By Sahil Handa
Monday, July 15, 2019
Many in the West regard Narendra Modi as a brown, bearded
Donald Trump. And there’s some reason to believe them.
In 2014, Modi announced himself to India as a radical
changemaker, promising to end corruption, confront corporations, and kick-start
a faltering economy. He would crush the rank dynasty politics of the Gandhi
family’s Congress party, reverse the fate of the failing rupee, and confront
neighboring Pakistan’s forces in the land of Kashmir. Twitter became a
mouthpiece for attacks on metropolitan, Western-sympathizing elites; Bollywood
became a way to adopt the language of the common man. Traditional political
procedure turned into an unavoidable burden — a mere sideshow to a mass
movement of disillusioned, rural workers.
Modi went on to receive the first majority India had seen
for 30 years. The narrative is a familiar one — I’ll leave you to draw the
obvious parallels. But there are crucial differences between Modi’s movement
and the one that led Trump to power two years later, and they are worth noting
for anyone who wants to understand these phenomena in the context of history.
In 1996, Salman Rushdie suggested that the Indian and the
American cultures could “recognize each other.” What did he mean? The two
nations may be far apart in wealth and geography, but they are both “made up of
people who come from elsewhere.” Of course, the melting pots are hardly filled
with the same ingredients: In India, it’s a concoction of caste, religion, and
language; in America, race, class, and country of birth. But both have in
common their possession of a shared identity — a national ethos that has
enabled their disparate, sprawling subgroups to coexist.
This has hardly been a peaceful, easy process —
minorities have long been persecuted at the hands of both governments. But the
mere fact that the world’s two largest democracies have managed to make it to
the 21st century intact defies all the norms of democratic government and state
formation. Both countries won their independence from the British; India
started with partition, America with revolution. Both were outcomes of calamitous
conflict and civil unrest — and at their onset, nobody expected either to
survive.
America’s revolutionary war spanned five years. It was
resisted from abroad and cost upward of 100,000 lives. Yet it was also the only
national revolution that actually worked — in large part because America was
never intended to be a utopia. As many better writers have explained before,
the wisdom of the Founding Fathers was their understanding of human limitation.
They recognized that any system must accommodate the worst in man as well as
the best — and this led them to ensure that their republic was founded on a
profoundly conservative set of documents. Individual rights; freedom of speech;
the separation of executive, judiciary, and political powers. And perhaps most
important of all, the separation of church and state.
A unique form of secularism characterized India’s founding,
too. On Independence Day in 1945, at a temple in the Hindu holy town of
Banaras, the national flag was unveiled by a Muslim. The vast majority of
Indians were Hindus, and that remains so today, but the country also has the
world’s second-largest Islamic population. The National Congress party wished
to unite the country across this divide, but many on both sides — most
significantly, the Muslim League — remained unconvinced that this was either
desirable or possible. The result was years of bloody rioting between Hindus,
Muslims, and Sikhs, and it followed that independence that came not to one
nation but to two. Partition was the greatest mass migration in history —
states were split, cleansed of diversity, and stained with civil blood. And so
it was that when Gandhi and Nehru found themselves at the helm of a desperately
poor, divided nation, they passed a resolution to ensure “the rights of
minorities.” The initiative proclaimed equal recognition for every citizen’s
faith under the law — secularism was not officially codified until 1976, but it
was inscribed in India’s great democratic experiment from the beginning. This
was a notably different secularism from the Western form — it was not a
separation between state and faith but a commitment to state inclusion of all
nationally represented faiths.
The genius of both Modi and Trump is their ability to
rewrite these national narratives — not with outright lies, but with emotional
half-truths. Their task has been made easier by opposition parties that have
long forgotten how to tell a convincing story — and who have often been guilty
of upholding the elitism that many voters have rightfully come to resent.
Under Modi, India is redefined as a Hindu state, with
dharma (the Hindu word for duty) at its roots. His vision transforms Indian
society from a heterogenous blend into a supposedly unified commonality —
alternate faiths can be accommodated, but for pragmatic reasons alone. This is
not, as some suggest, a contemporary fiction — it has intellectual roots in the
work of those who always dismissed Nehru’s secularism as a loose liberal
fantasy. These thinkers sought to blend modernity with the country’s Hindu inheritance,
prioritizing cultural allegiance to the nation over religious pluralism.
The problem, of course, is that such a narrative is a
dangerous relic of the past. The British raj took over from a Muslim empire,
not a Hindu one. Hindutva is an attempt to conflate complex national
history with religious quest, rendering Indian citizenship equivalent to
spiritual commitment and persecuting those who don’t subscribe.
Yet the sentiment appeals to an ever-increasing swathe of
unemployed young Indians — the “Modi Generation,” who believe that the 21st
century world can be made in their image. The median age in India is 29 —
compared with 40 in America — and the country has more young people than any
other. These youth did not live through partition. They see a world full of
failed Muslim-majority states, the closest of which are next-door neighbors. It
does not matter that their hero has failed to bring them jobs. It does not
matter that he was complicit in the loss of hundreds of Muslim lives in
Gujarat. What matters is that he is a lower-caste man who spent his boyhood
years selling tea at a train station. He is the incarnation of a proud
working-class calling — of Hindu dharma — and he is willing to spread that
symbolism through social media.
Trump has also harnessed the power of social networks,
but he has done so appealing to an entirely different demographic. America’s
electorate has gradually become older, wealthier, better educated — in other
words, its people have grown to look more like its politicians. As a result,
the electorate has become increasingly polarized — civil discord is no longer a
tale of representatives versus the people, but of one segment of the people set
against anybody who could conceivably take a politician’s place.
Over a third of American adults have a university
education, and those who do are significantly wealthier and more liberal. Trump
won by appealing to those on the other side of the education divide — the best
single predictor of Trump support in the Republican primary was the lack of a
college degree. The country has also
grown significantly more ethnically diverse, and Trump’s trick was to argue
that America was once a unified utopia. As living standards stagnated and
cultural norms changed, the message cut through, and many were left feeling
nostalgic for a previous age. The Democratic party’s response was to position
itself firmly on the side of migrants and minorities — anxieties about identity
were nothing but a mask for racist white deplorables. There was no recognition
of people’s anxieties or attempts to heal divides across identity groups — only
a repudiation of the notion that somebody considering voting for Trump could be
worthy of help. Alienation turned to anger, and anger morphed into resentment —
the educated elites were going to pay the price for their mistakes.
Unlike Modi’s, Trump’s supposedly golden age did exist in
the recent past. The call to “Make America great again” does not harken back
across three empires. In Trump’s frame, immigrants and minorities are no longer
an integral part of the national story — like Modi’s Muslims, they are said to
have infringed on the well-being of an ethnic (or, in the Indian case, a
religious) majority. The “greatness” of this period is certainly an illusion —
America was more racist and less prosperous 50 years ago. But illusions are
powerful when times are tough and loneliness pervasive — particularly when an
elite class looks to have left you behind. The country’s democratic distance
does not lie between its people and politicians — it exists between one segment
of the people and anybody who could conceivably take a politician’s place.
If it was up to Trump, he would probably have ridden this
populist wave to undermine America’s constitutional underpinnings. But he has
been constrained by her robust institutions and his own incompetence. Despite
repeatedly announcing his admiration for authoritarians, he has not yet made
any permanent inroads in emulating them. He failed to build a wall on the
Mexico border, failed to maintain a ban on Muslim immigrants, and failed to win
the plaudits of the mainstream media. Ironically, his inability to fulfill all
his promises have been masked by economic growth and one or two foreign-policy
successes. But his greater aspiration — that is, his personal aspiration —
looks to be checked (at least for now) by the Founding Fathers’ foresight.
Modi, by contrast, has already monopolized the media
establishment. Bollywood movies have been made about his rise, and he has
instituted his own textbooks in high schools. Perhaps he is simply a more
capable populist — Modi is politically astute, whereas Trump appears routinely
impulsive. But he is also aided by the fact that India is a weaker democracy,
and that his young, working-class base is only set to gain greater voting
power.
Social-media access will increase across the Asian
subcontinent, and Modi’s message will reach further. Citizens in rural states
may be flocking to urban areas, but those living in rural villages — who decide
the election results — still make up over 70 percent of India’s population. The
average age of a politician is currently 30 years higher than that of a voter —
that is also likely to change, but it will also take time. When Modi’s party,
the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) were emphatically reelected earlier this year,
there were 130 million newly eligible voters. Turnout among voters ages 18 to
25 surpassed that of the general population, and 80 percent of those young
Indians believe voting should be made compulsory. This base is politically
engaged and believes in democracy — what it has less faith in, however, is
secular liberalism.
In America, young people are becoming less keen on
democracy — if their turnout had been equal to that of the general population,
Donald Trump would still be in the White House. Trump understands that, and his
response is to energize his older voters. And the Democrats have failed to
appeal to those who don’t subscribe to his brand. Whereas Modi’s victories have
been expressions of enthusiasm, Trump’s was to a greater extent an expression
of disillusionment. The Republican party lost votes, but the Democrats lost
more.
As all of this plays out, two economic clocks are
ticking. Trump failed to deliver his cultural promises but maintained his
divisive rhetoric and cut taxes — he sacrificed economic populism to sustain
the tail end of consistent growth. If the economy doesn’t stop booming before
2020, he may ride his way to another term. Meanwhile, Modi failed to deliver on
the economy but doubled down on his religious machismo. His socialist roots led
him to try expanding the economy through executive order, but the rupee is in
freefall, there is widespread unemployment, and economic growth is slowing down
by the month. Statist political economy reflects the Modi generation’s
indifference to history. Perhaps it is no surprise — socialism appeals to the
young.
If Hindu duty and nationalistic fervor are baked into
Modi’s identity, it seems as though the people are willing to forgive his
economic mistakes. But for how long? That remains to be seen. The Congress
party shows no sign of adjusting its elitist approach. And in America, the
Democrats’ doubling down on identity politics might end up prolonging Trump’s
stay. Population growth is at an all-time low, the electorate is growing older,
and the American class divide is continuing to deepen. People want rootedness,
but the world is becoming less stable. Climate change and migration will rock
the boats faster.
Not all populists come to destroy democracy — some arrive
in order to rescue it. But their attempts are rarely successful without
significant cost — economic catastrophe, mass civil unrest, or all-out war.
This is not fascism, but two democracies in serious crisis. Both are closer to
the gilded age of the 1890s than to the horrors of the 1930s. Neither leader
shows any sign of pausing for breath. But the difference is that Modi sees a
rising a generation in his wake.
Donald Trump is promising a recent past to an alienated
mass. Narendra Modi is asking a burgeoning majority to help him erect a new
future. Either movement could spell the end of liberalism or force it toward a
better place. But it remains true that the youth have always been more willing
to fight for their cause.
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