How India's New Intellectual Elite Functions Under a Hindu Supremacist Government – ​​Game Drawing

Dressed in a crisp white kurta and pyjama, Manoj often sat in the library with several books scattered open around him: books on the RSS vision, appeasement of Muslims, and Christian threats to India’s unity. He introduced me to an older scholar who wrote a book about the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which Hindu mobs targeted, murdered, and displaced thousands of Muslims in Gujarat. ‘He has a lawsuit filed against him’, Manoj tells me, because he ‘proved that the attacks began with Muslims targeting the Hindus. They don’t like to hear the truth’. He tells me doing a PhD is important, that being a professional researcher is ‘a real career now’. He continues, ‘A good career – but it requires a goal, a “missionary zeal”. In the same breath, he asserts that while physical strength, arms, ammunition, and resources used to be the path of dominance in ‘the time of hunters and gatherers’, it is now about ‘strength through ideas’. ‘Not everyone’, he says, ‘is destined for everything – every police officer doesn’t become exceptional’. No, he says. We must accept our strengths and stand with pride. He theorises his and the think tank’s mission as requiring a ‘missionary zeal’, making a difference through the ‘strength of ideas’.
anuradha sajjanharThe New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi’s India.Cambridge University Press (2024)
As administrative head, Manoj perhaps exemplifies the Gramscian ‘organic intellectual’ of CI [Chanakya Institute, pseudonym for a think tank in New Delhi]. He is an active political organiser: no doubt a member of the RSS who disregards the farce of objective academia, but instead sees academia as a useful means through which to assert ideas. The conception of ‘zeal’, in this case, is powered by a righteousness against a series of conflated others. The ‘other’ covers vast swathes of time: from British colonisers to Muslim invaders, to a post-Independence culture of secularism and left-leaning politics. In her study of Thatcherite think tanks in Britain, Radhika Desai (Desai 1994) too acknowledges the presence of ‘zeal’ as an affective category. As the most conspicuous psychological characteristic of religious sects on the margins, ‘zeal’ is a common attribute to think tanks founded on the intellectual margins: ‘the intensity of belief, its unchanging character … the firm unwavering conviction, the abstraction and ahistoricity, the almost other-worldly belief that, despite counter-evidence, over the long run they will be proved right and a dogged attempt to maintain the purity of their belief’ (Desai 1994, 40). An interview with a former director of CI reveals how this zeal gets written as an attempt to ‘decolonise’ knowledge:
So what is it that distinguishes one think tank from another? There has to be a certain vision, a bit of ideology, or just an academic interest. You see, CI came up only 10 years ago and one need that was felt, that most think tanks in India did not have an Indian narrative. They had Western narratives, mostly, and Indian narratives coloured heavily by Western narratives. For instance, there was very little focus on what is Indianness, what is Indian culture. We’re all ultimately cultural animals. All Indian thinking was heavily influenced by this intellectual thinking which was developed in the West, so it was felt that we needed to develop an Indian narrative, we must bring in Indian culture. We must have confidence in ourselves, we must not be defensive when we talk about India, Indian culture, and so on. To develop an Indian narrative and to put Nation First – it was not a jingoism, but it is because, see what had happened was that over the years and centuries of colonisation, and all these attacks that happened, India’s creativity more or less ended.
This emphasis on a decolonising imperative drives much of the Hindutva discourse of identity. This, in particular, calls to Partha Chatterjee’s conception of the ‘thematic’ in anti-colonial movements which treats nationhood as an ‘essentialist conception based on the distinction between “the East” and “the West”‘ (Chatterjee 1986, 38). In its current formation within elite organisations like CI, this notion paradoxically tends to replace one sociocultural elite ostensibly representing the West, with another upper-caste Hindu elite. The former director demonstrates a key aim of CI: to reframe an ‘India First’, implicitly Hindu narrative ideology as a righteous quest for self-determination. In many ways, this desire echoes the ‘Indian renaissance’ mission of Hindu nationalist-sponsored civil society events, such as the Pondicherry Lit Fest in 2018 and 2019. The inaugural theme of this literature festival claimed ‘Bharat Shakti’ (Indian Strength), following from Sri Aurobindo’s declaration to ‘turn new eyes on past culture, reawaken to its sense and import, and see it in relation to modern knowledge and ideas’ so that ‘out of this awakening vision and impulse the Indian renaissance may arise’ (The Pondy Lit Fest n.d.). The ‘Indian renaissance’ thus combines both cultural and religious elements of Hindutva, yet attempts to separate it from its underlying politics.
While CI and other mimetic intellectual activities emphasise an anti-political, cultural renaissance, India Foundation goes further, calling itself the ‘vanguard of politically interventionist think tanks’. Subhash Das, the former head of IF, argues that political parties must develop clear policy ideas. He insists that Indians ended up as ‘slaves’ to Muslims and the British because they never valued their own set of civilisational political paradigms, and that think tanks like IF can revive a nationalist policy agenda. In our interview, he was open to discussing new ideas ‘as long as they are nationalist’, reifying a rigidly defined nationalism.
So there is no problem here. If your agenda is that you have come here because you are a leftist, and your agenda is that you are a businessman, and your agenda is this… you just settle one thing whether you are a nationalist or anti-nationalist. This is you… we are ready to argue with him too. But our agendas should be clear. We were such a society that we never valued the state – till a thousand years. Then we ended up being slaves for 1,000 years.
[It’s no problem if we have different agendas and different interests – whether you’re a leftist, a businessman – all that matters is that you tell us whether you are a nationalist or an anti-nationalist. We’re even ready to argue that! But our agendas need to be clear. Our problem is that our society has never valued our own state – that’s why we ended up being slaves for 1,000 years [under the Muslims and then the British].]
Here, Das argues that all communities and groups have interests and ideologies (‘agendas’) that guide them, but that some of these agendas are more nationalist than others. If we allow anti-nationalist groups to gain political power, he claims, we (‘true Indians’) will effectively end up as slaves to them once again. This rhetoric establishes a form of nationalism that is at once rigid and loosely defined, but rests in the hands of a select few proven nationalists to determine. Das claims that the political class has abdicated its policymaking responsibility, and allowed so-called vested interests, identity politics, and interest groups to influence policy more than they should. With the new ecosystem of BJP’s think tanks, he suggests that well-educated people without a political constituency (that is, a traditional political support base) can play a role in politically interventionist policymaking. India Foundation sees the BJP’s think tanks as a way for this upper-caste, elite, and nationalist talent to re-enter the policy-politics ecosystem:
Policymaking has completely suffered in this country because those that are responsible for making policy have no accountability for it. They can write anything. … Now we need to create a class inside the political sphere. In my opinion, we need to create a class within political parties who might optically be a minister, or a politician, but will ensure that the political agenda of the party is pushed. And they will now intervene in policy. And they will take over political policymaking. You’re going to need people who will be able to help you deliver, with ideas, with energy, with capacities, with capabilities. So, that’s why it’s a good time, it’s a good time for folks like us [without constituencies]otherwise, people like us had no chance in this country’s role.
Das heads a think tank that works to build intellectual respect for the BJP’s policies, yet sees this intellectual work as an active part of political organisation. He sees himself as intimately connected to his social class: a cosmopolitan, middle-class, upper-caste group without grassroots political constituencies, which can bring intellectual legitimacy to ‘political policymaking’. At the same time, he sees ‘folks like us’ as young, managerial experts who can bring much needed order to interest-driven political play: thus, he brings both a political and techno-managerial rationalisation to his active Hindutva politics.