Another factor accounting for the Modi landslide was the woeful campaign of the Congress Party. Most of the commentary in the British and, to a lesser extent, the Indian press mentioned the poor and unexciting campaign performances of Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Party and the latest incumbent of a well-known family! Lacklustre in front of the television cameras and unexciting when addressing campaign rallies, the historical allure of the Gandhi-Nehru brand fast disappeared. But it was not only a case of an absence of charismatic leadership in the Congress campaign, important as this is in India’s increasingly ‘presidential’ style elections. More importantly, the election possibly heralded the end of the dynastic family Congress Party and possibly even the Party itself that emerged in the split in 1969, engineered by Rahul’s grandmother Indira Gandhi. As Rahul himself remarked in 2013, “I am not afraid to say that the Congress has become moribund. It has scarcely a single leader with a modern mind… Congress has never succeeded into evolving into a modern political party,” as was reported by Hartosh Singh Bal in The Caravan, January 2013. Increasingly dependent on the Gandhi brand and masked by the surprising 2009 general election success, the Congress Party had been shown to be in the main at least an empty political shell devoid of the basic organisational requirements especially at the local level necessary to win elections. Irrespective of one’s views on the BJP, this was not the case in the BJP’s organisation. They had recruited the local activists, they had built the local branch organisation, they organised the training of the cadre and they successfully mobilised their ‘base’ at opportune moments. Given the difficulty of addressing ‘one’ electorate in a country so vast and different at state and national level, the BJP professionally and slickly presented one man as the leader and national focus. Newspapers reported that Modi had flown 300,000 kilometres and addressed 457 rallies during the campaign. These efforts were greatly and gratefully helped by an election war chest of an estimated 500 million pounds on the individual campaign of Modi. There is no limit on the spending by political parties as opposed to individual candidates. Much of this treasure chest came from eager corporate sponsors. They will be expecting a payback. The Congress Party by contrast, in their third period of office from 2009–2014, failed to get the ‘faithful’ out, failed to deal with the corruption, patronage and mismanagement charges of the last five years and failed to outline a convincing narrative and strategy for the country. They looked exhausted. The 2014 elections seemed to confirm the withering away of the Party. It could be argued that there is nothing left for Rahul to reform; the increasing importance of patronage and sycophantic adherents has resulted in a much reduced and weakened entity. In Delhi, the Congress lost in every seat. A party which had been in power for all but 18 of the last 67 years had been reduced to a historic humbling. William Dalrymple in an excellent article on the Indian election in the British journal New Statesman argued that the last few years of Congress government under the leadership of Dr Manmohan Singh had: “retreated into a vast programme of rural benefits and agriculture welfarism.” This he argues could not be afforded and was typical of initiatives that have “hobbled the Indian economy for much of its post-independence history and which Singh (Finance Minister and later Prime Minister) initially won so many plaudits for reversing at the beginning of his ministerial career.” As discussed in an earlier chapter, this is not a view that I share. If one is looking for plaudits resulting from ‘freeing’ the economy from its ‘over-regulated’, ‘antiprivate sector’, welfare-heavy direction, then it seems to me that Mr Modi is going to massively outdo Mr Singh in the plaudit stakes.
Also mentioned in an earlier chapter, an important part of Modi’s appeal and of the BJP’s campaign was his proclaimed ‘success’ in the management of the state of Gujarat which he has run since 2001. The 2014 campaign slogan based on his time in Gujarat was “Development For All”. Modi appears to like slogans and his “Vibrant Gujarat” branding was to publicise the big business friendly, economically dynamic and politically stable state under his leadership. Some other commentators were more critical. According to Aditya Chakrabortty writing in 2014, “running Gujarat was based on handing cut-price land and soft loans to big business, who in turn flew him around in private jets. This brought cash into the state, but very little of it has been shared out beyond big cities such as Ahmedabad.” Under Modi the Gujarat economy has tripled in size. His reforms of the electricity industry in the state (a source of grumbles and anger throughout India) resulted in Gujarat having one of the best and most reliable industries in the country; judges were required to work extra hours to clear the backlog of cases, and annual industry ‘summits’ provided publicity and investment pledges of significant sums. In 2008, Tata Motors moved its car plant from Communist-run West Bengal to Gujarat, an issue of major economic and political significance in India. According to the website, openDemocracy, this investment by Tata received a state subsidy that was at least 3–4 times greater and at a 0.1% interest rate that did not need to begin to be repaid for 20 years. “This was in addition to getting land at throwaway prices, free electricity and tax breaks.” In 2011 Ford motorcars invested $1 billion in another new car plant. Gujarat was seen to be a state on the move and Mr Modi was seen as its driving force. As an article in the Outlook put it after the results of the 2014 election had been declared, “The stock market and the business community can hardly contain their jubilation. India’s messiah with the magic wand has arrived.” As discussed in an earlier chapter, less often mentioned was Gujarat’s poor record on infant mortality, poverty and literacy rates.
Of course, the charges of aggressive corporate campaigning and funding for ‘their’ candidate together with issues of corruption and a sycophantic media are not particular to Indian politics or elections. Indeed, India and even the BJP under Modi has a lot to learn on these issues from politics and elections from the US and from the ‘home’ of parliamentary democracy, Britain. Speaking in 2016 for example, the noted anti-mafia journalist Roberto Saviano identified as the most corrupt country in the world not Afghanistan, Nigeria or India but Britain – or more particularly, London. The capital’s banking institutions were key components, he argued, of ‘criminal capitalism’ which laundered drug money through offshore networks. Drug trafficking revenues are greater than that from the oil companies – cocaine alone is a £300 billion a year business. Furthermore, it is through Britain that 90% of the owners of capital in London have their headquarters offshore. The Anti-Corruption International Summit in London in 2016 came and went with little notice or expected impact. Maybe Francis Fukuyama is right when he suggests, first, that corruption has become the defining issue of the present century, and second, that the main reason for this is the weakening and fragile modern state. While there may be some truth in this, it is not the whole story. The leaked Panama Papers with the Fonseca law firm at the centre of the scandal provided a glimpse and only a glimpse of systematic tax evasion totalling to date around $2 billion perpetuated by companies and wealthy individuals. Kept under protective cover by British governments of various political persuasions, these offshore havens such as the British Virgin Islands have been used by those with wealth to hide from around the globe. Governments throughout the rich Western economies are complicit as “enablers of economic crime”, as the anti-corruption organisation Global Witness puts it. Fragile states are part of the problem but the real culprits are the politicians from the 1980s onwards who have promoted the need for ‘austerity’ – shorthand for transferring wealth from the poorest to the richest. And commentators were surprised by the election of Donald Trump in America?
For us in the West, corruption is something that happens elsewhere, usually in emerging economies. The use of an extremely narrow definition of ‘corruption’ is a feature of a long tradition that portrays corruption as something limited to poor countries – that is, primarily something about bribes. Absent is a concern with systemic tax evasion, political funding patterns that buy influence and prestige, the c
hannelling of public funding into private corporations through ‘reforms’ such as Public Finance Initiative and privatisation activities, massive defrauding and mis-selling of the public by financial institutions and the easy interchange between political and corporation offices. We tend to forget the fines of $123 million on Ernst and Young over its sale of tax avoidance schemes, or the earlier fine of $456 million on KPMG after it admitted to a fraud that generated at least $11 billion in fraudulent tax avoidance schemes. The fines of $2.6 billion for Credit Suisse, $780 million for UBS and the $554 million for Deutsche Bank can be added to the hall of fame tax avoidance stars. We could also try and explain to a visitor to Britain about the relationship between donations to political parties and ending up in the House of Lords, but they wouldn’t believe it. India has indeed much to learn from Western economies. We might not bribe in an everyday way, but corruption is rife and ‘crony capitalism’ under recent British governments showed how hollowed out had become ‘the home of parliamentary democracy’. In the US, the situation is no better with the domination of politics by big money being a widely-accepted feature of American democracy over the last 60–70 years. The latest examples in 2016 of this relationship between money and political influence were the John Doe files detailing over 1,500 pages of how millions of dollars are secretly donated by major corporations and very rich individuals to third party groups to sway elections. The list of culprits reads like a who’s who of large corporations, Republican Party politicians as well as one Donald Trump.
And as a footnote, perhaps it would be useful to have a little more history and accountability about the role of looting and stolen assets by Western powers in countries for example such as Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and India.
In the post-election analysis, the scale of the BJP’s victory did throw up some interesting features. Young people were seen as a major force behind, and beneficiary from, the results. Around 100 million voters cast a vote for the first time and some pollsters estimated that up to 90% of 18–25 year olds voted for Modi. Furthermore the party appears surprisingly to have picked up significant votes in rural areas with some suggesting this reflected increased economic activity in the villages and smaller towns. And it is worth remembering that the undisputed winner of the election is a son of tea stall owner and is seen as an outsider of the political circles concentrated in Delhi. There was, however, a building inevitability, a Modi bandwagon visible as the elections approached. Media focus was seven times greater than on Rahul and, from my perusal of the daily press leading up to the election, reflected an increasingly pro-Modi perspective. A number of well-known authors, celebrities and commentators switched allegiance and came out enthusiastically endorsing Modi. Modi was now, it was suggested, a moderate developmentalist. And then in April, Time magazine of India headlined “Modi Gets a Bollywood Boost”. Two well-known Bollywood Muslim stars endorsed Modi and launched a version of Modi’s official website in Urdu. Urdu is the mother tongue of many of India’s Muslims. As William Dalrymple summed up in his article written just before the election, the election “represents the whole world of contestations: left against right, insider against outsider, secular Nehruvian vs. sectarian nationalist, Brahminical dynastic princeling vs. lower-caste, working-class self-made man.” It is little wonder that much of the world’s media were fascinated for a brief time anyway by the 2014 contest.
However, all was not plain sailing. It was this issue of “sectarian nationalist” as Dalrymple put it, and in particular the March 2002 pogrom in Gujarat under Modi’s leadership that was also of interest and comment in the international press. Within six months of Modi becoming First Minister of Gujarat, around 2,000 mostly Muslims were killed and about 200,000 people made homeless in an intercommunal bloodbath characterised by its planned, coordinated nature and by its savagery. The trigger for this outbreak of violence was an attack on a train carrying Hindu activists and pilgrims back from a ceremony in Ayodhya. Ten years earlier, a mosque – the Babri Mosque – said to have been built on the birthplace of one of the Hindu gods, Lord Ram, had been destroyed by Hindu activists in Ayodhya. This destruction of the mosque led to one of the worst episodes of communal violence in India since Independence. Modi has always denied his involvement in the riots, has never apologised for his government’s lack of protection of the minorities and never shown remorse, although some of his political associates have been charged and imprisoned. The British and US governments made clear at this time that Modi was not welcome in their countries. His election as leader of the BJP government in 2014 hastily led to a reversal of this position and he was soon welcomed to both countries.
Modi’s only reported expression of regret for the pogroms in 2002 compared them to a car running over a puppy while calling Muslim relief camps “baby making factories”. He refuses to take questions on the issue, instead walking out of interviews. A report by Human Rights Watch, writes Dalrymple, asserted that his administration was complicit in the massacres and that there was extensive participation of the police and state government officials. Several formal investigations through the courts, however, have failed to convict Modi while at the same time not exonerating him from involvement.
Interwoven with the 2002 killings is the association of the BJP and Modi in particular with the notion of ‘Hindutva’ (Hinduness) and organisationally with, as Amit Chaudhuri writes, “disciplinarian, quasi-militant, extreme right-wing outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS],” also known as the Sangh. Modi has been a lifelong member of the RSS which, as Pankaj Mishra notes, is “a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founders believed that Nazi Germany had manifested ‘race pride at its highest’ by purging the Jews.” It was a former member of the RSS who murdered Gandhi in 1948 for being too soft on Muslims. “I got inspiration to live for the nation from the RSS. I learned to live for others, and not myself. I owe it all to the RSS,” said Modi. Seeing the last Congress government under Mohammed Singh as only “working for the Muslims”, sexual violence towards women as being the result of “Western ideas” and today’s India being a colonial stunted creation and mere shadow of the “greater Bharat” stretching from Afghanistan to Indonesia, the RSS remains a formidable and organisational, influential political and religious presence. Present at most Modi political rallies were young men from the Bajrang Dal, a right-wing, hardline youth organisation dedicated to a muscular and revivalist version of Hinduism. Many are armed with ceremonial swords, others with combat knives and big-bladed hatchets. Throughout Indian cities especially in the poorest sections, thousands of RSS and Bajrang Dal groups meet daily at first light, sing and pray to ‘Mother India’, complete their drill sessions and then head off to get the voters out.
Quite how close and involved the RSS will be in the Modi government is at the moment not known. The influential but publicity-shy RSS is at the apex of a loose confederation of Hindu nationalist organisations, of which the BJP is the political wing. As Andrew Whitehead reports when reviewing Rajdeep Sardesai’s book, 2014: The Election That Changed India, the RSS is at the end of the day the final word within the Saffron ‘family’. At the heart of this family and of the RSS is Hindutva – the belief that India’s billion strong Hindus are burdened by the weight of centuries of Muslim and colonial rule. The secular tradition and trappings of public and political life, they argue, are too forgiving to religious minorities and not sufficiently respectful to Hindu values and traditions.
Modi has already demonstrated that he is prepared to reject key aspects of the RSS agenda, such as building a temple on the disputed site at Ayodhya. As Jason Burke who covered the elections for The Guardian asks, how much of the RSS agenda will be incorporated into government policy and could Modi restrain their campaigns if he so chooses? While Modi at the moment anyway is keeping some distance from the RSS, some of his more enthusiastic followers are less restrained. Kashmir is often mentioned and there is talk and activities of ‘reconversion’ to Hin
duism or ‘Ghar Wapsi’ – the Hindutva belief that all Indians are really Hindus but have simply strayed from the true path. There are also complaints about intercommunal marriages and isolated acts of violence against non-Hindu individuals and villages.
There has been, however, some critical discussion of the Modi victory in the Indian press. An example is the commentary in the daily paper The Hindu by Nissim Mannathukkaren in March 2014. He discusses the various processes whereby the “banalisation of evil” takes place. As he puts it, “a terrifyingly fascinating (example of this process) is now underway in the election campaign (in) the trivialisation and normalisation of the Gujarat pogrom, to pave the way for the crowning of the emperor.” He continues further on in the article with an even stronger line. “Fascism is in the making,” he writes, “when economics and development are amputated from ethics and an overriding conception of human good, and violence against minorities becomes banal… And if India actually believes this election to be a moral dilemma, then the conscience of the land of Buddha and Gandhi is on the verge of imploding.”
I have come across this coupling of ‘fascism’ with ‘Modi’ a few times in the media. In an Opinion piece for example in the Times of India in March 2014, Kanti Bajpai notes that, “There is every danger that a Modi-led India will be an India marked by soft fascism. At its core, fascism stands for state authoritarianism, intimidation by conservative-minded extra-legal groups, national chauvinism, submission of individuals and groups to a larger-than-life leader, and a Darwinian view of social life (the strong must prevail).” Kanti continues to argue “at least in the first instance” fascism will feature as the soft variety rather than hard fascism. Then there is an article on the Kafila website that talks of confronting “communal fascism”. However, most thinkers and political analyses, I think, would not see the BJP or Modi as fascist; although right-wing, pro-capital, religiously extreme and politically authoritarian, there are not the context and political characteristics that defined the fascist parties of Europe. Additionally, there are the complexities of Hindutva which muddies the association of fascism with the BJP.
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