Interview: From ‘vikas’ to ‘vishwas’, what the centralisation of politics means for India

In 2019, despite widespread economic distress and the failure of flagship policy moves like demonetisation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party were re-elected to power, with a bigger victory in the parliamentary elections than their 2014 success.

In attempting to understand the elements of this outcome, Neelanjan Sircar, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar, pitched the idea of a “politics of vishwas (belief),” which hinges heavily on voters’ trust in the persona of Modi, assiduously built by his party, rather than a political model that depended more on development outcomes.

The BJP’s 2024 campaign speaks directly to this idea, not least because the party’s main pitch is “Modi ki Guarantee”– a set of promises that the prime minister personally makes to prospective voters.

In the seventh interview of the CASI Election Conversations 2024, CASI Consulting Editor Rohan Venkat speaks to Neelanjan Sircar about his research into the roots of this “vishwas” politics, its antecedents in regional party structures emerging in the 1990s, and why you cannot study political centralisation without engaging with the concentration of economic power.

Could you summarise the “Politics of Vishwas” paper from 2020?

The core intervention that I was trying to make in that paper is that, much like studies that we’ve seen in the West, a large part of the scholarly work on Indian electoral politics and Indian party politics, starts with the issue first. Even if we don’t believe that voters are usually ideological, a lot of the analysis would be, “do voters care about economic issues this time? Do they care about the other issues? Do they care about inflation, unemployment?” And what I wanted to do was to bring the focus back to how political preferences and political ideas are created.

There’s a large literature in political behaviour about how leaders brand themselves, and how leaders are able to cultivate narratives and political preferences from the population. I use that literature and try to apply it within the Indian context to talk about the politics of vishwas (trust/belief).

The basic set of principles that I’m trying to follow is to make a distinction between the politics of vishwas, and the politics of vikas (development). And the way to think about that is that there are a set of issues upon which I judge a politician. If the politician does well, I vote for the politician again. If the politician does poorly, I vote a person out. That is the standard democratic accountability model, the politics of vikas.

The politics of vishwas is one in which the entire political system is geared toward building trust, vishwas, in the political leader at the top. That allows and obliges the political leader to frame political opinions for the voter. The reason why that matters is that the voter or the citizen has already decided which political actor he or she will support, and then finds the reasons to support that person.

Unlike the politics of vikas where there were a set of issues upon which politicians and parties were being judged, or some sort of accountability was being decided upon, in the politics of vishwas, the politician has already been decided upon, and the issue comes later.

We’ve gone into more detail on this specific argument elsewhere, but you argue this was broadly a departure from the way politics was being understood at the time on a number of counts. One, even the democratic accountability model was not necessarily standard in India, where other ideas of simply descriptive representation, ie, voting your caste, were common. But this was a step away from both of those approaches to understanding why and how people vote.

We understand, and we’ve seen across many state elections and national elections, that the leader matters. The branding of the leader matters. But we didn’t really have a set of political theories to grab from, to understand, a) what that model might be, and b) how that model can be distinguished from the standard caste or ethnic voting model, or economic accountability models.

I want to get a sense of the afterlife of this paper. How has your thinking on this evolved?

The last time we spoke at length about vishwas, at that point I was starting on a project in which I wanted to understand how the politics of vishwas emerged within the Indian context.

In a nutshell, the argument I’ve been interested in is that as the Congress party declined in strength in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of small regional actors that were essentially the vehicles for particular political actors or political families, rose in the states. These were highly centralised parties with very low intra-party democracy. Many of them are the precursor to the kind of politics of vishwas that we see today. Many of the things that we associate with the Modi-led government at the Centre today in terms of control of state institutions, media, relationship with large businesses, and of course, the personal branding, are things that we had seen in a number of the state elections and state parties and political leaders from the 1990s onward.

At times, we forget that Modi also cut his teeth as a very popular chief minister in the state of Gujarat. He picked up many of these tools as a chief minister. And he is, in many ways, the first person who really built his credentials as a chief minister and then became a prime minister. Where a lot of my thinking has gone is the evolution of the kind of politics that we see in India today. It did not emerge out of nowhere, or out of just some social anxieties, but it’s actually something that had been bubbling up for a long time, and something that we’ve been seeing at the state level from the 1990s onward. It has just simply been scaled up to national politics by a very successful chief minister, Narendra Modi, and a person that he has been associated with for a long time, Amit Shah, who is now the home minister in India.

Give us a few examples of what you mean in terms of these precursors before Modi as chief minister?

Leaders that come to mind: Mamata Banerjee, who leads the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal; Lalu Prasad Yadav, from the RJD [Rashtriya Janta Dal], and Nitish Kumar, who also followed him in the state of Bihar, with the JDU [Janata Dal United]. These are all parties that are essentially associated with these individuals. They centralised power within the parties. All decision-making had to go through them. They branded themselves as charismatic leaders. And of course, they have aggressively used state institutions against political opposition in all cases.

There are many other leaders and parties, as one looks across India. There’s the JDS [Janata Dal Secular] in Karnataka, there’s BJD [Biju Janata Dal] in Orissa. This is a model that we see winning out state after state in India. What is interesting about many of these parties is they’ve come from two sources. One source is leaders that were once associated with the Congress party like Mamata Banerjee, like Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra. The other is a loose coalition of parties that emerged as an opposition to Indira Gandhi, right? The Janata Dal. And so many of these parties like RJD, Rashtriya Janata Dal, JDU, Janata Dal United; JDS, Janata Dal Secular actually still have the Janata Dal name in them.

They have emerged from certain common roots, but when the system fragmented, they fragmented into these hyper-centralised parties built around individuals. And that’s exactly the model that Modi picked up in Gujarat. He had built this aura around himself as the chief minister in the state of Gujarat, with a national party, the BJP. He had completely centralised power within the BJP at the state level, so that a lot of the branding was around him, and he had a similar control over state institutions. When he came to Delhi in 2014, he essentially applied this model, a model that applied in many states and by him in the state of Gujarat, to the national level.

I was wondering if there was any reason not to point to Jayalalithaa, for example, here.

The reason why I don’t mention Jayalalithaa, or a number of the Tamil politicians, is because that’s a politics that came out of the Dravidian movement. It also happened before this particular period in time. So, while certain models of branding and centralisation within the party are consistent with what we saw in the Dravidian parties, this particular political moment in the 1990s, we saw a doubling of the effective number of parties in the political landscape. That hyper-fragmentation that was associated with federalism in India really took root in the 1990s, and a large number of the new parties that came up had this characteristic. Of course, you have parties that had these characteristics before this moment, and you have a party like the Aam Aadmi party that has this characteristic that emerged much more recently.

I’m curious about responses to both the original piece and your thinking about it over time. In broader literature, in your research community, have there been critiques or people building on this argument that you found done in an interesting or useful way?

A lot of the original thinking was done with my colleague and former president at the Centre for Policy Research, Yamini Aiyar. She has been on this series and has discussed how the centralising features have affected welfare delivery. In my imagination, these two were always going together. What we were seeing with the centralisation of welfare delivery was starting to be reflected in the way that we need to start thinking about political culture.

One place where a lot of my thinking has developed is about how this kind of politics affects welfare delivery, economic delivery, and economic outcomes. Second, which I’m still working through in my head, is that once you start having a system that looks like this, that is built around vishwas, for either the leader at the top, or a leader at the state level, what does it say for a certain model of representative democracy and parliamentary politics, and the relative importance of parliamentary politics in the minds of voters and citizens? It had declined quite a bit at the state level, and now I think even at the national level, the importance of parliamentary politics in the mind of the average citizen is shrinking quite a bit.

You could see antecedents on this going as far back as the anti-defection law…

In fact, the core argument that I make, trying to think about why we saw so many of these small, centralised parties emerge in the mid-90s, is precisely that it’s a survival tactic. In a system in which politicians can jump from one party to the next and can be bought off very easily, for a small party to not be sure of its party rank and file is extremely dangerous. The only solution you have to that problem is to centralise power within the party so that all votes are being given in the name of the leader at the top.

Irrespective of whether a legislator chooses to defect from the party or not, the popularity of the party stays intact. In many ways, this kind of centralisation, and the question of defection, and who can defect and where they will defect to, eats away at the confidence you have with your local representative and feeds into a certain political centralisation that now we’re seeing to a very great extent.

It’s interesting to then read that against what has happened to parties like the NCP [Nationalist Congress Party] and the Shiv Sena in the current moment.

In some sense, the question that remains, and one I don’t have a clear view on, is what are the implications when somebody takes what has been a very regional model and scales it up, as Modi and Amit Shah were able to do for the BJP? The need to have to build your brand as a leader before you are able to spread your wings necessarily limits how far you can spread when you are a smaller regional party. This is a question that a lot of regional parties are asking themselves. Is Sharad Pawar really restricted largely to Maharashtra, winning a few seats here and there? Is Mamata Banerjee largely restricted to West Bengal?

The one party that seems to have broken that mold, and we can talk about later, is the Aam Aadmi Party, where it very much was a Delhi party. And of course, Arvind Kejriwal, the founder of the party and the chief minister of Delhi was put in jail, but it’s a party that has spread to the state of Punjab and has made some inroads elsewhere.

Before we touch upon AAP specifically, now that for the last 10 years we’ve had Modi and this brand building happening at the centre, are we seeing regional politics and others attempting to play the same game? Is it an irreversible feature now of Indian politics? Or simply one amongst various models that continue to exist?

Irreversible means forever. That I can’t say. But in the short to medium term, certainly it looks like successful parties are going to be ones that build their image in this manner. There are certain benefits to being able to centralise to this extent, the most obvious being what I’ve just described – you don’t have to deal with serious factionalism within your party. Defection, and the party rank and file bargaining their position with other parties simply doesn’t affect your popularity. And increasingly, the ability of a political leader to make decisions quickly without any of these entanglements is becoming very popular, even with the electorate.

There are these few questions in surveys that many of us look back to, and various versions have been asked to voters over the years: Do you prefer a system with a strong leader that may not rely on parliament and the courts? And India actually shows up as one of the highest percentages globally on this question. So, this model is not just a solution to a problem that existed within party organisation, but it’s increasingly becoming popular in the electorate to run a party, and to run politics in this manner, which is why I think we’re starting to see so many of the successful parties convert to this one.

Even politicians whose image was built on another model have attempted to convert their own success into that, as with former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot.

Rajasthan was an extraordinary state. For those of us who are doing fieldwork, just to give you a sense of the extent to which Gehlot bought into this, he had a consulting firm – separate from the Congress party, his own party – engaged in running a campaign built around him. That gives you a sense of the extent to which political leaders believe this, and Gehlot is an old hand, he’s not somebody who just emerged in politics, he is very much of the Congress system – even he has moved to this imagination of politics.

That takes us to AAP. Is it the same model? It speaks often to vikas, development, as being its identity.

It is true that the Aam Aadmi Party has built a significant amount of its popularity on its ability to deliver, but it has also built a lot on the personal popularity of Arvind Kejriwal, who is the founder of the party. A good way to think about how the Aam Aadmi Party operates, is to look at the last couple of elections in the state of Punjab. The Aam Aadmi Party, as we now know, swept the last state elections in the state of Punjab, overturning traditional politics in the state, which had been essentially between the Congress party and the Shiromani Akali Dal.

Now, interestingly, almost the entire campaign was run without naming a chief ministerial candidate. Much of the popularity of the party was built on just what the party is and Arvind Kejriwal. This election was a sweep, but in the previous election, the Aam Aadmi Party was routed. And part of the reason why they were routed is that there was an association with the Aam Aadmi Party and more extremist elements in the Khalistani movement. That scared away Hindu voters and many other voters.

Now, this is where AAP is a very different party than other parties that we see. Normally, what you would try to do at that point when you started making ground in a state, and you’ve faced a bad loss, is to build institutionally. Instead, AAP gutted its own party. It got rid of almost anybody you would associate with the party in Punjab. You could not associate the party with any person in Punjab other than Arvind Kejriwal, who was sitting in Delhi.

When we came to the last state election, the one that AAP ended up sweeping, you could not actually see very many party workers on the ground. When I spoke to a Congress party worker, he said, “I don’t know how to compete against these guys. It’s like punching in the air.” There simply is no other brick-and-mortar party on the other side. So, this is a party that in some sense is the most extreme version of the politics of vishwas that you can imagine. You can’t really tie AAP’s politics to any particular social group, or any ideology for more than six months at a time. It is about your trust in the man who runs the party and the kinds of decisions he makes when it comes to delivery.

For these reasons, I think we have seen that the BJP has also tended to see AAP as its largest threat nationally. We see the kind of institutional pressure that has simply not been put on many of the other parties, as we see with Arvind Kejriwal being sent to jail during election time. His number two has also been sent to jail. There has been an attempt to institutionally take away powers from the Union Territory of Delhi. The full court press that has been put on Arvind Kejriwal and AAP is not something that we’ve seen for many other parties, and it speaks to the extent to which the BJP sees AAP and its brand of politics as dangerous for its own popularity, as sort of really being a reified form of the politics of vishwas.

You’ve argued that this model also allows parties to go beyond the descriptive approach to representation. How does the politics of vishwas play alongside that idea of having your own community, a person from your own caste, represent you?

I have always felt very early on that one of the key factors that we see in this rapid centralisation of power is the technological advances of economic delivery: direct benefit transfer essentially allows somebody to push a button in the minister’s office and deliver money in people’s accounts across the country. Or for a state level leader, across the state. Overnight, that empowers the chief minister, or the prime minister, particularly one who is good at branding himself or herself to build a direct connection between citizen and leader, without having to rely on party machinery, party workers, brokers, intermediaries, nothing.

What this has allowed is a certain kind of centralisation and branding, because even the benefits you’re getting, you can now attribute to the person at the top. This has had some interesting effects, and so obviously even the BJP feels that this is its strongest card. This time, the BJP’s manifesto is named “Modi ki guarantee”. In some sense, this is not just an argument that we’re making on paper, it’s one the BJP fundamentally believes it wants to sell to people.

The other strange empirical effect of this is that, because economic delivery is so closely tied to the political branding of a leader, there are certain winners and losers in this process. Mamata Banerjee is a big winner. She’s very much able to brand herself as being able to deliver certain kinds of schemes. And many of those schemes have genuinely been successful, just like many of Modi’s schemes have genuinely been successful.

But when we look at state-level leaders for the BJP, because Modi is the person who is delivering, many older state-level leaders within the BJP who had been successful, like Shivraj Singh Chouhan, like Raman Singh, first lost their popularity, and eventually in this round were actually cast aside.

The ability to marry branding and welfare delivery has meant that if you are a lower-level leader in the BJP, essentially one who is not Modi, you cannot take credit for that delivery, and that’s put you in a weaker position. The only chief ministers who’ve been able to rise in this era under the BJP have been those who have distinguished themselves through Hindu-Muslim polarisation, like Himanta Biswa Sarma and Yogi Adityanath. And they were both chosen after Modi became prime minister.

No other major leader from the pre-Modi era has been able to advance within the BJP since Modi became prime minister. And that has to do with the centralisation within the party. Because those dynamics do not exist with regional parties, many of the regional parties have benefited from this new kind of welfare politics, but the leaders within the BJP have really been hurt by it.

In the BJP, there are the older leaders who have been phased out, there are the “wannabe” Modis like Himanta and Adityanath, and then you have this remarkable side of chief ministers in Gujarat and Haryana who were just replaced by the BJP’s high command. Is this also a sign of broader vulnerability within the party? Ultimately, if they have to constantly pull up credit toward the center, that weakens everything around it, and creates a succession issue.

There is a major succession issue within the BJP, because there are at least a couple of claimants to the throne after Modi, and that would be a discussion in and of itself.

But what is fascinating about this musical chairs of chief ministers within the BJP is that it sounds a lot like what was happening with MLAs in many states with these strong state-level regional leaders. What we used to do with an MLA, we now do with chief ministers.

It speaks to the direct connect that Modi has to a voter, that you can cast aside one chief minister for another and it broadly doesn’t affect your popularity that much. It also speaks to just the scale of centralisation when we have a political party mattering this much in the policy decisions of the country. In institutional terms, there’s a concern that the federal bargaining is increasingly tilted toward the centre, but that federal bargain was also typically reflected within political parties, particularly a party like the Congress. What we’re seeing is that it’s eroding even within the political space. And so, centralisation isn’t just institutional centralisation, the more important centralisation is a centralisation that’s happening within a national party.

Given how Modi built his own brand within the BJP in the late 2000s, early 2010s, would it even be possible for someone to do that within the party today? I’ve always thought that that kind of approach would have to come from the right within the party rather than from the center.

Yes, I think that’s right. There’s been some talk of Nitin Gadkari, but essentially you require a political leader who is able to build a strong, social political base of their own, independent of Modi. Interestingly, that characterises Yogi Adityanath and Himanta Biswa Sarma. Himanta is actually a defector from the Congress party. And Yogi Adityanath is somebody who had a separate sphere of influence as a function of his religious credentials.

What has this model meant for the Congress?

The foundational story in some sense for the Congress party is factions. Before every election, there were about two or three people who could possibly be chief minister, with their own faction. They all hate each other. One person gets chosen or not chosen; another person just chooses to go to another party. As the entire pattern of politics has shifted toward hyper-centralisation, low intra-party democracy, one way to see factionalism is that it represents a lot of intra-party democracy because people at least get to choose between different actions.

As we’ve shifted to this much more centralised mode, the Congress party sees itself on the weak foot, precisely because this kind of factionalism has always performed poorly against this kind of centralisation. Before, it was a question of regional parties taking on the Congress, and now it is increasingly also a story of a more centralised BJP disproportionately defeating the Congress in head-to-head fights. In the last two national elections, we’ve seen around 90% or 90%-plus strike rates for the BJP in head-to-head contests against the Congress.

There has been the attempt at building out the personality of Rahul Gandhi, particularly through the Bharat Jodo Yatra, in a similar vein…

He has inherited the party he’s inherited – a severely factionalised party with powerful state-level leaders, and powerful state-level factions that need to be managed.

And by definition, he’s not even the leader of the party, so the centralisation model in some ways isn’t being built in the Congress. Switching tacks, what are you looking at in this election?

There are two directions in which our thinking needs to go. The first is that alongside political centralisation, India has seen extraordinary economic centralisation. Depending on who you talk to, 70%-80% of all profits in India accrued to the top 20 companies. We’re looking at income inequality numbers in terms that are rivaling Russia. We are nothing like eastern European or Eastern Asian or Southeast Asian countries. The question is, how do these two feed into each other? Increasingly, the income inequality and status inequality in society is becoming an issue. This was a large part of the farmer protest as well. The first thing they did was go and start boycotting Adani- and Ambani-owned shops.

But this kind of economic centralisation is very core to the political model that the BJP has, because these large businesspersons require a national leader, and the national leader requires these kinds of resources to continue. We’ve already started hearing rumblings about estate taxes, and inheritance taxes, and whether farmers are being treated properly. To what extent does inequality – social inequality, economic inequality – emerge as a genuine problem for anybody who is in government in India? That’s one thing I’m looking at.

The second thing is that, as we have this model happening at the centre and at the state level, if increasingly politics is about building a relationship between the leader at the top and the citizen, then what is the point of having local representatives? What is the point of having choices in your representatives? And what does that say about the extent to which people are interested in parliamentary democracy or parliamentary debate?

One of the things that we’ve noticed about this national election is that it’s very low energy. The first phase had a lower turnout – we’re speaking just after the first phase – we’ll have to see if that continues. Irrespective of what happens with turnout, it certainly doesn’t have the energy of the last two national elections. Is it just the case that people simply don’t raise their concerns through parliamentary politics anymore? If I’m a poor farmer today, is it better for me to take to the streets, because the government will bargain with me then, than for me to try to work through my political representatives and through the political opposition? It certainly seems so.

What would it mean for the model of vishwas politics if this were just a normal election? What happens when it runs into normality – rather than a charged-up opposition, more charisma fatigue?

My colleague Rahul Verma has asked this question. At what point have you mobilised everyone you can? How high can it go? Maybe it is the case that after 2019, given the strength the BJP has and resources and machinery, there really aren’t that many more people to mobilise. We see state institutions becoming tougher on the political opposition. Is it the centre saying, if I’m not able to increase the number of people coming out and voting for me, one strategy is to demoralise those who are definitely not going to vote for me?

For a party that has been this powerful, and this successful, and this popular, what does it mean to no longer have that energy from 2014 and 2019? And how do they respond with their state institutions? This time Modi has said that the BJP and its allies are going to aim for more than 400 seats out of 543. And that the BJP alone can get up to 370 seats. May or may not happen, but the point is that even if the BJP won 370 seats, it would be one of the most impressive electoral victories in Indian history, but it still wouldn’t have the same amount of energy as when the BJP won 282 seats just 10 years ago.

Another question is whether the sheer investment and planning that it took to build the Modi brand happened because it coincided with this moment of digitalization and technology, or whether this is the model that we’ll see going forward.

I don’t know what reverses the trend. When you read the YB Chavan Committee report on political defection, which Parliament was very worried about in 1967, they actually thought that we are in a transitory phase. Eventually, people will become ideological, and then this whole defection thing will stop. But some 50 years on, we don’t seem to be any closer to that kind of ideological consolidation. So, it’s worth thinking about whether we’ll ever get there.

Is there anything else that you’re working on that you’d like to point readers to?

I am interested in building out a larger research agenda on what the delivery of cash means for the individual household. There have been large debates about whether you give cash, or whether you give other kinds of state investment in infrastructure that a household can make use of. As we are starting to get access to more complicated data on what this kind of delivery means, but also as the state is starting to develop administrative capacity because of Aadhaar and because of the way this money is given, we’re talking about a completely new kind of politics.

What used to be a dirty thing, giving cash before an election, is now exactly what you’re supposed to do, except you just give it to somebody’s bank account. I’m starting to use administrative data to think about how getting cash is changing political and social perceptions.

Do you have three recommendations for books or papers for those interested in these subjects?

What I would suggest is to read broadly in three different directions about things that we’ve talked about. One is a paper that I always ask people to read, by Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal, called “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory After the Third Wave of Democratization”. Party institutionalisation at its core means that society has ideological roots to the bottom. When we talk about ideological voters, ideology fundamentally transforms society, and brings a stability and connection that a voter has with a particular party, or a particular kind of politics. What happens when you don’t have that?

Another paper I recommend is by a former colleague and a journalist, Harish Damodaran, called “From Entrepreneurial to Conglomerate Capitalism”. Harish has been a very close observer of the agricultural political economy, and also local capital. All of the old histories of local financing and small builders funding parties has shifted as profits moved to the top 20 firms. Overnight, it’s the big guys who have completely washed the small guys out. What are the implications for thinking about political economy when we’re seeing this kind of scale of wealth generation in certain classes and not others?

Third, because this is not intended to be a discussion of how democratic or undemocratic India is, but Robert Dahl wrote Polyarchy, one of his most famous books in 1971. I don’t just want people to read it to detect how democratic a country is or isn’t. He writes a lot about what it means to have political participation and political opposition. He thinks very hard about these two issues. In fact, the entire title of the book is Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. And it’s a path-breaking book, one that almost every political scientist and most social scientists across disciplines have read. But it’s really worth reading his exposition around political participation and political opposition closely to understand the various factors and features at play when we think about strong participation and opposition.

Neelanjan Sircar is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and a CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar.

Rohan Venkat is the Consulting Editor for India in Transition and a CASI Spring 2024 Visiting Fellow.