Post-democratic state

A historically novel kind of state seems to be arising in many corners of the world, which combines elements derived selectively from the two classic forms of the capitalist state, the liberal and the fascist. India under Narendra Modi too may be moving in that direction.

- AIJAZ AHMAD

THE INDIAN POLITY IS UNDOUBTEDLY passing through a watershed moment, considerably more ominous than the BabriMasjid demolition of 1992, the making of the secondA.B. Vajpayee government that assumed office in 1998 or the Gujarat killings of 2002. Those milestones in the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)-backed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power involved two orgies of violence a decade apart, with a smooth electoral transition in the middle of that decade. The Vajpayee governments of 1996 and 1998 would be inconceivable without years of bloodshed throughout the RamMandirmovement and in the aftermath of the mosque’s demolition. “Militarised Hinduism” of V.D. Savarkar’s dream, and the fascist spectacles it generated, were translated into votes, proving that communal violence pays electoral dividends. The Gujarat pogrom was conducted almost immediately after Narendra Modi became Chief Minister. Electoral support for him grew with successive State elections, and more and more among the national middle class came to favour him as future Prime Minister. He never bridled his fire-eating communal vitriol even as public relations agencies re-made him into a Vikas Purush (Development Man); vitriol and promises of vikas were equally at work in getting him to form government in Delhi.