The performance of a government is normally the sole parameter to know its success and failure. But there are occasions in the history of a nation when transformation of power comes with larger messages and expectations to fulfil the historically suppressed plurality of demands.
World leaders like Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa or Lula da Silva played their role in different forms but accomplished the historical task in their respective countries.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s seven years in power is suffused with significance in the history of India. That is a reason why debates not only in India but also outside, particularly in the western world, revolve around him with strong likes and dislikes. A strong leader with conviction to transform socio-cultural realities, marches on undermining fierce and bitter controversies which hung around him. Modi is doing so.
Commonly, cultural and social issues are predominantly tagged with a leader with a background of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The BJP’s advent in power led by Modi in 2014 broke the continuity of the old regime based on the Nehruvian idea of nationalism and secularism. It caused consternation among a powerful section of intelligentsia in India and their historic collaborators in the West. They keep ferreting out even a micro-opportunity to denounce, demean and above all demonise Modi as a fascist leader. The western newspapers like The New York Times and London-based medical journal Lancet lead such a chorus.
What Modi has done and undone which is keeping their furiousness undiminished since 2014? The radical postures on certain socio-cultural and constitutional backlogs marked the break from old politics and posture of, what Gunnar Myrdal called, ‘soft state’. It overruled orthodox and patriarchal veto of the Muslims on gender equality by framing law on `triple talaq’ which promotes gender equality. Does it discriminate Muslim minority in India?
The persecution of religious minorities has been a concern of liberals all over the world ever since World War II. Nehru’s ‘secular’ India had been a silent spectator for decades when minorities in its neighbouring countries, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, faced extreme coercion in the forms of killings, rape, conversions by the state and the Islamists. A law was framed to give them citizenship in India. How is it against any community is beyond comprehension.
No country protects its culture, developmental process and demography by allowing unaudited intentional capital from dubious sources to be used by their comprador NGOs. Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh first realised and took selective actions, which, however, were insufficient to curb them.
Modi did it in absolute terms. And lastly, Article 370, which was essentialised by old secular ideologues and successive governments as epitome of national integration, was abolished by the new regime causing pain to Pakistan and NYT more than Kashmiri Muslims. It is an ideological shift from the soft state to hard state. Logic of support or opposition requires empirical evidence. There has been a history of fierce and baseless opposition of the government in democracies but Indian opposition has never been wicked as it is today.
It is more obvious in the campaign against the government, particularly Modi, on Covid-19. The Congress quotes Lancet editorial to corner the Prime Minister for his alleged failure during the critical hours of the second wave. It signifies both its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. The journal, which blamed Modi, carries anti-India and pro-China sentiments for the last two decades. The medical journal criticised the government for abolition of Article 370 in its editorial on August 17, 2019 and supported China’s the Belt and Road Initiative which meant to control 75 energy resources of 65 countries as a golden global opportunity in its editorial on April 6, 2019.
Moreover, it used valuable space to give clean chit to China on coronavirus and consistently pleaded for cooperation with it. Indian opposition parties are perhaps oblivious to the fact that besides pro-Chinese inclination of its Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, the magazine’s Asia editor is Beijing-based Helena Hui Wang. It is these elements who manufactured social conflicts and campaigned that India under Modi had drifted from constitutionalism, liberalism and secularism. These intellectuals are what Irving Howe wrote of the 19th-century utopian socialists: “isolated critics without a social base.”
Value of democracy
Moreover, a political regime’s success depends on the expansion of the value of democracy in the economic field. Nehruvian regimes rhetorically constituted people and the economic democracy was confined to some populist measures for lower middle class excluding millions marginalised. Many slogans like socialistic pattern of society, democratic socialism, welfare state and growth with justice, had been raised to manipulate public opinion.
Modi transformed the governance from perception-based to precision-based by expansions of shared prosperity to the last man through programmes such as Jan Dhan Yojana, Aayushman Bharat, Ujjwala, rural electrification, toilets etc. The lost decades of the Nehruvian regime had left the political economy in lurch. It is true that neo-liberalism is dominating the world’s economic advancement and it is being contradicted by socio-economic upheavals whether Latin America or the western world. There is definitely a need to amend it. `Pink tide’ (left ascendency) in Latin America failed to face neo-liberalism.
Modi transformed the political economy by moralising the process. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is a major tool which was needed to break the unhealthy alliance between banks and corporates. More than Rs 2 lakh crore were recovered and around three lakh shell companies used for largely unethical practices were closed down. Had such steps been taken by Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi, the intellectuals would have celebrated them as a messiah of moral state and downtrodden.
In contrast to them, Modi lacks support of intellectuals who could theorise government’s programmes and advance narratives. Even the institutions such as Niti Aayog have failed to mobilise talent and remain merely a body basically documenting statistics and publishing pamphlets. Whenever a leader from any ‘third world’ country emerges on the international horizon, the task of backroom intellectuals and policy makers becomes more critical by forecasting opportunistic counter reactions of dominant forces.
Both powerful nationalists as well as leaders with Left leanings of Asia, Africa and Latin America have been victims of western propaganda and perceptions. Modi is no exception. But his fortitude and firmness of spirit does not allow him to be unduly discouraged or wearied by the politics of perception and propaganda.
The ideology which he owns and practices poses bigger challenge and opportunity to lift India from the state of mendicancy to a powerful nation based on its knowledge, tradition and self-reliance. He has unequivocally proved himself a transformer and India’s cultural and economic strength are now more visible and impactful than ever in its post independent history.
(The writer is a nominated member of Rajya Sabha)