India, 2010–2016: The Political Unconscious of a Metropolitan Class
*On meritocracy, moral superiority, caste, the War on Terror, and the passage from neoliberal common sense to authoritarian populism.*
**The Indian liberal of the early 2010s believed in freedom, equality, constitutional democracy, and the importance of checking one's privilege. The difficulty was that freedom generally began at the entrance to a private institution, equality was frequently a matter of correct language, and privilege could be checked without being surrendered.**
The republic was in danger, although its most sophisticated citizens were still discussing the etiquette of disagreement.
To reconstruct the metropolitan Indian liberal of the early 2010s is to revisit an extraordinary historical interval: the years in which the promise of economic liberalisation began to curdle into political resentment; the language of rights acquired an unprecedented visibility; the urban middle class discovered the pleasures of public protest; and an authoritarian form of Hindu nationalism transformed itself from an apparently provincial ideological project into a compelling national proposition.
By 2016, the atmosphere had changed.
A student could be publicly transformed into an enemy of the nation. A Muslim could be exposed to vigilante violence over allegations involving cattle. A Dalit scholar's death could expose the brutal hierarchies of the university. Dissent could be made to look like treason, while the government presented drastic executive intervention as evidence of national resolve.
How did this happen?
It is tempting to suggest that Indian liberalism suddenly became fascism. This would be dramatically satisfying and historically inadequate.
Hindu nationalism possessed a long organisational history independent of metropolitan liberalism, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, and decades of political mobilisation, communal conflict, and ideological development. Its consolidation cannot be explained as the unintended product of a few self-satisfied liberals.
Nor was India a fully established fascist state by 2016. Electoral competition and constitutional institutions remained, even as serious authoritarian and majoritarian tendencies became increasingly evident. Political scientists have subsequently described this trajectory through concepts including democratic backsliding, authoritarian populism, and ethnic democracy. Whether *fascism* is the most precise designation requires an argument about institutions, ideology, violence, and mass mobilisation.
The more interesting question is how particular elements of Indian liberal common sense became vulnerable to appropriation by authoritarian politics.
This is the subject of the present essay.
Its concern is not liberalism as an abstract philosophical doctrine, nor the many liberals who resisted authoritarianism. It is a specific historical formation: the post-liberalisation, metropolitan, often anglophone and institutionally advantaged Indian middle class, whose political culture combined meritocracy, consumer sovereignty, selective cosmopolitanism, and a remarkably flexible understanding of structural injustice.
The argument is that **this formation helped normalise a political sensibility in which democracy could be imagined as efficient administration, citizenship as cultural competence, justice as moral purification, and dissent as a problem of public disorder.**
Hindu-nationalist populism did not simply invent these desires.
It offered them a new political object.
## I. The historical conditions of the liberal personality
We must begin not in 2014, but in 1991.
Economic liberalisation transformed more than India's markets. It altered the symbolic organisation of social life.
The language of opportunity increasingly displaced the language of redistribution. The successful individual became the privileged protagonist of national development. Education, consumption, mobility, professional ambition, and access to global capital offered new ways of imagining citizenship.
The old developmental state had promised collective transformation, however imperfectly. The new aspirational economy increasingly promised individual advancement.
India would become modern because Indians would become competitive.
The metropolitan middle class occupied an especially consequential position in this imaginary.
Its members did not necessarily possess enormous wealth, but they often possessed access to institutional networks, professional credentials, English-language education, and the social confidence required to move through a newly globalised economy.
Their advantages could be experienced as accomplishments rather than inheritances.
Merit became the moral language through which class mobility and class reproduction could appear indistinguishable.
To invoke Fredric Jameson, this was not merely an ideology attached to economic change. It was part of the *cultural logic* of a particular capitalist transformation.
The economic order required corresponding structures of feeling.
A society reorganised around competition needed subjects who understood competition as freedom.
A society in which education became an increasingly important route to mobility needed subjects who could understand educational distinction as moral achievement.
And a society whose public imagination was increasingly organised through consumption needed subjects who could experience the market as the natural environment of democratic choice.
The metropolitan Indian liberal emerged from this configuration.
They might oppose religious fundamentalism, defend freedom of expression, appreciate independent cinema, and possess impeccable views on social tolerance.
They might also regard market competition as an essentially neutral means of distributing opportunity.
The contradiction was rarely experienced as a contradiction.
One could support equality while remaining passionately attached to the institutions through which advantage was reproduced.
One could oppose caste discrimination while treating upper-caste access to education and professional networks as evidence of merit.
One could defend individual freedom while assuming that the successful individual was the most credible representative of the nation.
The liberal subject was, in this sense, an achievement of historical amnesia.
They understood themselves as self-made because the conditions of their making had disappeared from view.
## II. Bangalore and the English-speaking republic
Bangalore offers an especially revealing setting for this transformation.
The city's technological economy and educational institutions helped establish English-language fluency as a marker of professional legitimacy and social mobility.
As Sazana Jayadeva's ethnographic research would subsequently demonstrate, English proficiency in Bangalore functioned not simply as a practical skill but as an important mechanism in the production and performance of middle-class status.
Language was becoming a kind of social passport.
Yet the significance of English exceeded the labour market.
It supplied a vocabulary of cultural distinction.
The competent metropolitan citizen could demonstrate sophistication through accent, taste, political references, educational pedigree, and familiarity with international moral conventions.
The result was a peculiar provincial cosmopolitanism.
Its practitioners could be intimately acquainted with the cultural politics of American universities while remaining comparatively unfamiliar with the social histories of the communities surrounding them.
They could recognise the language of privilege while possessing a limited account of how privilege was institutionally reproduced in India.
They could condemn racism in distant societies while treating caste as an unfortunate local prejudice rather than a foundational organisation of social relations.
None of this was universal. Bangalore also contained long traditions of labour politics, Dalit organisation, feminist activism, secular opposition, and radical intellectual work.
But within certain privileged milieus, liberalism was increasingly a matter of cultural competence.
To be liberal was to know how to appear liberal.
One adopted the correct vocabulary, consumed the correct cultural products, and expressed the appropriate disgust toward visibly reactionary forms of belief.
The problem was not that these expressions were necessarily insincere.
The problem was that sincerity had become an inadequate measure of political consequence.
An individual could possess sincerely egalitarian convictions while remaining comfortably located within an unequal social order.
The task of liberalism became the moral management of this contradiction.
In a remarkable development, the ability to acknowledge privilege could itself become a form of privilege.
The subject acquired distinction through their sophisticated denunciation of distinction.
## III. The War on Terror and the limits of secular sympathy
The period cannot be understood without the global political environment created after September 11, 2001.
The War on Terror reorganised the relationship between religion, state power, and acceptable political subjectivity across much of the world.
Muslim identity became increasingly entangled with questions of security, loyalty, radicalisation, surveillance, and national belonging.
India possessed its own longer history of communal politics, counterinsurgency, and anti-Muslim prejudice. The global War on Terror did not create these conditions. But it supplied an international language through which they could be interpreted and justified.
The secular liberal often occupied an ambiguous position in this arrangement.
They could reject overt Islamophobia while accepting the broader assumption that Muslim political and religious life presented a special problem requiring supervision.
The Muslim subject became intelligible through a limited number of categories: the moderate, the fundamentalist, the victim, the reformer, the nationalist, the suspect.
The ex-Muslim or apostate faced a further contradiction.
Criticism of religious authoritarianism could become welcome only when it confirmed an already established story about Muslim backwardness.
Conversely, criticism of state surveillance or anti-Muslim nationalism could become uncomfortable when it complicated the liberal's preferred distinction between enlightened secularism and religious extremism.
The demand was not simply that one speak.
It was that one occupy an intelligible position within an existing moral drama.
Talal Asad's work on secularism is particularly useful here. Secular power does not simply withdraw from religion. It helps define which forms of religion are acceptable, what counts as religious freedom, and how religion is permitted to enter public life.
The Indian liberal could thus defend religious liberty while retaining the authority to distinguish the respectable religious subject from the dangerous one.
Meanwhile, Kashmir, counterinsurgency, and the treatment of religious minorities exposed the limits of a constitutional imagination that frequently treated national security as an exception to ordinary political principles.
The problem was not necessarily conscious hypocrisy.
It was a hierarchy of political sympathies.
Certain injuries appeared as unmistakable violations of individual liberty. Others could be assimilated into the unfortunate necessities of preserving the nation.
This distinction would become especially consequential as Hindu-nationalist politics expanded the category of the suspicious citizen.
The national security exception, once normalised, was available for wider deployment.
## IV. 2011: The middle class discovers the people
The anti-corruption movement of 2011 marked a decisive transformation in urban political culture.
Anna Hazare's mobilisation around the demand for a strong Lokpal attracted widespread attention and significant participation from urban middle-class professionals and young people.
The grievances concerning corruption were real. Public anger at political scandals was neither invented nor inherently authoritarian.
But the movement's political language contained a revealing contradiction.
It frequently presented corruption as a moral contamination of politics rather than as a problem requiring analysis of the relationships between state power, capital, patronage, and institutional accountability.
The political class appeared as a corrupt body.
Civil society appeared as the repository of national virtue.
The people appeared as a morally unified public demanding purification.
In his 2012 essay *The Movement against Politics*, Partha Chatterjee identified the distinctive antipolitical character of the Anna Hazare mobilisation: its condemnation of the political class and its scepticism toward ordinary representative procedures.
Khandekar and Reddy subsequently analysed the movement as an expression of middle-class practices through which politics and citizenship could be imagined in the language of consumption and trustworthy brands.
The significance of these observations is considerable.
The movement did not simply demand cleaner institutions.
In some of its most visible expressions, it suggested that politics itself was a dirty activity from which the nation needed deliverance.
The ideal citizen was no longer necessarily the participant in a difficult democratic struggle.
They were the aggrieved consumer of defective governance.
The state had failed to deliver.
The politicians were dishonest.
The nation required competent management.
One can already detect the emerging fantasy of the administrator who stands above politics.
The historical irony is that a movement animated partly by liberal and democratic dissatisfaction could reinforce a suspicion of democratic mediation itself.
Negotiation appeared compromised.
Institutional complexity appeared evasive.
The performance of incorruptible moral authority appeared more persuasive than the slow and often frustrating procedures of representation.
This was not yet Hindu-nationalist politics.
The anti-corruption movement contained divergent tendencies, some of which helped produce the Aam Aadmi Party and other forms of electoral experimentation.
But its wider cultural consequences included the popularisation of a powerful anti-establishment vocabulary.
The people were virtuous.
The political system was rotten.
What the nation needed was a cleansing.
The meaning of cleansing was not yet settled.
## V. 2012: The politics of outrage
The mass protests following the December 2012 gang rape and subsequent death of Jyoti Singh in Delhi demonstrated something quite different: the capacity of popular mobilisation to force a national reckoning with sexual violence.
The movement contributed to important legal reforms, including the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013.
It would be intellectually dishonest to reduce this mobilisation to a spectacle of middle-class outrage.
Feminist activists, legal scholars, students, and civil society organisations made substantial interventions, and the reforms had consequences beyond public performance.
Yet the episode also revealed tensions within the developing culture of televised and digitally mediated protest.
The demand for justice could become entangled with demands for exceptional punishment, spectacular state action, and the restoration of national honour.
A politics of women's autonomy could coexist with a punitive imagination that treated the state primarily as an instrument for disciplining deviance.
This tension was not peculiar to India.
It illustrates a more general danger: the demand for protection can become compatible with the expansion of coercive power when protection is separated from a wider account of institutional inequality.
The feminist demand for bodily autonomy and the authoritarian demand for punishment may converge on particular outcomes while remaining profoundly different political projects.
The distinction requires constant attention.
A society does not become more emancipated merely because it becomes more punitive.
And a liberalism that identifies justice principally with the spectacular punishment of wrongdoing may find itself poorly equipped to resist the expansion of punitive authority into other domains.
## VI. The return of the nation
By 2013, the political crisis of the Congress-led order had become difficult to separate from a crisis of legitimacy.
Corruption scandals, anxieties about economic performance, and dissatisfaction with governance had weakened the authority of the incumbent coalition.
Meanwhile, Hindu nationalism possessed something that metropolitan anti-politics lacked: an extensive political and organisational infrastructure.
The BJP and the wider Sangh Parivar had developed through decades of ideological work, electoral organisation, cultural mobilisation, and institutional activity.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 had already demonstrated the force and consequences of majoritarian mobilisation.
The 2013 communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, which killed more than sixty people and displaced tens of thousands, was another indication that the politics of religious polarisation remained deeply consequential.
Thus the movement toward authoritarian majoritarianism was not simply the result of a sudden eruption of popular resentment.
It was the conjunction of a long-organised ideological formation with a crisis in the existing political order.
Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony is useful here.
Political power is not maintained through coercion alone. It also depends upon organising consent, creating common sense, and making a particular conception of the social order appear broadly desirable.
The crisis of the Congress-led establishment created an opening in which the language of efficiency, development, national renewal, and moral purification could be articulated into a new political formation.
The BJP did not need to persuade every voter to become an ideological Hindu nationalist.
Its electoral appeal could also draw upon economic aspirations, anger at corruption, dissatisfaction with established parties, and the promise of decisive leadership.
These different desires did not have to be identical.
They had to become politically compatible.
This is the logic of hegemony.
And it is also the point at which the liberal's familiar vocabulary could begin to change its political function.
Merit became decisiveness.
Efficiency became authority.
National progress became national restoration.
The critique of corruption became the promise of an incorruptible leader.
The opposition between the virtuous people and the compromised establishment acquired a more explicitly nationalist form.
The vocabulary had not simply been replaced.
It had been reorganised.
## VII. 2014: The authoritarian solution to liberal dissatisfaction
In the 2014 general election, the BJP won 282 Lok Sabha seats, securing a single-party majority. Its vote share was approximately 31 percent.
The result was decisive in parliamentary terms, but it did not represent a unanimous ideological conversion of the Indian electorate.
The election brought together varied political constituencies and aspirations.
For some supporters, the promise was development.
For others, it was administrative competence.
For others, it was political change after the perceived failures of the Congress-led government.
For committed Hindu nationalists, the election also offered the possibility of translating a long-standing ideological project into national state power.
These motives should not be collapsed into one another.
Nevertheless, their convergence produced an important historical transformation.
The figure of the strong leader could resolve, at least symbolically, several anxieties generated by neoliberal democracy.
Economic uncertainty required confidence.
Political corruption required purification.
Institutional complexity required decisiveness.
National humiliation required restoration.
The leader appeared as the point at which these different demands could be unified.
Here Stuart Hall's concept of *authoritarian populism* becomes especially illuminating.
Writing about Thatcherism, Hall analysed how a political project could combine market-oriented economic transformation with moral traditionalism, nationalism, popular resentment, and demands for strong authority.
The analogy is not exact. India possesses a different history of caste, religion, colonialism, and political organisation.
But the theoretical insight travels.
Neoliberalism does not necessarily produce a tolerant, individualistic political culture.
Market competition can coexist with punitive moralism, national identification, and authoritarian state power.
Indeed, the insecurity produced by competitive social relations may make fantasies of order particularly attractive.
The liberal economic subject and the authoritarian national subject need not be enemies.
They may be historically complementary.
The successful professional wants efficient markets.
The nationalist wants a powerful country.
The moral populist wants corrupt elites punished.
The authoritarian promises all three.
## VIII. The mistake of confusing anti-elitism with emancipation
The developing Hindu-nationalist public sphere made powerful use of hostility toward established cultural elites.
The English-speaking liberal could be portrayed as deracinated, hypocritical, alienated from ordinary Indians, and contemptuous of indigenous culture.
These accusations sometimes touched real contradictions.
Metropolitan liberal culture could be deeply exclusionary.
Its access to institutions, media, and education was unequally distributed.
Its universalism could conceal caste and class advantage.
Its cosmopolitanism could operate as a form of distinction.
But the exposure of these contradictions did not automatically produce an emancipatory politics.
A movement may accurately identify cultural elitism while consolidating other forms of domination.
The humiliation of an English-speaking liberal does not redistribute land.
The denunciation of Westernised intellectuals does not abolish caste.
The exposure of secular hypocrisy does not guarantee religious equality.
The rejection of metropolitan privilege does not necessarily weaken the power of economic elites.
This is where the politics of resentment must be distinguished from the politics of redistribution.
The spectacle of the elite being brought down can function as a substitute for the transformation of unequal relations.
Indeed, the cultural elite may be selected as an enemy precisely because its public humiliation is easier to stage than a confrontation with entrenched ownership or institutional power.
The liberal's visible superiority becomes the object of popular resentment.
The underlying hierarchy can survive in a different ideological form.
This is not a contradiction from the standpoint of authoritarian populism.
It is part of its political effectiveness.
## IX. 2015: The majoritarian claim to ordinary life
By 2015, violence against religious minorities and the increasingly aggressive policing of cultural and political expression had become prominent subjects of public controversy.
Human Rights Watch documented killings of Muslim men by Hindu vigilantes in incidents involving allegations about cattle, as well as attacks on churches and concerns about inadequate accountability.
The killing of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri became emblematic of the danger that accusations concerning beef could pose to Muslim citizens.
Writers and intellectuals returned literary awards in protest against intolerance and attacks on dissent.
These developments cannot be reduced to the moral failings of metropolitan liberals.
They concerned organised political actors, vigilante violence, state responses, institutional behaviour, and the wider climate of majoritarian mobilisation.
But they revealed the limitations of a political culture that had frequently treated secularism as a matter of personal tolerance rather than as a fragile institutional arrangement requiring active defence.
The distinction is essential.
Tolerance imagines a majority graciously permitting difference.
Equal citizenship denies that the majority possesses the authority to grant or withdraw the basic standing of minorities.
The liberal language of tolerance can remain compatible with hierarchy because it leaves the dominant subject in the position of permission-giver.
The minority is accepted conditionally.
They must be sufficiently moderate, respectable, assimilable, grateful, or reassuring.
Majoritarian nationalism radicalises this asymmetry.
The minority is no longer merely asked to be tolerable.
They may be required to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation itself.
The passage from tolerance to suspicion is not inevitable, but both can operate within a framework in which majority belonging is treated as the unquestioned norm.
The liberal's failure, where it occurred, was not that they were too tolerant.
It was that tolerance had sometimes substituted for a stronger conception of equal political membership.
## X. 2016: The manufacture of the anti-national
By 2016, the university had become one of the central theatres in which the relationship between dissent and national loyalty was publicly contested.
The death of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in January exposed caste-related grievances within higher education and triggered widespread protests.
In February, Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on sedition charges following allegations concerning slogans at a campus event. He denied the relevant accusations. The National Human Rights Commission raised concerns about the police response and allegations of intimidation.
The transformation was historically revealing.
The university, conventionally celebrated by liberals as an institution of independent thought, could be presented as a site of national betrayal.
Intellectual disagreement became a question of loyalty.
The dissenting student became a suspicious political subject.
The accusation of being anti-national performed a function analogous to, but considerably more coercive than, the popular accusation of privilege.
Both made a person's social legitimacy available for public judgement.
But the comparison has strict limits.
A verbal accusation of privilege and the use of state sedition powers are not equivalent forms of coercion.
The important connection lies in the broader political movement from argument toward moral classification.
The person is no longer simply wrong.
They are assigned a compromised identity.
Their right to speak becomes entangled with their entitlement to belong.
The public is invited to witness not merely a dispute but a trial of legitimacy.
The difference is that the authoritarian state may possess the means to transform reputational suspicion into legal jeopardy.
The politics of public humiliation becomes dangerous when fused with institutional and coercive power.
That same year, vigilante violence against Dalits and Muslims, including the public assault of Dalit men in Una, exposed the coercive dimensions of moralised social hierarchy. The unrest in Kashmir and the use of pellet guns further demonstrated the grave consequences of treating political dissent primarily through the framework of security.
The nation was increasingly represented as a moral body requiring protection against enemies within.
The category of the enemy could encompass political opponents, students, minority citizens, and critics of state conduct.
This is one of the central features that invites comparison with fascistic political tendencies: a conception of national unity in which dissent is imagined less as a legitimate condition of democracy than as a threat to the nation's essential identity.
Yet the precise institutional designation still matters. Authoritarian nationalism, majoritarianism, democratic erosion, and fascism overlap without being identical.
By 2016, the evidence strongly supported concern about authoritarian and majoritarian consolidation. Whether the stronger term *fascism* applied to the entire political order remained a matter of theoretical dispute.
## XI. Demonetisation: The economics of moral purification
On November 8, 2016, the government announced the withdrawal of the legal-tender status of existing ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes.
The stated objectives included action against black money, counterfeit currency, and financing of terrorism.
The policy's economic effects have been extensively debated, and a proper assessment must distinguish the government's stated purposes, the actual consequences, and the competing evaluations of those consequences.
But as a cultural event, demonetisation possessed an extraordinary symbolic structure.
The nation was invited to participate in a drastic act of economic purification.
Illicit wealth would be confronted.
Corruption would be punished.
The executive would demonstrate resolve.
The experience of disruption could be incorporated into a larger narrative of sacrifice for national renewal.
Here the earlier anti-corruption imaginary returned in a transformed political form.
The problem was again moral contamination.
The solution was again purification.
But the agent of purification was now the commanding executive state.
The transition is theoretically important.
The urban middle class's frustration with corrupt governance had helped popularise a desire for clean and decisive administration.
The authoritarian imagination could translate that desire into confidence in extraordinary executive action.
The moral economy of sacrifice supplied an additional source of legitimacy.
If citizens endured hardship, the hardship could be interpreted as evidence of their commitment to the nation.
The experience of sacrifice became politically meaningful independently of the policy's eventual measurable success.
This is not proof that everyone supported demonetisation for the same reasons, or that supporters were uniformly authoritarian.
It is an interpretation of the policy's symbolic appeal.
The anti-corruption narrative had moved from protest against the state to an extraordinary act performed by the state.
The fantasy of purification had acquired an executive.
## XII. Fredric Jameson and the political unconscious of the Indian liberal
We can now formulate the larger argument.
Jameson's work insists that cultural forms must be understood as responses to historical contradictions.
The metropolitan Indian liberal of the early 2010s inhabited a contradiction between the universal promises of democracy and the particular advantages of a highly stratified capitalist society.
They could recognise oppression but often lacked a political programme capable of transforming its material reproduction.
They could condemn corruption but sometimes imagined political salvation as the replacement of bad administrators by good ones.
They could defend secularism but remain uncertain about the status of minority political agency when it challenged national security or established cultural expectations.
They could embrace individual freedom while treating the competitive marketplace as the natural horizon of social life.
These contradictions did not make authoritarian nationalism inevitable.
But they created ideological vulnerabilities.
The historical question is how an organised nationalist movement could connect itself to aspirations that were not originally or exclusively nationalist.
Development could be articulated with national restoration.
Merit could be articulated with hierarchy.
Anti-corruption could be articulated with executive authority.
The critique of cultural elites could be articulated with majoritarian resentment.
National security could be articulated with suspicion of minorities and dissenters.
The result was not the simple destruction of liberal common sense.
It was the selective reorganisation of elements already present within it.
This is why the story cannot be told as a morality play in which enlightened liberals were suddenly overwhelmed by irrational masses.
Such a narrative would reproduce the very elitism that requires examination.
Nor can liberal complicity be inflated into sole causal responsibility. Hindu nationalism's long-standing institutions, historical grievances, organised political work, and independent sources of support were indispensable to its rise.
The more precise claim is that **some influential forms of neoliberal and metropolitan common sense proved compatible with authoritarian aspirations, and sometimes helped make those aspirations appear reasonable.**
The liberal did not necessarily become a fascist.
But the political world in which the liberal had learned to recognise competence, morality, progress, and national development could make the authoritarian proposition unexpectedly familiar.
## XIII. Why the category of fascism matters
The word *fascism* cannot be used simply as a synonym for cruelty, prejudice, or right-wing politics.
Historical fascism involved forms of ultranationalism, mass mobilisation, political myth, organised violence, leader-centred authority, and attempts to subordinate political pluralism to an allegedly unified national destiny.
Scholars disagree about how far contemporary Hindu nationalism reproduces this structure and which comparisons with European fascism are analytically illuminating.
Christophe Jaffrelot's concept of *ethnic democracy*, for example, directs attention toward a political order in which elections continue but the dominant ethnoreligious community increasingly defines the legitimate nation.
The language of democratic backsliding describes the erosion of civil liberties, institutional constraints, and pluralist protections without necessarily asserting that competitive democracy has disappeared.
Stuart Hall's authoritarian populism identifies the combination of popular consent, nationalism, moral order, and coercive authority.
These concepts illuminate different dimensions of the same historical problem.
The attraction of fascism as a category is that it asks whether national regeneration, the myth of a threatened collective identity, political violence, and the production of internal enemies are becoming central organising principles of political life.
The danger is that using the term without historical specificity can obscure the actual mechanisms by which authoritarianism develops.
For India between 2010 and 2016, the most defensible account is one of the consolidation of Hindu-nationalist majoritarianism accompanied by increasingly visible authoritarian tendencies.
The period contained developments that invited comparisons with fascistic practices, but it was not a single moment at which one completed political system suddenly became another.
The transformation was uneven.
It was contested.
And it encountered substantial resistance from civil liberties organisations, Dalit movements, feminist groups, students, writers, journalists, and other political actors.
That resistance forms part of the history too.
## XIV. The liberal discovers the consequences of his own vocabulary
The most bitter historical irony concerns the fate of liberal self-understanding.
The metropolitan liberal had often imagined political legitimacy through the language of competence, merit, rationality, and moral sophistication.
But these were never politically innocent terms.
Competence can become a justification for excluding the supposedly incapable.
Merit can conceal inherited advantage.
Rationality can become a weapon for dismissing forms of experience that do not conform to dominant cultural expectations.
Moral sophistication can become an instrument of social distinction.
And the demand that politics be purified of corruption can become a desire to escape the compromises of democracy itself.
Authoritarian populism could exploit these contradictions while directing resentment against the liberal subject who embodied them.
The liberal became the symbol of an allegedly alienated establishment.
Their language was mocked.
Their cultural distinction became evidence of disloyalty.
Their universalism was exposed as particularism.
But the humiliation of the liberal was not necessarily the emancipation of those whom liberalism had excluded.
It could simply mark the arrival of another authority claiming the right to define the nation.
The problem of domination had not disappeared.
Its moral vocabulary had changed.
What had once been condemned as backwardness could now be celebrated as authenticity.
What had once been praised as cosmopolitanism could now be condemned as foreignness.
The hierarchy of recognition had been reorganised.
Its underlying violence had not necessarily diminished.
## XV. The historical error of the enlightened minority
A final point is essential.
The metropolitan liberal often understood reactionary politics as a failure of education.
The masses had been deceived.
They lacked critical thinking.
They were insufficiently exposed to enlightened cultural values.
This explanation was comforting because it preserved the liberal's own social authority.
If political catastrophe resulted from ignorance, then the educated subject remained the natural custodian of political reason.
But the rise of authoritarian nationalism cannot be explained by popular ignorance alone.
It requires analysis of organisation, economic conditions, institutional power, political identity, historical grievances, media systems, caste relations, and the distribution of resources.
The educated are not immune to authoritarian desires.
Indeed, professional competence and authoritarian politics can coexist remarkably well.
An individual can possess advanced technical skills while endorsing highly exclusionary conceptions of citizenship.
A sophisticated cultural vocabulary does not guarantee democratic commitments.
And familiarity with Western political theory does not automatically produce an adequate understanding of Indian social relations.
The liberal faith in education as a sufficient defence against reaction was therefore doubly limited.
It exaggerated the political virtues of educational distinction.
And it underestimated the capacity of authoritarianism to present itself as modern, efficient, technologically advanced, and economically aspirational.
The fascistic imagination does not always announce itself through an opposition to modernity.
It can promise a more magnificent modernity.
It can arrive with a development plan.
## Conclusion: The dinner party is over
By the end of 2016, the optimism of the early post-liberalisation republic had encountered a profound political contradiction.
The promise of individual advancement had not abolished inherited hierarchy.
The expansion of consumer choice had not guaranteed political equality.
The proliferation of rights-based language had not rendered minority citizenship secure.
The public denunciation of corruption had not established a shared commitment to democratic mediation.
And the increasing cultural visibility of liberal values had not prevented the consolidation of a political movement whose vision of the nation challenged important elements of constitutional pluralism.
The metropolitan liberal was not the sole author of this development.
But neither could the liberal claim to have inhabited a world entirely separate from it.
The historical significance of the period lies in the compatibility of political desires that liberal self-description had encouraged people to imagine as opposites.
The desire for individual freedom could coexist with indifference to structural inequality.
The desire for efficient administration could coexist with impatience toward democratic procedure.
The desire to expose privilege could coexist with the preservation of inherited advantage.
The desire for national progress could coexist with majoritarian exclusion.
And the desire to escape corrupt politics could become the desire for a leader powerful enough to rise above politics.
This was not simply the betrayal of liberalism by an external enemy.
It was also a crisis in the historical forms through which liberalism had become common sense.
If the period teaches us anything, it is that authoritarianism does not require a society to abandon all its liberal aspirations.
It can appropriate some of them.
It can promise development, competence, security, prosperity, dignity, and freedom from a corrupt establishment.
It can translate political frustration into the desire for national regeneration.
It can make domination appear as deliverance.
The task of historical criticism is therefore not to console the liberal with the knowledge that they were always on the correct side.
It is to identify the arrangements of power that made their confidence possible, and the political forces capable of reorganising that confidence into something else.
The Indian liberal of the early 2010s believed the future belonged to the educated, the cosmopolitan, the meritorious, and the enlightened.
By 2016, they were discovering that the nation could be mobilised against every one of those descriptions.
Yet the deepest irony remained.
**The struggle had changed the identity of the person entitled to feel superior. It had not resolved the question of who owned the building.**
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## Sources and theoretical genealogy
**Historical and empirical sources**
- Partha Chatterjee, [“The Movement against Politics”](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.81.2012.0117), *Cultural Critique* 81 (2012).
- A. D. Khandekar and D. S. Reddy, [“An Indian Summer: Corruption, Class, and the Lokpal Protests”](https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540513498614), *Journal of Consumer Culture* (2015).
- Sazana Jayadeva, [“Below English Line”](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10081248/), *Modern Asian Studies* (2018), based on fieldwork in Bangalore.
- Ornit Shani, [*Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/communalism-caste-and-hindu-nationalism/), on the long history of communal violence and caste politics in Gujarat.
- Christophe Jaffrelot, *The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India* (1996), *Modi's India* (2021), and [*Gujarat Under Modi*](https://academic.oup.com/book/58884) (2024).
- Human Rights Watch, [World Report 2014: India](https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/india), [World Report 2016: India](https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/india), and [World Report 2017: India](https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/india).
- [National Human Rights Commission, notice concerning police action at JNU](https://nhrc.nic.in/media/press-release/nhrc-notice-to-the-union-home-secretary-chief-secretary-delhi-police-commissioner-registrar-jawahar-lal-nehru-university-over-police-action-in-jnu), February 17, 2016.
- [Election Commission of India](https://www.eci.gov.in/) and [Inter-Parliamentary Union: 2014 election results](https://data.ipu.org/parliament/IN/IN-LC01/election/IN-LC01-E20140407/).
- [Government of India announcement on demonetisation](https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=48&relid=153406), November 8, 2016.
**Principal theoretical references**
- Karl Marx, *Capital*, Volume I (1867).
- Antonio Gramsci, *Selections from the Prison Notebooks* (1971 edition).
- Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (1944/1947).
- Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970).
- Fredric Jameson, *The Political Unconscious* (1981).
- Fredric Jameson, *Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism* (1991).
- Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show” (1979) and “Authoritarian Populism: A Reply” (1985).
- B. R. Ambedkar, *Annihilation of Caste* (1936).
- Talal Asad, *Formations of the Secular* (2003).
- Nancy Fraser, *Justice Interruptus* (1997).
- Ernesto Laclau, *On Populist Reason* (2005).
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