In the 2024 national elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has failed to win the majority mark of 272 seats, falling more than 30 seats short. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will now have to rely on a coalition government, unlike in 2019, when it had achieved a brute majority on its own. This electoral diminution has been seen as a defeat of “arrogance”: a party that was claiming to win more than 400 seats, with its leader proclaiming himself as a “messenger of God,” has been forced to face the realities of people’s grievances. While numbers earlier appeared as a solid decree that couldn’t be questioned, they have now broken down into a vortex of power centers that have to be negotiated with.
Idyllic Past
This democratic power of numbers, its ability to downsize self-assured leaders, is markedly different from the pessimistic fate that they have suffered at the hands of modernity’s critics. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, for instance, note that “number” – “the medium of mathematical formalism” – converts all unfamiliar realities into familiar values, thus subjugating existence to the imperative of total control. Human beings and nature become mere numbers in the instrumental calculus of modernity, which determines everything beforehand. In this way, “Enlightenment…regresses to mythology”.
Indian history has been framed in a similarly pessimistic way, with colonial modernity being regarded as a numerical rationality that disrupted pre-existing social bonds. Sudipta Kaviraj terms this as the transition from “fuzzy” to “enumerated” communities. In pre-colonial times, identity was fuzzy in two senses: first, there was no single, unified identity that exhausted the multiple layers of self; and second, an individual wasn’t aware of the statistical significance of their identity. After the entry of colonialism, identities were enumerated through censuses. As a result, they acquired a definite shape and numerical strength. Instead of functioning as one affiliation among many others, they became cohesive labels that could be deployed for collective action.
Dipesh Chakrabarty embeds the logic of enumeration within the larger history of “modern governmentality,” which he regards as the source of “ethnic bloodbath”. Due to colonial census, Indian subjects came to perceive the socio-economic progress of a community as a “measurable entity,” defined by the parameters of education, employment, professions etc. The state’s principle of distributive justice presupposes “simple, homogeneous, sharply delineated identities, the kinds that passports bear”. In order to access goods and services offered by the state and civil society, the multiple identities that inhabit the “everydayness” of Indian lives have to be abridged by the representational framework of modernity.
By opposing the porosity of social identities to the modern practice of enumeration, Chakrabarty erects an idyllic past that doesn’t actually exist. According to Sumit Guha, the social life of pre-colonial India was equally marked by the presence of enumerated identities. In the 17th and 18th centuries,
“rustic potentates (and their literati employees)” were found all over rural South Asia, functioning “as enumerators and record-keepers for higher authority.” Unlike the “non-aggressive proximity” that Kaviraj finds in pre-colonial society, Sumit points our attention towards organized social groups who were aware of their numerical strength and often sought state intervention against their enemies.
Thus, there was no social fuzziness that was later damaged by the calculative political rationality of the colonial state. On the contrary, pre-colonial society was marked by political antagonism, with a revenue-extracting state influencing and shaping local fissures. Colonialism didn’t suddenly invent sharp fissures out of the fuzzy reality of Indian society. Rather, it offered better communicative structures for the public expression of already existing social identities. Aggregation and massification reached a new level with the creation of the nation-state – a horizon that wasn’t present within the pre-colonial period.
However, the absence of a pre-colonial nation-state doesn’t necessitate the romanticization of pre-colonial society as a domain free from the political logic of measurement. This replicates the tradition of Western political theory, which sees modernity as the progressive politicization of a non-political society. Peter D. Thomas notes:
From Nietzsche’s chilling apprehension of the state as the “coldest of all cold monsters,” to Weber’s fear that the future belonged to soulless bureaucrats, to Habermas’s pleas against the “colonization” of the lifeworld, to Foucault’s reflections on the governmentalization of political power, such analyses have long fueled fears of the growing “totalitarian” dimensions of the modern state.
In order to break out of the norms of Western political theory, we need to conceive of pre-colonial Indian society not as a non-political domain of sociality but as a set of social relations that is already structured by political power. There is no domain of society where identities can be detached from the enumerative ascriptions of hegemonic projects. The fact of class struggle means that there is no space where identities can enjoy a free-flowing porosity; they are always-already cross-cut by the imperatives of political struggle. This has important strategic implications for anti-fascist politics.
Anti-Communal Strategy
For someone who regards colonial modernity as a form of political intrusion into the fuzzy sociality of Indian life, all the ills of communalism lie in the modern practice of enumeration. It is the very structure of modernity that is responsible for freezing porous social identities into rigid cultural differences. Communalism, accordingly, has to be combated through the rejection of modernity, through the search for indigenous forms of pluralism and toleration.
A modern perspective, on the other hand, knows that an anti-communal solution can’t be discovered in the heterogeneity of pre-colonial social life. Rather, it has to be painstakingly constructed through concrete struggle in the here and now. This is a vision of profane politics: there is no sacred domain of sociality that remains protected from the contaminating influence of politics. There is no idyllic history that can be used as a signpost for present-day battles. Battles have to be fought in the tenseness of the present and in anticipation of the future, rather than in the sterile security of the past.
The 2024 general elections show how communalism can be combated through a profane struggle within the modern present. In a situation where the Indian Right was merging the democratic principle of numerical majority with the authoritarian regime of Hindu majoritarianism, there was no easy way in which oases of pre-colonial tolerance could be invoked. The Hindutva majority had to be fought by constructing an alternative bloc of numbers, a people that is committed to the protection of the constitution and its belief in social justice. Instead of taking identities for granted, the Opposition undertook the labor of articulating a new political identity composed from the grievances of the poor.
Numbers aren’t just demonic tools in the hands of modern governmentality. Rather, they are ways in which people can associate with each other in malleable ways. Just as mathematics can perform countless complex operations on numbers, politics can form and deform numbers in multiple ways. Thus, the modern imaginary of numbers stands as a symbol of society’s constructability, its de-linking from any solid foundation. Numbers are abstract: they possess no fixed identity and are always amenable to a process of re-arrangement.
This amenability to change, or lack of rootedness in a concrete base, is a feature of modernity that enables it assume an insurgent orientation vis-à-vis authoritarian governments. When Modi’s claim to godliness was repudiated in the election, it was once again reiterated that numbers are not confined to an exclusive political operation. They know no god, and their sphere of operability is undefined. Politics consists of a similar mechanism: it is not bound by any stable history and only follows the universal antagonism of class struggle.
Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has published over 300 articles on Marxist theory, social movements, imperialism, educational philosophy and cultural criticism. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia.
