[Pls. visit the original sites, just not to miss the essential flavour and
much more, including video/audio clips.
The oldest report/comment reproduced below is dated May 8.
The latest ones have been carried today, on the respective web editions.
Here's a listing of the captions:
I. 'Modi plays Hindu nationalism card to seek re-election'. (9 hrs. ago.)
II. 'Modi on Time magazine cover with controversial headline ("India's
Divider in Chief")'. (May 10.)
III. 'Can the World's Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi
Government?'. (May 9.)
IV. 'Modi Is India's Best Hope for Economic Reform' (May 9.)
V. 'Modi Reminds India of Indira Gandhi. Will He Share Her Electoral Fate?
India’s prime minister brooks no dissent and projects the personality of a
strong Hindu nationalist warrior combating the nation’s internal and
external enemies.' (May 8.)
VI. 'Government agency reveals new gaps in India GDP data: Unusual
criticism adds to suspicions that Modi is trying to spin country’s
statistics'. (May 8.)
Despite some scatter, it, no doubt, offers an unmistakable slant.]
I/VI.
https://www.ft.com/content/2a4bbf60-d5df-4ac7-b053-3f1d6493fff6
Modi plays Hindu nationalism card to seek re-election
9 HOURS AGO
[Audio clip: 15:17 mins.]
India’s election has turned into an ideological battle pitting an inclusive
vision of a multi-faith nation against the view that Hindus should have
sway. Jyotsna Singh discusses the tactics used by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and his opponents with with the FT's South Asia Bureau chief Amy
Kazmin and correspondent Stephanie Findlay.
Contributors: Josh Noble, weekend news editor, Jyotsna Singh, Delhi
reporter, Amy Kazmin, South Asia bureau chief and Stephanie Findlay, South
Asia corresondent. Producers: Jyotsna Singh and Fiona Symon
II/VI.
https://www.khaleejtimes.com/international/india-elections-2019/modi-on-time-magazine-cover-with-controversial-headline?fbclid=IwAR13c6xO-MthmvqBkhTeam4wtW-XwLHDYJ21cLBVNGIOxRtU1l1xuR5Hcfc
Modi on Time magazine cover with controversial headline
IANS
Filed on May 10, 2019
(Time magazine)
The headline may create controversy across India amid the election season.
American news magazine Time has featured Prime Minister Narendra Modi on
the cover page of its May 20 issue with a headline that may create
controversy across India amid the election season.
The headline reads "India's Divider in Chief"' that is and carries a
caricature of the Prime Minister criticising Modi.
This title pertains to the article in the magazine, written by Aatish
Taseer with the headline "Can the World's Largest Democracy Endure Another
Five Years of a Modi Government?"
The write up compares former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of
secularism with the prevailing social "stress" under Modi," the article
read.
Besides, the article has also recalled the Gujarat riots that allegedly
claimed lives of scores of people.
It is not the first time when the magazine has come with critical
commentary about Modi. In its published article in 2012, the magazine
described him as a controversial, ambitious and a shrewd politician.
III/VI
http://time.com/5586415/india-election-narendra-modi-2019/?fbclid=IwAR1ja4xqN6oRTIzVOqcJrcHx9P8HyxRHnPVsu_u0oH3GT-CnZt7BjUG50sg
Can the World's Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi
Government?
Modi during a road show in Varanasi, in the northern state of Uttar
Pradesh, on April 25 Adnan Bbidi—Reuters
BY AATISH TASEER
MAY 9, 2019
Of the great democracies to fall to populism, India was the first.
In 2014, Narendra Modi, then the longtime chief minister of the western
state of Gujarat and leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), was elected to power by the greatest mandate the country had seen in
30 years. India until then had been ruled primarily by one party–the
Congress, the party of Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru–for 54 of the 67
years that the country had been free.
Now, India is voting to determine if Modi and the BJP will continue to
control its destiny. It is a massive seven-phase exercise spread over 5½
weeks in which the largest electorate on earth–some 900 million–goes to the
polls. To understand the deeper promptings of this enormous expression of
franchise–not just the politics, but the underlying cultural fissures–we
need to go back to the first season of the Modi story. It is only then that
we can see why the advent of Modi is at once an inevitability and a
calamity for India. The country offers a unique glimpse into both the
validity and the fantasy of populism. It forces us to reckon with how in
India, as well as in societies as far apart as Turkey and Brazil, Britain
and the U.S., populism has given voice to a sense of grievance among
majorities that is too widespread to be ignored, while at the same time
bringing into being a world that is neither more just, nor more appealing.
Illustration by Nigel Buchanan for TIME
The story starts at independence. In 1947, British India was split in two.
Pakistan was founded as a homeland for Indian Muslims. But India, under the
leadership of its Cambridge-educated Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
chose not to be symmetrically Hindu. The country had a substantial Muslim
population (then around 35 million, now more than 172 million), and the
ideology Nehru bequeathed to the newly independent nation was secularism.
This secularism was more than merely a separation between religion and
state; in India, it means the equal treatment of all religions by the
state, although to many of its critics, that could translate into Orwell’s
maxim of some being more equal than others. Indian Muslims were allowed to
keep Shari’a-based family law, while Hindus were subject to the law of the
land. Arcane practices–such as the man’s right to divorce a woman by
repudiating her three times and paying a minuscule compensation–were
allowed for Indian Muslims, while Hindus were bound by reformed family law
and often found their places of worship taken over by the Indian state.
(Modi made the so-called Triple Talaq instant divorce a punishable offense
through an executive order in 2018.)
Nehru’s political heirs, who ruled India for the great majority of those
post-independence years, established a feudal dynasty, while outwardly
proclaiming democratic norms and principles. India, under their rule, was
clubbish, anglicized and fearful of the rabble at the gates. In May 2014
those gates were breached when the BJP, under Modi, won 282 of the 543
available seats in Parliament, reducing the Congress to 44 seats, a number
so small that India’s oldest party no longer even had the right to lead the
opposition.
Populists come in two stripes: those who are of the people they represent
(Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil), and those who are merely
exploiting the passions of those they are not actually part of (the
champagne neo-fascists: the Brexiteers, Donald Trump, Imran Khan in
Pakistan). Narendra Modi belongs very firmly to the first camp. He is the
son of a tea seller, and his election was nothing short of a class revolt
at the ballot box. It exposed what American historian Anne Applebaum has
described as “unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not
known that they disagreed with one another.” There had, of course, been
political differences before, but what Modi’s election revealed was a
cultural chasm. It was no longer about left, or right, but something more
fundamental.
The nation’s most basic norms, such as the character of the Indian state,
its founding fathers, the place of minorities and its institutions, from
universities to corporate houses to the media, were shown to be severely
distrusted. The cherished achievements of independent India–secularism,
liberalism, a free press–came to be seen in the eyes of many as part of a
grand conspiracy in which a deracinated Hindu elite, in cahoots with
minorities from the monotheistic faiths, such as Christianity and Islam,
maintained its dominion over India’s Hindu majority.
Modi’s victory was an expression of that distrust. He attacked once
unassailable founding fathers, such as Nehru, then sacred state ideologies,
such as Nehruvian secularism and socialism; he spoke of a “Congress-free”
India; he demonstrated no desire to foster brotherly feeling between Hindus
and Muslims. Most of all, his ascension showed that beneath the surface of
what the elite had believed was a liberal syncretic culture, India was
indeed a cauldron of religious nationalism, anti-Muslim sentiment and
deep-seated caste bigotry. The country had a long history of politically
instigated sectarian riots, most notably the killing of at least 2,733
Sikhs in the streets of Delhi after the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi
by her Sikh bodyguards. The Congress leadership, though hardly blameless,
was able, even through the selective profession of secular ideals, to
separate itself from the actions of the mob. Modi, by his deafening
silences after more recent atrocities, such as the killing of more than
1,000 people, mostly Muslims, in his home state of Gujarat in 2002, proved
himself a friend of the mob. He made one yearn for the hypocrisies of the
past, for, as Aldous Huxley writes, at least “the political hypocrite
admits the existence of values higher than those of immediate national,
party or economic interest.” Modi, without offering an alternative moral
compass, rubbished the standards India had, and made all moral judgment
seem subject to conditions of class and culture warfare. The high ideals of
the past have come under his reign to seem like nothing but the hollow
affectations of an entrenched power elite. When, in 2019, Modi tweets, “You
know what is my crime for them? That a person born to a poor family is
challenging their Sultunate [sic],” he is trying to resurrect the spirit of
2014, which was the spirit of revolution. Them is India’s English-speaking
elite, as represented by the Congress party; sultanate is a dog whistle to
suggest that all the heirs of foreign rule in India–the country had
centuries of Muslim rule before the British took over in 1858–are working
in tandem to prevent the rise of a proud Hindu nation.
An Ikea customer in Hyderabad Atul Loke—The New York Times/Redux
In 2014, Modi converted cultural anger into economic promise. He spoke of
jobs and development. Taking a swipe at the socialist state, he famously
said, “Government has no business being in business.” That election, though
it is hard to believe now, was an election of hope. When the Delhi press
tried to bait the Modi voter with questions about building a temple in
Ayodhya, a place where Hindu nationalist mobs in 1992 had destroyed a 16th
century mosque, said to stand at the birthplace of the Hindu epic hero Ram,
they stoutly responded with: “Why are you talking to us of temples, when we
are telling you that we’re voting for him because we want development.”
Sabka saath, sabka vikas–“Together with all, development for all”–was
Modi’s slogan in 2014.
As India votes this month, the irony of those words is not lost on anyone.
Not only has Modi’s economic miracle failed to materialize, he has also
helped create an atmosphere of poisonous religious nationalism in India.
One of his young party men, Tejasvi Surya, put it baldly in a speech in
March 2019, “If you are with Modi, you are with India. If you are not with
Modi, then you are strengthening anti-India forces.” India’s Muslims, who
make up some 14% of the population, have been subjected to episode after
violent episode, in which Hindu mobs, often with what seems to be the
state’s tacit support, have carried out a series of public lynchings in the
name of the holy cow, that ready symbol of Hindu piety. Hardly a month goes
by without the nation watching agog on their smartphones as yet another
enraged Hindu mob falls upon a defenseless Muslim. The most enduring image
of Modi’s tenure is the sight of Mohammad Naeem in a blood-soaked
undershirt in 2017, eyes white and enlarged, begging the mob for his life
before he is beaten to death. The response of leadership in every instance
is the same: virtual silence. Basic norms and civility have been so
completely vitiated that Modi can no longer control the direction of the
violence. Once hatred has been sanctioned, it is not always easy to isolate
its target, and what the BJP has discovered to its dismay is that the same
people who are willing to attack Muslims are only too willing to attack
lower-caste Hindus as well. The party cannot afford to lose the lower-caste
vote, but one of the ugliest incidents occurred in Modi’s home state of
Gujarat, in July 2016, when upper-caste men stripped four lower-caste
tanners, paraded them in the streets and beat them with iron rods for
allegedly skinning a cow.
Modi’s record on women’s issues is spotty. On the one hand, he made
opportunity for women and their safety a key election issue (a 2018 report
ranked the country the most dangerous place on earth for women); on the
other hand, his attitude and that of his party men feels paternalistic. He
caused outrage in 2015 when he said Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s Prime
Minister, had a good record on terrorism, “despite being a woman”; Modi’s
deputy, Amit Shah, speaks of women as having the status of deities, ever
the refuge of the religious chauvinist who is only too happy to revere
women into silence. Yet Modi also appointed a woman Defense Minister.
If these contradictions are part of the unevenness of a society
assimilating Western freedoms, it must be said that under Modi minorities
of every stripe–from liberals and lower castes to Muslims and
Christians–have come under assault. Far from his promise of development for
all, he has achieved a state in which Indians are increasingly obsessed
with their differences. If in 2014 he was able to exploit difference in
order to create a climate of hope, in 2019 he is asking people to stave off
their desperation by living for their differences alone. The incumbent may
win again–the opposition, led by Rahul Gandhi, an unteachable mediocrity
and a descendant of Nehru, is in disarray–but Modi will never again
represent the myriad dreams and aspirations of 2014. Then he was a messiah,
ushering in a future too bright to behold, one part Hindu renaissance, one
part South Korea’s economic program. Now he is merely a politician who has
failed to deliver, seeking re-election. Whatever else might be said about
the election, hope is off the menu.
I covered the 2014 election from the holy city of Varanasi, which Modi had
chosen as his constituency, repurposing its power over the Hindu
imagination, akin to that of Jerusalem, Rome or Mecca, to fit his politics
of revival. That election split me in two: on the one hand, I knew, as
someone of Muslim parentage (my father was a Pakistani Muslim) and a member
of India’s English-speaking elite, that the country Modi would bring into
being would have no place for me; on the other hand, I was in sympathy with
Modi’s cultural diagnosis of what power looked and felt like in India. In
the West, the charge that liberalism, or leftism, corresponds to the power
of an entitled elite is relatively new and still contestable. In India, for
decades to be left-wing or liberal was to belong to a monstrously
privileged minority. Until recently, there was no equivalent group on the
right, no New England Republicans, no old-fashioned Tories. It was easy to
feel that being left-wing was the province of a privileged few who had gone
to university abroad, where they had picked up the latest political and
intellectual fashions.
Sardar Singh Jatav recovers after an attack by higher-caste Hindu men in
September 2018 Atul Loke—The New York Times/Redux
Modi in 2014 was able to make the cultural isolation of the Indian elite
seem political–part of a foreign-led conspiracy to undermine the “real”
India. He revealed that a powerful segment of the country was living in a
bubble. It was an effective political tactic, but it also obscured the fact
that “real” India was living in a bubble of its own. Nehru had always been
clear: India was not going to become a modern country by being more
authentically itself. It needed the West; it needed science and technology;
it needed, above all, to embrace “the scientific temper” and to eschew the
obscurantism and magic that was at the heart of its traditional life. Modi,
inadvertently or deliberately, has created a bewildering mental atmosphere
in which India now believes that the road to becoming South Korea runs
through the glories of ancient India. In 2014 Modi suggested at a gathering
of doctors and medical professionals in Mumbai that ancient Indians knew
the secrets of genetic science and plastic surgery. “We worship Lord
Ganesha,” he said of the Hindu deity. “There must have been some plastic
surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human
being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”
He has in every field, from politics and economics to Indology itself,
privileged authenticity over ability, leading India down the road to a
profound anti-intellectualism. He appointed Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Hindu
nationalist ideologue, to the board of the Reserve Bank of India–a man of
whom the renowned Columbia economist Jagdish Bhagwati said, “If he’s an
economist, I’m a Bharatanatyam dancer.” It was Gurumurthy who, in a quest
to deal with the menace of “black money,” is thought to have advised Modi
to put 86% of India’s banknotes out of commission overnight in 2016,
causing huge economic havoc from which the country is yet to recover. Modi
now finds himself seeking to hold power in a climate of febrile
nationalism, with a platform whose themes have much more to do with
national security and profiting from recent tensions between India and
Pakistan than with economic growth.
In 2017, after winning state elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most
populous state, which happens also to have its largest Muslim population,
the BJP appointed a hate-mongering priest in robes of saffron, the color of
Hindu nationalism, to run that state. Yogi Adityanath had not been the face
of the campaign. If he was known at all, it was for vile rhetoric, here
imploring crowds to kill a hundred Muslims for every Hindu killed, there
sharing the stage with a man who wanted to dig up the bodies of Muslim
women and rape them. Modi has presided over a continuous assault on the
grove of academe, where the unqualified and semiliterate have been
encouraged to build their shanties. Academia in India was dogmatically
left-wing, but rather than change its politics, Modi attacked the idea of
qualification itself. From the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR)
to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which produced a roll call of
politicians and intellectuals, India’s places of learning have been
hollowed out, the administration and professors chosen for their political
ideology rather than basic levels of proficiency.
Modi is right to criticize an India in which modernity came to be
synonymous with Westernization, so that all those ideas and principles that
might have had universal valence became the preserve of those who were
exposed to European and American culture. What Modi cannot–or will not–do
is tell India the hard truth that if she wishes to be a great power, and
not a Hindu theocracy, the medieval Indian past, mired in superstition and
magic, must go under. It is not enough to be more truly oneself. “In India,
as in Europe,” wrote the great Sri Lankan historian A.K. Coomaraswamy, “the
vestiges of ancient civilization must be renounced: we are called from the
past and must make our home in the future. But to understand, to endorse
with passionate conviction, and to love what we have left behind us is the
only possible foundation for power.” The desperation that underlies Modi’s
India is that of people clinging to the past, ill-equipped for the modern
world, people in whom the zealous love of country stands in for real
confidence.
Cows are sacred to Hindus. Cow-protection mobs have killed at least 46
people since 2015. Most targets were Muslim Atul Loke—Panos/Redux
The question of what is hers, and what has come from the outside, is a
constant source of anxiety in India. The same process that made the Indian
elite “foreigners in their own land”–in Mahatma Gandhi’s phrasing–is
repeating, albeit unevenly, throughout the country across classes and
groups never exposed to Western norms and culture in the past. “Our culture
is being decimated,” one young member of the ABVP–the most powerful Hindu
nationalist youth organization in the country–told me in Varanasi. “Many in
my family have received degrees in commerce; but I chose to be nearer my
culture. A great civilization, like ours, cannot be subdued without the
complicity of men on the inside, working against us. Someone–I cannot say
who–is controlling us, and there is but the difference of a syllable
between vikas [development] and vinasha [ruin].”
This young Hindu nationalist is part of a new generation of Indians,
untouched by colonization, but not spared globalization. They live with a
profound sense of being trifled with. They feel their culture and religion
has been demeaned; they entertain fantasies of “Hinduphobia” and speak with
contempt of “sickluars,” “libtards” and the “New Yuck Times.” One has the
feeling they are converting their sense of cultural loss into a political
ideology. It produces in them a rage for the Other–Muslims, lower castes,
the Indian elite–“the men on the inside,” who have more generations of
Westernization behind them. Last month, Amit Shah compared Muslim
immigrants to “termites,” and the BJP’s official Twitter handle no longer
bothers with dog whistles: “We will remove every single infiltrator from
the country, except Buddha [sic], Hindus and Sikhs.” If this wasn’t bad
enough, the BJP’s candidate for the central Indian city of Bhopal, with its
rich Muslim history and a Muslim population of over 25%, is a saffron-clad
female saint, who stands accused of masterminding a terrorist attack in
which six people were killed near a mosque. Currently out on bail, Sadhvi
Pragya Thakur’s candidacy marks that all-too-familiar turn when the specter
of extreme nationalism and criminality become inseparable.
Modi’s India feels like a place where the existing order of things has
passed away, without any credible new order having come into being. Modi
has won–and may yet win again–but to what end? His brand of populism has
certainly served as a convincing critique of Indian society, of which there
could be no better symbol than the Congress Party. They have little to
offer other than the dynastic principle, yet another member of the
Nehru-Gandhi family. India’s oldest party has no more political imagination
than to send Priyanka Gandhi–Rahul’s sister–to join her brother’s side. It
would be the equivalent of the Democrat’s fielding Hillary Clinton again in
2020, with the added enticement of Chelsea as VP.
Modi is lucky to be blessed with so weak an opposition–a ragtag coalition
of parties, led by the Congress, with no agenda other than to defeat him.
Even so, doubts assail him, for he must know he has not delivered on the
promise of 2014. It is why he has resorted to looking for enemies within.
Like other populists, he sits in his white house tweeting out his
resentment against the sultanate of “them.” And, as India gets ready to
give this willful provincial, so emblematic of her own limitations, a
second term, one cannot help but tremble at what he might yet do to punish
the world for his own failures.
Taseer, a novelist and journalist, is the author, most recently, of The
Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges
Contact us at edit...@time.com.
This appears in the May 20, 2019 issue of TIME.
IV/VI.
http://time.com/5586417/hope-for-economic-reform-in-india/
Modi Is India's Best Hope for Economic Reform
Umakant Sharma works the looms in Surat, India Atul Loke—The New York
Times/Redux
BY IAN BREMMER
MAY 9, 2019
To win a fresh mandate for himself and his party in India’s upcoming
elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made extravagant promises and
worrisome threats. He can fairly be accused of fanning flames of hostility
toward India’s Muslim population of up to 200 million, and when terrorists
killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary troops in the disputed province of
Kashmir earlier this year, Modi ordered airstrikes into Pakistani
territory, a dangerous escalation by one nuclear-armed power against
another.
His economic record is mixed. Although India has become the world’s
fastest-growing large economy, in January a leaked government survey (after
the Modi government refused to release the data) showed the unemployment
rate hit a 45-year high (6.1%) in 2017. To create a governing majority
following the announcement of national election results later this month,
Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will probably have to find
coalition partners. That, in turn, would water down some of his second-term
plans.
Yet, India still needs change, and Modi remains the person most likely to
deliver. He has improved relations with China, the U.S. and Japan, but it’s
his domestic development agenda that has done the most to improve the lives
and prospects of hundreds of millions of people. Consider what he’s already
accomplished during five years in charge.
First, he’s ensured that the government has more revenue to spend. Thanks
to the Goods and Services Tax enacted in 2017, Modi has streamlined an
enormously complex system of state and federal tax collection, broadening
the tax base and sharply reducing the amount of money lost to fraud. That’s
a historic accomplishment in a country with so many development needs.
Modi has directed unprecedented amounts of money toward the country’s
seemingly endless need for new infrastructure. Construction of roads,
highways, public transport and airports have sharply increased the
country’s long-term economic potential. Although the process remains
unfinished, the government has also brought electricity to remote villages
that have never had it, a boon for economic potential, public safety and
basic quality of life.
The BJP-led government has also expanded a biometric identification system,
begun under the previous Congress Party–led government, that has already
taken iris scans and fingerprints from well over a billion people to help
citizens prove who they are so they can receive services. It has provided
bank accounts for 300 million people who have never had them, creating new
opportunities for these people to access credit and state subsidies. It
also brings them into the formal economy to potentially make the government
more responsive to their needs. The government says these measures have cut
sharply into waste and fraud within India’s welfare system, allowing the
state to provide more and better services at a much lower cost.
Health care reform could help half a billion poor people afford treatment
for cancer and heart disease. A program known as Ujjwala Yojana has helped
women in the countryside gain access to cooking gas for the first time. The
Swachh Bharat program has built tens of millions of toilets for hundreds of
millions of people. Modi’s commitment to renewable energy is part of his
plan to make India a leader on climate change. None of these projects are
complete, but all of them will help the vast majority of India’s people
lead safer, healthier, more productive and more prosperous lives.
What does it take to bring that scale of change in a country with 1.34
billion people who speak dozens of different languages and hundreds of
dialects spread across states with differing customs and political cultures
while competing for votes against dozens of national and local political
parties? Thanks to his reform accomplishments, but also in part to his
tough line on Pakistan and his appeal to Hindu pride, Modi is even more
popular now than when he was first elected five years ago. Voters in states
hit by past terrorist attacks, especially those along the border with
Pakistan, want a forceful Prime Minister they believe will protect them.
Modi also benefits from a lack of a credible alternative. The opposition
Congress Party’s election platform centers on a program that would provide
direct cash payments to 50 million poor families. But a promise is not a
plan, the BJP controls enough states to block a Congress government’s
projects and Modi has already delivered for many people.
Modi has the instinct to dominate and the thin skin of other strongmen, but
he also has a genuine track record in providing the kind of reform that
developing India urgently needs.
Contact us at edit...@time.com.
This appears in the May 20, 2019 issue of TIME.
V/VI.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/opinion/india-elections-modi-gandhi.html
Modi Reminds India of Indira Gandhi. Will He Share Her Electoral Fate?
India’s prime minister brooks no dissent and projects the personality of a
strong Hindu nationalist warrior combating the nation’s internal and
external enemies.
By Gyan Prakash
Mr. Prakash is the author of “Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and
Democracy’s Turning Point.”
May 8, 2019
Indira Gandhi surrounded by Congressmen, Parliament House, in New Delhi in
1967.
Credit
Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos
Image
Indira Gandhi surrounded by Congressmen, Parliament House, in New Delhi in
1967.CreditCreditRaghu Rai/Magnum Photos
Since coming to power in 2014, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India,
has assiduously centralized and personalized power. His critics often refer
to his term in office as an “undeclared emergency.”
The phrase evokes comparison with the period between June 1975 and March
1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended constitutional rights and
imposed her authoritarian will on the polity after claiming that India
needed the “shock treatment” to combat its enemies. That dark period, which
saw Mrs. Gandhi assume extraordinary powers, jail opposition leaders and
silence the press, is known in India as the Emergency.
Mr. Modi has ruled India with the iron will reminiscent of Mrs. Gandhi. He
brooks no dissent and projects the personality cult of a strong Hindu
nationalist warrior combating the nation’s internal and external enemies
with “surgical strikes.” His supporters vociferously endorse this cult and
throng his campaign events wearing Modi masks. The results of the
continuing Indian elections on May 23 will reveal whether India will
endorse Mr. Modi or spurn him as they did Mrs. Gandhi in the 1977 elections
after the Emergency.
Mrs. Gandhi was the last leader who even remotely achieved the popularity
and authority in Indian politics presently enjoyed by Mr. Modi. She came to
power two years after the death of her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, who led India from its independence in 1947 until his death in 1964.
As Mr. Nehru’s only child and confidante during his 17 years in office,
Mrs. Gandhi came to know leaders and intellectuals around the world. Unlike
Mr. Modi, she was secular, cosmopolitan, spoke several languages and took a
keen interest in the arts.
The ruling Indian National Congress bosses appointed the 49-year-old Mrs.
Gandhi prime minister when her father’s successor died unexpectedly in
1966. They had hoped that she would be their pliable instrument. But Mrs.
Gandhi adopted a pro-poor populist rhetoric and ousted the old bosses to
become the unquestioned leader of the Congress party by 1969. After she
defeated the opposition in general elections in March 1971, her popularity
and authority soared.
[Follow coverage of the Indian elections in The New York Times.]
Mrs. Gandhi’s stature reached a pinnacle when she led India in a successful
December 1971 war against Pakistan. After the war, which led to the
formation of Bangladesh, Mrs. Gandhi was likened to the Hindu goddess
Durga, the slayer of demons. Even veteran politicians dissolved into
sycophants around her.
Indira Gandhi.
Credit
Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos
Image
Indira Gandhi.CreditRaghu Rai/Magnum Photos
In spite of her unprecedented authority, Mrs. Gandhi was insecure and
distrustful, and had little patience for defiance. A serious challenge to
her authority emerged after protests against increasing food prices in 1974
snowballed into a powerful student and youth movement led by Jayaprakash
Narayan, a 72-year-old socialist politician and follower of Mahatma Gandhi.
On June 12, 1975, a court found Mrs. Gandhi guilty of the electoral
malpractice of using government machinery during the 1971 election,
invalidated her victory and barred her from political office for six years.
In her eyes, the internal agents of the “foreign hand” — a phrase she
coined and used to refer to hostile foreign powers — had struck. Thirteen
days later, she responded by declaring a state of emergency.
During the next 21 months, Mrs. Gandhi gave the police a free hand in
arresting, intimidating and torturing political opponents. Most egregious
of all was a coercive vasectomy drive to control population growth.
Mrs. Gandhi tried to sheath her authoritarian regime with a veneer of
lawful authority by ratcheting up the use of existing laws of preventive
detention and police powers. Though authoritarianism secured her power, its
stigma stung. She ordered national elections in 1977 believing that Indians
would reward her for instilling discipline. India rejected her decisively.
There is no formal declaration of emergency, no official press censorship,
no suppression of political parties in Mr. Modi’s India. Yet Mr. Modi
exercises authoritarian power, and his personality looms larger on the
Indian political landscape than Mrs. Gandhi’s ever did.
Riding to power in 2014 with an overwhelming majority for his Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, Mr. Modi quickly moved to centralize
power. His government bypassed the Parliament and issued ordinances to
advance his policies. Civil society organizations have faced
investigations. Unqualified Hindu nationalists were foisted on educational
and cultural institutions. A law was instituted to exert greater control
over the appointment of judges.
Aiding Mr. Modi’s autocratic drive are the centralizing provisions of the
Indian Constitution. Introduced in 1950, the Constitution imported the bulk
of coercive British colonial laws. They include the notorious 1870 sedition
law that the government uses against its “anti-national” critics.
Extraordinary laws enacted to suppress the insurgency in Kashmir and
elsewhere remain in force.
Longstanding police practices, preceding even Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency,
aiming to intimidate and harass critics persist with a vengeance. Such
undemocratic practices and legacies have acquired an ominous new life with
the ascendance of Mr. Modi and his Hindu nationalist party.
While Mrs. Gandhi resorted to emergency rule to survive a political crisis,
Mr. Modi’s regime thrives on Hindu majoritarian militancy. He stokes
majoritarian resentments against the minorities to further his rule.
Dissent is denounced as treason, and Hindu nationalists deride critics as
elites guilty of “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Violent attacks on minorities
have become common. Several intellectuals and journalists have been killed
by Hindu extremists.
The cult of Narendra Modi dominates Indian politics. Most of India’s
private television networks relentlessly boost his image and divisive
message for higher ratings and for protecting their privileges.
Less than 10 years ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party had a galaxy of seasoned
leaders, but today Mr. Modi embodies the party. His photographs, slogans
and programs appear everywhere. There are an app and a television network
named after him: the NaMo app and NaMo TV. He has not held a single news
conference in five years, claiming that he prefers speaking directly to the
people with a weekly monologue on state radio and, like President Trump,
with tweets.
Yet a few months back, Mr. Modi was on the ropes, having failed to create
jobs or boost India’s struggling agriculture sector. To cover up his
failures, Mr. Modi is running an electoral campaign whipping up
militaristic sentiments against Pakistan and full of dog whistles against
India’s Muslims. His party even nominated a Hindu nationalist politician,
who is facing trial for a 2008 terrorist attack on Muslims, as one of its
candidates.
With an authoritarian, hyper nationalist warrior asking for their support,
Indian voters are tasked with making a consequential choice for India’s
future. As B.R. Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader and the architect of
India’s Constitution, once remarked, Indians were particularly susceptible
to “bhakti,” or devotion. This was fine in religion, but in politics, he
warned, it is “a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship.”
VI.
https://www.ft.com/content/d0a91172-7150-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5
Government agency reveals new gaps in India GDP data
Unusual criticism adds to suspicions that Modi is trying to spin country’s
statistics
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking re-election partly on his economic
record © AP
Siddarth Shrikanth in Hong Kong and Amy Kazmin in New Delhi
MAY 8, 2019
A database used by India’s statistics office to calculate GDP figures is
riddled with gaps, according to a report by another government agency,
raising fresh questions about the credibility of the country’s economic
data.
In a report published on its website, the government’s National Sample
Survey Office said 39 per cent of the companies included in a key database
used to estimate India’s economy activity and GDP growth were closed,
untraceable or misclassified.
The findings, first reported by the Mint newspaper on Wednesday, represent
an unusual criticism by one government agency of another at a time when
international confidence in the accuracy and reliability of India’s
publicly reported GDP data has come under scrutiny.
Narendra Modi’s government has been accused by the opposition Congress
party and leading economists of trying to spin the country’s data to claim
that the country has performed better under his stewardship than during any
other Indian administration.
The NSSO, which is part of India’s ministry of statistics, carries out
large-scale, household surveys to gather data on a wide range of variables
from social economic indicators on health, education and intermarriage to
economic activity. It is a sister agency that sits alongside the Central
Statistics Office, which is responsible for producing official economic
statistics including GDP figures.
The NSSO found that 21 per cent of companies included in a database
underlying India’s GDP numbers were “out of coverage”, implying they were
no longer operating. Another 12 per cent could not be traced.
Since the database’s introduction under Mr Modi in 2015, it has been used
to underpin upward revisions of growth figures. At the same time, growth
estimates under the previous Congress-led administration have been
downgraded.
The revelations come amid mounting suspicion among independent economists
and civil society figures of the politicisation of India’s statistics
agencies, which have historically been seen as credible and non-partisan.
Analysts have argued that the changes made in 2015 are at the root of
India’s increasingly unreliable official statistics.
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Modi plays Hindu nationalism card to seek re-election
The report solves an “enduring mystery surrounding the divergence between
India’s brisk GDP growth figures and more sluggish high-frequency,
micro-data”, said Milan Vaishnav, director and senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. “The fact that
GDP figures were constructed on the back of such questionable corporate
data raises doubts about the judgment of India’s top statistical body not
to mention the credibility of India’s statistical system as a whole.”
Such doubts have been expressed by leading figures from official agencies
and academia. In January, senior members of the National Statistics
Commission, an autonomous body set up in 2005 to raise data collection
standards, resigned, leading to the body’s de facto collapse. In March, 108
economists published a joint statement demanding that the administration
“re-establish institutional independence and integrity to the statistical
organisations”.
In a report released on Tuesday, Goldman Sachs analysts noted the
significant challenges in measuring economic activity given India’s
sizeable informal sector and large services industry. “We believe that the
ongoing GDP debate in India is better viewed as a statistical discourse
than as a political one.”
When asked to comment on the report, a spokesman for the Ministry of
Finance referred the Financial Times to a Facebook post from March 19 by
Arun Jaitley, finance minister, in which he called questions on economic
data “fake campaigns” and referred to critics as “compulsive contrarians”.
The NSSO did not respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Jyotsna Singh
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