Today Narendra Modi led Bharatiya Janata Party has secured a strong mandate to govern India for a second term. In the five years of the preceding term many of the founding ideals came under strain. The election process also was marred by several transgressions by the ruling party. Notably, a wilful and blatant flouting of Election Commission rules by the ruling party, and cocking a snook at the good traditions of civilized electoral practices by fielding a terror suspect into the fray. Also invoking the army in election campaigns, which is against the rules.
None of that seems to have mattered to the voters and if anything the PM's stock seems to have gone further up. It makes you think whether it is just the "power" of an individual to subject a nation to his will or if there is something more to it.
Elections 2019 clearly appear to be driven by sectarianism, aggressive nationalism and a kind of inexplicable hatred towards liberalism among a vast majority of Indians. That appears more plausible than to ascribe the results to Modi's "oratory", or Shah's booth managing "genius" , or even to the "ineffective" communication of the opposition and so on.
The great Leo Tolstoy in his novel War and Peace devotes an entire chapter (Second Epilogue) to the discussion of questions like how did individuals make nations act as they wished. According to Tolstoy, the inner events of human beings are the most real and immediate experiences and they constitute what life is made of. In his view the routine political historians who write history as a series of public events are not providing the correct perspective.
Throughout the novel Tolstoy illustrates the difference between written history and the private history through the lives of the statesmen and commanders who are the players. He demonstrates how little control they have over the destiny of the events they believe they command, while the "soldiers" who do the fighting are the most responsible for its outcome. These men delude themselves by believing that it is their memoranda, resolutions, councils and orders that determine the outcome.
Tolstoy's argument is that even men of destiny like Napoleon are impostors as no single will or theory can fit the immense variety of possible human behavior, the vast number of possible causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which results in the events recorded.
Tolstoy throughout the novel, and especially in the chapter Second Epilogue, tries to prove that it is an illusion if individuals think they can understand and control the course of events by their own resources. Ordinary day to day lives of common people result in social, political and economic phenomena and not the other way round.
Tolstoy believes that our lives are subject to a control of natural law along with the entire universe. We are unable to accept this "inexorable process" and instead view our existence as regulated by the wilful acts of individuals with a capacity for good or evil. These individuals in their egoism take responsibility for events as that provides them with an imaginary significance. Like a mosquito flying in an aeroplane thinking that it is flying the plane.
Tolstoy examines the question of free will and inevitability. He stresses on the reality of an inexorable historical determinism. See this paragraph in Second Epilogue-
"If we consider a man alone, apart from his relation to everything around him, each action of his seems to us free. But if we see his relation to anything around him, if we see his connection with anything whatever—with a man who speaks to him, a book he reads, the work on which he is engaged, even with the air he breathes or the light that falls on the things about him—we see that each of these circumstances has an influence on him and controls at least some side of his activity. And the more we perceive of these influences the more our conception of his freedom diminishes and the more our conception of the necessity that weighs on him increases."
"The degree of our conception of freedom or inevitability depends in this respect on the greater or lesser lapse of time between the performance of the action and our judgment of it."
I think what Tolstoy is trying to infer is that, at the point while we are participating in the event it appears like we are exercising our free will. When removed from the present, say in a few years, it may seem that our actions lacked free will and we were acting on a natural course controlled by the universe.
I am trying to use these insights from Tolstoy to console myself when faced with the stark illiberalism, and such huge support for divisive, majoritarian politics in India. That some necessity (a necessity to cater to their base bigoted worldview?) maybe driving the vast majority of Indian voters to have voted the way they have done.
A few years back Fareed Zakaria had written this in his book The Future of Freedom-
"But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends—democratization and illiberalism—are directly related."
Zakaria's words just became truer in India today.
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