The discovery of Modi's India

Narendra Modi's is not a picture of a leader concerned about the well-being of the country he governs but of fulfilling a personal and political agenda in spite of it

All of a sudden, the vast sprawl of Hindu middle class India, the most vocal and articulate bhakts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have metamorphosed into sharp critics. This disillusionment has less to do with his record as prime minister when economic growth tanked, unemployment reached new highs and Indian society hit unprecedented levels of polarisation between 2014 and 2019. In 2020, the sight of millions of migrants making the arduous trek to their rural homes, victims of the world’s most draconian lockdown, did little to dent Mr Modi’s popularity. After all, little of what went before impacted his supporters; it was poor people, who don’t count for much in their scheme of things, and Muslims, who weren’t really Indians in their eyes, who bore the brunt of the Modi magic.

The current disenchantment is the result of a hard blow that this cohort of fervent majoritarian urbanites has sustained along with everyone else. They, too, are now tragically losing family members, friends and colleagues to this vicious second wave and feeling the severe dearth of hospital beds, oxygen, medicine and even space in crematoriums. The right-wing state that muscled in on India’s battle against Covid-19, appears to have fulfilled the left-wing Marxian prophecy and withered away. With it, Mr Modi’s stock has diminished. Both the mainstream and samizdat media now bristle with venomous criticism in spite of this regime’s ominous record of silencing critics. Some employees of a supportive media house, who never felt the need to address the channel’s patently biased coverage before, have written a sharp letter to the channel’s anchors complaining of a cover up. The construction of the Central Vista was regarded with indulgence before; today it symbolises Mr Modi’s Nero-like disregard for the plight of the people.  

A reality check. The breakdown of the healthcare infrastructure that is unfolding before our eyes was a crisis waiting to happen whether Mr Modi or anybody else was in power. The ratio of five beds per 10,000 population is among the worst in the world and administrations long before Mr Modi had abdicated public healthcare to the private sector. So far, however, concerns over this creeping privatisation was confined to the liberal media. Now, the ramshackle system is manifesting itself right here in the big cities, including the National Capital Region, uncomfortably focusing the global spotlight on India.    

Equally, only an exceptionally courageous political dispensation of any ideological hue would have taken the decision to cancel the Kumbh mela and risk the ire of millions of fervent Hindus. But here’s the thing: If anyone could take this gamble, it is Mr Modi. His popularity has sustained and grown despite all his mis-steps. This made his reluctance to cancel the Kumbh until it was too late so puzzling. Does he doubt the durability of his support base? Or does he have sneaking understanding that identity politics is skin deep?

A “libtard”, on the other hand, might ask why this allegedly terrific administrator so concerned about sanitation did not address the healthcare infrastructure issue head-on last year when Covid-19 struck. Instead of extending niggling concessions to this sector and that industry that didn’t amount to much, a public hospital- and healthcare-building programme could have provided the same stimulus effect as building roads and highways and kept India in better readiness to address the next health crisis, Covid-19 or otherwise. But by then, Mr Modi had declared victory against the virus — and the multitudes believed him by dropping their masks everywhere, crowding into unhygienic snans in Haridwar and allowing themselves to be herded into elections rallies. Instead of focusing on the early warnings of a second wave many times more virulent than the first Mr Modi expended his considerable energy on naming a cricket stadium after himself and campaigning relentlessly to win a state election with rhetoric that remains unsurpassed in terms of communal coarseness.

It could be said that Mr Modi’s priorities have always been oblique. For any standard politician a slowing economy and high unemployment would have been accorded priority, especially if they were brought on by his own grand experiment — demonetisation. Instead, Mr Modi focused on a crash programme to introduce GST, which proved a body blow to small and medium enterprises even as his tacit encouragement to states to ban cow slaughter endangered Muslim dairy businesses and low caste workers in the meat and leather industries. The distribution of gas cylinders to poor households and the Jan Dhan accounts, both of which earned him electoral mileage, proved to be roughly equivalent to the sub-prime loans that large US banks offered poor and middle class Americans. There’s always a little-understood sting in the tail.

And so the trend continued when he returned to power. The economy was tanking still, but his first order of business ran like this: Building a temple; building a new house for himself; altering the status of Jammu & Kashmir without informing its people and imposing a lockdown more extreme than anything inflicted on India the next year; amending the citizenship law to intimidate and exclude as many Muslims as possible; and passing farm laws without much reference to the farmers. When the pandemic hit, he even took time out to tell the nation to bang thalis and switch off lights and burn diyas. And now he’s relying on his predecessor’s much-maligned rural jobs programme to keep heads above water. All told, this is not a picture of a leader concerned about the well-being of the country he governs but of fulfilling a personal and political agenda in spite of it.