A strong anti-minority message and a sharp rise in Hindu nationalist sentiment has brought former pariah Narendra Modi to the forefront of Indian politics. But is this a future Indians really want to consider?
Fourteen months before a scheduled parliamentary election that is widely expected to yield a regime-changing mandate, has India begun a series of manoeuvres that would result in a major departure from the political consensus since 1947 on the stance towards the religious minorities in the country?
The poser is not being articulated by India watchers as a theoretical postulate but evidenced in swiftly increasing political legitimacy of Narendra Modi, one time antithesis of multi-cultural India and a political pariah outside his own fraternity. The strongman from the western Indian state of Gujarat, which accounts for less than five percent of parliamentarians, is no longer short of allies outside his home terrain because of the perception that Modi is no longer a political liability. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Modi is the first Indian political leader after Indira Gandhi who has chosen – and dared – to play the political game by the rules that others abhor. Like his predecessor, Modi believes in flowing against the tide, defying logic and political convention. In business transactions, sale or exchange of properties or commodities on a ‘as-is-where-is-basis’, smacks of supreme arrogance.
Democracies are best suited to leaders astute in the art of negotiation. Compromise is not a dirty word for them because political diplomacy is all about accommodating the viewpoint of others if persuasion fails. The goal of the moment is always to sail to the next port of halt. But for close to two decades – in varying degrees – Modi has broken this norm. He has always insisted on charting his own course and forced others to accept his ways.
In the early days he used this strategy in a limited manner within his party, but since the communal riots in 2002, Modi’s approach found expression outside the state also. He has implicitly and consistently argued that the reaction to the Godhra carnage – 59 people were burnt alive by an unidentified mob in a railway coach when Hindu activists were returning from a political campaign – was on expected lines, that Hindus would retaliate by killing any Muslim.
In interviews with me, Modi did not shy from saying that minority groups, in search of a dignified existence, must accept idols (and ideals) of the majority as their own. In the period since 2002, Modi has not altered this stance remotely in contrast to the assertion of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) one-time undisputed leader, L K Adavni who recently argued that his party must make a charter of commitments to minorities.
There are uncanny similarities to Indira Gandhi’s decision in 1975 to suspend fundamental rights and Modi’s resolve to stick to majoritarian politics. India, by Mrs Gandhi’s assessment, had moved beyond day-to-day display of democratic rights. Similarly, Modi and his supporters believe that an increasing number of people believed that a ‘mistake’ had been made during Partition when India opted to become a ‘secular’ state.
Just as Mrs Gandhi argued that ‘discipline’ was the panacea for all ills, the policies of exclusion and the strategy of browbeating is Modi’s hallmark. With Indians seemingly getting impatient with failure to contain terrorism, seeing every terrorist as a Muslim (if not every Muslim as a terrorist) and endorsing the policy of social exclusion as the correct approach on development matters, Modi is beginning to appear as the ‘solution’ for a large number of Upper Caste Hindus.
There are limitations – the biggest being that in the coalition era, leaders have to follow more inclusive polities to draw bigger groups into their fold. India is historically a fractured nation and in recent years fissures have become wider. Modi believes that hegemony of the majority would be the uniting factor. But if that happens – and for a fairly long period of time and not in a transitory manner – then the India whose idea is universally accepted, will cease to exist.
The next 14 months will determine if Modi is able to redefine India or if pursuit of power eventually forces India’s great polarizing figure to become more ductile and malleable. The latter option will be good for Modi and his career but the first possibility raises Kafkaesque prospects for India and its believers.
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