#162 The Closing Of The Indian Mind

India Policy Watch #1: What UP Tells Us<br/><br/>Insights on burning policy issues in India <br/><br/>&#8212; RSJ<br/><br/>If there was more proof needed that Indian politics has changed forever, it came this week with the results of five state assembly elections. BJP won the big prize, UP, with a comfortable margin while AAP swept Punjab marking its presence beyond Delhi in a spectacular fashion. The question is what is this thing that has changed? Is this the usual hyperbolic overreading of events that we have come to associate with the media these days? Or have things changed in a more fundamental manner in Indian democracy? I read through much of the analysis that appeared in the print media to understand this.&#160;<br/><br/>Something Has Ended<br/><br/>Three themes emerged.&#160;<br/><br/>One that focused on some kind of an end of the &#8216;old republic&#8217;. <a href="https://www.business-standard.com/article/elections/the-power-of-2-plus-1-seven-takeaways-from-assembly-elections-2022-122031001091_1.html">Shekhar Gupta writes of this in the Business Standard</a>:<br/><br/>&#8220;For 60 years since we became a republic in 1950, our politics was all structured around the Congress and its conception of a socialist, secular state. That epoch has faded fully. Now we are wading neck deep through a new, BJP/RSS/Hindu nationalism epoch. The preference of Hindu nationalism over Hindutva is consciously made. Religion has its oomph, but the pull of religiously defined new nationalism is enormously greater.<br/><br/>Today, if all of BJP&#8217;s rivals in Uttar Pradesh made a spectacle of walking to the Kashi Vishwanath temple across the new corridor&#8212;which I quite like&#8212;the secular republic has been redefined. Everybody has fallen in line. Today, we have a new nationalism, a new secularism and increasingly a new socialism redefined as efficient, non-leaky welfarism.&#8221;<br/><br/>The other theme was about some kind of an end to politics of identity, based on caste and other social formulations. As <a hre