Congress president Sonia Gandhi recently asserted — at a seminar to commemorate the 50th death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru — that her party still reveres Nehru’s ideals, the mainstays of which were “socialist economics”, “staunch secularism” and a “foreign policy of non-alignment”. As Nehru-Gandhi legatee — in the literal sense of family transmission — it’s unlikely that she (or Rahul, or Priyanka) will deviate from scripture.

Nor, at any point, is there any acknowledgment of mistakes made by UPA (other than the trivial one of lack of communication of Congress achievements, which weren’t visible to many). Kamal Nath stands out as a lone wolf among the Congress pack, by holding that India is changing and Congress needs to change alongside.

Congress indeed upholds Nehruvian ideals — but only as a catechism, an inert dogma, a shell game (Sonia somewhat pointlessly clarified that Congress was not caught in a “time warp”). Take secularism, which in Congress’s rendition has come to mean the mobilisation of collective ethnic identities. This is a perversion of its meaning in modern republics and has steadily diminishing appeal in India’s growing aspirational society, even among minorities it is specifically addressed to.

By contrast, in Nehru’s own day Nehruvian ideology was a live entity, in the process of being formulated even as it was keenly contested. Diverse counter-currents were in play. Vallabhbhai Patel believed in a strong state and was friendly with businessmen, a mode that PM Narendra Modi likes to uphold. There were the Gandhians led by J B Kripalani. B R Ambedkar broke away from Congress to champion the lower castes.

Communists, in those days, were dyed a deep shade of red. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari launched the Swatantra Party, which opposed centralized planning and stood for free markets and competition. There was also the Jana Sangh, whose main theme was Hindu victimhood.

All these tendencies, with the exception of the Jana Sangh, were either co-opted or destroyed by the Nehruvian consensus (NC) that came to prevail among large sections of the political class in recent times. Even liberalization could not puncture NC, as the launch of economic reforms was seen merely as a technical response to a moment of crisis — when India’s foreign exchange coffers had emptied — and therefore to be forgotten about as soon as the crisis was tided over. Who remembers Narasimha Rao these days? NC is leery about economic freedom, which is why the man who initiated India’s liberalization died in utter oblivion all round.

Before the advent of Modi few among the political class really questioned NC. There was widespread disenchantment with politics as the ordinary voter began to see it merely as an arena for cynical manipulation which offered no real choice. However, Modi’s campaign brought the inherent contradictions of NC in its UPA avatar to the fore.

Nehru had a vision of economic modernity, but in its UPA avatar NC amounted to the promotion of patronage politics, populist giveaways, expensive but leaky social welfare programmes, subsidies and farm loan waivers. The solution for poverty was thought to be MGNREGA, even if such schemes can be palliative at best. Jobs generated by MGNREGA create hardly any wealth or productive assets. One could just as well convert them into doles, except the system is so corrupt that doles would surely be diverted to line the pockets of its apparatchiks.

NC is at bottom an aristocra-tic model in which the political elite, through acts of noblesse oblige, reaches out to the poor through acts of charity, while dissing upstart social groups who happen to be wedged in bet-ween. You would be paid lip service to if you lay at the bottom of the social heap, but ignored if you stood up and attempted to rise.

Sonia said at the Nehru seminar, in what amounted to a defence of UPA policies in the context of its crushing defeat: “We remain profoundly wedded to Nehru’s concern for the weakest section of our society.” The language is a giveaway, because people are not inherently ‘weak’. Neither is the middle class a tiny minority whose cantankerous views remain a noisy distraction from a ‘pro-people’ government’s real task — as much of the political class still believes.

The reality is that liberalization — along with growing literacy and the global communications revolution caused by the spread of satellite television, mobile phones and the internet — has not only sent aspirations soaring, these trends have also propagated the middle class mindset. Most Indians, if they haven’t become middle class, at least aspire to be.

Poor people want growth as much as the middle class does (perhaps even more, because they really do want to improve their economic condition). They are very far from Rousseau’s conception of noble savages. If you patronize them they might sting you — as they stung UPA this election season.

Much of the political class has yet to wake up to this shift in terrain. But Modi cottoned on to it earlier than most — that is the real key to the stunning success of his election campaign. With Modi’s rise, NC has come unstuck and a new market of ideas could come up as they did in Nehru’s heyday. One can only hope that politics will move beyond the sterile opposition of NC and Hindutva — both of which are past their sell-by date — and ideas more relevant to a 21st century India can come into play.