Sanjay Srivastava writes | Election results: Triumph of society and independent thoughts over statism (2024)

Though diametrically opposed in their political stance, these two comments have something to tell us about the chronicle of the 2024 election result.

Both comments puncture the persistent myth about India that conflates the idea of “society” with that of the “nation”. One aspect is common to almost all countries that were subject to European colonialism: Their political leaders pinned their hopes for emancipation — political as well as cultural — on the idea of the nation.

The nation was a holdall of emotions about togetherness, fellow-feeling, commonality and striving together for the common good of all who belonged to it. From the voting queue to the chemist shop, there is, however, now a strong sense that it is not the nation that is central to Indian life but, rather, the state. It is the state that influences the life of a society and, most significantly, the state has been made visible as a human figure of both veneration as well as fear. In effect, there is both enthusiasm and resignation that it is now the state, which is the nation. The state, as distinct from the nation, is — in its most fundamental and unavoidable form — a mechanism. It has the capacity of enforcement through its bureaucracies, policing bodies and, perhaps most importantly, vast financial resources.

It is conversations on the ground — rather than academic arguments about the centrality of “constitutional” values — that tell us something about a fundamental shift in how Indians imagine democracy at home. It is imagined as a situation where what is good for the state — a mechanism for ruling — is seen to be good for society. There are two aspects to this. First, if the state says that society is threatened by “internal enemies” it identifies, then it becomes an accepted fact. And, second, there is acceptance that the mechanisms of the state — its capacity for enforcement of its will — must be utilised to thwart the objectives of the apparent enemies of society. The grounds on which the 2024 elections were conducted by the party in power were prepared through imagining the Indian state as society itself: Unquestionable because it represents the “genuine” interests of the entire population. However, the party that most strongly represented itself as the state was not as successful as it had imagined because of strong resistance to the idea that state equals society and that its claims in the name of doing unequivocal social good cannot be questioned.

The collapse of the society-state distinction has been assiduously nurtured over a decade and a half. This has produced a particular danger as far as genuinely democratic politics is concerned. The latter depends on not accepting that what is good for the state is unquestioningly good for society: Indira Gandhi’s defeat in the 1977 general elections demonstrated an awareness of this distinction. However, in the current scenario, the state has acquired a charismatic personality. Charisma is the capacity to undermine independent thinking and the suspension of disbelief. It is fundamental to the career of “heroic” figures across a number of contexts, including films, religious veneration and political life. When the state comes to be accepted as charismatic — rather than a mechanistic device for public welfare — we are truly in the realms of passive national life.

When a state is treated as charismatic — a machine becomes a personality — it has the effect of producing unquestioning admiration and support for centralised forms of power and those who promise centralised forms of power. This is the demonic beauty of the charismatic state: All ideas of freedom, autonomy and the public good come to be seen as deriving from the state. Even the individual is no longer an entity separate from the state, it is the state. This is a fundamental aspect of the political processes of the immediate past that were contested — and discarded in the elections.

Beyond “voting patterns” and “exit polls”, we also need an understanding of how voters relate to the most fundamental aspect of Indian society — the state. Threats to the democratic culture do not come from hyper or bigotry-inspired nationalism, for these are frequently countered by dissenting voices. The most fundamental threat to cultures of dissent — fundamental to any democracy — derives from the rise of the charismatic state, for this impairs our capacity to object to its actions by believing that whatever it does is for the benefit of society. Electoral victories that are achieved on the basis of blurring the distinction between the state and the society are the most significant dangers to a national life of genuine public welfare. The question isn’t so much about “why don’t Indians subscribe to constitutional values?” Rather, we should ask: Under what conditions, and through which means, are the values of constitutionalism undermined by those of statism?

For now, independent thought — in favour of genuine social and public welfare — has triumphed over the dangers of statism.

The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London