A few days ago, driving back from Berkeley to San Francisco, I was delayed for a while in a traffic jam on the other side of the Bay Bridge. The cause of the jam was a mobile procession organized by the Sikh community, with messages of support for Indian farmers and critical of Narendra Modi and the Indian government. The protesters likely came from the Sikh diaspora, whose history is intertwined with that of California’s rich agricultural history, and who probably still have family members in India who work as farmers. Similar protests have occurred in the United Kingdom and Canada, countries with significant Sikh minority populations.
In India, protests by farmers against planned reforms in the agricultural sector continue unabated, with talks stalled. The protests have elicited predictably nasty responses from the spokesmen of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the media and its troll armies. Wacky “deep state” theories, fanciful speculation about conspiracies between Muslims and Sikhs against a noble Hindu leader, and petty memes about Khalistani terrorists circulate on WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook.
Leaving aside the general case for reform in agriculture, the pros and cons of specific reforms have not been discussed in a meaningful and sustained way by all groups in society that may be affected by them. The laws were passed in September through Modi’s trademark modus operandi, that is, antidemocratic, top-down, and without much thought about its consequences.
At the service of corporate interests
As with the demonetization debacle, the benefits of deregulation are far from clear, with experts such as economist Kaushik Basu warning that it will serve corporate interests largely. So there may be a kernel of truth to the instinctively cynical response that this is yet another example of Modi handing the keys to the house to Ambani.
Modi may well survive this crisis, and his popularity among the elites and some subaltern classes will likely remain intact. It is also plausible that the government was anticipating these protests, and that Modi will try to spin his response as that of a strong leader who is willing to be unpopular for the good of the nation.
But the farmers’ response shows some flaws in the BJP’s Modi-era project. Hegemony, by definition, focuses on ensuring legitimacy through persuasion rather than force, just as hegemony, by definition, is always incomplete. The fact that the rank and file of Modi supporters from day one have resorted to brute force, violence and intimidation against Dalits, Muslims, Kashmiris, critics, dissidents, students, protesters against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizens: Reveals an acknowledgment, albeit unintended, that the project to establish a monolithic majority identity will never gain deep and permanent legitimacy among all sectors of Indian society.
This may seem like a questionable claim in the absence of a real political opposition worthy of the name in India and the half-baked whispers about secularism that occasionally emanate from non-BJP politicians. However, the need for the BJP to resort to a permanent state of violence – structural, physical and symbolic – against each and every designated enemy shows that for many groups the Hindutva of the Modi era remains, in Ranajit Guha’s memorable phrase, “a domain without hegemony.” The rejection of the farmers shows that Modi’s charisma in itself is not enough to ensure their support: he is not Gandhi, Nehru or even Indira in this sense.
Modi and the BJP are surely aware of the symbolic power of Indian farmers. In a characteristically incisive analysis, historian Shahid Amin has pointed out that it was the peasants of India who helped Gandhi transform Indian anti-colonial nationalism into a mass movement and it was they who made him a mahatma. So Modi and the BJP are careful not to attack farmers directly; their response has been to portray farmers as manipulated by secret forces or to mistake farmers for Sikhs, who in turn are labeled as anti-national Khalistani terrorists by BJP soldiers on social media.
So far, the Modi-Shah combination and the BJP, through trafficking and the use of violence and fear, have managed to secure enough populist support to tone down the political importance of Muslims and marginalize voices of conscience in society. civilian who may have had more purchase in a previous India. But ideology has its limits as does the power that emanates from it.
After the destruction of Kashmir’s autonomy and the huge protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizens, Modi’s global brilliance has disappeared. Even Arnab’s elites and observing classes who happily chanted liberal mantras for decades before giving Modi a penny have a significant transactional relationship with the Hindutva project. When the cow watchers, the moral police and a variety of Hindu signals come after them and their children (and they will), these groups will turn again. The challenge for any opposition is making sure you have someone to turn to.
In the last six years, Modi and the BJP have shown India the limits of secularism as a reason of state. In a prophetic essay, Akeel Bilgrami had pointed out that Nehruvian secularism was a “process of retention,” that is, it lacked widespread cultural legitimacy. However, it is worth noting that secularism in India, unlike Turkey, did not need to be applied with the barrel of a gun and with the force of the army. The fact that Modi’s Hindutva needed precisely this kind of support should give us hope. Although the Hindutva of the Modi era is at its noon, this is what the farmers remind us of.
Rohit Chopra is an associate professor of communication at the University of Santa Clara.
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