The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism, Populism and Neoliberalisation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the growth of authoritarian forms of politics in India should be seen in the context of a long-term crisis of the state as successive governments have been unable to establish legitimacy for the policies of neoliberalisation that have been pursued since the 1990s. These policies contributed to the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation. The previous Congress Party-led government’s mode of crisis management – which it dubbed, inclusive growth – failed to create new forms of political incorporation by addressing long-term structural problems in India’s political economy, such as jobless growth, and gave rise to new problems, such as large-scale corruption scandals. Subsequently, it increasingly developed what Nicos Poulantzas called, “authoritarian statist” tendencies to marginalise dissent within a framework of constitutional democracy. The current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s mode of crisis management builds on these authoritarian statist tendencies but has sought to build legitimacy for these tendencies and neoliberalisation through an appeal to authoritarian populism. This seeks to harness popular discontent against elite corruption with majoritarianism to create an antagonism between the “Hindu people” and a “corrupt elite” that panders to minorities.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• populism
• authoritarianism
• neo-liberalism
• Narendra Modi

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As a personification of India, Bharat Mata has long been a controversial symbol given that it is derived from Hindu traditions of worshipping the mother goddess and was popularised by Hindu revivalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has since become a key part of Hindu nationalist iconography and clashes with the injunction in Islam against polytheism and idolatry.

2. The notion of “crisis management” draws on Jessop and colleagues (1984).

3. While the nature of the dominant class coalition in post-independence India is contested, it is generally agreed that the power bloc has been made up of monopoly capital, big industry, big capitalist farmers and landlords, the bureaucratic-political elite, and after economic reforms, a corporate capitalist class, with a shifting balance of power within this class coalition (Harriss-White 2002, 43; Bardhan 1984; Chatterjee 2008, 56–57).

4. Though as Jha (2002) has shown, the ancient texts that Hindu nationalists view as Hindu scriptures, such as the Vedas, permitted cow slaughter for both food and ritual sacrifice. Like the notion of Mother India (Bharat Mata), the notion of the sacred Mother Cow (Gao Mata) appears to be a creation of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hindu revivalist and Hindu nationalist movements.