IN these times of pandemic, a new phrase has entered our lexicon of contemporary discourse – ‘new normal’. There is an imperative need to understand this phraseology for comprehending its full import. Defining feature of this pandemic affected situation is the severe restriction on collective public action. Given the fact, that such restrictions are necessitated by requirements of containing the spread, the need for scrutinising actions and measures of the governments is imperative to counteract the current aggressive unilateralism.

This is more so because the ‘new normal’ seems to be translating the agenda of the government in the pre-Covid times inhibited in face of possible public protest and resistance. The pandemic has thrown up challenges for most of the governments which stand thoroughly exposed by the crumbling public health infrastructure and the economic disaster with heavy toll on growth and massive loss of employment. Therefore, understanding the ‘new normal’, would be impossible without fully grasping the dominant tendency during ‘normal’ times, the pre-Covid times.

What was the dominant tendency of the pre-Covid times? A sharp accentuation of growth in unsustainable levels of inequality along with alarming growth in unemployment. This was further reflected in the erosion of access to rights and services to a vast majority of the people. In the current context, this is most tellingly manifested in the collapse of the public health system due to the insatiable drive for super profits by powerful insurance corporates and big pharma. Therefore, contrary to popular impression that the pandemic has broken up most of the present world, insightful observers have tended to agree that the world was already broken; the pandemic has merely removed the veil over the unsustainable situation.

This phenomenon is more pronounced in India as compared to many other major economies. The level of infections and deaths, the collapse of failure to address non Covid ailments and essential programmes of immunisation has marked the public health parameters in India. Together with the health dimension, an economic catastrophe is ravaging the people. Fairly, wide opinion has come to accept that approximately hundred and fifty million people have lost their jobs; out of these about twenty million are full salaried employees who have lost employment during the last two months. Despite the fact that the current crisis is driven by demand deficit, which was distinct in the pre-pandemic phase, the utterly clueless lockdown has led to a desperate pursuit of unlocking when the infection is surging. The world has now concluded that economic revival is not possible without a considerable degree of control over the spread of infection. While stimulus elsewhere have grudgingly accepted that cash transfer from the government to save salaries and jobs is the only option, the Indian official stimulus amounted to a meagre 1 per cent of the GDP. Obviously, this has made the situation unbearable with the health pandemic merging into an unemployment and hunger pandemic. Let alone addressing this catastrophe, that official data was not available to capture the full depth of the crisis underlines the precariousness of the situation.

Naturally, while acknowledging the gravity of the Indian situation, observers have appeared to be puzzled that how the degree of opposition and resistance of the people is not commensurate with the degree of urgency that it would have normally warranted? How it that Narendra Modi has till now not faced the level of pressure for being accountable? Is this apparent ‘invincibility’ for real?

THE GLOBAL SETTING
In the last few years, the world has come to witness several personalities who seem to feature a trend of populist nationalism. This brand of populist leaders stands in sharp contrast to the earlier generation of technocrat politician setting out a course of more formal neoliberal management of the economy and society. As George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist had observed, “Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weak men, as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?”

While there has been some attempt to explore the phenomena of such populism that have taken hold over a significant section of the population, these new dynamics are found to be inadequate in fully comprehending the phenomena.

While social media has indeed acted as an ‘incubator of absurdity’, wider changes in the nature of contemporary capitalism also demand a proper comprehensive study. The recent public attention to the overwhelming influence of Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram underline the vicious downside of the virtually unregulated conduct of such mega global companies. An extremely incisive documentary film on the Netflix, Social Dilemma brings out the downside of the business model of these companies. It is based on the role of these social media giants as facilitators who provision the marketing requirements of the advertisers. The technical tools like algorithms ensure that the millions of users get to see what the advertisers would want them to see. The infinite magnitude of personal data that gets processed by these social media companies directly feed into the profit of the advertisers and contribute to these companies' revenues. It becomes apparent that this programmes the thinking and individual actions of users, totally eroding their critical thinking. They are left with a sense of emptiness making them prone to receptacles of political messaging including populist ideas like misogyny, divisiveness and hate. The prospect of loss of users stops the social media companies to exercise any control to regulate these obnoxious dehumanising efforts. In the face of growing criticism, Twitter has recently removed large number of tweets from Donald Trump which were supposedly fake and manufactured information.

Interestingly, some credible international studies have revealed that India is home to maximum amount of fake news on social media. But the basic question is what are the changes in the way of contemporary capitalism as opposed to past. Monbiot has observed, “policies that were supposed to promote enterprise – slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions – instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation, the largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets such as land and buildings privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is a global phenomenon. Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power”.

THE IMMEDIATE INDIAN CONTEXT

The full might of unleashing the real agenda of the government seems to be conforming to this global trend. The labour reforms, the agriculture related reforms, the major privatisation efforts of mines, airports, railways, electricity distribution and other crucial public assets all seem to dovetail with this global trend. Faced with the economic crisis, when the people are reeling under the health, unemployment and hunger pandemic, taking advantage of the severe restrictions, the Modi government appears to be going berserk in realising its agenda. Institutional arrangements that the constitution envisaged to restrain the accumulation and centralisation of power in the executive seem to have largely rendered ineffectual. The recent discourse on the conduct of the judiciary, the role of the Election Commission, the function of police and other specialised investigating and prosecuting agencies like CBI, NIA, NCB is that they are giving a short shrift to lawful conduct ignoring individual freedom and citizenship rights.

In this overall atmosphere, there is surprise that prime minister Modi has largely escaped the scathing headlines and crushing opinion polls that have beleaguered his other populist counterparts. In a way of explaining this, a piece in CNN observes that the Indian leader is seen as a "national messiah" who is working on a grander agenda to reshape the Indian nation and is not accountable for day-to-day government failures. Modi has eked out for himself the role of not just a political leader but also the country’s social, moral and spiritual leader, in the mould of Mahatma Gandhi; he is seen as a saintly figure who means well and always acts in the larger national interest.

This insulates him from his now apparent massive failures in the management of public health and economy.

It is here that India’s specific dimensions need to be noted – ‘the politics of vishwas’. The claim is that significant sections have come to accept that “voters prefer to centralise power in a charismatic strong leader and they have faith that whatever the leader does is good” and contrast the usual model, “where leaders are held accountable on performance”. However, this approach seems to be relying on the belief that there is an ideological shift towards the replacement of our democratic, secular and constitutional republic for a fascistic Hindutva Rashtra.  This presumes that ‘vishwas’ obviates performance and interests are all petty. The second prediction is that this politics requires the continual feeding of ethno-nationalism, moving from one issue or one enemy to the other. And thirdly, it points out that vishwas is not just a political artefact – it has to be continually sustained by a saturation of the mind space and control of media.

But this approach appears to be fundamentally flawed; the optimism based on ‘vishwas’ where there is no performance implicitly admits that believing is merely for the sake of believing.

While there is the role of the RSS and almost vice like grip of domination over mainstream corporate media and social media, the chasm between imagination based on ‘vishwas’ and the ugly reality that threatens their daily existence cannot be sustained beyond a point of time. The recent widespread stirrings over the agricultural reforms appear to be providing some early hints of breaking the stranglehold of this so-called ‘vishwas’.

THE WAY FORWARD 

The crisis of livelihood is giving way to a crisis of survival. It is a fact that the alignment of political forces so far, has proved to be inadequate for overcoming the magnitude of ideologically driven popular nationalism which Monbiot described as the emergence of oligarchical ‘disaster capitalism’. The survival instinct of the people is articulating demands which show their rejection of the course that the Modi dispensation has set out while the discontent of the peasantry appears to be in the forefront of such resistance. All other sectors of the economy and the society who are currently facing the onslaught are also showing signs of synchronising their collective efforts towards the convergence into a mighty tide. The workers fighting against this displacement and loss of income, academic community fighting the policies of marginalisation and exclusion proposed by NEP 2020, the battle against misogyny and gender atrocities seem to be surmounting the restrictions imposed by the pandemic response. However, what needs to be underlined is that unless the survival agenda of the people gets integrated with a struggle for rejection of the ideological offensive which aims to reinforce this impression of ‘invincibility’ of the Modi-RSS dispensation, the existing regime of populist nationalism cannot be met effectively, let alone surmounted.