No quick-fix for leadership change in government

Prime Minister Modi remains unassailable either from within the BJP or outside it, even though today his popularity may have taken a beating.

It is unrealistic to think that a trending hashtag #Resign Modi would actually lead to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ouster. While social media may have helped his rise to power, it will certainly not pressure him to quit.

Criticism of the government’s inept handling of the pandemic’s second wave has come from both national and international media. Surprisingly, critical articles have also been written by analysts from corporate sponsored and right-wing think tanks. Only a year ago it would have been unthinkable that they would accuse the government of “hubris”, that leaders “wilfully led their people into disaster” or that “this government was elected for its marketing” but “in a deadly pandemic marketing is not enough”.

Even a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideologue and party leader like Ram Madhav has publicly admitted that the government’s handling of the second wave has “come under severe criticism”. Of course, as a party loyalist, he attributed this to “the high expectations” people had of Prime Minister Modi. Nevertheless he concluded, the government “should take this criticism in the right spirit” and that the “way forward is not hyper-centralisation, but ‘cooperative federalism’”.

Too much should not be read into this soft criticism from “within”. It is as unlikely to shift the leadership’s stance as social activist Arundhati Roy’s passionate plea for the prime minister to resign, “I, an ordinary private citizen, am swallowing my pride to join millions of my fellow citizens in saying please sir, please, step aside. At least for now. I beseech you, step down.”

It is reminiscent of Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament in 1653, “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” However, her plea unlike Cromwell’s does not come from a position of strength. As of now there is no instrument to effect a political change.

There are those who pin their hope on what they consider to the power behind the throne, the grey eminences of the RSS. But why would the RSS act against its favourite son? Moreover, the equation between the RSS and its political front, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has changed. Today, Prime Minister Modi, a man the RSS produced, has become bigger than the parent organisation.

There was a time when it was rare for a BJP candidate to win unless the RSS cadre put its weight behind him or her. Candidates would fall at the feet of RSS pracharaks and other RSS bigwigs to support their candidature. In places where the BJP party organisation was weak it was the RSS that delivered a local machinery for elections. Now, it is Prime Minister Modi who delivers the election to a candidate or even an entire government to the party. In several North-eastern states of India--he, along with Home Minister Amit Shah, have been able to produce a government virtually out of thin air. He has taken the party to areas and regions where the RSS had an insignificant or token presence.

It is the RSS which gains material benefits, status and employment opportunities from Prime Minister Modi. Every BJP minister in government today has an RSS appointee in his office. Semi-autonomous and autonomous bodies, where the government’s discretion plays a role, are manned by RSS men. One only has to go through the list of state Governors to see that barring a few exceptions, they have come out of the RSS family of organisations. Why else would ideologically oriented nobodies, with no record of political or public service, be sent to the Raj Bhavans? The list of Governors in this regime includes virtually unknown faces like Ganeshi Lal (Odisha), Satyanarayan Arya (Haryana), Acharya Dev Vrat (Gujarat) and Ganga Prasad (Sikkim). Others, now retired, included Tathagat Roy, V. Shanmuganathan and Balram Das Tandon, among others. Prime Minister Modi’s commitment to the RSS is therefore unquestionable. Today the RSS draws strength from him and expecting it to take him to task on governance lapses is out of the question.

If the RSS is too weak can the party itself be expected to effect a change in government leadership? Unlikely. Like the RSS, BJP leaders too depend on Prime Minister Modi’s favours and know their limitations. In the past too L K Advani, despite being an icon of the Ram Temple movement, ultimately recognised his limitations as a vote getter and gave way to Atal Bihari Vajpayee who brought more to the electoral table. However, even Vajpayee’s public oratory could not take the BJP beyond 181 seats in the Lok Sabha. Today the BJP has in Modi, a leader who has taken it to an unimagined 303 seats. Who can challenge him and still win elections on this scale for the party? A Nitin Gadkari, a Rajanth Singh or a Yogi Adityanath? Prime Minister Modi, therefore, remains unassailable either from within the BJP or outside it, even though today his popularity may have taken a beating.

Barring the unforeseen, his fate, will be decided by the people at the hustings. Trying to fix the current system by patching it up with a replacement leader will only prolong the erosion of the Indian polity at the hands of people driven by the same majoritarian ideology as Prime Minister Modi.

India will eventually emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic with the efforts of its citizens and civil society organisation -- and despite its moth-eaten, half-functioning healthcare system and legal institutions. The bunch of leaders at the helm today need to be fully exposed and ousted by the people consciously voting against their politics of hate, their incompetent governance and their obscurantism. Any hope that a change of leadership will bring better days is as futile as the Chief Minister of UP ordering scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur to find ways of converting Nitrogen into Oxygen!