Indian liberals' 1989 moment
1989 AS A CAUTIONARY TALE
- Towards a Congress-*mukt *pluralism?Mukul Kesavan
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140605/jsp/opinion/story_18477811.jsp#.U5QSEPmSw1o

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, there existed in Western
Europe and most other parts of the world, a Marxist intellectual culture
independent of (and vehemently critical of) Soviet-style socialism. Paris
and Frankfurt nurtured Marxist (or marxisant) intellectuals who thought the
Soviet Union was a political abomination, whose socialist aspirations and
prescriptions shared nothing with the reality of ‘actually existing
socialism’.

A remarkable generation of British historians and public intellectuals like
Christopher Hill, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, Rodney Hilton and E.J.
Hobsbawm both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Marx and affirmed a
commitment to a broadly socialist politics. In 1980, Perry Anderson, one of
the founders of the *New Left Review*and Verso, could publish *Arguments
Within English Marxism*, a book-length evaluation of the work of E.P.
Thompson, framed as a fraternal conversation between fellow Marxists.

If you had suggested to Anderson or Thompson in 1980 that their politics
and their intellectual universe were in some way dependent on the life of
the Soviet State and the ‘actually existing socialism’ that it claimed to
champion, they wouldn’t have believed you. After Hungary and 1956, their
socialist practice had been built around an opposition to the Stalinist
socialism of Iron Curtain countries. They would have read the collapse of
the Stalinist State system as a vindication of their intellectual
evolution, not as the loss of an ideological anchor.

But the truth is that the disintegration of the Soviet Union did trigger
the collapse of anything that could be described as a Marxist or socialist
political culture in both Europe and most other parts of the world.
Individuals remained socialist in their intellectual and political
commitments, but the buoyancy that the sense of being part of a broad
political current brings was gone.

A quarter of a century on, Indians committed to a pluralist politics who
see the majoritarian nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a threat
to the idea of an inclusive republic, should ask themselves if 2014 is
their 1989 moment and if there are lessons to be learnt that might avert
the marginalization of their political and intellectual commitments.

If the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 weaned Western European
socialists off their dependence on the Soviet Union and their default
tendency to treat ‘actually existing socialism’ as the rock on which to
build a better world, the 1984 pogrom in Delhi was the event that
demonstrated to liberal and secular Indians that the Congress that Indira
Gandhi built had no claims at all on the pluralist values that had
constituted the republic.

In the three decades after that monstrous pogrom organized by the Congress,
socialists, liberals, pluralists, call them what you like, raged against
the Congress in print, voted against it in elections, savaged its
dynasticism and condemned it for betraying the values of its great
predecessor, the Indian National Congress of blessed anti-colonial memory.

The politics of the *bien pensant* were constituted, first, by their
understanding of the Congress as a cautionary tale and, second, by their
recognition that the BJP was the largest menace to the peace of a pluralist
republic. We looked for alternatives — the Mandalist politics of the Yadav
parties, the Bahujan Samaj Party’s Phule-esque attempt to build an
inclusive plebeian coalition, the many jerry-built Third Front alternatives
that came and went, a Left that lived in its politburo — but nothing
politically plausible at a pan-Indian level emerged.

But whether we acknowledged it or not, the mere existence of the Congress
as an alternative to the BJP rescued us from the sense of crisis induced by
the razing of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the savage political violence it
encouraged that climaxed in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. I can remember the
enormous relief I felt in 2004 when the Congress pipped the BJP to the post
in the general elections. Had Vajpayee won that election on the scale that
the India-Shining-wallahs had predicted, *desi* liberals would have had to
confront the prospect of marginality a decade earlier. As it was, if the
Nineties and the turn-of- the-century belonged to the BJP, the Noughties
belonged to the Congress.

Manmohan Singh’s decade is interesting because it illustrates how important
the existence of a United Progressive Alliance government was to liberals.
Even those who saw the Congress as a political dead-end, were comforted by
the thought that the government was run by a party that paid lip service to
the liberal and pluralist ideas they affirmed. The knowledge that the
Congress was the party of Old Corruption, that it was capable of being
opportunistically communal when it suited its purpose, that it was a
grotesque dynastic excrescence in a republican country, was offset by the
undeniable fact that it wasn’t the BJP.

This is not to suggest that using the UPA to enact liberal or welfarist
policies or preferring it to the BJP was wrong or culpable. It wasn’t. But
it is to suggest that in the ten long years of the Manmohan Singh
interregnum, *desi* liberals, consciously or in a taken-for-granted way,
got used to working with the notion of an ‘actually existing secularism’.
Even those on the ideological Left were happy to work with the Congress’s
High Command apparatus and its more kosher apparatchiks to influence this
policy or that.

Now that the Congress is reduced to a leaderless rump in Parliament with no
real prospect of revival, we have to reckon with the extent to which the
hazy sense of a ‘secular’ establishment underwrote our existence. All of us
believe that we come by our intellectual convictions individually, that
they are hard won. And we do, and they are, but it would be unwise, in this
politically inhospitable moment, to underestimate the extent to which the
common sense of the republic sustained our beliefs.

This is the first decisive political victory for the majoritarian Right and
it’s reasonable to believe that the republic’s ‘common sense’ will shift
rightwards. Liberals, pluralists, leftists have never before experienced a
world where an explicitly *Hindutvavadi*leadership can claim a popular
mandate, with all the legitimacy that this confers. It is a world whose
institutions are already reconfiguring themselves to embrace the new
*Zeitgeist*.

Indian liberals (which I use as shorthand for the country’s pluralists and
secularists and social democrats and leftists) mustn’t repeat the mistake
that the independent Left made in 1989, which was to assume that its
intellectual positions were sustainable because they were self-evidently
virtuous and deeply felt. Without reckoning with the new reality of a
public world re-oriented to the Right, without accounting for how much
harder we will have to work to make our case, without learning from the
mistakes we made while using the Congress, wittingly or otherwise, as a
crutch, we might become rare and exotic orchids in a political landscape
whose ecology has been radically changed.

We could make a start by not rounding on every liberal who thinks aloud
about why things went wrong. When beleaguered by the enemy, it’s useful not
to start attacking your friends. We could also stop looking for
sociological succour. It’s one thing to factor in the relevance of caste or
community to Indian politics and its political arithmetic; it’s quite
another to assume that adding up the fractions is a substitute for a
pan-Indian political ideology.

For some considerable time India’s *bien pensants* have subcontracted the
political work necessary to sustain a secular, pluralist culture out to
‘other people’ who live in the Great Indian Hinterland. Now that Mr Modi
has done us the unexpected favour of demolishing the convenient props that
sustained this secularism-at-one-remove, we need to think about how we can
contribute to creating a Congress*-mukt* pluralism. The Aam Aadmi Party,
whether it falls apart or forges on, has in its brief career, shown us the
political potential of an inclusive populism. For this, if nothing else, we
are all in its debt.