The recent decision by the Centre to go ahead with the caste census, ahead of the upcoming polls in Bihar, is undoubtedly a victory for Rahul Gandhi and the agenda of social justice.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had earlier rejected the idea of caste census as being divisive, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said he recognises only four castes. In addition, there was no immediate electoral traction to the promise of caste census for the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
In spite of this, Rahul Gandhi stuck to his commitment to caste census as a game changer.
He strongly believed that this could open up new avenues to the excluded castes. He prevailed on the Congress government in Telangana to go ahead with the caste census and formed a commission under Justice Sudershan Reddy to suggest policy outcomes based on the data. While many claimed that not even the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) were excited about the caste census, Rahul did not budge.
In fact, on many occasions, he has demonstrated the resolve to take positions that may have hurt him politically and his party electorally.
Is this a rare kind of commitment to social cause and equality? Or, as some think, lacking pragmatic and strategic thinking? Can there be political commitment without strategic thinking? It is important to decode the method behind the madness to understand the new nature of politics that might be unfolding before us.
The 'Mad' Genius?
Rahul Gandhi has undoubtedly emerged as one of the unconventional politicians in the recent past. He is pursuing politics as an "experiment with truth". In a recent interview with Congress politician Sandeep Dixit, Rahul begins by saying that he is continuing the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in his pursuit of truth, unmindful of the costs or benefits it may or may not bring.
He went on to say, "I will not veer from the truth even if it has political costs," and that he is, like his grandmother was, unmindful of public perception. What matters to him is to pursue what is necessarily true.
It is this pursuit that Rahul ends the interview with, saying it will never allow him to compromise with the likes of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Rahul seems to be seeking more than just power in politics and certainly holds onto a curiosity without reducing politics to a series of strategic moves.
At the memorial meeting for Sitaram Yechury, he remarked that politics rarely brings out the best in a human being but it mostly brings the worst. This is not an ordinary observation from a mainstream politician. It is deeply reflective of his own existential reality. It brings a sense of honest self-reflection.
The general perception is that Rahul may not succeed because he seems to be spiritual. Some even think he is not crafty enough to understand, and therefore, looks too gullible to inspire confidence. This marks the changed context. Perhaps, nobody would have felt Mahatma Gandhi would fail because he was spiritual or gullible. Some of Gandhi's peers did get impatient with his non-interventionist and non-consequentialist methods.
We are in vastly different times from that of Gandhi and Nehru. It is not only fear that is holding people back, as Rahul noted. Dissent is seen as a site of privilege. Dissent is seen as an exemplification of social and cultural capital.
Rahul Gandhi can "afford" to speak a language of truth and principles but the common mass needs everyday shortcuts and clever-by-half modes of engagement to get past their everyday needs and more so to seek mobility.
Sticking to principled positions leaves them nowhere and it is not a realistic choice most people can afford.
Protest as a site of spiritual pursuit—from the times of Mahatma Gandhi—has become a symbol of cultural capital in Rahul Gandhi's time. We need to decode and make sense of this surreal shift to understand where Rahul's pursuit of truth would take him and how his rhetorics will shape oppositional politics in the near future.
Chimeric Realities
In a recent conversation with my students in Jawaharlal Nehru University, I was narrating the instance of the civil rights activist K Balagopal's disdain for wearing "good clothes". He once went to negotiate a strike of truck drivers but the drivers refused to engage with him because they thought he was not a senior or respectable enough leader, given his dishevelled appearance.
When his colleagues requested him to be better dressed, he quipped he does not look for the respect that comes with one's clothes. To this, a Dalit student of mine said, rather indignantly, "We do not have that privilege, and therefore, Babasaheb had to be in a two-piece suit". This rather poignant remark captures the mood of our times. The codes of social reality have changed in a way where the pursuit of truth is socially differentiated.
Part of the explanation for these new sensibilities exists in the nature of social change that political democracy brought in the last five decades. The success of democracy has successfully instilled a process of social democratisation where the imagination of dignity and civility has reached everyone.
At the same time, the failure of democracy is in having not given the material conditions required to realise that idea of dignity.
Rahul himself noted, recollecting his interaction with a caste Hindu gentleman once who was upset with the Congress because it had allowed Dalits and the OBCs in the village to stand for their rights and claim dignity. People from dominant communities feel compelled to cope with what they consider an anomalous condition through aggression, abusive uncivility, and even violence.
In such a context, reference to 'truth' becomes a burden of morality, rather than liberation, through spiritual pursuit. It is not that people do not value truth and being spiritual, but they may not frame it the way Rahul does. It is this enduring gap that the machinations of the BJP-RSS fill. While the 'truth' does stir up the RSS, it fails to shake them up.
If Rahul's resistance against the RSS is not seen as inspirational but as symbolism of his privilege, it indeed is a grave challenge that must be addressed and it cannot perhaps be addressed simply by invoking Gandhi and Nehru. Being unmindful of public perception is a symptom of power, not truth or honesty. The RSS is riding high on this chimera or mirage that reality has itself created.
Semantics of Truth and Power
Philosophically, this conflict between truth and power has spanned the last few decades. German philosopher Immanuel Kant of the early 19th century was in search of universal principles that were relevant across time and space.
That universality, he thought, was prior to all experience and cannot be reduced or changed depending on the context. He thought the idea or the principle of "categorical imperative" was universal and it referred to the fact that people have to be treated as ends in themselves and not as means and in consequentialist modes.
Kant believed that ideas of dignity and respect were universal and also normative to give direction to societies to move towards and institutionally realise the principle of rule of law.
Later, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche countered Kant by arguing that this search for absolute moralism is like replacing God with morality. Morality and truth are not natural facts but social constructs. It is the "will to power" that constructs a social notion as a natural truth.
But more importantly, Nietzsche and later, Michel Foucault, came to argue that lofty idealism is not how common people think in their everyday negotiations. Morality becomes an imposition on their lifeworld. They are better off thinking in terms of interests, and negotiating power as it exists.
The world today has got strangely divided between idealism as a privilege and the pragmatism of the common mass. What looks like fear in a certain context could well be pragmatism of the immediate.
All this, of course, does not mean Rahul Gandhi has to give up his pursuit of truth and stop resisting the RSS but he certainly has to think harder as to how to make that resistance the story of the common people.
It is not going to happen on its own or as an inspiration from above. Without the love and identification of the common mass, he cannot travel too far.
In this context, the recent success of Rahul Gandhi in pushing the Centre to accept caste census is a case in point. Rahul did not relent on the demand, even if it got little traction in the electoral domain. It has now gathered a greater significance with the Centre acknowledging its potential to become a counter-narrative. This has come from Rahul's pursuit of the truth, linked to his privilege, but will it galvanise the mass? Will it yield electoral success? For Rahul, these are not of immediate concern; can we afford to think in similar registers?
(Ajay Gudavarthy is a political theorist, analyst, and columnist in India. He is associate professor in political science at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)