DON’T BLAME THE PEOPLE
This week I ask, is the world going back? Regressing? Is it becoming more tolerant, even enthusiastic, about “strongman rule”? And about strongman rule’s seemingly required companion, the supremacy everywhere of a nation’s majority community (e.g. India’s Hindus) or of the race that supposedly “created,” “inherited” or “dominated” a region (e.g. the whites of the U.S. and the Jews of Israel?
Noam Chomsky, let me add, has employed a good word, ethnocracy, for the system desired by supremacists, which would supplant democracy. Ethnocracy’s supporters dislike democracy, for there your rights descend from your being a human and a citizen, not from your race, bloodline, religion or sect.
The question about the world going back is not confined to Americans shaken by Trump’s victory. Or to Indians disappointed that the setback that Modi received in June has been reversed (seemingly at least) in the latest regional elections, first in Haryana and then, very recently, in Maharashtra. Or to lovers, worldwide, of liberty and equality who’ve been showing their dismay over Israel’s brazen, unimpeded, and destructive march across others’ territories, including Palestine and Lebanon. Most of these lovers of liberty and equality will probably welcome Wednesday’s announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, for they are lovers of life as well, but the ceasefire does not constitute any evidence that supposedly strong nations are finally ready to be firm with Israel.
HEADLINES CAN MISLEAD
The question about the world going back comes loaded with frightening anxiety over power’s alliance with wealth, symbolized glaringly by the Trump-Musk partnership in the U.S., by the Modi-Adani partnership in India, and by counterparts elsewhere in the world.
Part of the response to the question is that headlines about elections results are misleading. They, the headlines, can usually capture only one part of the story. Trump certainly defeated Harris. This time, unlike in 2016, when he entered the White House after defeating Hillary Clinton, Trump also won a majority of the popular vote, which had been denied to him in 2016, on top of the more limited but constitutionally sufficing victory within the electoral college.
However, as Peter Baker of the New York Times has pointed out, something else also happened. Quoting strategist Matthew Dowd, who had plotted the 2004 victory of Republican George W. Bush over Democrat John Kerry, Baker explains that a number of Americans voted for Trump thinking he would be better than Biden in coping with the inflation they had experienced in the last four years, not because they liked Trump’s extremist policies usually associated with his MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) agenda. It appears that on voting day, such voters sufficed to make the crucial voting difference. Baker repeats Dowd’s words:
“A majority of folks on Election Day (in 2024) didn’t like or trust Trump and thought he was too extreme. The non-MAGA folk who voted for him did it despite Trump, not because of Trump. They were voting against Biden more than they were voting for Trump.”
Something similar can be said about the undoubtedly important Maharashtra results from India that showed a coalition of three parties led by Modi’s BJP surprising many pundits (and belying some exit polls) by defeating the INDIA bloc that opposes Modi. A supremacist line was no doubt part of the successful electoral campaign put up by the successful pro-Modi alliance. In coded language, Modi advised Maharashtra’s Hindu voters (a preponderant majority) to defeat a supposed Muslim ploy to “slaughter” Hindus by dividing them. If they refused to vote for the INDIA bloc, Maharashtra’s women and men would prevent the wicked division.
Modi’s ploy notwithstanding, most analysts appear to agree that neither Hindu supremacy nor fear of alleged Muslim designs played a major role in Maharashtra. Far more effective, it seems, were three handy instalments of cash received in their bank accounts by millions of the women of Maharashtra in the weeks before voting under a state government scheme alluringly called, “For Our Beloved Sisters”.
ANTI-BIDEN, NOT PRO-TRUMP
The conclusion that the bulk of the pro-BJP vote in Maharashtra cannot be credited to a Hindu-supremacist or anti-Muslim current was more than confirmed by the simultaneous electoral verdict from the eastern state of Jharkhand, where the INDIA bloc’s alliance (led by the Adivasi chief minister Hemant Soren) was comfortably re-elected, defeating a BJP campaign that was heavily financed and energetically mounted.
Although Jharkhand is much smaller than Maharashtra, it is hardly unimportant. It holds a large Adivasi (tribal or indigenous) population, apart from being the state to which Jamshedpur (the city of the world-famous Tata companies and steel plants) and other mines and major industrial plants belong.
Far more openly than in Maharashtra, the people of Jharkhand (and especially its Adivasis) were exhorted during this latest election season to be alert to alleged Muslim designs, which were said to include, this time, a large-scale “infiltration” in Jharkhand of Muslims from Bangladesh. This was only a continuation or extension of an old insincere stance, which is that Adivasis should “lead the Hindu defence” against a supposed Muslim “divide-and conquer” strategy.
Pressing this line of attack during the last several weeks in Jharkhand was 55-year-old Himanta Biswa Sarma, one of India’s most strident champions of “Hindutva”, the ideology of India’s supremacists. Currently the chief minister of northeast India’s largest state, Assam, Sarma should feature on any shortlist of Modi’s future successors. However, Sarma’s gambit failed completely in Jharkhand this November. Soren and his INDIA bloc partners were re-elected with clear margins.
It may be said, in short, that neither Americans nor Indians are telling the world at this point that they favour a departure from democracy or regret their embrace of diversity and equality.
What about a concord between big money and “strongman” rule? As of now, the Trump-Musk and Modi-Adani relationships show no signs of strain. At the same time, there seems to be a difference between the desires of Elon Musk, the creator of Tesla and the world’s richest man, and the desires of Gautam Adani, who is merely one of the richest. While Musk seems eager to run a decent piece of the U.S. government, and is therefore willing to serve under Trump as a member of his cabinet, Adani thus far has preferred to sponsor and back Narendra Modi from a space outside the government, while retaining his sights on the airports, seaports, and mines of the world. Reaching out to Trump as well, Gautam Adani has not merely congratulated the president-elect on his victory, he has announced an investment of 10 billion U.S. dollars in U.S. energy and infrastructure, which he claims would create 15,000 jobs in the U.S.
Commentators have been quick to link Adani’s announcement to the fact that Biden’s Department of Justice has recently indicted Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani, and others in a court in New York’s Eastern District for alleged criminal violation of U.S. laws and for bribing officials in India. In less than two months, Trump will be the president and his appointees will run the DOJ. If Trump’s DOJ withdraws the indictments against Adani, or ceases to pursue them, the world will get a sobering reminder of the global power of wealth, even if that wealth has been acquired by a citizen of a largely poor country where, as of November 2024, the government has to give food rations for free to 805 million people, which is more than twice the population of the U.S.
WHAT MUSK COULD DO
According to a New York Times article by Theodore Schleifer, a former Trump aide named Mick Mulvaney, who served as “Trump’s second chief staff,” has a piece of advice for Musk: “Be a straight shooter with Mr. Trump.” “Musk,” says Mulvaney, “has enough money – and enough other things to do. More than perhaps anybody else on the planet, [Musk] doesn’t need the job. He is uniquely situated to be the bearer of honest news.”
