A twist to India’s political DNA

Indian democracy is all set to challenge the Darwinian theory of evolution. And the Lamarckian mutants, incubated by the economic liberalisation of the 1990s and accelerated by the BJP’s sweeping victory in the last general elections, could become the game changers.

For a quick recap for those who have forgotten their school biology, 18th century French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck is associated with the widely discredited theory of evolution that posited that organisms inherit traits their parents acquired in one lifetime. He is also credited with formulating the first cohesive theory of evolution.

Darwin’s theory of evolution and its rejection of the Lamarckian theory of soft inheritance had nearly choked Lamarck out of scientific reckoning for some time, especially in popular consciousness.

However, Lamarck’s famous example of how the Giraffe got a long neck, primarily by reaching out for branches of trees when grass got spare, has survived in memory, perhaps because it can be so easily expressed through digital imagery.

Two of the most exciting mutants on the political landscape of digitalised, post-liberalisation India are Hardik Patel and Asaduddin Owaisi. The first is the 22-year-old leader of an agitation to get caste reservations for Patels, the dominant caste in Gujarat and rarely connected to poverty or, for that matter, centuries of social oppression. Patel is ranked 174th among the top 500 most common last names, as of the 2000 US Census.

Hardik is a callow politician but a political Himesh Reshamiya in his capacity for drama. Once he claimed he was kidnapped, and then presented himself in court. The Gujarat High Court wasn’t pleased and told his lawyer that his story of “abduction” seemed corny and he was in danger of a contempt of court. This is besides being showered with currency notes at a musical programme in Surat, where he was denied permission to hold a rally.

The other is a suave, bearded barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, the Naqeeb-e-Millat, (Leader of the community), in India, by some reckoning. He a relatively modest throwback to Qaid-E-Azam, The Great Leader, of the same community, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

These two political mutants are the direct fallout of “unlocking value”, a stock phrase of stock brokers, one ‘promise’ the Modi government delivered, though not a promise made at election rallies.

The BJP government is widely perceived to be a pro-business government, and a lot of its most famous supporters are people who are in business newspapers while their wives adorn society magazines. There has been no countering of this perception by the BJP government, though they strain to explain that they have the interests of poor India at heart.

There is no reason to disbelieve the party. The Modi government has, in its little-more-than-a-year rule, unlocked the value not of India’s economy, its avowed goal, but its politics. Owaisi also exudes the one aspect of Jinnah’s personality that impressed most of his contemporaries, an incipient tendency for rationality.

Nobody who has watched Indian politics for the last few decades can imagine a Muslim leader declare that Muslims do not want Haj subsidies and would rather it be directed towards the education of Muslim girls. In a way too indiscreet, he was addressing the Modi government’s own concern of empowering the girl child.

Hardik Patel and Asaduddin Owaisi are the two most dramatic values held back by former Congress regimes’ “secular” policies. The BJP government’s belligerent identity politics has unlocked them. Awkwardly, they are both “unknown unknowns’’ for the new regime.

Hardik represents the centrifugal force of the Hindu political identity that is fast discovering that small, cohesive groups with loud enough voice and muscle within however small a region can negotiate better deals for themselves.

This is beyond the binary calculation that Indian Hindus are primarily divided into the “pseudo-secular, self-hating and West-aping” lot and sanskaari ones.

Similarly, Owaisi represents the new centripetal force for India’s scattered Muslims. He is their Modi. He is belligerent, rhetorically smart in his oratorical exercises with crowds and above all batting for a “modern, secular, confident and self-sufficient” Muslim identity.

Unless one is congenitally partisan, this need not be a dismal picture. In Hardik and Owaisi, the two rising stars of the political firmament, there are good signs of a closer integration and fairer power-sharing among Indians.

Western India and the Deccan are moving closer to Delhi. To be sure, even if Hardik’s efforts make him an important political player, he’ll stay in Gujarat. But, he’d dent the Hindu ‘ummah’ that the RSS dreams of raising and profiting from, politically. And, it is more likely to contribute to a decentralising of the Hindu identity from the nativist idea of monolithic Hindu that the RSS prefers.

Owaisi’s efforts have a longer history, by today’s timeline standards, and his performance has more depth, so far. His financial security and his progressive agenda for his constituency, even when seemingly alarmist to devoutly Hindu ears, borrows from the same opportunity that Hardik feeds on.

At one level, both are the symptoms of the value Modi’s ascension has unlocked. Only, most stockbrokers won’t be pleased. That should concern nobody in the game, because they do not vote in significant numbers, they only bankroll the show.

Individuals do not evolve, they only grow, but groups of organisms such as populations and species, do. India is evolving, as also is democracy. And, sometimes, just like Lamarck’s theory, some old instincts and conjectures, once discarded, can be of use.

In a 2007 paper, Harvard professor David Haig has opined that epigenetic processes do allow a Lamarckian element in evolution but the processes do not challenge the main tenets of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

The rockstar of rationalism, Richard Dawkins, has popularised memetics, another Lamarckian version which proposes that cultural information can be transferred to new generations, and not necessarily through genes. In a situation where polarities are sown in the wind, look out for the mutants, period. They might change your world without seeking your vote.

The writer is a journalist and author of Defragmenting India: Riding a Bullet Through the Gathering Storm

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