Post-Colonial Nations, Populism and the Enemy of the People: Situating Modi in the Past and the Present of the Indian State

This paper argues that populism in post-colonial nations is based not on the idea of ‘the people’ but on the idea of the ‘enemy of the people’. This ‘enemy of the people’ is constructed historically and includes political parties that mobilized for, and failed to enforce, revolutionary political change. While political parties create, as opposed to just mobilizing, cleavages it is not understood as to what happens when the attempts to create these cleavages fail. I demonstrate that the resultant ‘failed articulations’ get institutionalised in the judicial, political and popular history in the form of ‘the enemy of the people’ and these failed articulations in the past hamper emergent anti-authoritarian politics in the present.

I make this argument through an archival and ethnographic case study of the political idea of the ‘anti-national’ in India. Using archives from 1920 to 2014, covering the terrain of anti and post-colonial politics, I historicize the idea of the ‘anti-national’ as it goes from having a fluid meaning to becoming a consolidated legal term and bring forth the various legislations that were passed, over decades, to curb ‘anti-national’ political parties and social movements which challenged the hegemonic state. Further, through a sixteen-month-long ethnography of emergent anti-authoritarian movements in India led by the Communist Party of India and Dalit organizations, I demonstrate how this historical concept has been expanded by the Modi government to undermine the emergence of oppositional politics.

In doing this, I bring to bear the importance of colonialism and its impact on emergence of populism in postcolonial nations and thus chart a distinct trajectory of historicizing populism in the global south. Methodologically, I argue for archival and ethnographic ‘immersion’ to be built into historical sociological projects to appreciate path dependency and historical contingency in which political articulations succeed and fail.