MODI’S TROUBLES
The prime minister must break free from Lutyens’ Delhi to win the country to land reforms. The second and last of the series.New Delhi: Nothing about yesterday’s farmers’ rally in Delhi changes this writer’s analysis and opinion about the Nehru-Gandhis. The Nehru-Gandhis care as much about the poor as Adolf Hitler wept over Jews. The ten years of two United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments was about loot and plunder. When Manmohan Singh demitted office, he left India tottering and on the brink of economic collapse. Any family that permits Robert Vadra to prosper and become one of the country’s leading land bankers squanders the moral authority to point accusing fingers at others. The country knows what the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty are about; they were comprehensively rejected in last year’s general election. But that does not ease Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s troubles, and they are multiplying by the hour. He is losing the war of perceptions, and without structural corrections, he may forfeit the 2019 election.
Narendra Modi has mounting problems on several fronts, and these could be broadly listed as the “I” issue, cabinet and economic misguidance, domestic negligence and disengagement, implementation failures, and the growing dissent in the Bharatiya Janata Party which could impact future elections. Some of these matters will be addressed in this piece and the rest subsequently. Governments in India usually sputter and cease delivering in the middle of the third year when executive decisions are deferred for political actions and preparations for the coming election. The trend now is for governments to lapse into election mode within a year of polling which is disastrous for growth and development. Narendra Modi has tried to defy this trend but he faces an increasingly uphill task to retain and build on his previous image of a “doer”
Modi’s biggest potential undoing is what is characterized as the “I” problem. There is excessive focus on the self in areas which distract and detract from the seriousness and single-mindedness required of prime ministry and irritates vast legions of people, including this writer. In plain words, Prime Minister Modi is obsessed with dressing to a degree absent in his predecessors, and it attracts the worst notices from the press and elsewhere. When Amitabh Bachchan met Modi in his South Block office some months ago, both were dressed alike, almost as though they had made a pact. Bachchan is an actor (though he is scarcely Marlon Brando or Henry Fonda) and has to maintain an image. He gets to decide what is fashionable and whether he loves or loathes the role is his business. Modi has been elected to govern the country and retrieve it from the mess of the last decade. He is not a fashion symbol. For a man who claims to follow Swami Vivekananda, he should dress simply and accept the necessities of protocol. He will be judged by his performance four years from now, not how he draped a shawl. For a poor country like India, he cannot be dressing rich. He is not a private citizen for the duration of prime ministry. The same applies to his finance minister. Arun Jaitley was wearing a florid shirt and tie during consultations in Washington. It is downright insensitive to speak of the plight of farmers in rural India adorned like a peacock.
Prime Minister Modi’s second major problem is cabinet misguidance. It is hard to imagine that Modi can be misguided but there are whispers that he is being pressured by country lobbies especially of the West to hew to a line. The United States, naturally, is in the forefront of lobby pressure but Western Europe is not far behind. The argument employed here is that the backing and support of the United States and the rest of the West is critical to the rise of India that consequentially entails wide-ranging market concessions on the part of the country. In a globalized world, no country can remain an island unto itself. But India shares uniqueness with the United States in being one of its own largest markets. When it could afford to, such as during the interwar period, the United States was an isolated, self-contained economic power, growing the more prosperous by providing for its own vast and insatiable domestic market. The production figures for that time are astonishing. It had a larger output than the cumulative total of the other six extant Great Powers. With the Great Crash of 1929, two successive American Presidents, Herbert Hoover and especially Franklin D. Roosevelt, became inward-looking and introspective, occupied with domestic recovery, and desiring the “appearance of immediate action and results”. After ten disastrous years of the UPA, Modi should have worked on an American model lookalike of internal recovery mediated with limited international engagement. To expect the West to bail out India from self-inflicted backwardness and misery is mindless and little different from Manmohan Singh’s abject pleadings abroad. The success of the 1991 reforms was based on the fulfilment of internal demand and supply. Modi was misguided by the lobbies in abandoning that for conditional Western largesse.
In this respect, Prime Minister Modi has been let down by his finance minister. Arun Jaitley is a lawyer like his predecessor in office, P. Chidambaram, and untrained in economics. Typically a cabinet minister is chosen for his value as a technocrat (Manmohan Singh as P. V. Narasimha Rao’s finance minister) or for political traction. Jaitley has neither. He lost the only Lok Sabha election he fought last year and is no match for the political sagacity of his cabinet colleague and rival, Rajnath Singh. If Rajnath Singh were deployed to seek support for the controversially amended land acquisition bill, it might not have been suffering its present uncertain fate. Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari have been its awful ambassadors. Gadkari cannot inspire confidence in anyone for anything. But worse for Jaitley, he is no technocrat. For instance, he is no match for the Reserve Bank Governor, Raghuram Rajan, either in designing economic paradigms or implementing them. Modi needed an economic revival plan and Jaitley did not provide it. They fell back to the worn nostrums of Western support. Deep in recession, the West is scarcely in a position to assist India; the Rafale deal, for instance, contrarily works to save Dassault. In other words, India will swim or sink through its own efforts or lack of it, and the immutability of this situation is not fully apparent to the Narendra Modi government.
To be continued...
Editor’s Note: 1. General (retired) V. K. Singh deserves the fullest applause for the flawless evacuation operations in war-torn Yemen. The piece against him when in service that he intended a coup remains a blot on the newspaper that published the lie.
2. The Swachh Bharat campaign will become meaningful and successful only when it is introduced on a nonpartisan basis in school syllabi as part of environmental studies. Children are the best harbingers of change.
3. This writer does not visualize any turnaround in the fortunes of the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) with Sitaram Yechury as its new general secretary. Yechury is a cynical, jaded Lutyen’s Delhi fixture who is close to 10 Janpath and ready to do its biddings. With all his inadequacies, Prakash Karat forced his party to keep a distance with the Indian National Congress; Yechury will dissolve that dividing line and make CPI-M a B-team of the INC. He does not have the skills, vision or energy to regenerate the CPI-M. The party has lost its relevance under a succession of frail leaders.
Narendra Modi has mounting problems on several fronts, and these could be broadly listed as the “I” issue, cabinet and economic misguidance, domestic negligence and disengagement, implementation failures, and the growing dissent in the Bharatiya Janata Party which could impact future elections. Some of these matters will be addressed in this piece and the rest subsequently. Governments in India usually sputter and cease delivering in the middle of the third year when executive decisions are deferred for political actions and preparations for the coming election. The trend now is for governments to lapse into election mode within a year of polling which is disastrous for growth and development. Narendra Modi has tried to defy this trend but he faces an increasingly uphill task to retain and build on his previous image of a “doer”
Modi’s biggest potential undoing is what is characterized as the “I” problem. There is excessive focus on the self in areas which distract and detract from the seriousness and single-mindedness required of prime ministry and irritates vast legions of people, including this writer. In plain words, Prime Minister Modi is obsessed with dressing to a degree absent in his predecessors, and it attracts the worst notices from the press and elsewhere. When Amitabh Bachchan met Modi in his South Block office some months ago, both were dressed alike, almost as though they had made a pact. Bachchan is an actor (though he is scarcely Marlon Brando or Henry Fonda) and has to maintain an image. He gets to decide what is fashionable and whether he loves or loathes the role is his business. Modi has been elected to govern the country and retrieve it from the mess of the last decade. He is not a fashion symbol. For a man who claims to follow Swami Vivekananda, he should dress simply and accept the necessities of protocol. He will be judged by his performance four years from now, not how he draped a shawl. For a poor country like India, he cannot be dressing rich. He is not a private citizen for the duration of prime ministry. The same applies to his finance minister. Arun Jaitley was wearing a florid shirt and tie during consultations in Washington. It is downright insensitive to speak of the plight of farmers in rural India adorned like a peacock.
Prime Minister Modi’s second major problem is cabinet misguidance. It is hard to imagine that Modi can be misguided but there are whispers that he is being pressured by country lobbies especially of the West to hew to a line. The United States, naturally, is in the forefront of lobby pressure but Western Europe is not far behind. The argument employed here is that the backing and support of the United States and the rest of the West is critical to the rise of India that consequentially entails wide-ranging market concessions on the part of the country. In a globalized world, no country can remain an island unto itself. But India shares uniqueness with the United States in being one of its own largest markets. When it could afford to, such as during the interwar period, the United States was an isolated, self-contained economic power, growing the more prosperous by providing for its own vast and insatiable domestic market. The production figures for that time are astonishing. It had a larger output than the cumulative total of the other six extant Great Powers. With the Great Crash of 1929, two successive American Presidents, Herbert Hoover and especially Franklin D. Roosevelt, became inward-looking and introspective, occupied with domestic recovery, and desiring the “appearance of immediate action and results”. After ten disastrous years of the UPA, Modi should have worked on an American model lookalike of internal recovery mediated with limited international engagement. To expect the West to bail out India from self-inflicted backwardness and misery is mindless and little different from Manmohan Singh’s abject pleadings abroad. The success of the 1991 reforms was based on the fulfilment of internal demand and supply. Modi was misguided by the lobbies in abandoning that for conditional Western largesse.
In this respect, Prime Minister Modi has been let down by his finance minister. Arun Jaitley is a lawyer like his predecessor in office, P. Chidambaram, and untrained in economics. Typically a cabinet minister is chosen for his value as a technocrat (Manmohan Singh as P. V. Narasimha Rao’s finance minister) or for political traction. Jaitley has neither. He lost the only Lok Sabha election he fought last year and is no match for the political sagacity of his cabinet colleague and rival, Rajnath Singh. If Rajnath Singh were deployed to seek support for the controversially amended land acquisition bill, it might not have been suffering its present uncertain fate. Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari have been its awful ambassadors. Gadkari cannot inspire confidence in anyone for anything. But worse for Jaitley, he is no technocrat. For instance, he is no match for the Reserve Bank Governor, Raghuram Rajan, either in designing economic paradigms or implementing them. Modi needed an economic revival plan and Jaitley did not provide it. They fell back to the worn nostrums of Western support. Deep in recession, the West is scarcely in a position to assist India; the Rafale deal, for instance, contrarily works to save Dassault. In other words, India will swim or sink through its own efforts or lack of it, and the immutability of this situation is not fully apparent to the Narendra Modi government.
To be continued...
Editor’s Note: 1. General (retired) V. K. Singh deserves the fullest applause for the flawless evacuation operations in war-torn Yemen. The piece against him when in service that he intended a coup remains a blot on the newspaper that published the lie.
2. The Swachh Bharat campaign will become meaningful and successful only when it is introduced on a nonpartisan basis in school syllabi as part of environmental studies. Children are the best harbingers of change.
3. This writer does not visualize any turnaround in the fortunes of the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) with Sitaram Yechury as its new general secretary. Yechury is a cynical, jaded Lutyen’s Delhi fixture who is close to 10 Janpath and ready to do its biddings. With all his inadequacies, Prakash Karat forced his party to keep a distance with the Indian National Congress; Yechury will dissolve that dividing line and make CPI-M a B-team of the INC. He does not have the skills, vision or energy to regenerate the CPI-M. The party has lost its relevance under a succession of frail leaders.
New Delhi: What is inarguably making the situation worse than it is is Narendra Modi’s virtual disengagement from the people since becoming prime minister. Outside of election campaigns, Modi has not held one mass rally to retain connect with the electorate. Democracy involves sustained confidence-building and hand-holding. The poor of this country have been cheated for sixty years. They have not turned away from democracy to something abominable and this is a significant tribute to the poor. The poor have made sacrifices before and will do so again provided they are convinced future generations will not suffer as they presently do. If land acquisition followed by industrialization is the solution to the misery and backwardness of the country, the prime minister must be in the forefront of selling this vision. Prime Minister Modi cannot leave this most important task to subordinates much less ministers with so little traction with the electorate as Nitin Gadkari and Arun Jaitley. Rajnath Singh would be a natural choice at least in North India if the prime minister has to devolve the responsibility of making land acquisition sweeter than a necessary evil, but Modi has to be in the van of the campaign, else he will be consumed by the backlash.
The important thing to understand is this. A major policy change like a universal land acquisition law should be backed by a political campaign no different and equally intensive and all-pervasive as an election campaign. In the present instance it should be seen as a precursor to the Bihar poll or the election in Uttar Pradesh in 2017 and no less significant. It is right that Modi should expect Bharatiya Janata Party MPs to hard-sell the amended land-acquisition bill. But they are not enthused. There is a great gulf that separates party MPs from Modi. The prime minister is seen to talk down to them, passing orders and dictating actions, leaving them no freedom of purpose and little self-motivation. Some ministers and MPs recently congregated to express unhappiness at the functioning of Modi. They are upset at what they perceive as centralization of authority. They exult about the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Delhi assembly election and are machinating to produce a similar result in the Bihar poll. If the BJP loses Bihar or is forced to form a coalition government, Prime Minister Modi’s position would be threatened. The campaign to remove him would gather pace backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh; the leader to succeed Modi has more or less been finalized.
Would it come to this? Who can say? But forewarned is forearmed. Prime Minister Modi should use the opportunity provided by the need to amend the land acquisition law to reconnect with the country. He proved by last year’s general election victory that he can sway the electorate to his thinking. His compulsion is to win land from farmers for industrialization willingly; there has to be give on the side of his government. The Indian National Congress’s Luddite campaign against industrialization must be defeated. It is in Prime Minister Modi’s hands to do so. Once he takes the offensive by directly going to the people with his land-for-industrialization programme, the opposition will lose momentum. A lot rides on winning this campaign. Foreign governments say they would only trust Modi with trillions of dollars of investments if he can win the trust of the country to land acquisition. It is now down to implementation.
Can Modi do it? It all depends on how he addresses the challenge. Unless he leads from the front, the party can give him no effective support; it is the general election campaign all over again. Neither will sitting in Delhi help. Lutyens’ Delhi imparts a false sense of complacency to rulers. Modi was an outsider to Delhi who promised change. He must bring that change by remaining an outsider and reasserting that identity. If India trusted his vision in May 2014, there is no reason to believe that it trusts him less. On the other hand, he must trust the nation’s good sense more. Turning the advice that Prime Minister Modi gave to civil servants on himself, he must temporarily quit the files, leave Delhi for a short space of time, and reconnect with the people. He must do this as often as he can. It is a fallacy to consider the prime minister’s office solely to be that prized corner room in South Block. The whole country is his parish, so to speak.
Back in the late-1980s, this writer remembers telling a local Delhi politician that V. P. Singh’s political success lay in leaving the capital and taking the campaign to the people. Whether or not the unsolicited advice was carried to V. P. Singh, he did exactly that in the ensuing weeks, rapidly becoming Rajiv Gandhi’s nemesis. It is no secret that Indira Gandhi relied on the same solution. That is the way forward for Prime Minister Modi. His quarrel with the Luddites of the opposition who want to keep the country backward and poor and themselves in luxury and splendour is just.
The important thing to understand is this. A major policy change like a universal land acquisition law should be backed by a political campaign no different and equally intensive and all-pervasive as an election campaign. In the present instance it should be seen as a precursor to the Bihar poll or the election in Uttar Pradesh in 2017 and no less significant. It is right that Modi should expect Bharatiya Janata Party MPs to hard-sell the amended land-acquisition bill. But they are not enthused. There is a great gulf that separates party MPs from Modi. The prime minister is seen to talk down to them, passing orders and dictating actions, leaving them no freedom of purpose and little self-motivation. Some ministers and MPs recently congregated to express unhappiness at the functioning of Modi. They are upset at what they perceive as centralization of authority. They exult about the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Delhi assembly election and are machinating to produce a similar result in the Bihar poll. If the BJP loses Bihar or is forced to form a coalition government, Prime Minister Modi’s position would be threatened. The campaign to remove him would gather pace backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh; the leader to succeed Modi has more or less been finalized.
Would it come to this? Who can say? But forewarned is forearmed. Prime Minister Modi should use the opportunity provided by the need to amend the land acquisition law to reconnect with the country. He proved by last year’s general election victory that he can sway the electorate to his thinking. His compulsion is to win land from farmers for industrialization willingly; there has to be give on the side of his government. The Indian National Congress’s Luddite campaign against industrialization must be defeated. It is in Prime Minister Modi’s hands to do so. Once he takes the offensive by directly going to the people with his land-for-industrialization programme, the opposition will lose momentum. A lot rides on winning this campaign. Foreign governments say they would only trust Modi with trillions of dollars of investments if he can win the trust of the country to land acquisition. It is now down to implementation.
Can Modi do it? It all depends on how he addresses the challenge. Unless he leads from the front, the party can give him no effective support; it is the general election campaign all over again. Neither will sitting in Delhi help. Lutyens’ Delhi imparts a false sense of complacency to rulers. Modi was an outsider to Delhi who promised change. He must bring that change by remaining an outsider and reasserting that identity. If India trusted his vision in May 2014, there is no reason to believe that it trusts him less. On the other hand, he must trust the nation’s good sense more. Turning the advice that Prime Minister Modi gave to civil servants on himself, he must temporarily quit the files, leave Delhi for a short space of time, and reconnect with the people. He must do this as often as he can. It is a fallacy to consider the prime minister’s office solely to be that prized corner room in South Block. The whole country is his parish, so to speak.
Back in the late-1980s, this writer remembers telling a local Delhi politician that V. P. Singh’s political success lay in leaving the capital and taking the campaign to the people. Whether or not the unsolicited advice was carried to V. P. Singh, he did exactly that in the ensuing weeks, rapidly becoming Rajiv Gandhi’s nemesis. It is no secret that Indira Gandhi relied on the same solution. That is the way forward for Prime Minister Modi. His quarrel with the Luddites of the opposition who want to keep the country backward and poor and themselves in luxury and splendour is just.
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