Market intellectuals The vacant middle. By Mukul Kesavan
Pundits will tell you
that a lot of them endorsed Narendra Modi (and his baggage train of violent
vigilantes and drilled Golwalkarites) in 2014 because they thought he would
privatize Air India. Even when once pro-Modi commentators shyly channel buyer's
remorse about the prime minister, they end by writing that if Modi were to sell
off Air India, he would repay their political investment in him, renew their
faith in the National Democratic Alliance and refresh Modi's credentials as a
modernizer or 'reformer' or whatever the latest term of art is for Davos Man.
Selling Air India is
shorthand for economic rationality. Economic rationality is a mantra which,
chanted loudly enough, builds a wall of noise which keeps the soundtrack of
lynchings and suicides off-stage. These casualties can be waved away as
acceptable collateral damage, the price India must pay for a muscular leader
capable of selling the short-term pain of market rationality to the masses.
Elected sadhvis,
sadhus, mahants and pant-shirt bigots tell us exactly what
they think of Muslims, Christians and Dalits and what they plan to do to them;
WhatsApp mobs kill people in the name of protecting cows from slaughter or
children from abduction; a vigilante with a history of violent affray is
elevated by the ruling party to the chief ministership of India's most
populated province and still these opinion-mongers see and hear nothing. Where
others hear mobs shouting 'maar', ' kaat', these high
priests of the invisible hand, these pragmatic centrists, these world-weary
veterans of the wars against the License Raj, cup their ears and and hear the
aspiring masses chanting 'Mar-ket, mar-ket, mar-ket!'
Some of these sages
can claim the virtue of consistency. One, for example, candidly admitted that
he endorsed Modi in 2014 because he thought that communalism was an acceptable
price to pay for economic growth. Four years down the line he said he would do
it again because the lack of economic growth was due to global trends, not
Modi's policies; the gau rakshasas and their lynched victims
were statistically insignificant and, best of all, there had been no
State-sponsored pogroms on Modi's watch.
This smooth
willingness to grant Modi absolution for not delivering on his original
promise, economic growth, while blandly normalizing the savagery that bloomed
around this regime's footprint, is one way in which the discourse of economic
reform is used: to clear a space for barbarism. It also has the advantage of
deodorizing the pundit's journey to the smelly reaches of the Hindu Right... read more:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/market-intellectuals-241394