The most disheartening aspect of Arnab Goswami’s interview with Narendra Modi was not the soft questions, nor the lack of probing follow-ups, for I expected no better from Goswami. It was the inability of the prime minister to produce a cogent defence of his government’s policies or a persuasive sketch of its achievements.
If you bowl a series of waist-high full tosses to a striker and he fails to smack a single one to the boundary, his ability as a batsman must be called into question. Since Modi’s communication skills are well established, the absurdly high platitude quotient in his responses (the world has changed, blah blah, interdependence yadayada) can only be explained by his having nothing substantive to project. Seeking a few grains in the chaff, the media highlighted his defence of Raghuram Rajan, though it had arrived with all the alacrity of the Gujarat police’s riot response in 2002.
The Modi government’s motto seems to be to aim low and claim high. Instead of keeping up the pressure for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat, it made a lot of noise about entry to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, which would have provided meagre benefits. In the event, the canny Eleven Xinping thwarted even that tiny victory. What use those visas denied to Chinese dissidents?
Or take the new civil aviation policy proclaimed a “game changer” by the minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju. It tweaked the criteria for airlines to fly abroad and introduced dubious price controls and cross subsidies, while completely ignoring the white elephant named Air India squatting on the minister’s desk. Hey, oil prices are low, let’s kick the can forward on fundamental problems and hype minor adjustments.
The path to power
Modi was elected on three promises: overhauling the mechanisms of governance, reshaping the economy, and promoting the majority religion. While the Bharatiya Janata Party's reform programme resembles railway minister Suresh Prabhu nodding off while performing an asana on Yoga Day, its communal plan is like the hairy Baba Ramdev (a man who can’t cure his own strabismus but promises to heal other peoples’ cancers) enthusiastically performing jumping jacks on stage the same day, no doubt exactly as Patanjali did 5,000 years ago, or maybe ten.
The BJP’s cosmopolitan supporters downplayed the religious aspect of its election rhetoric as a mere propaganda tool unconnected with its pragmatic goals, but now the reverse appears more accurate. The party’s promise of economic and political reform was disinformation designed to woo mainstream media and influential liberal commentators, while its deep commitment was to Hindutva as it always has been.
From appointing patently unqualified acolytes as heads of renowned institutions, to changing school text books to reflect its sectarian vision of history, to engendering conflicts using the holy cow as proxy, the party’s enthusiasm in exploiting wedge issues contrasts glaringly with its timidity in reform. The imbalance is bound to grow as citizens more attuned to their lived experience than massaged GDP growth figures become disenchanted with the regime. I fear it could spiral into the worst iteration of the nine-year curse to date.
Let me describe the curse. The Indian economy and polity appear to run in nine-year cycles, reaching a crisis point at the end of each period. An inflammable mix of falling growth, high unemployment and social tensions lead to an outbreak of violence on a large scale every nine years, with one region of the nation often becoming a focal point of tension, and a minority community bearing the brunt of the pain.
Looking back
The year 1965-'66 had many of the elements needed for the curse to take effect, with India reeling under food shortages and a recession, but perhaps the India-Pakistan war served as a counter balance to internal tensions. In 1974-'75, we were less lucky. A civil disobedience movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan undermined Indira Gandhi’s rule, and she responded by clamping down on civil liberties and unleashing the worst attack on individual liberties in India’s independent history. Her younger son Sanjay Gandhi, the most unsuitable and unqualified person ever to wield great power in India, a man openly contemptuous of democracy and democratic institutions, launched a dreadfully misguided family planning programme that targeted poor people and Muslims for forced sterilisation.
In 1983 and 1984, sectarian violence and terrorism gripped Assam and Punjab. It climaxed with Indira Gandhi’s assassination and a pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi. Nine years later, militant Hindu anger fixated on the Babri Masjid. In the wake of the mosque’s demolition, violence broke out in many parts of the country. The most explosive bout of rioting occurred in early 1993 in Bombay, with Muslims the targets and members of the local chauvinist party, the Shiv Sena, the main perpetrators.
Nine years later, Narendra Modi’s Gujarat became the laboratory of militant Hindutva and Muslims again faced Hindu wrath, condoned and probably channelised by state machinery. In 2010, anger at the ruling Congress party’s corruption, exemplified by the hash it made in preparing for the Commonwealth Games, fed a new civil disobedience movement headed by Anna Hazare, which took hold of Delhi the following year.
If we didn’t see the same kind of violence that we had in previous decades, it was partly because of the largely Gandhian nature of the anti-corruption movement, partly because Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, a more sensible pair than Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, handled the protesters with kid gloves, and partly because India had enjoyed eight years of unprecedented economic growth and dropping poverty levels.
Next round
The curse is due to return in 2019-'20. Should Modi’s Make in India campaign become something more than the empty slogan it currently is, we might stave off its worst effects as we did in 2011, but a brief glance at the world around us should keep us from complacency. We often speak of India as two nations, but the rise of Donald Trump and the Brexit election indicate that the US and England also have two nations in their midst. The uneven development spurred by globalisation is obviously a greater threat than ever. The Patel and Jat riots of the past year provide a foretaste of what might come if the Modi government continues to cut social programmes and unemployment keeps rising.
One country seemed to have squared the circle by embracing the opportunities of globalisation while also creating an increasingly equitable society, and that was Brazil five years ago. Its newly elected President Dilma Rousseff was an inspirational figure who had survived torture by security forces during the dictatorship. With the FIFA World Cup and Olympics to look forward to, Brazil was the envy of the developing world. Then everything went horribly wrong, the economy fell into recession, Rousseff was impeached, and her administration replaced by a bunch of reactionaries, many of whom face corruption charges. Add the Zika scare to the mix and you have a picture of Brazil today almost unimaginable five years ago.
I hope we don’t see a downturn of Brazilian proportions. Our economies are very different and good arguments can be made that India is on very stable ground. On the other hand, how many people predicted the meltdown of 2008? How many surprises and shocks elsewhere in the world will it take for us to believe it could happen to us? In states like Uttar Pradesh, Sangh Parivar activists are infecting every village and small town with the virus of hatred.
As the next election approaches, Narendra Modi might find he cannot win on a positive platform of development, governmental reform and anti-corruption. He will be left with one dangerous weapon, and if he and his troops wield it effectively we could face a communal conflagration that dwarfs 2002, 1993, and 1984.