Among the right-wing strongmen enjoying broad electoral support today, Narendra Modi commands a position in India at least as sweeping as that of Erdoğan in Turkey, or Duterte in the Philippines. Like them, he glories in being a plebeian upstart with a thuggish base, though he rules a country of nearly 1.3 billion people, a sixth of the world’s population. Since his victory in 2014, Modi’s bjp has enjoyed unchallenged dominance of the national-political scene: an overall majority in both Houses of Parliament, buttressed by control of the largest provincial state legislatures. The latest polls tip him for another five years as prime minister in elections due to be held by Spring 2019.footnote¹ The bjp’s nearest rival, the once all-powerful Congress Party, has been reduced to less than a tenth of Lok Sabha seats and governs only a handful of states. Indeed the scale of bjp hegemony today can bear comparison to that of the Indian National Congress party in the first decades after Independence, under Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Then, too, a single party with a charismatic figurehead commanded the national scene and predominated at state-provincial level.

What sort of rupture do these new hegemons represent with the more reverential forms of bourgeois rule that went before? The best way to grasp the novelty of India’s new regime may be to compare its mode of operation to that of Congress. Electorally, the pattern is clear: an era of single-party Congress rule from Independence in 1947 to the late 1960s, followed by its steady decline and increasing resort to coalition governments; a long interregnum, with the upward trajectory of the bjp and its allies beginning in the late 1980s, after the brief fillip for Congress in 1984, following Indira’s assassination; and the restoration of a single-party majority by the bjp under Modi in 2014, thirty years later. Between the two eras lies a major shift in the political-economic epoch, from the statist developmentalism of the post-war decades to a globalized neoliberalism since the 1990s, reflected in the programmes of both parties; and with it, a dramatic though uneven advance of different caste and class fractions. Here as elsewhere the main political trend, to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall, has been ‘the great moving right show’. The bjp is no ordinary party: its nervous system is supplied by a 1930s-style, uniformed, hard-line Hindu-nationalist cadre force, the rss, which also controls a wide array of civil-society organizations, known collectively as the Sangh.footnote² Yet this makes its rise as a second all-India hegemon all the more striking. How do the dynamics of the two compare, in terms of national ideologies, party forms, leading figures, class alliances, patterns of rule? This essay will look at the similarities and contrasts between them, and at the passage from the first to the second. For if, in a negative sense, the decline of Congress created the space for the rise of Hindutva forces, in key respects it also paved their way.

To secure a hegemonic bourgeois bloc requires stability at three levels: control over those below, through whatever shifting mix of sticks and carrots; successful arbitration between ruling-class fractions—which in India, still 70 per cent rural, also means effective handling of tensions created by the agrarian bourgeoisie; and a sufficient degree of support from the professional and petty-bourgeois middle classes. As Gramsci pointed out, there is no hegemony without the effort to forge a national-popular will. A successful hegemonic ideology will mask contradictory interests while offering some ‘unified’ sense of belonging to the majority. This is where nationalism comes in, calling for subordination to a ‘higher’ cause or promising benefits to ‘true nationals’, and thereby reconciling otherwise clashing interests. In the Indian context, fighting on the terrain of nationalism has involved securing mass support for one’s particular vision of ‘India’s’ cultural and political content. Both the rss and the Congress emerged as mass-political projects in the inter-war period, and confronted the problem of forging a national-popular will for self-determination against British colonial rule.footnote³ Though their constructions of what Indian nationalism was supposed to mean had differing inflections, they came from a shared starting point.

Nineteenth-century stirrings of Indian national consciousness drew upon a Romantic-Orientalist nationalist historiography crafted by upper-caste Hindus, which glorified an ‘ancient’—that is, pre-Muslim—‘Hindu’ India and denigrated the long centuries of Muslim rule before the arrival of the enlightened British. In the run-up to Independence, both versions of Indian nationalism foregrounded the religious divide. But ‘communal’ nationalists saw the Mughal era as a foreign-imposed dark age, and the ‘unity of Hindus’ as the paramount principle on which a strong India must be built. A ‘softer’ variant, taken up by the Congress leaders, called for a religiously brokered Hindu–Muslim pact, based on ‘unity in diversity’. Though Nehru saw virtues in the Mughal rule of Akbar, for most Hindu intellectuals the key factor was the supposedly unique tolerance, goodness and accommodating character of Hinduism, which would enable the development of a composite Indian culture, in turn founding a composite nationalism. Since this accommodating spirit was allegedly ancient, it had to pre-date the coming of Islam and thus once again afforded a special status to a Vedic-inspired Hinduism. This helped to create the myth that, despite the deep entrenchments of caste and wide variations in religious practice, Hinduism constituted a single if mosaic-like faith, the ‘mosaic’ itself being testimony to its inherent tolerance. This was the basis of the ‘secular’ Indian nationalism propounded by the Congress leadership, who presented it as founded on a deep, impartial respect for all religious communities—as if imbalances in numerical and power terms would not count.footnote⁴ It was, effectively, ‘majoritarian nationalism in a liberal garb’.footnote⁵ During the independence struggle, both versions therefore allowed Hinduism’s symbols and myths to be deployed for the purposes of popular mobilization; the Gandhi-led Congress made no such use of Muslim symbols.

If Congress predominated with ease over the fractured political landscape of 1930s India—winning nearly half the seats in the limited-franchise 1937 provincial elections, for example—this was in part because its leaders had established themselves as key interlocutors for the British authorities, and took care to damp down any mass mobilizations which threatened that position. By contrast, the Indian Communist Party was banned until 1942, and its militants were executed or imprisoned. The Sangh, for its part, largely stayed away from the independence struggle, preferring to cultivate its ‘purity’; the rss was briefly banned after an ex-member assassinated Gandhi in 1948, but legalized in 1949 by the Home Minister Sardar Patel, more hostile to the Communists than to the ‘patriotic if misguided’ rss. As for Congress itself, leadership of the national movement had endowed the party with immense prestige and mass credibility in the first decade after Independence, which also supplied its major ideological adhesive. This was the era in which the Nehruvian Consensus held sway—in reality, a mishmash of developmentalist goals, vague ideals and nationalist themes, such as modernization, ‘scientific temper’, industrialization, socialism (in the sense of welfarist capitalism), democracy and non-alignment, combined with Indian national unity and the soft-Hindu ‘secularism’ described above. The latter had little real resonance on the ground; belief in it served more to delude Congress under Nehru that its official nationalism had deep historical roots and thus a strong hegemonic dynamic as well. It did not. Once Independence was achieved, the Congress’s ideological porosity became more apparent. If it exercised a sustained hegemony over the next decades, this was due less to its ideology than to more material factors: developmentalism, the first-past-the-post electoral system, the advantages of incumbency and neutralization of any communist threat.

Among these, the developmental promise of Nehruvianism had the greatest public appeal. Between 1950 and 1980 India achieved an annual average growth rate of 3.5 per cent, later derisively dismissed as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’, but an economic breakthrough of sorts when compared to the colonial era. In the first two decades of independence, state-led and tariff-protected industrialization nurtured a growing industrial bourgeoisie. Land reform, though limited to the abolition of the latifundia-like Zamindari system, created an aspiring—and numerically important—agrarian-capitalist class. The Congress electoral base of Dalits, tribals and mostly poor Muslims saw, or could hope to see, some improvement in their lives. This was accompanied by the institutionalization of local representative bodies, with election to office at various levels, and the subsequent linguistic division of states in 1956, all of which had some degree of public support and helped to stave off mass discontent and buy time. But the uneven outcome of development was also one of the main reasons for the erosion of Congress hegemony. By 1967 it was clear that the Nehruvian promise to bring about a social-democratic version of sustained capitalist progress had failed. The absence of more serious land redistribution ensured that mass immizeration in the countryside would continue. Growing discontent among the new agrarian-capitalist layers, and greater awareness of their mobilizing capacity at provincial level, led to them severing their earlier links with the Congress to set up their own regional parties. Statist developmentalism continued to enjoy widespread hegemony, however, backed by both the Sangh and the cpi.

At the same time, the ‘winner-takes-all’ electoral system established by the Constitution of India, on the Westminster model, continued to give Congress huge parliamentary majorities even as its share of the popular vote began to fall.footnote⁶ Mocking the principle of faithful representation, the first-past-the-post system gives the winning party stronger control over government and its resources, which it can then use to buy further popularity—an artificially enhanced form of hegemony. It has served the bjp equally well: in 2014, the party won 51 per cent of seats with 31 per cent of the vote. Despite its reputation as an outstanding, liberal and democratic text, the Constitution also set family law—marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance, family property—under the control of the various religious authorities, instead of instituting a uniform civil code. This was due in part to Congress’s wooing of the Muslim Ulama for its vote block, but also to the ‘soft’ Hindu nationalism of so many of the Congress representatives at the 1946–50 Constituent Assembly. (Ironically, this has allowed the Sangh to position itself as more progressive than Congress, as an ardent proponent of a civil code, while castigating the other parties and secular intellectuals for seeking to ‘appease’ the ‘backward’ Muslims.)