This must be a burden or gift of history, depending which way you look at it. We Indians are prone to theorising a lot. We draw big picture scenarios out of scattered developments with limited impact and presume everything else in the vastly diverse country easily fits into the construct. We conveniently forget that there are too many moving parts, too many conflicts, too many contradictions and too many asymmetries that make India what it is. The complexity of heterogeneity renders any grand, overarching theory inadequate.
The obsession with theories would not be problematic if it did not come at the cost of common sense. Take politics for instance. To even an untrained observer, it is confusions galore out there. Against this backdrop, the proposition that the Indian politics has taken a decisive rightward shift because people are disillusioned with Left and the Left of the Centre politics stretches credulity. A whole lot of people in the country, barring perhaps the educated and the indoctrinated, don't vote for ideologies - they are not simply aware of these. They vote for parties and candidates, and in India they have a penchant for throwing out non-performing ones. This, however, is conditional upon the rival party being strong enough.
RSS. PTI image
The Indian Right itself is a complex beast. If one personifies Right winger as a communal Hindu with a jingoistic trait who believes staunchly is promoting private enterprise, then such an entity is not acceptable to the voter. He has been rejecting it for the last several decades. If he is about economy alone, well, the Right is hardly any different from the rest. If you care to notice closely, the BJP governments that won the latest round of elections have been as populist - the welfare schemes that the non-BJP governments are being blamed for - as their non-BJP counterpart in the country. If it's about promoting industries, other states have been doing that as well.
Thus the Indian voter moving Right is a flawed assumption. The Indian voter could be changing preference, but the change is hardly along ideological lines. Is the rising popularity of Narendra Modi a vote of confidence for ideology? Well, no. He is busy positioning himself as a centrist leader, not someone like the personification of the Right wing ideology we created earlier. It is a different matter that extreme views of all hues have decided to take a ride on the Modi bandwagon.
Does the AAP represent a great idea? Again, this theory is suspect. The party does not exist beyond its single-point programme: taking on corruption. This itself is not new; political outfits, civil society outfits have been raising the issue of corruption for decades. The only fresh element in AAP's approach is its determination and proclivity to be reckless. Its efforts are laudable, but political parties are supposed to be much more than a single-point agenda. People's democracy is alright but it would be premature to judge its success since the party have not had a long enough run yet.
No party is born with an evil agenda. However, all of them get bureaucratic and distant from people once they get bigger. Corruption creeps in. The AAP is likely to go the same way if it exists long enough. We still don't know whether the party is an idea or just a programme. Moreover, we are yet to understand whether it is more than its noise value.
The biggest challenge for any party in India is to survive within its diversities. All parties are coalitional in nature and they prosper or perish depending on how they manage the conflicting and competing interests within their ambit and outside. The frequency with which the people change governments in the country is reflective of the fact that they subscribe to no ideology and are more pragmatic than sentimental in electing their representatives. Theories are good on the ears, if only they reflected reality!
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