Price of the Modi Years

by Aakar Patel

He has legitimised and normalised the RSS and made its values promoting an exclusionary nationalism acceptable to Indians. What was once communal is now legitimate and what was secular has been made inauthentic.

Government, of course, is different because it does not function on the profit motive, because its constituency is so diverse and on a scale so vast that it cannot directly be compared to the CEO’s focus on quarterly profits and instinct for sharper trade-offs.

The Modi years are littered with the corpses of projects thus taken up and discarded once a new toy had been identified.

In annual growth rate, Gujarat was slower than Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Bihar in the Modi years.1 Gujarat had in fact grown faster between 1992 and 1997 than under Modi.

India had lagged behind large parts of the world on most of the meaningful indicators for several decades, but it had also made improvements, even if these may have been slow. Under Modi, this has actually been reversed in several areas, including in the HDI indicators, where improvement first plateaued and then deteriorated as the effect of executive strokes like demonetisation and the 2020 national lockdown hit the poor. The full impact of the actions from above was visible on the population.

Great Man theory (which posits that history is largely explainable through the impact of great individuals)

Actually, they cannot. Print media, especially newspapers, have an asset that only they possess, and that is the beat reporter—the individual whose job it is to daily track one subject, whether it is the municipal corporation, the magistrate’s court, the secretariat, health, education, crime and so on. There are thousands of these individuals around the country (the last newspaper I worked at had 300 in Gujarat alone). These reporters are a newspaper phenomenon and do not exist in television because their material is not visual. Television is a medium of ‘debate’, and not reportage. It doesn’t make economic sense for TV channels to deploy large numbers of reporters who cannot produce visual material or who produce visual material that is mundane, such as an interview with the education secretary, municipal officer or the public prosecutor. This is why TV has few of these reporters and these beats, and mostly only print does. Their output is the mainstay of news in the country. It is what keeps scrutiny of the government going. Most television ‘breaking news’ is secondary and taken either from material already published in newspapers or by wire agencies like the Press Trust of India. The death of newspapers will end both the information stream currently available to citizens and it will end scrutiny of the government. Websites cannot fill the gap because they do not have the economics that print has. There is not a single digital publication anywhere in the world with the n...

Demonetisation was the idea of a man with a diploma in mechanical engineering from Latur, a town in Maharashtra.7 Anil Bokil runs an institution called ArthaKranti (economic revolution), and describes himself as an economic theorist. His thinking was: in a country like India where 70 per cent of the population survives on just Rs 150 per day, why do we need currency notes of more than Rs 100?

Exports of goods in the financial year ending March 2014, two months before Modi took over, was $312 billion. The following year, exports fell to $310 billion. They fell again in 2015–16 to $260 billion. In 2019–20, they returned to where they were when Modi took over, to $314 billion. In 2020–21, they fell to $290 billion.

Akshay Deshmane, reporting for Huffington Post, wrote of how the Modi government ‘prioritised minor institutional and procedural tweaks to game the ranking system’.52 India rose in the rankings because of a ‘methodological weaknesses’ that put disproportionate emphasis on insignificant changes.53 For instance, ‘eliminating the need for a company seal or rubber stamp to open a bank account, dropping the need to submit a cancelled cheque with employee provident fund applications, removing the need for traders to submit hard copies of documents, and increasing the capacity of an online customs payment gateway’.

Millions of workers and their families began walking to their villages. Many starved, many died. Many who walked on the highways were harassed and bullied by the police. Some walked on the railway tracks to avoid harassment and were run over.

The Indian who makes a median income has never been able to purchase with her living wage the sort of quality that she deserves and is her right.

The foreign policy of Manmohan Singh made Indian access and openness towards furthering economic opportunity the focal point of engaging the world. This was likely one reason why a quarter billion Indians (27 crore) were pulled out of poverty in his two terms, according to a study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.167

Modi has visited China nine times in office—four as chief minister and five times as prime minister—but has been unable to understand what it wants from India because his focus is on himself and not the other side.

When an army officer tied a civilian to a vehicle’s bonnet and paraded the individual around Kashmir for hours, the perpetrator was given a medal instead of a court martial.11

It is only in 2021, after India ended a 17-month internet and mobile blockade13 that violence began to taper off.14 The carrot was more effective than the stick, but this is not understood by India under Modi.

Phrases like ‘zero tolerance’ are not the product of subtlety of thinking. They are facile and naive reactions to a complex problem.

However, ‘beef lynching’ as a category of violence has been introduced to India after 2014. Journalists know this because they are familiar with the sort of crimes that make the front pages. Three years into Modi’s first term, a research report found that 97 per cent of all cow-related violence in India came after he was elected.1 The report was from 2017 but already it showed that 84 per cent of those killed were Muslims. In 30 per cent of the attacks, the police registered cases against the victims. The data also showed that half the attacks were based on rumours.

The allocation for Ayushman Bharat (dubbed ‘Modicare’ by Amit Shah when it was launched) was the same for 2021–22, Rs 6,400 crore, as it was for the year before. The usefulness of this scheme and of focussing on insurance rather than building infrastructure may be seen in the fact that of its 11 crore population only 19 people in Bihar received Covid-19 treatment under ‘Modicare’ and of Uttar Pradesh’s 20 crore only 875.

When Congressman Shashi Tharoor complained in a tweet in 2017 that the BJP had merely changed the names of 23 Congress schemes, and said that Modi’s was a ‘name-changing’ government and not a ‘game-changing one’, his claim was put to the test. It was found that he was right about 19.32 It turned out that the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana was the UPA’s Basic Savings Bank Deposit Account; Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana was the same as the National Girl Child Day programme; Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana was the Rajiv Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana; Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation was the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission renamed; the BJP’s neem-coated urea was the same as Congress’s neem-coated urea; the Soil Health Card scheme was the National Project on Management of Soil Health and Fertility; the Atal Pension Yojana was the Swavalamban Yojana; and even Make in India was the National Manufacturing Policy (NMP) under a new name.

It was revealed that Chinese firms that were banned by the government in the aftermath of the Ladakh crisis had contributed to PM CARES. TikTok gave Rs 30 crore, Huawei Rs 7 crore, Xiaomi Rs 15 crore and PayTM, with a 38 per cent Chinese stake, gave Rs 100 crore.13 This was particularly striking because the BJP had vociferously attacked the Congress after it was revealed in 2020 that the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation had received donations from the Chinese in 2005.

A Gujarat firm that claimed to have developed ventilators in 10 days was given a contract for 5,000 ventilators. These turned out to be dud machines, forcing hospitals to put out an SOS for real ventilators.15 This firm was linked to the individual who had gifted Modi the famous suit with his name in pinstripes.

On 10 March, the BJP replaced its chief minister in Uttarakhand because he wanted to restrict the Kumbh Mela coming up the following month to a purely ceremonial and symbolic one, i.e., without physical attendance by the masses. This was vetoed and he was replaced overnight.10 He would later say that he had worried about the Kumbh becoming a super-spreader event.11 The Kumbh Mela takes place every 12 years and should ordinarily have happened in 2022. However, astrologers convinced the BJP government that April 2021 was more auspicious.

In March 2021, the Union government’s science ministry funded research to see if chanting the Gayatri Mantra could treat Covid.17

It is why the dirge by Parul Khakhar became popular. Here is its text, translated by Salil Tripathi: Ganges, the Carrier of Corpses Don’t worry, be happy, in one voice speak the corpses O King, in your Ram-Rajya, we see bodies flow in the Ganges O King, the woods are ashes, No spots remain at crematoria, O King, there are no carers, Nor any pall-bearers, No mourners left And we are bereft With our wordless dirges of dysphoria Libitina enters every home where she dances and then prances, O King, in your Ram-Rajya, our bodies flow in the Ganges O King, the melting chimney quivers, the virus has us shaken O King, our bangles shatter, our heaving chest lies broken The city burns as he fiddles, Billa-Ranga thrust their lances, O King, in your Ram-Rajya, I see bodies flow in the Ganges O King, your attire sparkles as you shine and glow and blaze O King, this entire city has at last seen your real face Show your guts, no ifs and buts, Come out and shout and say it loud, “The naked King is lame and weak” Show me you are no longer meek, Flames rise high and reach the sky, the furious city rages; O King, in your Ram-Rajya, do you see bodies flow in the Ganges?.