The months of November and December are close to festival time but the celebrations centre not on the religious but the intellectual, as literary festivals pretend to be Kumbh Melas of the urban landscape.
This month saw an interesting one at the Tata literary festival in Mumbai where the conversations were rewarding, especially on politics and philosophy. I must confess, I find most Indian writers in English boring but the gossip, the real interest, is centred around politics.
Ideas
As ideas floated happily and as quarrels spread over coffee, one theme haunted many conversations.
The literary metaphor of the year as character, obscenity, even obsession was the American president Donald Trump. He is a delight, a source of irritation and anxiety and many American intellectuals travelling to South Asia are almost ritually apologetic about him. They treat him as an aberration, a stigma, and even a joke. Then thinking seriously, they begin asking about the epidemic of Trumps all over and wondering what is going on.
US President Donald Trump: charisma?
The first item of almost immediate comparison is with Narendra Modi Indian. Indian NRIs add fuel to the fire by insisting that Modi is the original elected authoritarian and that Trump is an imitation.
They insist that Modi exudes gravitas while Trump exudes a playboy image. As the debate went beyond the eccentricity of detail, one sees a sense of worry.
The sociology around each of these characters is similar. Each autocrat is a highly popular figure. Each exudes a charisma which is fascinating. One senses a quiet twinning of charisma and dictatorship. Yet what is troubling is that people want such dictators.
They see them as decisive, problem sowing, representative of the deeper problems of the unconscious or the unsaid which were never articulated in politics. One senses that these new noisy dictatorships were the creations or projections of these silent majorities tired of the indifference of seasoned politicians.
In fact, it is in this context that the novelist and historian Mukul Kesavan coined the term, a serendipitous one. He talked of ventriloquist dictatorship, the voice of crucial majorities or critical interests. They looked dominant but sociologically they were creations of these forces.
Modi, for instance, was a creation of an aspirational middle class that pined for a homemade Hindutva. In that sense, Modi as a script, like Trump, is fine tuned to the hard hats in each culture.
US President Donald Trump ‘projects machismo’
What fascinated the discussants was the need for such tyranny. It is as if India is tired of the slowness of democracy and suffers from China or Pakistan envy where dictators take quick decisions.
Democracy sounds autistic next to these decisions which evoke speed and masculinity. Both Trump and Modi project a machismo in their decision making.
Imagine
As one spectator to the seminar noted, ‘imagine Shastri trumping his chest or making 56’ pretensions. Indians, especially, among the middle class and elite suffer from this China syndrome as we feel handicapped by a not-too-impressive democracy.
China demands respect. When it sneezes the world holds a handkerchief, while India is dismissed with a smile. A nation desperate for attention seeks a dictator with a democratic facade.
Dictators have become suddenly appealing to democracies. As people survey the phenomena globally, one senses a botanical, a collectors’ interest in list-making as one reels off the names of Chavez, Abe, Zuma, Trump and Modi till one wonders why there is such an epidemic of elected dictatorships.
Is it because democracies now lack an institutional chutzpah, a sensitivity to institution building that they had earlier? Is it that we now see words like secularism, parliamentarianism as terms of delay, wanting speed in anything global.
US President Donald Trump
There is a worldwide impatience with slowness, whether of economics, institutions, as delivery systems which a Trump, a Modi or a Chavez recognise and hope to solve.
Even if they do not offer content, their constituencies are content with a style that at least hints at some attention to the problem.
Symptom
There is a third symptom one notes among elected dictators and here Russia’s Putin is a classic example.
They do not shun violence, they like being seen as bullies, they present themselves as there to stay. Each dictator begins as a Rorschach of these oppressed majorities and then acquires a life of his own. He begins by bowing to the will of the majority, till the majority makes his will their own.
Suddenly we seem possessive about out elected tyrants as if we have patented our own desi Draculas and want to see them grow.
The crowds feel dictators understand power while elected MLA are hypocritical about it. The crowds feel dictators talk to each of them directly. Today, each Indian feels he has a direct line to Modi and God while the Congress politician was an allusive creature.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin
What is also fascinating is that each of these specimens is a glocal creature. Modi, Abe, Trump and Putin all illustrate the global impatience with democracy and yet each story is a vernacular act of storytelling where each man seems desi in his own way.
The awe and the interest each summons is impressive. Yet behind this attitude, one senses a note of worry, a worry about a new generation which has few memories of democracy, no sense of democratic vintage and see in these specimens the answer to their idea of a brave new world.
The writer is a social science nomad