'Narendra Modi is swallowing the Congress'

Permissive communalism, as represented by the Sachar Committee report, cannot become the basis to counter the threat of majoritarianism, says D L Sheth.

Edited excerpts:

With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party on the back of a consolidated Hindu vote, what are the challenges to secularism?

There has been a big change, which nobody can deny. The instrumentality of this change is Narendra Modi, but to say that he is the face of the change will also be wrong. For the change is basic and far too long term. There has been a basic structural change of the Indian electorate. There has always been a kind of silent majority or electoral majority, which generally had certain stability to its composition. This stability gave the Congress a long run and constituted of minorities, the Dalits, the tribals, illiterate or semi-illiterate.

Small influential elite that comprised corporates and the upper middle class super-ordinated this whole structure and was the beneficiary class of the Congress after Jawaharlal Nehru. It was this beneficiary class that embraced, eventually, a Congress idea of secularism, which is the post-Nehruvian idea. The Congress idea of secularism that it holds today is what I call permissive communalism. It is treating all religious communities equal and giving them an equal communalising opportunity, which is easily garnered electorally for mandate and majority.

The beneficiary class, who are also the secularists and the left, accepted this changed idea of secularism without examining it. But this electoral structure became volatile. This is when the BJP built itself consistently. From a primarily urban party, it acquired a broader base through the Hindutva movement in the 1990s, and later garnered support of the educated urban and rural middle class. However, this urban middle class also voted for the Congress in 2009 because of the economic promise.

I think Hindutva as an ideology does not appeal to most Hindus. Otherwise, they would have voted for the BJP, and the party wouldn't need a pre-poll alliance of two dozen parties. It might be a Hindu consolidation but I would distinguish it from it being a vote for Hindutva. Majority of Hindus, if they get dissatisfied, would vote otherwise. There is a Hindu consolidation. But it is not ideological.

Isn't there a threat of majoritarianism?

There is a contradiction between ideological political Hindutva and development, which lies in the fact that people who support Modi today for development do not want instability, they do not want pangas (trouble). The moment there is any mess, they are against it. In 2004, the BJP lost because Hindus did not vote for them. What happened in Gujarat in 2002 lost a lot of Hindu votes. However, those who purvey the politics of minorityism do not want to listen to all this. They are the greatest polariser.

But recent slogans like love jihad and pink revolution do indicate that the radical elements are trying to dominate the discourse.

This will be counterproductive to their idea of garnering or consolidating the Hindu vote. This might be Hindu consolidation but also a vote for development and aspiration. A new majority has been created, which Modi has tapped. It is basically of younger people who were not politicised until recently as much they are today, in terms of voting if not other things, and consists of people who are educated primary school plus. This is a large block of electorate. Whoever taps the block will get the mandate. Modi and the BJP have tapped that block. These people are not enamoured or ideologically enthralled by Hindu Rashtra. They are more enthralled by economic opportunities, of freedom and openness of life. The knickers are not going to attract them at all, whatever you do.

Could democracy face a challenge, just as it did in the 1970s, when the Indira Gandhi government couldn't deliver?

It can be more extreme also. Just as majoritarianism cannot work, minorityism cannot work against majority. You cannot have anti-majority secularism in this country. Majority of Hindus today are not communal but they are increasingly becoming communal. So, if reaction politics grows you may find, as it happens in many places, more extreme reaction, where people forget about development, and this threat to Hinduism kind of discourse takes place. But I don't think it will.

What about the Congress. Can it not revive?

The Congress is not defeated. It is decimated. It is not like the earlier defeats, like 1989 or 1977, when Maharashtra and the southern states were with the party. I think the Congress is being swallowed by Modi. Modi is re-organising its pantheon and ensuring stability, even accommodating Indira Gandhi and Nehru "chacha" to Mahatma Gandhi. This is how the Congress used to swallow parties in the past. The only thing that can stick in the throat is anti-minorityism and love jihad kind of movements getting a hold, which I don't see happening; a kind of major Hindutva lobby, which I don't see happening because the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh itself is changing. Modi has a record of keeping the extreme right wing in check in Gujarat. Whether he is able to do so now is an open question.

Are there any lessons that the opposition can draw from the Bihar by-polls? Or are such kinds of caste alliances not sustainable?

They are not sustainable because the basic thing has changed. It will not work if caste politics is not penetrated by the politics of youth, where the electorate is largely illiterate. If these variables are not there then caste politics can give the BJP a run for its money, like we saw in the Bihar by-polls with Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad and the Congress combination. But I think the change is going to assert itself in this round in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In Uttar Pradesh, the Hindu vote is consolidated in the name of development. However, if they keep saying they do not want Muslim vote, if they carry this into governance, this would lead to disaster.

How can minority rights be protected?

All democracies are majority-oriented, and cultural majorities like to consolidate into political majorities, but modern liberal democratic state should always fob that off by conceding to minority rights that are cultural, like worship, but not economic, because such privileges would only go to the upper rungs. So, we have to reinvent in a different way the policy of reservations, to make it broader in terms of making opportunities available to backward and poor of all communities.

We need a public discourse based on genuine secularism, not permissive communalism as reflected in the Sachar Committee report or the Rangnath Mishra Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, or majoritarianism. Minorities will always be discriminated. We need mechanisms to check that. Our mechanisms are not sufficient. For example, we do not have something like the "race commission". We don't have individuals, we only have groups. But discrimination is done at an individual level, this is how minority rights should be articulated and politically defended, both cultural and economic rights. We have to move from a democracy of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isai (Christians), to one for all citizens of India.

Much will depend on how matters proceed and whether Hindu consolidation also becomes Hindutva consolidation.

D L Sheth, Honorary Senior Fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Study of Developing Societies, is one of India's foremost political scientists.