In a few weeks, over 500 million Indians will line up at polling booths to elect their 17th parliament since India won its independence from the British in 1947.
They will have to choose whether to reelect the far-right government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi or to elect a coalition government. Several regional parties, which rule over states with populations of 200 million (Uttar Pradesh) to 34 million (Kerala), will decide the fate of the country.
But it is hard to predict the election. The far-right is muscular, taking advantage of spectacular military maneuvers to tantalize the population. Modi launched an attack on Pakistan. The temperature in the country soared with jingoism. The attack itself is in dispute. The bombs wrecked some trees in the Massar Jabba forest reserve, so Pakistan lodged an “eco-terrorism” charge against India at the United Nations.
Then, Modi had the air force blow up a satellite in space. It was theatrical, but of no real military value. This drama is designed to swing the electorate, which wavers as India’s economy crushes its population.
Delhi (India) is a city I know well, having walked its many roads for decades. And yet, the city keeps growing, eating into the fertile soil as it displaces farmers and grows housing development. The government estimates the population of the city to be almost 19 million, although on a crowded bus or in the Metro at rush hour it feels as if just that number is squeezed against your body.
When I was a young boy, it was not hard to see the fields at the edge of the city, the landscape agricultural and the bounty of the countryside making its way — often on oxen carts — to the city’s many, decentralized markets. Difficult now to know where the city ends and where other towns begin, harder yet to imagine the origin of the food in the supermarkets.
Urbanization across India is taking place at a pace that is staggering — now almost a third of India’s 1.4 billion people live in cities. What draws people to the cities and towns is the disruption of India’s agriculture, where millions of agricultural workers are simply not able to make a living. This has to do with the commercialization of agriculture, the domination of a few large multinational companies over the entire industry of food and the withdrawal of government support for farmers.
Roughly 300,000 farmers have committed suicide in India in the past decade and a half. This is their cry into the dark for the death of agriculture. Suicide, migration, the brutality of everyday life as jobs vanish and livelihood become more and more insecure: these are the contours of today’s world, not just in India.
There is a word for it — precariat, a concept developed by the International Labour Organisation, that links two words: the proletariat (workers) and precariousness. So few people have permanent jobs these days, fewer yet decent jobs.
Work is precarious and social life is fragile. Government, which once had on its agenda the enrichment of its citizens and of social life, now seems to be overwhelmed by the task of security — with border patrols, military forces and police officers as the way most people encounter the state. Basic needs of people — education, health care and transportation — have been effectively sent into the private sector, where they are not easy to afford.
Elections remain, but they take place with populations that find themselves exhausted by the everyday tasks of survival — the hours of the day sucked away by child care, commuting, precarious work in one or two jobs and then elder care.
Parts of social life that should be taken care of by the state (child care, elder care) are now private matters, often work that is done by women. Where is the time to study the manifestos of political parties and the statements of candidates? Where is the time and energy for a rich democratic environment?
Democracy, in this precarious social world, is tender toward hate. Hate is so much easier to digest than the complexity of public policy. Traveling across India, one often gets into political discussions with strangers. Politics is not a taboo subject. Conversations are defined far more by WhatsApp groups and cable television than by any sober publications.
Few people are deluded enough to believe that India is in great economic shape. Half of the population goes to bed hungry each night. But why is there hunger? The answer to that swirls in the trough of hatred. It is so much easier to blame minority groups (Muslims and oppressed castes), so much easier to get angry at someone than to think clearly about problems and solutions.
Lies and prejudices swirl around. Fantasy masquerades as reality. The nastiest forms of patriotism are wheeled out to befuddle decent people. Nothing here is peculiar to India. The playbook is familiar to those who follow elections in the United States and Brazil, in Turkey and the Poland.
Leaders say anything they want that tickles the bigotries of their audience and that creates sufficient majorities to bring them back to power. That is what Modi counts on. What looks like gravitas from afar is nastiness the closer you get (and the more Hindi you understand).
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro came to Washington recently. The media called him “Trump of the Tropics.” In fact, these men are cut from the same social crisis. They are not the problem, merely its symptom.
As long as there is no agenda to address the fundamental questions of precarious work and social desolation, the vast amounts (close to $32 trillion) stashed away in tax havens, the root cause of hatred will remain. That hatred will rot the institutions of democracy and create an atmosphere of ill-will hardly conducive to civilization.
It is likely that Modi will not be reelected. But if he does come back, it is not because he has a mandate based on his record. It is because hate has so eroded the imagination of our countries that democracy is not what it could be.
Vijay Prashad, the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, is the editor of Strongmen (O/R Books, 2018). He lives in Northampton.