Have you noticed one very peculiar thing about the Modi government? In its life of the past nine years, it has seldom been punished politically for its wrongdoings. Setting aside criticisms based on issues of ideology and the turn to majoritarianism, one can easily point to the many blemishes and failures of this government but they often go unrecognised or are even trumpeted as achievements.
As the government enters the last year of its second term, a stock taking of many disconcerting blemishes with which it lives on might be briefly discussed in order to underscore the theme adopted by the “mother of democracy” — that the King can do no wrong. The puzzle is: How does democracy condone so many governance failures?
To start with, the persona of Narendra Modi had acquired considerable controversy even before he became the Prime Minister. This dates back to Gujarat 2002. While there has been a judicial closure of this issue, the core point remains: How can a chief minister who could not protect citizens of his state from a large-scale violence rise to become the prime minister and win durable and widespread adulation across the country? Even if one believes that there was no complicity, ordinarily, such a background would have worked against a candidate seeking nationwide mandate. Most probably, it instead worked as an asset.
Then came the disastrous decision of demonetisation. The manner of its implementation hugely inconvenienced the poor masses. Nobody knows what it achieved. If anything, there is robust evidence that it did not address the issue of “black money”. The added objective of weakening terrorist networks was even originally unbelievable. But surprisingly, neither did that decision reflect adversely in election outcomes nor did it reduce the PM’s popularity rating measured through surveys.
Three, before the 2019 elections, the issue of the Rafael deal briefly created a storm. While the Supreme Court’s decision was partly instrumental in blunting the issue, even otherwise, popular opinion was unwilling to listen to charges levelled by the Opposition despite being about a sensitive defence deal because it was believed that “Modi can do no wrong”.
Four, take the handling of the devastating pandemic in 2020. For weeks and months, the failures of the government and the suffering of the ordinary citizens kept occupying the nation’s eyeballs without troubling its conscience. India celebrated the pandemic with “events”, slogans and televised addresses of the prime minister drowning out stories of deaths or long marches by destitute migrants across the country. As is typical of this government, no clarity on the data on deaths due to Covid exists nor is there any assessment about the loss of livelihood suffered by the vast multitude. The cost of lockdown in terms of collapse of learning outcomes of children and young adults has not even been talked about.
Five, and following on the heels of Covid, came the ill-fated farm laws that were rammed through Parliament. True, that the government, for the first time, finally backtracked and withdrew the laws. But making those laws and the subsequent unresponsiveness to the protests finally culminating in a loss of face by having to withdraw those laws constituted a major setback and failure. This alone would ordinarily prove to be the undoing of a government.
Six, all through the second term so far, another mystery that is wrapped in an enigma of secrecy and a conspiracy of silence has been the question of clashes with China and alleged incursions into Indian territory. Besides the verbose smartness of the external affairs minister and the blanket statement by the PM that nobody has encroached on Indian territory and we won’t allow anybody to do so, no systematic, point-by-point response has been forthcoming.
Seven, more recently, the question of nexus between the ruling party and the Adani group gathered momentum. The government easily hid behind SEBI and a tame intervention by the SC. But again, the juridical points are irrelevant. It is a question of charges not sticking and nobody taking the government to account. No statement in Parliament, no explanation, no denial. The nationalist identity of the leader and the ruling party are adequate to deflect public opinion from such charges.
In the midst of all this, over the past nine years, the “double engine government” has faced defeats in many assemblies. This process began right after the 2014 election and has been recurring regularly. Such defeats would ordinarily weaken the ruling party and translate into losses in parliamentary elections. But Modi has been successful in splitting voter choices between the local and national and keeping the latter in his favour. Therefore, losses in assembly elections have failed to adversely impact the fate of the central government.
Finally, carried away by the popularity he enjoys, the prime minister has consistently indulged in questionable language in his attacks on the Opposition. A leader was obliquely referred to as “Congress’s widow”, while another was mocked as “Didi-o-Didi” and in a third instance, the epithet of “fifty crore girlfriend” was hurled. Any one of these utterances would ordinarily cost popularity. Instead, this has been taken as a cue by the party more generally, producing a language of politics that is not just anti-women and coarse but plainly bordering on hate speech as in the case of “goli maro… ko”.
The last nine years are marked with these nine failures and blemishes — like the proverbial nine lives of the cat. The purpose of listing them out is not to count the misdeeds of this government. A larger point is involved here, which we should ponder over as a society: In any democracy, even one of these blemishes or failures would have sufficed to not just weaken the government or reduce its popular support but in all likelihood, unseat it. Something that would ordinarily be a liability in a democracy has not hurt the government. There has been no media outcry on these matters. The very moralistic middle class has refused to take cognisance of these failures. The structure of politics and political rhetoric has been such that these are not seen as mistakes. There seems to be no form of political reprisal.
So, more than the mistakes or blemishes, the issue is about the political culture that we are adopting as a nation. It is something for social psychologists and theorists of democracy to ponder. What has changed — or what is it in our collective imagination —that makes it possible for a government, a party and a leader to overcome ordinary constraints and become so unaccountable that both governance and rhetoric can be twisted with impunity?
These days, it is argued that there is a paradigmatic shift in the way democracy and nationhood are understood. Perhaps, it is this shift that endorses the phenomenon of “Modi can do no wrong”. It is a misfortune that “civilisational” claims are accompanied by disrespect to popular suffering, nationalist claims are coupled with hiding state failures in protecting the nation-state and origins of democracy (being the Mother of democracy) are associated with vile language from the grass roots to the apex.
The writer taught political science at Savitribai Phule University, Pune
