Rajdeep Sardesai: Where is PM Modi’s ‘new India’? // Modi Is Taking India to a Dangerous Place. By Prem Shankar Jha
One of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s great skills as a political communicator has been his ability
to constantly summon up catchy buzzwords. If 2014 was the year of ‘acche din’,
Make in India and Swachh Bharat, 2015 was about Start up and Stand up India,
2016 was Digital India and 2017 is now about ‘New India’. But shorn of the
artful messaging, what does ‘New India’ really mean?”
Is it a ‘new India’
when over 70 ill-fated children tragically die in a Gorakhpur government
hospital, an annual monsoon ritual in one of the more backward regions of the
country? Is the prime minister assuring us that Japanese Encephalitis will be
conquered, that public investment in health will be doubled, or that primary
health centres will be strengthened? The truth is, the public health system in
the country is in ICU.
Is it a ‘new India’
when Assam is flooded every year, when thousands are displaced in another
annual catastrophe? Are we being assured that there will be a genuine effort to
plug the encroachments of river banks, the lack of drainage, rampant
deforestation, all of which contribute to the sorrows heaped upon hapless
people by a swelling Brahmaputra?
Is it a ‘new India’
when government schools struggle to provide quality education to lakhs of
students across the country? In a statement in parliament in December 2016, the
HRD minister acknowledged that 18% teacher posts in government-run primary
schools and 15% in secondary schools remain vacant. Is the government assuring
an end to this acute teacher crisis in the immediate future?
Is it a ‘new’ India
where agricultural land-holdings are shrinking, where small and marginal
farmers remain indebted to village money-lenders, where deepening agrarian
distress means that even in a year of a bountiful harvest, farmers denied a
remunerative price commit suicide? Is it a ‘new’ India where the government is
in denial on the reality of a manufacturing slowdown and jobless growth,
especially in a post-demonetisation universe? A recent study of the Centre for
Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) reveals that 1.5 million jobs were lost
post-demonetisation in the first four months of 2017… read more:
There was a
discernible note of self congratulation in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
Independence Day speech this year. As usual, it was replete with claims – “In
our country everyone is equal”, “Those who have looted the nation and looted
the poor are not able to sleep peacefully today” – and exhortations –
“Bharat jodo“, “Let us create a new India” – that are entirely
devoid of content. But these are not the sources of his satisfaction. That
arises from his confidence that he has ensured a continuation of the BJP in
power for the foreseeable future. He has done this by ensuring that the
opposition is unable to unite to face the BJP in 2019; and by relentlessly undermining
the constitutional safeguards upon which India’s secular democracy has rested,
should it become necessary to retain power through constitutional sleight of
hand.
The path India is
being taken on: In the last
three years, Modi and Amit Shah have removed virtually every institutional
hurdle to the creation of the ‘new nation’ he talked about. The BJP now
has a president and vice-president of its choice, thus ensuring that any
conceivable future head of state will follow Modi’s instructions. After
its successes in Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Assam, the party will
soon have
the majority in the Rajya Sabha that it needs to enact transformative
legislation.
By overturning the
seniority-cum-merit system of promotion in the army, Modi has sent the message
out loud and clear to the army that henceforth, it does not serve the
constitution but the prime minister. The spate of statements from all and
sundry in the armed forces that have begun to equate dissenting with the BJP
with treason shows that the army has got the message.
The obstacle of the
Supreme Court remains. But Chief Justice J.S. Khehar, who had overturned the
judicial accountability Bill and saved the collegium system for the appointment
of Supreme Court and high court judges, will retire in a few months and it is a
safe bet that Modi will renew his
struggle to destroy the higher courts’ capacity for judicial review
after he is gone.
Modi’s ideal state:
Only the electoral system, the
beating heart of our democracy, will remain standing in the way. Despite all
their bluster, Modi and Shah are acutely aware of the fragility of the BJP’s
hold on power. In 1967, the Congress had required 40.7% of the vote to win 282
seats. In 2014, the BJP did it with under 31% of the vote. They will never,
therefore, feel truly secure till they have captured that additional 10%.
Since that extra vote
is not yet in sight, they have been following a two-pronged strategy to regain
power in 2019. The first is to woo away the crucial 10% of the electorate
by creating paranoia among caste Hindus in order to create a ‘Hindu’ identity
as distinct from caste. The second is to ensure, by hook or by crook, that the
opposition remains fragmented. To do this, the Modi-Shah duo launched a
no-holds-barred campaign to destroy state-level parties like the Aam Aadmi
Party in Delhi, the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar and the Trinamool
Congress in Bengal, that enjoy a measure of constitutional autonomy and
therefore the capacity to form an alliance capable of defeating the BJP in
2019.
But what is the goal that Modi believes is now in sight? Behind the
camouflage of his grandiose and so far unfulfilled promises lies a single
unswerving aim. That is to build a Hindu rashtra. There are hints
of this in his speech, but three years into the BJP’s reign one does not need
these pointers to understand the kind of India that Modi, and the RSS, intend
to build…read more : https://thewire.in/168526/narendra-modi-india-bjp-shah/
