You could see the look on Modi’s face. Disappointment, disbelief, disorientation, an emotional dysentery upon securing a record third mandate to achieve a legendary triple victory on the trot – a diamond-horned unicorn in Indian politics where anti-incumbency and fickleness dominate the electorate.

Why such gloom in a moment of glory? It is because Modi, along with his supporters, wanted so, so much more. 240 seats eked the BJP to victory, but it required the help of alliance partners known for their unsteady handshake. During the campaign season, Modi boldly declared a target of 400 out of 543 seats, but the electorate had other ideas in mind. Beyond the surface reasons of rural distress, candidate selection, caste arithmetic, and even misinformation about the removal of reservations, there are much deeper reasons for the BJP’s reduced mandate as well as omens for the future of Indian politics.

For the BJP is an anomaly. It is a party of outsiders despite a decade and running in power. They are not the royalty that so many Indians are accustomed to being ruled by but rebels. Many blame it on the Congress-aligned backend political system of India, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the academia, the media, and so on – which all, of course, play a part. But here, we must go past the cathedral and into the catacombs. What do the skeletons of Indian history tell us about how Indians prefer their power? And how does that manifest in India’s modern popery?

Silver Medals, Golden Mandates

In 2019, Manu Joseph wrote a brilliant article about how the Gandhi family continues to dominate the Congress Party despite multiple electoral failures. In brief, they are the second choice of the regional satraps – the first choice of the satraps is themselves. Let me explain.

The INC consists of groups of feudal families who hold power in regions. These families are rooted in the land as their branches seldom go beyond their fiefdoms. They rule their lands with mud-smeared iron fists. Posh and petite in public campaigning for social justice and equality but rambling and roving hierarchical mafiosos once sinking back into their village gullies. Alas, they are mostly content with their grove of influence. But what happens when their ambition goes beyond their borders or if an invading force, namely the BJP, comes into their territory? Now they need allies.

The local satraps find common cause in the Congress Party, the party of the establishment and of the status quo. No other party can oil the wheels of bureaucracy and judiciary in such a manner as the Grand Old Party of India. A perfect fit for the stagnancy and stupor of feudalism that these satraps utilize. This is a party not interested in national evolution but in local extraction. And, of course, the organizers of this party are a family that specializes in such endeavors.

Now that a minimum common program is agreed between all these satraps across India, they must elect a leader. In self-interest, they each, of course, propose themselves as the master of the party. A deadlock emerges to determine the party’s center of gravity. Only a force willing to play second fiddle in their localities can unite them. A force that isn’t as tied to one locale and has enough money and influence to move it across the country, solidifying a network. One that forges connections with each feudatory allowing them to continue their forgery. This force, the First Famiglia, or the Nehru-Gandhi family, thus automatically becomes the second choice amongst all these feudal lords and thereby the first choice candidate of consensus.

The Jagirdars

This process is not a child of modernity. It is an ancestral rite of Indian politics. In an absolutely fantastic article explaining this phenomenon, Kaal Chiron elucidates the concept of “Jagirdars.”

From the age of the Sultanates and possibly even prior, most localities in India were ruled by autonomous strongmen cum chieftains cum kings who would pledge fealty and revenues to overarching central authorities in exchange for relative autonomy. This penchant for decentralization ensured stability but stifled progress. More ominously, disunity would give way to mass subjugation and lethargy of the masses because the Jagirdars were only concerned with themselves. Jagirdars would employ the power of the central sovereign combined with their own forces to smother any potential rebellion. Incentives aligned like stars as the central power enjoyed a steady exchequer from the Jagirdars, who enjoyed the scathing exploitation of their underlings.

Those who sought to upend this system would first have to become a part of it and tame it. By the time one was entrenched and sought an overturning, the Jagirdars would be roaming one’s courts, coffers, and camps as essential cogs in a once-promised machine of change. If upset, the selfish and cynical Jagirdars would gladly betray their new uppity master for a return to the cozy consensus of old. This is what is said to have happened to the last great breakers in Shivaji Maharaj and Sambhaji Maharaj, who scattered the old Mughal patron and would not relent to the old corrupt system, instead gaining strength and faith from the lower rungs of society and other rival elites of the Jagirdars. Naturally, this invited the ire of Jagirdars, a few of which played a role in the brutal betrayal and death of Sambhaji himself, even at the onset of a genocidal blood feud raging between the Marathas and Mughals. The House of Bhonsale was taught a lesson it would never forget and made peace with the unfortunate system as the Deccan ran red.

This system of decentralized rule would continue through the British Raj and even into Indian democracy. Decentralized Jagirdars could continue their brutalization of the populace, cornering riches and resources as long as they gave lip service and loot to a master above. This brings us to an essential variable in the equation that explains the Congress Party’s natural knack for rule – democracy itself.

Democracy, Diversity, Disorder

India is a special place. Unlike many other earlier democracies, universal enfranchisement was a given not a grant. Since the clock struck midnight on August 15th, 1947, every single adult Indian was eligible to vote. While it sounds valiant in theory, this also meant that one of the poorest, abused, and illiterate populations in the world would determine their own destiny. What could go wrong?

Now, I am not telling you this to punch down on the Indian masses. We have to view this scenario of democracy in the context of the Jagirdar phenomenon. While kings bent the knee to the tricolor of the republic, both old and new rulers would retain their functional fiefdoms. And now their conflict would be supercharged with the forever war of elections in a democracy. Calculated battles would be fought across the calendar over and over again in a way that was alien to India prior. War became politics, but luckily, with much less bloodshed. Indeed, India has seen very little violence compared to similarly positioned nations. One can undoubtedly pin this down to the pluralism of Hinduism that permeates the land, but also some credit should be given to its downstream diversity as well as its new democracy allowing low-scale non-violent conflict between these diverse groups to settle scores instead of guns and glaives.

This lack of open and violent conflict also meant that feudalism remained entrenched. Except now, feudatories would be formalized under the aegis of the Indian Parliament. As a result, Indian democracy would remain decentralized and patronage-based. Parties that sought to dismantle this system would be up against not just aggravated parties and feudal lords but the nature of Indian democracy itself. Stability sunk into a sweltering stagnation.

Now, beyond the stability that Dharma, diversity, and democracy give is an issue I refer to as India’s obesity of diversity. India is hyper-diverse in both width and depth, making it exceptional compared to other nation-states. Each Indian carries an arsenal of identities that intersect and compete for priority and balance daily. Caste, ethnicity, religion, etc.. are all different identities that are abnormally numerous and rooted, causing a vicious zero-sum competition between them exacerbated by the concept of democracy. Indian democracy is identity politics taken to the extreme.

Coalition crafting is the main technique used to achieve Indian political victory. Droves of castes and communities must be catered to, given representation, and allocated resources, all while these same droves gnaw at each other’s ankles and exchange blows above and below the belt, and I am just referring to those communities on the same side of a coalition! This type of diversity is not a mainstay in most other democracies, at least with the numeracy and intensity that India possesses.

So, in this land of infinite sides and eternal strife, there needs to once again be consensus and compromise. Each side and identity is simply too small to form a majority on its own; instead, it is required to form the coalitions we mentioned previously. A uniter must arise like the central powers of old; an amorphous, reflective creature that is aloof from the intense competition between identities and assuages the image of each community.

This environment is ripe for something called a Stranger King.

The Stranger King

The Stranger King theory was developed by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins during his research on colonialism specifically in Indonesia and Oceania. What he observed was that Europeans would enter into lands with warring tribes and offer themselves as brokers between them. While certain tribes were lulled into security, others would be used by the European Stranger King to eventually take over the territory. Better funding, technology, and foreign influence would overwhelm other tribes as those who sided with the Stranger King ascended over their rivals.

In the myopia of conflict, these tribes would all be colonized and exploited eventually.

Now back to India. The BJP is frequently branded as an upper-caste party of Brahmins & Baniyas. Or as a Hindi-Heartland party. Or recently as a conniving project of Gujaratis. Modi himself has been attacked as an OBC and especially as a Gujarati. What does the Congress represent? The INC is neutral. It is a broker. Rahul Gandhi is a mix of Kashmiri Brahmin, Gujarati Parsi, and Italian – functionally an Indian without an allegiance to a particular region or caste.

While the INC is viewed as a party representing Muslim interests, it does not possess the image of favoring any particular caste or region. Thereupon, it is a fair broker of interests between Hindu castes. As Muslims have been increasingly pushed to the periphery in politics, now a battle between Hindu groups has arisen. The BJP is in the midst of upending many of the status quo and old ways of Indians despite its conservative label. Reform, whether in the economic or social sphere, is seldom welcome. In the BJP’s pursuit to build a grand Hindu coalition of all castes, one caste or another will eventually get filled with angst and envy at the other. Thus, whenever a caste or state feels angst, they fall back to the INC. They use the INC as an anti-vote, a fulfillment of antagonism against the protagonist of the “New” India Story in the BJP. They come to the always-available foreign Stranger King of “Old” India.

In this way, the INC is a natural broker for India, a perfect Stranger King, because it is seen as a neutral foreign force that doesn’t necessarily favor any specific group (besides Muslims). Hindus, in their infinite pursuit of distinguishing themselves from each other and possessing a morbid obesity of diversity, will look for a mediator between their interests. Treason is seen as craftiness, and betrayal is a survival mechanism. A consciousness of kind lacks so sorely amongst the Hindus that many are happy to ally with those outside or even inimical to their faith simply to preserve the dominance of their caste. So just as the old colonial masters played tribes against each other, just as the Mughals destroyed Hindu temples as their own Hindu generals watched on, so does the perennial Stranger King in the INC pit caste against caste in modern-day India as Indians prefer to wallow in trivial old rivalries and zero-sum status games.

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“The world’s most ‘primitive’ people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”

–Marshall Sahlins