Drama of Democracy

On January 22, 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the long-awaited inauguration of the new Ram Mandir on the banks of the Sarayu River in Ayodhya—a gigantic temple constructed at the spot where the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid was razed by a mob of Hindu nationalist kar sevaks (volunteers) in December 1992, unleashing sectarian violence across the country.1 The land had remained tied up in legal battles until 2019, when a supreme court judgment handed the disputed site over to a Hindu temple trust, clearing the path for the construction of the new Ram Mandir where the Babri Masjid had stood.2 Speaking at the January 2024 event, Modi described the inauguration as “the day India gained independence,” thus invoking Hindu nationalism’s version of Indian history as one of Hindu subjugation by Muslim rulers and foreign invaders.3 The “thousand years of foreign rule” trope—which made international news in 2023 when Modi rehearsed the line for a joint session of the U.S. Congress4—is the ideological heart of the century-old Hindutva movement, which holds that India’s colonization (“slavery”) began not in the eighteenth century, with the consolidation of the British empire, but rather a millennium earlier, with Muslim conquests in the region.5

Hindutva’s periodization of Indian history (where an earlier epoch of rule by Hindu kings is said to have been superseded by an age of Muslim domination, which was in turn swept aside by European imperialism) has been interrogated and discarded by professional historians (Indian and otherwise), who have found the notion that religion (and religious conflict) is the primary driver of South Asian history to be untenable.6 And yet notwithstanding evidence unearthed by professional historians, nonhistorian purveyors of Hindutva ideology nevertheless insist on a version of history in which the arrival of Muslims in India heralded the destruction of Hindu civilization: the forcible conversion and “enslavement” of Hindus, and the wholesale demolition of temples and building of mosques in their place.7 In this context, for Hindutva ideologues the restitution of Hindu civilizational glory hinges upon on things like architectural “restorations” such as the temple at Ayodhya, as well on the general purging of Muslim cultural influences (which are by definition characterized as “foreign”) from Indian arts, music, and language. Observers across the political spectrum thus characterized the January 2024 inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya as the culmination of the Hindu nationalist movement over which Modi’s political career has presided. More than just “another biggish ribbon-cutting event,” the inauguration was celebrated by India’s broadcast media as “‘the moment’ when India experienced a ‘civilisational reawakening’ and when it exited its ‘colonial mindset.’”8 The laser-lit festivities in Ayodhya were attended in person by a parade of prominent personalities—film stars, business tycoons, politicians and ministers—whose dancing and merry-making was captured by national television channels and live-streamed into the furthest-flung corners of globe.

While some celebrated, others raised alarms. In conjunction with other high-profile Hindutva legislative agenda items over which Modi has presided (the Citizenship Amendment Act, for example), and in step with escalating and increasingly unchecked vigilante violence (“bulldozer justice”)9 against people suspected of Hindutva-transgressing practices (trading or consuming beef, for instance, or entering into interfaith marriages), the Ram Mandir movement’s realization is characterized by scholars of Indian politics as the culmination of a categorical shift in Indian democracy “towards a de jure Hindu majoritarian state.”10

The inauguration of the Ram Mandir comes at a moment when the popularity of the party of Hindutva has indeed reached an all-time high: a December 2023 survey by the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research (CPR) reported that 47 percent of urban Indians explicitly identify with the party—a full 8 percentage points higher than only a few months earlier.11 And yet, drawing on insights from Mumbai, I will conclude this book by suggesting that perhaps this is not the whole story. Drama of Democracy opened by pointing out that contemporary diagnostics of democracy’s ailments tend to hinge on normative presumptions of liberalism—premises that simply do not hold much water in Mumbai. While the city is site of no little political passion (even upheaval), Mumbai’s energetic churnings diverge from the diagnostics by means of which democracy the world over tends to be narrated: the rise of “populism” wherein charismatic authority and the figure of a leader obviates representative institutions and procedures; the forestalling of substantive citizenship and political accountability by the influx of money into elections; a “post-truth” epistemological crisis in which people can’t work out who or what to believe; irrational mobilizations of “identity” that fuel passionate political divisiveness; a “crisis of representation” in which the masses pour into the streets to assert that elected politicians do not actually represent them. While Mumbai’s political life is undoubtedly cash-flush, charisma- and affect-animated, concerned with belief, punctuated by crowds, and shot through with passionate attachments to linguistic, regional, ethnic and religious identifications, the precise ways in which these phenomena are (and are not) problematized by Mumbaikars are illegible to these framings, pointing to very different material-practical terrain and conceptual vocabulary of representation—which have been the subject of this book.

Drama of Democracy has offered an ethnographically grounded account of representative democracy, one in which representation is not the opposite of the real, but rather is where reality is enacted, encountered, and evaluated. Rather than counterpose representational sign with embodied action, this book has asked: How are performative bids to represent enacted and assessed? Notably, the 2023 CPR surveyors asked their respondents this very question. With the Ram Mandir temple inauguration in Ayodhya taking place on the eve of India’s general elections (scheduled for April–May 2024), respondents were asked for their perceptions of the event: Did the temple inauguration really “correct historical wrongs done to Hindus,” as the government claimed? Or was it an electoral stunt in the run-up to polling, enacted “merely to win Hindu votes”? The response was striking: among those explicitly identifying with the BJP, more than a third (35 percent) described the inauguration as a pre-poll stunt—an assessment that was shared by approximately half of all respondents. And yet even more remarkably, notwithstanding this widespread characterization of the temple inauguration as a polling stunt, when asked about their “satisfaction” with the Modi government’s construction of the Ram temple complex in Ayodhya, only 17 percent of all survey respondents expressed any discontent. Put another way: while half of surveyed Indians (including a full third of those who personally identify as BJP partisans) characterized the temple inauguration not as the actual rectification of “historical wrongs” at all but rather as an election-season gimmick intended “to win Hindu votes,” a full two-thirds of those describing it as such did not find this grounds for disapproval of the event. What is to be made of this extraordinary empirical finding, whereby a spectacular event explicitly professing to “rectify a historical injustice” is widely recognized not to be doing that at all, and yet still does not garner commensurate disapproval?

The overwhelming approval (or at least not explicit disapproval) of the temple inauguration event, combined with widespread acknowledgment that its claim to be “righting wrongs” ought not to be taken literally, suggests that a great many people evaluated the event as a variety of performance. This was political theater, but not of the disparaged “only natak” variety (outlined in chapter 2), where theatricality is denounced as deceptive when (and only when) it professes to be otherwise. While India’s secular political leadership, progressive intellectuals, professional historians, and legal experts sought (and fought) for decades to counter the Ram Mandir movement’s claims to be “righting historical wrongs”—gathering a deluge of archival, archaeological, and legal evidence to the contrary12—the accounts in this book demonstrate that communication in a performance register is not readily amenable to disputation by a “setting-the-record-straight” variety of truth claim. In chapter 3 we saw how a sensational and disparaging video that circulated over WhatsApp was countered by the targeted candidate’s campaign team not by disputing the video’s specific allegations but rather by staging a corresponding spectacle: a live “making-a-counter-video” performance that sought not to counter inaccuracies with “facts” but rather to upstage—and to thereby to redirect the election-season hawa (wind) so that it might blow in the candidate’s favor. In light of this, the 2023 CPR survey suggests that the premise upon which the marshaling of scientific evidence to counter political support for the Ram Mandir movement was based may have been similarly mistaken: appreciation and support for the Ram Mandir movement (as perhaps for Hindutva more generally) simply does not require literal “belief” in its storyline (i.e., that constructing the new temple corrects “historical wrongs done to Hindus”). One can appreciate and resonate with a good show as such without being “deceived” by literalist interpretations of its storyline; to recall the words of the social media campaign manager in chapter 3, people can tell a show from a lie.

Drama of Democracy’s conceptual toolbox would pose of the Ram Mandir inauguration a very different set of questions: If the event was evaluated as a show, then what exactly was on display? What were people turning up (or tuning in) to watch? With significant numbers of people abjuring the literal significance that the government ascribed to the event (“rectifying wrongs”), what did the event enjoin people to “believe”? Images from news reporting as well as social media commentary circulating during and after the event suggest that the inauguration-show was being assessed using the very criteria according to which Mumbaikars appreciate and evaluate a pre-poll rally-show: for starters, a who’s-who lineup of the personalities on parade. Journalists covering the Ram Mandir inauguration reported feverishly on who turned up and who did not: photographs of Indian business mogul and Asia’s wealthiest person, Mukesh Ambani (who declared January 22 a holiday for its India offices), posing with cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar were splashed across the pages of India’s mainstream media undoubtedly increased “the size of the image” (to recall a formulation from chapter 2), thereby contributing to the Modi campaign’s mahol and hawa—its atmosphere and directional momentum. Meanwhile, India’s four Shankaracharya (Hinduism’s top spiritual leaders) were conspicuous in their pre-announced absence, and video clips of their explanations swirled over social media (punctuated by opposition-leader commentary seeking to ascribe political significance to their absence).13 Research on how these sorts of appearances and absences were evaluated—and by whom—would certainly make for interesting reading.

Drama of Democracy’s conceptual toolbox suggests that perhaps India’s tryst with majoritarianism ought not to be taken quite so literally “at its word”—at least not entirely. Indeed, scholars of Indian politics have long noted that Indian voters are by and large not ideological but rather eminently pragmatic in their electoral behavior.14 In a recent large-scale study carried out in the medium-size cities of Jaipur and Bhopal, for instance, political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachill marshal large-n survey data to demonstrate the remarkable savviness of the voting poor in selecting and forging relations of political representation that render their material claims effective. In contrast to any presumption that ethnic, religious, or even partisan identity would predict political trust or confidence in the context of gloves-off majoritarianism that characterizes political discourse in India (especially at the national level), Auerbach and Thachill’s account establishes that voters are looking for something very different in their representatives: education, practical expertise, and demonstrated efficacy in everyday, practical problem solving.

The non-ideological character of concrete authority (especially at the local level) sits awkwardly alongside the undeniable salience of ideology and identity in popular political discourse—an awkwardness that joins an array of puzzles for which scholars of contemporary Indian politics do not have clear answers. Why, for instance, has Modi’s brand of majoritarianism garnered so much more support in India’s northern regions than in (no-less-Hindu) southern states such as Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian ideology, anti-Brahmanism, and regional language identity remains unmoved by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Sanskritic version of Hindu nationalism? Or perhaps even more awkwardly for literalist readings of Hindutva’s ideological discourse, how can we account for what seems to be a growing popularity of the BJP among Indian Muslims?

Drama of Democracy invites a consideration of political communication beyond face-value readings. Consider, for example, the continuing deluge of defections in Maharashtra to parties allied with the BJP-affiliated ruling bloc. In one high-profile instance, in March 2024 Maharashtra state legislator Ravindra Waikar15 said goodbye to Uddhav Thackeray’s party after a half-century affiliation, during which Waikar represented Mumbaikars four times as a corporator and three times as MLA. Cynical readings of Waikar’s defection to the breakaway faction of the Sena led by Eknath Shinde cited familiar explanations: some speculated that, under the pressure of an Enforcement Directorate probe into irregularities in his real estate dealings, Waikar had buckled and sought protection from the ruling bloc (a situation that recalls the allegations of “complaint natak” that damaged Seema’s reputation in chapter 1); others suspected that Waikar had simply been incentivized with cash to join the ruling coalition. To speculate on the veracity of such allegations would be to miss the point; more interesting is Waikar’s own recounting of his reasons for the move: he explained to the media that, after his repeated requests to the state government to fund infrastructure projects in his constituency went ignored, “I realized that in order to do development I had to be part of the government.” Now, of course this is not the way that representative democracy is meant to work; and the denial of urban development funding to opposition-affiliated politicians was subsequently (and rightly) the subject of high-profile exposé by Mumbai’s fearless and tireless news media.16 Yet at the same time, Waikar’s explanation recalls accounts from this book demonstrating that the gift-mediated forging and reconfiguration of alliances and trust is what the crafting of relations of representation practically entails, especially in the run-up to polling.17 To recall the words of a veteran karyakarta in chapter 1: “everybody flips.”

Indeed, as chapter 1 demonstrated, the role of cash gifting and exchange in forging and reconfiguring sociopolitical networks of power and authority in Mumbai is hardly news—and certainly not unique to this particular historical conjuncture (even while the size of the alleged sums are somewhat unprecedented). Pushing past facile assumptions that cash transfers signal mere market-like exchange, chapter 1 attended to money’s multiple meanings, demonstrating how election-season cash animates intricate, contingent, highly speculative relational and informational networks by means of which representation is actually produced and instantiated—and political contestations and substantive citizenship claims articulated. On the one hand, we saw that gifts of cash work much like any other gifted good in producing relations of trust mediated by debt and obligation. On the other, cash gifts perform semiotic work, indexing access to powerful networks of knowledge, resources, and authority. In light of these findings, perhaps the more pressing question with regard to Waikar’s joining the BJP-allied faction of the Sena is not whether or not money was given but rather what Waikar’s new relationship with the ruling bloc might mean for his capacity (his taaqat, to recall a formulation from chapter 2) to access municipal resources and funding for local developmental work and to wield the practical authority necessary to get the work done. Waikar’s wager is that the allegations of disloyalty necessarily attending his defection will be outstripped by his renewed and revitalized taaqat: his strengthened capacity to represent.

Thinking with Waikar’s wager, moreover, leads us straight to the paradoxical co-articulation in Mumbai (as in India) of non-ideological voting with spectacular majoritarianism: just as Waikar speculated that perhaps his stagnating political career would shift back into gear if he were to become “part of the government,” the ruling coalition was eager to court the seasoned politician in the run-up to the parliamentary elections precisely because of Waikar’s enduring relations with area voters, social workers, and “mains” of all sorts. Beginning with the mass defection that toppled the Uddhav Thackeray–led government in Maharashtra, the BJP-affiliated ruling bloc in Maharashtra has been keenly courting corporators and local-level influence brokers—those who have spent much of their lives cultivating relations of trust with local residents.

Take, for example, Waikar’s constituency, known as Jogeshwari East, which was one of the Mumbai areas worst affected by the 1992–93 riots that wracked the city in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya,18 and where contemporary residents express no interest in revisiting the road which led to that dark episode. An in-depth report marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the violence notes that for Mumbai’s post-riot generation, the “divide” between Hindu and Muslim residents of Mumbai’s popular neighborhoods and “slums” has been “bridged by three factors.”19 First (and recalling Sayeed Rizwan’s family history recounted earlier), unlike earlier generations of working-class Mumbai children who attended Marathi- or Urdu-medium schools (depending on their religion), in contemporary Mumbai, children of all communities often study together in English-medium schools. Second (and as this book also demonstrates), the post-riot generation of working-class Mumbaikars is extraordinarily active in neighborhood-based voluntary associational life and “social work” organizations. And third, local leaders from Mumbai’s myriad Muslim communities have taken a proactive interest in liaising with the Mumbai police, especially at times of heightened tension—a dynamic we saw especially in chapter 5. The Jogeshwari building where one of the worst episodes of violence unfolded during the 1992–93 riots—where six Hindus were burned alive in their home—has since been converted into a women’s welfare center by a nongovernmental youth organization. Speaking with a media reporter after the 2019 Supreme Court ruling (which handed the Ayodhya site to the Ram Mandir trust), the coordinator for that NGO (also a Jogeshwari resident) explained that “on Friday, after the verdict was announced, we met several residents to ensure there was peace and communal harmony in the area. Things have changed for the better here.”20

Mumbai has indeed changed in the three decades since a mob of Hindu nationalist kar sevaks tore through barricades of the Babri Majid and destroyed it with iron rods, igniting sectarian violence across the country. In this context, what are we to make of a Mumbai legislator representing a constituency where community leaders of all faiths espouse “peace and communal harmony” suddenly forming an alliance with a political coalition espousing exclusionary majoritarianism and “bulldozer justice”? Our Mumbai toolbox suggests that perhaps Waikar’s wager has a second dimension: beyond the bet that “flipping” will increase his own taaqat, perhaps he is also wagering that Hindutva’s muscular swagger ought not to be taken entirely at its word. Undoubtedly there is a core constituency for Hindutva, one that has been prevalent on the subcontinent’s political landscape for a hundred years and whose violent vigilantism has been given carte blanche in recent years.21 And yet it is entirely possible that the spate of defections to the BJP and its alliance partners does not indicate a concomitant expansion of true-believer majoritarian sentiment, support for the vigilante violence that attends it, or approval of the tightening authoritarian chokehold on media freedoms and public expression. Let’s be honest: this is a bleak moment for democratic freedoms. At the time of writing, some demonstrators and activists arrested during the 2019–20 anti-CAA protests are still being held without bail. And yet while India’s shrinking spaces for free expression are read by some commentators as a sign that India is embracing autocracy, the outrageous attempts to intimidate and muzzle might also be read as an anxious attempt to keep pace with rising discontent.22 While there is obviously a core constituency for divisiveness, violence, and authoritarianism, it is increasingly apparent that support for with parties allied with Hindutva does not necessarily indicate unbridled support for these things. Tellingly, when Maharashtra Congress Party veteran and former chief minister Ashok Chavan23 defected to the BJP in February 2024, the Mumbai media reported “murmurs of discontent” among long-standing party workers—especially the core cadre associated with the party’s ideological body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.24

Indeed, notwithstanding the continuing spate of defections to the Hindutva-affiliated bloc (a full quarter of the BJP’s candidates for the 2024 parliamentary elections were themselves defectors), contemporary Mumbai appears unmoved by incitements to divisiveness. When Islamist terrorists bombed the local train during rush hour in July 2006, killing two hundred and injuring four times that number, Mumbaikars responded not with retaliatory rage but with exasperated anguish; the next morning, when the trains restarted, Mumbaikars of all faiths squeezed right back into the overcrowded train compartments, standing shoulder-to-shoulder just as before.25 The response was similar two years later, in November 2008, when Mumbaikars watched in horror and grief as militants unleashed another series of gruesome attacks on the city.26 Contemporary Mumbai appears impressed not by spectacular destruction (the bulldozing of buildings or bodies) but rather by development, increased educational opportunities, and the promises of participation in global modernity. In this context, returns on the ruling coalition’s investment in someone like Waikar—with the hopes of drinking from the seasoned politician’s relational reservoirs of trust during an upcoming election—may ultimately hinge on the extent to which Mumbai voters engage discourses of divisiveness not literally but rather with the remarkable everyday fluency with which Mumbaikars adeptly navigate and assess political signs and representations more generally.

This book’s introduction posed the question of whether there exists some natural affinity between political style and substance, whether democracy’s defenders speak the language of rationality and sincerity while political emotion, imagery, and embodiment properly belong to the authoritarian right. Indeed, this is a question many were asking during a year when—amid resurgent Trumpism—sixty countries (representing half the world’s population) headed to the polls. In this context, it is notable that one of this book’s key findings is that virtuosity in the performance arts of political communication is not the unique purview of any particular political orientation; in Mumbai, all parties speak the affective language of theater. To point this out is not to underplay the very real violence that performance itself can entail; on the contrary, spectacular violence can itself be a macabre variety of theater, as it was during the 1992–93 riots.27 The fact that performance of violence results in actual death does not make it any less of a show; quite the opposite.28 Three decades ago, power and authority were enacted in Mumbai through discourses of divisiveness and dramatic displays of violence with impunity. And yet in the contemporary city, interreligious animosity and acrimony appear no longer to capture the public imagination as a compelling storyline. A pragmatic public may indeed be enthralled by its own pageant of power. This is the constitutive contradiction of representation, playing out in the theater of political life and the drama of democracy.