Indian Politics at Crossroads: New Dawn for a Modian Era?

Let us begin with a straight point. It is not very easy for any ordinary citizen to become prime minister, president or chancellor of even modern democratic nations. In such nations across the globe, including western democracies, there are racial, linguistic, gender and religious considerations behind selecting a political leader. These considerations work as unwritten codes of political conduct and eliminate the very basic democratic conjecture of equality before the law, because a leader has, by definition, to aspire to be(come) more than a common citizen. The influence of these considerations is also based on the act of image or cult building, in which individual identity is negated for communal/majoritarian identity. For example, one need to be aware that the United States has not had a female President so far and no Western European democracies have a black president or prime minister, except Ireland, where Leo Varadkar, a gay Irish-Indian doctor, was Prime Minister in 2017-2020 and is now the opposition leader. This reality shows the negation of individual identity over the preference of communal/majoritarian identity and is part of the practical side of global realpolitik.  

Similarly, Indian politics is no exception to this unwritten code of political conduct.  Provided the stratified social structure, linguistic politics and religious-caste sensitivities in Indian society are taken into consideration, the choice of prime minister of India has been decided by a variety of factors, mostly caste status and heritage of the Nehru/Gandhi clan. Though any Indian citizen with no criminal background can be considered to hold higher posts of Indian democracy, it is not always the case practically.  Similar to western democracies, a multiplicity of issues can problematize the criteria of an individual’s eligibility to be considered for the post of India’s prime minister. Though modern India is characterized and considered to be the direct progeny of an anti-colonial, secular freedom struggle that spanned almost two hundred years, the troubled socio-political history of the Indian sub-continent always invites considerations of social capital like religion, caste, gender and financial position into democratic practices. Further, though the nation turned into a democratic republic with Indians as leaders of the various political parties and the nation, this also shows that various forms of social hegemonies continue to exert serious influence on Indian politics. As Dr. Ambedkar has rightly pointed out, India’s political leadership used to indicate the message that political freedom without social freedom is impossible. This is evident as the majority of Indian prime ministers hailed from upper middle-class and upper-class elite backgrounds.

The Elite Cult

Hero cult is typical of Bollywood, the Indian Hindi film industry and also its various regional manifestations. There are a number of stereotyped qualities for a hero:  A hero should be tall and fair skinned, a maestro of musical talents, and able to beat up to 50 men in one go.  This cult of a hero is very influential in Indian politics as well.  Since 1930 until his death in 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian National Congress and then prime minister of India for almost seventeen long years, had been the most potent figure of Indian politics. The Indian National Congress could not think of replacing Nehru. Moreover, Nehru was hailed both as the architect of modern India and the champion of South Asian authority. What is termed as Nehruvian policies used to hold a powerful sway over Indian politics until the 1990s. At the height of Nehru’s power, blind followers of Nehru, such as UN Dhebar, went to the extent of eulogising that India cannot move on without Nehru’s presence in Indian politics, reflected in the term ‘Nehruvian’, which denotes something heroic, a political hegemony of one man’s unquestioned authority over the world’s largest democracy. The term Nehruvian literally means ‘the period of Nehru or related to Nehru’, but in actuality it shows the power politics associated with the cult of an individual. This personality cult means that there is a whole plethora of blind followers who not only praise the leader but bully his opponents.  The influence of Nehru in Indian politics is further indicated by Indian phrases such as Nehruvian secularism, Nehruvian socialism, Nehruvian diplomacy, Nehruvian planning, which are widely used in regular political debates and in official policies.  While the term’ Nehruvian’ has been and is still hailed as a progressive indicator of Indian politics, the disastrous impact of the cult of ‘Nehruvian’ is that it forgets the basic idea that postcolonial India is a democracy in which Nehru led the government, while the term ‘Nehruvian’ generates feelings that Nehru was a king who ruled his Indian empire.

Not only that, the socio-cultural factors that established such a cult have also been largely unreflected While Nehru’s commitment towards anti-colonialism and socialist secular values have to be recognized, if we ask what was Nehru’s most important criterion to become leader of the Indian National Congress and later Prime Minister, one is not astonished to find that Nehru’s family background, caste position and western education had been milestones in making a prime minister out of a Kashmiri Brahmin boy. Delving into the biographical side of Nehru’s family, one finds that born into the upper caste and elite Brahmin family, as the son of a wealthy lawyer, Nehru had always been bestowed the privilege of tasting the best possible things in the world. He never experienced poverty, but leisure and lavishness. Nehru never faced slavery, though he was imprisoned for long times, but masterhood and authority were his companions. Motilal Nehru, the powerful father figure, was always there to buy Jawaharlal Nehru’s achievements, including the rise to prominence in the Indian National Congress.   

Post Nehru Realities

Nehru was not an exception in Indian politics, as many national and state-level leaders of Indian nationalism had an elite background and most of them utilised their social and cultural capital to become rulers at various levels in India.  Following Nehru as Indian Prime Ministers, we see his daughter, Indira Gandhi, also bestowed with the best tastes of life. She lived in Teen Murti Bhavan, the prime minister’s residence, was trained by her father in politics, and never experienced the life of an ordinary Indian. In the midst of her authority and personality cult, she has been hailed by her colleagues as ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’. No doubt, these trends show the degeneration of Indian democracy. Indira was followed by her elder son Rajiv Gandhi, an Air India pilot by profession and a western-educated elite man with a foreign wife, who in his early forties was fated to step in. Of course there are exceptions to this elite politics. Morarji Desai, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Charan Singh, Chandra Sekhar and H D Deva Gowda were Indian prime ministers coming from more ordinary social backgrounds. However, their hold on power was also far less for various reasons.  

Laymen’s Rise

In this context, the rise to power of Narendra Modi as the prime minister of India since 2014 indicates a sharp deviation from the earlier regularities of Indian politics.  Mr. Modi is coming from a lower caste and ordinary background, which indicates that people of lower origins can also be successful rulers if the key of Indian politics is handed over to such laymen. This does not mean that Mr. Modi is a direct incumbent to the throne of Indian politics, or that he was selected because he belonged to an ordinary social background. On the contrary, Mr. Modi had been in politics for many years before becoming India’s Prime Minister in 2014. He was in power since 2001 as the Chief Minister of Gujarat and has been controversial in exercising his ministerial power at certain occasions. But even then, the fact that he got an opportunity to lead the world’s largest democracy is not a small factor. As an individual, Mr. Modi does not have a financially rich family background nor socio-culturally elite parentage. Rather, his family background and parental status show that he experienced an ordinary Indian life including poverty, marginalization and negative impacts of social hierarchy, which probably indicates that he had experienced caste discrimination earlier in his life, though he is not a Dalit.

The rise to power of leaders like Mr. Modi seems to indicate that Indian politics is moving away from its elitist circles, where family background, social position and caste status decide a person’s eligibility for higher office. He may not be successful in creating a ‘Modian Era’ as seen in the case of Nehru. But Mr. Modi represents a revolution of the laymen, showing that postcolonial Indian democracy is not about purity of race, semen or caste. In this, the persona of the current Prime Minister of India is a significant reflection, one could almost say, a mirror image, of recent re-assessments of the position of the Indian Constitution as the cornerstone of the nation. As the historian Rohit De, who teaches at Yale University, is now showing in A People’s Constitution. The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), this Constitution may have been made by elite men, but its focus is the common Indian as a rights-holding citizen. As is increasingly evident to those who are willing to leave the magic circles of elite acclaim of heroic leader figures and their products, breaking new methodological ground is possible and much-needed, as De (p. 4) claims, ‘by studying the Constitution through the daily interpretive acts of ordinary people as well as judges and state officials’. The fact that India’s postcolonial democracy has become attuned to the non-elitist leadership style of someone like Narendra Modi has, thus, deeper meanings and implications than just the traditional earlier privilege, elitism and somewhat haughty ‘modernity’ that still left most Indians feeling that they did not fully belong to this nation of now almost 1.4 billion people. Anyone paagal enough to put themselves forward to lead this nation has different agenda than earlier generations of India’s leaders. In that sense, too, the stressful but relentless democratisation of the Indian Constitution that De’s new book analyses is matched by the heavy labouring of the current leadership, which cannot rely on inherited privilege, but has to justify its claims to electoral acceptance by various kinds of action that make India the unique democracy that it has now become in the global world.

Vineeth Mathoor
Vineeth Mathoor
Vineeth Mathoor teaches at the Research Department of History, N.S.S. Hindu College, Kerala, India. He is an Assistant Editor of South Asia Research published by Sage International.