Are we living through the Right’s Peterloo moment?

I’m writing this in the red netted dress that I bought for my birthday, hammering away excitedly at my keyboard because some alpha males across the world are having a difficult year, and I cannot let the moment pass without registering my glee.

I was in my first year of journalism college when the current right-wing government came to power in India. Simultaneously, the right and centre-right found lush land in large swathes of the world — in Europe, the US and in central and South America. Its leaders became international celebrities rolling each other’s logs and its pep squad had a coadunate pathology of persecution complexes and a great appetite for hatred. The same tyrannical mindset sprawled from Washington to Budapest, Jerusalem and Delhi. They called it a new world order, called themselves the future.

Theatre, darling. Pure theatre.

The political mood right now has given me the voyeuristic pleasure of watching an extremely expensive outfit come apart at the seams on someone else. And I would never be so ungenerous as to deny myself a little schadenfreude. A fourth term for Lula, a student-backed electoral victory in Serbia, Orbán’s great departure after 16 years, Netanyahu struggling to save his skin and Trump in lame-duck land. Add their Indian counterpart, and the international brotherhood of strongmen is coming to terms with an alternative reality that ain’t so cheery for them.

I know the world won’t arrange itself into convenient political narratives for my entertainment and these developments cannot be bundled together and passed off as evidence of some sweeping global realignment, but I’m enjoying the view.

I watched this politics take up space in my own country, and in my own life. I watched invisible writs decide which story I was cleared to write for the newspaper that day. I walked away from a job I had spent years studying for because I could not pal around with that arrangement.

I saw up close how prejudice becomes prime-time entertainment. I saw it become dinner-table conversation in my own family. I watched the most elementary demands for dignity rescripted as seditious acts of disloyalty. I watched people being asked to prove their patriotism and bigots decide who could claim the country and on what terms. I watched the public square become inhospitable to anyone who declined to yield to the amour propre of men who could not tolerate being questioned.

Mark Fisher wrote in Capitalist Realism about the trouble of imagining a world beyond the one we have. Political dominance produces a similar mental surrender. Instead of asking what might replace it, you start thinking about how to live with it. But I refuse to do that, now more than ever, when people across the world are reminding their governments that political power flows from their will, and the electorate will take it back when it wants.

I found my MA English notes during the annual Diwali cleaning, and re-read P.B. Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy. It took me back to Peterloo. In August 1819, thousands gathered in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform. The state answered with cavalry, killing at least 15 and injuring hundreds. Shelley was in Italy when the news reached him, and in response, he wrote this incendiary poem, and came up with a rallying cry that has waded across two centuries of political strife: ‘Ye are many — they are few!’

Shelley encapsulated the theory of political power in five words. Even with its cavalry, courts, prisons and the whole weight of officialdom behind it, the State chickens out at the sight of a heaving crowd. The crackdown that was expected to chill the people and force a retreat became the bugle call for the reform movement.

It would be foolish to write the obituary of the Right just yet. Growing inequality and precarity provide fertile ground for right-wing sentiment. Exclusionary and extremist as those ideas might be, they are still popular, and firmly embedded in institutions, the media and public life. As long as it can maintain its stranglehold on these institutions, the Right will hold on to power even if popular support slowly dwindles.

What gives hope is that the brotherhood, for all its money, muscle and repulsive fanfaronade, is learning that the audience can lose interest even when the show is still running.

Rebecca Solnit, in Hope in the Dark, writes about hope as a way of inhabiting uncertainty, of recognising that the future remains open even when the present gives us very little to believe in it. I like that idea because it doesn’t ask us to become cheerleaders for our own circumstances. It asks very little of our optimism and a little more of our imagination.

India has unfinished business with the political project of the Right. Which has enfeebled its democratic institutions, made vitriol defensible in public life, taught people to live with a curtailed sense of belonging. None of this will disappear because the political weather has changed elsewhere. There is work to do, and plenty of it, but I no longer feel the rest of my life is a prisoner of the present moment.

The Right wants us to accept its reading of the future as a fait accompli. Even as the rest of us recover the nerve to imagine otherwise. Character building for everyone involved. I suppose this is also why I have so little patience for the idea that we must wait until everything is fixed before we let ourselves celebrate. I want to be furious when fury is warranted and frivolous when frivolity floats my boat. The world is a dreadful place to live in if we surrender all its pleasures to the people making it dreadful.

So yes, there was a red birthday dress, and there was a woman sitting in it, rather uncomfortably, conjuring the end for those who spent years trying to dictate the terms of everybody’s existence. And she had a rather good time doing it.