Re-reading ‘Consensus’ in the Modi Era

Several recent studies and ruminations have engaged with the gargantuan shift that appears to have occurred in India’s political landscape, particularly since the advent of a brute majority for the BJP in 2014 and then an even more debilitating (for the Opposition) victory in 2019. In the aftermath of the pyrrhic electoral performance in the recently concluded general elections, however, the consideration of a book such as Modian Consensus: The Rediscovery of Bharat by Swadesh Singh becomes pertinent. In developing his thesis around the question of the rediscovery of a civilizational consensus, Singh brings to the fore a relevant argument around the Gandhian political consensus that bore India’s spiritual core at its heart along with a value system that was intrinsically subcontinental. This spiritual-civilizational consensus that drove India’s politics through centuries, argues Singh, was overshadowed by the Nehruvian consensus that developed during the first decades after Independence. The central argument, therefore, that Modian Consensus attempts to foreground remains the advent of a conjugation between civilizational and Gandhian consensus—brought to bear in the form of a large, broad-based political consensus around the centripetal figure of PM Narendra Modi.