Prime Minister Narendra Modi had painstakingly nurtured and created the persona of a decisive head of the government whose philosophy is very different from that of the fatigued Congress leaders. Even the die-hard sceptics had nursed a vain hope that Modi would change the national discourse and the Indian way of doing things. Likewise, he struck a chord with his captive audiences overseas and was seen to be a pragmatic idealist who understood the Indian idiom.
In a perception driven polity, the BJP too was able to successfully project that it alone is the harbinger of good governance – a beacon of hope for the nation which would readily give it even a bigger mandate in 2019.
Almost three years down the line, with the clock ticking away, such is the presumption that the party does not even talk of the two 18 months that remain of its tenancy, but of the magical year 2022 – the watershed moment when all the golden eggs of the BJP will hatch – including housing and power for all poor, double income for farmers, a digital and cashless society –essentially a new unstoppable India. Such is the condescending tone and the single minded obsession to chase numbers – for instance, ”skill training for 500 million people by 2022” – that the leadership is not unduly worried that empty promises would resonate across the nation in 2019 and could even boomerang on the party.
PM Modi is too shrewd a person not to realise that no nation can live on hubris alone; nor can people subsist on a staple diet of rhetoric, bluster and half-measures. But the PM is smug in the belief – rather he is convinced – and the party has internalised this view, that he has altered the fundamentals of our politics by establishing the BJP’s hegemony in the states – either by own mandate and, where that is not possible, by forging post poll opportunistic alliances, “depriving” the other mainstream party of its mandate, or by inflicting itself on the population by other means.
This, in turn, is expected to pave the way for a one man, single party, majoritarian rule for at least a decade. Theoretically speaking, India would of course remain a textbook democracy with multi-party elections but within this single party matrix. The pecking order at the Centre will be such that the smaller parties – mostly regional satraps – will be constrained to share the mandate with the only dominant party on the landscape – the BJP.
The co-option of the smaller players will ensure that an “ostracised” Congress cannot even win a municipality without political crutches; this will effectively confine it to national catchment areas like Puducherry, on the periphery of the political divide. However, such a fantasy is possible only if the already diminished Congress suffers some kind of national erosion. That should explain why the high decibel “malign Gandhis” project now goes well beyond outsourcing of the tirade to party mavericks, raking up the alleged legal infringements in the National Herald and lampooning the infirmities of Rahul Gandhi.
That should also explain the enthusiasm and audacious presumption with which the BJP spokespersons fritter away their energies on national TV in targeting the Gandhis, especially Rahul.
So, even as the PM has assumed the responsibility of ensuring that headlines stay effectively managed in a perception-driven polity and that he is seen as a development oriented leader, the RSS is weaving the alternative saffron narrative through the likes of Yogi Adityanath, whereby it hopes to polarise the population to an extreme. With this kind of dichotomy, there is no ideological confusion; so, in the RSS scheme of things Prime Minister Modi will take care of the political outpouring but the entire country is Yogi’s preserve – his canvas is far bigger, where he can inflict the saffron notions of cultural nationalism on us.
So far so good, but there is a snag:
There is an inherent occupational hazard in painstakingly building an entire political narrative around one’s own persona as PM Modi has done. Because the very mascots of Hindutva, by their conduct, which is at times incompatible with all-inclusive development, are deconstructing this myth, bit by bit. Similar saffron claims were made on prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, too, but he realised that this kind of template demands total conformism which will constrict his freedom of choice and tether his agenda of governance.
Also underlying the notion that the BJP has proprietary rights to good governance is an equally fallacious assumption that the ease of doing political business is facilitated if the same party has a government at the Centre and in the state. This power play is further couched in the simplistic reasoning that the Centre and the states need to work in tandem if fruits of development are to be shared.
But these fruits of development are neither visible on the ground, nor are they ripe to be plucked in the states where BJP is in control; nor do the people feel they are active participants in the growth process. We perhaps had a glimpse of this disconnect in Gorakhpur where red tape smothered 70-odd children with its fatal embrace! The recent derailments have also brought down the façade of development – the first big embarrassment for the prime minister.
Interestingly, the recent train derailments too have more to do with the Railways’ misplaced thrust on peripheral activities – services like Wifi, giving precedence to ‘pizza over passenger comfort,’ attempts to simulate aircraft like experience on board trains – rather than improving the existing the assets and infrastructure. All this again has to do with the perception driven political mindset.
In a perception driven economy – that is not based on reasonable growth assumptions – the layman, given his simplistic reasoning, gets into a “hopeful” mode and boards the never-ending merry-go-round. One can imagine his cynicism when he disembarks and realises that his level of suffering has enhanced. Instead of getting down to governance, the BJP has allowed itself to be distracted by frequent elections and simply frittered away its energies in chasing a mirage of Congress-mukt Bharat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi may continue to believe that he is doing a great job and that he has a tenacious hold on the power structure, but he is also allowing the saffron forces to marginalise him, thus diminishing his room for political manoeuvre. That is neither good for the BJP, nor for PM Modi, in a perception driven polity.
The author is editor of The Free Press Journal.
