Can Modi really end India’s caste-oriented identity politics?

It was one of the great speeches in the history of Indian democracy. Only a few hours after the results of the largest electoral exercise in the history of democracy confirmed the victory of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the general election of 2019, the returning prime minister stood on an open-air stage at the party headquarters in Delhi. In front of an adoring audience of party workers, Modi delivered in his inimitable style, with scores of ringing phrases, a trenchant analysis of his mandate and — in sharp contrast to his often-crass rhetoric during the campaign — an ambitious and large-hearted agenda for the five years ahead.

Partly, the speech was a reflection and consequence of the verdict itself — a landslide, with the party’s vote share rising beyond all expectations from 31 percent to 38 percent, making Modi the first non-Congress PM ever to be re-elected. Also, the dynamics of power usually mean that people are never more generous and graceful than in victory. But Modi’s words were original and insightful when the world would have happily accepted a more facile and rehearsed message. And it was timely, too. Rancorous though they may be, elections in a democracy also offer society, when all the dust of the campaign trail has settled, a road to a new vision of itself.

And, as history is inevitably always written by the victors, it follows that the winning party in an election — and a prime minister such as Modi, whose hold over the Indian imagination is rivaled in modern India only by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru — can use days such as last Thursday to shift society’s understanding of itself onto a whole new plane. It is part of a politician’s job, at moments like this, to be a storyteller. And Modi, in insisting that the election result was not just an endorsement of his policies but also a repudiation of strategies and mindsets that had long been thought to be politically normative in India, showed he understood that.

Most interesting and visionary, to my mind, was Modi’s assertion that henceforth — after nearly 70 years of election campaigns in which caste identity had been central to political strategy and canvassing — caste-oriented identity politics was dead, slain by the BJP’s ability to bring together voters from all walks of life. “Hereafter, there will be only two castes in India,” he declared. “Those two castes will consist of who are poor and those who are working to abolish poverty.”

It was a brilliant, game-changing thought. If at all there was anything disquieting about it, it was only that it was, in its stark positing of a binary, reminiscent of the rhetorical predilections of a man who has always dealt too insistently in the politics of polarization, of setting people and camps against each other. Here, for the first time, a dialectical relationship (and therefore a nascent solidarity) was set up between the two sides, reminiscent of the best visions of left-wing politics (as Modi himself noted).

But what basis did this rhetoric, stirring as it was, have in reality? Does his own record as a leader and prime minister suggest that it was an idea he would be able to actualize? Sadly, hardly so. If anything, the most revealing remark Modi made during his election campaign — a classic example of the old, cynical, narrow-minded style of reasoning in Indian politics — came during an election rally in the town of Wardha late in April, at a time when no one expected that the BJP would win so comprehensively.

There, he suddenly attacked Rahul Gandhi, his opponent from the Indian National Congress and direct rival for the prime minister’s post, for contesting the election from a constituency — Wayanad in the southern state of Kerala — “where the minority is in a majority.” Rahul Gandhi, Modi was saying in effect, was trying to pander to the religious minorities of India and stitch an electoral victory out of their support. By implication he, Modi, stood resolutely with the Hindu majority.

But, by doing so, Modi was himself dividing Indians into two “castes,” based on nothing other than the completely fortuitous circumstances of their birth. And this tactic shows how coercive even calls for national unity — such as the one made by Modi after his victory — can be if they contain within themselves the smug assumption the terms of such unity can be decided only by the ones making the appeal. This is the moral flaw at the core of the BJP’s conviction in its own generosity.

Finally, Modi’s materialist reworking and provocative simplification of the idea of caste, making it a metaphor for economic inequality, smartly left just enough room for the continuation, if required, of his own repeated rhetorical appeals to his own caste background in the past: The claim — very tendentious in my opinion — that his political opponents despise him only because he comes from a poor and lower-caste background.

Modi is a brilliant rhetorician and an often-inspired political thinker. But, as any student of ethics knows, the translation of words and phrases into deeds and actions is where good intentions — not to mention election-day highs — usually go awry. Very little in Modi’s career suggests that he will, in a crisis, be able to hold the cadre of his party, whose very basis of ideological solidarity and zeal is based on a valorization of Hindus as “real Indians” and a demonization of Indian minorities as faithless, to the benevolent nationalism he outlined last week.

But, yes, it was definitely one of the great speeches in the history of Indian democracy.

• Chandrahas Choudhury is a journalist and novelist based in New Delhi. Twitter: @Hashestweets