Let The Left Teach You How Not To Read Election Results

Universities and scholars should watch out for Narendra Modi. He has now humbled two giants from Harvard. The first is Amartya Sen the second is Steve Jarding.

Among the failures that the Uttar Pradesh assembly results has highlighted is academia’s inability to analyse, rather than deride. This despite the fact that there is an urgent need to summon current theories in social sciences to comprehend the political surprise that has unfolded in the heartland of India, as Sanjay Baru pointed out.

So, the purpose of this article is two-fold. First, to highlight motivated commentary that is typical of media organisations still sympathetic to the Left. Second, to put forward plausible reasons for the massive victory of political hardliners in UP based on current research in the social sciences.

What’s not right with the Left

An alumnus of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), on the basis of his “travels in the state, evolving trends over the past three years (particularly in west UP) and conversations with a wide range of people (in person and over the phone)” predicted audaciously that “we are headed towards a hung assembly, the competition is largely between the BSP and BJP.”

Now that the reputation of the filmmaker is hung in public, he could seek solace in the fact that Karl Marx was not only an economist-philosopher par excellence, but also a miserable astrologer. So, if the filmmaker still wants to flirt with psephology, he should read a fine piece that Anand Teltumbde wrote about the Bahujan Samajwadi Party.

Again, my guru of political analysis and Jawaharlal Nehru University alumnus, Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta has disappointed. The avowed leftist has served the proverbial old wine in a new bottle by brandishing “communalised development”: “In this politics of development, Modi has created a constituency and vote bank called “Hindus” out of the various castes and groups of the state.”

Note the politics that the journalist performs in the sentence. It is a textbook case of subtle propaganda masquerading as journalism. By stating “Modi has created”, he performs a denial essential for the survival of democratic Left in trying times. The sentence crafts only the prime minister as an active agent in a relation that is fundamentally a two-way street. Narendra Modi sought a mandate and UP voted for him. But the Left must overlook the agency of the masses. After all, in his many guidebooks on political action, Acharya Marx has taught that the masses are opiated and can only afford “false consciousness”.

It is impossible to be so dismissive of the masses in a democracy. After all, they are ‘janta janardan’ even ‘mai-baap’ during polls. Modi must be therefore be deified. He must be made the Creator so that there is only one “sinner” in UP.

Such passive portrayal of the populace was made by another leftist doyen – Antonio Gramsci. If Modi can be depicted as Pied Piper, then the voters will fit as dazed rats that have acted under “false consciousness”. This is to mean ‘hegemony’ without mentioning it. The concept is outdated despite revision by Louis Althusser.

Perhaps we should add Michel Foucault to the done-and-dusted reading list of Marx-Gramsci-Althusser. Foucault too will assure that both the “powerful” and the “powerless” agree to the experience of domination. But unlike the gods in the leftist pantheon, Foucault will conclude that the powerful and powerless are unfixed categories. This explains why elections outsmart red scriptures. Next stop, of course, would be Jacques Derrida….

Caution: Such readings are dangerous because, once understood, they push readers to unlearn their cherished identity. In other words, it will effect a change that will require courage dissimilar from collecting before water cannons. It will require a struggle that Jean-Paul Sartre summarised as “condemned to be free”.

To conclude, the Left plays foul. If it wins the political battle, it is Revolution. But if it loses, it is Hegemony. This is like the crafty ‘heads I win tails you lose’ riddle or the curious comedy of ‘if I win hail EVM but if I don’t, hai-hai EVM’. This reason why Karl Popper called the Leftist theory of political action unscientific. It is not open to test.

Don’t demonise, analyse

Let us now borrow from foreign secretary S Jaishankar and analyse and not demonise the results of the Assembly elections in UP.

1. The long list of welfare measures announced by the BJP-led central government seems to have resonated. It will take time to verify this since the media has not reported them. Last year, the media was humbled when Mamata Banerjee decimated the Left-Congress combine with underreported schemes further suppressed by a motivated media.

2. It is highly possible that vikas or development, the poll plank of Modi+Shah, has operated as an ‘empty signifier’ or ‘floating signifier’ – a breakthrough concept in semiotics. Put simply, it is an unfixed symbol to which users invest meanings of their choice. It is like the Joker in a card game. Any value can be assigned to it. It’s very likely that Modi+Shah and the electorate of UP have forged a meaning of vikas, which is different from what the word means to the capital-based media. The latter have either not investigated it or are too invested in certain positions to see it.

The phenomenon is not new, however. During the nation-wide stir led by Anna Hazare in 2011, it was impossible to mobilise the myriad and often conflicting interests without an unfixed symbol. Corruption was, as Mukul Kesavan had pointed out then, the empty signifier that managed to do so. If the flexibility of bhrastachar was successful yesterday, the fluidity of vikas seems to have succeeded today.

JNU research student and Left leader, Pratim Ghoshal, on the other hand, has evoked the ritual mantra of a defeated Left: “Development today has become the heart of the heartless world and the sigh of the oppressed as it has entwined in its enigma both the rich and the poor, while comfortably accommodating those in the middle.” It is high time that the “enigma” in the hinterland be studied and not derided, particularly by individuals who have university affiliations.

3. The first two points highlight, besides their principal arguments, a wide chasm between the residents of the metropolis and those of the hinterland. This disconnect is more cultural than geographical. It is between the Westernised conservatives of the city and the ‘glocal’ populations of the countryside. The former has little idea about the latter. The latter has begun to give a damn about the former, particularly in matters that have to do with the ballot machine. A repressed culture is on the return and it will challenge several foundations of European modernity normalised in India. Whatever the future of India is, it must be constructed responsibly and without legal leniency for the violent.

4. The UP result is a seal of approval to unleash what Alex de Tocqueville feared was the danger of democracy – “the tyranny of the majority”. There have been incidents of passionate rage on the streets that are more than stray but less than general. These include the brutal killing over beef in Dadri, the savage attack on an accused student leader in the capital, the communal assertion in Malda and underreported riots in Howrah. How stray or general these attacks are, is largely a matter of subjective perception. A media outlet has already indicted the UP result as the beginning of fascism reminiscent of Europe.

The trumpet of change in Uttar Pradesh is so loud that it has blown away Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati. The ‘TsuNamo’, as some folks in the media have innovated, has also resulted in despair in the ‘my name is red’ brigade in universities. This is particularly true after the Trinamool Congress hammered and sickled it again in West Bengal last year. Like Rahul Gandhi, the Red brigade has suffered yet another thud.

But grown-up comrades in universities, much like stubborn parrots, will continue to harp on the same old misgivings against the ‘rise of the Right’. It is symbolic of the mediocrity that their predecessors promoted. Bereft of scholarly wonder, they will answer and not question. They are unlikely to go beyond binaries of hero-villain, as my professor Avijit Pathak has suggested, and left at these crossroads, nobody is any wiser.