2019 and populism | The Indian Express

2019 and populism | The Indian Express

Written by Ashutosh Varshney, Srikrishna Ayyangar |New Delhi |Updated: April 6, 2019 6:54:04 am

The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute. He is a contributing editor for The Indian Express.

Ayyangar is Associate Professor of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University

2019 and populism

There is large support for anti-elitist politics in India, but it is not uniformly spread out.

Populism is not a full-blown ideology like liberalism, conservatism or socialism. It is a “thin-centered” discourse rooted in the idea of popular will and is comfortable aligning itself to any ideology that could be broadly appealing to a majority.

In international political circles, Narendra Modi is now widely described as a populist. He is placed broadly in the same category as Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the Filipino Rodrigo Duterte and the US’s Donald Trump. These leaders are not exactly alike, but it is now generally argued that they share roughly the same ideology, labelled as right-wing populism or majoritarian nationalism.