When first-time MP Narendra Modi arrived in New Delhi to be sworn in as India’s Prime Minister, he flew in a private aircraft belonging to the Adani Group, although he could have taken a commercial flight or hired a chartered plane. On landing, Mr Modi was greeted raucously with the slogan HarHar Modi, patterned on communal-military lines.
The two events showed where Prime Minister Modi’s loyalties and priorities would lie: with Big Business and Hindutva, both of which he had served with pious zeal in Gujarat since the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 and through the many crony-capitalist deals he cut later.
Over the past year, he has showered favours on both constituencies, and antagonised many classes and groups, including some who voted for him out of the naive belief that he would bring “development”. His honeymoon period has ended, but he doesn’t seem to have grasped that.
This was proved by a third development. That’s Mr Modi’s May 16 statement in Shanghai to an Indian audience: “Earlier, you felt ashamed of being born Indian, now you feel proud to represent the country…” He repeated this in Seoul, adding the religious motif of “sins” committed in past life as the cause of being born Indian: “There was a time when people used to leave [including] businessmen … These people are ready to come back. The mood has changed.”
Mr Modi thus heaped a gratuitous insult on Indian citizens, for which he has deservedly drawn flak. The use of terms like “shame” and “sin” reveals deep insecurity and an inferiority complex in Mr Modi’s paranoid persona, which psychologists should analyse.
The boastful claim that the “mood” in India has changed dramatically in his one year in office is meant to cover up that inferiority complex—in the same way that Hitler and Mussolini tried to do by declaring that they had made the German and Italian people “proud” through military aggression and by making the “trains run on time”! These comparisons should seriously worry us.
What’s the first-year balance-sheet of Mr Modi’s government? Frankly speaking, it’s overwhelmingly negative. India has socially regressed in multiple ways, economically become more unbalanced and unequal, and politically got further polarised in an unhealthy, skewed manner.
India’s social regression is evident in the growth of rabid communalism, attacks on democratic rights, intolerance towards dissent, spread of authoritarian ideas, Hindutva takeover of educational and cultural institutions, greater licence to male-supremacism and violence against women, spread of insecurity among the religious minorities, all amidst neglect of human development and growing disdain for social cohesion.
The Ramzada-Haramzada abuse, ghar wapsi, attacks on churches and open calls for depriving Muslims of the right to vote are just the crassest forms of the present outbreak of communalism. The government’s indulgence towards them sends a clear message: it’s India’s open season to malign non-Hindus, ban the sale of beef and even slaughter of bulls, impose surya namaskar and the Bhagwad-Gita on school students, and build a cult around Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse.
The message is amplified when those charged with Gujarat’s “fake encounters” and communal killings, including BJP president Amit Shah, are discharged without trial; but the entire might of the state is brought to bear against secular campaigners like Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand on trumped-up charges—because they are trying to bring the culprits of Gujarat-2002 to justice.
Other signs of social regression are evident in savage cuts in social sector budgets: by 20 percent in health, 29 percent in Mid-Day Meal schemes, 17 percent in education, 51 percent in women and child welfare, and similar reductions in sanitation, drinking water and rural infrastructure schemes.
Central transfers to the states, which implement many social schemes, were cut by a huge 30 percent. In the National Rural Health Mission, the shortage of primary health centres is over 20 percent and of doctors 70 percent-plus.
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act had its worst-ever performance under the Modi government. In 2014-15, the number of person-days of work created was 40 percent less than in the previous two years. Only 3 percent of families got the promised full 100 days of work, and 70 percent of wages were delayed—to disastrous effect in a year of acute agrarian distress.
Industrial growth has slowed to about 5 percent, and the investment rate has declined from 37 to barely 31 percent. Employment growth in industry has fallen to its slowest pace in a year, barely a fifth of what’s needed to absorb the growing workforce.
The suit-boot-ki-sarkar is shamelessly pro-rich and anti-poor. It’s cajoling capital to invest by improving the “ease of doing business” through various incentives. But investment isn’t forthcoming because a huge number of companies are financially stressed. Fiftytwo percent of India’s top 500 companies are excessively indebted, and 14 percent of bank loans have turned bad.
The Modi government has failed to diagnose this, and believes that the key to stimulate investment is threefold: dismantle environmental regulations, allow unbridled diversion of agricultural land to industry (hence the land ordinance), and “reform” labour laws to allow hire-and-fire policies.
The first approach has meant ruthless “fast-tracking” of industrial-project clearances without scrutiny, violating the Forest Rights Act and coastal zone regulations, and redefining “forests”.
The high-level (TSR Subrahmanyam) committee has recommended far-reaching changes in 5 environmental laws, including abolition of Central and state pollution control boards, self-certification of environment-related information by project promoters, and automatic clearances for roads and power-lines through forests earlier declared “no-go” areas, etc. But environmental regulations are no obstacle to industry: over 94 percent of proposals have been cleared since 2007.
Land has become an extremely contentious issue. The UPA’s land law was meant to give farmers and those dependent indirectly on agriculture a stake in determining their fate—necessary since some 60 million people have been displaced from land since 1947, mostly without rehabilitation. The NDA’s ordinance undermines this rationale. It’s opposed tooth-and-nail by a wide spectrum of parties and farmers’ organisations. A land agitation could turn politically explosive.
The government is sitting on lakhs of acres it acquired for various defence undertakings and Special Economic Zones, but which it hasn’t distributed. The whole idea behind the ordinance seems to give private capital free access to land and what liesunder it, especially valuable minerals—in other words, a huge racket. This has become a Modi government obsession.
The planned dismantling of labour protections will rob workers of the right to form unions (for which the minimum membership has been raised from 7 to 100). No permission will be needed to lay off workers or close factories with 100 workers; these account for 90 percent of the total number of units. The factories Act will also be undermined, making a travesty of safety rules. Employment of contract labour for permanent work will become rampant.
Politically, Mr Modi is running the most over-centralised government in India’s history. This cannot work without destroying decision-making integrity and creating insecurity among bureaucrats and ministers; indeed, RSS men have been appointed as “officers on special duty” to spy on them. This makes nonsense of democratic government.
Worse, Mr Modi has introduced venomous confrontation into politics, which goes against the spirit of democracy. Intimidating and cornering your opponents, and even your allies, can quickly become counterproductive. Several NDA constituents and Sangh Parivar outfits have turned against the land ordinance. Mr Modi is making enemies out of friends.
Going by the recent Assembly elections, by-elections, and local-body polls in different states, the enthusiasm witnessed in favour of Mr Modi in April-May last year has all but vanished. The BJP proved incapable of repeating its Lok Sabha performance in vote-shares/seats even in favourable situations like Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh or Jharkhand. The edge it established in parts of West Bengal, including a lead over the CPM in Kolkata, has already eroded.
What’s becoming manifest now is the effect of the thinness of the original support for Mr Modi. He won 31 percent of the vote, but 52 percent of the Lok Sabha’s seats, the highest such disproportion ever. This happened because his support was highly concentrated in a handful of states—not least because of planned communal violence and polarisation along caste and class lines.
Another factor was Mr Modi’s high-octane, corporate-bankrolled, multi-billion-dollar election campaign, which hyped up Gujarat’s at-best-modest growth and social indicators as great achievements. Thus a CSDS-Lokniti poll asked people which state in their opinion was India’s most developed: 64 percent answered Gujarat, only 4 percent said Maharashtra, and even fewer cited Kerala, India’s indisputably most advanced state in social development.
This illusion, partly based on the search for a messiah, is breaking down. People are realising that the “56-inch-chest” man is a hollow caricature of his manufactured bloated image. Mr Modi’s troubles are set to worsen in the coming months. (IPA Service)
