Run-Up To 2019: The Perils of Normalisation

Close to half-a-decade or thereabouts, India stuck a Faustian deal. Amid frenzied Delphic pronouncements of a happy future, it chose to erase a bit of its recent past. It chose demagoguery over common sense, suspended disbelief to accept sorcery of big numbers and dumped old-world moral restraint to let the inner beast out and roam the world with reckless abandon.

Midwifing the deal was the great demagogue. According to some, he is the greatest salesman ever born. He sold a grand vision. The country fell for it hook, line and sinker. Five years on, the vision is in tatters. The leader has diminished. His silver bullets have proved to be duds and he is now more words and bombast than achievements. However, this story is not about any single person. It is about the toxic baggage the deal left us with. Call it ideology, if you please.

It was an engaging intellectual proposition to begin with. The old world was getting asphyxiating, claustrophobic and out of touch with reality. The ideas were out of place and did not resonate with the young. The old narrative of India was getting jaded. Even leader-speak had failed to enthuse anyone. The country was hungry for something; it didn’t know what.

Then moved in the ‘new’, riding on the decibel trajectory of the demagogue. Perhaps it needed him for reach among the masses. It challenged settled truth with alternative truth. Facts vs. facts promised to be a wonderful setting for new knowledge. Revisit the axiom, question certitudes, upend a few fossilised beliefs, revise history if there’s compelling new evidence – the possibilities were immense. If the challenge threw up a refreshing new idea of India, it was welcome.

However, vulgarians took over too soon. Degeneration followed. Champions of new ideas were replaced by foot soldiers of ideology. As is the case with any ideology, it needed enemies to assert exclusiveness, a steady supply of them. If there were none, they had
to be created. The enemy, so far, has assumed many faces: Left, anti-national, rationalist, anti-Hindu, beef-eater and so on. Many are ready to be minted still.

If you have enemies, you need to have hate too. Not surprisingly, the ideology normalised hate and cynicism. Worse, it normalised public expression of brute aggression. You could kill a human for a cow. You could lynch people in love and you could violate just about
everything. The avalanche of appreciation for your action removed any sense of guilt. The strongest validation came from fellow travellers of faith on social media and in politics. War cries were everywhere.

You were only a small cog in a big wheel.

Somewhere along the line, a devious ambiguity was carefully built: the leader, the great demagogue, said things sweet, nice and palatable – about cleanliness, about the anxiety of children facing exams, about honesty and what not- and convinced the country that in him lay all hope; the commanders and foot soldiers of the ideology, meanwhile, went ahead with their cynical agenda at furious pace. They crammed the information space, supplanting substance with noise, arguments with aggression, and other spaces too. The enemy had to be hounded out of all crevices and dealt with. The leader, in a deliberate move, stayed clear of the lot. Silence served the normally loquacious person well here. He was never party to anything obnoxious.

Now, old hypocrisy is confronted with new hypocrisy, old lies with freshly-minted lies. The ‘new’ promised deliverance from intellectual oppression and the colonisation of the mind, it has ended up with worse oppression instead. The deal was spurious indeed. The country was short-changed. Worse, it was left divided in unimaginable ways.
What now?

This question makes the elections of 2019 so defining in independent India’s history. It’s not about the greatness of the demagogue anymore. With a series of missteps he has neutralised his appeal as a visionary. The power of his words to enthuse masses is on the wane.

What remains is the fight between ‘the’ ideology and a population taken for a ride. The search of the latter for a new bridge to the future will be renewed in the elections.

(This is the second article in a series on how India has changed post 2014).

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