The value of those who keep losing to Narendra Modi
1 min read . Updated: 05 Mar 2023, 11:55 PM IST
PremiumWhat is the relevance of ‘good guys’ who always lose? What is the purpose of people who stand for harmony, equality and freedom, but cannot draw the support of citizens who, too, want harmony equality and freedom? What is the point of an activist who speaks to the masses when the masses do the exact opposite of what he asks them to do? In a democracy, what is the meaning of public rejection?On Friday, we learnt that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has expanded its influence over the Northeast after winning two states there and being very much in the game in another
What is the relevance of ‘good guys’ who always lose? What is the purpose of people who stand for harmony, equality and freedom, but cannot draw the support of citizens who, too, want harmony equality and freedom? What is the point of an activist who speaks to the masses when the masses do the exact opposite of what he asks them to do? In a democracy, what is the meaning of public rejection?
On Friday, we learnt that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has expanded its influence over the Northeast after winning two states there and being very much in the game in another. Next year, the party is expected to win India’s general elections easily, even after a decade in power. And it is set to dominate politics for many more years, especially at the Centre. How should we view the people who have been fighting the BJP? What is the point of their existence? This may sound like an insult, but that is not my intention. In fact, I am trying to arrive at their value to us. I am not referring to professional politicians, like Rahul Gandhi alone. I am chiefly talking about the long tail of politics that is not called politics. Idealists, journalists who have not sold out to the BJP, poets, developmental economists, humanities scholars and writers with a moral compass. They have raged against the BJP and portrayed its leaders as hardline Hindus who oppress other religions. Yet, Nagaland, with a nearly 90% Christian population, has voted for the BJP. The intellectual resistance to the BJP has portrayed it as a party that is in cahoots with billionaires, yet the poor vote for the party. (Time and again, what the poor demonstrate is that between the rich and the posh, they despise the posh more.)
The fact that those who stand for the finest human virtues lose against the BJP does not mean that the people of India have no respect for those virtues. Most humans hold the same set of virtues dear, but the hierarchy in which they are held at any point in time is what sets us apart. At the moment, most Indians are at a stage where they wish for swift prosperity more than a sense of harmonious unity with the rest of India. But this does not mean they are dismissive of unity or even the well-being of other people.
So that is the relevance ‘good guys’ have. They are conservationists of a society’s best qualities; they ensure that just because some virtues are not influential anymore, they do not slide further down the ranks of relevance. In that way, they reassure those who fear the BJP that what matters to them is not entirely irrelevant. It is a voice that can emerge only from defeat.
But shouldn’t human virtues have better champions, people who know how to defeat the practical types? Not only do the ‘good guys’ of India not know how to win, they also do not retire; they persist in their doomed fight because they have nothing else to do and they ensure that more talented activists with more potent fights in them do not rise.
To understand the true value of idealists, it is useful to assess not the worst and mediocre among them, but the finest. So let us consider Ravish Kumar, a journalist and activist whose Hindi is exquisite and his calm son-of-the-soil lament is the very voice of India’s conscience. He is the reminder that Indians whose dominant language is their mother-tongue are at a different level of articulation than Indians who have been muddled by English.
The arguments that Ravish makes do not win elections. And his overarching argument that the BJP is bad for the nation is something that people periodically reject. Yet, Ravish is extremely popular. A few times, when I have thought that a group of drivers under a tree are watching a Hindi film, it has turned out that they are watching a clip of Ravish. I have heard Ravish’s voice in this manner from passers-by. Never have I heard anyone listen to Prime Minister’s podcast, ‘Mann Ki Baat’. I know this is all anecdotal, but I believe intuitively that Ravish’s monologues are more popular than Modi’s. Without a doubt, Modi is many times more popular, and he would demonstrate so if ever there is a vote. But voting is not all that people do. There are some healthy things Indians do and listening to the voices of their nation’s conscience may be among them.
Many ideological foes of the BJP do not accept that they are defeated. They feel that as long as they persist, they are not defeated. This is merely wall-poster-grade philosophy. Often persistence is just the doomed Plan-A of people with no Plan-B. It is hope, which is a form of sorrow and a conversation with the self. Also, the idea that their persistence will sow the seeds of a spectacular victory against the BJP many years later is a fallacy. The BJP will, of course, lose in the future, but that would not be because of the persistence of losers, but because of internal turmoil, as the Congress party’s decline has shown.
The charm of Ravish is in his state of defeat. He accepts that all resistance to the BJP is futile in the near future, and that nothing he says or reports will change that. In that way, his work is art, because art is the pathos of the underdog. This is also why Modi’s poetry, in his own observation, is probably not high art. In his poems, he is a kite, soaring with “the grace of the sky", towards the sun, held back “only by the string", or “an ocean that leaps with energy", or a man who is as “upright as a mountain" and as “pure as the river". Ravish, on the other hand, speaks of the melancholy of defeat. That is the core constituency of art, and people are drawn to art even when they don’t know it is art. I can’t prove it, but I think many people who vote for Modi enjoy the melancholy dispatches of Ravish.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’