Problems in Thinking about Politics

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, which is sitting comfortably in the seat of power at the centre, has been on a spree of taking decisions on some of the sensitive domains of the political and public life of the country. Most importantly, the central government does seem to find it easy to take such decisions as it does not seem to be facing a decisive and determinative opposition. The limits of the commentaries in the media on electoral politics lie in the fact that they analyse post-election developments in a superficial and selective manner. Their limits are in being temporal rather than transformative; being immanent rather than transcendental. However, there are deeper problems that one finds in thinking about politics in contemporary India.

The most worrisome post-election scenario that one notices is the stranglehold of calculative thinking over reflective thinking. What is interesting to note is that calculative thinking is common to the politics of the ruling party as well as the opposition. It is beyond doubt that the ruling party has been considerably calculative in taking decisions during the last few years. In such calculative thinking, members of the ruling party tend to use the “ordinary human being” first as raw material to be exploited for election purposes and later on as an entity to be kept entangled in a series of political as well as socially necessary illusions. Those who have vested interests in perpetuating their rule normally work through the calculative rather than the reflective mode of thinking about politics.