The New Experts: Populism, Technocracy and Politics of Expertise in Contemporary India

Abstract

Over the last five years, the Indian right-wing has been discrediting left-liberal experts and encouraging pseudo-scientific religious knowledge systems. Yet, crucially, it has also cultivated its own institutional networks of those it considers to be intellectuals and experts: an ostensibly anti-colonial alternative authority to challenge the “hegemony of the progressives” and the “erstwhile custodians of discourse.” This article examines the evolution of a shifting network of experts and elites, interrogating what is considered to be expertise in the context of governance. Through a study of Indian think tanks, this article shows how two forms of political legitimacy govern contemporary India: (i) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class and religion; and (ii) technocratic policy,which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. Using data from participant observation and over 50 interviews in New Delhi, before and after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s election victory in 2019, this article emphasises the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement.

KEY WORDS:

• Technocracy
• populism
• expertise
• knowledge production
• India
• think tanks

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the wonderful colleagues and friends who took the time to give me insightful, challenging and critical feedback on several early drafts of this article. Including, but not limited to: Ron Aminzade, Tanja Andic, Vinay Gidwani, Teresa Gowan, Vishal Jamkar, Yagmur Karakaya, Oanh Nguyen, Victoria Piehowski, Nithya Rajan, Marie Thouaille, Ellie Kuper Thomas, and Leki Thungon. I would also like to thank the generous anonymous reviewers for helping to make the argument of this article clearer and more compelling. This research study received ethics board approval from the IRB at the University of Minnesota.

Disclosure Statement

The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ The term “alt-right” was coined by Richard Spencer, a leader of the US white supremacist movement, to refer to an alternative right-wing movement composed of anti-establishment politics that centres itself on white superiority and rejects egalitarianism and universalism (Southern Poverty Law Center n.d). Similar to white nationalism, Hindu nationalism’s version of the alt-right argues that Hinduism as an identity, practice and national foundation is under attack by multicultural forces.

² This includes supposedly independent bodies of knowledge production like universities, research organisations, and advisory bodies and ideally independent knowledge dissemination bodies like the media.

³ Here, the use of the Latin “demos” to refer to a collective People: ranging from a village, an assembly, and a body of citizens, as in early forms of Athenian democracy (Blackwell 2003). “Technos” refers to the Latin prefix of “technocracy,” a word coined in 1919 by W. H. Smyth as a name for a new system of government by technical experts who could best advise how to live and realise our “individual aspirations and national purpose” (Atherton 1922, 29).

⁴ This chasm is being deepened and legitimated in new ways. In a speech delivered to the All-India Trade Unions Workers Camp in 1943, Ambedkar (1991) said: “All political societies get divided into two classes – the Rulers and the Ruled. This is an evil. If the evil stopped here it would not matter much. But the unfortunate part of it is that the division becomes stereotyped and stratified so much so that the Rulers are always drawn from the Ruling Class and the class of the Ruled never becomes the Ruling class. People do not govern themselves, they establish a government and leave it to govern them, forgetting that it is not their government.”

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted as part of the author’s dissertation fieldwork, for which she received funding through the Bright Award at the University of Minnesota.