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This post is timed for the June 4 Indian election results, the world’s largest exercise in electoral democracy. We have an interview with Dr Anuradha Sajjanhar, whose new book examines the rise of an intellectual elite that explains and justifies the Hindu nationalist agenda.
The book, The New Experts, was published last month. It’s timely, thought-provoking and relevant to any part of the world where right-wing politics is remaking public discourse and policy with the help of a post-liberal elite, the new Brahmins. Think Poland, Italy, the United States...
The podcast will go out later in the week, after the election results. I hope you enjoy this post. If you can afford it, please upgrade to a paid subscription to help keep This Week, Those Books accessible to our community of more than 10,000 subscribers in 112 countries. Thank you.
Yours
The Big Story:
India’s new elite has helped the country’s Hindu nationalist BJP government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi “normalise” exclusivist policies, says Dr Anuradha Sajjanhar, an assistant professor in politics and public policy in the UK. The class of new Brahmins has done this, in part, by attacking the liberal old order as an out-of-touch, overly entitled, English-speaking group of people with a “slavish” attachment to western ideas.
The Backstory:
We saw something similar happen in Poland, as politics professor David Ost’s research pointed out with respect to the rise of the rightwing nationalist Law and Justice party.
The American right’s new experts are also gaining ground, not least with their controversial critical race theory.
Sajjanhar says she started to research India’s new experts when she saw “people I respected start to increasingly justify Modi’s candidacy and potential as Prime Minister, overlooking his involvement in the 2002 (Gujarat) riots and anti-Muslim violence overall”.
Here's the Q&A:
How has the Indian election, which ran six weeks from mid-April, affected the basic premise of your book?
Most of the central framework of my argument still applies and various bits have come to the fore. For example, Modi and the BJP's anti-Muslim rhetoric is becoming more naked and brutal, clearly dehumanising Muslims and arguing that they are claiming more benefits than they deserve. This stereotype of Muslims 'stealing' from the welfare state has been bolstered by 'experts' from the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council recently arguing that Muslims birthrates are skyrocketing.
Public discourse about the heightened participation of think tanks and consulting firms has also sharpened. Earlier this year, Modi's government was revealed to rely heavily on consulting firms to make and implement policy, funnelling millions of dollars to them.
A few months before that, the Indian government was reported to be devising its own democracy ranking index with the think tank ORF. This was in response to India's democracy being named “one of the worst autocratizers” by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, among other global groups.
The Indian government has also targeted the Centre for Policy Research, which has historically produced rigorous, if critical, research.
You say that Mussolini’s Italy and Thatcher’s Britain also demonstrated a melding of populism and technocratic competence, as in India. How so?
Recent discourse about populism, particularly taken from the European context, determined that populist framing is about the people vs an elite. How it defines the 'people' and the 'elite' varies, across movements and ideological affiliations. It often involves a leader emerging from outside established political ranks. For example, Trump, the businessman, looking to 'drain the swamp' of American politics. Modi, of course, rose within the RSS and the political ranks of the BJP.
Mussolini and Thatcher are examples of how so-called populist leaders don’t just ride an anti-establishment wave, they leverage existing institutional frameworks while promising technocratic competence to gain support.
Is the BJP no longer so dependent on Prime Minister Modi’s personal brand and political charisma then, because the new experts can ensure the Hindutva agenda is embedded in India’s psyche and behaviour?
I don't claim that elite experts or institutions dramatically shift mass opinion or change the wave of party support. I am arguing that they are able to legitimise paradigms of thought, to normalise them in circles that might have deemed them ideological or biased.
This is where the growth of a legitimised intellectual culture comes in. In moments of crisis or political change, intellectuals and technocratic experts often try to re-establish the direct political relevance of their activity, reworking fundamental ideas about society. Their commitment, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall says, is not only to reorganise elements but also to “break the mould”, dismantling, reconstituting and polarising the space to the right.
So the diffused network of intellectuals and experts that support or are sympathetic to the BJP will continue to do this. At the moment, Modi is a unifying figure around whom vastly different networks of BJP supporters can rally.