It’s natural to feel lost when flooded with an enormous amount of information churned out by various entities on a daily basis. Apart from the lack of context, this feeling of loss is translated into distinct anxiety when the information pertains to the changing character of a democratic country. Hate speeches and communal dog-whistling by elected leaders, violence, rash policy decisions, and a crackdown on dissent and opponents have almost become normalised in India.
Many link these changes to the ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014. In the past nine years, the party has cemented its control – albeit through controversial means at times – on the psyche of India. Observers feel it’s likely to retain power for a long time to come.
How and what has changed in India in the last nine years?
Well-known political economist and social commentator Parakala Prabhakar tries to answer just this question in his new book, The Crooked Timber of New India. In his view, as the subtitle of the book notes, the Indian Republic is in a “crisis”. This situation, Prabhakar feels, will not end even with the electoral defeat of the Narendra Modi-and-Amit Shah-led BJP.
Indeed, even if though the book concerns itself directly with only the past nine years of the NDA government, its insights throw up a deeply alarming future for India. The book is a barometer to measure India’s trajectory towards being an illiberal democracy. The greater challenge, Prabhakar underlines, is “to excise from the minds of a significantly large, vocal, influential section of our people the toxic and ill-founded belief that India belongs to people of only one religion and the rest should content themselves with being second-class citizens.” Unfortunately, he adds, the political forces who believe in the secular and democratic ideals of India, “simply don’t grasp this”.
‘Silence is not an option’
Opportunism has always been an ingredient of politics. But to Prabhakar, the “real and grave danger”, is the propensity of some political forces in India to strike a “Faustian bargain” with the Hindutva project rather than directly confronting it. That’s why, the author feels, “silence is not an option.” Originally written for his video blog Midweek Matters between 2020 and 2022, Prabhakar’s essays interrogate a wide range of issues in contemporary India that have become more critical since 2014.
From Modi’s rhetoric to the debates on the hijab and saffron scarf, Prabhakar’s choice of issues to write about isn’t really unique. Even though the book borders on anti-BJP rhetoric at times, it’s Prabhakar’s grasp of data and statistics that really make his essays engaging. More important, the craft of interpreting small data to contextualise it within the larger Hindutva project echoes Prabhakar’s experience.
A doctorate from the London School of Economics and an alumnus of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prabhakar uses his knowledge of India’s economic situation, unemployment, poverty, and population dynamics to effectively create an anti-propaganda handbook. Armed with an easy-to-grasp framework of data analysis for anyone who wants comprehensive and sharp insights into understanding some of the ailing sectors of the Indian economy, Prabhakar’s book simply can’t be ignored today. The writer is troubled by the Modi government’s decision to withhold important data in fields like poverty and unemployment. Worryingly, he points out, India’s data integrity has been compromised under the current regime.
Ignorant opposition
Coming as they do from someone who belongs to a political family and is married to India’s current finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and has tried his hand at electoral politics, although without any success, Prabhakar’s insights about contemporary Indian politics are worthy of attention.
In his view, the opposition’s failure to challenge the BJP is a “long, consistent failure of vision, strategy, and energy.” In comparison to the hard work and determination shown by the proponents of the Hindutva project, Prabhakar says “political forces which are ranged against the majoritarian project, however, have never worked as hard, with as clear and ideology or even half as much conviction”. For opposition parties, political work has been synonymous with election campaigns and sleepwalking from election to election, with “no committee-focused, ideological work in the interval.”
He also feels viewing the current government as though it is just like previous governments in India is an “illusion.” The fight is not merely electoral, Prabhakar emphasises. “It’s cultural, political, psychological, religious, and social.” Therefore, even if the opposition manages to win the elections, it would be meaningless without what he calls “full-scale head-on, deep and long-term engagement” to “exorcise the Hindu-Hindutva identity project from our body politic”.
A post-mortem of India’s Covid-19 response
The book’s longest and perhaps most scathing chapter deals with India’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which left more than five lakh people dead in India, many of them due to the lack of basic hospitalisation facilities. From turning the vaccination doses per day into a public relation exercise for the government to the complacency shown by politicians in holding election rallies while the pandemic was raging, the chapter offers a damning portrait of the union government’s response to Covid-19.
Using comparative data from other countries in terms of vaccination, policies, and public inquiries ordered to ensure accountability for failures by the government, Prabhakar’s analysis paints a very grim picture of the ruling dispensation which, even if we were to put it mildly, reeks of indifference and horrifying apathy towards its people. After studying his analysis, there can be no doubt that things could have panned out in a better way in the country. Put simply, many lives could have been saved.
Given his training as a senior political economist and someone who has worked in the administrative capacity of a policy advisor, one wonders if Prabhakar should have touched on more topics in his book. One of the key additions could have been a chapter on the political economy of Jammu and Kashmir before the August 2019 scrapping of the erstwhile state’s special status conferred by Article 370. While one of the arguments peddled by the BJP to justify the decision was to ensure “development” in Jammu and Kashmir, a dispassionate analysis of various indices clearly reveals that the erstwhile state was much better off than various other states of the country despite having a special status. Perhaps Prabhakar could have had more surprises in store for the people of India on the actual facts about Jammu and Kashmir.
The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis, Parakala Prabhakar, Speaking Tiger Books.