This is the 60th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.
HADIYA
A Supreme Court judge remarked to me,
“You think we abolished slavery?
Well, let me tell you, mate,
You belong to the state.
Your rights mean nothing. You are not free.”
DADDY COOL
Ivanka told NaMo, “I am glad,
Even though your report card is bad,
You manage to muster
Such a lot of bluster.
You remind me so much of my dad!”
This is the 59th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.
PADMAVATI
There is a film that I have not seen.
It is based on a fictional queen.
Its name begins with ‘P’.
Somehow that offends me,
So I will not allow it to screen.
HEALTH MINISTER
A fellow named Himanta Sarma
Told me, “Cancer is caused by karma.
You are not sanskaari.
I feel really sorry.
What disease you will get, oh Varma!”
This is the 58th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.
POLITICAL LOVE
RaGa sang NaMo a sweet jingle.
“Modiji, you make my heart tingle.
Forget this doom and gloom.
We should just get a room.
We are both Qarib Qarib Single.”
THIRD MAN
One day Mufflerman began to shout,
“RaGa and NaMo just make me pout.
Amit, I have to say,
They are mile hue.
Why am I always the odd one out?”
This is the 43rd installment of Lighthouse, my monthly column for BLink, a supplement of the Hindu Business Line.
No party that has portraits of Indira Gandhi in its offices can be a credible Opposition.
These are grave times. Our prime minister is an incompetent and delusional megalomaniac. Our country is being polarised across religious lines because the ruling party deems it electorally advantageous. Despite bonanzas like low oil prices and good monsoons, our economy has gone backwards under this regime, mainly because of Tughlaqesque misadventures like Demonetisation. Across the country, millions of young people are coming into the jobs market and finding that there are no jobs for them. There is unrest.
All this is fertile ground for a resurgent opposition with new ideas. And yet, all we are getting is a return of the ‘same-old same-old.’ There seems to be a consensus among Delhi liberals that because we desperately need a strong opposition, we must desperately prop up Rahul Gandhi. At one level, for these three reasons, this seems to make sense: One, the Congress is still the only pan-India party besides the BJP; Two, the Gandhi family is so entrenched that no alternative leaders have emerged; Three, Rahul Gandhi is, at the least, a well-meaning, earnest chap, and not a venal sociopath.
However, this is a terrible idea. It is bad for the Congress, because they need rejuvenation, not this slow slide to death. It is bad for the country, because we need a strong opposition. There are two reasons, one small and one big, on why the Congress needs to move away from the Gandhis.
Reason one: There is no reason to believe that Rahul has suddenly gained the competence (or even the intelligence) that he has so clearly lacked all these years. In the past, he has repeatedly made a fool of himself in speeches and interview, which are embarrassingly numerous on YouTube. His new supporters point to his recent talks and interviews in the US, but those contain mainly rehearsed talking points, so clumsily articulated that it’s sometimes obvious that he’s mugged them up.
He says many of the right things – but so did Modi before he came to power. Words are not enough. Gandhi’s party was in power for most of the six-plus decades before Modi came around – and it did not walk this talk. That is why Modi got his chance.
What is more problematic is that he also says many of the wrong things. He praises bank nationalisations, for example, and seems to approve of Indira Gandhi. (More on this in the next point.) He doesn’t seem to have a basic grasp of economics – or indeed, the capacity to think critically about these subjects. In other words, it appears that he still is what I had referred to him as many years ago: a handsome village idiot, albeit one with a smart team that preps him well, and a witty new social media staff.
I have often been mistaken, and would be delighted to be proved wrong on this. Here’s one way to do this: rather than give rehearsed speeches and answer softball Q&As, let Rahul Gandhi give an interview to an independent, bipartisan journalist who will ask probing questions about public policy to understand the depth of Gandhi’s thinking on these issues. I nominate myself for this. If he can’t hold his own in an interview with me, he doesn’t deserve to be PM.
That will never happen. Meanwhile, here’s my second reason for why we need to move beyond the Gandhis: the legacy of this family is a harmful one, and the Congress can only progress if it comes to terms with this, and moves beyond it.
The sharpest criticism against Modi is that he is the true successor to Indira Gandhi. He has her authoritarian streak; and his economic policies are as damaging to this nation as hers were. How, then, can a party that has portraits of Indira in all its offices be a credible opposition?
Harmful as Jawaharlal Nehru’s economic thinking was – the command-and-control mindset that Modi shares – he was otherwise a great statesman, and his economic ideas were the fashion of the time. It is easy to give him the benefit of the doubt. But it is hard to be gracious about Indira.
I often make the point that some bad economic policies can be termed crimes on humanity. Indira carried out a series of policies – her bank nationalisations, FERA (1976), the Urban Land Ceiling Act (1976), the Industrial Disputes Acts of 1976 and 1982, alongside the many controls she imposed on the economy –that kept millions of Indians poor for decades longer than they should have been. The humanitarian cost was staggering.
The commentator Nitin Pai once estimated that a one percent rise in India’s GDP brings two million people out of poverty. This damage that Indira’s policies did to the country are unseen and unacknowledged – especially by her own party.
What is even more egregious is that Indira did not implement these out of conviction, in which case she would be wrong but not necessarily evil. (Hanlon’s Razor.) Her sharp move leftward came because she needed to differentiate herself from the Congress establishment, and began as an act of political positioning. And then, she got into full populist mode with attractive slogans like Garibi Hatao, which seemed to make sense as her policies harmed the rich. That zero-sum vision of the world she sold was wrong, of course, and her policies harmed the poor much more in the long run.
It is the damage that the Congress did to India for over 60 years that set Modi up for his resounding win in 2014. The Congress needs to come to terms with that, and articulate a new vision for the future. New ideas will only come with new leadership. And those who support the Congress have a responsibility to demand just that. Their message to the party should be, “Don’t keep taking us for granted. We deserve better. The country deserves better.”
This is the 51st installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.
FALL GUY
Yashwant-bhai told me, quite sedately,
“Amit, have you seen the news lately?
Our nation has been shamed.
Modiji can’t be blamed,
So I will blame it all on Jaitley.”
ELPHINSTONE
There is more to Mumbai than the rain.
Human life keeps going down the drain.
Just another stampede
That will never impede
Our rush towards a grand bullet train.
This is the 50th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.
I WAS THERE!
There’s a TV anchor with much flair.
He was caught lying. There was fanfare.
What’s the point of this rage?
This is the post-truth age.
Super Arnab can be everywhere.
MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR
Kim said Trump is mentally deranged.
Expect more insults to be exchanged.
I suggest, to stop doom,
Those two should get a room.
They sound like lovers who are estranged.
This is the 42nd installment of Lighthouse, my monthly column for BLink, a supplement of the Hindu Business Line.
Many political parties are great at campaigning and winning elections. They all botch up governance. Here is why.
I just finished reading How the BJP Wins, an excellent book by the journalist Prashant Jha on the BJP election machine. It left me in awe of Narendra Modi’s political talent and Amit Shah’s management skills. Between them, they crafted a narrative that had wide resonance, constructed a masterplan based on reconfiguring caste alliances, and put together a ground game with booth-level granularity that won the BJP election after election. They redefined political campaigning in India, and the book deserves to be a case study on how to win elections. And as I finished the book, I was left with a disturbing question:
Why is it that the same group of men who are so good at campaigning are so bad at governing?
This is not a partisan question. Every party that has ever been in power in India has aced the campaigning (after all, they won) and provided appalling governance. The problem here is not competence: the BJP showed immense intelligence, ingenuity, will power and hard work on the campaign trail. The problem here is incentives.
The incentives of a party fighting elections are straightforward: they want to win the elections. The spoils of power are tempting, and everyone works hard. But once they come to power, their incentives are not quite so straightforward.
Consider the two things they needed to come to power: money and votes. Let’s start with money. All democratic politics is about the interplay between power and money. You need humungous amounts of money to win elections. Special interest groups or wealthy individuals provide this money. They do it as an investment, not out of benevolence. And when their horse wins, they want an RoI. They used money to buy power; now they want the power to be used to make them money.
So the first incentive for a politician is to make money for the people who gave him money. It’s as crude as that. In a local election, this could mean that a contractor funds a party so he gets pothole repair contracts from them once they come to power. (And of course, he messes up the repairs so he gets another contract the next year.) At a national level, it means policies that affect crores of people get framed to benefit certain funders.
For example, small traders have traditionally been a strong support base of the BJP. What do small traders want? They want to be protected from competition. How does this reflect in the BJP’s policies? They have traditionally been against Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in retail. What is the impact of keeping FDI out of retail? Less competition, and therefore less value for consumers. So this notional value that the consumer loses, where does it go? To the small trader, naturally. Basically, the government redistributed wealth from common consumers to a special interest group, all no doubt with rhetoric that sounds noble.
At an individual level, think of the big industrialists who backed this government, and the many ways in which the government pays them back will become obvious: the infrastructure projects, the defence contracts, and a million little invisible favours.
Besides funders, the politician in power has to keep voters happy. Specifically, he has to please those particular vote banks that brought him to power. This can happen through direct patronage. It can happen through policies that seem to benefit the vote bank in question. Note that policies that appear compassionate might actually be harmful in the long run.
For example, farmers are a big vote bank. But the average farmer will prefer mai-baap benevolence to deep structural reforms. Imagine a politician telling a farmer: “I will remove the minimum support price, remove all price controls, and abolish APMCs. Like it?” Ya, I know. Forget it and give the loan waiver already.
All politics, therefore, amounts to bribery. Whatever you do in terms of governance is not to make sure the nation is better off, but to give RoI to your investors, and inducements to your voters. Governance does not sell.
Government, of course, does not consist only of politicians but also of bureaucrats. Their incentives are aligned towards increasing their own budgets and power. To the extent that they are rent-seekers, they want to expand the scope of that as well. Why would anyone stop a gravy train they are on?
This, then, is what I call the Paradox of Democracy. A party that needs to win elections can never govern well because it needs to win elections again. And it does this by redistributing wealth from all of its citizens to some of them. I rarely quote myself, but I can’t resist ending this column with a limerick I once wrote:
POLITICS
A neta who loves currency notes
Told me what his line of work denotes.
‘It is kind of funny.
We steal people’s money
And use some of it to buy their votes.’
*
Also read:
This book review was first published in Pragati.
Prashant Jha’s book, How the BJP Wins, is an incisive look at how Narendra Modi and Amit Shah transformed Indian politics.
India is polarised when it comes to evaluating Narendra Modi’s performance, but unanimous on the subject of his political talent. Whether you love him or loathe him, it is clear that Modi has changed the landscape of Indian politics. This did not happen by accident. Prashant Jha’s book, How the BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine, aims to reveal the method behind the madness.
The BJP’s rise in the last few years has, in Jha’s words, “altered politics, created new social coalitions, dissolved older fault lines, generated new conflicts, empowered some, alienated others and is having a profound impact on state institutions.” Jha, without taking sides or getting into ideology or governance, aims to demystify the electoral machine that Modi and Amit Shah built. He does an exceptional job, travelling widely, speaking to many insiders and resisting the temptation to editorialise.
Despite being written so soon after the UP elections, which features prominently in this book, it is no quickie. It contains deep insights into how the BJP planned and executed its ascent, divided into these five areas.
One: The Narrative
Over the years, Modi has redefined himself from a ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ to a ‘Vikas Purush’ to a ‘Garibon ka Neta.’ It is hard enough to build a successful brand once, but Modi has managed to redefine himself time and again, adding new layers to his appeal without losing the old ones. How does he do it? Well, consider that all of the three formulations above depend on simplistic binaries. That simplicity is the key.
Jha writes, in the context of Demonetisation, though this could hold in any other context:
[Modi] distils the most important policy decision of the times in simple, accessible terms. He frames it as a binary between right and wrong. He projects himself as the man fighting the good battle, on the side of the people, victimized by the bad guys. But while willing to fight, he also positions himself as a leader who can throw it all away, for he has no vested interests, nothing to lose. He also acknowledges the pain, but taps into the sense of righteousness, the sense of sacrifice and makes citizens feel they are participants in a great national mission, distinct from the prosaic and banal.
Jha breaks down one of Modi’s speeches in Moradabad to show how masterfully it is constructed. As contrast, he describes a speech by Rahul Gandhi in Bareilly that is not just complicated but also incoherent:
Instead of keeping the story simple, he added too many elements to it and complicated it for the crowd. After throwing in China, Himachal Pradesh, apples, Obamaji, he focussed on Bareilly’s own specialisation – this was clearly not the most effective way to explain a simple point.
Messaging matters, and Modi nailed it, not just by perfecting a simple, explicable message, but also by broadcasting it better than his opponents could manage. Consider how he continued so many of the UPA’s welfare schemes and claimed them as successes of his own administration. “Welfare delivery may or may not be sharper,” writes Jha, “but it is, as an observer put it, louder.”
Two: The Ground Game
Jha describes Modi and Shah as “ruthlessly expansionist, in terms of both territorial limits and social base.” One of the seminal moments in the BJP’s history was surely when Shah was appointed as the BJP general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh. He asked the RSS for reinforcements, and they sent over “a rising organisation talent” Sunil Bansal. Bansal became Shah’s right-hand man, and together, they set about understanding UP.
In Bansal’s words, Shah “only got charge of UP in 2013. But within six months, he had travelled to every corner of the state. He knew issues in each region. He knew which leader fit in where.”
Shah and Bansal soon identified “six issues that were dominant in popular consciousness – law and order, women’s safety, corruption, jobs, migration and ‘appeasement.’” They narrowed this down to two, and came up with the slogan, Na gundaraj, na Bhrashtachar/ Is baar Bhajapa Sarkar.
Getting the messaging right is well and good, but how do you get it across, and how do you get people to the voting booth after that? Shah and Bansal set about revamping the organisation with stunning granularity, picking teams for each of the 147,000 booths in the state, fixing targets and responsibilities for each individual in the chain of command, including in terms of recruitment. Shah set a crazy target of getting one crore new BJP members, and “by 31 March 2015, the BJP had 1.8 crore new members in the state.” (Both the means and the number itself are dubious, but that’s part of the game.)
“Between August 2014 and March 2017,” writes Jha, “Shah travelled to almost every Indian state twice, covering over 5 lakh kilometres, to understand, supervise and direct party units.” As the chapter entitled ‘Shah’s Sangathan’ makes clear, Shah did not travel so much to micro-manage, but to put processes in place. Every cog of the machine had to function smoothly and in consonance with the others. Only then would it pull off the social engineering that Shah knew was required to win elections.
Three: Reconfiguring Caste
The chapter titled ‘Social Engineering’ is the most fascinating in Jha’s book. India votes on the basis of identity, and the caste landscape of UP seemed insurmountable for the BJP. But Shah “is slowly transforming the BJP into a party of the less privileged castes, while retaining the support of the privileged” – and UP is a fantastic case study of this.
How could the BJP move from being ‘a relatively exclusivist Hindu party’ to ‘an inclusive Hindu party’? In Jha’s words, “By identifying the most dominant political caste (which is not necessarily synonymous with the most dominant social caste) in a particular setting, and mobilizing the less dominant against them, Shah is weaving together unprecedented social coalitions.”
Jha elaborates:
The calculation is simple. All Indian states are plural in their composition. With the rise of Mandal politics, assertion of OBCs and their mobilisation, the more numerically and socially dominant of these groups – from peasant backgrounds – have also become politically dominant. But precisely because of that, a range of other castes – both the traditionally powerful and the more marginalised – feel alienated. And thus, the trick is to mobilise these castes and construct a coalition against the dominant caste – which is, in the post-Mandal era, usually the numerically largest middle caste of the particular setting.
In Maharashtra, for example, the dominant political caste is the Marathas. The BJP had traditionally employed a pro-OBC strategy, and for the last assembly elections, they “stitched together an alliance of upper castes, OBCs and, to a lesser extent, Dalits.” It got 52% of the upper-caste vote and 38% pf the OBC vote – and swept to power.
In UP, Shah came up with ‘The 60% Formula.” He knew that Muslims (20% of UP’s population), Yadavs (10%, and loyal to the SP) and Jatavs (10%, loyal to the BSP) would not vote for them. That left them with “55 to 60% of the electoral playing field.” This meant upper castes, OBCs who resented the Yadavs, and Dalit sub-castes who resented the Jatavs, the elite among the Dalits who had cornered the gains of the previous BSP administration.
How would the BJP reposition itself to appeal to all these people? Its methodology had three components:
Changes in the party’s organisation structure to make it more inclusive; reformulation of its messaging, so that backward communities felt both a sense of victimhood and a sense of emancipation; and alliances with parties with a base among these communities, despite the BJP’s [recent] overwhelming dominance.
In 2014, Shah “got a quick survey done of the composition and structure of the party in UP. And to his shock, […] he discovered that among party office-bearers across the state – from Lucknow down to the district level – only 7% were OBCs and 3% were Dalits.”
This dominance of the party by Brahmans, Thakurs and Banias had been a traditional problem for the BJP. But how could the party be revamped without upsetting existing office bearers?
[Shah and Bansal] then figured a way out. The party could increase the number of positions instead of eating into the existing pie. Shah gave his go-ahead. This became the license for the party to increase positions at all levels in the party, especially for OBCs and Dalits. Twelve new office-bearers were added in each district. A hundred new members were added to the state executive committee. Those who remained office-bearers were not removed, which helped in mitigating resentment.
Within a few months, the BJP had “a pool of a thousand new OBC and Dalit leaders.” As many as 34 of the 75 district presidents were OBCs, with 3 from the scheduled castes. The president of the state BJP was also an OBC: Keshav Prasad Maurya.
The BJP went beyond tokenism, though. Jha quotes Badri Narayan, a scholar on the subject, as saying:
What Kanshi Ram did for Jatavs, the RSS and BJP are doing for the rest of the Dalits. They are helping create their community leaders. They are helping document their caste histories. They are exploring heroes of their community. They are inventing and celebrating their festivals. They are placing shakhas near Dalit bastis.
The BJP applied this formula across states, and the results were overwhelming. But through all this, it did not forget its roots.
Four: The Sangh Parivar
Speaking of the BJP and RSS as separate entities might be a false dichotomy. All of the BJP’s key leaders – Modi, Shah, Bansal, Maurya – are products of the Sangh. Modi and Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the RSS, are good friends.
Jha describes the RSS campaign in 2014 – as opposed to the BJP campaign – as “a much quieter, parallel campaign […], the invisible campaign we did not see.” The main driver of this campaign was Ram Madhav, a pracharak based in New Delhi. He brought both technology and a data-driven approach to the Sangh grassroots.
Madhav started by buying Lenovo tablets for all the regional pracharaks, and training them in how to use it. Then he supplied them with “detailed constituency-wise booklets for each candidate,” prepared by Prashant Kishore’s team, and granular voter data across constituencies prepared by Rajesh Jain. “This data was then used by the Sangh to do the quiet door-to-door campaigning, and work on voter mobilisation which was critical to bringing them out on polling day at the booth level.”
After 2014, Madhav moved on to an important role in the BJP, which goes to show that the BJP is the Sangh.
That said, the Sangh made it a point to stay in the background. As an elderly, anonymous pracharak told Jha:
Let me explain it to you in another way. A parent takes care of the child, educates him, helps him settle down, provides him a home, but doesn’t go around announcing it. [As for doing visible organisation work], that is not out work. […] Our work revolves around quiet sampark, contact, on a door-to-door basis – encouraging people to vote for a leader and a party which thinks of the nation, increases India’s prestige worldwide, improves the army’s morale and believes in vikas for all.
And ah, one more thing, which is the note that Jha ends his chapter on: “The two (BJP and the Sangh) remain integrated in their quest for Hindu unity, and Hindu rule.”
Five: Hindus vs Muslims
At one point in the book, Jha is in the Lucknow office of the BJP – 800 Whatsapp groups are run from there, by the way – and tells a party leader that much of the news they spread about Muslim atrocities is fake. The reply:
Bhai saheb, that does not matter. The point is to show we are the victims. This will get Hindus angry. They will then realise they have to unite against the Muslims.
This is party strategy, and I wonder whether it reflects the bigotry of the party, or an amoral supplier’s response to the bigotry that exists in his marketplace – society itself. Jha doesn’t address this – it is a feature of the book, not a bug, that he doesn’t get side-tracked by digressions – and he lays out many of the ways in which the BJP is trying not just to bring disparate castes together, but to eventually construct a unified Hindu vote. And the way to do this is by demonising the other – the Muslims of India.
Some of this messaging is direct and to the point, as in the case of Love Jihad, Kabristan-Shamshaan and KASAB (the Congress [KA], Samajwadi party [SA] and Bahujan Samaj Party [B], their enemies in UP). Some of it is via proxies, such as the Anti-Romeo squads (“actually the Anti-Salman Squad”) and the gauraksha rhetoric, which hit out at Muslim livelihoods. All of it is meant to construct a simplistic Hindu-Muslim binary, and thus consolidate the Hindu vote.
It has worked. Jha writes of how a newly elected BJP MLA from UP explained his victory: “It was an India-Pakistan election.”
The Challenge Ahead
Jha ends his book with chapters on the BJP’s spread beyond North India and musings on its future. The key challenge before the BJP is this: their expanded electoral base means that they now represent multitudes, and contain contradictions. How long can the BJP claim to represent the interests of such a diverse collection of people? Surely at some point, something will give.
The largeness of the BJP’s social coalition holds an opportunity for the opposition, which is blowing it. Here’s what Jha writes about Rahul Gandhi (early in the book, and not in this context):
Rahul Gandhi did not appeal to the Lucknow Bania, he did not appeal to the Gorakhpur Thakur, he did not appeal to the Moradabad Dalit, he did not appeal to the Bundelkhand Brahman, he did not appeal to the Allahabad Kushwaha, he did not appeal to the Muzaffarnagar Jat, he did not appeal to the Saharanpur Saini. He did not appeal to the rich trader, he did not appeal to the middle-class teacher, he did not appeal to the young man who works as a taxi driver in Delhi and had returned home to vote, he did not appeal to the farmer with marginal landholdings, he did not appeal to the woman who was below the poverty line, he did not appeal to a college student now ready for the job market.
In other words, Gandhi is the opposite of Modi, diminishing the Congress as much as Modi and Shah have grown the BJP. Things change very fast in politics, of course, and nothing can be taken for granted. The BJP can be beaten – but before that, one must understand how they won to begin with. Jha’s book is an excellent guide.
Here’s a thought…
While reading Jha’s book, I was filled with awe for the BJP’s election machine. And it struck me, what if Modi and Shah put as much effort into governance as they do into campaigning? This country would be transformed. But they won’t – and it’s worth reflecting on why that is the case.
This is the 45th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.
NO AADHAAR
A friend told me, “You need Aadhaar, mate,
If you want a death certificate.
You just can’t get away.”
I jumped and said, “Hurray!
I will live forever at this rate.”
MISHTAKE
Sushmaji told Modi, “What a scam!
How could you gift away our Doklam?”
Modi said, “Galti se,
I just gave it away.
I thought they wanted dhokla. Goddamn!”
This editorial by me appeared today in Pragati.
Many of the intellectuals who supported Narendra Modi in 2014 should have realised their mistake by now. They haven’t. Here is why.
Almost a century ago, Vladimir Lenin is said to have coined the term ‘Useful Idiots.’ The term referred to those intellectuals or eminent people who gave a movement respectability by association, but weren’t actually respected within the movement itself. RationalWiki defines a Useful Idiot as “someone who supports one side of an ideological debate, but who is manipulated and held in contempt by the leaders of their faction or is unaware of the ultimate agenda driving the ideology to which they subscribe.”
If this sounds familiar, it should. Useful Idiots abounded in Lenin and Stalin’s time – many were sent to the Gulag once their utility diminished – and authoritarian despots since, from Hitler to Mao to Chavez – have had their own set. And of course, if you live in India in 2017, there are Useful Idiots here as well.
I want to make it clear that I am not referring to any of the people I mention in this essay as idiots. I will use the term ‘Useful Idiot’ only in the sense outlined above. Some of the Useful Idiots that will come to mind are accomplished individuals, even giants of their field, and their behaviour is as much poignant as it is deplorable. Some of them are people I admired or liked, and as I look at them, it strikes me that in a parallel universe, I could be in their shoes. We are all frail.
Act 1: The Longing for Better Days
When Narendra Modi spoke of Achhe Din, it had enormous resonance for many people. Here are things reasonable people can agree on: India had been ravaged by over six decades of mostly Congress rule; the bad economic policies of Nehru (otherwise a great leader) and Indira had kept us in poverty for decades longer than we should have; government was basically a mafia, and we were ruled by a kleptocracy rather than served by public-spirited statesmen; the ‘liberalisation’ of 1991, forced upon us by a balance-of-payments crisis, had helped but only a little, as many reforms remained to be done; the current dispensation did not show the will to make reforms; the people of India languished as a parasitic beast called government sucked us dry.
In every tunnel, the eye searches for light. It was easy to be seduced by Modi’s rhetoric. (Much of that rhetoric – ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’ – came from outside intellectuals, and not inner conviction.) It was tempting to give him the benefit of the doubt for the riots of 2002 – after all, it is a liberal principle that a man is innocent until pronounced guilty. It was tempting to see him as the messiah.
I am not saying that the beliefs above are correct. (I myself did not hold them, and was undecided.) I am saying that they are reasonable. It was reasonable to look at 67 years of opportunity cost and ask, What could be worse? It was reasonable to look at the derelict UPA government and ask, What could be worse? I would even say that it was reasonable to recognise that things could indeed be worse under Modi, but consider it a chance worth taking.
With the benefit of hindsight, I feel it is unfair to gloat about the people who got this wrong, as they clearly did. Anyone can be wrong once. But to be wrong repeatedly, when all the facts are before you, when the stakes are so high, is unpardonable.
Many of those who supported Modi did so assuming that the social wing of the Hindutva movement would be kept in check while long-awaited economic reforms would happen. The eminent economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya voiced their support of Modi. (Their books contain an excellent diagnosis of India’s condition, as well as a road map for the future.) Many people on the ‘economic right’ (more on this phraseology later) walked into his camp. Modi got a resounding victory, and had the mandate he needed to carry out sweeping changes. He did nothing.
Act 2: Mugged by Reality
I outlined, in a keynote speech I gave a few months ago, all the evident failings of Modi’s government since 2014. I don’t want to spend too much time on them, so a brief summary: no reforms; a move leftwards to a Nehruvian command-and-control view of the economy; a continuation (and even expansion) of most of the flawed schemes of the previous government, often with fancy name changes; maximum government, minimum governance; a rollout of GST, which they had earlier opposed, with so many slabs and exemptions that it was a wet dream for those hoping for another Inspector Raj; demonetisation.
And that’s just the economics. (Saffron is the New Red.) At home, Modi mishandled Kashmir, with violence escalating. And the social wing of the Hindutva Project that he clearly believes in is tearing Indian society apart. Quips about it being safer to be a cow than a woman have become a cliché.
As Arun Shourie famously said, NDA = UPA + Cow.
Many who had supported Modi in 2014 now realised that their optimism was misplaced and the worst-case-scenario was unfolding. Public intellectuals like Sadanand Dhume deserve credit for changing their mind when they were mugged by reality, and for having the intellectual honesty to continue to speak truth to power. But many did not.
Demonetisation (or DeMon) was described by a friend of mine as a litmus test that revealed which intellectuals cared about their principles, and which just wanted proximity to power. DeMon, on which I published many pieces, was the largest assault on property rights in the history of humanity. It led to people dying in queues, businesses shutting down, livelihoods being decimated. There was no way any of its goals could be achieved, and there was no way taking 86% of the money supply out of circulation would fail to devastate the economy. All this was evident from the start. Any economist who supported DeMon lacked either intelligence or integrity. I don’t even know which is the charitable explanation.
Modi is a master of optics, and controlled the narrative to actually make short-terms gains from DeMon. But it was worrying and depressing that so many people who should know better continued in their steadfast support of him. Why did they do so? I posit four reasons.
Act 3: Living in Denial
Here are four possible reasons why these Useful Idiots continued to stay Idiots.
One: Rationalisation
These Useful Idiots, having gone public with their support of Modi, had their reputations and self-esteem at threat. They could not simply change their minds. Also, they badly wanted to be right. So they rationalised away Modi’s inaction. When he did not reform, they called it ‘gradualism’, and pretended that change necessarily had to happen slowly. Let him settle in. Give him time. The political economy is complicated. And so on, despite the fact that the man wasn’t even trying.
Confirmation bias also kicked in. Every time he said something they wanted to hear, they clapped vociferously. Every time he did something they would have condemned under previous administrations, they stayed silent. Every time violence erupted against Muslims or Dalits or anyone near a cow, they blamed it on ‘fringe elements.’ They could rationalise everything until DeMon. But how could they continue to do so after that?
Two: The Carrot
The Patronage Economy swung into place after Modi came to power. Ignore the rumours about the BJP’s IT cell having prominent people on their payroll. There were enough legitimate ways to reward cronies. Rajya Sabha seats, Padma Awards, sinecures at government institutions, lucrative directorships in PSUs, seats in the Niti Aayog, and so on. I bought a recent issue of a magazine that supports the BJP, and most of the advertisements inside were by PSUs. Their editor keeps writing in praise of free markets, but is no more than a parasite living off taxpayers’ money. The irony.
To pre-empt the inevitable Whataboutery, let me agree that such a Patronage Economy existed for decades under the Congress as well. But the honourable thing to do then is to dismantle it once and for all. Instead: jobs for the boys!
Three: The Stick
This government is vindictive, and it appears that it will remain in power for a long time. Who would want to mess around? I know of two free-market supporters in Niti Aayog (not Panagariya) who were appalled by DeMon. But they were given orders to support it publicly. Both of them did so, in ways that would make you cringe. Indeed, friends from within the establishment have told me that those orders were given to all their Useful Idiots. Silence was not an option. Even the previously venerable Jagdish Bhagwati debased himself. (In his case, it could have been any of the above three factors. Does it matter which?)
There were Useful Idiots who had spent their lives on the periphery, dreaming of power. Now that they were establishment intellectuals, why would they risk losing that position? For the sake of principles and truth? Come on!
Four: The Lust For Power
For some of us, power is the means to an end. For others, it is an end in itself. Everything you do to get there is a façade. I have been stunned and saddened over the last few months to see how so many people I knew have been transformed by proximity to power. These Useful Idiots never actually believed in anything: their principles were all Useful Principles. Once close to power, they discarded these principles; just as their masters will one day discard them.
A friend I respect told me a few months ago, “Amit, the economic right must ally with the social right. Then we will be an unbeatable force.” I disagreed. Although ‘right’ and ‘left’ are now useless terms, I’d fall into the economic right because I support free markets. I support free markets because I support individual freedom. And individual freedom is incompatible with the agenda of the social right – which, in India, basically means bigots and misogynists. I told my friend that he was wrong, and that people like him would merely give respectability to this ‘social right’, which would eventually spit them out like paan on the roadside. That process has begun.
Arvind Panagariya left Niti Aayog recently, reportedly under pressure from the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, his reputation in shreds. Modi and gang have consolidated their political capital, and no longer need these Useful Idiots. These Useful Idiots will rationalise, will enjoy the trappings of power and money, and will be cautious about pissing off The Supreme Leader. They may even sleep well at night, for self-delusion is the essential human attribute.
I feel sad for what they have done to themselves. But I feel sadder for what is happening to this country.
*
Also read
Saffron is the New Red —Amit Varma and Barun Mitra
The Landscape of Freedom in India—Amit Varma
