The Post-Ideological Party
Opportunism has become commonplace in Indian politics today. And we, the political public have learnt to shrug our shoulders and accept it, not as a corruption of politics or as betrayal but as a constitutive feature of politics. Arguably when most of us read of Raghav Chadha and six others leaving the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), we must have lapsed into a moment of cynicism. After all Punjab elections are around the corner and the AAP should be readied for defeat. Are these defections a calamity? Perhaps yes, perhaps not.
The once outspoken Raghav, and all these members of the Rajya Sabha who have sat in the house of the elders for many years as representatives of a crisis ridden, Punjab, have done nothing about the predicament of the people of the state. Two among those who have sat in the august Rajya Sabha as representatives of Punjab are amongst the richest Punjabis if not the richest Indians.
They must possess the gift of making money. Why haven’t they deployed this gift for the interest of the constituency they represented while they were in power? They have now completely rejected any responsibility for the beleaguered state by joining a party that has little idea of what equality is, let alone what redistributive justice, or freedom for all from the exigencies of daily life means.
More relevantly the exit, the latest among many others, throws a deep shadow on the AAP, which at one point brought down the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government by articulating loudly amplified charges of corruption. India Against Corruption became their identity, their mantra and their rationale for making an entrance into the political arena. AAP presented itself as a post-ideological party, a party that no longer believed in ideologies that uphold ideals of equality, freedom, and justice.
AAP promised pragmatism, a version of post-ideological politics driven not by ideals but by expediency. Do we not need a coherent idea of what a political party stands for, where it wants to take us, how it proposes to do so, and what status of the citizen in its world view is? AAP’s magic wand was corruption. But corruption, like governance, is not a political term. For politics is always contested. And no one will contest the undesirability of corruption or good governance. There is in AAP’s world view no grand clash of ideas and ideologies, of different notions of what a good society is, and of what a party proposes to accomplish if elected.
The concept of post-ideology is not a new development in the history of the world. The notion of a post-ideological phase of history, and post-ideological social science disciplines, caught the imagination of West European and American scholars in the 1950s and the 1960s. This was associated with another phrase ‘the end of ideology’ that was elaborated in different ways by Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Raymond Aron, and Seymor Martin Lipset.
The stance was expressed vociferously at the 1960 meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) established in 1950. A post-ideological period would follow the end of ideology. The CCF was an international organisation of writers, poets, historians, philosophers and scientists who shared a common antipathy towards communism. Their preference was for a welfare state that can easily live with inequality, over a strongly interventionist state that secured the wellbeing of its citizens.
The CCF representing the intellectual upper-class elite was popularly seen as a front for anti-communist activism, as a promotor of liberal democracy, and a critic of Utopias identified with communism. The Congress reached prominent cities of the global south-Delhi, Mexico City, Beirut and Cairo.
Taking an anti-left position, the post-ideology thesis articulated by various liberals and modernisation theorists in the West insisted that social and economic needs can only be resolved by practical means and not by ideology. This alone dismissed communist claims to legitimacy. There was according to liberals no other ideology. Communism had failed to validate its claims. Much of the confidence of liberals and modernisation theorists were shaken when in the late 1960s and the 1970s discontent and protest challenged capitalism and its legitimising ideology of liberalism. Liberal triumphalism re-emerged after the collapse of actually existing socialist societies in East Europe and Russia in 1989 and 1991.
Another version of the end of ideology thesis that rejected all ideologies from liberalism to fascism, erupted on the stage of politics by the twenty-first century. Adherents of this thesis charged that the clash of civilisations had led to ideological fatigue, and liberalism had failed to solve the perennial problems of humankind from hunger to pandemics and climate change. We need pragmatic solutions instead of moral absolutes. ‘India against Corruption’ captured the imagination of the middle class. And AAP came into prominence as a post-ideological party.
This has bred some disastrous results. Arvind Kejriwal has refused to take principled stands on matters of great import. He supported the move of the Union government to read down Article 370 of Jammu and Kashmir. The leaders of the party refused to back the massive movement of students against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which lasted from December 2019-February 2020. The sit-in in Shaheen Bagh against the Act made international news, but the AAP as a Delhi based party did not join it.
The party stayed away from taking a position on the riots in North-East Delhi in February 2020 which led to loss of lives. And when the students and faculty of Jawaharlal Nehru University were attacked by lumpen elements from outside in January 2020 the party leadership kept quiet. There are a host of such issues that should have drawn a principled position from AAP which was to later come into power; but the leaders kept quiet. So much for pragmatism. What is the point of organising a political party if it cannot protest against the destruction of civil society and civil liberties?
In sum, post-ideological parties that adopt pragmatism give importance to ‘what works’ rather than ‘what should be’, eschew philosophical doctrines in favour of pragmatism and short term solutions, and abjure taking of principled positions on gross violation of human rights or wellbeing or dignity or justice or equality.
The irony is that these seven ‘honourable’ gentlemen are joining a highly ideological party. The members of the BJP are held together by an integrated and comprehensive vision of what India is, what the country should look like, and what the values, the ideals and the commitment of citizens should be. We may not like it, but no one can deny that the BJP intends to remake India and Indians. These defectors are now part of an ideology that is majoritarianism. Does majoritarianism not violate our Constitution that was meant to transform the world of politics?
Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.
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