Nuances of Appeasement Politics

Can the politics of Appeasement make a level playing field?

The one word that we have grown accustomed to over the past couple of decades in Indian political narratives is ‘Appeasement’.

It is the favourite usage that the Hindutva zealots have fallen in love with. Whether people understood the meaning of the word objectively is doubtful. It has, nevertheless, been very productive in the majoritarian diatribe against the ‘liberal democratic’ agenda.  It is another matter that even the centrist liberal democracy space is distorted, skewed and subjective.

Most politicians, journalists and commentators have a strait-jacket idea of ‘appeasement’. It is used more in its negative, majoritarian interpretation, to mean the pandering of minorities, especially the largest religious minority, by the socialist, left, progressive political forces. 

But that is just half the story. Literally, ‘appeasement’ is the action of satisfying the demands of an aggressive person, community or organization. In political terms, appeasement therefore implies yielding to pressure groups whose displeasure can hurt the rewards that parties and leaders would reap at the hustling.  Every vote counts, so if there can be a way to garner the support of blocks of voters politicians would tap the route. It is so in every democracy whether in the West or the less developed world. We see not just in the imperfect democracies of the third world, but also in large, developed polities like the US and the UK that parties pander to segmented interests and play upon anxieties and apprehensions of fragmented sections.

 In the Indian context, even after seven-plus decades of the trauma of partition that was based on religious cleavages between the majority and the largest minority communities, it is still open to politicians to fan 'minority' headwinds and reap rewards at the elections.

However, the truth is that playing up minorities and instigating a motivated majoritarian agenda are both equally divisive, negative and capable of creating and cementing the societal divide with negative fallouts in the long term.

It is a fallacy of Indian politics to think of appeasement merely as a minority vote bank consolidation technique. The majority voters also are susceptible to consolidation and tactical voting. Therefore, there is as much majoritarian appeasement as there is minority appeasement. 

The right-wing conservativism that is on full display in the US and Indian democracies is a manifestation of the appeasement of the native, conservative majority voters. Both types of appeasement politics would encounter diminishing returns over the medium to long term even as the electorate gets fatigued by the cliched slogans and promises.

In India, casteism lends itself to clever manipulations by politicians to divide and dissipate commonalities in the larger shared civic concerns and priorities. It is very convenient for politicians to play up sectarian, linguistic and sub-regional nuances to dent the possibility of common concerns and secular issues taking centre stage. Indian social and political developments over the decades show how communal and caste divisions were used cleverly by provincial politicians to consolidate their hold and the primacy of their family succession in local politics.

At least, do not be fooled by motivated narratives that paint appeasement as a one-sided phenomenon that only benefits minorities at the expense of the majority. 

Appeasement applies to both majority and minority sections of society and we are still a long way from the tipping point of realising the madness and senselessness of politics of pandering to differences.