Post-Truth Politics in India’s Right-Wing Ecosystem: An Extended Critical Commentary

ABSTRACTThe right-wing movement in India received an impetus in 2014 with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), capturing governmental power at the national level. Among the fundamental traits of the right-wing movement in India, as in America, is what is called post-truth. The latter is a condition where blatant lies (or half-truths) are deliberately produced and spread on a massive scale, for an ideological and political purpose. The post-truth condition has important intellectual and political implications. For example, given its commitment to claims that are without any objective basis, the right-wing movement sees society as divided into groups on the basis of subjective criteria (e.g., religion). Thus it denies the objective basis for seeing a society as class-society. It also concomitantly denies the state as class-state. A directly political implication of post-truthism is the accumulation of lies by means of the suppression of dissent. The right-wing movement, including its post-truthism, does not hang in the air, however. It has a solid political-economic foundation. This article critically discusses the post-truth character of India’s right-wing movement, and explains how it is that the overall character of India’s capitalist economy is behind this. The broader arguments of the article have wider applicability beyond India.KEYWORDS: Capitalismclasscapitalist stateright-wing movementIndia Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 It had earlier come to power in 1998 for 5 years and for brief periods earlier.2 Patel (Citation2022) said: The BJP did not have a majority of its own in any state in India from the time that the party (as Jan Sangh) was founded till 1990. . . . It had a national vote share in single digits for four decades till it suddenly doubled to 18 per cent, and then doubled again. What happened in a short time for the party to become nationally popular? Of course it was the movement [based on lies about minorities and ancient India, etc.] that mobilised Hindus against the mosque in Ayodhya [a city in northern India] that was destroyed, triggering pogroms across the country.3 They include: Jagdish Bhagawati, Arvind Panagariya, Gurucharan Das, Ashok Desai, Arun Shourie, Surjit Bhalla, Amitabh Kant, Vivek Debroy, etc.4 These ideas are even promoted by scientists and engineers allied with the Hindutva movement such as Subhash Kak for whom sacred texts of Hinduism are scientific texts (Nanda Citation2002).5 A new book by two Indian academics shows how the emerging trend of crisis of truth, fake news and manipulated information leads to unnecessary ideological and ethical conflicts (Abraham and Mathew Citation2021).6 On 8 November 2016, the Prime Minister gave a surprise address to the nation, announcing demonetization of these notes and saying that those holding onto untaxed “black money” in the form of these notes will be caught (Indian Express Citation2016).7 Misra (Citation2022) said: The anonymity of electoral bonds is only for the broader public and opposition parties. The fact that such bonds are sold via a government-owned bank (SBI) leaves the door open for the government to know exactly who is funding its opponents. This, in turn, allows the possibility for the government of the day to either extort money, especially from the big companies, or victimise them for not funding the ruling party—either way providing an unfair advantage to the party in power.8 While the government suppressed the data, a financial newspaper leaked findings from the unemployment report. “While the leaked 2017 unemployment rate, 6.1 percent, may not sound so gloomy, it is roughly triple the rate of five years earlier, the last time a comparable national survey was conducted” (Gettleman and Kumar Citation2019).9 The Hindus who stand for democratic rights of all can be, and are, criticized by the RWM.10 This is especially possible because of “unflinching police support for the Right-wing forces that has contributed enormously to the growth of fascism in India” (Independent People’s Tribunal Citation2018).11 Justice Chandrachud adds: The attack on dissent strikes at the heart of a dialogue-based democratic society and hence, a state is required to ensure that it deploys its machinery to protect the freedom of speech and expression within the bounds of law, and dismantle any attempt to instill fear or curb free speech. (The Wire Citation2020)12 Theory is seen as abstract ideas which have nothing to do with the world.13 In response to Amartya Sen’s comment that demonetization (currency note ban) was a despotic action that has adversely affected the economy, Narendra Modi said: “On the one hand are those (critics of note ban) who talk of what people at Harvard say and on the other hand is a poor man’s son who through his hard work is trying to improve the economy.” He added: “In fact, hard work is much more powerful than Harvard” (The Hindu Citation2017).14 This view is reinforced by the view that individuals—or groups of individuals united by loyalty to a religion and religious nationalism—create their own destiny, only if they have the right moral values derived from religious scriptures. The focus on the individuals, especially in terms of their subjective being (how/what they think), and/or on the groups of individuals formed on the basis of subjective traits, is a recipe for class-blindness.15 The Congress Party does not consistently and forcefully confront right-wing Hindutva forces as “it might lead to the loss of the electoral support of the Hindus” (Panikkar, in his foreward to The Rise of Fascism in India, published by Independent People’s Tribunal [Citation2018]). The party includes within it politicians who were till the other day belonged to the BJP or who are otherwise favourably disposed towards Hindu nationalism.16 Note that earlier different sections of India’s socialist left movement used to receive some support from the USSR and China, and that is not the case anymore.17 The capitalist system will survive if religious bigotry against non-Hindus stops. What is required is that the masses’ consciousness be diverted from capitalism’s failures, that they give consent to it and that they remain divided ideologically and politically: these are the ideological-political needs of capitalism. Anti-Muslim bigotry is only one contingent mechanism. This means that capitalism’s—big business owners’—broader ideological and political needs overlap with religious bigotry on the part of some politicians and their followers, and this situation is behind the right-wing politics which resorts to truth-politics.18 Consider the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Also consider the demolition of the Lenin statue in a town in the State of Tripura following the defeat of the Left in the 2018 provincial elections. A right-winger reasoned: For years, there has been resentment against this statue of Lenin. It was built by the municipality and funded by the taxpayers’ money. Why should the taxpayer have to finance a statue of Lenin? What does this foreigner Lenin have to do with our people? (BBC Citation201Citation8)19 The orphanage doctor in a US drama, The Cider House Rules, says: “When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life” (quoted in D’Ancona Citation2017, 86).20 In 2016, in Canada, wage gap between immigrants and those born in the country, and looking at the three of the most popular destinations for immigrants in the past decade (Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary), sits at 25, 17 and 23 percent respectively (Magesan Citation2017). Note that this applies to all immigrants and not just to South Asians.21 Ghosh (Citation2016), an economist, says that the goals of justice (social, economic and political), liberty (of thought, faith, etc.), equality, and fraternity (including dignity of individuals, and unity of the nation) define what Indians as Indians value, and that to be nationalists is to believe in these goals as Indians, and that policies that go against these goals are anti-nationalist, and that BJP’s pro-business and anti-minorities policies have been anti-nationalist.22 The ideal of “the strong leader” projected by the Hindu nationalism has convinced the people against democracy to a large extent. Among those who surveyed only 46 percent preferred democracy, while the preference for “leader with strong hand” was 48 percent. This trend is predominant in central India, where the support for democracy is only 33 percent and leader with strong hand gets a support of 60 percent. This points to the rapid erosion of democratic ideals in the Indian society, particularly in BJP strongholds (Noora Citation2021).23 In his appeal for release from jail in British India, Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist, said to the colonial government: “If the government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the strongest advocate of . . . loyalty to the English government” (quoted in Kulkarni Citation2019).24 India’s opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, has said, BJP has been “institutionalising lies” (e.g., lies over COVID-19 deaths, the GDP figures, etc.).25 Besides, if Washington/West is so bad, then should the Indian government(s) not delink themselves and their countries from Washington/West?! Indeed, those politicians who say Washington/West is anti-India are exactly the ones that are opening up India to exploitation and subjugation by Washington/West and making the country behave as a junior and subjugated partner in their global (anti-China) strategy.26 In the US and Europe, it is between whites and non-whites, and between the native-born people (especially, whites) and immigrants (especially, Muslims), and so on.27 The 64% of Hindus in India (minus Jammu and Kashmir) say being a Hindu is very important to being truly Indian, as per a recent PEW survey. Only a third of Hindu voters for whom neither being Hindu nor being able to speak Hindi is very important to national identity voted for the BJP in the 2019 parliamentary election. By comparison, 60% of Hindu voters who place great importance on Hinduism and Hindi as central to Indian identity voted for the BJP, so Hindus who are politicized on the basis of their religious identity have been made central to the right-wing agenda (Corichi and Evans Citation2021).28 The right-wingers “in the name of God actually seek the destruction of all that is spiritual and peace loving not only in Hinduism but in other religions as well” (Independent People’s Tribunal Citation2018).29 By making this argument, I am not saying that one has to be religious in order to be ethical. Nor am I denying that a given religion is not contradictory in that while it may endorse good principles, it may also endorse ideas and actions that help reproduce an inegalitarian social order.30 Politics is indeed not only a source of power but also money.31 Consider thousands of Muslims killed and Muslim businesses and houses destroyed in communal riots engineered by right-wingers, often with the support of their government. In the 2002 three-day riots in Gujarat ruled by the BJP, at least a thousand Muslims were killed by Hindu right-wingers.Additional informationNotes on contributorsRaju DasRaju Das is Professor at the York University, Toronto. He is on the graduate programs in Social & Political thought, Geography, Environmental studies, and Development studies. His teaching and research interests are in political economy, class theory, the capitalist state, and international development. His recent books include Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Brill, 2017) and Marx’s Capital, Capitalism, and Limits to the State: Theoretical Considerations (Routledge, 2022). He is editorially associated with a number of scholarly journals: Dialectical Anthropology; Class, Race and Corporate Power; Critical Sociology; Human Geography; and Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis.