The ‘dim lights’ of Populist Politics

by Kalyan Kumar Das

The usual discussions on any ‘populist politics’ (and at this initial stage, I use it more as a pejorative and commonplace term than the subtleties with which the Left Populists deploy it) usually revolve around, for obvious reasons, the hoi polloi, the mass or the people. It is an amorphous, nebulous, and yet, the most perplexing and annoying term of modern political discussions and thoughts. But the initial impetus for me to pen this polemical piece came not from this inevitable repository of populist politics but from a constituency (an equally heterogeneous and ideologically diverse socio-political group) that can be very roughly described as the urban, predominantly caste-Hindu, aspirational, upper-middle class/middle-class people. This has its fractions and sub-groups and their concomitant ideological inclinations. Some, in the state of West Bengal, might be identifying them as ‘left-liberals’ who, at the level of group affiliation and identification, place themselves as the opposite of the people and are dismissive of populism of all kinds-Modi’s chest-thumping, majoritarian and zealous populism to Mamata’s desperate and often, ‘comical’ efforts to mimic a quasi-authoritarian regime. Then there are those belonging to the same social milieu who reiterate Modi’s technocratic demagoguery, his exhibitionist politics of personal ‘piety’ and at the same time, they are never getting tired of underlining the petty crimes, corruption by the Trinamool Congress workers and party-members, or the chaotic and ad hoc functioning of governmental institutions in this regime. What irked me was the common trait of ‘making fun’ of Mamata’s populist politics that I discerned in a quite wide cross-section of this otherwise diversified constituency i.e., the urban middle class. Prima facie, this entails several intriguing points for me. While there are people who see Mamata’s politics as a powerful antidote to Modi’s ‘right-wing populism’ and see her political dominance (not perhaps any sense of hegemony) as a default but significant rise in ‘subaltern’/chotolok politics, there are those who want what they describe as ‘substantive development’ of the people at the margins (presumably, the TMC fringe elements who create the image of the party’s ad hoc governance come from this section). While their hearts are in the right place, this tendency to see ‘substantive development’ demands several other contemplations I deem to be of pivotal significance for our present political predicament. Before I chart them out for the convenience of my dear readers, I must add the necessary disclaimer that this piece is more about the ‘left-liberal’ urban milieu than their Modi-loving counterparts. I do recognize several similarities in the thought patterns but this ideological distinction needs a bit of foregrounding. The other disclaimer is that, unlike the statistics-loving quantitative methods of a political scientist or a sociologist, this short, rather, journalistic piece is not based on any ‘scientific method’; but is based on how things are perceived and thus, in the DNA of these observations, there is a tendency to be embedded in anecdotes. For the paucity of space and to avoid redundancy, I stay away from making those anecdotes narrativized here. This is also to avoid ad hominem attacks and thus, to avoid digressions into things that do not require my immediate attention and yet, I wanted to let the spectral presence of the anecdotal haunt my piece.

The group that is under my attack, (in their focus on the tentative lens of substantive development’) emphasizes making it possible for a rickshaw-puller’s daughter from a small town in Jungle Mahal to aspire to become a B.Tech. from Jadavpur University or the son of a lower caste, lower-division clerk with the state government to be a professor of English literature at Presidency University. Since the second example is that of my trajectory, I have every reason to feel more emotionally inclined toward this fixation on the institution-centric model of substantive development. But I cannot be blind to the underlying ‘meritocratic hubris (to echo Michael Sandel) of these perceptions nor can I afford to get blinded by this optimism. I am painfully aware of the ‘democratic elitism’/ ‘democratic realism’ and I recognize the negative connotations ‘democracy as a concept’ always had from its earliest roots in the Greek idea of democratia to its contemporary underpinnings in this state and beyond. At the outset, I cannot help but notice the difference between my inclinations and theirs as, respectively, a modus vivendi approach and a more concept-centric view of democracy. As a voter, I do have my own petty-bourgeois class interests that would join this very social cluster I am attacking, in their passionate, emotionally charged rebuttal of Mamta’s politics: a politics where there is neither enough Dearness Allowance nor enough scope for strengthening the secondary/higher-secondary school education through which a Gautam Bhadra could emerge from a Chetla Boys School. But I have different stakes here in my debate with Bishakha and the ilk.

First, why be so disdainful towards Mamata’s politics and her apparent supporters? The left-liberal ilk, with their feet directed towards Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and other cities of the Western world, make their occasional winter visits to Kolkata and see how this city is in a condition of ‘eternally dying’ (nothing seems to have changed since that omniscient narrator’s voice from Mrinal Sens’ Padatik in the seventies to our time almost fifty years later). The ‘heritage walks’ of these migratory birds to the historic alleys and lanes of North Kolkata are poignantly interrupted by the city’s ‘uncouth aesthetics’ obsessed with its ‘blue and white’ structures that they take to be Mamata’s doing. Their smirks and disdainful remarks on ‘Mamta’s populism’ have made me reactionary and I am digressing. Let me quickly focus on some aspects of their reservations about the TMC’s populism and punctuate them with my views and readings.

Bishakha’s optimistic insistence on the “substantive development” of the people has several -conceptual implications. At first, the model presupposes that the postcolonial nation-state’s mode of governance is analogous to the ‘governmentality’ of the modern European state. This insistence, is, of course, guided by the developmentalist logic that has shaped the Nehruvian era and still exists in different avatars in different pockets of the Indian polity. But I am more inclined to echo the anxieties of Prathama Banerjee and I am trying to think of our sovereignty as always already plural, conflicting, and dispersed and thus, the state does not have a relation of pure externality that can then exercise its developmentalist governmentality upon a uniform whole of the ‘society’. Bishakha’s model presupposes that the institutions of our liberal democracy- public education, basic healthcare or employment in the ‘organised sector’ should be adequately opened up for not just the urban middle class but also the people who come from the fringes or the people who constitute the amorphous category of the People. This has an inevitable top-down or vertical axis of governance where some people with education are automatically perceived as more informed ‘citizens’. But sadly enough, the very category of the ‘informed citizen’ is in itself a misnomer at best. Moreover, in our AI-driven world of spectacle no one is going to be capable of being properly informed and then make choices that are good for themselves or for the hoi polloi. This has been the case even in earlier debates on the efficacy of democracy, for example, the John Dewey-Walter Lipmann debate in the United States of America of the early twentieth century. Even an ardent optimist like Dewey agreed with Lipmann that the People is a phantom. Instead, what we might think of is at best, a messy and fuzzy and contingent coming-together of several groups of people who are described by Bruno Latour as ‘peoples’. Latour reminds us that there is an ‘irremediable obscurity’ that looms large on our political predicament and we have to recognize it as such.

Bishakha’s insistence on organized development for the margins, and her expectations from the democratic institutions of our world (also increasingly across the world) to function more effectively- are all embedded in a Deweyean optimism of ‘deliberative democratic thinking’. I am, despite being an Ambedkarite (a premise that had an unmistakable imprint of John Dewey’s ‘creative democracy’), not very sure if this institution-centric vertical model could work for us or for the rest of the world which is facing a massive crisis of the liberal-democratic template. However, this model triggers several practical problems for us in the postcolonial world and our concerns about populism. As Kalyan Sanyal pointed out, the excessive presence of a ‘surplus army of laborers’ creates unimaginable challenges for our political parties. Postcolonial capitalism can offer only an extremely limited scope to accommodate this group of laborers who can neither go back to a precolonial artisanal/peasant status nor can they be placed in the formal sector of the economy. While Sanyal’s focus is different from mine, I would take this basic observation and ask Bishakha about the possible logical outcome of her model of substantive development. As Sanyal reminds us, this group, previously, has either been killed in the world war or the famine of a past era. Neither of these two is a desirable/available possibility in our time. What do we do with these people then? They cannot be given employment; they have been the inevitable results of ‘primitive accumulation’ and cannot go back to a premodern life of existence. Bishakha has problems with the freebies that are distributed among the ‘peoples’. She would prefer her domestic help to not only receive her freebies but also be able to send her kids to a public educational institution to enable their upward mobility. I agree with this; more so because I am a product of a similar trajectory. But I am also thinking of how her model would lead us to a point where they cannot be provided with the employment that they would rightly deserve. I am utterly conflicted on this point- irremediable obscurity reigns and thus, like Latour, I would be more patient with whatever ad hoc populist model of providing them with subsistence that is available and not dismiss them for a greater certainty- no matter how lucrative and desirable that looks. Latour says: ‘A sombre pessimistic vision that does not square with the ideals of democracy? Wait. We have to enter into this argument the way we might spend a bright sunny day in a dark cave. Our eyes, blinded at first, have to adjust gradually to the darkness- the dim lights that will soon be discerned may be fragile but they are the only ones we will ever have. The sun may be shining outside- except that there is no outside!’

My friend Sourav Chattopadhyay has rightly pointed out that my reference to this policy- challenge and the ‘bad solution’ of freebies this government offers, are leading us to a conceptual myopia where society is a given whole. But I am instead echoing Partha Chatterjee and Prathama Banerjee and saying that the ‘peoples’ are more in the domain of the ethico-political than indeed juridico-citizen status. We are in a situation that is neither a classic domain of European governmentality nor a conducive space for Nehruvian developmentalism. I am more tempted to suggest that we stay more patiently with the ‘conceptual indeterminacy’, refuse to uncritically accept the vanguardist developmentalism of the state, take stock of the dispersed sovereignties, be more mindful of the possibilities of what Banerjee calls ‘developmentality’ (neither developmentalism nor governmentality) and make ourselves more open to recognise, if not celebrate, the ‘dim lights’ Latour wants us to see. TMC’s regime is barely the best example of what I am now hinting at. But to be sarcastically dismissive of their politics, to think that the ever-decreasing gap between the party and the government and their populist ‘farce’ of empowering the subaltern are unquestionably bad for democracy is to expect from democracy (and in turn from the realm of the political) what it can never conveniently offer.

References:

Banerjee, Prathama. "The Abiding Binary: The Social and the Political in Modern India." Histories and Presents, ed. Stephen Legg and Diana Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Bernstein, Richard J. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Dewey, John. "Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us." The Collected Works of John Dewey. 1882-1953 (Early Works, Middle Works and Later Works), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-70.

Latour, Bruno. "From the Illusions of Democracy to the Realities of Appearances." The Problematic Public: Lippmann, Dewey and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Kristian Bjørkdahl, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024.

Sandel, Michael. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good. New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2020.

Sanyal, Kalyan. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge, 2019.