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Raging for a Hindu Order

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Raging for a Hindu Order RAGING FOR A HINDU ORDER AUTHORITARIANISM, HINDU NATIONALISM AND CRISIS OF MODERNITY Hassan Zaheer Abstract: Contemporarily, the world is experiencing a severe contestation of political ideas as nation-states are increasingly drawn toward finding their relevance in conservative nationalism. With the cold death of Fukuyama's End of History, ideological conflicts are born anew. Illiberal political ideologies are being revived, political distinctions are drawn, discourses are monopolized, and the return of the idea of the sovereign is upsetting the impartiality of legal order. The paper seeks to examine the resurrection of these ideas which are espoused in the politics of Hindu nationalism in the theoretical framework provided by German political theorist Carl Schmitt. His writings on politics, liberalism, and constitution outline a blueprint of illiberal authoritarianism. With the electoral mandate, powerful constituencies, and rising middle-class support, it is critical to develop an understanding of why Hindu nationalism appeals to the society and deliberate over what future holds for the modernity as fringe ideas are now becoming mainstream in India. Keywords: Hindu Nationalism, Carl Schmitt, Authoritarianism, Modernity, India Introduction In contemporary times, the world is experiencing a tumultuous and disruptive period of political unease and social fragility. Societies in the oriental and occidental worlds are gripped in Hassan Zaheer is a postgraduate scholar in Sociology at the University of Karachi. He is currently working as a Non-Resident Research Associate with the Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research (CSCR), Islamabad 135 Raging for a Hindu Order Zaheer mass psychosis, crude nationalism, cultural ethnocentrism, and politicization of religion. The political and social values of the post-Cold War order of politics and culture no longer defines the governing structures of the societies across both worlds. This phenomenon of cultural and political backlash by the people against the ‘Old World’1was in the making for long as political undercurrents had been creeping into the social institutions of various societies2and vying for political power against competing forces of globalization and cultural homogeneity.3 Nonetheless, the political and social structures of the ‘Old World’, the Western Modernity, also played their critical role in not only exhibiting dereliction of duty in understanding the primal fears and ambitious of the people but actively sought to undermine the potency of these political undercurrents fraught with sentiments of anger, disillusionment, and vengeance. Concurrently, these structures of the western political order propounded a perspective of an alternative reality that betrays the brooding resentment in the societies.4 The present study will examinethe crisis of modernity in augmenting the rise of crude authoritarianism in Indian society. The paper will seek to analyze the architecture of politics of Hindu nationalism, and by association Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in India in the theoretical framework of German political theorist and a potent critic of liberalism, Carl Schmitt. It will 1Robert Zaretsky, “Max Weber Diagnosed His Time and Ours,” Foreign Affairs Magazine, July 24, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/central-europe/2019-07-24/max-weber-diagnosed-his-time- and-ours. Also see Bruno Macaes, “The Secret Sources of Populism,” Foreign Policy Magazine, June 18, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/18/the-new-political-influencers/ 2 Pankaj Mishra, “Globalization of Rage,” Foreign Affairs Magazine, November/December 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2016-10-17/globalization-rage. Also see FareedZakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs Magazine, November/December 1997, https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/FZakariaIlliberalDemocracy1997.pdf 3 Pippa Norris, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); George Ritzer, “The Globalization of Nothing,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 23, no 2 (2003): pp. 189-200 4 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, Summer 1989, https://www.embl.de/aboutus/science_society/discussion/discussion_2006/ref1-22june06.pdf. Also see Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 2 (1991): pp. 12-34; J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis(New York: HarperCollins, 2016) 136 The Journal of Political Science XXXVIII (2020) GC University Lahore analyze how the Schmittean notions about politics, constitution, and society are influencing the authoritarian politics of Modi and how Hindu nationalism is exploiting the crisis of modernity to augment its political power, therefore cultivating ‘A Hindu Order’. Modernity, and more specifically the western conception of modernity, served as one of the essential idea and prime suspect behind thecomplacency of the western world in seeking to curate their perspective on reality and subsequently projecting the idea globally through organized violence and indoctrination.The term of ‘modernity’ has no singular definition but concerning the paper, it is pertinent to opt for the definition of Modernity which is propounded by British Sociologist Anthony Giddens: “The period of comprising all of post-medieval history of the western world”, this definition ensures the focus of the study.5 There are some primary, multifarious fallacies in the underlying operation of the idea of modernity in the western conception of the word: the assumption of a homogenous historical experience of all societies6; the colonization of non-western world through various machinations and brute violence7; the assumption of the universal appeal of ideas of secularization8, liberal democracy9, and market capitalism10, and distinguishing a ‘civilized west’ and ‘uncivilized others’.11 Notwithstanding the progress and evolution of societies occurred in the Eurocentric modernity; the rise of nation-states, mass society, progress in science and technology, 5 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (California: Stanford University Press, 1991) 6 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments(New York: Vintage Books, 2004) 7PriyaSatia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution(New York: Penguin Press, 2018); ShashiTharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2016) 8 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 9 Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” pp. 12-34 10 Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Globalization of Discontent,” Project Syndicate, December 5, 2017, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/globalization-of-discontent-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-2017-12 11 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005) 137 Raging for a Hindu Order Zaheer industrialization and mass literacy,there also happened to be profound perils of these rapidly evolving changes in the social structures and organization of societies across the globe.12 Yet, none of the political actors advocating for the adoption of Eurocentric modernity by non-western societies through the will of the people or barrel of the gun had imagined that the inevitable consequence of this full-spectrum domination of western conception of modernity would be the rise and mass acceptance of authoritarianism.13This is precisely where lies the ‘Crisis of Modernity’, western advocates of modernity could not even imagine that there could be plural conceptions and forms of modernity which can be distinctive from its western counterpart.14 Although, there were clearer signs - in the formof intermittent rise in conservative political forces, civil wars and faltering societies - of the consequences of dominating western modernity on the people which had a distinct socio-historical experience, the challenge for modernity and its associated ideology of liberalism emerged from its backyard.15In recent years, two pivotal events in the modern history of western politics catapult the political undercurrents against modernity and its perils to the mainstream; these events were the election of Donald Trump and the vote of Brexit.16 The consequences of these changes in the western political world are felt more palpably in non-western societies. The case study of the paper comprise of India. In one way or the other, the political world of the Indian society has had a structurally-chronic relationship with the 12John Hutchinson, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Peter Wagner, Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012 13 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998); Roberto Stefan Foa, “Modernization and Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 29, no. 3 (2018): pp. 129-140 14 SN Eisenstadt, “Modernity and modernization,” Sociopedia.isa, (2010); Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2016) 15 Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2019) 16 Francis Fukuyama, “Against Identity Politics,” Foreign Affairs Magazine, September/October 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2018-08-14/against-identity-politics-tribalism-francis- fukuyama. Also see Douglas Keller, “Donald Trump, Globalization, and Modernity,” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11, no. 3 (2018): pp. 265-284; MatejAvbelj, “Brexit: An
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