I want to preface this by saying this is going to be a retrospective political essay with my personal feelings and opinions on various matters. It might not be a good read for everyone unless they also come from the same state and system as me.
I was trying to find a good introduction for this post for quite some time, as I was planning to write this for long. I was playing a couple of options in mind, trying to settle on it, but since this is going to be a political post, I decided today to settle on the moment in my life when I officially entered the electorate.
I don’t remember much of the details since it was more than a decade ago, and it was quite a mundane event for me at that time. It was so mundane that I didn’t even care since a high schooler in his final years isn’t expected to participate in political discourse. I had assumed that it was just another official document I would need later in life. I was naive and grew up to be apathetic partly because my parents didn’t really want me to participate. They never said that out loud, but you could obviously sense it. This shielding is perhaps not surprising considering how much people value education and material success it brings in life and how dirty politics is here, but perhaps it is surprising given how political the society and surroundings actually are.
I cannot hope to encompass the entire fervour, but I shall say there’s some election happening every year or so in which we are supposed to participate; there’s political discourse happening inside tea shops every five feet apart and inside buses between random men who never met before. There’s some protest or rally going on every day, and there are political student unions in every university participating in all of those above and then some more.
The next part may even be more surprising when I say that for a society with so much political participation, we haven’t progressed much, whether in terms of economic growth or social growth. The subject experts can better analyse the reasons. I never studied them academically. So I will resort to making a couple of perhaps broad generalisations based on my own experience and opinions.
I think people are aware that we are the birthplace of several major religions and that we have nearly two thousand distinct languages in use. Language, religion, customs, and even everyday social norms really do change dramatically within a few hundred kilometres. I’m personally trilingual, but I would be completely lost culturally and in terms of communication if I travelled to certain parts of the country.
We were founded on the principles of secularism, mutual respect, and “unity in diversity”. I was taught in school that, despite the immense diversity, it is this shared sense of unity that brings us together and gives us a common sense of belonging. Learning about this felt genuinely “cool” and special when I was younger. I now realise that we were shielded from the reality that there is also a huge amount of deeply rooted, unspoken inter-community and inter-faith hostility, and that this supposed unity is remarkably fragile whenever something falls outside one’s own “community”. It’s difficult to even define what exactly constitutes a community here. Sometimes it means people of the same religion; sometimes people of the same religion and of the same social status on top; and sometimes it can even be something as small as belonging to the same family.
I don’t know exactly how we arrived at this point. Some of it is undoubtedly historical, some of it has been passed down through generations, and some of it may simply be the result of people inheriting thoughts and prejudices without ever questioning where they came from. Often, there isn’t even a conscious decision to hold these beliefs. People just grow up with them, absorb them, and continue passing them on.
Anyway, coming back to the present, I notice this every day. Sometimes online, sometimes in real life, and I’ve come to believe that this lack of unity and the latent hatred have been a major hindrance to social and political progress. I don’t think people collectively vote with the long-term improvement of their surroundings in mind. More often, it seems to come down to short-term benefits such as government subsidies, social benefits, or whatever promises a politician makes to pander to a particular electoral community and secure their votes. This gives them enough of an edge where they don’t really have to care about people from other communities.
This creates a particularly destructive cycle. Disunity, political apathy, and inter-community hatred create an environment in which corruption can thrive. Governments change, but people’s lives as a whole remain unchanged. Elections can be won by pandering to specific communities, securing particular vote banks, exploiting or cultivating existing inter-community hatred, and offering enough freebies or targeted benefits to keep those constituencies satisfied. The result is a political system that rewards division and short-term thinking rather than long-term reform. In that sense, it can feel like a travesty of democracy. A democracy can only produce meaningful change if its voters collectively demand it. If the electorate does not choose to prioritise the right things, those things are not going to happen, regardless of who is in power.
I shall admit that I played my own part in this. I knew better, but I didn’t vote. Elections went by while I sat at home, hating everything and trying to be a closeted ideologist. Part of that was undoubtedly apathy and a sense that there was no real collective will for change. However, the bigger reason was that I never found a single political party here whose ideology I could genuinely stand behind. I have very strong ideological beliefs of my own. So I kept asking myself how I could I vote for someone who doesn’t represent what I believe. I could never quite bring myself to choose the lesser evil, because to me, the lesser evil was still evil. So I opted out entirely.
So I watched quietly as the right wing took power year after year by appealing to the broad religious identity and exploiting and/or actively cultivating the existing inter-community hatred. It gave them the largest and most powerful vote bank ever in terms of raw numbers and also because religion here is not merely an abstract belief. It is deeply intertwined with people’s everyday lives, social identities, family structures, customs, and their sense of status and belonging. It is as tangible as it can get.
Once in power, they steadily weakened state institutions after institution, replacing independent or democratically accountable positions with party loyalists, while presenting the transfer of social welfare and economic opportunity toward capital as necessary for industrial growth. At the same time, their public-facing political wing cultivated a softer, more culturally palatable form of religious nationalism, while their extremist wing worked to cultivate the hardline religious beliefs and embed them within institutions such as the education system. Their long-term vision is like a puritanical theological society in which individual freedoms and particularly women’s rights or even basic human rights become subordinate to religious and social conservatism.
And while all of this was happening, the public sphere itself changed rapidly. Religious festivals, holidays, saints, sages, and processions increasingly became more politically and culturally prominent than say students protesting for their rights or ordinary people protesting over social and economic issues. Public harassment and lynching members of the other community became increasingly common.
Much of this was and still is ultimately hidden behind a singular political strongman. He has been the face of every election, the saviour who stood above the ugliness of everything surrounding him. His supporters revere him and can separate him and the party from the institutions being degraded, from the extremists operating in plain sight, and from the consequences of the policies being implemented by his government.
People love their protagonists and antagonists in movies; they love their pop stars, their larger-than-life characters. So naturally demagoguery thrives. His face is everywhere. On newspapers, on public transport, on advertisements, on subways, trains and buses.
Even though they were elected to power at the centre and in almost every state, a few states remained outliers. Mine was one of them, despite being the birthplace of the founder of the right-wing ideological movement. Of course, no one actually cares about his ideals anymore; his name is largely invoked as a symbol to legitimise the extremist political project.
We had a socialist government, followed by a communist, and eventually a liberal one, but never a right-wing one. It took a long time for the political tide to reach here. But when almost the entire country is already within their grasp, the scent was eventually bound to reach here too. And so it did.
I was appalled. They initially tried to present themselves as centrists, but it did not take long for the extremist fangs to show. One of our universities consistently ranks among the finest in the country, but it has also historically been a stronghold of socialist and communist politics. They have never been particularly comfortable with that even when they were the opposition. Once in power, there seems to be an almost instinctive desire to eliminate dissenting voices by whatever means available. So party cadres were mobilised to attack the students living in the university accommodation in the middle of the night, while religious hardliners were brought in to picket the gates, block access, and chant religious texts in an attempt to create chaos and intimidation. New regulations were introduced by the state that made it possible to remove particular student political leaders from the university, and more recently, job transfers were mandatory, creating a mechanism through which dissenting professors and university officials could potentially be displaced.
The broader objective seems clear to me - remove dissenting voices, turn the university into a new party stronghold, and gradually undermine an institution built around independent thought and critical inquiry. Once that happens, education becomes another sector that can be opened up to political patronage and private capital, while the very culture of critical thinking that makes a university valuable is slowly dismantled.
They have followed the exact same playbook elsewhere in the country to much success. I have little reason to not believe that this time will be different.
All of this leaves me sad and hopeless that this is the reality I have to wake up to every day. I sometimes find myself wondering how we arrived at this point, and today I am writing about the conclusions I arrived at through introspection. I don’t think history will forgive us for what we allowed to happen. It certainly won’t forgive me, because I failed to exercise the rights I had. While they were becoming entrenched in their puritanical and extremist ideology, I was sitting at the opposite extreme. I hold myself responsible for the political and social decay that I caused, and the fact that generations after me will have to live with the consequences of that apathy.
I can only hope that, by the time they are finished, there is still enough of a democratic apparatus left for the electoral outcome to be undone. I learnt from my mistake, and I hope to play my part now, even if that means swallowing the concept of “lesser evil”.
This post isn’t a call to action. I’m too much of a coward to go out into the streets and fight for what I believe in. This is simply a personal retrospective, serving no other purpose than to document my feelings. I may face repercussions for publishing this later in life. It has happened numerous times before here, but it won’t change my views or my principles.
I want to end with a play on a quote I’ve always liked.
Tyranny does not require constant effort when we are collectively apathetic.