Calm down please: From Maharashtra to Bihar, a politics of apocalypse

Indian Express

18 hours ago

Dear Express reader,
In the last few days, the news from two states, otherwise positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum — Maharashtra ranks among India's most industrialised states, while Bihar remains one of the least developed — has sounded similarly dire.
In Maharashtra, amid incidents of violence on the language issue, after a government circular on Hindi in schools appears to have created space for the estranged Sena cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray to re-unite to be 'saviours' of the supposedly re-endangered 'Marathi Manoos', the Devendra Fadnavis dispensation has passed a law that paints an alarmist picture of a state overrun by 'urban Naxals'.
The Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill uses cloudy language and extra-large definitions as it purports to, as CM Fadnavis said in the Assembly, rescue the state's youth from those 'provoking people for armed revolt to demolish democracy, Parliament and institutions'. It is in line, arguably, with Fadnavis's earlier remarks on the election in Maharashtra: It was a contest, he said, not between parties but between the 'forces of nationalism' and 'forces of anarchy'.
In Bihar, the Election Commission's exercise for updating and cleaning up electoral rolls, the Special Intensive Revision, which in a dramatic departure from the past, casts the onus on large swathes of undocumented voters to prove their citizenship, has sparked widespread fears of disenfranchisement. At the same time, a spate of incidents of murder in the state have revived 'law and order' concerns, at least among the politicians, including one prominent BJP ally.
Whether or not Bihar sees a revival of the nasty and brutish motif of 'jungle raj' — this time with a role reversal, with the RJD using it to hit back at the ruling BJP-JD(U) — ahead of a crucial election, the ground is fertile for an apocalyptic clamour to rule the airwaves. This can only be bad news for a state that desperately needs a sober search for answers for the way forward. For all its several accomplishments, Bihar's turnaround story, scripted and steered by Nitish Kumar, has hit a long plateau, and Nitish himself is a waning presence.
What is common to Maharashtra and Bihar is an apocalyptic politics that makes fear its currency, and in which complex challenges are presented with simple solutions. These feature zero-games and us-versus-them scenarios which demonise the opponent and create conditions that are ripe for 'saviours', draconian laws and the strong-armed state. The rhetoric of apocalypse is a conversation cul-de-sac, a dead-end for debate.
In Maharashtra, therefore, the Thackerays raising the pitch on the language issue and the Fadnavis government arming itself with wider powers to blur crucial distinctions between terrorists, Naxalites and 'urban Naxals', threatens civil liberties, even as it narrows the possibilities of a policy and politics that aims at re-energising growth momentum in the state. In Bihar, the costs of apocalyptic politics are even more dispiriting. The return of 'law and order' as an issue combined with anxieties of disenfranchisement could make the upcoming election more about pessimism, and less about hope, in a state that lags a long distance behind Maharashtra on development parameters.
But it's not just the politics of Maharashtra and Bihar. A politics that trades on spectres and scenarios of the end of the world as we know it, and fantasies of rebuilding on a blank slate, no matter what it takes, is in fashion.
The Narendra Modi-led BJP at the Centre, as much as it taps into the aspirations of a changing electorate, has also excelled at telling stories of a fall and rise.
Read between the lines, and in its telling, any attempt to change requires the destruction of the old order. The old order, the Congress-Left 'eco-system', must be felled and flattened, and New India will rise from the ashes of the old. It will be a country that is radically rearranged and reconstituted, with a grand temple in Ayodhya, without Article 370, with One Election, One Language, One Civil Code (and One Party and One Leader). The fantasy of total destruction and erasure of the old is intrinsic to the BJP's version of apocalyptic politics, and its vision of the new.
The politics of Modi's main challenger, Rahul Gandhi, is also apocalyptic, but a coherent vision of the new utopia seems to be missing from it. That is one reason why his war cries of 'Constitution in danger' and 'Democracy under siege' and his exhortations for rooting out the existing system, which he paints as irredeemably authoritarian and corrupt, don't get much voter buy-in. Gandhi paints himself as a crusader, raises the pitch, but falls short in offering a persuasive or even clear vision of an alternative.
Despite their differences, however, the politics of both Modi and Gandhi does the same disservice: Their painting of the apocalypse narrows the space for a conversation with the political opponent, leave alone for treating them with respect and reciprocity. If the opponent is the enemy — and in CM Fadnavis's language, a 'force of anarchy' — anything goes, arguably, in terms of how they can be treated.
Apocalyptic politics is an abdication of democratic humility, of the responsibility to negotiate and explore the middle ground in a country of great diversities. It sets the stage for conduct that is unconstrained by the rules of the game, that does not abide by even its small and basic conventions and courtesies, and leads to a polarised polity.
When deployed by the powerful, an apocalyptic politics also hides the fact that there are multiple pathways to reach goals, and many possibilities to tweak and change the system from within, not just the all-or-nothing options that are being propagated.
Till next week,
Vandita