Now that the elections in Delhi are done and dusted, and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been duly lauded for having successfully side-stepped the politics of hate, it is far from clear that the politics of hate has finally had its day.
One notices that the remarks made by Amit Shah, that slogans such as ‘shoot the traitors’ may have cost the party’s electoral chances, post the rather resounding defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have drawn some positive comments in sections of the media, and from notable political commentators. Yet, what the home minister is reported to have said leaves legitimate room to the doubting Thomas to read between his lines, as it were.
To wit: is it not interesting that Amit Shah’s second thoughts should have come after the results rather than during the unprecedentedly vicious campaign that the party unleashed on the Delhi electorate?
Is it conceivable that the venomously targeted communal tirade articulated by one senior campaigner of the BJP after another were wholly independent and arbitrary exercises of vitriol and not the expression of a thought-out campaign strategy?
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How is it that the honourable home minister, in now choosing to remark on the brutally vilifying statements made by some of his co-campaigners should have conveniently forgotten the remark he himself made about the need for the electorate to so press the electronic button as to send the “current” to Shaheen Bagh?
And how may one read Amit Shah’s generic thoughts on the politics of hate from the statement he has now made?
Notice that he has underscored the feeling that hate-filled vituperations made by his colleagues should not have been made, not because the politics of hate is in and by itself dangerous anathema to a decent electoral democracy, but “because our performance may have suffered because of this”. Mister Shah’s remorse is then clearly an instrumentalist one: ergo, had the tactics of hate succeeded, he may not have made any of the observations he has now made.
That read of his remarks is of course substantiated first by the fact that he made no effort through the campaign to restrain his colleagues from the course they had chosen—a fact suggestive of a considered last-ditch strategy to meet the solidly fact-based positive campaign by the AAP; but also by the most significant caveat in his statement post-defeat. The BJP, he has said, does not fight only for victory or defeat, but “to expand its ideology through polls”.
The sting, thus, is ominously in the tail.
The communal vitriol seems indubitably linked to the expansion of ideology. And the “ideology” relentlessly grounded in sectarian polarisation. Given that Amit Shah explicitly delinks this project from winning or losing elections, the conclusion is inevitable that the electoral process for the Hindutva forces is in essence only a route to achieving its teleological purpose—one that seeks to transform the character and content both of the state and then of the concept of citizenship within it.
Several BJP leaders made openly communal remarks during the election campaign: (L-R) Kapil Mishra, Amit Shah, Adityanath, Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma. Photo: PTI/The Wire
The tentative nature of liberal democracy
As in other countries as well in our day, democracy is not seen as a universally accepted resting point of politics, but a rather irritating medial stage to a different “order of things”.
One may recall that this sort of eventuality was so sentiently analysed by Adorno and Horkheimer in their prophetic Dialectic of Enlightenment during a fraught period in European history – a thesis that should continue to caution us about the tentative nature of liberal democracy, unless nurtured with hard conviction and collective commitment.
One must, therefore, exercise caution in reading the seeming recantation in the Shah statement as marking a watershed either in the politics of the Hindutva forces or in the democratic politics and verity of the nation.
On a pragmatic basis, it becomes more and more obvious with each passing day that there is little in the record of governance or in concrete economic achievements of the current dispensation for them to carry into any further poll campaign. That anyway leaves them but the one choice. That this tried and tested course has come a cropper in Delhi surely ought to give heart to secular forces wedded to the republican constitution and committed to consolidating democratic processes and democratic values, but always remembering that the leopard may not have changed its spots.
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In recent days, some allies, including time-tested ones, of the BJP have voiced salutary cautions on how the ruling party has tended to evaluate and deal with public protests on issues of concern to citizens across communities, and articulated welcome sentiments of an inclusive and pluralist bent. Clearly, the frighteningly no-holds-barred attack mounted by the Hindutva forces on the hitherto unprecedented participation of minority groups in public protests has sent shock waves to partners within the NDA.
It remains to be seen how this moment of recognition may or may not translate to any lasting rethinks among them with respect to the state of dominant politics in the country. But that they may be beginning to see the unacceptable intensity and extent of the ideological march of these forces bodes well for now.