How do you benchmark the first hundred days of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government? There are five objective criteria on which the performance of any government must be evaluated. They are: political stability, social cohesion, internal security, economic development and international relations. How does the government then square up on these parameters?
After 1984, this is the first government where a single party has a majority in the Lower House and, therefore, political stability should be a given, but here lies the rub. The agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the paradigm of governance in a democracy are defiantly at cross-purposes. While the RSS, as the fountainhead of Hindutva, wants its ideological agenda to be implemented, the reality is that the nation has moved beyond the fundamentalist dogmatism that is the sine qua non of the ideological mentor of this government.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s public disapproval of attempts to assign credit of the election victory to “one individual” is only an overt manifestation of an intense internecine struggle. Coupled with that is the marginalisation of the old guard in the BJP, who may be getting on in years but are present in Parliament and have deep roots in the party organisation. They have not taken too kindly to the attempts to ostracise them.
The perception of centralisation of power in the Prime Minister, as indicated by enigmatic source-based reports that keep surfacing regularly as to how the Prime Minister or his office has upbraided his ministerial colleagues from lunching with industrialists to the kind of clothes they should wear on foreign trips, only reinforces this perspicacity.
The public overruling of home minister Rajnath Singh on the choice of interlocutor for the Naga peace talks and his implicit exclusion from the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet point to the discord inside. The contradictions with the RSS and the instability intrinsic in the BJP will manifest itself over the short term and the facade of stability will give way to instability sooner than earlier.
Social cohesion and communal harmony have been the biggest casualties of the past 100 days. The government kicked off its innings with a statement that Article 370 would be repealed. It followed up that with a reiteration in Parliament that a uniform civil code would be implemented. Its affiliates use phraseology that amounts to telling the minorities that they should consider themselves second-class citizens of India. MPs belonging to its ally, the Shiv Sena, misbehaved with a Muslim employee on a Ramzan fast.
Mr Bhagwat declared that India was a “Hindu rashtra”. The oxymoron of “love jihad” was invoked by the BJP to communally polarise Uttar Pradesh, where 600-odd communal incidents have taken place in the past 100 days. To top it all, a BJP MP invoked community demographics to propagate a bizarre theory of communal violence. In the midst of all this, the silence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is deafening.
The country’s internal security situation has also become unstable with estrangement both with Jammu and Kashmir, as shown by the unprecedented resolution on the Indo-Pak talks passed by the state Assembly, as well as with the troubled parts of the Northeast, especially after a particular state was singled out for transferring, humiliating and then removing governors. The lull in anti-Maoist operations has also given the Maoists time to recoup and consolidate.
What is also a matter of concern and has not happened over all these years of the proliferation of revivalist Islam in West Asia is the radicalisation of Indian youth as a consequence thereof. It may be a mere coincidence or perhaps not that young Indians are involved with the most barbaric Islamist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and are fighting alongside them in Syria and Iraq. This could be a direct result of the insecurity that is becoming increasingly intern-alised among younger people of minority communities as a consequence of the Sangh Parivar’s politics of majoritarianism.
The BJP’s coming to power and its obvious “Hindutva” agenda in its 100 days in office may have given a fillip to this feeling. It has the potential of becoming India’s biggest security nightmare in the years to come.
The disappointment on the economic front has perhaps been the most palpable. While the government can take comfort in the fact that the GDP grew by 5.7 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal, it should not be forgotten that for 57 days of that quarter there was a UPA government at the wheel of the economy and the NDA government was there only for 33 out of the 90 days that make up the quarter. The first Budget of the new government has been exceptional for being so mundane that it was forgotten even before the finance minister’s speech got over. Financial pundits who wrote reams of criticism about the UPA’s economic policies, hoping that their critiques would serve as handy resumes for a job in the new dispensation, were scrambling around red faced to unearth virtues in the Budget.
For the common man there was a triple whammy of high food prices, increase in rail fares and an increase in fuel prices. It, therefore, has become increasingly evident that the government has no gameplan for the economy. The most disquieting issue has been the summersaults that the government has performed on foreign policy. No vision has been articulated that could possibly delineate the contours of a long view from New Delhi. The Pakistan policy has swung between extremes of feting Nawaz Sharif to calling off the foreign secretary-level talks.
The silence on China’s cartographic invasion is eloquent. There is no clarity on outstanding issues with Bangladesh and a complete failure in maintaining the balance between China and Japan in East Asian politics. In conclusion, it can be safely said that if the first 100 days are any indication of the road ahead, this country could find itself in extreme strife often sponsored, if not patronised, by the government as the challenges mount and the pressure grows. For a government that has gone into hibernation mode already with regard to its media interface, the default option of increased polarisation would appear extremely attractive and that eventually would be its nemesis.
The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari
