The Populist Perversion

by Bishakha Nandy

Kalyan and I have long been provoking each other to passionately debate West Bengal's current political scene, emphasising the relative merits and demerits of AITC’s populist leadership in West Bengal. At the outset, Ms. Banerjee’s electoral victory was too readily translated as Bengal’s desperate plunge from the ruthless neoliberalism of the Left rule. From critiquing the Left Front government’s folly and malversation to eventually accruing the AITC as a plebiscitary force, things became dangerously oversimplified and perversely polarised. Let's cover some housekeeping points before diving into the debate's heart. We live in an age of pervasive populism which Cas Mudde understood as a political approach divided into the conflicting interests of two groups- “the pure people” and a “corrupt elite”. Samir Gandesha explains how populism can ideally put a check and balance on parliamentarianism and executive authoritarianism on the ordinary people by contextualising “the existential confrontation between ‘the people’ and the ‘elite’ or the ‘powerful’”. Examples of populist governance all over the world also tell us something. Populism served with a high dose of authoritarianism and anti-pluralism (Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi) tends to pull the most crowd in our times. Following the results of the 2011 assembly elections, Mamata Banerjee’s performative populism- evident through her so-called ascetic attire; aggressive-masculinist demeanor, and diction; and lack of sobriety in language or through her freebie politics- loomed large to project that it is in the interests of a disenfranchised and struggling mass that her party finds political relevance and hence remains unquestionable.

Within this conundrum of binary power balance and an electoral politics governed by it, the larger political situation bears evidence to a way of life that disregards and destabilises the existence of others in the social and political spheres. This is to engage with the Deweyan concept of ‘creative democracy’ whose essential conditions, moving beyond the grand narratives of civil and legal safeguards ensured by the Constitution, question our mundane doings, and quotidian practices. This means not being complacent with the overarching and anyway indispensable institutionality of democracy and becoming more sensitive and responsive to its non-institutional demands implicit in a constant exchange of ideas, regard for an opposition’s human value similar to one’s own, and a commitment to respect differences. It means the co-existence of multiple and conflicting truths free from the threat of eviction or co-optation into a dominant whole.  Unfortunately, antipluralist politics emerges and sustains along the lines of hatred and violence. It works to suppress what Dewey called the production of ‘knowledge of conditions as they are’ and instead seeks to subject one set of people to the knowledge-authority of the other.

Banerjee’s cumulative power march and final coronation to the chief ministerial position of West Bengal was propelled by the Left’s whacking violence at Singur-Nandigram-Lalgarh.  In its three and a half decades of rule the political ambiance in the state had long been fouled by the CP(I)M’s exercise of systematised corruption and criminal governance sustained by a party bureaucracy and the brandishing existence of its harmad bahini. In the age of the purported socialist rule in West Bengal a culture of threat prevailed to silence imminent threats to its status quo. It reminds us of Tapan Sinha’s mastermoshai- a retired, principled school teacher- who fell victim to the paralysing atanka (fear) inflicted through a rule of corrupt power and hooliganism of his student. Gone were the days when the struggles of small/medium peasantry and landless labourers engendered their land reform movements, like Operation Barga. Instead, the CP(I)M’s developmental model took its inspiration from neoliberalism and won the loyalty of the upper and middle-class population acquiring a typical bhadrolok party image. This solidarity intensified so much so that the so-called Leftist government not only fortified its hallmark cause of the backward sections of society but even undermined the masses to facilitate, what Wendy Brown called, the ‘marketization of democracy’. The consequences are well-known, to restore the power balance a social demand for populism toppled the government. The alienated, displaced, and enraged people provided the Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress, prima facie, a fair chance to launch the much-needed paribartan promising distributive justice.

The three originating axes of TMC’s advent, ‘Maa, Mati, Manush’er sarkar’, duly attempted to achieve the twin objectives of- a) creating a rhetoric where the people and their interests feel revived as opposed to the political monopoly of the corrupt elite and strategizing to, b) potentially attenuate and eventually wipe out the legitimacy of CPI(M) from the political scene, more so as a viable opposition party. The current political strategy feeds on containing a sizeable portion of the uneducated, unemployed, unskilled group of people who are arguably contained either through nominal cash assistance and/or lured by illegitimate muscle power.  After coming to power, one of the foremost things that surely echoed her populist spirit was the ruling out of bandh/strike as an expression of protest. Instances of workers’ protests aimed at resisting the BJP’s onslaughts on the PSUs and raising the minimum wages were brushed aside. A vital constitutional element- the right to dissent- became redefined as “goondagiri on the streets”. Thus, Mamata the opposition leader and champion of street politics in her days suddenly morphed into Mamata the autocrat desperate to crush outlets of opposition and adversaries.

In the wake of chit-fund and financial scams, sexual assaults, and land-grabbing cases at Sandeshkhali; rampant vilification of raped and molested women across caste and class; massive hawker eviction drive; a gutted public education system, lumpen rule; and a wretched public health status the present government failed on more than one occasions to qualify its populist claims. Two things happened simultaneously- a) a half-hearted attempt at containing the socio-economically backward sections of society through doles and freebies, and b) the existence, security, and aspirations of a heterogeneous public became jeopardised; questioning the premise of populism and democracy at once. A new subculture has been formed and sustained through the mushrooming of the ad-hoc nature of jobs in crucial public service sectors bypassing fixed and transparent qualification criteria, job security, and workers’ welfare.

Many, like Kalyan, might be tempted to argue that this created more jobs for a greater number of people resulting in equitable income distribution. Executed by an arbitrary recruitment system such tactics of pseudo-employment based on a poor utilitarian logic exemplify a patron-client relationship. This is directed at distracting us from the derailed status of public education and joblessness. Citing the impossibility of our current economies to meaningfully absorb the ‘surplus army of labourers’ and then using that to validate the imperilled condition of essential public goods is tantamount to saying that a freebie economy can replace the depletion of education or health facilities. It also stays blind to the complete lack of choices and opportunities that common citizens in a welfare economy are supposedly entitled to. Most significantly, this limits quality education to the wealthy folds of society. The lack of good public schools or hospitals forces people to seek the service of private institutions that are hugely exploitative and duplicitous and mostly outside the reach of ordinary households. Thus, it is imperative we ensure that today’s Goutams and Kalyans are not coerced from becoming someone of their choosing and doing.

Moreover, impairing the school service commission has affected women job aspirants more given the gendered binaries governing the employment market. So, I cannot remain unaware of the consequences it brought to the sections of societies where schemes like Kanyashree work to flourish the marriage market instead of empowering women in any meaningful way. Finally, resorting to the Dewey-Lipmann debate Kalyan challenges the importance of education in producing informed voters. We inhabit a world that Daniel Bell long ago termed ‘information society’, characteristic of a society that subsists through the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information. Thus, it is evident that we can never be adequately equipped to grasp the complexities of the world in a way to make informed political choices. But what does Dewey say about education while mentioning the ‘democratic community’- that makes resources available for individuals to realise their fullest potential and powers through social, political, and cultural participation? Instead of rendering education irrelevant, he saw it as correlative to intelligence, indispensable in understanding democracy, and above all, as a way of life and not considering it as a self-perpetuating machine. His remedial of the popularization of knowledge was the only antidote he directed to the democratic realism offered by Lippman espousing rule by the elite experts in a democracy.  

The major challenges that circumscribe today’s political condition include an almost dormant opposition, an unscrupulous public distribution system, and anti-democratic rule resulting from a business-minded government. We are witnessing a period of heightened capitalism where our rights as a community have become volatile and, at times, obscured. The answer to the excesses posed by liberal democracy, in a global space confronted with the tension between safeguarding collective interests while securing individual rights; citizens increasingly reduced to ratepayers, and competitive historical vantage points shaping citizenship rights and immigration policies, the palpable answer lies not in the illiberalism popularised by the Viktor Orban regime but might be in what John Dewey saw as ‘more democracy’.  Amidst a huge public uproar regarding the R G Kar episode, the by-polls following the Lok Sabha elections in 2024 thumping victory came rolling at the feet of the TMC leadership. Such instances of plebiscites have been repeated before following the outbreak of governance failures and subsequent public furore marking a period of democratic crisis for us. This surely is a moment where an unsure and unaffected people uttered its dispersed and dissociated positioning vis-à-vis its governed status. I am afraid that we have become adept at rearing indifference to the tragedies and crises that impinge the lives of others, in other words, to those that are not our own. The perils of singur-nandigram might find a crisis equivalent to or in greater impact during this populist regime. The lives of local tribals and the ecological balance await the imminent perils of the government’s market-driven zeal to industrialise and exploit a proposed coal mine site engulfing a large expanse of land at Birbhum’s Deucha-Pachami.

Kalyan is right in pointing out that the cluster of English-educated, relatively affluent sections of voters, with more or less heterogeneous professional aspirations deride the vote bank of TMC and prefer to lean on the nativist payload of the BJP as a fitting reply to Mamata’s minority politics. This group, most certainly, would see Deucha-Pachami expropriation as a welcome moment for development. It is a moment that begs to ask if the end of the communist regime marked a moment to augment populism. On the other hand, for many, earlier the TMC was there to oust the misrule of the LF and now it stands to stall the inroads of the BJP juggernaut in Bengal. The economic and socio-cultural rifts serving this divisive electorate base for these apparently competing brands of populism (TMC and the BJP) might have divergent origins and immediate interests yet their electoral outcomes drastically converge in practice- it breeds a culture teeming with communal hatred with an attended decline in responsibility and compassion for the Other. Difference readily infuses itself into a majoritarian force aimed at silencing the adversary. Our politics signify a diminished state of democracy where carnivalized public spaces become too trepid to be transformed into what Arendt would call ‘small republics’- the heart of democracy.

The crucial question is how far this culture of cumulative hatred and aggression allows one to understand one’s own self. Our political choices reflect attempts to weaken or cast out the enemy/opposition- a template that is essentially populist as it necessitates the idea of a common enemy.  Our electoral decisions are defined by non-preference, they reflect the repudiable Other more than they reflect us. Contrarily, we need to borrow Arendt’s perspective of civil society as constitutive of ‘public space’ that fosters large-scale, complex democracies. For her politics is germane to dissent, debates, and disagreement in a community, notwithstanding fragmentation, disputes, and unresolved conflicts, keeps the possibility of an ongoing dialogue, speech, and action alive between opponents. The Latourette emphasis on the non-existence of the ‘outside’ beaming with the hope of democracy that Kalyan has readily adopted to make a case for populism, to me, is always negotiable and socially engageable despite the limits and uncertainties of democracy.

References

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, R. J. (2000). Creative democracy-The task still before us. American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 21(3), 215-228.

Dewey, J. (1969-70). "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.

Gandesha, S. (2018). Understanding Right and Left Populism. In J. Morelock (Ed.), Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism (Vol. 9, pp. 49–70). University of Westminster Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv9hvtcf.7

Mudde, C., Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Westhoff, L. M. (1995). The Popularization of Knowledge: John Dewey on Experts and American Democracy. History of Education Quarterly, 35(1), 27–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/369690