May 18, 2014, 8:07 pm IST Santosh Desai in City City Bang Bang | India, Politics

A cultural revenge?
Democracy has spoken again, this time with a new accent. If in its early days, democracy in India
principally represented the views of the liberal educated elite, and in the post-Mandal era, opened up its
portals to a completely new, hitherto under-represented class, in the coming of Narendra Modi in 2014,
what we see is the triumphant emergence of yet another class, that so far lay largely unnoticed in the
folds of the Great Indian Middle Class. While Modis appeal has clearly transcended traditional electoral
segments arrayed along the lines of caste and class, his core support base comes from a class that has
been described as the urban non-English speaking aspiration-seeking section of society that is impatient
to move on in life.
There is truth in this description but it is not sharp enough. While English as a language has certainly
built class barriers in India, many core Modi supporters are comfortable enough in the language; indeed
many are highly educated, work in international environments and deal with cutting edge technology.
The divide is a deeper cultural one and one that has informed many other debates of our times. The
operative fault line here is between those described as liberals and those that see themselves as the
cultural mainstream and what follows is an attempt to characterise the worldview of this section in non-
judgmental terms, so as to be able to understand it fully.
To those outside this definition, the liberal worldview stands for a particular form of self-loathing that
springs from a desire to challenge and even dismantle what are seen to be the natural building blocks
of identity gender, class, caste, region and religion. Each of these sources of identity is subject to
rigorous examination, and its naturalness distrusted. The focus is on differences and the attempt is to
erase these so as to level the playing field. Liberal concerns tend to flow margin-inwards- how are
minorities treated, how does one address discrimination by gender, caste and sexual orientation and so
on. Issues of equity, justice and discrimination take precedence over others.
Using this framework, the liberal worldview has rendered the cultural mainstream not only deeply
uncomfortable but virtually illegitimate. Every natural instinct of this class is subject to being labelled
regressive, communal or chauvinistic. The liberal viewpoint accords to itself an implicit moral superiority
which it then deployed to pass judgement on the world around it. The liberal hunt for injustice and
discrimination is relentless and unsparing, even of itself and this creates an atmosphere of deep
discontent given the fact that injustice and discrimination abound in the country. The standards
employed are rigorous, even world class and span areas like the environment, sexual orientation, laws
of all kinds, affirmative action based on caste, gender injustice, among others. For the cultural
mainstream, these issues are seen as marginal, a culturally alien device that the liberal worldview uses
to beat them into moral submission.
By placing issues related to equity and discrimination at the heart of its professed concerns, an entire
political industry that thrives on creating pockets of influence based on patronage has been created. The
political establishment is transparently self-serving while apparently looking after the interests of the
marginalised. Imported idealism becomes a vehicle for local cynicism; the result is a political system that
mouths platitudes while serving itself. To the cultural mainstream, the Nehru-Gandhi family has become
a symbol of this political culture of creating differences and then feeding them opportunistically so as
extract power for itself.
The politics spawned by Nehruvian liberalism has evoked a simmering sense of rage. For some time
now, the self-described cultural mainstream has been seething at what they see as the contemptuous
rejection of their way of life and their ideals by a group that deals in ideas that have no natural cultural
resonance with the Indian reality. The fault line is essentially a cultural one democracy has been seen
as a vehicle that has served to impose a new set of ideals with an alien vocabulary on a passive majority.
The implicit mental model that is imagined in the new India promised by this new regime is one of
benign majoritarianism, where the majoritarian is imagined not merely in terms of religion but in all
aspects of reality as it exists. It is an emphatic vote for maintaining the essential structure of reality as it
exists and providing propulsion from that starting point rather than focus on differences at the margin.
The nation as a formulation the notion of India First is shorthand for existing reality with its
structure and way of life intact. In truth, Narendra Modi promises progress much more than change,
although that may not be immediately apparent. The constituency he represents is comfortable with
social continuity and what it sees as organic evolutionary change. The right-wing fringe might think
differently, but the core Modi supporter usually has no problem with social evolution and change as
long as it is not structurally disruptive.
It is easy to think of the new regime in terms of Modis persona but as powerful a figure as he is in
todays political reality, he represents a more fundamental change. Narendra Modi has unified the
cultural mainstream of India electorally. It is as if India is beginning again, this time driven by ideals of
the dominant cultural mainstream. Potentially, this changes everything, and causes hope and dread of
equal intensity. At this time, without question it is hope that dominates for that is the sentiment of the
majority. Of course, the majority never sees itself as merely that, it always equates itself with the whole
and accords to itself an air of engaging reasonableness. Armed with that self-belief, it usually has little
interest in carping voices of dissent or of issues of those at the margin. Perhaps better days do lie ahead,
as the Modi campaign promises, but whether that includes everyone is something that time will tell.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.