India is fast reaching a critical point of no return. The centre of the nation’s political culture has shifted so far rightward that the consensus on where India should be heading (even if parties differed on how we should get there) has collapsed. Hate and violence are so pervasive that what was unimaginable yesterday is inevitable tomorrow. Without a doubt, India’s democracy has been successfully hacked, and the national political culture that was collaboratively forged in India’s Constituent Assembly is being insidiously re-wired.
A case of steady progress
Yet, it would be a misnomer to posit that this started only during 2014. Always on the fringes and working without state power, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and later the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were forced to focus on non-electoral politics. However, two crucial breakthroughs enabled them to dramatically escalate the scope of their work. The Janata Party government enabled the RSS to position ideological sympathisers in the bureaucracy as well as the media and film industries. This project accelerated during the first tenure of the National Democratic Alliance government, and was leveraged devastatingly between 2010 and 2014. Key stakeholders, both within and outside the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, worked in concert to reshape India’s consciousness. Just to cite three inter-connected examples, the India Against Corruption movement (which was purportedly propped up by the RSS-BJP) destabilised the UPA and legitimised anti-establishment norms. This was accentuated by senior bureaucrats (many of whom joined the BJP eventually) crippling key levers of state power from 2011. In conjunction, the BJP stalled Parliament repeatedly, to propagate the myth of “policy paralysis”. Collectively, these blamed all of India’s woes on the ‘elite establishment’ (the Khan-market/Lutyens gang) and the political culture it upheld, namely India’s Constitution.
