At the turn of the 21st century, Russia became known for a new species of political operatives known as ‘political technologists’. Unlike their humdrum ‘spin-doctor’ cousins in the United States of America or the United Kingdom, the political technologists of the Kremlin did much more than peddle forked narratives in the media for their political overlords. Their mandate was no less than to engineer the whole political space.
Drawing on the capacious political patronage and financial resources of the Kremlin, these shadowy wizards of Oz could float a fabricated party one day and reconfigure an existing party the next. The object was always to fragment, coerce or co-opt (in a word, ‘manage’) the political spaces of the Opposition. Besides, the frequent reshuffling of party decks helped maintain the appearance of pluralist competition. Beyond mere narrative-setting, the scope of this new political technology of control included confecting the very props and imagery around which narratives were woven. An oft-cited example is from the 1996 presidential election, when the socialist challenge to the unpopular incumbent, Boris Yeltsin, was undercut first by amplifying the candidature of a right-wing extremist and, then, by using the oligarch-controlled media to establish the narrative of a joint “red-brown” menace to the nascent Russian democracy.
While Russia might have been the pioneer in the postmodern management of democracy, it would be fair to say India is fast catching up on such political technologies of control. In following the dizzying turn of political events unfolding in Bengal over the last month of the new Bharatiya Janata Party government, one is left with the feeling that “Nothing is true and everything is possible”, to quote the surrealist title of Peter Pomerantsev’s memoir of Putinist Russia. The choreographed mob attacks on Trinamool Congress leaders, the publicised raids on alleged syndicate operatives, the police-led humiliation parade of a local ‘Muslim strongman’, the cascading exits of former regime insiders and their rehearsed denunciations of the fallen regime are all ritualised acts within an ongoing theatrical performance of Bengal’s redemption. “We don’t have censorship in Russia, we have theatre on television, theatre that the government creates for the people,” as Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the main political technologists for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, later confided.
To briefly recap, the bulk of the legislative and the Parliamentary parties of the formerly ruling TMC have split from the parent party led by Mamata Banerjee. The modalities of alignment of the rebel legislators with the state and the Central governments remain unclear. One suspects that the state-level rebel TMC will serve as a managed Opposition while its parliamentary wing functions as a loyalist party within the ruling regime at the Centre. Indeed, the parliamentary faction has already merged with an obscure, unrecognised outfit called the Nationalist Citizens Party of India and offered its support to the ruling National Democratic Alliance.
Ultimately, the fate of the identity of the TMC (including the name and the grass-and-two flowers symbol) might rest in the hands of the Election Commission of India and the higher judiciary. Mamata Banerjee certainly will not be reassured by looking at the outcome of the recent precedents. In Maharashtra, Sharad Pawar, who founded the Nationalist Congress Party, lost both the name of the party as well as the clock symbol to his late nephew, Ajit Pawar, much like the Thackeray family lost the name of the Shiv Sena and its bow and arrow symbol to Eknath Shinde.
The induced split of the TMC, however, is of quite a different qualitative nature from that of the Shiv Sena or the NCP because it does not fulfil any necessary political prerogative. And in that respect, it reveals the essential political logic of the management of democracy. While the Shiv Sena was sliced up to effect a government turnover and the NCP to stabilise the subsequent NDA government, the TMC breakup has little to do with either the formation or stability of government (the BJP enjoys a two-thirds majority in the Bengal legislature). Thus, the TMC split (apart from bolstering the NDA majority in Parliament) was done mainly to inoculate the administrative regime against any future counter-mobilisation by an effective Opposition.
It is worth remembering that a substantive democracy (an institutional arrangement corresponding to the rule of the demos) implies a whole lot more than regular elections. As the political theorist, Nadia Urbinati, argued, elections are just periodic moments of popular authorisation and accountability of governing elites. The act of voting does not exhaust the democratic implications of popular sovereignty. After all,
the meaning of popular sovereignty is not just that the people get to vote but that the people get to rule over the polity.
How does one ensure that administrative policies are aligned with popular will? The will of the people, of course, does not manifest itself in a direct manner; it needs to be constantly mobilised through a competitive struggle between the ruling and the Opposition parties. Thus, a representative democracy, as Urbinati defined it, is government through the continuous mobilisation of public opinion. The main precondition of a democracy is therefore an open public sphere (free media, civil society and political parties) which allows this process of partisan mobilisation and counter-mobilisation of popular opinion to happen all the time, not just during the election campaign. In a managed democracy, by contrast, the administrative regime systematically colonises and manipulates the public sphere in such a manner as to throttle these channels of adverse popular mobilisation between elections.
The reason why the new BJP government in West Bengal (much like its counterparts in Assam and Uttar Pradesh) is constrained to rely on such political technologies of control is that actual policies of the administrative regime do not carry much mobilising potential among the popular sectors. It would be hard to mobilise popular opinion on the standard neoliberal policy package unveiled so far by the Suvendu Adhikari government (eviction of street hawkers in Calcutta, fast-tracked corporate land acquisition, commercialisation of basic utilities and prepaid smart meters).
Nor could the new regime mobilise popular opinion around structural reforms of corrupt political-bureaucratic networks of accumulation (unless one thinks that Suvendu Adhikari, the former TMC regime impresario, has been elevated for his crusading anti-corruption credentials). The tried-and-tested route through which BJP governments secure popular legitimacy is by constructing a shared communal enemy (such as the ‘Bangladeshi Muslim’), saturating the public sphere with anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and deflecting all popular grievances onto this ‘Other’ figure. Given its track record so far, one imagines that the Adhikari government would closely follow this model.
Yet, as Mamata Banerjee’s protest march in support of evicted hawkers demonstrated, even a rump Opposition retains the capacity to reorient the public sphere away from communal polarisation and towards questions of livelihood. To recall Urbinati, the task of the political party is not to prepare for the next election (that might be fatal in present circumstances) but to sustain the continuous mobilisation of public opinion against the neoliberal policies of the government. The dream of all political technologists is a feckless Opposition that confines itself to policy critiques within formal institutions. What they fear are parties capable of mounting a counter-hegemonic struggle that links together disparate social grievances and fuses them into a shared popular frontier against the excesses of the administrative regime. The big question is whether decayed parties such as the TMC, the Congress and the Left can rise to the challenge.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist