Assam's Political Apathy and the Rise of Authoritarian Nationalism

The Hindu

10-07-2025

Published : Jul 10, 2025 14:43 IST - 5 MINS READ
Last weekend, I went to Assam, regarded by TV anchors as a faraway corner, for a family event. For a brief while, I was on a different planet, blissfully unaware of politics. I forgot about the manipulation of voters' rolls in Bihar, where a crucial State election is within sight, and was clueless about Elon Musk wanting to start a new political party in America (a trend that should not be pooh-poohed by traditional political machinery). It was a magical existence, without a care for political developments in these turbulent times that our species is hurtling through.
I admit: my own political awareness was, like an old single-engine aircraft, slow in starting. The first time I witnessed anything political was during the Bangladesh liberation war, when our north Bihar was blacked out every night, and we ran to my grandmother's roof to watch aircraft pass over. I had no idea what was going on. Similarly, a few weeks after we arrived in New York (NY) in 1974, my father made me watch Richard Nixon's televised resignation. Again, I had no idea why.
However, life in the US awakened my political consciousness. I saw, as soon as I got there, that Whites hated Blacks; and both hated Indians (and other immigrants, no doubt). Hatred of immigrants has always existed. Immigrants, on the other hand, are pusillanimous; they don't want to be distracted from their main aim of plucking dollars from American money trees.
So, the adult attitude was to avert one's eyes from racist behaviour and get on with life. Racism is based on an absurd ignorance: in 1979-80, when Iranian student revolutionaries took hostages at the US embassy in Tehran, the Greek-Americans, Italian-Americans, and others who populated Queens, NY, would shout at me to 'free the hostages, give us oil', and other reductionist babble.
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Racism is ingrained in society: my 7th-grade social studies teacher used to say that 'some people' wanted to ship all the Blacks back to Africa. Today's politics follows a continuum from decades past. (Isn't it a fact that Indira Gandhi opened Pandora's Box out of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerged?) We used to think former US President Ronald Reagan was a shameless racist, but four decades later, people seem to be shocked that US President Donald Trump is a shameless racist.
Politics and conscientiousness
Once it entered my consciousness, politics was there to stay. It should be so for each of us. Politics is about the right choice; about how we navigate our place in society, about how society allocates resources, and about how our grievances on resource allocation are addressed. Politics is the intersection of all levels, classes, groups, and sections.
Unfortunately, some disdain politics, because of either their comfy privilege or their abject poverty. Others prefer petty politics of the office or family. Indian politics, my yoga-master says, is basically everyone pulling each other down 'by their ears'.
Last weekend, however, my political consciousness was in suspended animation. I did not even think about this column. And nothing changed.
I was charmed by the sprawling yet small-town Guwahati, its lanes displaying its character—unlike the bland, homogenising big city infrastructure projects that seem to complicate problems rather than solve them. (Garbage collection in Gurgaon happens not due to political action but social media pressure.) Here, the green hills are soothing, and the Naga bamboo chili pork is filling.
The local Chief Minister (CM) is trying to make his mark with one major infrastructure project after another, though one must agree that the highway along a section of the Brahmaputra is impressive. However, his execrable politics are merely abusing his opponent's wife as a foreign spy. No surprise there; Garry Kasparov this week tweeted Umberto Eco's 'Features of Fascism' and among its 14 rules is number 7, the obsession with a plot, 'possibly an international one'.
Yet, I fear that the CM will get re-elected repeatedly: one, because of the lack of competitive politics; and two, because politics seems such a distant reality from which Assamese voters are detached. They might not be too outraged, because the Assamese have for decades been frustrated with outsiders. Eco's rule 5 is Fear of difference: 'The first appeal of a fascist movement (or a prematurely fascist movement) is an appeal against the intruders'.
They were angry with the Bengalis since the 19th century. In the 1960s, this became anger with the Bangladeshis. The BJP smoothly transitioned it to islamophobia from the 1990s to the 2000s, and this even though more than a few Assamese Hindus have had good interpersonal relations with Assamese Muslims. Assam has long been a fertile ground for fascism, and with the BJP having successfully tapped into this long-standing social frustration, it is an uphill climb for challengers, made more so by political apathy.
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It is the same for the country as a whole; the absence of politics and the apathy of voters towards politics ensures that Modi, or his hand-picked successor, will have a smooth ride.
For an apolitical society best suits the right-wing. Part of the regime's success in depoliticising society is its constant barrage of premiership-as-entertainment (Prime Minister in fancy dress, collecting esoteric awards), war as theatre, and immigrant/Muslim demonisation as gladiatorial blood sport. Our PM's collection of medals from miscellaneous countries is only outdone by Trump's collection of Nobel Prize nominations. (Perhaps Modi should also be a nominator, having adopted flattery-as-foreign-policy.)
The moral content of our politics today matters less than the fact that we take sides. And if only a few people are vocal, that's enough for the powers that be: Eco's rule 13 speaks of a TV or internet populism 'in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as vox populi'.
If you were to pluck a philosopher from any time or any culture, they would survey our apolitical planet with its macro-chaos and micro-numbness and each come to the same conclusion: that politics has failed, and most of us have chosen the wrong side.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.