India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  When the votes were counted, on 16 May, the Bharatiya Janata Party had got an impressive 282 seats, a clear majority. Its main rival, the Congress Party, had been comprehensively routed. Congress had won a meagre 44 seats, more than a hundred and fifty less than in 2009.

  The BJP’s most stunning victory was in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. Here, it won 71 seats out of 80, prevailing over the Congress as well as locally powerful caste-based parties. (In the 2009 elections the BJP had won a mere 10 seats in the state). It also did well in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and, inevitably, in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. The BJP fared less well in the states of West Bengal and Odisha in the east, and in Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south. In these states, a majority of the population do not speak or comprehend Hindi, and were not so easily swayed by the seductive powers of Narendra Modi’s oratory.

  Taking the country as a whole, the BJP increased its vote share from 19 per cent to 31 per cent. First-time voters in particular, and those under thirty-five in general, voted enthusiastically for the BJP, a striking reflection of Rahul Gandhi’s incompetence as a vote-gatherer, since the young thought his far older rival much more likely to fulfil their expectations.55

  The election was not won by Narendra Modi alone. Even so, there had been few instances in the past where a single individual left such an impress on an Indian election. Perhaps the only precedents were the elections of 1952 and 1971, where Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi led and personified their party’s successful campaign, just as Modi had now done.

  Although schooled in the RSS, as chief minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi had kept the Sangh at a distance. He did not want an alternate centre of power. However, in the run-up to the general elections, the RSS and Modi were once more reconciled. After an initial hesitation, the Sangh endorsed him as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, and RSS cadres canvassed energetically for Modi on the ground, particularly in the key state of Uttar Pradesh. Their reward was soon forthcoming; out of 23 members of the prime minister’s Cabinet, seventeen were from the RSS.56

  In July, Modi’s close associate Amit Shah was elected president of the BJP. Shah was the one man the prime minister trusted completely. In Gujarat, he at one time held nine portfolios in Modi’s Cabinet. However, Shah had a controversial past; he had even been externed by the Supreme Court from his home state for fear he might tamper with the evidence in cases of extra-judicial killings. Now, as president of the ruling party, he was the second most powerful man in India.57

  VIII

  In his first months in office, Narendra Modi announced a whole array of new schemes and programmes. There was the ‘Swachh Bharat’ mission, which promised to eliminate open defecation by 2 October 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. The prime minister himself took a broom to the dirty riverside ghats of the holy city of Varanasi.58 Then there was the ‘Make in India’ campaign, which promised to make the country a hub of manufacturing to match China.59 Next came Modi’s ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ mission, which sought to promote gender equality through the education of girls.60 And there was also the ‘Smart Cities Mission’, whereby the prime minister sought to have one hundred urban centres developed as hubs of innovation and creativity.61

  The prime minister also revealed a penchant for acronyms. While welcoming Foreign Direct Investment, he said that FDI must also stand for First Develop India. On New Year’s Day 2015, the Planning Commission was abolished, being replaced by the Niti Aayog, the first word of which also spelt National Institution for Transforming India.62 And in advocating better relations with the country’s most powerful neighbour, Modi argued that we should INCH towards MILES, the first acronym joining India and China, the second joining Millennium with Exceptional Synergy.63

  In its last year in power, the UPA government had brought about a new Land Acquisition Act, which made the consent of farmers mandatory before their land could be taken over for industrial or other projects. Narendra Modi had promised to repeal this with a new law, making it easier for entrepreneurs to acquire land to build factories that would generate employment as well as wealth. However, the law his advisers drafted was fiercely resisted within sections of his own party, nervous as being seen as excessively ‘pro-business’.

  Modi’s election campaign had been handsomely funded by large corporates. He had himself promised faster industrial growth and the rapid generation of jobs. After his proposed land acquisition bill was stalled, he now promoted a new Goods and Services Tax (GST). This was originally an initiative of the previous prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who had however failed to get it passed through Parliament.

  The GST bill sought to eliminate the existing taxes, levies and duties that prevailed in different states, and replace them with a single Value Added Tax for all goods and services. When the UPA government had first proposed the GST, Modi had opposed it, saying it would infringe on states’ rights. Most entrepreneurs, however, were strongly in favour of a GST; so were most economists, who argued that it would create a unified national market, spur growth and reduce corruption. In August 2016 a GST bill passed through Parliament; it had now to be ratified by a majority of state assemblies before it could become law.64

  Modi’s focus on energizing the domestic economy was expected. For the economic growth that India experienced in recent decades had not generated adequate employment. Between 2000 and 2010, India’s total workforce had increased by 63 million. Of these, 44 million joined the unorganized sector, 22 million became informal workers in the organized sector, while the number of formal workers in the organized sector actually fell by 3 million. Despite its long history of industrial enterprise, and its many technical and engineering colleges, India had not been able to match the success of even Bangladesh and Vietnam (let alone China) in generating widespread employment in factories that produced goods for the world market.65

  By the standards of most developing countries the unemployment rate in India was low. But it was increasing, a worrying sign for politicians and policy-makers. It stood at 6.8 per cent in 2001, and had climbed to 9.6 per cent a decade later. The export boom of the 1990s had tapered off. New manufacturing projects were inhibited by high (and rising) land and labour costs. The infrastructure promised by the state (better roads, ports and airports) to ease movement of raw materials as well as finished goods had not substantially materialized. It was thus that the BJP had claimed in its 2014 election manifesto that it would create ten million jobs a year, an extremely ambitious target which, once in power, it was finding increasingly hard to achieve.66

  In 2015, the limitations of India’s ‘jobless growth’ model were starkly shown up when some 2.3 million young men applied for 368 junior posts advertised for by the Uttar Pradesh government. The jobs were at the lowest level of the government hierarchy. They involved riding a bicycle to run errands for senior officers, keeping watch outside their offices, or serving them and their guests tea. Yet so scarce was private sector employment in this part of India that some 25,000 postgraduates and even 255 men with PhD’s applied for these menial jobs in government.67

  The prime minister’s emphasis on such programmes as Make in India was a response to such anomalies in the development process. This push towards more rapid economic growth, however, led to a further dilution of environmental standards and safeguards. In October 2015, the Ministry of Environment and Forests made mining easier by deleting the hydrological value of forest cover as a constraint on new projects. Natural forests play a crucial role in sustaining rivers and lakes. The new policy encouraged forest destruction at the hands of new mining and industrial projects, imperilling the supply of fresh water to agriculture and rural households.68

  The Ministry of Environment and Forests (which now had ‘Climate Change’ added on to its title) had its budget slashed by 50 per cent in the first year of Modi’s prime ministership. Meanwhile, existing laws for wildlife and biodiversity protection were also relaxed, and fines levied on industries for causing pollut
ion cancelled. The consent of tribal communities for new projects in their vicinity, previously mandatory, was now withdrawn.69

  Industrial growth at all costs was the new mantra, regardless of what this dilution of environmental norms would mean for the provision of clean air and water to the ordinary citizen, or for the sustainability of the development process itself. The implications of these new policies soon revealed themselves, when, in April 2016, a global study reported that India led the world in environmental conflicts. Some 27 per cent of all nature-related conflicts in the country were related to the scarcity of water. Other conflicts pertained to the destruction of forests, the disposal of untreated garbage, and the impact of industrial pollution.70

  IX

  The economic policies Narendra Modi pursued as prime minister were consistent with his track record in Gujarat. What was more surprising was his keen interest in global affairs. In his first year in office, Modi travelled to as many as nineteen countries, these including Japan, China, Australia and the United States. In his second year, he travelled to another seventeen, while re-visiting some countries he had already been to.

  Although he was not formally the Minister of External Affairs, Modi took complete charge of foreign policy, as only Jawaharlal Nehru among Indian prime ministers had done before him. He told an interviewer that he travelled so much since (so he claimed) the Indian media had painted an unflattering portrait of him, and he wanted world leaders to discover for themselves the real personality of the new prime minister of India.71

  In his travels abroad, Modi made it a point to address members of the Indian diaspora, in public meetings held in such places as New York’s Madison Square Gardens and London’s Wembley football stadium, where large and delirious crowds cheered him on. His speeches were characteristically robust. To convey that, unlike past prime ministers, he was authentically Indian and proud of his heritage, he invoked religious thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda, presented the Bhagavad Gita to foreign dignitaries, and celebrated the gift, by India, of yoga to the world.72

  In other countries, as in India, Modi seemed tireless. Yet it was not easy to discern a particular thread in his foreign policy initiatives. He visited Japan and made some unflattering remarks about another country (which many presumed to be China), but then, a few weeks later, entertained the Chinese president in Gujarat. Modi invited the Pakistani prime minister to his swearing-in ceremony in May 2014, and, a year-and-a-half later, dropped in to attend his grand-daughter’s wedding in Lahore. Yet relations between Pakistan and India continued to be frosty, with official spokesmen trading barbs and innuendos, as they had long done. Modi’s own Defence Minister said in public that ‘going to Pakistan or going to hell is the same thing’.73

  The one area where there was clear continuity was in India’s relations with the United States. When Barack Obama visited New Delhi in January 2015, Modi spoke of there being a special ‘chemistry’ between him and the American president.74 In truth, Modi was merely consolidating the work done by his two immediate predecessors, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, in bringing the world’s two largest democracies, which had been alienated from one another during the Cold War, closer together once the Cold War had ended.75

  X

  In a book published in 1970, Rajni Kothari had spoken of the ‘Congress system’ of Indian politics. Unlike in Europe and North America, where two or more parties alternated in power, in India one party was dominant, if not hegemonic. It was solidly in power at the centre and in most of the states. For many years after Independence, the Congress was successful in presenting itself as the ‘authoritative spokesman of the nation as well as its affirmed agent of criticism and change’.

  Kothari was writing in the aftermath of the 1967 elections, the first time Congress’s countrywide dominance was seriously threatened. The party retained power at the centre, but lost power in as many as eight states. But, as Kothari showed, in the ways that mattered, the Congress remained ‘the preponderant political force in the country’. Indeed, in six of the states lost by the Congress in 1967, the government was led by a former Congressman. And so the Congress remained ‘the ruling party and the overwhelming political force at the national level’ – in addition, it ‘control[led] various avenues for influencing state politics’.

  One byproduct of the political dominance of the Congress was that it helped keep the country together in those first, fraught, fractious decades of Independence. Thus, as Kothari remarked, ‘because the Congress managed to be in power continuously and there was no united or effective threat to its authority, the country’s political process gained incomparable advantages of continuity and unity’.76

  This ‘Congress system’ of which Kothari spoke held, more or less, for the first three decades after Independence. It was challenged in 1977, after the Emergency, but then re-asserted itself between 1980 and 1989.

  The years 1989 to 1998 were a period of transition in Indian politics. Congress dominance weakened across India, as parties based on regional, religious, caste and class identities won elections and ran governments in state after state. A third phase was inaugurated in 1998, with the emergence of a bipolar polity. This was a consequence of the rise to national prominence of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The two poles were constituted by the Congress and the BJP respectively, around each of which smaller parties clustered.

  The general elections of 2014 saw the Congress reduced to an all-time low. In December of that year, after state elections in Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand, a further and perhaps more definitive landmark was reached: the BJP now had more members of state assemblies than the Congress.

  The rapid decline of the Congress was a consequence of, among other things, the fading appeal of its First Family. With an ever-younger electorate, fewer and fewer Indians remembered the contributions of Nehru, Indira or Rajiv. The party organization had crumbled in many parts of the country; once it lost power in a particular state, the Congress found it extremely hard to regain it. In Tamil Nadu it had not been in power since 1967; in West Bengal, since 1977; in Uttar Pradesh, since 1989. A third reason was the lacklustre leadership of Rahul Gandhi. He failed to inspire enthusiasm among voters; indeed, he was the first member of his family not to command the respect of even his party colleagues.77

  While the Congress had lost ground across India, some regional parties remained robust. In the general elections of 2014 the BJP had done very well in Bihar. But when assembly elections were held there in 2015, Modi’s party was crushed by an alliance of two Bihar-based parties. The next year, Mamata Banerjee and the TMC won comfortable re-election in West Bengal, and J. Jayalalithaa and her AIADMK did likewise in Tamil Nadu. The Communists remained strong in Tripura and Kerala, while in the city-state of Delhi, a new party, the Aam Admi Party – born out of the anti-corruption movement of 2011 – had humiliated both the BJP and the Congress.

  As I write this, in October 2016, it is clear that the BJP has replaced the Congress as the principal pole of Indian politics. Another milestone in its march was the victory in the Assam state elections earlier this year, where the Congress had been in power since 2001. A combination of anti-incumbency, Narendra Modi’s personal appeal and the subtle stoking of fears of further Muslim immigration from Bangladesh enabled the BJP to win a majority in Assam.78 This was the party’s first bridgehead in eastern India, perhaps presaging further inroads into the smaller north-eastern states, hitherto Congress strongholds.

  As this book goes to press, BJP is in power at the centre, and in as many as thirteen states. Karnataka remains the only major state in which the Congress is in power. The BJP is today India’s sole national party, with a major presence in a majority of the states of the Union. It is to national politics now what the Congress once was.

  XI

  At the height of its power and influence in the 1950s and 1960s, the Congress could count on comfortably winning the elections it fought. But it still faced protest and opposition from politicians in other pa
rties, from intellectuals, from social movements and from insurgencies. There were criticisms of the Congress government’s economic and foreign policies by scholars and by MPs, opposition to its social policies from popular movements (think the language struggle), and, not least, violent attempts to challenge the unitary idea of India it had promoted (think the Kashmiri, Naga and Mizo upsurges).

  And so it has been with the BJP government too. In the Lok Sabha, the alliance led by the BJP enjoys a comfortable majority. However, whenever a state assembly election is held, what is now India’s sole national party is strongly challenged by other parties. And, what might worry it as much, in between assembly and national elections the BJP faces intense pressure from popular movements conveying various forms of discontent with the government’s policies.

  One early source of discontent with Narendra Modi’s government was the influence on its functioning of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. Between 1998 and 2004, when Vajpayee was prime minister, the RSS’s hardline Hindutva agenda was largely kept in abeyance, in part because the BJP did not have the numbers to govern on its own. But now the party had a majority in the Lok Sabha, in whose making RSS cadres had played an important and perhaps determining role. The Sangh asked in return for control of key ministries (Education, Culture and Home among them), while also demanding that key appointments be cleared by it.

  Meanwhile, some newly elected BJP Members of Parliament made provocative statements in public. One charged Muslims with promoting ‘love jihad’ by capturing Hindu girls and converting them. A second praised Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. A third asked that all Christians and Muslims be ‘reconverted’ to Hinduism. A fourth used an extremely derogatory word, implying a complete lack of morals, to describe the Muslim community as a whole.79