Commissioned Book Review: Ajay Gudavarthy, Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India’
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231195460 |
| Author | Sana Shah |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(2) NP9 –NP10
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1195460PSW0010.1177/14789299231195460Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2023
Commissioned Book Review
Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India’
by Ajay Gudavarthy Taylor & Francis, 2023. GBP
£120.00, ISBN 9781032070827.
A recent attempt to study the emergence of the
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing party,
currently ruling in India and to analyse its elec-
toral grounding, has come in the shape of a book
titled Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New
India’, written by Ajay Gudavarthy. Situated in
the matrix of cultural studies, the work is novel in
its attempt of analysing the potential of emotions
in mobilising electorates, implying the creation
of an emotive majority, across different sections
of the society, for generating a particular political
landscape in India. A long-standing argument
that the book rehearses here, locates the BJP
as the political correlative of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sang (RSS) from which it derives
its cultural base for political mobilisation.
The author further attempts to understand
the deep currents of emotions, like fear, hatred,
anxiety, pride, shame, dignity, among others
that the Right, under the leadership of Modi
tries to capitalise on, given the projections of a
set of historical wrongs, in the backdrop of the
larger questions related to identity, cultural
belongingness and socio-economic mobility.
The structure of the book pans out through dif-
ferent sub-themes branching into corresponding
chapters, such as Politics and Emotions, Economy
and Ethics and Ethical Emotions. The author
while listing the arguments in the chapters, alludes
to the arguments of selected scholars without any
consistency in approach. So, one could see, for
instance, in the invocation of Foucault, when the
author draws on his definition of power, while also
refuting it at another point in the book (Gudavarthy,
2023: 138). Similarly, when invoking historians
like Achille Mbembe, the arguments flow from
his quote against fossilisation of social categories
if they foreclose the possibility of dialogical
exchange (Gudavarthy, 2023: 168). However, the
author himself, while making a case for the
reframing of subalternity, employs the category
‘cultural subaltern’ to discuss the politics in ‘new
India’, thus holding firmly onto the category of the
subaltern (Gudavarthy, 2023: 94, 118, 138).
Though, the author rightly observes how
Modi’s politics is centred on optics and perfor-
mance, however, that is not all that there is to his
politics. We need to ask, first, what explains the
differentiated response by individuals within a
group when the same emotional trope is being
invoked, to explain differential electoral prefer-
ences; why do emotive politics act on some,
while on some it does not. The author attempts
to understand public morality in India in the
present regime, arguing that ‘anger born out of
legitimate aspirations got expressed as intoler-
ance, which the current political leadership sys-
tematically attempted to convert into a system of
hatred’ (Gudavarthy, 2023: 38). However, one
may ask, if the legitimate aspirations did not
materialise, why did it pave way for anger and
not despair or hopelessness or sadness or grief
for that matter, why only anger? Furthermore,
why is intolerance the next stage of anger?
The author further argues that Modi is pitch-
ing the psychological and emotional issues of
meaning of life as against the basic issues of
material and physical existence and that it is
turning out to be a battle of material versus
meaning. However, we need to remember that
the citizenry exists on a spectrum of different
material conditions that as the lens through
which the politics of emotions is made sense of.
The kind of situation that the country finds
itself in is an outcome of the lack of any princi-
pled form of politics. While the work takes the
question of electoral politics very seriously, it
has less to offer on the question of what one
might do to create a more meaningful political
discourse, as against mere electoral competition
between political parties. For instance, when
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