Shankar Gopalakrishnan - The BJP Is Digging Its Own Grave
Elections often act as
a giant lens, bringing into focus subterranean trends that were already
developing. And if there is one thing that these polls have brought into focus,
it is the hollowing out and brittleness of what the BJP represents – at
precisely what might look like its moment of greatest triumph. That isn’t necessarily
a good thing, even for those of us who are opposed to the RSS’s ideology. But
it does mean that, while the future may head down several pathways – some of
them terrifying – in the long term a monochromatic, dictatorial ‘Hindu Rashtra’
run by the RSS is actually quite unlikely.
To see why, let’s go
back to 2014. The Modi government came to power on a tidal wave of political
action by two broad sets of actors – the RSS and its Sangh parivar on
the one hand, and a big business-corporate-media nexus on the other. Each had
its own political project. The corporates backing Modi wanted to push their
version of ‘economic reforms’. The RSS, of course, sought to push Hindutva. Those of us who don’t
agree with one or the other, or both, of these projects, tend to focus on how
they result in injustice, violence and hatred. But these two projects have
another problem. Not only can they not meet the expectations of the rest of us,
but they also cannot meet the expectations of their own supporters.
In this sense, they are fundamentally delusional.
The economic
project: Most commentators have
noted that the economic
project has vanished from the BJP’s agenda. This is a surreal election
where the ruling party wants everyone to forget its own previous campaign
slogan – ‘achhe din’. This isn’t an accident, nor is it merely a result of
“economic mismanagement” by the Modi regime. The problem in 2014
was that the corporate media had managed to convince both itself and a large
section of the public that its ‘reforms agenda’ – withdrawing the new Land
Acquisition Act, diluting labour laws, making forest and environment clearances
‘easier’ and so on – would benefit India’s businesses, and, thereby, everyone.
But in reality, and
much before 2014, “reforms” in India had degenerated into steps that benefit
the country’s top 100 companies and no one else. This makes them not merely
unjust but actually
irrelevant. Thus, forest and environmental
clearances are already granted to
99% of projects, so diluting them further makes little sense; labour
regulations are already so weak that many
businesses don’t even realise they exist and for the vast majority of
businesses, land acquisition issues are not relevant... read more: https://thewire.in/politics/elections-2019-bjp-rss-hindutva
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