Shiv Vishwanathan -Time, modernity and the BJP
The party is addicted to the ideas of nation state, progress and development pickled in the formal-dehyde of the 19th century. Its patriotism is a deep devotion to repeating these ideas in the present. No other regime is as idolatrous of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to ‘Make in India’ is an invitation to the likes of them to make India’s future because India as a regime is clueless about it — we are being out-thought and out-fought in every forum.
Sociologists have often commented that outsiders have a more clear-sighted view of everydayness than us. Recently, I was ranting against the communalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when a European friend of mine, a philosopher, observed that the categories of left and right were grossly overdrawn in India. They emphasised a world of deep dualisms, or even a richness of traditional thought, that does not exist in India. India, he said, cannot claim a Gramsci or a Rosa Luxemburg. Worse, our rightist parties have no sense of the creative traditions of conservatism. An Indian Edmund Burke is unthinkable. Beyond its corrosive communalism, the BJP has no idea of the right as a systematic ideology. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of capitalism is adequate. Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore were more creative nationalists than Veer Savarkar or K.B. Hedgewar. My friend noted that Indian parties were more vehicles for modernity, and it is as exponents of modernity that they make sense. One has to explore how these parties use time, history, linearity as modernising forces. It is as vehicles of modernity that parties come to power.
Surrogate
moderniser
When the Congress lost
its modernising impetus, the BJP became the surrogate moderniser. It is in
terms of its claims to modernity that the BJP has to be assessed. The BJP’s
attitude to time has always intrigued me. So far, it has been dealt with
eclectically. If the left saw economics as a classic force, history was always
the collective impetus for the BJP. Its obsession with history confuses myth
and the rationality of logos. At one level, it contemporarises the ancients by
creating equivalences to current achievements in ancient times. The examples
range from test-tube babies and plastic surgery to biotechnology. India is seen
as one fluid continuity from the Vedic Age to now. While ancient history is
rendered current, it rewrites the history of the last 500 years, unable to
accept defeat. It desperately wants Maharana Pratap to win the Battle of
Haldighati, and it insists Ram was a historical figure. It is perpetually encouraging
people to rectify history at every stage, where even murder becomes an act of
rectification, for instance of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri in 2015 or Afrazul Khan
in Rajsamand in 2017.
Often the BJP’s use of
time is more strategic and complex. It fetishes 2019, which it sees as the end
of Congress history and the beginning of Ram Rajya. Everything focusses on
2019, and BJP president Amit Shah is the time-keeper, the impresario of 2019 as
the beginning of a Congress Mukt Bharat. This is not just an electoral
strategy. The BJP genuinely believes that a millennial moment it has prophesied
is coming.
Attitude to time
Oddly, for all its
fetishisation of 2019, the BJP is one party that has no systemic idea of the
future. It might borrow a few glib ideas such as smart cities, yet it has no
sense of the future as a set of strategies. The fetishisation of 2019 has to be
understood in this context — 2019 is its end of history thesis. It has no sense
of the future except of the NRI who combines modern consumerism with ancient
history. The future is 2019 repeated. The attitude to time
is best caught in the complete absence of ecological thinking. It is content
with linear time and progress. It dissolves the Planning Commission not because
it was a Congress idea but because it was a futurist notion. The party is
addicted to the ideas of nation state, progress and development pickled in the
formaldehyde of the 19th century. Its patriotism is a deep devotion to
repeating these ideas in the present. No other regime is as idolatrous of Bill
Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to ‘Make in
India’ is an invitation to the likes of them to make India’s future because
India as a regime is clueless about it — we are being out-thought and
out-fought in every forum... read more:
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/time-modernity-and-the-bjp/article24534804.ece