State of the Union: Koi lauta de mere beete hue din

On May 16, 2014, a Friday morning, as results started trickling in, it became clear pretty soon that Modi was headed towards an absolute majority — the first in 30 years after 1984. India’s Rockefeller moment had arrived. Corporate India’s first overt intervention in the sweepstakes of electoral democracy had paid off. Bombay Club version 2.0 popped the champagne.

Their war chests coupled with the muscle of 400-odd news channels created the blitzkrieg that resulted in this windfall. Their decision to back “a man” as opposed to hedging their bets across the political firmament, as they had always done, heralded the most significant power shift in Indian politics. Euphoria was in the air as the Shangri-La of “achche din” was at India’s doorstep.

One year later, on a Saturday morning as you would open this newspaper, the ecstasy has all but disappeared. It’s been replaced by a weary sense of resignation — a sense of being conned, though the sullenness that crystallises into cold anger is yet to coalesce.

On September 4, 2014, in this very paper, in a piece titled Century worth a Duck, the first 100 days of the Modi government were benchmarked on five criterion that help provide a macro overview of any government. Let us deploy the same yardstick after 365 days.

The first is political stability. It is imperative to make a distinction between legislative stability and political coherence. While the numbers in Lok Sabha do provide a degree of comfort to the government, there is, however, a reality that even Arun Shourie alluded to — that the sum total of this government is only three men in a boat, namely the Prime Minister, his finance minister and the president of the BJP. The centralisation that excludes even the home minister from the all-important Cabinet Committee on Appointments — he sees files on their way down rather than on their way up — is an alarming tale about how this government is structured.

Delhi is replete with stories about how the higher bureaucracy is omnipotent and the political executive — read ministers — are mere pygmies. Instructions on important issues are directly conveyed to the secretaries from the PMO, who then process the papers accordingly and the ministers just sign on the dotted line. Yet, nothing moves in the government. The emasculation of the political executive has dire portents for the Westminster Model that is premised on the supremacy of the Cabinet system.

Coupled with that is the complete marginalisation of the veterans in the BJP, Messers Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and the rest who are trotted out only for photo-ops. There is a storm brewing. It is only a matter of time before it makes a landfall.

The wipeout of the BJP in the Delhi Assembly elections is a clear manifestation that people have moved away from the “three men in a boat”. The “canny” one in the boat possibly sensed a defeat in Delhi and made Kiran Bedi the unwitting fall lady.

The next benchmark is social cohesion. This perhaps has been the biggest casualty in the previous one year. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and its ideological fellow travelers have left no stone unturned to medieval India. Every abomination, from “love jihad” to “ghar wapsi”, from calling minorities second-class citizens to asking Hindu womenp to procreate more to increase their demographic numbers, and attacks on places of worship, especially churches, is meant to create a fear psychosis among the minorities.
Equally ominous are the systematic appointments of ideologically inhibited individuals to autonomous bodies with the remit of documenting India’s hoary past and saffronisation of education by tampering curricula. This is the most overt assault to change the very narrative of India.

However, the most glaring failure of this government has been on the third benchmark — economic development. The raison d’etre of Narendra Modi of Gujarat fame during the most expensive election campaign in India was that a policy paralysis had gripped this nation and a strong leadership was required to rescue the economy from its state of morass. The most telling accomplishment of the “strong leadership” of Mr Modi in one year has been the free fell of the Indian currency.

In August 2013, the current foreign minister and the then Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha had notoriously tweeted: “The Rupee has lost its value, PM his grace”. On May 16, 2014, $1 was equivalent to Rs 58.86. Three hundred and fifty-seven days later, on May 8, 2015, one American dollar is to Rs 64.04. Against six currencies, the trade weighted real effective exchange rate (REER) has ascended from 109.58 in February 2014 to 124.34 in February 2015.

The monthly economic report of the department of economic affairs (DEA) of the finance ministry pegs the growth of gross value added (GVA) for agriculture and allied services at 1.1 per cent in 2014-15 as compared to 3.7 per cent in 2013-14. No wonder there is agrarian distress all around and farmers are committing suicide during public protests.
Eight core infrastructure sectors of the economy registered a measly 1.4 per cent growth in February 2015 as compared to 6.1 per cent in the February of 2014 — when the UPA was in office. Five sectors of the economy — crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilisers and the steal sector — have recorded negative growth. Growth in broad money (M3) decelerated to 11.3 per cent in March 2015 from 13.4 per cent during the corresponding period of the previous year. Growth in bank credit also decelerated to 9.2 per cent in March 2015 from 11.7 per cent during the March of the previous year. Even deposits with scheduled commercial banks went south to 10.9 per cent in March 2015 as compared to 14.6 per cent in March 2014. Non-food credit too went down to 9.4 per cent in March 2015 compared to 11.7 per cent during the same period last year. Business confidence is at all time low. The economy is emanating gigantic red warning signs. No wonder the chummy capitalists now appear morose. The champagne corks appear ready to go back into the bottles.

On the fourth benchmark that is the internal security situation, the scenario is depressing if not distressing. Even during the worst days of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir never, ever were Pakistani flags so openly waved, as they were in the past one-month. The Central and the BJP-People’s Democratic Party government in the state was, at best, a helpless bystander if not collusive in this brash and brazen challenge to the Indian state. The release of Massarat Aalam — the mastermind of the stone-pelting incidents in the summer of 2010 — brings into question the resolve of the National Democratic Alliance government to tackle terrorism.

Given that the release was orchestrated while the state was under President’s Rule belies the BJP’s rhetoric about being tough on terror. Left-wing extremism has again reared its snakehead with back-to-back attacks in Chhattisgarh. What perhaps was most telling of the weakness of the Indian state was the abduction of 300 villagers from near a bridge building site on the Baru river in Sukma district, the day the Prime Minister was in Dantewada, pleading with the Maoists to see their sins in the eyes of militancy-affected children barely 60 km away. The battalions tasked with fighting the Maoists in an inhospitable terrain are complaining of being equipped with inferior weaponry and are literally sitting ducks for the better-armed reds.

The situation is no better in the Northeast. There has been no breakthrough on the Armed Forces Special Powers Act issue and no headway in resolving the million mutinies that plague the picturesque Northeast. It recaps the famous couplet, “Shahenshah Bahadur Shah Alam, Delhi se Palam”. The writ of the BJP-led NDA government is circumscribed by its inefficaciousness.

On to the final benchmark — international affairs — there is complete absence of a vision or even a coherently articulated strategy. There is no clear sense about where the NDA government would want to see India in 2019 when its term ends. Though the Prime Minister has been a fleeting visitor to India in the past one year, his trips across the world have been more of the meet and greet variety than having any substantive policy content in them. Collecting non-resident Indians in stadia and “king konging” does more harm to India’s interests than helping it.

Imagine if the Prime Minister of Nepal would fill the Indira Gandhi stadium with the Nepalese living in India and hold forth on all and sundry matters — how would that go down with the Indian foreign policy establishment? Or what if the Prime Minister of Bangladesh collected a million Bangladeshi’s at the Boat Club, presuming she got permission to do so, to declare victory over the Land Boundary agreement with India? The endemic screaming of our television anchorites and hosts would rise to vein-bursting proportions. Mr Modi’s interlocutors in the US, Australia and Canada have been more than polite, but as to how long would this restraint last is an open-ended question.

On substantive issues this government has lost the plot. Calling off the foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan over the Pakistani high commissioner’s meeting with Hurriyat leaders in August last year and then burying its head in the sand when the same exercise was repeated this year on Pakistan Day sent out a very clear signal to the hawks across the western border — that they are dealing with a bunch of novices in Delhi.

The government unfortunately, much like the previous one, has reached its “Sharm el-Sheikh” moment rather early in its term. The relationship will continue in the state of frozen turbulence as it has been for the past six decades.

The most devastating evaluation of this government came from a rather mellow group of investors whom I came across at a legendary watering hole in Mumbai on a Saturday evening.

One of them turned to the crooner after a couple of doubles and asked if she could sing Koi lauta de mere beete hue din — an evergreen Bollywood song that loosely translated means, “Could someone please return me to the old times!”

The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari