Corruption Discourse, Aspirational Class and Emerging Politics

Corruption Discourse, Aspirational Class and Emerging Politics...

The youth who were the back bone of the "India against Corruption" did not think about the atrocities against the dalits and adivasies, they did not think about the atrocities against the farmers in the guise of land acquisition. In most cases they had not voted during the elections.  But they turned out in great numbers to vote for Modi. These middle class youths have benefitted the most from the neo liberal economic policies.  These policies have gone against the working class, the rural poor and particularly the dalits and the adivasies.  The pain and sufferings of these people have never been the concern of this aspirational class.  The vary campaign against corruption heavily backed by the youth has been neither inclusive nor democratic.  It has all trappings of the social movement in Germany that brought Hitler to power.

To convey my point, I would like to quote Prabhat Patnaik’s article in Front Line, June 13, 2014, “Social counter-revolution”.

“The "corruption" discourse started by Anna Hazare, in retrospect, legitimised the advocacy of a squeeze on the poor. The fuzziness of the term "corruption", or, even worse, of its Hindi equivalent bhrashtachar (literally meaning "wayward conduct"), made it possible to include within its corpus almost anything one did not like. The right-wing commentators used the opportunity to deride all transfers to the poor as instances of "corruption". And given the persistent and even worsening caste divide between the Dalits on the one hand and the upper and middle castes on the other, of which the recent "honour killings" of young couples are horrendous instances, it was not difficult to create the impression that the path to economic advance of the intermediate classes was blocked by lack of "development" caused by "corruption" which included transfers to the poor. (The well-to-do agrarian classes' dislike of the MGNREGS no doubt came in handy here.)

A deadly brew consisting of communalism, xenophobia ("an Italian lady is ruling us"!), hatred of "dynastic politics" (as if that was the source of the economic travails), hatred of all egalitarian measures like affirmative action in the form of "reservation", a rejection of bhrashtachar, within which was included everything from celebrating Valentine's Day to pro poor economic transfers, was concocted and served especially to the youth, belonging not just to the upper strata (who in any case are exposed to this diet from birth) but also to the intermediate strata.

Modi did not invent this brew; it was being concocted for quite some time. Modi, and through him his corporate backers, simply made skilful and flagrant use of it. Put differently, corporate funds have been channeled through Modi to utilize the fault lines in our society, to drive a wedge between the marginalized and the less marginalized sections so that the merger of corporate and state power (which Mussolini saw as the essence of fascism) is effected with ease.

Such right-wing anti-egalitarian views, to be sure, can always be found in society. But they come to the fore in the era of globalization because it witnesses a weakening or destruction of class-based organizations, including, above all, trade unions. It must be remembered that when Hitler called for fresh elections in Germany in 1933 immediately after being sworn in as Chancellor, despite all Nazi propaganda and terror, the entire Berlin region where the German working class was concentrated had still overwhelmingly elected Communists and Social Democrats. Such was the strength and resilience of class-based organisations.

It is not surprising that similar "young" right-wing forces, fired with animosity against egalitarianism in general, and against economic transfers to the poor in particular, are active in many parts of the world at this moment, notably in Thailand and Venezuela.

The change that the 2014 elections presage, therefore, goes beyond just the communalisation of Indian society; it goes beyond just the "fascification' the Indian polity. It entails nothing short of an attempt to roll back the long social revolution that has been effected in this country over the last one hundred year under the dialectically interlinked impact of the anticolonial struggle and of the social emancipation movement of Jyotirao Phule, Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and B.R. Ambedkar (though the leading participants the two movements may not have always been cognisant of this dialectical interlinking, not to mention several progressive contemporary chronicle of modern India). We are witnessing in short the unleashing of a veritable counter-revolution against long social revolution of the last century that had m a country with millennia of institutionalised inequality expressed through horrendous practices like "untouchability" and "unseeability", enshrine equate among citizens as a founding principle of its republican Constitution.   (Front Line, June 13, 2014. Prabhat Patnaik)