Shake-up the Congress needs

LANGUAGE and time have a way of transforming politics and the politician in surprising ways. Consider Modi. Eight years of his rule have given him a sense of gravitas; he has graduated from an RSS pracharak to a BJP Pradhan Mantri. Time has made Modi the archetype of a new statesman, a leader who taps into the unconscious of a people to create new constituencies.

Advertisement

While the BJP builds itself around the rapacity of the nation state, the Congress must search for an all-encompassing civilisational frame.

There is a sense of magic around him. Even his sense of ordinariness evokes the idea of the chaiwala. When the Press looks at the ordinariness of Rahul Gandhi, it sees mediocrity. Modi is a leader who is seen as standing tall among world leaders thus satisfying India’s alleged need for dignity and self-respect. Time messages that he is here to stay, and that the BJP will shape the political ecology of the next decade. One does not need a Prashant Kishor to tell us that.

The picture the Congress presents is radically different. Even a sense of nostalgia is lost as Rahul starts embodying the comic and the helpless. His performances seem laughable, while Modi evokes the predictably laudable. Modi, for the media, evokes a new epic, while Rahul Gandhi, at best, summons the limerick.

A writer raised on the myths of the Congress, committed to pluralism confronts such a situation with a sense of angst and anxiety. Yet, he senses what looks like a great celebration is a monolingual chant, the creeping rhetoric of a soft authoritarianism. The question is, how does one reinvent the Congress in an age like this. One thing is clear one cannot resort to the gimmick of reviving the family.

One senses one needs a new discourse and a different kind of storyteller. The Congress has to recreate its vision of the whole. It has to revive a plural, syncretic vision of India when our current sense of patriotism is becoming a monolingual catechism. Following AK Ramanujan’s depiction of 300 Ramayanas, we have to invent 300 narratives of the Congress which converge to create a richer whole.

It has to challenge the globalism of the BJP, ending parochialism with a cosmopolitanism of a civilisational kind. Rahul’s attack on the IFS and its arrogance in a series of mumbles will not do. The Congress has to show that the BJP evokes a narrow India, both in its external and internal politics, that it is a mediocrity of textbook ideas that lacks the innocence and generosity of the Nehruvian years. It has to show how Nehruvianism provides a heuristic for a world politics, that it is not an intellectual corset from the past.

To do this, it has to reconstruct the vocabularies of the past. Scientist CV Seshadari playfully claimed that the India of his time needed ‘a don’t use me dictionary’. It was a compendium of terms of policy like development, poverty, security, boundary. Seshadari argued that all the words needed to be reworked, for reuse. Language, he claimed, was an essential part of ethical repair.

One should realise that in reviving debates, one is reviving the templates of democracy. One cannot rely on the old grids of electoral democracy based on the dogma of the electoralism of number and representation. The Congress has to revive the immediacy of direct democracy, as the ‘Occupy’ movement across the world did.

An electoralism of number leads to a tyranny of majoritarianism, which, in turn, polices minorities in the name of patriotism. This idea of the staleness of minority politics was aptly put by a scholar at a recent seminar. He said, ‘I do not want to be a minority, policed for good behaviour. I want to be a citizen to celebrate India as a whole.’

The idea of the helpless, marginal in an informal economy that the Congress created as a votebank has to be radically reworked. Marginals have to be seen as part of a creative plurality, the way indigenisation movements in Latin America are doing. Marginals have to be part of an alternative imagination challenging the monolingualism of economic planning. Congress sycophancy to textbook economics has to be challenged for the poor to be liberated from poverty. Similarly, the tribal has to be seen as an expert on diversity, as a constitutional trustee of the forest where he can rethink the tree and the leaf as part of the new constitutionalism. Also, the idea of the Dalit needs a Dalit idea of science, of waste, of pollution. One has to go beyond pollution to create a new blend of hygiene and justice. Only if the Congress acquires a sense of the dialects of vulnerabilities, can it reclaim a sense of the idea of inequality and how to combat it. It must abandon the idea of the scientific temper and replace it with a pluralistic link between knowledge and democracy. It needs a global radicalism of the Anthropocene, and must abandon the current idea of development which turns citizens into refugees. The dams and laboratory can only become temples if they create a syncretic science of sustainability rather than a monolingualism of a BJP model of nationalism and development.

To do this, the Congress, which used universities as votebank, has to revive the idea of an alternative university. It has to think of a university of ideas which is dialogic, not developmental, where dissent does not crucify a promising career. The Congress, in reworking itself, has to rework the syllabus and the Constitution by rethinking a new idea of the commons.

While the BJP builds itself around the rapacity of the nation state, the Congress must search for an all-encompassing civilisational frame. It must return to the civil society for ideas, create knowledge panchayats that create a politics of conviviality. It needs a new ecology where nature is a part of the Constitution, where technology is encompassed as ethics. Only by transforming politics into a life-giving exercise can the Congress seed itself as the future of a new democratic imagination. No G-23 is going to achieve that.