Doing It ‘Wrong’: What If BJP Is Left Wing And Congress Is Right Wing?

Doing It ‘Wrong’: What If BJP Is Left Wing And Congress Is Right Wing?

Almost everyone seems to know how to fit Indian politics into the usual left-right binary. The BJP is the right-wing party, dominated by religious conservatives. Its worldview is rooted in tradition. Its supposed goal is Hindu Rashtra. The Congress is the liberal, socialist, and secular alternative. No wonder then that the Congress gets so much support from global media outlets, the intellectual class in foreign universities, and so on, and the people back home who also have a global outlook. You know, the educated folks in the big cities.

But wait a second, because we know we have already gone wrong. How is a BJP stronghold like Bengaluru supposed to be the most conservative part of Karnataka? Even within the city, look at the tech hub in Bengaluru South. The Congress has not won this Lok Sabha seat since 1989. In India, the BJP dominates the cities. Even in Kerala, where the BJP usually struggles to open its account, they just got their mayor in the capital city of Thiruvananthapuram. Also, the higher the level of education, the more likely the support for BJP. This seems upside down, when you look at global trends, such as in the United States, or almost any other Western country.

So what is happening? What if we changed some labels and tried a completely new understanding of our political system, and see if that explains things better? Like why do the urban, educated classes vote for BJP? Why is Congress stronger in villages? Who really is a conservative and what is a liberal? What is nationalism? And where do minorities fit into this?

Let us see if we can explain why the BJP is not family-run, but the Congress has to be. Not just the Congress, but almost all its partners in the so-called INDIA bloc, from the RJD to the DMK, with the sole exception of the Communists. We will explain that too. In fact, the Communists and BJP could be closer than we think, if you look deeply at historical processes, that is. And why does the year 1848 matter so much? Let's get curious, and perhaps a bit naughty.Politics is a creation of the modern age. In the old days, there was no such thing as politics, because there was no need for it. Almost everyone lived, worked, and married within their own little village community, or just around it. Each group had its own traditions, which played the role of laws. This made sense too. Without modern communication, how would a centralised government understand the needs of people a 1,000 miles away? If they made a decision, how would it be implemented? How would people living far away from the capital even know about it?And so, all we had was nobles with some loose authority over village chiefs. This was the structure of empires of the past. The nobles supported the king, and the king kept the privileges of the nobles in place. The most common form of transfer of power was from father to son. This is the basic structure of the Congress party today, and almost all its partners in the INDIA bloc: a collection of ruling families, each from one caste or language group. Each ruling family gets its power from smaller, more local ruling families at the district, block, or panchayat level. The family structure is the core of these parties.

You will notice what is missing here: an ideology. What is the ideology of the Congress party? At various times, it has tried to be hardcore socialist, free-market reformist, or a party of social justice. But the real answer is that the Congress has no ideology. This is not a criticism, but a mere explanation why. A ruling family has no ideology. Its only aim is to keep the power and privileges of the nobles in place. Otherwise, the nobles would revolt against them and replace the ruling family. If the nobles didn't do that, they would themselves face revolt from the local chiefs below them.

We have often heard that the Congress would fall apart if the Nehru-Gandhis were not at the helm. Now we really understand why.

The lack of ideology is also why the INDIA bloc is together, despite so many obvious contradictions. A caste-based regional party in the Hindi heartland that wants a special package for their state? They can ally with Congress. How about a regional party that claims taxes from the south are being siphoned off to the Hindi heartland? Also an ally of Congress. Or a regional party in, say, Bengal known for making insulting remarks against Hindi-speaking migrant workers? Still an ally of Congress. Even the state units of the Congress, and each leader in each state, don't see eye to eye. It doesn't matter, because the only point of agreement is that all of them recognise the Nehru-Gandhi family crown. As long as each group stays in their own turf, the arrangement works.

A city inherently challenges this arrangement. A city draws in people from all sorts of backgrounds. These people now have to live together, and work together. Consider someone who migrates from Bihar to, say, Mumbai or Bangalore for a job, whether as a labourer or an engineer. In the big city, the old loyalty to a village leader, or caste or sub-caste leader, no longer makes sense. In the old days, the only people who migrated over such long distances and had to work with all kinds of people were traders. And remember the most traditional support base for BJP? The trading communities, the Marwaris, the Sindhis, and so on.

The opposition to the Nehru-Gandhi monarchy comes from the BJP. The BJP is the classic nationalist party. But what exactly is nationalism? In the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, Europe was going through the same processes as India today: rapid urbanisation, which began to break down the old feudal system. People challenged the rights of kings. Parliaments were created across the continent. The main political battle was now between those who believed in kings, and those who didn't. Those who wanted to keep the king were the conservatives, also called the right wing. Those who wanted to get rid of the monarchy were the liberals, or the left wing. The terms “left wing" and “right wing" originally come from the way the French National Assembly was arranged after the revolution. The monarchists sat on the right. Those who opposed the monarchy sat on the left.

In the Indian political context, this should make the Congress the conservative right wing. Meanwhile, the BJP, with its anti-monarchy instincts, should be considered the left, or at least the liberals. Sounds like heresy today. But the facts of history are absolutely clear.

Almost equally by instinct, those who were against the monarchy were also nationalist, because they had to be. You see, a king can rule over all kinds of people. For example, the Habsburg empire of central Europe ruled over Austrians, Hungarians, many northern Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and more. The German-speaking kings of Prussia ruled over many Polish and Ukrainians, and so did the Tsar of Russia. The king does not care as long as they all pay taxes to him. But without a king, how do you keep a country together? How do you even define a country? The obvious answer was nationalism.

This is why the year 1848 matters. In this remarkable year, a wave of revolutions rocked the empires that ruled Europe, whether French, German, Austrian, or the Italian states. Each group of people, whether Austrian, Hungarian, German, Czech, Polish, or Romanian, wanted their own national parliament. Even the Pope himself was ousted from the Vatican for a while, and a republic was established.

But nationalism creates problems too, specifically that of “minorities". The Danish nationalists, for instance, wanted the Germans out of the area of Schleswig, which they saw as an integral part of Denmark. The German nationalists wanted the Danish out of what they saw as their province of Holstein. The Czechs wanted the German minority out of their lands. The Ukrainians were upset with their Polish landlords. The Hungarians wanted their own national parliament, but also their Czech and Romanian minorities to either leave, or accept the Hungarian language and culture.

So what happens when the power of monarchy is challenged? The minorities begin to worry about their place in what comes next. That is essentially what you see in India even today. The minorities tend to vote almost as a bloc for the Nehru-Gandhi family and all the ruling families that are allied to them.

In a strange twist of history, and due to some clever subversion, we tend to think of nationalism today as “right wing". But the Communists, who are deeply anti-monarchy, have always been the best nationalists of all. Marx and Engels were swept up by the enthusiasm of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. But when the 1848 revolution failed to topple the monarchy in Berlin, Engels blamed the minorities for it. Engels even coined a term for minorities, the “Volkerabfalle", which literally means “human garbage". A disappointed Engels wrote that minorities were permanent enemies of the revolution, leftover fragments of history as he called them, and would have to be wiped out. The parallels with Hitler's idea of wiping out the “untermenschen", or the so-called inferior races, are obvious.

Nevertheless, in the interwar years, nationalism, even with all its problems, was seen by almost everyone as the path to world peace. The great multi-ethnic empires of Europe used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs, the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. After defeat in the First World War, all three empires were broken up. And each “nationality" was given its own country: Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, all. This principle of national self-determination lay at the heart of the famous “Fourteen Points" of US President Woodrow Wilson given in 1918, which shaped the world after the great war.

This was also the real context in which the Hindu nationalists talked about their goal of a Hindu nation in the 1920s and 1930s. People such as Golwalkar or Savarkar. Because the BJP looks to them for inspiration, leftist historians have found it convenient to take their writings out of context for their age, and created a kind of blood libel that connects the BJP to Nazism.

As a matter of fact, the only real successor to Hitler's extreme nationalism are the leftists themselves. After the Second World War, the Communists flushed out minorities all across Europe. The Poles from Ukraine, the Ukrainians from Poland, the Italians from Croatia, the Romanians from Hungary, the Turks from Bulgaria. As late as 1968, Communist Poland expelled its last remaining Jews. In Asia, the Communists in Vietnam flushed out the ethnic Chinese, and so on. Even today, Communist countries such as China, Vietnam, and the former Soviet bloc countries are the least diverse of all.

The point of all this is to realise that India is at a different stage in its politics than what we see in the West. It makes no sense therefore to try and connect our politics to the current left-right binary as it stands today in America or Europe. As India goes from rural to urban, our politics becomes more similar to the transitions that hit Europe in the 19th century.

So on the one hand, we have the conservative, right-wing Congress, which is structured more like a hereditary monarchy with the Nehru-Gandhis at the helm. Its support base is in villages, where the old feudal structures still remain. Unlike what many people believe, the Congress is not secular. That would mean a total separation of the state from religion. Instead, the Congress is pluralistic. It appeases every group in its own local area, every caste, every language, both Hindu conservatives and Muslim conservatives. The Congress used to be the party of Hindu conservatives. In fact, most social justice movements in the 1980s and 1990s were against the stifling caste structure of the Congress. As long as everyone stays in their little corner and people don't mix, the Congress model works. This would explain almost no social progress in the first four decades of Congress rule until 1991.

But now a new urban educated class is rising in cities. Their politics is liberal and nationalist, represented by the BJP. And most importantly, their politics is ideological. For the moment, the minorities fear this ideological nationalism, bound by what we might call the laws of history. The onus is on the BJP to address these fears. The onus is on the Congress to manage its decline as the old feudal India withers away.

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For the moment, the BJP owns all the ideological bases. All ideas such as nationalism, free markets, and even welfare socialism are expressed through the BJP. But what lies ahead? Will modern India see the rise of not one but two ideological parties, as it happens in other democracies around the world? Or maybe India will chart its own unique course. Only time will tell.

Abhishek Banerjee (@AbhishBanerj) is an author and columnist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.

Source: News18
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