Unshattering the Tea Cup in Modi's India

Nationalist extremism isn't "over" after one election; there is always more to be done

In direct contrast with my piece on South Africa’s turn to coalition governance, the story of India’s election was much more easily depicted by legacy media as a “win” for democracy. What was the difference between the two situations, if they both involved monopolies laid low by the need to form a coalition? Simply put: the political party in South Africa was more vaguely popular in the West, through its old association with Nelson Mandela, whereas we already knew to view Narendra Modi as dangerous.

But our partiality for undemocratic monopolies that favour “our” side is a topic for further exploration elsewhere. Today we’re talking about India on its own merits.

So what happened this past week? Well, far from the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) hoped-for 400-seat steamrolling of the Lok Sabha (Indian parliament) under its National Democratic Alliance, it managed to land a mere 240 seats—down from 303 last time—and was strongly rivalled by INDIA, an alliance that won 234 of the house’s 543. Since the BJP did not single-handedly win an absolute majority, it’s now going to have to incorporate non-BJP members in subsequent deals and cabinet posts.

And the world cheered, because a coalition government where Narendra Modi cannot push through every BJP desire without resistance is a much less dangerous affair.

But how much less dangerous?

Today, for paid subscribers, we’ll look closer at what this coalition government means in practice, but with a distinctly humanist bent.

Because the trouble is, our species is by and large small-c conservative, which means that we vastly prefer what is stable and familiar, and struggle with any changes to in-group norms. A strong majority defers readily to authority, and gains a significant sense of “right” and “wrong” from what is sanctioned by our governments and surrounding cultures. Live in a death-penalty state? Then you’re statistically more likely to favour the death penalty yourself, even if your generation never got a chance to vote on the law itself, in contrast with people who grew up in a place without the death penalty at all. Live in a country where it’s normal to bulldoze the family home of someone who committed a crime? You’re probably going to see collective punishment as more acceptable than if you lived somewhere that doesn’t normalize this practice.

And we love to think that we might be exceptions to the rule—that our morality surely comes from some deeper or more transcendent Truth, not mere habituation to whatever’s familiar—but it’s all context-dependent. Even if we grew up horrified by facets of our region’s legal and social norms, they nevertheless shape the moral battlegrounds we find ourselves fighting all our lives. In the US, for instance, minority rights are being clawed back yet again, and this means that many people who’d surely love to be advancing even more progressive legislation by now are instead stuck counting their wins via how much they can keep their homes from regressing further.

I’m no stranger to the allure of exceptionalism myself. I’ve absolutely stepped up to defend people I saw being attacked, instead of standing with a hateful crowd—and yet, it’s easy to rest on past laurels and think that of course I will always resist what I perceive to be an unjust status quo, just because I did so before.

No matter how many times I’ve already shown up with the courage of thought and action against groupthink, I too could be gripped at any time by a fear of standing out that diminishes my willingness to act in response to injustices I see around me—and more likely to rationalize them away, to spare myself the guilt of inaction. That’s part of what it means to live in a group-oriented species like ours. We like to belong.

And we will endorse a lot of cruelty to others, just so we can keep fitting in.

This weakness can also be a site of deeper empathy, though. If we allow ourselves to remember that we’re all shaped by our contexts, and that our contexts can change, then we can learn to target our activism more strategically, and fruitfully.

One of the least effective ways to push back is to group up humans by nation-state, ethnicity, religion, or politics and collectively dismiss them as lost causes. (Yes, even if it feels very therapeutic to do so.) We’ve seen a lot of that rhetoric as of late—whether it’s through people suggesting that southern US states should just be flooded as a wasteland of hateful Christian nationalism, or that Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank should all be nuked because apparently the whole region is “hopeless”.

Now, most people are just venting when they openly talk about wiping out whole flattened demographics, but they’re also reminding us of a difficult human truth: it is so easy for humans to acclimate to dehumanizing one another, or to let it slide when people they love dehumanize others.

And it is so hard to come out of that mentality again.

But not impossible.

This is why I get so annoyingly emphatic about resisting the treatment of any demographic as a hivemind: because even if a state has normalized thinking in one way for a long time—even if, say, war or a particular political monopoly has suffused the airwaves with hateful propaganda for years on end—when that law or culture does change, so too can this supposedly hopeless group of human beings.

So it went with US marriage equality, for instance, with even many Democrats being effortlessly against it when related law hadn’t been firmed up—only to have a sudden revelation about basic human decency after its legality had changed.

And despite the bitter, hard-won battles for other advances for equality and public health and safety—desegregation, the dropping of miscegenation laws, the removal of head taxes, the closing of residential schools, the open serving of LGBTQ+ in the military, the inclusion of marital rape as a criminal charge, bans on corporal punishment, seat-belt laws, public smoking bans, women gaining financial autonomy, shifting criminal and legal statuses for marijuana—once these changes were effected, they suddenly became much more “self-evidently” correct social policies.

Is this behaviour universal? Of course not. And when a law takes away previously held rights, or otherwise threatens longstanding cultural entitlements, it’s obviously going to spark outrage and long-term protest movements, rather than mild acceptance.

But our alignment of right and wrong with whatever the state has made licit is true enough that we have to take this herd mentality into account whenever thinking about how best to build a society that protects more of us from harm. We have a significant status-quo bias when thinking about moral action, and this makes a strong majority of us go with the flow of whatever is sanctioned and normalized in our cultures.

Which is why, even though Modi and the BJP have certainly been dealt a blow in this election, it would be wrong to assume that the threat of Hindu nationalism has been tempered by this election result alone. There are certainly promising signs of change—but also, decades of ugly, deeply entrenched cultural and legal status quos to be undone, before this country of 1.4 billion—200 million Muslim—can say that it’s truly overcome the harm of Modi’s reign.

For those who won’t be able to read on, I wrote in 2022 about India’s rising neo-fascism in a four-part series for the now-defunct OnlySky. Those pieces are mostly about nationalist histories in the region, and include a reflection on the influence of literal Third Reich thinking in many of the extremist outfits that have risen to prominence in recent decades. The pieces are titled as follows, for easy perusal:

• Part 1: “Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion people?”

• Part 2: “The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism”

• Part 3: “The global turn toward nationalist politics”

• Part 4: “The weaponization of religious custom”

Suffice it to say: hate isn’t built in a day—and its monuments won’t topple as quickly, either. When there is still so much in the law that favours dehumanizing other human beings, the strong majority of our species that is small-c conservative will all too easily continue to follow both state and social status quo, even at cost to other lives.

The work of re-humanizing ourselves, and each other, presses on.