AAP, apolitical politics, and middle class desires

The recent victory of the Aam Admi Party in New Delhi has been received with much jubilation among the middle class in India.

The newspapers are inundated with celebratory stories of the everyman who has stepped into politics. Celebratory Facebook posts and twitter feeds speak about the arrival of the every man. The victory is celebrated as a historical victory, as a harbinger for the appearance of the aam admi, the everyday man on the political stage.

This narrative strikes me as appealing to the middle class in India precisely because of the apolitical politics of the Aam Admi party.

There is no specific ideology to root the politics in.

There are no macro stories for the party other than the story that the party represents a fight against corruption in the political structures in the country. That the political structures need to be fought is indeed a relevant and much-needed political conversation.

And yet, the aam admi's political participation stops at looking at corruption in the political class.

The fight against corruption does not interrogate the economic structures that constitute the fabric of corruption. The fight remains conveniently oblivious of the corruption in the economic rationality of neoliberal India.

The fight of the Aam Admi does not examine the logics of corruption within capitalism that form the basis of an unethical system.

In fact, many of the participants and supporters of the party are your everyday middle class corporate citizens drawing their salaries from large corporate houses.

To what extent do these middle class citizens closely examine the corrupt practices of the very corporate houses they get paid by?

To what extent do these middle class everyday people question the fundamental corruption of the economic logics that sustain them financially?

To what extent is the Aam Admi party an entry point to interrogating the corruption in the logics of liberalization that constitute mainstream India?

These are the sorts of questions I hope we will continue to ask as we examine the everyday claims of the Aam admi party in the backdrop of the Delhi elections.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation. These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South. The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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