Why Ramachandra Guha is Getting the Crisis of Our Times Wrong

Merely replacing the Gandhis will do nothing in bringing about a probable democratic alternative, unless we challenge the neo-liberal forces, writes AJAY GUDAVARTHY.

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Ramachandra Guha is one of the foremost public intellectuals in India, and he has also stood his ground against a muscular Modi-mania. He minced no words in expressing his contempt for Brand Modi politics. 

The problem with the Guha kind of critique, even against Modi, is that it is based more on reading personality-centric psychological factors that are completely disassociated from the political economy of such imageries. Even as we critique the social psychology of growing majoritarianism, it needs to be necessarily connected to the nature of changes in India's society and economy over the last three decades.

The myth of Modi is deeply connected to the myth of neo-liberalism. 

Modi's aggressive posturing speaks to a disgruntled aspirational generation, so does his critique of dynastic politics. His mode of centralisation of power (more than any family-rule could achieve) is connected to the demands of global capital at one end and to the growing, and consciously-provoked, anxieties among the citizenry at the other. Modi has filled a vacuum that was created by growing aspirations for mobility and declining propositions of realising them. Modi succeeded in replacing mobility with retributive justice.

It is in this context that one needs to analyse the role of the Congress party and its leadership. 

What is depicted by Guha as a pure crisis of leadership and of the Gandhis, is in fact a larger crisis of the social democratic vision in politics, which we see globally. By merely reducing the situation to the Gandhi family as the source of the crisis, Guha is not only simplifying but also falling for the bait Modi has set up.