Politics of Populism | Economic and Political Weekly – Economic and Political Weekly

Populism in very general terms could be defined in terms of a demagogue choosing to play to the gallery. Such a demagogue selectively tells people what they want to hear. In populism, the communication assumes a skewed form where a political leader needs to speak to the people who, in turn, need to be spoken to. The popular speech, for obvious reasons, is full of promises that ensure instant solutions to perennial problems that are fragmented into discrete realities and then are reduced to their everydayness. Thus, populism finds its purpose in the fragmentation of the concrete problems and their reduction to their everyday manageability. In fact, populism helps condense the long-term questions into everyday concerns that are easy to tackle by offering promises of quick solutions, such as money transfer.

A demagogue necessarily resorts to a form of authoritative speaking, which is done periodically through a top-down flow. Speaking to people is accompanied by an indirect suggestion that people should develop auto-reflection that would allow the demagogue to become an integral part of their popular consciousness. Thus, a political leader succeeds in entering the popular consciousness by constructing narratives that need not be evidentially validated but are to be endorsed by popular belief. Thus, a unilateral claim of a humble social background made by a leader, can make people believe in such claims and not ask for empirical, textual, documentary or testimonial evidence for its authenticity. The cognitive capacity of people is supposed to catch this gap but people fail to do so because popular appeal by the demagogue prevents them from developing an interrogatory disposition towards the self-deception that is internal to the empty promise.

Common people get temporarily impressed by what they see as promising even in imagination rather than see its objective possibility. Thus, some people saw in the`15 lakh promise a kind of possibility of this amount physically reaching their hands or their bank accounts. But what they saw in promise did not result in the experience of receiving the currency. It is in this context of the contradiction that exists between seeing a solution in promise and experiencing it in actuality that populism as an ideology seems to succeed.

Populism acquires emptiness as it tends to thrive on the virtual rather than the real. This empty nature was evident in the promise to distribute`15 lakh. It was meant for everyone to identify with such a promise. This promise was also empty in another sense in that those who offered such a promise also did not have any social group in mind and the promise was meant for every person in the country. It was an unmediated promise that could therefore include in its evasive logic anybody and everybody. The promise of`15 lakh underscores the point that there is going to be an unmitigated gap between seeing the money in promise and physically touching it.

Political parties are in the business of deploying empty forms of populism, and tend to prioritise peoples everyday concerns over their long-term questions. For example, the money transfer is perceived in terms of its everyday existential pressure. Thanks to the election season that short-circuits the long-term questions by reducing them to everyday problems that could be solved through the election promises.

Populism is about the immediate existential concerns which are of everyday nature or day-to-day problems. This focus on the everyday, however, tends to vanish transcendental questions such as what kind of society one wishes to leave behind for the future generation. This is an intergenerational justice question. This is in terms of democracy and environment. Why is that people do not raise this question and, on the contrary, are prepared to suffer from hardships that are involved, for example, in perennial patterns of distress migration that gets further intensified by lockdowns caused by the pandemic?

The demagogue, however, is constantly anxious about the possibility that people might go off when there is a need for raising the bogey of fear; that the nation is in danger or the religion is in danger. So the political leaders with right-wing orientation decide to use different issues and emotional appeals ranging from patriotism to religion in danger, to women being insecure, but not the Adivasis and Dalits being constantly in danger. Such political leaders find in fear an advantage because fear persists among the people. The demagogues from the ruling party are comfortable in populism as the opposition also operates within the same framework of populism. The ideology of populism in effect makes the question such as why me/we and how long? Why rape against Dalits? Why Adivasis are constantly vulnerable to the displacement caused by development? These questions which connect the thinking to both the past and the future suggest how long and why me or we. Populism seeks to confuse this very concrete/existential question by ignoring its transcendental urge to secure a better future for the young generation.

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Politics of Populism | Economic and Political Weekly - Economic and Political Weekly