“What Bengal thinks today, India will think tomorrow” — several generations of Bengalis have thus misquoted Gopal Krishna Gokhale to summon the state’s self-image as the vanguard of Indian nationhood. That Bengali exceptionalism looks a bit jaded, now that the state seems to have hopped on to the rutted road to Hindutva modernity — bulldozers on the streets, “Vande Mataram” in schools, restrictions on beef and so on. It is worth exploring, therefore, the nature of the recomposition of the political order in West Bengal, and how it compares with the other states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
We might note at the outset that the BJP’s dramatic expansion in eastern India over the last decade (Bengal, Odisha, Assam, the Northeast) has effectively put paid to a certain cultural essentialist interpretation of Hindu nationalism which located its natural habitat in the Hindi belt. It has demonstrated that the Hindu nationalist model is not preternaturally disposed to any cultural formation. Nor is it genetically tied to any particular historical lineage, such as the legacy of the Arya Samaj or the shadow of Mughal heritage. It is equally at home in Uttar Pradesh as it is in Bengal. Or it might be in Kerala in a decade or so. This is because what Hindu nationalism offers today is a solution to the crisis of political hegemony, which itself arises from a series of structural transformations in the political economy over the last few decades, a common feature across the country.
The particular solution that the Hindu nationalist model offers can be captured by the concept of a ‘conservative revolution’. The sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, explained the “philosophies of conservative revolution” as “always grounded in a radical overcoming which allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing”. From what we know of the experience of Assam and Odisha, it is likely that the new order of the BJP in Bengal would mainly preserve the inherited institutional and economic base while pursuing a vigorous and violent ideological transformation. To understand the point, we must first examine the nature of the crisis of political hegemony in Bengal, and what it is about the ideology of Hindu nationalism that enables it to suture this disintegrating political order.
The crisis of political hegemony in Bengal, as in many other states, can be traced to the entrenchment of a dual economy in the neoliberal period. We have a large informalised economy, which as per government estimates, generates close to half of all economic output and employs nearly 90% of all workers in the non-farm sector. Of particular interest to us are the high-rent and shadowy industries of real-estate, construction, transport, road-contracting and sand-mining, all of which have expanded massively with the post-1990s spurt of urbanisation, particularly in second and third tier cities. The enormous financial spoils and the web of patron-client relationships generated within this economic substrate have become organically intertwined with the organisational base of all political parties, providing its local leaders and cadre networks.
The first aspect of the crisis of hegemony — the fracturing of the dominant ‘power bloc’ after 15 years of rule — emerged within this context of the dual economy. This involved the growing contradictions between the provincial commercial classes rooted in the informalised sector, on the one hand, and the national corporate capital and professional middle classes on the other. As the academics, Zaad Mahmood and Soham Bhattacharya, have argued, the Trinamool Congress’s populist regime rested on a top-down social coalition. At the apex stood political entrepreneurs of the commercial classes — drawn largely from non-Brahmin forward castes or subaltern backgrounds — who controlled local party networks and managed a large clientelist base of the poor and the women tied together through patronage and welfare schemes. Mahmood and Bhattacharya described this emerging provincial elite as a “non-hegemonic commercial class” because, unlike the old bhadralok elite of the Left Front era, they were unable to claim broader cultural or moral leadership over society.
The narrative of ‘corruption’ and ‘stalled developmental projects’ helped the BJP mobilise the professional middle classes alongside its big corporate partners. Further, the Hindu nationalist project promised to restore the bhadralok as the vanguard of a new cultural revolution aimed at establishing Bengali Hindu sovereignty, much as Hindutva politics has reinvigorated the cultural dominance of the Ahomiya middle classes in Assam, or of the Brahmin-Karan elites in Odisha. By recognising only a unified Hindu political subject and disavowing the political salience of caste and class contradictions, Hindu nationalism is uniquely suited to the exercise of ‘hegemonic leadership’ in the Gramscian sense: the ability of a dominant elite to universalise its world view and interests as those of society as a whole.
While providing the bhadralok elite with the mantle of cultural and moral leadership, the new saffron order would likely integrate the provincial commercial classes through the same patronage networks (the much hyped syndicates and so forth) inherited from the TMC. The best indication of this has been the choice of the chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, who had been implicated in a series of high-profile corruption scandals before shifting to the BJP. The choice of Adhikari echoed the choice of Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, both seasoned political bosses of the old regime much adept at managing the pyramids of patronage-based financial accumulation. For instance, an investigation last year by The Reporters’ Collective revealed that over half of the BJP’s declared funds from four northeastern states (Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, and Manipur) came from those companies that had secured government contracts.
The second aspect of the crisis of hegemony relates to the breakdown of the traditional model of political representation. This degeneration of the concept of party-based political representation to little more than political brokerage has hardly been unique to Bengal. The hegemonic Hindutva solution to the crisis of the party form has been to reorganise political representation around the direct identification between a charismatic Hindu leader and a unified Hindu political subject, of which Uttar Pradesh and Assam are the best examples.
Regional parties like the TMC, on the other hand, have struggled to establish such a direct relationship between the leader and a coherent sub-national ‘people’. Unlike the collective Hindu subject, the collective Bengali subject remained, at best, weakly integrated. The TMC could certainly assemble an electoral coalition of provincial commercial elites, welfare-dependent subaltern groups, minorities, and sections of the middle classes. Yet it lacked the ideological capacity to fuse these disparate political groups into a collective political subject. To use the formulation put forth by the philosopher, Ernesto Laclau, the TMC failed to establish a “chain of equivalence” linking the demands of these varied groups into a common hegemonic project. In the absence of such a collective project, social groups were co-opted by separate administrative and patronage-based mechanisms. Muslim communities, for instance, were incorporated mainly through appeals to their religious identity rather than by invoking solidarities rooted in class or caste subordination linking them to other marginalised groups within the coalition.
Contrast this with how the BJP in Bengal has ideologically reframed political demands of various segments (citizenship for Namasudras, cultural autonomy for Rajbanshis, inclusion for Hindu OBCs) within a common frontier of Hindu sovereignty defined against the ‘Muslim Other’. This is the kind of ‘chain of equivalence’, which can mobilise a collective political subject, the linchpin of the new mode of representation. Furthermore, the BJP has a deep appreciation for what Antonio Gramsci called the “materiality” of ideology. It knows how to embed the political categories of the Hindu nationalist ideology within bureaucratic institutions, administrative routines, laws and regulations. In Assam, the Himanta Biswa Sarma government has made the category of the ‘Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant’ (Bengali-speaking Muslim) the master signifier governing the distribution of rights and resources. The interpellative capacity of these governmental procedures has turned the distinction between indigenous (Hindu) and outsider (Muslim) into the organising principle through which ordinary Assamese negotiate the State and imagine collective life.
The Hindu nationalist solution to the crisis of hegemony, therefore, lies not in transforming the political economy itself but in reorganising the structure of popular consent around it. As Bourdieu would have noted, this allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing. This is the essence of the conservative revolution promised by the poriborton in Bengal.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
