Modi has ideologues, but no implementers

If you wanted to sum up the contradictions of two years of the Modi government, you could do so by taking one name, Subramanian Swamy. The logic of nominating him to fill up a BJP vacancy in the Rajya Sabha is baffling. And that’s an extremely mild word. Consider what he brings to the table. A record, if that’s not too respectable a word for his CV, as a loose canon (a better choice than the word appended to his name for years, “maverick”). For years, he has harboured the ambition of becoming India’s finance minister, based on the fact that he is an economist and taught a course at Harvard.

(That course is now in the past tense — he was fired for writing an article that expressed the most vicious anti-Muslim, anti-Islam views.) His frustration has led him to attack Arun Jaitley, his party’s own finance minister. And now he has fired several unbecoming salvos at the universally admired Reserve Bank governor, Raghuram Rajan. This has caused so much embarrassment to the party, that its president Amit Shah has gone on public record to say that Dr Swamy’s views are his own, and not the BJP’s.

There’s also the fact that Dr Swamy has been attacking the Gandhi family for years, attacks which have continued now that he is in the Upper House. Did the BJP want Congress support to pass vital bills, like Goods and Services Tax Bill in the Rajya Sabha? Was bringing in a known baiter of its leadership the best way to get the party’s cooperation? The answers are obvious, which lead us to ask what were the compelling reasons to give Dr Swamy the Rajya Sabha seat. Does he have a mass following that needs to be appeased? Is he the respected leader of an important constituent of the government?

Does he have unparalleled expertise and erudition in difficult subjects which would, without him, be unavailable to the BJP? Since none of these three questions can be answered with a “yes”, the mystery of Dr Swamy’s elevation to the Rajya Sabha will remain one of the Modi government’s many mysteries.
The central mystery, though, is why Mr Modi, the most energetic Prime Minister India has seen in many years and a man brimming with a roomful of ideas and a houseful of slogans, handicaps himself this way with his choice of people. Till Dr Swamy came along, the leader of this pack was undoubtedly Smriti Irani. Is there a brick left anywhere which she will not drop?

Yesterday’s paper came with the latest screaming headline: the HRD ministry rejected all three names suggested by the search committee for the next chairman of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Who was the chairman of the search committee? A.M. Naik, CMD of Larsen & Toubro, and until now the chairman of IIMA. What were the three names suggested? Deepak Parekh, chairman HDFC; Pawan Munjal, CMD Hero Moto Corp; and R. Seshasayee, chairman Infosys. Could there possibly be a better panel of names?

Rejection of all the names given by the search committee is unprecedented. Rejection of these particular names is incomprehensible. But this is consistent with Ms Irani’s two years in the job: she seems to have alienated almost everyone who is touched by her ministry. Could that possibly serve Mr Modi’s objective? Consider also the record of Mahesh Sharma, the minister of state (independent charge) for culture and tourism. In his two years on the job, has there been a single announcement of his on the cultural front, which has not greeted with either derision or has evoked strong criticism?

One can go on with more names from the Council of Ministers, or from party MPs and MLAs, but let’s stop here. I read somewhere that the problem that bedevils the party is that most intellectuals like to occupy the liberal space, and the BJP therefore finds it difficult to get the right men or women who are one with its ideology. This is possibly so, because a strictly Hindutva-RSS outlook on life is not quite compatible with the modern world. The question to ask is why should ideology be paramount in selection of individuals?

Shouldn’t merit and competence be the only required qualifications? Another way of looking at this is by considering the kind of ideology that would benefit the country the most. Our 60-plus years of experience after Independence has clearly shown that an ideology that gives free rein to Indians’ spirit of enterprise is the only one that’s needed. It’s the economy, stupid, as was said in another context, and all else — religion, community, the burden of our historical past, should be subservient to that one ideology.

What Mr Modi needs are implementers, not ideologues. He has, instead, got implementers who are ideologues first, so each wants to implement his or her version of an inchoate ideology. Of Mr Modi’s many programmes and initiatives, the one that has caught the popular imagination the most is Swachchh Bharat. At least that’s the finding of an opinion poll done by one of our newspapers.

That’s not such a strange choice because behind it is undoubtedly the subconscious desire that the Prime Minister wields its most potent symbol, the broom, in every area of national life, not just the literal sense of cleanliness but in the larger sense of cleaning up public life. Shorn of political posturing, an objective assessment of the Modi government’s two years in office would be that this was a kind of setting up period: ideas have been expressed, programmes have been announced and the future course of action has been set.

The next three years are for the action phase. This, at least, is the hope. But that hope wavers in the face of reality: this is a government of a few good men. Far too few, indeed, to guide a country filled with a sixth of the world’s population.