We are informed that the Modi government is preparing a campaign to spend hundreds of crores on a publicity blitzkrieg to be inflicted on the nation next month to mark their completion of one year in office. Vajpayee took five years to cover his government in mockery with his India Shining blast. This government is readying itself within 365 days to present its Modi Shining moment.
Before we are all knocked senseless by high-pitched, front-page, full-page ads and self-laudatory ditties on television and radio, it might be best if we were to put on the protective armour of cool good sense to evaluate the Year That Was. First, the good news. The worst has not happened, not yet. Unlike the Third Reich, democracy has withstood Modi. Secularism holds. Parliamentary institutions continue, even if rarely visited by Modi. The press is still free even if NGOs critical of government are being bullied. The judiciary remains in place. Notwithstanding Modi and the BJP-sangh parivar, we continue to be the India of Gandhi and Nehru.
So long as the essential Idea of India remains undisturbed, we might yet survive the next four years. But survive we will only if we do not let complacency lull our antennae to quietude. But what else is there to celebrate?
Illustration: Bhaskaran
The economy is being fed slogans, not growth, and certainly not social justice. While statisticians construct a fantasy of soaring growth rates set to overtake China, 60 per cent of India’s people living in rural India have suffered just 1.1 per cent growth in agriculture in Modi’s first year. Not only is agriculture the most neglected segment of the economy, but it is also the most denigrated. Instead of the government addressing questions of yield and productivity, affordable inputs and intensified extension work, the claim is made that since the Indian farmer does not find agriculture remunerative, the solution lies in depriving him forcibly of his land. The BJP, and Arun Jaitley in particular, are conjuring up dreams of 300 million jobs in industrial corridors piercing through precious farmland, rendering at least 300 million unemployed by capturing the land that employs and feeds them.
Also, the BJP’s prioritisation of rural empowerment and participatory democracy is dramatically revealed in Jaitley slashing the budget allocation for the ministry of panchayati raj from more than Rs7,000 crore to merely Rs94 crore.
This contempt for the aam aadmi is reflective of the authoritarianism that marks the Modi style of governance. Almost every single economic ministry is deliberately placed under a minister of state, not a cabinet minister, so that Modi might take all crucial decisions. Indeed, the cabinet secretariat’s circular on the allocation of business makes it explicit that all policy matters are the personal fiefdom of the prime minister. He is his government’s hegemony.
On many matters, the cabinet is bypassed. Cabinet committees are ignored at will. Photographs show ministers cringing at his feet while he lords it over them from a raised chair, burnished like a throne. Bureaucrats have been threatened into quiescence, with the result that files are not put up at all or left mouldering in the vaults of the PMO while the PM indulges his penchant for taking off on yet another trip to exotic destinations.
Meanwhile, Modi’s core support is not overawed. It is they who made him PM. It is they who intend to control his government. It is they who demand to be satisfied. Failing which a swift Night of the Long Knives awaits their nominal leader. This is the lunatic fringe of the sangh parivar, well represented in the government by the likes of Sadhvi Jyoti and Giriraj Singh. Behind them on the back benches are the likes of Yogi Adityanath and Vinay Katiyar. In the wider world, there are Praveen Togadia and Mohan Bhagwat. In the wings are encounter experts. It is from their ranks that Modi has risen. He is one of them. He is beholden to them. Their achche din have come. Ours are awaiting the denouement.
Aiyar, a former Union minister, is an MP and social commentator.