The reason for ritual

Nobody can accuse the current government of moving quickly on its social priorities. From its first day in office in 2014, the direction of travel for the Republic of India was clear: Towards a more majoritarian and culturally conservative conception of nationhood and of the state. But this movement — it is perhaps too much to call it “progress” — has not been as fast paced as some of the government’s most fervent supporters would like. However, with the ceremonies and myth-making surrounding the inauguration of India’s new Parliament building, a major step forward has been taken for this programme.

This is not to say that the cultural turn in India’s politics has been hard to discern. The previous incarnation of the National Democratic Alliance, under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had its social-conservative priorities — especially the redrafting of textbooks under Murli Manohar Joshi’s human resources development ministry. However, Vajpayee’s own personality and the broad-based nature of the NDA-I coalition limited the action that it could take. Once the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a majority on its own in 2014, it was reasonable to expect that a harder line would be taken by NDA-II than by NDA-I.

And, indeed, various long-held priorities of the right wing began to be ticked off. The special status of Jammu & Kashmir was revoked, and legal footing was given to a temple where the Babri Masjid had once stood. But no progress was made towards a uniform civil code — the third great element of the BJP’s triad of priorities — and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act was quietly de-prioritised following nationwide protests.

Of course, there have been multiple ways in which the public culture of the Indian state has bowed to majoritarianism in the past few years. But many of these are the choices of individuals or of institutions, and have not been written into law or codified in any other way. The real promise of 2014 — that the landslide election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would lead to the re-founding of the republic on sterner and less “secular” grounds — was not followed through in full measure.

It is now possible to see what this re-founded second republic would look like. The prime minister’s inauguration of the Parliament building was a ceremony both presidential and religious. The actual President was nowhere to be seen, although civics textbooks teach us that she is a constituent of “the Parliament of India” alongside the upper and lower Houses. The speaker of the Lok Sabha appeared to observers to be portrayed in proceedings as a glorified assistant to the prime minister in the ceremonies, when as the presiding officer of the House of the People he should have had a more central role.

Is such personalisation inevitable, even beyond the undoubted popularity of the current prime minister? Countries that have turned towards majoritarianism and away from classical liberal democracy have often sought to replace messy parliamentarian systems with the domination of a popularly elected executive president. Turkey is an excellent recent example of a country that has made such a shift under political pressures similar to India’s. Nor is this debate new to India. The last time a single politician dominated the political sphere, in the 1970s, there were multiple open calls for a presidential system.

And what of the religious imagery? Those of us who saw it as a betrayal of the founding principles of the republic are clearly out of tune with the times. More importantly, it was seen as vital precisely because it trumped those founding principles with new ones. This nascent energy was visible even in 2014, when the prime minister-elect’s visit to Kashi Vishwanath appeared almost like an inaugural ceremony; and in the more recent opening of the Kashi corridor in 2021. But to bring it within India’s Parliament is a new departure.

The establishment of a new republic of course will require its own creation myths. The discovery of a long-lost “sceptre” fits neatly into this need. What appears to have been a gift by a particular Tamil religious community to the first prime minister has been expertly reconfigured into a religious benediction on the “transfer of power” that was evilly hidden from the people by their earlier secular overlords. More such myth-making will be necessary for the new republic to create an ersatz history for its own justification and legitimacy.

The restoration of lost imperial or religious ceremony is vital for the desecularisation and demodernisation process. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey has expertly used Ottoman ritual; President Vladimir Putin’s inaugurations have distinctly czarist overtones, including a ceremonial mass by the Patriarch of Moscow; and just last week Xi Jinping welcomed central Asian leaders to Xi’an amid Tang Empire imagery. We should expect nothing else from the second Indian republic.

The writer is director, Centre for the Economy and Growth, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi