Modi-fied development

What runs concurrently with elections? Election jokes. Here’s the latest: “This is the first time in the history of Independent India that the Congress and the BJP have the same election slogan. The slogan is ‘Rahul Gandhi will be the Congress Prime Minister’.”

This may be a joke, but it is not being fair to the young man. He took a long, long time to get out of his Hamletesque indecision, but once he decided to get into the fray, he has gone in all guns blazing, criss-crossing the country, giving one fiery speech after another. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer the youthful passion of his speeches to the cynical set-pieces of Narendra Modi.

I am probably in a minority here. It is amazing the antipathy Mr Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi generate in urban upper-class India. The failures of United Progressive Alliance-II are heaped in their heads by the chattering classes, all of them conveniently forgetting that for all the talk of dynastic politics, Mr Gandhi had nothing to do with the running of the government. As for Mrs Gandhi, all those who say she is all-powerful and was the puppeteer running the Cabinet, no one asks the all-important question: why did she not, then, ask Manmohan Singh to step aside, when all the unravelling scams made it obvious that he was clueless and ineffective as a leader? Dr Singh need not have been sacked and humiliated; all Mrs Gandhi had to do is to have told him to step aside pleading ill-health. The country would have been relieved.

(A little aside here. Talk to the urban antidynasts, and soon they will say wistfully, “How we wish Priyanka would have entered politics full-time instead of her brother! She has so much of Indira Gandhi in her!” The irony of what they are saying escapes them. Not just that; they fail to grasp that their hopes about Priyanka are based on nothing but the superficiality of her looks and her bearing).

Does the other voter feel the same way? By the “other”, I mean the working class and the rural voter. Both combined, form the majority of the electorate: does this silent majority feel the same way about the Gandhis, and particularly about Mr Gandhi? Is “dynasty” a pejorative word for this voter, or is it the opposite, standing instead for strong family ties and strong family values? This has been the perennial problem of the media and so-called opinion makers when it comes to calling elections: they know how they feel, and how their peers feel, but have no clue about the “other”, the majority view. That is why election forecasts so often go wrong. All I will venture to say at this stage is that we really won’t know what is what till the month of May comes along, and the votes are counted and announced.

That said, one can objectively see that the failure of Mr Gandhi, his media managers and the whole Congress machinery to nail Mr Modi on crucial points, has allowed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial aspirant to get away with murder (in the case of Gujarat 2002, literally). Mr Modi’s abysmal ignorance of history and geography were even worse than Sarah Palin’s blunders. But while Ms Palin was laughed out of court and lost all credibility, Mr Modi has got away with it. Similarly the so-called “clean chit” given to Mr Modi by the Special Investigative Team in the 2002 carnage could have been shown to be hollow and inconclusive. What could have been highlighted were the dirty tricks employed by the Gujarat government to delay the Zakia Jafri case and other cases which could hurt Mr Modi. Instead he has been allowed to get away in this too.

Arvind Kejriwal showed that in one day, he could do more damage to Mr Modi than the Congress machinery could do in months. Mr Kejriwal’s attacks were on the Gujarat model of development, which have been objectively shown to be either over-hyped or false. Statistics on this are freely available, and they show that on many parameters, Gujarat’s record is patchy at best, and quite inferior to other states which make no claims.

In two important sectors for example — education and health — Gujarat’s record is below the national average. Dropout rates in schools are a staggering 58 per cent compared to the national average of 49. This rate rises steeply for the underprivileged like dalits (65 per cent) and tribals (78 per cent). Not just that, the enrollment of boys in Class I has actually dropped over the last decade, and dropped drastically by 24 per cent. Higher education figures are dismal too.

Health care is also in bad shape. Infant mortality in Gujarat was 38 in 2012, while for that year the figures in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu were respectively 25 and 21. Maternal mortality ratio too is high: 122 for Gujarat, 90 for Tamil Nadu, 87 for Maharashtra and 66 for Kerala. All this is caused by a huge shortage of doctors: at primary health centres, shortage of specialists like pediatricians and gynaecologists is 94 per cent. In tribal areas that goes up to 100!

Who sings the praises of Gujarat’s development model? Industrialists and corporate bosses. This obvious lopsidedness of development in Gujarat, with the underprivileged (including Muslims) being excluded from the fruits of its modernisation programme could have been highlighted, but wasn’t. There is more that could have been shown up: remember that Amit Shah ordered surveillance of a woman in Gujarat, as per the instructions of “the Boss” (which could only be Mr Modi)? This was a complete misuse of government machinery and a blatant intrusion of privacy, a shockingly dangerous portent for the future. (Some reports suggest that the young lady had been seeing Mr Modi, but the surveillance began when she developed an affinity for another man).

Finally, there is Mr Modi, the strong man who will brook no opposition. L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and now Jaswant Singh have all been shown who is boss. Another portent for the future? If only the Congress had the ability to warn voters of the dangers ahead! It would do itself, and the nation, a signal service.