The Grand Disconnect

Rajesh Ramachandran

Every time the BJP wins an election there is a collective gasp of disbelief and a sigh of resignation from the liberal elite. A large section of the commentariat often fails to understand or analyse election results that go so completely contrary to its prognosis. Well, it is simply because there exists a terrible disconnect between the masses, that is the voters, and the liberal elite and its commentariat. This chasm has grown bigger in the last three decades of economic reforms and liberalisation. Now, there is no organic link between the city and the village. The migration of the village to the city is into the slums not into its middle class colonies. The cities have become independent modern republics which cannot understand or converse with the pre-modern villages. They talk different languages and idioms and their belief systems are often mutually contradictory.

MN Srinivas talked about the migration of the village elite reinforcing their dominant caste status in Rampura, the locus of his field work. But there are no Cities of Gold any longer, turning carpetbaggers into tycoons overnight. In fact, migration now doesn't ensure empowerment or affluence to unskilled or semi-skilled aspirants at all. Post-liberalisation even the patterns of migration have been skewed. The migrant labourers, domestic helps and rickshaw pullers remain outside the limits of the city's imagination. The city is only for those who speak English, study in English medium schools with a universal syllabi like that of the CBSE or the ICSE, gain degrees from respectable institutions and universities and use a global idiom of what is supposed to be fashionably liberal and progressive. 

This post-liberalisation or, if I may, po-lib intellectual idiom, interestingly, is something that has turned the village into the other, the enemy. The first casualties of the po-lib intellectual or political project were the Indian Left, Gandhi, Nehru and the rural-urban continuum. To be politically fashionable, the media, the publishing houses and the universities had to ridicule the Left, call venerable old leaders like EMS names and to trample on everything that was held sacred by the generation of freedom fighters. Nobody was ready to tell the po-lib intellectual that calling Gandhi a casteist and a Hindu was like accusing Martin Luther King of being a Klu Klux Klan activist. For this new-generation political activists in the universities, religious secessionism of the militant Islam variety was suddenly kosher, with a new far Left platform coming up to project an idea of India that is divisive, secessionist and elitist, all in the name of the unwashed masses. This was a cynical attempt to knowingly or unconsciously reframe the colonial perception of India as a conglomeration of conflicting identities, groups, and even nations (let us not forget the Adhikari thesis). But wasn't that exactly the colonial construct: “There is no, and never was, an India, or even any country of India… no Indian nation, no people of India… that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-West Province and Madras should ever feel that they belong to one great Indian nation, is impossible,” wrote Sir John Strachey in late 19th century. It could as well have been a fiery liberal elite Indian intellectual from any of the country’s big universities in 21st century seeking a separate nation for a community.

The colonial project failed because of the vision of the leaders of the national movement and their idealism. For instance, The Tribune wrote on March 19, 1881, “We do not believe in the theory that India is an assemblage of countries and that her people are an assemblage of nations. The vast continent from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, and from the Brahmaputra to the Indus, forms one great country, and Bengalis, Punjabis and Mahrattas, the Rajputs of Mewar, the Nairs of Travancore and the Gurkhas of Nepal, the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Mohammedans, all constitute members of one great nation, bound together by affinities of language and similarities of manner and customs, and by a community of intellectual, social and political interest.”

That was the national mainstream sentiment till liberalisation brought new capital into media, publishing and the universities. Along with Nehruvian socialism, his idea of India too was discarded. All the ills of the nation were attributed to him (yes, today’s trolls are but unlettered, unintelligent versions of edit page arguments of early 1990s). But the new economy and new liberalism were limited to the cities, where CBSE schools mushroomed. There was no capital infusion into rural educational institutions which remained backward, regressive and superstitious. That was the beginning of the making of two Indias. A rural student educated in a regional language medium school could become anything three or four decades ago, but no longer. The best example is KR Narayanan who went on to become Harold Laski's  favourite student at London School of Economics. When the elite or the dominant castes withdrew their wards from government schools, these schools became mere dole-dispensing mechanisms for shameless teachers who never taught.

The city was getting more liberal, logical, reasonable and globally connected, but the village was getting poorer, isolated and destined to serve the city forever. In fact, even the city is only a metaphor now. The labourers, domestics, autodrivers and delivery boys from villages numerically dominate the urban space and its elections. No wonder Delhi is now a poorvanchali or an East Indian city -— a geographical contradiction indeed. These poor villagers do not understand the underlying liberalism in the slogans of secession and the elite's intense hatred for things the masses claim as their customs. Unless the po-lib intellectual finds a new idiom, the masses will drift towards false narratives and find security in a past which didn't exist. The ideas of Rani Padmini's honour and internet during the Mahabharata times are but symptoms of a disease deep-rooted in a pre-modern mind that is fearful of the modern. Unfortunately, the cynical po-lib politician is worse than the intellectual. He has no agenda to transform the lives and politics of the villages. He merely pushes the masses into the waiting laps of the Ram Lila troupe, which just needs grease and grime to turn men into beasts.