T N Ninan: Not always soft

With Modi govt, we may be seeing India willing to adopt hard stances more often than before, even if this new approach is selectively applied

Half a century ago, the Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal penned the three-volume Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. In this magnum opus, he called India a “soft state”, a term that encapsulated the “indiscipline” reflected in poor respect for the law by the police (broadly defined) as well as the policed, and the collusion of public officials with the big and powerful. You could say, for instance, that the soft state was unable to enforce land reform legislation. Myrdal and subsequently others have argued that low respect for the law (from the point of both observance and enforcement) flowed partly from a freedom movement that had involved deliberately defying the law.

This inherited attitude — that the law is some kind of colonial imposition which must be resisted, ignored, or by-passed — finds current reflection in students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who had disrupted a university meeting, objecting to the university’s insistence that they pay a fine for their misconduct. In other parliaments, a member speaking out of turn can get thrown out of the house; here the opposition protests when the Speaker takes such action against even those who have flouted all parliamentary norms of conduct.

But with the Narendra Modi government, we may be seeing the Indian state willing to adopt hard stances more often than before, even if this new approach is only selectively applied. A case in point is the troubled state of Jammu & Kashmir, with everyone from Yashwant Sinha downwards suggesting in the last few months that the Centre reach out to the people of the state in order to address what was generally seen as a new level of alienation. Not only has the Modi government ignored this widely-proffered advice, it has gone on the offensive by attacking separatist leaders on a vulnerable point: The source of their funding, which everyone has long known is Pakistan. The battle has been taken to the separatists.

The border stand-off at Doklam may be a second example of the new refusal to play the soft card. With the army having moved pre-emptively into a position of advantage in that narrow piece of territory, India has refused to back off despite heavy shelling by the Chinese media. This follows the tough posture adopted on the Belt and Road, and the persistence in pushing other agenda items like Indian membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in the face of clear Chinese opposition. The Chinese are being given the message that India does not want conflict but is not so timid that it will not pursue its interests. The last time such a message was given quite so bluntly was probably in 1986 at Sumdorongchu, by a flamboyant Gen K Sundarji.

The Modi government’s multi-faceted attack on corruption is a third example of the state deciding that it won’t be soft any longer. The targeting of the Lalu clan and other opposition politicians has a questionable selectivity, but a slew of initiatives linked to demonetisation, Aadhaar, the goods and services tax, and the new bankruptcy law have a common underlying thread: The law must be respected, and those who flout it will pay a price. The message about the new toughness has gone home in at least some circles, and finds reflection in the sharp surge in the number of people paying income tax (from 36 million reported earlier to 60 million now), as well as the reduced amount of Indian money in Swiss bank accounts.

The problem with this attempt at being less of a soft state is that the approach is strictly selective. The long arm of the law has not reached out so far to anyone aligned with the ruling establishment, in the way that critics and those in the opposition have been delivered hammer-blows. Besides, the encouragement given to vigilante groups to take the law into their own hands runs directly counter to the respect for the law that is being enforced in other spheres. The difference between a putative autocracy and a purely rule-based system is precisely such selectiveness, which operates in one and not the other.