Pratap Bhanu Mehta: India is bereft of leadership // Bharat Bhushan: BJP makes it clear rules of politics are different for it and Opposition
The Republic of India
is facing a leadership crisis. The economic hardship faced by millions of
Indians is severe. Hard won gains in poverty reduction are at risk. The pandemic has
not peaked. If the evidence of the last few weeks is anything to go by, we are
nowhere near the state of readiness which was within our capacity to achieve.
The capacities of our health care system are going to be severely tested now.
The immediate military environment is turning adverse. No one is quite sure where the Chinese logic of showing India its true place will end. They are clearly testing India’s resolve, and at the moment, the sum total of our objective is to avoid a domestic public embarrassment. Nepal’s ability to dare India is a sign of our diminished power and diplomatic hubris. China may be losing international credibility very fast. But India is also, in its own way, becoming a less attractive power because its growth story is stalling and its democracy is becoming less exemplary.
55 Indian Journalists Arrested, Booked, Threatened For Reporting on COVID-19
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pm-modi-coronavirus-crisis-economy-india-china-border-dispute-6460702/
Bharat Bhushan: BJP makes it clear rules of politics are different for it and Opposition
The immediate military environment is turning adverse. No one is quite sure where the Chinese logic of showing India its true place will end. They are clearly testing India’s resolve, and at the moment, the sum total of our objective is to avoid a domestic public embarrassment. Nepal’s ability to dare India is a sign of our diminished power and diplomatic hubris. China may be losing international credibility very fast. But India is also, in its own way, becoming a less attractive power because its growth story is stalling and its democracy is becoming less exemplary.
55 Indian Journalists Arrested, Booked, Threatened For Reporting on COVID-19
These crises are
challenging. But they are made more intractable by the fact that India has a
leadership deficit at the top. India’s political tragedy is that even the depth
of the crisis cannot be acknowledged. The government fully understands that to
even acknowledge any elements of the crisis would be to puncture its
legitimising myth, that India is in the hands of a powerful leadership that was
going to be the sole vehicle for its manifest destiny. Whereas the blunt truth
is that there has almost never been a time in India’s recent history when it
was so bereft of leadership.
The surest sign of
this is the fact that the entire energy of government is geared towards the
preservation of the legitimising myth of the leader by propaganda, diversion,
repression... https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pm-modi-coronavirus-crisis-economy-india-china-border-dispute-6460702/
Bharat Bhushan: BJP makes it clear rules of politics are different for it and Opposition
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) derides every statement
of the Opposition about the coronavirus crisis, as “playing politics”, for the
party it is politics as usual. Union Home Minister Amit Shah, whose absence
from the frontlines during the pandemic’s early days caused much speculation,
has come back with a spree of virtual political rallies. He has already
addressed three rallies—aimed at West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa—and there are 72
such big rallies to be held by him and other ministers.
Bihar will go to the
polls in November this year and West Bengal early next year. In West Bengal,
the BJP installed 70,000 large flat-screen at the “booth level” (there are
78,000 polling booths in the state) and 15,000 giant LED screens across the
state to address voters. Shah told viewers that his party wants to win the
coming election and only they were capable of transforming the state into
“Sonar Bangla” (Golden Bengal). In Bihar—where 50,000 flat-screen TVs and
10,000 big LED screens were put up to cover 72,000 polling booths—he predicted
that his party would win by a two-thirds majority in the coming legislative
elections. Shah’s rally in Bihar alone is alleged by some Opposition leaders to
have cost over Rs. 140 crore. Despite barbs on social media that the BJP was
supplying “LED TVs instead of ventilators”, Shah celebrated his government’s
achievements in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet amid predictions
of electoral victory Amit
Shah has also reluctantly accepted “We may have made mistakes, we may
have fallen short, and we may not have been able to do something(s),” while
referring to his government’s handling of the pandemic and the migrant crisis
that followed after a national lockdown. Such
public acknowledgement of policy failure is a first by the Modi government. The
demonetisation disaster by contrast has quietly disappeared from the party’s
propaganda literature on its governments’ achievements as well as from the
Prime Minister’s Letter to the Nation.
“But”, deflecting
public anger on the migrant crisis Amit
Shah asks the Opposition, “What did you do”? The Congress is
blamed for labour out-migration from Eastern India because they did not create
enough employment over the last several decades. In West Bengal Chief
Minister Mamata Banerjee is falsely said to have referred to
the Shramik Express trains as “Corona Express” to paint her as hostile to
returning migrants. In Orissa too previous (non-BJP) regimes are blamed for job
related migration. However, Shah sings a quite different tune in Bihar. There
he has to contest an election in alliance with the incumbent party in five
months’ time. So returning migrants in Bihar are praised by him as building the
foundations of the nation.
It is quite
meaningless to question the Opposition’s “contribution” to the pandemic efforts
as they neither have the resources nor the constitutional mandate that the
government enjoys. Opposition parties neither collect taxes nor have access to
the Exchequer or the executive machinery of the bureaucracy. Like any NGO the
opposition parties must dig into their own resources to proffer help. Where
they did attempt to use their own comparatively meagre resources they were
thwarted by the ruling party. In Uttar Pradesh, Congress Party
functionaries who tried to ferry migrant workers home in hired buses had
charges pressed against them by the state’s BJP government and they are
languishing in jails. The central government’s forfeiture of MPLADS (Members
of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme) funds for
the next two years means that even elected legislators can do little to
redirect resources to their constituencies.
Having disarmed an
already weak Opposition, to then shift blame on its head for the ungovernable
fallout of the pandemic is childish, yet a routine practice for BJP leaders.
Within minutes of criticism by the Opposition, ministers of the Modi government
begin throwing their toys out of the pram on national television, accusing it
of weakening the nation’s resolve during a countrywide crisis.
Every statement
by Rahul Gandhi who has been pro-active in forewarning
the government about the enormity of the pandemic has been harshly criticised.
He was accused by the BJP of spreading panic on February 12, when he asked the
government to put necessary systems in place for combatting the imminent danger
posed by the pandemic. No less than the Union Health Minister, Harsh Vardhan,
went on record to claim that everything was under control. When Rahul
Gandhi questioned the government’s preparedness to deal with the
looming possibility of economic devastation as early as March 17, he was
shouted down. Later when he questioned the benefits of the sudden nationwide
lockdown, he was accused by senior ministers of “playing politics”, being
“irresponsible” and “weakening” the national resolve to fight the pandemic. His
meeting with migrants trudging back to their villages, was testily dubbed as
the superficial theatrics of a “drame baaz”, by the Union Finance Minister.
None of the BJP
ministers including Amit
Shah spelled out what they sought from the Opposition except desisting
from criticism. The Opposition in their view, must remain a mute spectator to
chaotic lockdowns, inflated packaging of the government’s economic stimulus,
abjuring of much-needed cash transfers to farmers and migrant workers and keep
quiet even on the Chinese occupation of Indian territory in Ladakh. Any
critical response will be considered “politicking in a crisis situation”.
However, the ruling
party is free to pursue politics at any time of its choosing. The Union Home
Ministry waited to announce a nationwide lockdown till
the BJP had successfully ousted the Congress government
in Madhya Pradesh. Even now, in the midst of the pandemic, the BJP has been
engaged in luring four Congress legislators for winning an additional Rajya
Sabha seat in Gujarat, one of the worst Covid-affected states. In Rajasthan too
its attempts to destabilise the Congress government have barely been thwarted.
Clearly there are different political rules for the BJP and the Opposition.
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