The odd unity among the opposing trinity

Ever since Modi delivered a resounding victory- the Left, the Liberals and the Islamists (all collectively against him) have turned into an angry lot instead of introspecting.

They are now spooked by the Modi-man who has initiated a renaissance of sorts, one of aspiration drawing from the nationalistic zeitgeist of our present and seeking cultural inspiration from India’s ancient past.

Let's understand the unintended but comical congregation of the Left, the Liberals and the Islamist trinity despite the very distinct ideologies each has from the other.

The Indian Left champions the cause of the working masses, wishes to revive socialism, presses for a strong public sector and consists of atheists for the most part.

The Indian Liberals often belong to the elite group who hold open borders, women empowerment, LGBTQ rights and capitalism dear to them. Religion plays second fiddle to their identity, and they take a rather ambivalent ‘to each their own’ stance as a means of exhibiting their broad-minded thinking.

The Islamists are identity centric who seek solace from religious pursuits and are regularly guided by the orthodox clergy. They draw strength by huddling within their respective sect and by adhering to its value system inexorably. 

Although each group has little in common, they all fit very snugly in the intersection of the anti-Modi Venn diagram. They put aside their diametrical differences and often bring about an entente with one another.

The Left hate Modi because to them, he appears to have taken up the lion’s share of the ambit of influence on the working class and rendered them insignificant.

The Liberals dislike Modi as to them, he appears anti-western, a region from where they derive and espouse their ideals.

The Islamists abhor Modi as they view him as a unifying force of the otherwise Hindu divided family and denigrate his actions as anti-minority and ones that diminish their grip in public matters.

Dislike for the man alone is their binding glue.

If they were to put up a candidate collectively, they would win. 

Minority as they may be, they are a politically conscious group who vote in large swathes and given that a third of the country doesn’t vote, a major victory for them isn’t far-fetched. 

However, were this to happen they would either get unstuck faster than one can blink or bring about mayhem on the economy and create an irreparable fracture in the nation's social fabric. 

The exact thing they condemn Modi of doing; one might ask how and why?

Their primary grouse is that Modi's further rise will lead to a situation where the insignificant opposition will count for less than it already does. In other words, they fear that he'll have powers akin to that of a dictator, preventing anybody (read themselves) to oppose him or flourish under his regime.

At best it is a figment of their imagination and at worst, it is fear mongering to propagate their warped agenda.

The Left draw their inspiration from communists and any attempt to demonstrate the virtue of their policies, which frankly destroy more than they create, is meretricious at best since China today is communist only for namesake. The Liberals appear to be living in a bubble of idealism, who question everything in the real world but provides no workable solutions. The Islamists seem to be frozen in time and so their inflexibility facilitates their claims of perpetual victimhood in the ever-changing modern world.

What this motley mix of anti-Modi brigade can't seem to fathom, is that the rise of right-of-center nationalistic powerful leaders is not just India centric, it's a global phenomenon.

Across the geographies there is both, fatigue and loss of faith in 1) Democracy, 2) Globalization and 3) Liberalism. All three phenomena were seen as the antidotes to the past, where human spirits were quelled and the citizens were downtrodden. They were seen as an ushering in of a new era of uplifting the last citizen of society and placing them first.

The reasons were the following:

1. Democracy had demonstrated how America, the nation with no monarchy could unleash the human spirit and keep rising. In this meritocratic and ability driven society, anyone could participate in the nation’s growth since there was equal opportunity for all. However, with time the democratic process has sadly come to mean as the least evil form of government and not necessarily the best one. Today, it is one in which the opposition’s preset agenda is to simply oppose the ruling party irrespective of the merits, including in matters of national development or international prestige. Partisan acrimony across the aisle has reduced the aspirational term “democratic progress” into an unfortunate oxymoron. This applies as much in America - the world’s first democracy, as in India – the world’s largest democracy.

There is adequate empirical evidence that can be drawn from modern governance to show that less “demo-crazy”, if you will, equates to a happier and healthier population.

Impatience bubbling, people no longer seek solace in the slow handy work of law, they demand a quick fix in order to ensure stability. And that can only be delivered by an agile, responsive and less interventionist democratic system. Finance and investment seem to prefer the same, as even foreign direct investment from democratic nations is seen to be heading faster in favor of those stable but less democratic. The examples of phenomenally high growth during the decades long rule of a nearly one-party monopoly in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia under powerful leadership is worthy of praise. The efficient royal management of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait – all have delivered similar results. China, which was lagging far behind on all progressive counts unleashed its potential energy into such a powerful force, having swallowed many nations’ GDP equivalent worth of wealth in the past three decades. It is now become a challenger to the US and is vying for the throne as the world’s superpower, rescuing a whopping 900 million people out of abject poverty in the process.

In today’s context, those ‘pernicious’ dictators whether living or dead appear to be far and few in relevance and are viewed as an aberration in the past.

2. Globalization was at first seen as a novel idea, where one could source the best and cheapest products from even the furthest or remotest distant lands. And so, outsourcing of goods by wealthy nations and exporting of products by the developing ones took a firm grip on the imagination of respective economy planners and became a key component of national strategy formulation. However, when special economic zones were created, the unintended consequence beyond just the cheap products coming in was of critical value contributing factories moving base to foreign lands. Many blue collared men lost their jobs in rich nations and a sense of over dependency of poor nations on wealthier ones was created.

With the advent of technology, distance became of piffling importance and the inevitable happened - services followed the goods. And that meant not only outsourcing goods but services and finance as well. This now hurt white collared jobs too and as a backlash, immigration controls were put in place. The e-commerce and automation induced efficiency was the clarion call for departure of jobs everywhere. The gap between the wealthy and the many less fortunate widened with each passing year and reached a point where the top 3% of people owned 70% of the wealth. Across geographies, shrill screams against the privileged wealthy and for job protection measures were heard by every politician in both the western and eastern hemispheres.As an offensive-defense response, tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, currency manipulations and revisit of trade agreements were introduced in the game. The champions of free trade were losing in their own game. Thus, through trade wars, they set off the slow poisoning of the globalization Frankenstein that they had once created.

3. Liberalism needs a special mention as it was a much-needed ether in Europe, after the execrable excesses of the 2nd World War. That conservativism leads to xenophobic and nationalistic tendencies with eventual wars amongst nations. But liberalism leads to brotherhood and trans-nationalism was a convincing argument then. Due to the wide spread of the British Empire, the English language had become a ticket to prosperity. In light of westernized education in erstwhile colonies and the witnessing of the mesmerizing all round rise in a classless America, nations across the world eschewed conservatism and embraced virtues of liberalism. And so, liberalism and its inalienable must haves such as respecting everyone’s individuality, extolling plurality, freedom of expression and using internet as an open unrestricted and uncensored resource by all took the fancy of the world's opinion makers and continued to do so for over half a century.

Nevertheless, over time liberalism turned extremely naive and unconscionable having moved away from realism. It continued to project a narrative beyond the use-by date, one that was hyper-moral as if set in some benign wonderland. That human evolution had not reached a point where every group can demonstrate maturity and good-natured reciprocity and above all a mutual respect for differences seemed to bypass the comprehension of the liberals.

The liberals continue to bestow the rather appealing to the senses title of ’moderates’ upon themselves. They believe that they are the balanced rationalists. They may have made sense in a different milieu, but today there’s a dire need for rationality’s center of gravity to shift. What the lily-livered liberals seem to not get is that world-over, new problems under democracy and globalization have mushroomed domestically or have travelled in from abroad just like the goods and services - without passports. Key among them is a motivated anti-establishment culture festered by interest groups and lobbyists, dissemination of fake or manipulative news, power brokering by minorities, culturally incompatible immigrants, foreign NGOs and sovereign funds posing as fronts with vested sociopolitical and financial interests and finally terrorism. And now these concepts or entities are visibly seen to be thriving due to unfettered support of the myopic liberals, who continue to assert a fool’s equanimity no matter how evident the risk posed by these approaching hostilities.

When called out, the problem makers would be heard taking shelter behind feckless arguments like – discrimination and subjugation and the feeling of being completely misunderstood, knowing full well that the liberals shall come rushing to provide succor at every instance.

In their zeal to protect the supposedly disadvantaged, the often limousine liberals have made any mainstream indigenous ideology, heritage or cultural pride of those in the majority look overbearing, unseemly and therefore at immediate fault. Instead of assimilating with the mainstream, mischief makers keep becoming defiantly assertive in their own deviant ways, with the encouragement of the liberals. Picayune squabbling of politicians on these matters clamoring for vote banks does no favors either. The liberals continue to sermon the mainstream population to unilaterally and unwaveringly go out of their way and be accommodative to them.

The proverbial tail had begun to wag the dog.

So clearly all the three phenomena have run their course and the pendulum has now swung away from them. And to rein in the impact of the same, strong leaders are being put into power from all and sundry world-over.