Prime Minister Modi must ignore his critics and make interventions against lumpens. It may have a seminal impact on contemporary political debate and engagement between differing narratives, writes ISHAN JOSHI
Ignoring the raised, patrician eyebrows from the relics of the ancien régime, or indeed, the beetled furrows of the arriviste establishment, it must be said that the lumpen element has been an intrinsic — whether essential or not is an argument for elsewhere — part of the freedom struggle and later the agitational agenda of the governing class of independent India.
In the 1920-1950 period, it informed the pan-Islamist Khilafat agitation led by the Ali brothers and supported by the Mahatma, the non-cooperation movement wherein the Chauri Chaura incident led Mahatma Gandhi to call off the agitational plan rather than give any quarter to lumpen violence from within, the state-seeking Pakistan movement led by MA Jinnah, especially in the last year of British rule after his call for direct action and even, arguably, the Quit India movement to a small extent despite it bearing the imprimatur of the Mahatma and the full weight of his political and moral authority.
Post-independence, the language movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the agrarian land redistribution agitations of the left that spilled over into the next decade; Jai Prakash Narayan’s total revolution mobilisation and the anti-emergency agitation of the 1970s; the Ayodhya movement of the 1980s and 1990s; the various statehood movements from the 1950s till the early 2000s; and the anti-cow slaughter, abolition of tripletalaq and nativist agitations in different States in 21st century India, have all struggled to keep the lumpen element at arm’s length, albeit with differing intensity of effort and varying results.
The mass aesthetic post-1947, on the other hand, has consistently been under-theorised with inconvenient aspects air-brushed and often misreported; the former, one suspects, as a deliberate sacrifice at the altar of the Nehruvian nation-building effort and the latter, as a manifestation of the same intent as agitprop.
The groundwork for the metaphysic of lumpenisation, as it were, predates contemporary battles for political power. Successive Governments in India, both at the Centre and in the States, have absorbed it fully into the governance eco-system. Periodic hand-wringing on the issue by the old establishment, more frequent of late for obvious reasons, should come as no surprise. It depends almost entirely for its personal and professional fortunes, as all establishments in non-meritocratic societies tend to, on a transactional relationship with the powers-that-be because its life-defining and inter-generational privileges are premised on the shifting sands of access to opportunity, ideological synergy, quasi state support and a syncing of a priori assumptions about shared national values.
So, when the Prime Minister condemns the lumpen elements of the cow protection movement or the following of a sect leader for indulging in intimidation and violence and affirms the law should take its own course, he is very clearly sending out the message that such behaviour is entirely unacceptable. This is not an exercise by Prime Minister Modi, as those who skim the shallows may have convinced themselves, in proforma condemnation but is in keeping with a rather obvious belief of his political life — acceptance of the fact that lumpen violence and/or intimidation is wrong, should be effectively curbed where it occurs by respective administrations and ought to be punished, it does not mean he will stop supporting the causes he and his party believe in. And why should heIJ No other mainstream political party would change its agenda on such spurious logic and selective reasoning and no commentator would suggest it do so.
The political Opposition and the BJP’s critics from civil society would do themselves a favour by first accepting that the lumpen element is an across-party/issue phenomenon. Subsequently, if they so wish, they could construct a narrative to counter a movement and/or agitation whether in terms of intrinsic worth or priority. And then exhibit intellectual honesty, political will and an understanding of the exceptionalism of the Indian condition within which their alternative narrative must gather traction from citizens of the republic.
But the moment they take the easy way out by conflating the lumpen behaviour of a section of the proponents of an agenda (it could be any) with the right of the main body of its protagonists to believe in and agitate within the law for the fruition of their efforts, they effectively lose the argument.
To begin engaging with the mass aesthetic, working to shape it even, is to join the battle for ideas that is raging in the land. leaning on the crutches of a disingenuous construct of the ‘barbarians are at the gate’ variety, which is what focusing solely on the (utterly condemnable) lumpen acts of a section in all mass agitations amounts to, just won’t cut it intellectually and, more importantly for political parties, electorally. lumpen behaviour by a section of agitators is a lived human experience for most, if not all, citizens regardless of the issue being pressed.
Perhaps decades of entitlement do lead inexorably to a decay in the ability to recognise that the process of democratisation, while it may throw up a demagogue or two, is rather potent as a slayer of shibboleths too.
On balance, the BJP, as the premier political party of India, also needs to be careful about how it deals with the lurking danger of a lumpen takeover of its allied agendas as it has far more to lose. Modi has got the party to power on its own at the Centre, an achievement that escaped the more charming Atal Bihari Vajpayee and less angular lK Advani, and looks a shoo-in for a second term unless the incipient signs of an economy in trouble turn more ominous and the hope expressed by Meghnand Desai that opportunities to earn a living — as opposed to traditional job creation — have increased under BJP rule is belied.
The focus on governance issues for the remainder of his current term in these circumstances, however, must not distract the Prime Minister from keeping an eye on and crushing the lumpen element within as he did in Gujarat when he was the Chief Minister, precisely because the causes espoused are vital components of his and the BJP’s nationhood argument and, therefore, need far more civilised, erudite and effective ambassadors.
(The author is a Goa-based journalist)