practitioners of politics to engage with the aim to transform the specific into the universal or see the universality in the specificity.

The party in India that best rose to the occasion in this regard won the elections.

In concrete terms one can simply say that Sonia Gandhi, an Italian by birth, understood in the course of her 40 years in India that she had to be both herself as well as a symbol of Hindu motherhood and spiritual purity if she were ever to lead the party of her deceased mother-in-law and husband to victory.

On the other hand, the BJP misread the situation, misread the people in the streets and, caught up in their wild, zealous, militant but conservative mobilisations, found themselves cursing Sonia's "foreignness" and, worse, labelling her children "half-breeds."

But that is only the subjective part of the story, the objective reality of BJP's rule in India has indeed been quite sordid, just like that of the Congress Party before it was thrown out in favour of the BJP.

Western capitalist economic development is western capitalist economic development; matters little who the administrators are. The end result is always wealth in the hands of a chosen few and massive abject poverty for the many.

The rural poor, despite all the policies of Hindu cultural rejuvenation and the build-up of wealth in the cities, found themselves on the brink of starvation, causing the suicide rate in the rural areas to more than treble.

Despite the recorded economic growth rate of seven-eight per cent annually, agriculture, the mainstay of the rural areas, was down because of the lack of resources injected there and employment was increasing by less than one per cent, too minuscule to make a difference in the lives of the people in the streets.

One of my favourite Indian authors, Arundhati Roy (the other is Rohinton Mistry), said the following in her speech delivered to the World Social Forum in Mumbai in January this year:

"...A government's victims are not only those it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too.

"Millions of people have been dispossessed by 'development' projects... They have no recourse to justice.

"In the past two years there have been a series of incidents in which police have opened fire on peaceful protesters, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments by dams, mines, steel plants and other 'development' projects...

"Across the country, thousands of innocent people, including minors, have been arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial.

"In the era of war against terror, poverty is being shyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism..."

So the activists of the streets have spoken and the BJP lost power.

Unlike so many pundits around, I am one of those who hold strongly to the view that only street activism will determine the quality of the future. India reinforced the lesson.