Ideology, anybody?

Gadfly

Some days ago, while responding to Karnataka ex-CM Siddaramaiah’s statement that leaders were joining the Congress since they liked the party ideology, another ex-CM, HD Kumaraswamy (HDK), responded that “ideology died long ago for all parties. There is no ideology for any party and parties have no commitment. Power is the only ideology for the parties”. It was a rare moment of public self-awareness, even self-criticism, from a contemporary politician. The lament may have been about politics in Karnataka, but the complexes it captures speak across India. But I partially reject HDK’s view.

If anything, it’s hard to see the Modi government’s almost eight years in power so far as anything but the mainstreaming of Hindutva. But, here too, it’s ideology and some critical caste-community-regional alliances and social factors that have made Hindutva the pivot of politics in this era. So, if we take HDK’s comment (a common refrain) for its worth, it doesn’t explain the BJP’s inability to win elections in Bengal (though it’s now a formidable Opposition there), or Tamil Nadu or Kerala or other states. Political power and money power are crucial in politics in most countries, but even more so in India, given its built-in social and economic inequities. Yet, behemoths like the BJP don’t have it easy in many major states, where their ideology finds little appeal.

So, the situation is layered: Ideology certainly dictates politics, but in degrees. It’s often checked by other imperatives. Currently, there are two ideas clashing and crisscrossing each other in interesting and intractable ways. These are notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘inequality’. No matter how ideologically driven parties may be, they must battle the hard facts of inequality and enable the social goods for a democratic republic. So, how do they tame these issues while still retaining their ideological core – and yet not rile and offend the so-called Hindu voter?

Almost all non-BJP political parties look trapped. They have been forced to battle Hindutva, and yet not lose non-Hindu or ‘lower caste’ voters. In early 2020, the Aam Aadmi Party kept its distance from the Shaheen Bagh protests. None of their leaders attended it as it may have further polarised the vote in the Delhi Assembly polls then. In the bruising Bengal polls, Mamata Bannerjee made overtures of ‘Hinduness’. Over the last few years, a panoply of Congress leaders has parroted their Hindu identity. Transforming the Opposition’s rhetoric and narrative of politics are Modi-Shah’s biggest achievements.

Yet, ideology does not help completely, nor all the time. In Uttar Pradesh these past weeks, some key state-level BJP leaders have crossed over to rival parties. They influence caste and subcaste votes. For the BJP, no amount of heating up the poll with ideology has appeared to abate the hammering UP’s mainly informal economy has received over the last four years. That plan worked in 2017. Now, the lightning-rod of ideology is clashing with the lived experience of local inequality. There’s plenty of rage over what happened with the farm laws or the second wave of the pandemic earlier, and the general hellishness of life in India’s most populous state.

Rife inequality, caused by policymaking, has beset India and besmirched the poll season. Opposition parties want to expose incumbents on their policies that have widened inequality. Sitting state governments, like in UP, are struggling to answer to that, and so are approaching it ideologically. Oxfam India’s recent ‘Inequality Kills’ report makes for hurtful reading, considering India sees herself as a great democracy. If it’s causing so much inequality, it means the ideological enterprise constructed by the Centre is cracking. All ideologies have their limitations.