Woke Politics, Populism and India’s Future 

Recent debates on Indian politics are often staged through familiar contrasts: muscular nationalism versus compromised secularism, decisive leadership versus khichdi coalitions, and authentic popular sentiment versus detached liberal elite. Beneath these binaries, however, two quieter transformations are shaping the field. 

One is the consolidation of a majoritarian right that offers emotionally compelling stories of cultural injury and restoration. The other is the rise, within parts of the liberal and left spectrum, of a symbolic, jargon heavy “woke” politics that often leaves core structures of power intact while claiming a superior moral stance. 

Susan Neiman’s critique of contemporary “woke” thought and Shawn Rosenberg’s analysis of democracy’s cognitive demands offer useful tools to make sense of this conjuncture and to think about what a more plural and solidaristic politics in India would require.

Neiman and the erosion of universalism

In her book, Left Is Not Woke (2023), Neiman writes as someone firmly situated on the left. For her, being on the left means treating social rights – to work, education, health, housing – as matters of justice rather than charity, and grounding politics in three linked commitments: universalism, a distinction between justice and raw power, and a belief that progress, though never guaranteed, is possible.

In her account, much of what currently passes for “woke” radicalism has quietly loosened its grip on these commitments. Political identity is increasingly framed around fixed group labels. Victimhood is treated as a source of moral authority. Appeals to universal standards are dismissed as covertly hegemonic or “merely liberal.” The result is not a deeper politicisation of everyday life but a reorientation of politics toward symbolic performance.

This style did not arise entirely anew. 

It can be seen as a continuation of an older elite progressivism that often relied on symbolic gestures rather than structural confrontation. What is distinct today is how digital platforms and the broader “infodemic” have amplified this tendency: moral postures, identity signals and rapidly circulating vocabularies travel faster than substantive political work. In such an environment, performative progressivism becomes a survival strategy for actors seeking relevance, visibility and distinction in congested liberal spaces.

This helps illuminate a pattern visible in parts of India’s English language public sphere. A segment of actors located in universities, media and cultural industries has adopted a repertoire in which political standing is closely linked to the deployment of specific vocabularies about caste, race, gender, sexuality and decolonisation. Within this repertoire, it is often possible to remain a beneficiary of status quo institutions and yet speak as an oppositional figure. The structures that organise land, labour, finance, policing and welfare are rarely confronted directly. Attention is concentrated on language, representation and individual posture. A person can be a complicit gainer and an oppositional warrior at the same time because the core distribution of power is not at stake.

Neiman’s notion of the “prestige of victimhood” clarifies why this configuration is attractive. The initial move from celebrating heroes to recognising victims corrected real omissions in historical memory. Over time, however, suffering itself can become a kind of currency. To have been wronged, or to speak in the name of those wronged, is to claim a certain authority, even in the absence of sustained organisational work or substantive proposals. In India, this dynamic appears in different corners of the spectrum. 

Majoritarian narratives of civilisational injury claim that a religious majority has been humiliated over centuries. Narrower progressive subcultures sometimes treat the ability to speak as, or for, a marginalised identity as sufficient warrant, irrespective of material position. In both cases, the risk is that politics is reduced to competing claims of harm rather than a collective effort to reshape institutions.

These shifts are visible in how certain vocabularies have come to function as markers of political legitimacy – terms such as “centering”, “erasure”, “positionality”, or “calling out” often stand in for argument. Complex institutional questions may be reframed as matters of personal purity or betrayal, and disagreements are sometimes coded as forms of harm rather than invitations to deliberation. Such patterns dilute democratic debate by shifting attention from material stakes and institutional design to the performance of moral standing.

For Neiman, the problem lies not in naming specific injustices but in what happens when identity is treated as a closed, all explaining essence. Identity based movements originally aimed to build solidarities across divides, connecting different axes of exploitation. When identities are hardened into primary and exhaustive descriptors, that earlier ambition shrinks. In an Indian context, this helps explain why efforts to construct composite identities and horizontal solidarities – across caste blocs, religious communities, linguistic regions and occupational groups – are sometimes denounced as morally suspect. Parties that attempt broad alliances are described as “opportunistic,” while those that refuse all compromises present themselves as ethically pure.

Coalition governments become an easy target in this vocabulary. The historical record of coalition rule in India contains more successes than failures. Yet blanket claims that coalitions are by definition corrupt, unstable or incapable of pursuing justice often rest less on careful assessment and more on an implicit preference for purified standpoints. A universalist politics of the sort, Neiman defends, by contrast, begins from the fact of plurality and treats cross cutting alliances as indispensable instruments for advancing shared human concerns in divided societies. 

On that view, the “impurity” of coalitions is not a moral defect; it is the price of building common projects among people who do not share a single identity.

Victimhood, tribalism and the hollowing of solidarities

Neiman also tracks a shift in the moral economy of politics from heroism to victimhood. Initially, centring victims was a way of remembering those erased by official histories. Over time, however, this can slide into what she calls a “victimhood Olympics,” in which groups compete for recognition by foregrounding their suffering. Suffering then appears not only as something to be repaired, but as a credential in itself.

This shift intersects with a change in the way identity politics operates. Instead of treating identities as multiple and fluid – child, worker, neighbour, believer, voter – contemporary discourse often narrows people down to one or two birth traits, usually race and gender in Neiman’s context, religion in India, and invests those traits with explanatory monopoly. Politics is then narrated as an encounter between fixed blocs rather than a contested process of alliance building and institutional design.

In India, this has paradoxical effects. On one hand, dominant groups deploy narratives of injury to justify majoritarian assertion. On the other, groups that have historically organised for redistribution and civil liberties across communities are treated with suspicion if they engage in pragmatic bargaining. Their successes in expanding welfare or reducing violence are recorded as tactical manoeuvres devoid of principle. 

A politics that might be described as one of horizontal solidarities – stitching together different subordinate groups around social rights and constitutional protections – is thus easily described as “dirty” compared to postures that refuse coalition in the name of uncompromising identity.

Neiman’s preferred term for this pattern is “tribalism.” Tribalism reduces persons to single, inherited traits and pits “our kind” against the rest. It appears on the right in ethno-religious nationalism, but also in segments of the left where allegiance to one’s group identity is treated as overriding any standard that might apply to everyone. 

Her concern is that once this mindset becomes common sense, universalist claims are heard only as disguises for someone’s tribal interests. In such a climate, appeals to shared institutions and common rights are easily dismissed.

Rosenberg and the cognitive demands of democracy

If Neiman examines the normative and conceptual shifts on the left, Rosenberg focuses on the relationship between democratic institutions and ordinary patterns of thought. His central claim is that mass democracy presupposes citizens who can think in ways that are relatively rare in everyday life. Democratic governance, as envisioned in liberal theory, expects citizens to be moderately well informed, capable of taking the perspective of others, willing to engage in argument among equals and comfortable with a degree of ambiguity.

Empirical research on political cognition, however, suggests that many citizens do not usually think about politics in this way. Political understanding often relies on concrete images, simple stories and emotionally salient cues. People use heuristics and social identities to make sense of complex information. Under conditions of stress, fear and rapid change, there is a tendency to gravitate toward narratives that offer clarity and closure.

Rosenberg does not condemn this as irrationality. He treats it as a feature of how human beings process information under limited time and attention. However, he also argues that it creates a structural tension inside democracy. Institutions that incorporate checks and balances, federal arrangements, coalition cabinets and judicial review will often appear slow, confusing and morally ambiguous to citizens who are primarily seeking reassurance and straightforward answers. When economic insecurity and social anxiety are widespread, that tension sharpens.

Right wing populism exploits this disjuncture. It offers a picture of politics that fits more easily with concrete, categorical patterns of thought: there is a real people, there are corrupt elites, there are dangerous outsiders, and there is a leader who embodies the will of the people and promises to sweep away obstacles. In many societies, including India, this story is layered onto existing cleavages of religion, caste and region. It simplifies responsibility, identifies enemies and offers emotionally satisfying rituals of belonging.

The contrast with coalition politics is stark. Coalitions distribute responsibility across parties; they require compromise and partial victories; they often move in small increments rather than sudden breaks. For citizens who do not have time or inclination to track the details, such arrangements can look like evasive manoeuvring. In that environment, a leader who speaks in simple binaries – national/anti national, disciplined/chaotic, protector/traitor – has an advantage.

Rosenberg’s argument suggests that democratic politics cannot simply assume that citizens will spontaneously acquire the skills it requires. If democratic life is to be sustained, there must be institutions and practices that help people move, at least some of the time, from immediate reactions to more reflective engagement.

When elite woke-ism and populism reinforce each other

Neiman and Rosenberg are writing in different registers, but their diagnoses help to clarify a striking pattern in recent Indian politics. On one side, a segment of liberal discourse has adopted a form of woke-ism that is heavy on moralised language and light on structural confrontation. On the other side, a majoritarian right has honed a populist narrative of national revival under strong leadership. The interaction between these two does not follow a simple cause and effect line, but they can reinforce each other.

Symbolic woke politics tends to be concentrated in spaces with considerable cultural and economic capital. It often speaks in a lexicon inaccessible to most citizens, assumes familiarity with specific theoretical debates, and invests a great deal in questions of phrasing. 

Because it rarely addresses structural issues or material distribution, it leaves key structures of power largely intact. At the same time, it can outsource the hard, unglamorous work of electoral coalitions and policy implementation to actors whom it then criticises as insufficiently pure.

This creates two openings. The first is internal. If universalist language is treated with suspicion within parts of the liberal space, there is little conceptual ground on which to defend projects that deliberately span identities and regions. The second is external. Majoritarian populists can portray themselves as the only ones speaking in plain terms about welfare, security, national pride and social order, in contrast to a caricatured liberal elite allegedly obsessed with ever finer distinctions of identity. They can exploit the distance between symbolic battles in elite spaces and everyday concerns, reinforced by the cognitive tendencies, Rosenberg describes.

The result is a political landscape in which horizontal solidarities are doubly squeezed: from the right, by a project that seeks to define the nation along religious and majoritarian lines; and from the left, as part of the liberal milieu, by discourses that treat broad coalitions as morally compromised.

Towards politics of plural universalism and horizontal solidarities

The question, then, is how these two bodies of work can help imagine a politics in India that combines universalism with respect for plurality and that remains intelligible to citizens shaped by the cognitive patterns Rosenberg analyses.

Neiman’s insistence on universalism does not call for a colourless, homogeneous public. It starts from shared human vulnerabilities and aspirations: susceptibility to pain, attachment to dignity, desire for meaningful work, need for security and care. In the Indian context, a universalism of this sort would treat caste oppression, communal violence and gendered exploitation not only as harms to specific communities but as denials of conditions that everyone has reason to value. It would not deny the particular histories of different groups. Instead, it would connect those histories to a wider argument about what it means to live in a just society.

Such politics would also require rehabilitating the legitimacy of composite identities and coalition arrangements. In a country as divided and layered as India, governments and movements that hold together diverse constituencies around social rights, constitutional guarantees and peace are unlikely to be tidy. Their compromises can and should be scrutinised. But automatic dismissal of coalitions as inherently suspect obscures the fact that they are often the institutional expression of horizontal solidarity in a plural society.

Rosenberg’s work points to another set of tasks. If democracy expects citizens to weigh policies, assess institutions and tolerate ambiguity, it cannot treat their cognitive limits as an afterthought. Reading and “thinking laterally,” which he sees as crucial to sustaining reflective citizenship, are not purely individual virtues. They depend on social environments that reward curiosity and provide access to diverse perspectives.

In India, this implies several preconditions. One is deliberate unlearning. Citizens are exposed from early on to ready made narratives about nation, religion, caste and class. Critical engagement requires, at least occasionally, suspending the urge to locate every new argument on a familiar left–right–centre spectrum and asking instead whether the argument is coherent and honest on its own terms. Another is nurturing curiosity, a willingness to ask how others see the world without immediately slotting them into antagonistic categories.

These dispositions are not produced by exhortation alone. They grow in institutions that encourage argument rather than deference: schools that treat civics as a space for discussion rather than rote learning; party organisations that prioritise internal debate and political education; unions and associations that conduct study circles instead of only mobilising for short term demands; media ecosystems that make room for extended, substantive conversations in addition to fast moving commentary.

A politics of horizontal solidarities in India, informed by Neiman and Rosenberg, would therefore have several features. It would defend social rights as universal entitlements, not just group based favours. It would take coalition building seriously as a moral and strategic practice, rather than a necessary evil. It would resist the glamour of purity, whether in majoritarian or identitarian forms, and instead value the patient work of negotiation and compromise. It would invest in forms of civic education that help citizens handle complexity. 

Crucially, it would also cultivate a commitment to doubt. Neiman proposes doubt as a fourth principle alongside universalism, justice and progress: a readiness to question even one’s own preferred movements and vocabularies. Applied to Indian politics, this involves subjecting majoritarian narratives of civilisational hurt and liberal narratives of cultural sophistication to the same standard of scrutiny. It asks whether particular styles of argument are actually widening solidarity or simply reinforcing existing hierarchies in new language.

The road ahead

Neiman and Rosenberg, working from different traditions, converge on a picture of contemporary politics in which ideals and capacities are out of joint. Parts of the liberal space retreat from universalism into tribalised identity, while democracy at large places cognitive demands on citizens that many struggle to meet. In India, these tensions intersect with a long history of caste hierarchy, religious division and linguistic diversity, and with a more recent phase of assertive majoritarian nationalism.

Taken together, the two authors help shift the debate away from familiar polarities between “liberal” and “illiberal”, “secular” and “communal”, and toward questions about what kinds of solidarities, concepts and citizens Indian democracy is cultivating. They suggest that any attempt to renew politics will have to do at least three things at once: reclaim universalism without erasing difference, defend pluralist and coalitional institutions as central rather than peripheral to justice, and take seriously the cognitive work required for democratic life.

Such a project does not promise quick victories. It offers no easy comfort to those who would like politics to be a matter of occupying the highest moral ground through the right vocabulary. It is, however, one way of thinking about how to move beyond the stalemate between elitist woke-ism and right-wing populism, toward a politics that is both more honest about its own limits and more ambitious about the solidarities it seeks to build.

Vignesh Karthik KR is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden and a research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London.

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