When the Indian Constitution was being born, its makers had resolved that all further politics would be done within its purview. BR Ambedkar said: “…we must give up the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods to achieve economic and social objectives, there was much justification for unconstitutional methods.
politics and a distinction
Political theorists distinguish between ordinary politics and extraordinary politics. Ordinary politics reproduces the established order. In exceptional politics, the sovereign, the people, change the fundamentals and reorganize the system. The establishment of a new order is considered the ‘end of politics’ unless it is challenged through rebellion. David Held uses the concept of ‘the end of politics’ to analyze Marxism. “The end of polity (or the end of the era of the state) meant a change of political life as it was known…,” with the establishment of communes. Extrapolating, the purpose of all politics is to end politics.
The founders not only refrained from civil disobedience, but also retained the tools of the imperial legal framework to enforce obedience by citizens – ranging from treason to defamation, of which prominent leaders against the current regime are now guilty. Not everyone agreed with the new constitutional arrangement; Right and left of the Indian political spectrum questioned its legitimacy from the beginning. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manifesto in 2009 stated that “the leaders of independent India … continued to work with the institutional framework created by the British”, which was at odds with India’s “civilizational consciousness”. Political mobilization continued outside the legally defined boundaries of what might be termed “between the boundaries of insurgency and institutionalized political activity”. ‘Worse than the British’ became a slur regularly hurled at the Congress regime by its opponents. Underground armed rebels, separatists and political rebels pushed the limits of the constitutional order. On the contrary, political agreements with various disgruntled elements also tampered with the original arrangement. The then Prime Minister AB Vajpayee had famously said that the solution to the Kashmir problem would be sought not within the limits of the Constitution but within the limits of humanity.
Three points of extraordinary politics are milestones in the journey of India’s current Hindutva order – the JP movement, the Ayodhya movement and the Anna Hazare movement, all confined mainly to the region above the Vindhyas. What is common among all three is that they mobilized the people to overthrow the constitutionally established order through rebellion and even violence. JP called it total revolution.
The 1971 election made Indira Gandhi and the Congress unbeatable through institutional mechanisms. The response was the Gujarat Navnirman Andolan that attacked legislators, followed with similar tactics in Bihar, and finally, JP called on the army to disobey the elected government. This culminated in the declaration of emergency and the suspension of democracy itself. In another, the Ayodhya movement, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar argued that the popular sovereign cannot be constrained by a law that is of his creation. The Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992. In the Anna movement, there was a demand for a new system to give short sentences to anyone suspected of corruption; The entire parliamentary model of democracy was criticized as illegitimate and devoid of popular approval.
In all these three phases of extraordinary politics in India, the Sangh Parivar was a common factor. In fact, it was sequential, one leading to the other, and peaking in 2014 in Hindutva’s electoral majority. The elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, said that India had finally freed itself from “1,200 years of slavery”. A new order was being born.
Contradiction of order
When the Order is reconstituted, the instruments of the previous regime are taken over rather than replaced. As was the case at the founding of the Republic, its transformation to a Hindutva order was soon followed by a redefinition of what is legitimate politics. The decades-long journey through various enactments of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is instructive. From 2019, individuals and not just organizations can be notified as ‘terrorists’. Mere association with an illegal organization makes a person liable regardless of the commission of any illegal act. The Supreme Court of India told the protesters at Shaheen Bagh (2019–20) that they should act within the ambit of the law. Any criticism of the government is portrayed as anti-national; Restrictions on freedom of expression are enforced for undisclosed national security reasons, and foreign links make any opinion questionable. Simultaneously, the Ayodhya rebellion has been legitimized as a sovereign act through retrospective judicial process.
If institutions and laws reproduce the established order, change often comes from the gray zone beyond them – from MK Gandhi to Rosa Parks, Nepal’s Maoists who were labeled “eco-terrorists” by the US legal system, change And the commandments are often conflicting sermons. Just as those in power use law and institutions, so can those who challenge them, but only to a limited extent. The real challenge can only come from popular mobilization, extraordinary politics.
If the Hindutva regime considers all politics against itself anti-national, it has a long history of undermining the political process. It is the quintessential culmination of neoliberalism which relegated politics to an inferior, unethical sphere of collective action. Decision-making had to be separated from the messy negotiations of representative democracy and public opinion, and new concepts were established. Questions of economy and development were considered to be beyond politics, and to be decided by experts unaccountable for ‘good governance’.
Civil society organizations were promoted as an alternative to political parties. This was partly an elite response to a deepening of the democratic process that produced subaltern parties and leaders that were not affirming institutional decorum. The United Progressive Alliance had an informal ‘core committee’ that became the super cabinet; The National Advisory Council became another body that operated outside the political system. The Congress outsources the deliberations outside the party.
Last year, after brainstorming on survival strategies, Congress announced a key idea – to mobilize civil society organisations. Indifference, if not contempt, towards the electoral process has now become a symbol of high moral standing in the Congress party. This erosion of the political was on display during the agitation against the farm bills in 2020-21 – the BJP condemned it as ‘political’; Its defenders said it was not political. The BJP regime has turned the civil society debate full circle, declaring it nothing less than a new “battlefront”.
In When Protest Becomes Crime (2019), Carolyn Terwindt coined the concept of ‘prosecutive narratives’, “which employ a context, the selection and interpretation of facts, and the choice of certain perpetrators.” For example, she points out, in 2000, Spain enacted a law that criminalized sympathy and glorification of ETA, which made regular politics of separatism illegal and prosecuted. Last year, the Jammu and Kashmir Police made a case of “narrative terrorism”. Essentially, the prosecutor has the ability to declare the limits of legitimate politics, as happened in the defamation case against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who was expelled from Parliament.
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The extra-ordinary politics of Hindutva has crushed the political field of action by neoliberalism. Hindutva is still in the process of consolidation. While it is using existing laws and institutions, for example, to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya, it has also been made clear that the assumption of the basic structure of the Constitution is invalid in the face of sovereign will. The next moment of extraordinary politics is just beyond the horizon – regardless of the outcome of the election in Karnataka.
varghese.g@thehindu.co.in