If the West is keen to ‘understand’ BJP, it must drop the arrogance, deploy more resources, and get rid of Orientalist tropes

There is a lot to unlearn, to learn, to understand, to assimilate and to digest.

A recent?column?by?Wall Street Journal?columnist Walter Russell Mead has found considerable traction in India.

Unlike the op-eds in western media that dish out alarming assessments of Indian democracy with the mass-production efficiency of a Chinese toy factory, the author deviates from the script.

He speaks to members of BJP, its ideological parent, the RSS, tries to comprehend the socio-cultural and ideological reasons behind BJP’s hegemonic political success and acknowledges that there are glaring gaps in America’s understanding of the “most important foreign political party in the world” even if from the standpoint of American national interest.

Mead still delves into some tropes, but let’s attribute that to a lack of vocabulary to grasp India and its complexities in an Indian context, through Indic terms, instead of force-fitting western normative frameworks. This has proved an insurmountable hurdle even for some well-meaning western thinkers.

Unlike his western counterparts, Mead does something that lends him a greater understanding of the subject that he is trying to grasp. He holds “intensive series of meetings with senior BJP and RSS leaders” and is “convinced that Americans and Westerners generally need to engage much more deeply with a complex and powerful movement.”

If the western intellectual ecosystem is keen to define India and figure out, for instance, why a country with impeccable democratic credentials since Independence has twice voted for a man through free and fair elections (and is likely to hand him a repeat victory in 2024) whom western analysts love to hate, then it must deploy more resources.

Quite often, this simple point is overlooked. Instead of any grand conspiracy hatched by the West to keep India “in check” (the reverse is true for now), western analysis of India, its society, politics, or the ascendancy of the BJP is hampered by a poverty of resources. That results in poorly informed journalism full of lazy tropes and ultimately, inadequate understanding.

This is unfortunate. Just as global perceptions are shaped by the soft power of western media and its institutions, and therefore India might be at the receiving end of discredited narratives and lack of objective assessments, similarly western understanding of India is equally hampered, leading to skewed analyses that ultimately harm bilateral engagement with the world’s fifth largest and fastest-growing economy.

India is not just one of the world’s largest nation-states, but a continent-sized civilization with more heterogeneity, languages, ethnicities, and cultures than anywhere else in the world. It is a vast, complex, potpourri of diversities and maddening paradoxes.

And to “interpret” India,?New York Times, for example, has deployed a correspondent for “South Asia” covering “India and the broad and diverse region around it that includes Bangladesh, Nepal and the island nations of Sri Lanka and Maldives.” This speaks of the arrogance of the western gaze, sitting outside and looking in, ready with its ideological lenses and wanton speculations to explain it all in a jiffy.

What Mead does, therefore, is a commendable start. To truly understand the rise and dominance of the BJP, helmed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who runs a BJP-led government at the Centre, or to project how India’s rise as a great power would eventually shape the world, western analysts and institutions must begin by shaking off their arrogance, get rid of their habit of ‘explaining’ India through orientalist tropes or attempted validation of existing views and adopt the humility and curiosity of a student. There is a lot to unlearn, to learn, to understand, to assimilate and to digest.

Mead says “the BJP’s electoral dominance reflects the success of a once obscure and marginal social movement of national renewal based on efforts by generations of social thinkers and activists to chart a distinctively Hindu path to modernization.” That is only a quarter of the story.

The BJP’s stunning ascendance is also a result of unprecedented ‘jan bhagidari’ (people’s participation) that forms the cornerstone of Modi’s politics and mass appeal. Indian democracy is now percolating to the grassroots and subaltern voices are rising to the fore, challenging the notion that democracy is a Eurocentric construct, pushing back against European notions.

As External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, speaking on India’s Vaccine Maitri initiative, had said on the floor of the House in 2021, “in recent years, as democracy struck deeper roots, we have found our own cultural expressions and identities that define us in a diverse world. In fact, drawing from our heritage, we have become even stronger voices for international cooperation and solidarity.”

BJP has identified with this churn better than its political rivals. Its dominance, therefore, is not “democratic backsliding”, as western newspapers, think tanks and ‘international democracy-ranking’ organisations insist, rather it is an indication of the fuller expression of democracy, a more participatory form of democracy in a nation that is transitioning from a semi-feudal to a modern nation, never deviating from the framework a Constitutional Republic state but rooted in its beliefs, ethos, culture and Dharmic traditions.

It is therefore appearing a challenge for the West to define India, especially since 2014, rooted as western intellectual tradition is in the belief that “true democracy” must conform to the Euro-Atlanticist framework whose values are “universal” in nature. Western exceptionalism rests on an axiomatic assumption that its values are universal, and therefore democracies and cultural traditions in other geographies must conform to those set of rules and values. Any deviation from those standards are deemed either “backsliding” or “less evolved.”

This moral binary harms the West more. What also doesn’t help is the fact that in the absence of the right framework to define India, or decipher the social movements and ideological churnings that are aiding and cementing BJP’s hegemony, western journalists, academics, intellectuals, think-tankers turn to a set of cosmopolitan interlocutors — self-appointed interpreters of the natives that cannot speak — who are not only deracinated, elitist and hold an ideological bias against the BJP and its support base, but are also increasingly bitter at being deprived of agency and power since the churn that took place since 2014.

A combination of these factors results in insufficient understanding of India’s rise and BJP’s grip over the polity. We find no reference in western analysis of the triple factors that have boosted BJP’s rise — welfarism, ideological clarity and nationalism. Instead, Modi has been painted as a “demonic” figure who has unleashed the worst impulses of his base to ride to power, thereby exposing the disconnect and elitist disdain for the democratic choice exercised by India’s masses.

It is the BJP-led government at the Centre that was the first responder with aid, personnel, medicines, sniffer dogs and an entire field hospital for earthquake-hit people of Turkey and Syria. Under Modi, India’s?relationship?with the Gulf and Arab nations has taken a quantum leap.

The BJP-led Centre’s welfarism rests on the implementation at an unheard-of scale of basic infrastructure and facilities such as cooking gas, toilets, financial inclusion through 14 crore bank accounts for the poor, electricity and piped water supply to ever household that is transforming the country and enabling the inherent strength of India to be unleashed. These are targeted at the poorest section of society irrespective of their religion, caste or creed.

Modi is frequently depicted as a “Hindu nationalist bigot” by the western media and intelligentsia, yet it is the Modi government that has implemented progressive policies such as the ending of regressive Triple Talaq or ‘Halala’ that have been welcomed by Muslim women. He is also repeatedly reaching out to the most backward section of the Muslim community, the?Pasmanda Muslims.

The RSS has been at the receiving end of West’s poor understanding, plain lies and discredited stereotypes. It is routinely touted as a militant Hindu organization that is apparently out to cleanse India of its Muslim population. Mead, who spoke to RSS functionaries including Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, writes, “Bhagwat, the spiritual leader of the RSS, spoke to me about the need to accelerate India’s economic growth, and disavowed the idea that religious minorities should suffer discrimination or loss of civil rights.”

Mead’s intention might be honest, but his words are meant as some sort of a revelation that betrays the utter lack of knowledge in the West about what the RSS is, what it stands for. For instance, Bhagwat, in multiple forums, has?said?that India cannot be imagined without its minority population and “anyone who says Muslims should not live in India is not Hindu.”

Understanding the BJP has equally proved a challenge to the West. The BJP cannot simply be cast into the western framework of right-wing or left-wing, nor can it be identified as a ‘conservative’ or a ‘liberal’ party. On many issues, the BJP, frequently described as a ‘right-wing’ Hindu nationalist party by the West, has taken positions that are starkly liberal in nature. The BJP-led government has taken a progressive stance on?abortion?an issue that has divided America, neither has it opposed the decriminalization of homosexuality.

In its party manifesto, the BJP bats for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), a secular set of personal laws that will apply to every section of the population. On many economic issues, the RSS takes a decidedly leftist stance.

Instead of dealing in simplistic stereotypes and oriental tropes, the West, therefore, needs to fundamentally change its terms of engagement with India. Theories that define the Euro-Atlanticist construct are useless when applied in India, force-fitting the nation’s journey into a post-colonial scaffolding is also proving to be inadequate. This incoherence extends to the West’s understanding of BJP, the party that has proved to be the agent of change. Mead’s effort shows that at least some in the West are cognizant of the problem. It’d be a brave man to bet against the closing of the western mind though.