When Modi doesn't return as PM in 2019
A couple of months ago a friend, somebody I would describe as centre-right, and far more knowledgeable than me on political issues, placed a bet with me that Narendra Modi would not be the prime minister after the 2019 elections. He set the odds at 10 to 1. He laughed at my surprise and said, “Consider it an emotional hedge. If you lose - and Modi is no longer PM - you won’t mind paying me Rs 1,000. But if you win, at least you get Rs 100.”
I laughed and said okay, and then he explained to me his logic.
The 2014 elections were a wave, as much anti-UPA as in favour of a Modi who promised to transform India. That wave will not recur. The NDA currently has 275 seats in the Lok Sabha (272 elected, two nominated, and the speaker), and its allies add another 40 to that kitty. The BJP can do what it wants because in a House of 545 seats, it has a simple majority by itself. And the BJP is in the complete control of the Modi-Shah duo because the wave, and the majority, is seen as their doing.
In 2019, though, there is unlikely to be a recurrence of the wave, the BJP is already at its peak in large states like Uttar Pradesh - which it virtually swept, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra. The only way that it has to go is down, and that could mean a loss of anywhere between 50 to a 100 seats. It might still remain the single-largest party, but it will not be calling the shots, and just as Modi and Shah were seen as the people who gave the BJP a thumping victory, they will be seen after 2019 as the ones that drove the BJP to its biggest loss in seats.
Given that the politics within the party are already vicious, and that its biggest ally - the Shiv Sena (no other NDA ally has seats in the double digits) - gives almost daily lectures against the BJP, the reign of Modi is already over. Only its epitaph needs to be written.
I heard almost the same logic from a Congress politician recently. The BJP has consistently written cheques with their speeches, that they don’t have the wherewithal to cash. From Rs 15 lakh in people’s bank account from black money brought back from abroad, to creating millions of jobs, to a foreign policy built on boastful talk and hugging any dignitary in sight, Modi’s governance track record in the past four years has gone from unerringly from disaster to another disaster.
Every new announcement is treated with derision and a fearful look at the bank, in case Modi has another brainwave and decides to cancel whatever money we have left.
The single greatest success that Make in India has achieved is a massive outpouring of Modi jokes. And maybe that is enough, maybe the Opposition can just wait in the wings and let Modi continue to destroy himself, and be ridiculed out of power.
There is a precedent. The Republicans under George W Bush’s presidency went from one massive error to another. Dubya, a person with limited intellectual ability, surrounded himself with people who thought they were smarter than they were. At the same time the genius of Karl Rove, supported ably by Rupert Murdoch’s execrable Fox News, did a great job in stirring up the nastiest parts of the American psyche while sowing falsehoods and divisions among the Opposition.
All of that did not help, by the time Barack Obama stood for elections all the dirty tricks in the world could not hide the wars that America was losing (or at least not winning, which counts for the same when you are a “superpower”), the economy in free fall, and a banking sector so contemptuous of regulations that it brought the world to its knees.
Obama did not merely win, Dubya and his team of idiots lost, catastrophically, and in their wake destroyed much of the rational basis of the Republican Party.
The problem is what came after. During his presidency Obama managed to tie a bow on the Iraq War, but ISIS was already rising. Afghanistan remains in dreadful stalemate with lives being lost - often innocent lives of Afghan civilians - almost every day. The price of stabilising the banking sector was that all the biggest thieves got away. And for all the idea of a better foreign policy, the indescribable folly of lumping together various conflicts under the “war on terror” was to create a menace that could never be eradicated.
When states such as Egypt’s military dictatorship, Putin’s Russia, China’s authoritarian dictatorship, and Saudi Arabia’s regime are your allies, then your enemies are likely to be regime opponents somewhat closer to Bhagat Singh, Nelson Mandela, and Menachem Begin (all "terrorists" in their day) than anything else.
Obama inherited a state already caught in a deeply damaging battle against democracy and human dignity. He could do little to change that, and by perpetuating the omni-spying of the National Security Agency, and the extra-legal execution by drone, he also added to the problems. The appeal of a lunatic like Donald Trump, who said (not incorrectly) that the system was failing (by-passing the fact that people like him had exploited those failures to make money and destroy jobs and industries) was not irrational.
If I am to believe my friend, and the Congress politician, then all we have to do is wait for Modi’s reign of error to come to an end is the laughter of our fellow citizens, I fear what comes after if there is no plan. How do we fix the mistakes of the past four years, of the deep damage done to social harmony, to systems of accountability, to the independence of the Election Commission and the judiciary, to the bullying of every single community that is seen as marginal?
What stops the government that comes into place in 2019 from continuing down the self-destructive path that we have taken since 2014?
Do you really think the mad screamers on your TV screens will become sensible? Do you really think the sycophants will go away, or will they just find another "great leader" to take their selfies with?
We have two advantages, the first is the influence of India’s independence movement, and the Constituent Assembly debates.
We tend to forget that India’s independence movement was as much a social reform movement as well as a political movement. As much as it argued that the dignity of Indians was deeply compromised as a colonised people treated as subjects, it also argued for the greater role of women in public life, and in BR Ambedkar’s fiery prose, the importance of the need of dignity for Indians marginalised in unequal societies.
Our leaders had the wisdom to understand that in our tryst with destiny, we had only partially achieved what we aimed to do, or in Nehru’s words, "not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially". Ambedkar, as always, was far more blunt. Speaking of the Constitution, he said, “In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value.
"In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?
"If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which is Assembly has to laboriously built up.”
It is essential that this path must continue to be followed. Fortunately, in the past few years a series of blunders by the Modi government has raised the relevance of these same points. There has been no stronger statement of the importance of the essential dignity of Indians than the recent case which enshrined the right to privacy (justice KS Puttaswamy versus Union of India).
During the recent hearings of the legality and constitutionality of making Aadhaar mandatory, similar arguments have been forwarded on the right of Indians to be citizens, not subjects.
When I raised these points with an Opposition leader, he said that while he was in favour of a more democratic approach, he replied that while Indians are all in favour of democracy when it comes to people above them, they want those less empowered than them to stay down.
In a hierarchical society it was hard for politicians to make an appealing argument for radical democratic and egalitarian values.
He may be correct. For anybody who has seen elections close up in the hinterland much of the argument is, “Now our people will be in power.”
And this points to one last thing - political parties will not save India, because they will only change things at the margins. The Centre is us, the public, civil society, the Indian citizen. Let us stop looking for saviours and lobby, work for, change ourselves. Only then will we get the Opposition we deserve, and the government too.
Only then can we achieve what our Independence movement aspired to achieve, a free country of free citizens.