The Age of Anger began in 2014 with Modi. Now it’s time for bargaining, silence

09/05/2024

The silence of the voter, amid high temperatures and campaigning, has emerged as the overwhelming feature of India’s latest and most consequential election. The sullen silence has spooked analysts—and gamblers—into a hedging position. The buzz heard soon after the inauguration of the Ram temple late January that this election was a ‘done deal’ has lost its bite and no longer appears to be catchy or even credible.

This silence is in stark contrast to the high-decibel messaging that has relentlessly sought to saturate the collective imagination through a ceaseless remaking of India over the last decade. From ‘Make in India’ to ‘Swachh Bharat’ in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term, to India as ‘Bharat’ and ‘Vishwaguru’ in his second term, the constant drumbeat has, if not exhausted collective attention, then certainly dulled the senses. By the time the latest strapline of ‘Viksit Bharat’ came along last month as the mantra for Modi’s re-election, few seem animated, let alone excited, by this promise.

Silence, in a crucial way, is a form of speech. Regardless of the verdict next month, this current silence is not only chastening but also critically expresses a shift in political sentiment.

Is the Age of Anger over?

A decade ago, Modi galvanised the prime emotion of anger that has defined our age. Rage against the established order ushered in Modi’s rise to power. Even though Modi’s credentials as a votary of Hindutva were well-established by 2013, anger as a sentiment and stance overwhelmed any and all issues, from the economy to identity, back then.

Modi, through his first national campaign, deftly emerged as India’s everyman and a provincial prodigal who was on top of the most powerful political domes in the world. His election was widely held to be the reversal of orders or the end of the so-called ancien regime of Lutyens elite, or the English-speaking, liberal, and metropolitan elite—the LME, so to speak.

By 2014, the LME was globally reviled and resented for not being nativist enough and for living in a zealously enclosed bubble that was out of touch with national aspirations. Whether it was Donald Trump in America or Brexit Britain, Modi has been at the centre of that global arc of antagonism and anger that has reshaped democracy everywhere.

After a decade, this phenomenon has globally shared features ranging from bucketloads of disdain for scientific and academic expertise to the dismissal of old-school journalism as ‘legacy media’, with both policy and opinion being conducted on digital social media. Regardless of whether globalisation has been the key driver, the Age of Anger has installed neo-nationalism as the reigning political currency everywhere.

The point and effect have not simply been the rise of the strongman or the personality cult of a leader here or elsewhere, but that vast numbers of people and populations have, for most part of a decade, been almost always on the boil—forever angry, volubly and loudly so.

Today, the Indian voter’s silence may mask anger, but the anger no longer seems immediate or ambient. Globally and in India, a crucial pushback began a couple of years ago. As I argued then, 2022 was a watershed year as the pushback against strongman populism forced a new sequence in politics. Then, whether it was Lula’s mandate in Brazil, Biden’s wresting of the Senate in the mid-terms, or the beginning of the end of the Tories in Britain, the leader as strongman began, for the first time, to look mostly bumptious and arrogant. A new politics, nevertheless, had been initiated.

It was also the year of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in India that undoubtedly hit the pause button on Modi’s relentless hold on power.

Sounds of silence

After anger, we are told, comes bargaining, in the cycle of emotions. At first sight, the silence has an air of barter about it. Despite efforts at whipping up resentment and anger, these have fallen on largely deaf ears. The overwhelming effect is the absence of a ‘Modi wave’ in India. The barter of silence has steered manifestos, pledges, and speeches toward rights. Whether or not these rights are couched in the name of guarantees or justice, the first principles of democracy—the equity of rights—are nevertheless discernible. The anger has found a new anchor. The arc of anger has noticeably moved from resentment to rights.

The lived life of the economy, whether it is the price of everyday goods or the means to attain them through jobs, has now filled reportage and airwaves. As celebrity anchors move through India’s expanse, eating their way through street food and dhabas in a mixture of travelogue and political reportage, nearly all encounters with the voting populace have articulated a strained economy. Aspiration, which had buzzed the political landscape for a decade, has been replaced by a prosaic realism.

If a decade ago, Modi, the quintessential ordinary man, had risen to the very top and, since then, had only spoken in the grandest of scales, then today, the silence is demanding a calibration of expectations. Little wonder, then, that analysts are routinely dubbing this election as determined only by the local. The promise of national grandness now demands that the ordinary, at the very least, be dignified with a promising life. This is to say, while India or Bharat remains preeminent, this election has turned the focus on the lives of Indians. Precisely because nationalism and the nation are so secure, the focus has silently but surely shifted to the citizen.

It would be an error to view voter silence as a return to the old order or even as the revenge of the liberal metropolitan elite. That old order, long decadent, was easy pickings. That the nativists, with their resentful ire, got their first to dismantle what was already broken should not detain nor detract from what, in effect, is truly underway. 2024, then, whether in Britain but especially in India, is the radicalisation of rights. Regardless of the verdict next month, the 2024 Lok Sabha election has already silently asserted a return to the original promise of democracy.

Shruti Kapila is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Cambridge. She tweets @shrutikapila. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)