As an irredeemable “rayta” individual myself, I have been battling the so called “trads” on social media for at least two years now. Not just me, almost everyone I know on the Indian right in social media has been grappling with this bitter divide for years. As such, it is amusing to see Indian liberals discovering it just now. Liberals are slow, I know. And if only they had the curiosity to try and understand more about their opponents, they would know that Opindia did an explainer about it years ago…
But now that the liberals are finally here, they are writing feverishly about what they see. How the “trads” are casteist, misogynist and generally terrible in so many ways. And how the “raytas” abhor them, mock them and sometimes try to knock some sense into them. All of this is of course true. This is why liberals are so excited. They have discovered a gap in the right wing armor. A faultline inside what they used to believe was a right wing monolith.
Understandably, this has caused some alarm on the Indian right. Will this divide doom the Indian right? Can the Indian right afford this division in the face of an implacable ideological foe whose aim is to wipe it out?
Quite the opposite, really. I would argue that the current situation represents a massive win for the Indian right. Liberals are finally giving in to forces that are beyond their control. The real aftermath of 2014 is now beginning.
How so? As kids, aren’t we all taught that unity is strength? One individual twig will snap easily. But take a bundle of sticks, tie them together and you have something that doesn’t bend or break.
The reality however is a bit more subtle. To understand, compare and contrast the following two real life situations. For the last several weeks, a big section of media, internet influencers and activists have been heckling BJP leadership over something that happened at a gathering somewhere in Uttarakhand. Today even the BBC picked it up. Granted that the things said at this so called “dharam sansad” were atrocious in nature, but what did the BJP have to do with it? Was it a BJP event? Were the speakers at the event BJP leaders or even members of the BJP? No, and no. Then, how come the BJP is supposed to answer for them?
It doesn’t matter, liberals would argue. Saffron is saffron. BJP is saffron. And so, Modi must answer.
Now compare this. Do you remember when the radical cleric Abbas Siddiqui, who heads the political party known as the Indian Secular Front (ISF) called for deaths of 50 crore Indians? That was 2020. Since then, Sonia Gandhi’s Congress party, as well as the CPM, have formally allied with Siddiqui’s ISF. In fact, senior Congress MP Adhir Chowdhury, who is also the leader of the Congress Legislative Party in the Lok Sabha, even campaigned for ISF at a joint rally with Siddiqui in Kolkata only a few months ago. Then, why shouldn’t Sonia Gandhi, the Congress and the wider liberal ecosystem take responsibility for the hate speeches by Abbas Siddiqui?
But they don’t. And I dare say most people would also give the Congress a pass on this. In politics, everyone makes compromises. The Congress and ISF are two separate parties. Folks like Abbas Siddiqui are very clearly the fringe. Why blame the Congress, or your average liberal, for what he says?
But does the BJP get a similar waiver? They didn’t even have anything to do with the gathering of private individuals somewhere in Uttarakhand. No, saffron is saffron.
So where is the strength, really? Is it in unity or in disunity? Amazingly, the disunity, or at least the perception of disunity, really paid off for the liberals here. As long as one side is perceived as divided into several ideological factions, they don’t get blamed for the sins of others. In fact, the more heterogeneous a side is perceived to be, the less they are at risk.
If you really think about it, this ability to appear differentiated is really a form of privilege. It reflects power structures as they have existed in society. How many people would mix up the French with the British or the Germans or the Italians? And yet, so many people would lump together people of an entire continent as “Africans.” We tend to perceive Europeans as highly differentiated because the West has dominated the world for the last 200 years. We know that the English play cricket and the Spanish don’t. How many people can name one difference between Ethiopia and Uganda?
On the Indian political scene, the same underlying phenomenon is at play. For decades, the Indian right had almost no chance of grabbing the levers of power. The dominant forces came to be seen as highly differentiated. Congress is different from the Communist Party, and they are both different from say the Janata Dal, or the Bahujan Samaj Party, or the Trinamool Congress. And then there is the wider liberal “intellectual” ecosystem, consisting of academics, mediapersons, the television and film personalities, authors and poets patronized by these parties. These people all think the same way. But because their side has always been dominant, their groups and subgroups are still perceived as highly differentiated. And often each individual is seen as representing only themselves.
There is tremendous power in this perception of disunity. When one well known actor comes out and says that Mughals were refugees, nobody else on the “liberal” side has to suffer the blushes. On the other hand, Prime Minister Modi is personally accountable if some guy throws a stone at a church in Navi Mumbai. Is there any evidence that the offender had something to do with BJP, or the act was even politically motivated? No, but it could have been. It is so much easier to do the intellectually lazy thing and put the entire Indian right on notice on mere suspicion.
Remember how the Biden administration recently banned flights from eight African countries to contain the spread of the omicron variant? Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho and Mozambique didn’t even have a single confirmed case of omicron at the time. But somebody at the White House had not bothered to check. Because Africa is Africa. Just like saffron is saffron here in India. The privileged do not recognize that differences exist among those who don’t have privilege.
This is why I am smiling as the liberals tilt at windmills, trying to knock down the Indian right by playing up the “trad” vs “rayta” divide.
The liberals don’t realize what is actually happening. They are conceding ground. Eight years ago, they would have said that the Indian right is a monolith, an undifferentiated evil. Today they admit there is such a thing as “good Indian right” and “bad Indian right.” Cool, that’s a start. They will discover many many more shades in years to come.
In truth, the liberals are dealing here with forces beyond their control. The Indian right has become dominant politically. They have become the axis around which Indian politics revolves. The balance of privilege is beginning to shift, slowly but surely.
Over the years, a number of people have asked me if I apply the term “liberal” too liberally. For instance, why do I refer to Maoist atrocities in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh as “liberal terror”? Is TMC really a “liberal” party?
In reality, I have always seen this as a tit for tat tactic. If they don’t differentiate between us, I refuse to differentiate between them. So for me, everyone opposed to the Indian right is a “liberal.” It could be a Maoist in Bastar, a CPM comrade in Kerala or a TMC worker in Bengal. All the feudal family based parties, the casteist parties, the Islamist parties, the regional parties opposed to the Indian right are “liberal.” Along with so called intellectuals who are against the Indian right. All liberals. As long as you ask me to clarify on what some crazy maniacs I never heard of before said at some assembly in Uttarakhand, I hold every liberal intellectual personally accountable for every action of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And we should not stop there. We should also hold them personally accountable for every crime of the Catholic Church anywhere in the world, as well as every atrocity ever commited under Communism or Islamism.
It is time to counter liberal privilege and turn it on its head. With time, as Ajit Datta points out here, the “trad” vs “rayta” debate should go mainstream, and occupy the center of the political discourse. Move over, liberals and watch from the sidelines.
