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The phantasmagoria of confidence: the tragi-comedy of Indian liberal democracy

The 20 July 2018 no-confidence motion shown for 12 hours live on Indian national news networks where the Congress party (with 44 seats in the Indian parliament of 545 members) defied the ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by initiating a no-confidence motion against them has to be seen in a light different from the commonsensical reading as the conflict between liberal democracy and populist authoritarianism. This essay is on a Marxist reading of the politics of parliamentary democracy and how the commodity principle must be seen governing bourgeois politics. It claims that one does not have to read into the appearance levels of what the leader of the liberal democratic Congress party Rahul Gandhi said or did not say, or what the Prime Minister Narendra Modi said or did not say. This essay claims that the no-confidence motion was not merely a spectacle, but a delusion that Marx calls a ‘phantasmagoria’ transformed into the political space where both the liberal democracy of the Congress and the populism of the ruling BJP are fighting for the political space of capitalist authoritarianism. This essay seeks a different space where popular politics can be played out, a space that is radically different from that of the bourgeois state.