The Sabarimala agitation may help both the Left and the BJP, but for the moderates in Kerala, such radicalisation would mean a lurch to electoral irrelevance

In his perceptive reading of Mahatma Gandhi’s psychological evolution, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote in 1969 that Gandhi’s experiences during the mill workers’ strike in Ahmedabad in 1918 was the ‘Event’ around which a gestalt — a wholesomeness of world view — was formed. It was during this period of prolonged agitation that Gandhi began to think of Satyagraha as the political actualisation of dharma. He began to use fasting as a political tool and arrived upon ideas based on “radical factualness, obsessive punctuality, and an absolute responsibility”. The long period of struggle allowed for experimentation of strategies, alteration of goals, and a recalibration of methods. This ‘Event’ was a singular crucible of experiences into which Gandhi’s past poured in, and out of which something permanently revolutionary emerged.

Unlike Gandhi’s personal transformative experience, nearly 75 years later another ‘Event’ — six month-long complexly motivated riots — influenced another generation (one that included Narendra Modi and Amit Shah) to draw different lessons about transformations in politics. After this struggle, the BJP in Gujarat became the party that its Hindu middle class found not just viable but progressively its dominant political expression. At the heart of the riots was reservation politics. In January 1985, the Madhavsinh Solanki-led Congress government (Solanki is a grand Machiavellian, but now forgotten, political figure) went into overdrive and decided to implement the Rane Commission’s recommendation. But the government ignored the Commission’s directive to focus on economic class; instead, the reservations were implemented on the basis of caste.

How the debate was framed

As the scholar Howard Spodek wrote, this decision led to “stirring grave doubts about his [Solanki’s] honesty and straightforwardness”. By February 1985, murmurs of dissent against Solanki exploded onto the streets. Universities and colleges were the first sites of anti-Solanki discontent. By June, the anti-reservation riots had become full-fledged communal violence. Stabbings, bomb blasts and arson continued till July 1985. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, with tactical support from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, took charge of framing the extant debates in middle-class Gujarati households. The political preferences and vocabulary of an entire generation of young men and women radically realigned. A State that was a reliable Congress State thanks to Solanki’s KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) strategy now became a saffron stronghold.

What is the importance of prolonged social agitations in forming the political beliefs of individuals? More importantly, what is the contribution of sustained social agitations (Mandal, Ram Janmabhoomi, etc.) in transforming, if not radicalising, the political beliefs of large demographic groups? We don’t fully know the answers to these. In part, this is because we think of political preferences as sticky, and deem any switches as marginal or opportunistic. In fact, so overwhelming is the rhetoric of political ideologies that few ask what happens if constitutive factors which influence ideological formation change. Yet, despite lacking a good theoretical understanding, we know political preferences do undergo dramatic changes in individuals, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Nowhere is this starkly seen than in Kerala’s Kannur district, where political violence between RSS and CPI(M) workers are often thinly veiled as revenge killings against those who “betray” political loyalties.

The Sabarimala case

Where things get tricky, however, is in situations where political choices are often “strong opinions, weakly held”. By this, one means political preferences which are held for short periods of time as tactical responses, where electoral fates are controlled by a moderate middle who vote for different parties depending on what matters to them during that particular election cycle. In fact, given the substantive anti-incumbency waves that the Indian electorate regularly displays, elections in India are often decided by switches by the pragmatic middle.

What happens to the political preferences of such pragmatists when an agitation mindset slowly begins to take over? We currently see this taking place in Kerala’s Hindu population thanks to the Sabarimala imbroglio. The moderate Hindu middle classes, often apolitical and apathetic, have slowly begun to form hardened political preferences due to the perception of assault on their identity by forces much larger than their individual selves: the state, the police, and so on. A sustained six-month-long political agitation, at least till the general election in 2019, over Sabarimala, in an age of viral social media and aggressive cable television shows, can lead to a generational transformation of Kerala’s moderate middle. This, ironically, may work for the CPI(M), with strict party-based loyalty tests and cadre-based voting patterns, and for the aggressively growing BJP. But for pragmatists and moderates across the State, this radicalisation is a lurch to electoral irrelevance. The legacy of the Sabarimala agitations may not just be the rise of a Hindu electoral block in some key constituencies but also a steady replication of Kannur-style violent politics elsewhere. That all this has been unleashed by a Supreme Court ruling should remind us of the wisdom of that tired but often tested truth: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.