‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

’—Immanuel Kant
FOREWORD
Parakala Prabhakar is a renaissance man. An economist, a public policy professional, a
corporate consultant, a public opinion pollster, a political activist and analyst, a writer, a
Telugu litterateur, a scholar. The close to seventy episodes he recorded under the
rubric Pathana Kutuhalam, introducing to today’s Telugus worldwide the prose and
poetry of a Gurajada and a Joshuva, a Sri Sri and a Dasaradhi, showed the depth of his
understanding of Telugu literature, culture and social milieu. The many episodes of his
political platform, Midweek Matters, showed both his grasp of our contemporary
national political economy and his passionate commitment to India’s development,
democracy and the welfare of its citizens.
This man of many parts is also my friend. Unfortunately, my friendship with him dates
back only to a little over a decade. A decade also separated our time at the Jawaharlal
Nehru University, where I was in the early 1970s and he in the early 1980s. When we
finally met, we instantly became friends and fellow travellers, often advocates of lost
causes. That, in short, is what best describes Prabhakar and me. The advocates of lost
causes. ‘Essentially, nothing straight can ever be made out of crooked timber,’ says
Prabhakar. Yet, we try. This collection of essays has been written with that hope in
mind. Prabhakar has been charged by the desire to straighten the crooked timber.
‘Mine is an unabashedly critical voice,’ says Prabhakar in this book. ‘It is, unrepentantly,
a dissenting note…My task is simple, limited and focused. It is to point out when our
government, our public institutions and our leaders depart from the ideals of our
Republic and deviate from their stated objectives and promises to the people. It is a
simple effort to speak truth to power. At all times.’
It is a commentary on our times that even those who have been close to power have
become fearful of speaking truth to it. Elected politicians have become pompous
autocrats at all levels of government. That Prabhakar continues to speak truth to power
despite the growing intolerance to criticism of men and women in positions of authority,
is a testimony to his commitment to the defence of the values embedded in our
Constitution.
Prabhakar chose to stay put in Hyderabad over the past decade even though he could
easily have entered the national political stage. This, however, has not made him less
aware of the political and economic reality of the country as a whole. On the other
hand, what we see through his writings is a perspective that is as informed by the local
as it is by the national.
Steeped in the culture and politics of the land of the Telugus—now divided between two
states—Prabhakar has also kept his finger on the pulse of the national polity and
economy, observing and recording how these have changed. This aspect of his
personality and intellect—of striking deep roots in his janmabhoomi, while nurturing
wide intellectual branches that reach out into global and national politics and
development—is what makes Prabhakar a renaissance man.
An important point that comes through many of Prabhakar’s essays is the growing gap
in the promise and performance of so many political leaders. The most prominent
example of that gap is that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His promise had two
aspects to it. First, the fact that he came to represent development as the longest
serving chief minister of one of the country’s most developed states. While the
ignominy of his handling of inter-faith relations and communal violence in the state
remained a shadow over his record as chief minister of Gujarat, the fact that he chose
to consistently focus on development in his national election campaign of 2014 won him
widespread support across the country.
The second promise was of good governance. After all, he came to power on the back
of an anti-corruption campaign launched by the India Against Corruption movement.
The national electorate hoped that he would temper and combine his Hindutva politics
with good governance and a focus on development. This was the promise. Regrettably,
and many critics would say predictably, Modi’s performance did not match that promise.
Neither his handling of the economy nor his promise of good governance inspired much
confidence. The demonetisation of high-value currency destabilised the economy.
Charges of corruption in defence equipment procurement dented his image.
Consequently, as Modi’s first term came to an end, his re-election prospects began to
get dimmer. Modi then abandoned all talk of development and good governance and
climbed on to an avowedly nationalistic platform, targeting Pakistan, and a bigoted
communal mobilisation, targeting the Muslim minority. Prabhakar’s essays bemoan this
gap between promise and performance and its consequences for the polity.
That Prabhakar is not pontificating from some ivory tower comes through clearly from
many of his essays that show his acute awareness of ground realities. He was the
earliest of political analysts to draw attention to the political mood of sullenness and
alienation in Punjab on the eve of the last state assembly elections. The Aam Admi
Party tapped into this mood, winning handsomely and leaving behind all the major
parties.
The power of Prabhakar’s pen lies in his summoning of facts to defend his views. He
does not resort to just polemic, nor does he speculate like so many political analysts
and commentators. Much of political analysis in the Indian media is nothing more than
speculation and gossip-mongering. Prabhakar’s training in economics makes him base
his opinion on the firmer foundation of fact. These columns show that he is a keen
researcher, constantly and consistently gathering evidence in order to bolster his
arguments.
It is this factual foundation of his political criticism that makes his opinion unassailable.
As India moves closer to the next general elections, the Modi government will be faced
with a barrage of such facts about its poor record both on account of development and
good governance. One should, therefore, expect that the ruling dispensation will defend
itself by campaigning not on the basis of facts but through illusions like ‘Amrit Kaal’. The
next vote will be sought on the promise of a golden future, not the record of crooked
timber performance.
Prabhakar’s prose comes out of Hyderabad. It deserves to be read across the country
and around the world, by whoever worries about India’s present and cares about her
future. SANJAYA BARU
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The essays in this volume were written between 2020 and late 2022, and have been
revised lightly for this collection. Most of them were presented, with a little
modification, as episodes of my video blog Midweek Matters. Some others have
remained with me unpublished and are being made available to the reading public for
the first time. Some have been written specially for this volume.
Although they all had different contexts and varied points of departure, they all, as the
readers will notice, nevertheless have a common theme: India’s inexorable drift towards
becoming a Republic with highly compromised secular, liberal, plural, democratic
credentials. The process has gained seemingly irreversible momentum since the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah came to power in
2014.
The Modi-Shah-led BJP at the moment has two advantages. I would call them two
boons.
One, a knock-kneed opposition. Two, the coming to fruition of decades-long grunt work
put in by the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its many
parivar organisations, which have never really accepted our Constitution.
The second one became possible and went on unchallenged largely because the
political forces that are wedded to the founding values of our Republic had not sized up
the menace posed to those values by the long years of electorally unrewarding, quiet
and arduous work that has been put in by the Sangh Parivar outfits, away from the
limelight of news cycles.
Successive electoral victories of political forces wedded, however loosely and infirmly, to
the liberal, plural, democratic values of our Constitution led them to believe that these
values are unassailable; that these values don’t need to be guarded fiercely and
propagated widely at all times. They became lazy, complacent, even cynical. And the
Sangh Parivar’s consistent assault on these values—quiet at first and brazen since the
early 1990s—has brought us to the state that we are in today, when the founding
principles of our extraordinary Republic are under threat. This is a primary theme of the
essays collected here.
Readers will also notice another concern in these essays. The crisis that the Indian
Republic faces will not disappear with the electoral defeat of the Modi-Shah BJP.
Because that entity, however overpowering it might seem today, is not the fount of the
crisis. The crisis is deeper and the challenge to the Republic is much more formidable
than what the Modi-Shah-led BJP per se poses. Today’s knock-kneed opposition could
be straightened and made to stand its ground and get its act together. It might even
score an electoral victory in the near future, although this seems very improbable
today, as we go to press.
An electoral victory in the near future will certainly help the Republic emerge from the
crisis more easily than would be possible otherwise. To me, however, the greater
challenge is this: to excise from the minds of a significantly large, vocal, influential
section of our people the toxic and ill-founded belief that India belongs to people of
only one religion and the rest should content themselves with being second-class
citizens. The challenge is to show them how disastrous—even to themselves—would be
the eventual consequence of their uncritical support and surrender to a political
formation that champions such an insidious, narrow formulation of our national creed.
This crooked timber of New India needs to be clearly grasped at this time in our
Republic’s life. I feel that the political forces wedded to the founding values of our
Republic simply don’t grasp this. They also don’t have the ideological wherewithal and
the much-needed grit to put in the necessary hard work for long years—away from the
limelight and without expectation of immediate short-term gains in the electoral-political
game. This is an important reason why our Republic faces a fundamental crisis today.
Any political mobilisation that does not keep this ugly reality at its core cannot serve our
Republic well. Worse, it might even lead to some political forces striking a Faustian
bargain with the Modi-Shah BJP and becoming partners in its project of turning India
into a Republic of one religion, one language and one political party. Of course, some
political outfits have already done this. To me, this is the real and grave danger. It is
the reason why, like some other fellow citizens whom I admire, I write, speak, warn. I
don’t believe that silence is an option. Therefore, this book. Every small effort will
count.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to a lot of people. I will be able to mention only a few
here.
My colleague Ms Uma Devi Kota tops the list. She has taken up the work responsibilities
at RightFOLIO that were originally mine on to herself, so that I could have enough time
to think, collect my thoughts, put them down on paper, sometimes present them as
vlog posts, travel around to give talks, share my reflections with others and gain clarity
and insights.
I am deeply thankful to Dr Sanjaya Baru for encouraging me to publish my essays and
for writing a foreword to this volume. His foreword overwhelmed me and humbled me
at the same time.
I want my readers to know that I am extremely grateful to a friend who read the drafts
of my essays and offered insightful comments. I benefitted immensely from those
remarks. But alas, I cannot mention the name of my benefactor without violating the
pact of non-disclosure between us. I can only express my gratitude here.
I will not be able to conclude my thanksgiving without mentioning the help of Mr
Nazeer Chinna and Mr Devasani Shivakrishna. Both made my work so much easier, and
I could thus fully concentrate on formulating my ideas, rather than worrying about the
drudgery of logistics.
Lastly, but equally importantly, I thank the team at Speaking Tiger Books, especially
Ravi Singh, the publisher. He has been supremely gentle in persuading me to revise
what had already been written and to write what needed to be written but which I
hadn’t yet written.
When many publishing houses baulked at publishing something unapologetically critical
of New India in New India—during the Amrit Kaal and the Achche Din—Ravi came
forward to do it. Such persons give me hope that all is not yet consumed by the raging
bush fires of New India.
PARAKALA PRABHAKAR April 2023
INTRODUCTION
The Crooked Timber of New India
As I write the introduction to this collection of essays, it is close to nine years since the
Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept into power. A new era began in
May 2014, or so we were told. Delivering his victory speech in Vadodara, Mr Modi
declared that good days were upon us, and promised a shining India; in his Lok Sabha
address, he referred to his party’s victory as a ‘new hope’ and dedicated it to the poor
and the disadvantaged; in his Independence Day address three months later, he
resolved to take everyone along and deliver good governance through hard work and
consensus. Over the eight years since, all the promises have been betrayed. Narendra
Modi has squandered two massive national mandates and several state-level mandates.
But the ruling party continues to be in a state of denial; it is, in fact, belligerent. The
BJP’s supporters remain convinced that the party, the government it runs and their
Supreme Leader have ushered in a new era in our country. To them it is a New India
now, a ‘Vishwaguru’, the guru of all the world. But India is, in fact, facing a crisis. Our
polity, society and economy are broken. The signs are all around us.
It is necessary to bring the disparate elements together in order to grasp the big picture
and its serious consequences. It is equally necessary to foreground important
developments so that they are not buried under the misinformation that our twenty-
four-seven news cycles rain upon us without pause. The main, perhaps the only, reason
for bringing my sometimes regular but largely occasional essays together in this volume
is to connect the dots and rescue significant facts from the news rubble, so that we can
see the emerging picture of the recently minted New India. Those who follow the
developments in our polity, economy and society with discretion and scepticism may
nod at my observations with familiarity even if they disagree with my interpretation of
them. Others who are too busy with their not so easy quotidian lives to devote special
attention to the unfolding events will, I hope, be less indifferent after reading these
essays. Both these sets of citizens, the observant and the not so observant, ought to be
much more engaged with the New India that is being fashioned in front of our eyes,
and identify the crookedness of its timber.
Here, then, are some facts.
For the first time since the 1990s, the number of people who are below the poverty line
in India has increased. The country added 75 million to the world’s poor in 2021 alone,
and slipped to the 132nd position (out of 191 countries) in the UNDP Global Human
Development Index for 2021-22. Among India’s neighbours, Sri Lanka ranked 73, China
79, Bhutan 127 and Bangladesh 129. Only Pakistan (161), Myanmar (149) and Nepal
(143) were worse off (it is telling that all three have been majoritarian religious states
for much of their modern history). India also ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the
Global Hunger Index 2022, down from the 101st position the previous year.
Employment in the country is on a sharply declining trend. The Modi government has
not released any data on employment since 2016—perhaps because the last time the
labour bureau released data, it showed that unemployment had risen to a five-year high
of 5% in 2015-16. In January 2019, the Business Standard published a news story
based on the leaked periodic labour force survey of the National Sample Survey Office
(NSSO) for 2017-18. This was the first full financial year after the disastrous
demonetisation of high-value currency notes in November 2016. The news story quoted
the NSSO report which showed that the unemployment rate in India was at a 45-year-
high of 6.1% in 2017-18. The government reacted immediately by saying that the
report had not been finalized yet and the data was being reviewed because there had
been some problems with ‘methodology’. The survey report was then suppressed and
hasn’t been made public till date.
While the government releases no data on employment, the Centre for Monitoring
Indian Economy (CMIE) reported that in August 2022, even as India and the world
were emerging from the worst effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country’s
unemployment rate shot up to 8.3%, and the labour market shed 2.1 million jobs. As of
end-March 2023, as I write this introduction, the unemployment rate is 7.76%. Small-
and medium-scale industries are yet to recover from the pounding inflicted by
demonetisation. Rural distress continues unabated.
The ruling party and its supporters flaunt 13.5% growth in the second quarter of 2022-
23 as a sign of efficient management of the economy, glossing over the fact that the
figure looks impressive only because of the hopelessly low base the economy had
plummeted to in the previous two years. They want the country not to notice the fact
that the economy is yet to return to the pre-pandemic level. They want us to forget that
even before the pandemic struck, our economy was well into a slowdown. Indian
entrepreneurs are unwilling to invest in the country. The flight of capital continues
remorselessly.
The nation’s economic woes stem from the Modi regime’s staggering incompetence. It
has been unable to put together a well thought out, cohesive economic philosophy. It
tries to market the easy path of selling public sector assets as reform. It shuns the
heavy-lifting task of initiating actual reforms in running the public sector. New India
parrots the idiom of full-fledged neo-liberal market ideology on the one hand, and on
the other, short changes the nation’s assets to benefit the ruling party’s chosen cronies.
The recent, damning Hindenburg report about the rise of the Adani Group has raised
serious questions about Gautam Adani’s close ties with the Modi regime. The country is
still waiting for the government to clear the air.
In the absence of organised economic thought and competent economic advisers to the
government, New India falls prey to voodoo economists. They could easily convince a
clueless government to take a disastrous measure like demonetisation which broke the
back of the economy. During the pandemic, a phoney stimulus package tried to address
—or rather, give the impression of addressing—supply side issues, when the pressing
need was for strengthening the demand side. The effects of these insincere, half-way-
house measures are there for everyone to see. The economy is still struggling to return
to what was already a low pre-pandemic level.
While it has made a mess of the economy, the ruling party has proved itself a genius at
political manipulation. The most obvious evidence is the manner in which it has toppled
elected governments in state after state. In September 2022, a batch of eight
legislators left the Congress to join the BJP in Goa. There were allegations that they
were paid 40 to 50 crores of rupees each to switch sides. This was within weeks of the
government of the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance falling in neighbouring Maharashtra after
a dramatic split in one of the alliance partners, the Shiv Sena, engineered by the BJP.
The splinter group of Sena legislators cooled their heels in five-star luxury hotels in
Assam and other BJP-ruled states. Then they returned to Mumbai to join hands with the
BJP and form a new government. Forming governments in states where it was denied a
popular mandate has now become a standard practice for the BJP. In states like
Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, governments formed by the Congress fell after
legislators were lured to defect to the BJP. In states like Haryana, pre-poll alliance
partners were induced to switch sides to team up with the BJP. Rejection at the ballot
box is no longer an impediment for the BJP in forming governments.
The Modi regime is obsessed with untrammelled power to do as it pleases. Democracy
is a nuisance. Our Parliament today has been reduced to a body that gives a stamp of
approval to every legislation and measure proposed by the government. It no longer
performs its duty of debating people’s issues; the debates are often prevented by the
speakers of both Houses of Parliament. The ruling BJP, with its absolute majority, is
squarely to blame for this emaciation of our highest legislative forum.
In the pursuit of absolute power, opposition leaders and their associates are raided by
tax authorities, summoned by enforcement agencies for long, humiliating hours of
questioning, and are even jailed without any trial. Raids and investigations stop once
those leaders join the ruling party. Owners of media outlets who do not tow the
government’s line are served tax notices and investigated for alleged financial
irregularities. They are spared when their publications tone down criticism of the
government. Reputed think tanks are raided by tax authorities in a bid to cow them
down. Compliant officers are appointed to head the investigating agencies. Those who
show any inclination to act independently are removed from their positions. In New
India we have seen an inconvenient head of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
removed in a midnight coup. Misuse of investigating agencies today is at an
unprecedented level. The Enforcement Directorate (ED), especially, has become an
instrument to terrorize and silence the opposition.
The police force has become a similar instrument. Sedition charges are slapped on
citizens who post comments that are critical of the government and the majoritarian
ideology of the ruling dispensation. Journalists who venture to probe crimes or
atrocities committed in states under BJP rule are locked up. They do not get bail for
months and even years. Mere accusation becomes a sentence. An influential functionary
of the government in charge of national security, while speaking at the National Police
Academy’s passing out parade in November 2021, formulated a bizarre and dangerous
doctrine—that civil society is the new frontier of war. Perhaps he did not realise that he
was regurgitating the discredited security doctrines of military dictatorships of 1960s’
vintage. Or perhaps he realized this only too well.
Courts, including the Supreme Court, seem to have aligned with the Executive in its
aggressive attempt to constrict civic rights. The lofty remarks of their lordships during
court hearings and in lectures outside the court rooms are rarely reflected in their
judgements and orders. The earnestness shown by the Supreme Court in its order
constituting a committee to examine the use of the Pegasus spyware by the
government had completely evaporated by the time the final decision was pronounced.
Neither the Court nor the committee could extract a categorical answer from the
Narendra Modi-Amit Shah regime whether it had bought and authorised the use of the
military-grade spyware against opposition leaders, journalists and civil society activists.
The committee tamely rung down the curtain on the investigation, saying that the
government did not cooperate and therefore no evidence of Pegasus use was found!
And through all this, extreme bigotry has been legitimized. Criminals convicted for Bilkis
Bano’s gang rape in Gujarat during the 2002 riots were set free by the state
government—with the consent of the Union Home Ministry—even as households in the
country were hoisting the national flag and participating in the Har Ghar Tiranga
programme to mark Aazadi ka Amritmahotsav—75 years of our country’s independence.
The BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in our Republic, openly said
that the 2021 electoral fight in his state was between 80% and 20%, thus framing the
election as a fight between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority. A Hindu ‘dharma
sansad’ held in neighbouring Uttarakhand called for the genocide of Muslims a few
weeks before the state went to the polls. One speaker urged Hindus to emulate what
Myanmar had done to the Rohingyas and ‘cleanse’ India of Muslims; another declared,
‘If 100 of us are ready to kill two million of them, then we will win and make India a
Hindu nation.’ Neither the state nor the central government condemned the remarks.
The streets of the national capital—where the police force is controlled by the Union
Home Ministry—were witness to processions taken out by militant Hindutva
organisations with activists shouting slogans like ‘Is desh me rehna hoga toh Jai Shri
Ram kehna hoga’ (If you wish to live in this country, you must say Jai Shri Ram), and
‘Jab mulle kaate jaayenge Jai Shri Ram chillayenge’ (When we slaughter the mullahs,
they’ll scream Jai Shri Ram). None of these potential terrorists are in prison, they roam
around free and emboldened. Across the country, especially northern India, Muslim
men have been lynched on the suspicion that they stored beef in their homes or
smuggled cows for slaughter. Street vendors, bangle sellers and small shopkeepers are
routinely beaten up. Hindu school children were mobilised in the streets across BJP-
ruled Karnataka, made to wear saffron scarves and heckle Muslim schoolgirls wearing
hijabs.
Meanwhile, those of our public universities which were vibrant arenas of political debate
and contest of ideas are being attacked and made dysfunctional. Masked men and
police enter the campuses with iron rods and lathis to tame the young dissenting minds.
Private universities established by successful business leaders are compelled to ease out
academics and thinkers who are critical of the government. Premier institutions of
science and technology bring out publications that propagate mythologies held dear by
the ruling establishment. The proceedings of the Science Congress have also begun to
reflect the establishment’s obscurantist beliefs. That cow urine and dung are the most
effective cures for COVID 19 infections and a host of other diseases is no longer
advocated by a small fringe element in our society. Their therapeutic efficacy was
publicly championed by legislators and important functionaries of the ruling party.
With a few honourable but dwindling exceptions, our print and television media bend
backwards to serve the political and ideological interests of the ruling dispensation. By
the very structure of its ownership and the high cost of operation, the media is
vulnerable to financial pressure by big-ticket pro-establishment corporate advertisers
and coercion by the government’s enforcement agencies. Influential players in our
mainstream media are deferential to the powers that be, or act as cheerleaders for the
government. Television debates are framed to suit the ruling party’s agenda. There are
hardly any investigative stories. Reports of rural and agrarian distress, the voices of the
marginalised find little space. Issues that are inconvenient to the ruling party are
crowded out of the news cycle.
Digital forums are controlled in a different way. They are inundated with fake news and
false narratives. The ruling party leads the game. Its large digital armies flood cyber
space with tonnes of false and irrelevant information and civil society stands confused
as access to credible information becomes hard. This is smart censorship in New India.
Digital news outlets and forums that still hold out are under new pressures. Their
energies are sapped by defamation suits and unending trips to courts. New Internet
Technology Rules brought in at the beginning of 2021 make it difficult for them to
escape government pressure and punitive measures. The rules make the government
the sole arbiter of whether a news item or story is against the ‘national interest’. The
number of internet shutdowns in the country have risen steeply since 2014. So have the
number of requests from the government to social media platforms such as Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube to take down posts critical of the government. Even as this book
goes to press, the government has proposed a regulation that any news deemed ‘fake’
by its Press Information Bureau (PIB) ‘or any other agency authorised by the
government for fact-checking’ will have to be taken down by all platforms, including
social media platforms.
While the Indian government wages war on its own citizens, China continues to enjoy
the fruits of its recent incursions and sit pretty on a major chunk of our territory
unchallenged. But the Prime Minister tells the nation that there was no incursion at all.
Hardly anyone calls him out.
The Prime Minister and his government get away with misinformation, ambivalent
statements and plain lies because we, as a people, demand neither information nor
accountability. Perhaps the most shocking evidence of this government’s disdain for
transparency is the controversial electoral bonds scheme, introduced in 2017. The BJP
today is the richest political party in the country, and a significant portion of its wealth
has come to it through these electoral bonds, which make it possible for companies to
donate unlimited amounts of money to political parties anonymously. But the donations
are not, in fact, anonymous—the bonds can be issued only by the State Bank of India,
which is owned by the government. Between 2018 and 2022, the BJP received 5,270
crore rupees—that is, 57% of the total electoral bonds sold. The main opposition party,
the Congress, was a very distant second, receiving ₹964 crore, or 10% of the total. All
the remaining political parties of the country put together received the remaining 33%!
We do not know who paid the large sums to the ruling party and what is the quid pro
quo involved. Petitions challenging the opaqueness of these bonds which were filed
over five years ago have not yet been decided by the Supreme Court. Nor has the Court
stayed the sale of the bonds pending hearing. The ruling BJP, therefore, continues to
get richer and benefit from the apex court’s baffling inaction. Deployment of huge
financial resources has made the ruling party a formidable electoral juggernaut. No
other party in the country today can match its money power.
Withholding information about political donations to the ruling party is at least
sanctioned by law, however controversial that law may be. The withholding of
information on important parameters regarding economy and governance, however, is
done simply by denial and stonewalling. The government does not share information
with Parliament about farmers’ suicides; or the deaths of migrant labourers during the
COVID waves and the brutal lockdown of 2020; or the loss of jobs due to the pandemic
and the loss of lives due to lack of access to hospital beds and oxygen cylinders; or the
level of unemployment in the country. It simply says that it doesn’t have the data.
When it does release data, the figures are obviously finessed. Today, India’s statistical
integrity is questioned across the world. Data emanating from government sources is no
longer credible.
The Planning Commission was scrapped soon after the Modi-led BJP came to power in
2014. An institution with a grandiose name and a clever acronym, National Institution
for Transforming India—NITI Aayog—was set up in its place with much hype. We are
yet to see a single transformative idea coming out of this body.
Instead of information and accountability, we have noise—the white noise of
propaganda and ‘jumlas’, catchy slogans which are as hollow as they are glib. New
India is never found wanting in announcing innovative schemes, initiatives,
programmes. The names of the schemes trip off the tongue easily like clever phrases
coined by smart adolescent copy writers: Skill India, Make in India, Stand up India,
Startup India, Digital India, Swacch Bharat, Smart Cities, Bullet Trains, Khelo India, Jan
Dhan Yojana, Atmanirbhar Bharat, PRASAD, Beti Padhao-Beti Bachao, Namami Gange,
Doubling of Farmers Income, Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas, sab ka prayas, sab ka
vishwas, Har Ghar Tiranga, Amrit Kaal…It is a long and ever expanding list. The
schemes are launched with fanfare. And every launch is eventified with grand
spectacles.
After the dazzling launches are over—after they have served their purpose of giving a
platform for lofty speeches with clever punchlines and vicious digs at previous
governments—and made it to the next day’s newspaper headlines, the schemes fall by
the wayside. Even the annual reports of the concerned ministries do not care to give
any details of these schemes. Scant attention is paid to them once the events have
generated enough publicity. The Beti Padhao-Beti Bachao scheme for the girl child,
launched by PM Narendra Modi in 2015, is a shameful example of this publicity mania.
A Parliamentary standing committee report revealed that between 2016 and 2019, 79%
of the funds released went only into media advocacy. A mere 21% actually went
towards any concrete initiative for the education, health and welfare of girls.
This should surprise no one. Essentially, nothing straight can ever be made out of the
crooked timber of New India. These much-publicized events are only expendable launch
vehicles fired to put the payload of a majoritarian political creed into orbit. As the actual
payload takes off, they fall away as debris. The political creed that is put into orbit is
divisive, hateful. It defines citizenship on the basis of religious identity and ‘others’
minorities—mainly religious minorities, and particularly India’s Muslims. The autocratic
Hindutva regime that is in power today thrives on skilful manipulation of the base
instincts and sociocultural insecurities that lie barely concealed beneath the political top
soil of the nation. Instead of bringing harmony among divergent elements of our
nation, the present establishment and its ideological associates mobilize the street,
accentuate divisions and stoke the fires of suspicion and hatred towards minority
communities in order to win and consolidate political power.
This government wilfully squanders our demographic dividend by filling the minds of
young Indians with violent prejudice. Millions of our young citizens now confuse
patriotism with blind past-worship, militarism, aggressive religious identity and uncritical
support for the ruling party and its shrill, bombastic leaders. They become the foot
soldiers of violent Hindutva without the capacity for independent thought and,
tragically, without self-respect, having merged their personalities with the state and the
Supreme Leader. They cannot build anything; they can only demolish and destroy.
A majoritarian regime militates against social cohesion and thus disables a nation,
rendering it incapable of delivering economic development to the people. The crooked
timber of New India disallows the fostering of harmony, celebration of diversity,
strengthening of national integration—all of which are pre-requisites for a progressive
and prosperous nation.
It is us, as a people, who must ultimately take the blame for this. Democracies are
hijacked by autocratic politicians and parties because we empower them to do so,
either as active participants in their agenda, or passive victims, or indifferent
bystanders. Even when economic mismanagement is obvious, political malfeasance is
manifest, institutional subversion is brazenly open and suppression of civil rights is
relentless, New India’s government and ruling party are not effectively challenged. They
are not punished by the electorate. Any government that presided over the kind of
economic downturn and political wrongdoing that we witness today would have been
shown the door by now. But this government survives, its imperious rule virtually
unchallenged, emboldened by a huge majority in the Lok Sabha, the Upper House of
our Parliament, where the BJP alone has 303 seats—over 56% of the total seats. Our
first-past-the-post voting system gives the party this massive presence in the Lok Sabha
even though it garnered less than 38% of the popular vote in the 2019 national
election.
But such is the pro-establishment noise in the mainstream media, elite clubs and
middle-class drawing rooms, that we often forget that over 62% of Indians who voted
in 2019 did not vote for the BJP. Large sections of the middle class continue to indulge
the leadership’s autocratic conduct and false promises, its dog whistles to summon dark
and divisive instincts in society, its open promotion of select crony businessmen.
Indeed, a significant section of this class are active cheerleaders and evangelists of the
regime. The underprivileged, as always, are afraid to disagree with the dominant
discourse—more so now, for not only have they been made irrelevant, they also risk
being branded anti-national if they do not sing the praises of the ruling party and the
Prime Minister.
This should lead us to a deep reflection on the sources of political power and the
popular appeal of the regime that presides over New India.
Fear is a hard and visible reality today—never since the Emergency of 1975-77 has
there been so much fear in society. To criticise the government or the BJP is to be anti-
Modi, and, therefore, anti-national, unpatriotic. So, many people feel it is safer to
express support for the establishment, or to remain silent. Which is not to deny that
there are a lot of people who genuinely believe in the Modi-government’s narrative.
They propagate it, too. One can’t blame them. They are under a spell. They are either
members of the ruling party or active and vocal supporters. There are such people in
academia, industry, civil services, the media and the professions. They seem to think
that good things are indeed happening. To them, price rise, joblessness, destruction of
our constitutional institutions, subversion of our democratic processes, violation of
fundamental rights and privacy, perpetual discord are a small price to pay for the
grander civilisational mission that this government has set out to accomplish—that is, to
make India a Hindu Rashtra.
But there are others. They don’t believe the government’s narrative and they wouldn’t
want a Hindu Rashtra—which can only be an undemocratic and regressive nation—for
their children. Still, they champion it because of the Faustian bargain they have struck
with the ruling dispensation. This is tragic for our Republic. These people are conscious
of the damage they are doing but their conscience is hostage to greed and extreme
self-interest. Their only mission in life is immediate personal reward. Some others sign
up for the official narrative because they like to be on the winning side—for no
particular gain, but for security, for comfort. They too inflict damage on the fabric of
our nation. And then there are those who simply cannot stand up to the might of the
government; their business interests won’t let them. All these categories of people are
not alike, their motivations are different, but cumulatively they serve the ruling
dispensation’s agenda.
The agenda of using a variety of instruments of fear and coercion. So that people and
institutions are intimidated into submission and silence.
The agenda of perpetual spin and distraction—grand choreographed events like Kashi,
Kedarnath, Ayodhya on the one hand, and gala celebrations of a ‘billion Covid jabs’ and
mega rallies with cheering NRI bhakts in foreign lands, on the other. So that people are
dazzled and overwhelmed and become numb to the regime’s assaults on the ideals of
our Republic.
*
Some people accuse me of being negative. They ask me why I don’t see anything
positive at all in what the government is doing. They tell me: Don’t you see that the
alternative is bad? Do you want to see x, y, or z as our next PM, don’t you know that x,
y, z would be a disaster? Some others say: Parakala, you are only highlighting the
problems, sitting pretty in your air-conditioned room. Don’t just talk. Do something.
Give us solutions.
This is a trap I will not fall into. It is just another form of censorship. The primary
intention of my writings and speeches is to raise a red flag when I see something going
wrong; unpack the process of the country’s drift towards ideas and actions that are
inimical to our Republic’s democratic, plural, liberal and secular creed; draw attention—
consistently and with clarity—to the failures, inefficiencies, falsehoods and mala fide
intent of the government.
To highlight the good done by the government, there are innumerable platforms in the
country. In fact, there is a glut of such media platforms. The ruling party’s own gigantic
publicity machinery and well-funded digital army are also doing that job day and night.
They overwhelm our public discourse with an avalanche of pro-establishment
propaganda dressed up as news and expert opinion. So, mine is an unabashedly critical
voice. It is, unrepentantly, a dissenting note.
My writings and my voice are not anti someone or anti something. They are wedded to
the founding ideals and principles of our democratic, plural Republic. I do not work for
or against any individual or political platform. People will choose their leaders and
governments; I have no illusion that my irregular writings and speeches could play any
significant role in influencing those choices. Regimes will be changed by the people. My
task is simple, limited and focused. It is to point out when our government, our public
institutions and our leaders depart from the ideals of our Republic and deviate from
their stated objectives and promises to the people. It is a simple effort to speak truth to
power. At all times.
I am unconcerned with alternatives. That is not the brief I have given myself. I want
the incumbents to do well. To redeem their pledges. To uphold democratic norms. If
they don’t, I raise my voice. As a simple act of citizenship. Period.
As a citizen, in order to raise an issue, I do not think that I should first be ready with a
solution. I believe that in a mature democracy, solutions emerge out of an open and
informed discussion in which people and experts participate. I need not earn the right
to be critical by also saying something good about the government and its leaders once
in a while. I can choose to be critical without in some way singing praises of the
regime. That does not make me less objective, it does not make me partial. I do not
have to fake impartiality and objectivity. I do not feel obliged to say: Look, I
complimented the powers that be there, therefore when I criticise them here, I’m only
being even handed. No. That is not my way. I exercise my full-blown, unhindered,
untrammelled democratic right to speak my mind to the powers that be. Give them a
fair crack of the whip while being faithful to facts. I will not be discouraged by toxic
trolls. Nor will I be numbed or gaslighted by constant propaganda and mega events.
I am reminded of a conversation in the film Gladiator between two senators about the
new emperor, Commodus, who has promised the people of Rome a grand spectacle—
one hundred and fifty days of games. The walls of the city are being painted with
enormous pictures of gladiators fighting wild animals in the Colosseum, its sand covered
with blood.
Senator One: One hundred and fifty days of games!
Senator Two: He’s cleverer than I thought.
Senator One: Clever? The whole of Rome would be laughing at him, if they weren’t so
afraid of his Praetorians.
Senator Two: Fear and wonder. A powerful combination.
Senator One: You really think the people are going to be seduced by that?
Senator Two: I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for
them, and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom, and still they’ll roar. The
beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It’s the sand of the Colosseum.
He’ll bring them death, and they will love him for it.
As we mark 75 years of Independence and celebrate Azaadi ka Amritmahotsav, the
situation in our country is not very different. A lot of us have learnt to love the ones
who are bringing death to our Republic’s founding ideals. To its plural, liberal and
secular values. To its regional, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity. The process is
slow but unmistakably sure footed. The slowness lends the process stealth. The loud
drumbeat of propaganda in the background numbs the nation to the gradual rise of
horror and disaster. And there’s a plethora of gala events to entertain and distract us
from the subversion of the Idea of India that was nurtured during our freedom
movement and enshrined in our Constitution.
Our democracy is in crisis, our social fabric is torn, our economy is in peril, and we are
being dragged back to the dark ages. It is the paramount duty of every citizen to point
this out, forcefully and repeatedly; to sound the warning bells. Through my columns
and speeches, and through this book, I’m doing my duty as a citizen.
PARAKALA PRABHAKAR
March 2023

MODI Vs MODI
Will the Real PM Stand Up?
(This essay, originally written for ‘Midweek Matters’ in August 2021, has been edited
and updated with a postscript.)
August 2021
I never miss the Independence Day address by our prime ministers. Even when I was
abroad, in the pre-internet days, I used to visit our diplomatic mission in the city to
listen to them. On Sunday, 15 August 2021, our present PM, Narendra Modi, delivered
his eighth Independence Day address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort.
He is a very competent communicator. There’s hardly anyone among his peers today
who can match his oratorial skills. He packs his speeches with the precise message he
wants to convey, and uses a host of rhetorical devices to good effect. Everything he
says has been planned well in advance, and with a clear purpose. Nothing is really
spontaneous. So it is important to examine carefully what PM Modi says in the most
significant speech of the year, in order to understand what his government has in store
for the country. It is important not only to consider what he says forcefully and at
length, and what he says cursorily, but also what he chooses not to say.
Let us look back at his speeches from 2014 to 2020, and put the 2021 speech against
the backdrop of the words he spoke in those seven addresses to the nation. And try to
understand from them the shift that has taken place in these years.
In 2021, I was a bit late tuning in. When I did tune in, about seven minutes after the
PM began his speech, I was stunned by what I heard. These are the words he was
speaking: ‘…amaanaveeya haalaat se gujare, atyaacaar sahe. Jinhe sammaan ke saath
antim samskar tak naseeb nahi huya. Un logon ko hamaara smruti me jivit rakhna utna
hi jaruri hai.’ (‘…those who suffered inhuman experiences. Who were denied dignity
even in death. It is equally important to keep them alive in our memory.’) For a
moment, I thought he was speaking about the thousands of people who had died in the
devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that summer—those who could
not get hospital admissions, struggled for oxygen, for ventilators; who could not get
dignified last rites; whose abandoned bodies floated in the Ganga. Had the PM finally,
after three months of complete silence, found the humanity and courage to fully
acknowledge his government’s criminal failures and apologise? It seemed unreal. The
next sentence brought me back to reality. Our PM was not speaking about the victims
of COVID. He was telling us about his government’s ‘emotional’ decision to henceforth
observe 14 August every year as Vibhaajan Vibheeshika ka Smriti Divas—Partition
Horrors Remembrance Day.
He was unclear whether he meant that we ought to remember every single person who
lost her or his life during the communal violence that erupted in the wake of Partition.
The PM never lacks clarity when he wants to be understood. If he had meant the
atrocities committed by all communities—Hindu, Muslim and Sikh—against each other,
on both sides of the newly created borders that divided a united India on the basis of
religion, he would have said so clearly. If he had meant that we should remember and
ensure that such hatred and violence is never repeated in our country, he would have
said so in as many words. He didn’t. He left his listeners to draw their own inferences.
That, to my mind, is no insignificant political message in his Independence Day address.
Along with the many resolutions that he announced to shape the next 25 years, until
the centenary year of our Independence, which he called Amrit Kaal—Ambrosial Era—
he also wanted us to revive the memories of the poison of communal hatred that
engulfed us 75 years ago. And carry that hemlock in our minds and hearts until 2047.
If for a moment you forget about the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, the 2021
Independence Day address appeared forward looking, full of resolve and inspirational.
It called upon people to do their best to create a Shrestha Bharat, a Perfect India. It
exhorted them to make their dream of a prosperous India a reality. Therefore, if before
all of this the Prime Minister chose to summon the dark, blood-soaked period of
violence and hatred into the nation’s consciousness there must be some purpose behind
it. There must be some subliminal messaging embedded in the Partition Horrors
Remembrance Day. His reluctance to send greetings to the government and people of
Pakistan on their Independence Day—14 August—only strengthens the subtext of the
announcement. As does his reference to ‘centuries’ of ‘slavery’: ‘ Bharat ne sadiyon se
matrubhoomi, sanskriti aur aajaadi ke liye sangharsh kiya hai. Ghulami ki kasak, aajaadi
ki lalak iss desh ne sadiyon tak kabhi chhodi nahi.’ (‘India has struggled for the
motherland, culture and independence for many centuries. For many centuries it has
never let go of the pain of slavery or the longing for freedom.’) A century and a half of
colonial rule was not what he was talking about. He was also not talking about the
great freedom struggle which gave us the independent Indian nation we all inhabit
today. It is revealing that ‘motherland’ and ‘culture’ took precedence over
‘independence’ in his formulation. And the way he constructed his sentences, he
suggested an ongoing fight. The call to remember ‘Partition Horrors’ every year must be
understood in this context.
But the beginning of his innings in New Delhi had been promising. It was a different
avatar of Narendra Modi we saw in the first few months after he became the country’s
Prime Minister. I don’t know how many of you remember his first Independence Day
address in 2014. He didn’t carry the ‘Mia Musharraf’, ‘James Michael Lyngdoh’ kind of
rhetoric from Gujarat with him when he arrived in Delhi.
His 2014 election campaign agenda was almost entirely on issues of development and
corruption. On 15 August 2014 he called himself not Pradhan Mantri but Pradhan Sevak
(the Prime Servant). He didn’t look for enemies and scapegoats in his predecessors. He
gave credit to all of them—in fact, to every state and its leadership, as well—for the
progress that India had achieved until then. Let me recall for you the English rendering
of that speech. He said: ‘[Today,] if we have reached this far after Independence, it is
because of the contribution of all the prime ministers, all the governments and even the
governments of all the states. I want to express my feelings of respect and gratitude to
all the previous governments and ex-prime ministers who have endeavoured to take
India to such heights and who have added to the country’s glory.’ In 2014, the Prime
Minister also said: ‘We don’t believe in moving forward only by virtue of majority. We
want to move ahead on the basis of strong consensus.’ He continued to elaborate on
the principle of consensus, which he said his government had already put into practice:
‘[The] nation has witnessed the entire session of Parliament. Having taken all the
parties and the opposition along while working shoulder to shoulder, we achieved
unprecedented success and the credit does not go to the Prime Minister alone, the
credit does not go to the people sitting in the government, the credit goes to the
opposition also, the credit goes to all the leaders of the opposition too, and all the
members of Parliament. I also salute all the political parties…’
Yes, believe me, this was our Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi.
The Modi who has now disappeared.
That first year, Modi also spoke about ‘the poison of casteism and communalism’. And
he said, ‘…look behind you and you will find that nobody has benefitted from it’. Then
he gave a call: ‘Let us put a moratorium on all such activities for ten years’, so that ‘we
march ahead to a society which will be free from all such tensions’. He told us about the
benefits of such a national approach: ‘And you will see how much strength we get from
peace, unity, goodwill and brotherhood. Let’s try this experiment for once.’
Can you recognise the person who spoke these words? Does the Prime Minister himself
recognise the person who spoke that language? Does he ever recall those words he
uttered not very long ago?
He spoke about Team India in 2014. About 125 crore people who comprised Team
India. About all the chief ministers and the prime ministers who comprised Team India.
This is precisely what he said in the first meeting of NITI Aayog too. In his 2014
address, he said, ‘There should be a team of chief ministers and Prime Minister, a joint
team of the Centre and states should take things forward.’
If you look up the text of the Prime Minister’s 2015 speech, too, the phrase Team India
is repeated many times. In some parts of his speech, every sentence contained that
phrase.
But the phrase disappears—believe me, it completely disappears—from his speeches
2016 onwards. A very short shelf life for Team India. We do not hear the phrase any
more.
And when did we hear the designation ‘Pradhan Sevak’ after the 2014 speech? Never
again from the ramparts of the Red Fort. I wonder why.
Nor was his self-appellation as ‘chowkidar’, the nation’s guard and guardian, ever heard
again from the shade of the Tricolour fluttering high at the historic Red Fort. Why?
I was trying to look for clues to the changeover from the idea that ‘great things
happened during the past 70 years’ that was prominent in his 2014 speech, to the
declaration that ‘nothing good happened in the last 70 years’ which is repeated ad
nauseum these days. The Prime Minister’s cabinet, his party leaders, his devotees shout
this at us every other day. Of course, the initial whistle was from the PM himself. It
began in 2016. If you examine the framing of the past in the Prime Minister’s speeches
since 2016, it is like this: his government versus every other government before him. A
sort of ‘Before and After’ and ‘after-me-the-deluge’ framing.
Some people would say this is understandable—the Prime Minister wants to set himself
up as the antipode to the Congress and the dynasty that presided over it. But the fact
is, it doesn’t stop with that. The framing that ‘nothing happened’ in the country before
the Modi regime came to power dismisses Lal Bahadur Shastri, Morarji Desai (of whose
coalition Modi’s own party’s former incarnation was a part), V.P. Singh, Chandra
Shekhar, Narasimha Rao, I.K. Gujral, Deve Gowda—and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, hailed as
the tallest leader of the BJP.
I will give you just one example from the 2021 Independence Day speech which is
evidence of this framing. The Prime Minister took credit for taking electricity to every
village in the country. It was framed as something that hadn’t been done ‘for 70
years’—no PM before Modi had managed the electrification of 100% of India’s villages.
But the actual fact—that the extent of the Modi regime’s task was in fact very modest—
was not in the frame. The truth is this: by the time Modi became Prime Minister, all but
18,500 of India’s 600,000 villages—that is, 97%—already had electricity. So it was like
the last runner in a 10,000-kilometre relay race completing the final 100 metres to the
finishing line and taking the credit for the entire relay marathon. This is just one
example. When you have time, please look up his speeches. You will find many such
clever claims.
The PM is also very good at reporting new, revolutionary ‘initiatives’ that have—to
quote one of his tweets—‘forever transformed India’s development trajectory’. These
initiatives are in fact old schemes with new, catchy names. Like the Jan Dhan Yojana,
which is the old Basic Savings Bank Deposit Account; or the Pradhan Mantri Awaas
Yojana, which is essentially the Indira Awaas Yojana; or the Pradhan Mantri Krishi
Sinchayee Yojana, which is no different from the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits
Programme. About such initiatives he speaks with confidence from the Red Fort. He
gives you numbers. He tells you how many Jan Dhan accounts were opened. How many
redundant laws were repealed. How much grain was produced. How much ration was
distributed. He speaks confidently about these things because almost all the work was
done before he came on the scene, and when the schemes had different names.
It is easy to tell what he is not confident about. These are the programmes or initiatives
for which he has no data to give us because they did not exist before his time; he
thought them up. So, he has no figures to offer for Make in India, Startup India, Skill
India, Stand Up India. All of these are his government’s flagship programmes which, if
they had been thought through properly, could really have been tools to transform
India. Look up his speeches. You won’t get a clue about how these programmes are
doing. He no longer even mentions them.
You will notice one more interesting feature of his Red Fort communication. Ideological
and political issues that were addressed a few days or weeks before 15 August find
mention in his speech. And he deals with them at length. For example: Scrapping of
Article 370 and 35 A. Laying the foundation stone for the Ram Temple at Ayodhya.
Abolition of Triple Talaq. Decision to mark Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. But
about larger humanitarian issues of colossal significance, there are hardly any words. In
the 2017 speech, the Prime Minister spoke about demonetisation very cursorily—the
country was reeling under its impact even ten months after the decision. Similarly, the
COVID-19 tragedy found very brief mention in the 2020 and 2021 speeches. Just a few
sentences, a few seconds. And in none of the speeches does he tell us how many jobs
were created.
The grand show of humility, all the talk about team spirit, consensus, compassion,
cooperation, the need to eradicate the poison of communal and caste disharmony that
marked the 2014 and 2015 Modi speeches from the ramparts of the Red Fort began to
fade by 2016 and then disappeared completely. Were his mighty words of those two
years unreal? Just a performer’s lines delivered for effect without intent? Only empty
rhetoric meant to snare the young and the middle classes of the country? If they were
truly the defining creed of Modi’s New India, could they have vanished from his annual
discourse on politics and governance? Which is real—2014 or 2021?
Postscript, August 2022
The 2022 Independence Day address by Prime Minister Modi was a pretty long one.
Over 80 minutes. As he himself repeatedly said in the speech, it was a very significant
moment, the beginning of what he called the ‘Amrit Kaal’, the Ambrosial Age. It was,
therefore, an occasion to share with the nation his view of the situation in the country
and his approach towards addressing the many critical issues that confront our
Republic. In his long address, Modi had ample chance to do this. To tell us, for
example, how his government—or rather, he, since the entire government now resides
in his all-powerful self—intends to handle price rise, high unemployment, deceleration
in manufacturing, and the alarming situation on our eastern border where China has
been sitting pretty on a substantial tract of our land. But the PM characteristically
avoided all these.
Instead, he resorted, again, to rhetoric that to my mind is barely disguised and crafty
stoking of divisive sentiments. And he offered a revised version of the discredited
‘Achhe Din’ promise in the form of ‘Amrit Kaal’.
He repeated a dog whistle from his 2021 address: Partition Horrors Day. And he spoke
again of centuries of ‘foreign rule’. Although he did deign to mention Jawaharlal Nehru,
he took care to name him after many others, and not in the company of freedom
fighters—those slots were reserved for Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and those whom the
BJP is trying hard to co-opt into its pantheon, like Subhas Chandra Bose.
This time, Team India was himself and ‘130 crore Indians’. Not chief ministers, nor the
leaders of other political parties. Even as he was ushering in India’s Amrit Kaal, an
entire age, he was not prepared to yield some space to any other political player in the
country.
Among the five pledges—‘panch pranns’—that he elaborated in his 2022 address, one
was to shed ‘our slavish mentality’, and another was to respect and cherish ‘our own
heritage’. These again amount to dog whistles. When he spoke of ‘slavish mentality’, he
was not referring to Indians looking to the West for endorsement and acceptance. Go
back and listen to recordings of his address: he said that for hundreds of years, we
have been slaves. He was referring to India’s Islamic regimes. So, respecting and
cherishing ‘our heritage’ obviously meant respecting not our composite heritage, but the
Sangh Parivar’s idea of an exclusivist Hindu heritage.
Towards the end of his 2022 address, Prime Minister Modi gave a call to the people of
India to stand by him in his fight against corruption, and in his effort to cleanse our
institutions and national life of that menace. This to me was a clear indication of an
even more aggressive taming of state institutions, and widespread use of enforcement
agencies against political opponents painted as corrupt individuals.
So, this was what I heard in his long Independence Day address of 2022: a project to
usher in an era that would see a revival of an imagined pre-Islamic ‘Hindu’ India, and a
one-party State where the entire political opposition would be branded as corrupt and
possibly put behind bars. In other words, an Orwellian Hindutva autocracy.
This, indeed, is a far cry from the Modi we heard on 15 August 2014.

THE RISE AND RISE OF THE NEW BJP

How Did We Get Here?
(This is an edited version of an essay written in November 2022.)
That the BJP has become the dominant political force in the country is beyond dispute.
It is now an electoral juggernaut. It has been decisively voted to power in two
successive national elections and several state elections despite its grave failures. In
addition to its own aggressive cadre, it has the ideological backing of a plethora of
Hindu supremacist organisations—the Sangh Parivar—that can recruit support from a
civilised Sanskrit lover and also command the blind allegiance of club-wielding vigilantes
roaming the streets. It has big business on its side and enormous financial resources to
buy support when needed. It is not burdened by constitutional norms and democratic
niceties, and it is not averse to lying and deceiving. It is willing to use State institutions
to advance its political goals. It does not hesitate to summon the dark elements that
swim below the surface, and to tap into the animosities and cleavages that always lie
dormant in a stratified and diverse society like India.
This party, committed to majoritarian rule, is in a position where it can subvert the
basic values of our Constitution and face hardly any challenge. It feels this country of
almost 1.5 billion souls is its private property.
How did we, as a nation, get here?
*
Until the mid-1980s, every political platform in the country defined itself as either pro
Congress or opposed to the ‘grand old party’. Relation to the Congress party defined
the credentials of a political formation its participation in alliances. Alliances were
formed with the intention of dislodging the Congress from power. The Samyukta
Vidhayak Dal of the 1960s, the Janata experiment of 1977 and the later alliances of the
National Front and United Front were essentially formations designed to keep the
Congress out of power. The first non-congress government to complete a full term at
the Centre was the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—with Atal Bihari
Vajpayee as Prime Minister—almost half a century after the country’s first national
election. Thereafter, the Congress returned—unexpectedly and only as the leading
partner of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments from 2004 to 2014. Then
the country’s political landscape was transformed.
Today, the BJP occupies the very position that the Congress did. Although it is the NDA
that has been in power at the centre since 2014, the Alliance is only notional. The BJP
on its own has absolute majority and its partners do not count for much. Political
configuration in New India is defined by a party’s pro or anti BJP stance. Just as non-
Congress parties came together in a bid to defeat the Congress in an earlier era, non-
BJP parties are trying to dislodge the BJP today. In other words, the BJP has effectively
replaced the Congress as the defining pole of India’s polity.
But that is not all. The rise of the BJP has accompanied a deep transformation of the
political narrative and conversation in the country. The open espousal of a majoritarian
agenda by the BJP and the Sangh Parivar organisations has not been a sudden one; it
has come after decades of clever political footwork. It began with positioning the
Congress’s creed as ‘pseudo secular’ and its policies as anti-Hindu. The BJP and its
parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), worked tirelessly to
build the narrative that in the name of secularism, the Congress appeased Muslims and
Christians—that the Congress was, in fact, communal. Note that in this framing, the
term secularism was not jettisoned. The BJP could not afford to position itself openly as
a majoritarian political platform. Not yet. Instead, the party maintained that it believed
in being ‘genuinely’ secular, unlike the Congress.
That was the initial stage of the BJP’s effort to consolidate and mobilise the Hindu
majority behind itself. It painted India’s Hindus as helpless victims of the politics of
minority appeasement. Reclaiming ‘Hindu pride’ became its primary agenda, and for this
it found a potent symbol—the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir. Hard-line but as yet fringe
militant Hindutva outfits like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had been claiming for
some time that the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya stood at the site of a temple to Ram, built
at the exact spot where the god was born. The narrative that the VHP and other such
groups had built was that the Mughal emperor Babur had demolished the Ram temple
and built a mosque over it. They were demanding that the temple be rebuilt at the very
site. In the mid-1980s, the BJP came out in open support of the demand, and became
the primary agitator for this ‘sacred’ cause.
By 1989 this mobilisation had begun to assume compelling appeal and other political
parties were getting nervous. Rajiv Gandhi had to inaugurate his 1989 election
campaign in Ayodhya. Appeal to Hindu identity could not be ignored any longer. BJP
president Lal Krishna Advani’s Rath Yatra of 1990 was an audacious attempt to mobilise
Hindus, cutting across caste and class, around the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid
dispute and thus unite them against a common ‘enemy’—India’s Muslims. This strategy
appeared to have yielded rich dividends, as the BJP won 85 Lok Sabha seats in the
1989 elections, up from just two in 1984. In the 1991 elections, occasioned by the
collapse of the National Front coalition, the party increased its tally to 120. It had made
the Ram Mandir issue central to its campaign, but it was careful not to sound
aggressive. In its election manifesto, it had said: ‘BJP firmly believes that construction
of Ram Mandir is a symbol of the vindication of our cultural heritage and national self-
respect. For BJP it is purely a national issue and it will not allow any vested interests to
give it a sectarian and communal colour. The party is committed to build Shri Ram
Mandir at Janmasthan by relocating superimposed Babri structure with due respect.’
The following year, the mask was off. The BJP and its ideological affiliates engineered
the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The BJP’s tally in national elections has never dipped
below 100 ever since—it won 161 seats in 1996, 182 in 1998 and 1999 (when its NDA
Alliance came to power with Vajpayee as Prime Minister), 138 in 2004 and 116 in 2009.
In 2014, with the national mood strongly against the UPA government, the BJP, led by
Narendra Modi, for long a polarising figure in Indian politics, stormed to power with 282
Lok Sabha seats. It got an even stronger mandate in 2019, winning 303 seats.
But it would be a mistake to see this stunning rise of the BJP as inevitable. If Hindutva
has become the dominant political discourse today—if the Hindutva brigade continues
to poison our national discourse and subvert our democratic traditions with impunity—it
is because other political parties and the influential sections of our society have not
challenged this narrative. Instead, they have encouraged it.
There was a time when the BJP was compelled to say it too was secular. Since the late
1980s, and especially in the last decade, the Congress and other political parties have
felt compelled to say they too are Hindu. Today, every political leader does a round of
temple visits during election campaigns. Prominent columnists and authors find it
necessary to establish their devout Hindu credentials before venturing to criticise BJP
leaders for their bigotry. Society at large does not reject obscurantist beliefs—in fact,
large sections support them. In all this, assertion of the primacy of an ‘eternal’ and
‘pure’ Hindu identity is unmistakable.
Where does this assertion place the minorities, especially the Muslim minority? Equal
status to minorities on a par with the majority Hindu community is no longer an
uncontested proposition. Religious identity has finally forced itself into the conversation
about citizenship. For the first 50 years of our Republic, this was unthinkable. Religion
had nothing to do with citizenship. This began to change during the BJP’s first full term
in office—1999-2004. After a lull of ten years when the UPA led by Manmohan Singh
was in power, the project to officially ‘Hinduise’ the Republic gained fresh impetus after
the BJP’s unprecedented electoral victory of 2014. After it was re-elected in 2019, the
Modi regime introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which for the first time
made religion the basis of Indian citizenship. There were non-violent protests across the
country, led by brave Muslim women. But while it was heartening to see many ordinary
citizens across religious identities join the protests, the fact was that a vast majority of
Hindus stayed away. It was not their problem.
What was worse, except perhaps for the left parties, no mainstream political party came
out into the streets to challenge the government’s brazen attack on the Indian
Constitution, which is founded on the idea of equal citizenship to all, regardless of
caste, class, faith and gender. Almost every political party betrayed our Constitution,
afraid of alienating the Hindu majority. The silence and inaction of the Aam Admi Party
in Delhi, the site of the biggest anti-CAA protests, was a prime example of this
cowardice and cynicism.
It is no wonder that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar now confidently conflate ‘Indian’
with ‘Hindu’. If you are an Indian, they say, you are necessarily a Hindu. The Supreme
Court’s verdict of 1995 that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life has, in no small
measure, contributed to this gradual transformation in the political discourse. The BJP
and the Sangh Parivar have been able to successfully leverage this framing by the apex
court.
In the BJP’s initial formulation of ‘genuine’ secularism, the position was that while there
could be no rejection—‘tiraskar’—of the minorities, there should be no appeasement
—‘puraskar’. The minorities should instead be ‘reformed’; they should be guided to
acquire Hindu culture, or ‘samskar’, and thus made to integrate with, and become
acceptable to, the Hindu majority. This seemingly benign majoritarianism does not hold
any longer in New India. While the non-BJP parties have felt compelled to frame
themselves as ‘secular but Hindu’, the BJP has been openly and aggressively asserting
its political creed of unqualified Hindu identity. Samskar has yielded place to
unambiguous tiraskar.
The BJP is comfortable with not having a single person in its council of ministers, or
even among its members of Parliament, who belongs to the country’s largest minority.
In the 2019 elections, it fielded only six Muslim candidates. Three in Jammu and
Kashmir, two in West Bengal and one in Lakshadweep. All six lost. Since July 2022,
when the Rajya Sabha term of one-time minority affairs minister, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi,
ended, there hasn’t been a single Muslim BJP MP. In Gujarat, the BJP has not fielded a
Muslim candidate for the Assembly elections since 1998. In UP, the party did not give a
ticket to a single Muslim in the 2017 and 2022 Assembly elections. This is an
unequivocal message of tiraskar from India’s ruling party.
That there is hardly any outrage about this in our civil society comes as no surprise.
The nation is numbed to this shift; this has become normal in New India.
It is puzzling that Hindu majoritarian ideology is more acceptable today than it ever
was, even in the years immediately after Partition. The key to understanding the
crookedness of the timber of New India perhaps lies in solving this puzzle. Arguably, a
more favourable ground for the assertion of a Hindu majoritarian creed existed in 1947-
48 and the years immediately after. There had been large-scale communal violence
during the partition of the Subcontinent. Many thousands had died and in the transfer
of populations, Hindus from what was to become Pakistan had left their homes with
little more than what was on their person. On this side of the new border, they lived for
months, sometimes years, in refugee camps. Leaders who championed Hindutva and a
Hindu nation—leaders like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Balraj Madhok, Karpatri Maharaj,
Guru Golwalkar—were more competent and far taller than any of their ideological heirs
in the BJP and RSS today. The political and social environment could not have been
more conducive to Hindu majoritarianism. But the creed did not gain ground then.
But this creed existed; it was being nurtured and propagated under the radar, so to
speak.
Congress dominance of our polity for almost four decades, followed by non-Congress
secular platforms, and the victory of the Congress-led UPA coalition against the BJP-led
NDA in 2004 and again in 2009 had served to mask the slow but sure strengthening of
majoritarian attitudes in the country. Political forces wedded to a secular, liberal,
diverse and inclusive idea of India could not sense that the ground was slipping from
under their feet. They could not see the growing challenge that was lurking in the
shadows, and were either complacent, or flirted with communalism themselves,
believing that they could play with fire for short-term benefit, without having to pay the
price for such cynicism. India’s democracy could be injured, they felt, but it would
survive.
Another reason why they were unable to size up the potency and force of the Hindutva
narrative was the soft and liberal idiom deployed during the Vajpayee-led NDA regime.
It led India’s political establishment to the false understanding that the BJP had
reconciled itself to being a right-of-centre party, and that it was not fundamentally at
odds with a plural India. The political arena then looked almost civilised—as though
Indian politics had settled for a contest between two formations for a long time to
come: the Congress-led centre-left and the BJP-led centre-right. The idea that the
secular and inclusive creed of India was beyond challenge appeared to have taken hold
in the country. Many parties who were ideologically incompatible with the BJP,
therefore, did business with it. And while doing business with it, and joining the alliance
led by it, they lent acceptability and respect to its illiberal ideology. It is important to
recall, again, that in the 1980s and early 1990s, BJP leaders used to struggle against
what they called ‘political untouchability’; hardly any political party wanted to be seen to
be associated with it. Gaining acceptability in the political class was the biggest
challenge for the party. Back then, BJP leaders would maintain that they had no hidden
agenda, that Hindu majoritarianism was not their core ideology. Their emphasis was on
being a party with a difference, a party of honesty, good governance, fresh ideas and
‘cultural pride’.
As we have seen, the abandonment by the BJP of its right-of-centre position, the open
and aggressive espousal of the majoritarian creed, was gradual. In fact, the party was
unsure of the viability of an openly majoritarian agenda even in 2014. Therefore, the
pitch then was economic development, fighting poverty, decisive leadership, the Gujarat
model, corruption-free administration, end of policy paralysis, creation of jobs, bringing
back black money stashed abroad, crediting Rs 15 lakhs in the bank accounts of honest
tax-paying citizens, and a host of other such grand promises. The prime ministerial
candidate, Narendra Modi, declared in his campaign speeches that Hindus and Muslims
should not fight each other; instead, they should together fight against poverty and
unemployment. And in the early months of his prime ministership, he spoke about
himself and the chief ministers of all states together making up Team India; about
cooperative federalism; about the contribution of all his predecessors in shaping our
country, and he being merely the Pradhan Sewak—the Prime Servant. Entering the
Parliament, he bowed down to touch the steps in a gesture of worship, like a pilgrim
entering a shrine. His first Independence Day address on 15 August 2014 reflected this
inclusive and conciliatory approach.
But this spirit did not last long. There was an unmistakable shift away from this
inclusive agenda in the PM’s subsequent addresses from the ramparts of the Red Fort.
His impatience with consensus, with any view that is not a complete endorsement of his
own, is legendary. His self-regard borders on megalomania. He has disdain for the most
fundamental ideas of a Parliament: debate, discussion and accountability. His silence in
the face of communal hate and violence is shocking.
For him, his party and supporters, nothing worthy at all happened in India before 2014.
The six decades before he became PM were an era of darkness—which would include
the first NDA rule under his party’s tallest leader, Vajpayee. Everything worthwhile has
been done in the country only since 2014, when a New India was ushered in. Any
shortcomings and failures post that date which cannot be glossed over or made
invisible are attributed to the incompetence of his predecessors, especially to the first
Prime Minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru. And to centuries of Islamic rule.
The present BJP’s majoritarian rhetoric, all-pervasive Hindutva chauvinism and the
narrative that nothing worthwhile happened before 2014 finds resonance with and
endorsement from influential and vocal sections of the middle class—professionals,
media barons, news presenters, columnists, government officials, entrepreneurs and
corporate executives. They join in the Sangh’s and BJP’s agenda of denigrating leaders
like Gandhi and Nehru, celebrating Gandhi’s assassin Godse and contentious icons of
Hindutva like Savarkar, and corrupting and then appropriating the legacies of great
historical figures like Sardar Patel and Subhas Bose. These sections remain silent about
the failures of the Modi regime: relentless price rise; the falling rupee; rural distress;
alarming dip in industrial production; rising unemployment; COVID deaths; the brutal
effects on migrant labour of the sudden and unplanned national lockdown of 2020; the
hardships endured by common people on account of demonetisation; the failed promise
of doubling farm incomes; the lynchings; the vigilantes roaming the streets; atrocities
on women and Dalits; freeing of convicted rapists and murderers because they are
Hindu; slapping of sedition charges on citizens who question the government or criticise
the Prime Minister…It is a long, long list.
It isn’t as if everyone in this vocal section of opinion-makers and ‘influencers’ is
convinced that a flawless, superpower New India is in the making since 2014. A lot of
them don’t believe this narrative, but some of them go along with it because they want
to be on the side of the dominant political dispensation in the country. They change
direction with the changing winds. They would have been votaries of a just, secular and
inclusive idea of India until recently. Fortunately, these opportunists are a largely
passive lot, so the damage they can do to our national life is limited.
Then there are those worthies who do not believe the post-2014 narrative, who are
aware that the new BJP’s majoritarian creed is tearing the delicate social and cultural
fabric of the country apart, and yet they are cheerleaders of the present regime and
evangelists for its divisive creed. They do not endorse the Modi government’s policies
and sign up for the Hindutva project out of conviction, or even under pressure. They do
it in exchange for, or in anticipation of, benefits, concessions, access, privileges,
protection of their business interests and a place under the political sun. It is these
dangerously cynical sections of society that do serious damage to the founding ideals of
India, because they are skilled, resourceful, occupy strategic positions and can influence
the public narrative in the country. They have played a major role in emboldening the
BJP and the Sangh Parivar to openly pursue the project of making India a Hindu
Rashtra.
The most effective challenge to this project should have come from political parties
ideologically opposed to the BJP and its Parivar. But they have failed us—a long,
consistent failure of vision, strategy and energy. As we have noted, Hindu
majoritarianism has not become the dominant narrative overnight. It moved forward in
slow motion. It is mainly the result of decades of patient, hard work away from the
glare of publicity by a highly indoctrinated, organised and disciplined cadre of
volunteers of the RSS and its affiliates. For years, their work was carried out without
expectation of immediate political or electoral gains. It was consistent and usually low
key. The dedication and doggedness of the volunteers often earned the admiration of
the people they worked among, even if those people did not share the overall objective
of the RSS. This consistent, focused work and the presence of the cadre on the ground
primed common people, especially in smaller towns and in villages, to be receptive to
majoritarian messaging—assertion of Hindu identity and ‘othering’ of minorities.
In 2014, the BJP harvested that mobilisation for electoral gains as it had never been
able to do before, aided by a blundering UPA government. Now that success has been
achieved—with the champions of aggressive Hindutva in power—this disciplined work
on the ground has not stopped. It continues with greater discipline and resolve—and
vast resources—to summon to the surface base political spirits from the depths of a
stratified society like ours with many social and cultural fault lines.
Political forces which are ranged against the majoritarian project, however, have never
worked as hard, with as clear an ideology or even half as much conviction. For years
now, the left, the Congress and other parties have not had a cadre willing and able to
do patient, arduous and continuous ideological work at every level, from cities to
districts to panchayats. These parties sleep walk from election to election with no
committed, focused, ideological work in the interval. For them, political work is limited
to election campaigns. Not surprisingly, they have ended up ceding political space to
the majoritarian creed of New India.
Parties opposed to the BJP’s Hindutva project are yet to recognise that the challenge
today is much bigger than an electoral fight with the BJP. They need to put in hard,
long-term political work to systematically excise the ugly growth of communalism from
the country’s body politic. Without that kind of serious ideological work, electoral victory
against the BJP looks improbable. Even in the unlikely event of an electoral victory, it is
bound to be fleeting and uncertain as long as the communal and majoritarian narrative
does not lose its force and resonance in our society. This failure of the non-BJP political
class is the main reason why our country today is a crooked edifice.

BJP-RSS
Rabbit and Duck Illusion
(This is a slightly updated version of a ‘Midweek Matters’ episode of August 2021.)
The other day a senior volunteer of the country’s dominant Hindu ‘nationalist’ cultural
organisation called me up. He said, ‘Parakala, your critique of the Union government is
well argued. Either it should listen to you or put you behind bars.’ And he laughed,
trying to give me the impression that what he said was in jest. But which half of his
second sentence was said in jest? Was he serious about wanting the government to
listen to me, or about wanting it to put me in prison? For me, not knowing which half
was said in jest could be cause for some anxiety. Both would remain equal possibilities.
At some point, the first scenario would be more real; at another point, the second.
This duality reminded me of the famous Rabbit-Duck illusion. Although published in a
German humour magazine in October 1892, the picture eventually became an important
object for serious psychological experimentation and philosophical meditation on human
cognition. It is a picture that can look like a duck as well as a rabbit. For those who are
not familiar with the drawing, here it is:

Some of us may see a rabbit immediately. After some time, we are also able to see a
duck. Once we become aware of the duality, we tend to see a rabbit now, and now a
duck. The point is, once we see the duck, we cannot un-see it. In fact, the initial quick
vision of a rabbit may even completely recede, yielding the dominant cognitive space to
the duck. Or vice versa.
I want to elaborate on how the rabbit-duck illusion can help us to understand the
current political scenario in our country. For a large section of the Indian people, the
Hindu-Hindutva construct of Indian identity did not appear as an acceptable political
project for a long time in our modern history. They could not see the duck. They saw
the rabbit: a liberal and diverse idea of India. Gradually, with some work, the duck
made itself visible—that is, the exclusively Hindu-Hindutva idea of India began to
register itself on people’s consciousness.
With time, to some people the duck—the Hindu-Hindutva idea—began to appear as the
only vision. The rabbit has now receded from vision completely.
To many others, once they had glimpsed the duck—the Hindu-Hindutva idea—it
appeared both acceptable and unacceptable. Depending upon the situation, and how
often and how insistently they were shown the duck, they began to see the duck first
as an acceptable alternative to the rabbit, and then as the first choice. So to them now,
the duck may not be the only vision they see, but it is the vision they see first. The
rabbit hasn’t receded completely from their consciousness, but it is suppressed.
For a large proportion of both these sets of people, once they see Hindu-Hindutva as
the only or the first choice, they are not able to ‘un-see’ it—even if they see flaws in it.
And from then on, they are not able to think of the rabbit, the liberal, diverse idea of
India, as the primary choice, or a choice at all.
That is where the real strength of the Modi regime lies.
*
After the BJP’s failure to capture West Bengal in 2021, after it was outsmarted by Nitish
Kumar in August 2022 and then lost Himachal Pradesh later that year, some hope has
risen among the opposition parties that the ruling party at the centre is on the back
foot electorally. Drawing a blank in Kerala and the inability to propel its ally AIADMK to
power in Tamil Nadu were also seen as signs of the BJP’s waning influence. There were
also the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine mess, disastrous economic
performance, suspicions over defence purchases, the farmers’ agitation, and steep hike
in fuel prices, which were seen as reasons enough for significant erosion of the BJP’s
acceptability among the electorate. Even half of such errors and failures would have
been sufficient to undo any government under normal circumstances. More recently,
revelations about the Adani group, considered close to the ruling establishment, have
also given the opposition an issue to corner the Modi government.
Any other government and ruling party would have panicked by now. Remember UPA-
II? With just a few as yet unproven allegations of corruption and scams, and in the face
of an agitation launched by the likes of Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Baba Ramdev,
that government was rattled. The Union government as an entity sat with this agitating
group as its equal to negotiate. It blinked. Its loss of nerve showed. That weakening
preceded the rout of the UPA in the 2014 elections.
But the opposition today is in the grip of illusion if it thinks that the present government
is like any other previous government in our democracy.
To my mind the seasoned leaders of the parties opposed to the Modi-Shah BJP regime
and the RSS don’t understand the source of the ruling combine’s strength. They are
unable to grasp the changed ground reality. At the same time, they are also unable to
comprehend the enormity of the challenge they are confronted with. If their
assessment is that the RSS-backed Modi government’s mistakes have weakened it, they
could not be making a bigger error of judgement. What we have today in Delhi is not
any other kind of government or ruling party. And what we are in today are far from
normal circumstances. I will explain why I think so.
Both the duck and the rabbit have competed for cognitive space in the Indian political
imagination from the early days of our freedom struggle. One version or the other of
the Hindu-Hindutva notion of Indian identity found powerful patrons from the late 19th-
century onwards: Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, the Arya Samajis, the Prarthana
Samajis, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, Madan Mohan Malaviya, V.D. Savarkar,
the Hindu Mahasabha, the Ramarajya Parishad of Karapatri Maharaj, and a host of
others. However, that notion was overshadowed by Gandhiji’s version of Indian identity
—a plural, humane and accommodative national identity. And immediately after the
Mahatma’s passing, the Nehruvian secular-socialist narrative of India, which privileged
diversity and a scientific temper, gained prominence. It pushed the RSS-Hindu
Mahasabha-Jan Sangh construct of a Hindu-Hindutva India to the margins, both
electorally as well as intellectually.
This was a remarkable achievement. As I have discussed in the essay ‘The Rise and
Rise of the New BJP’, the ground was fertile for the Hindu-Hindutva majoritarian
ideology in the wake of Independence and Partition. Large scale transfer of populations
across the borders of India and Pakistan, communal riots in many provinces, and
mutual suspicion offered the right mix for it to thrive. The champions of the Hindu-
Hindutva construct like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee were all widely respected in their
own right. Hindutva could not have asked for a better line up of advocates. Yet,
notwithstanding a propitious social climate and capable champions, the Hindutva duck
could not claim enough cognitive space in the Indian political imagination. The non-
Hindutva secular construct, the rabbit for our purposes, was so overwhelming that even
the BJP at its inception declared its creed as Gandhian Socialism to claim its place in the
Indian political sun.
But dogged persistence, years of patient cultural messaging and quiet but consistent
close-to-the ground propaganda, together with hard, methodical and undramatic
political work gradually began to shine a light on the hitherto overshadowed Hindutva
part of the Indian political narrative. The duck started to become visible. The biggest
acknowledgement of its emergence from the cognitive shadows came when Rajiv
Gandhi chose to launch the 1989 Congress general election campaign from Ayodhya
with a promise of ushering in Rama Rajya. After that, it was difficult to un-see the
Hindu-Hindutva duck—to the decades-long work of the RRS and its larger family, and
the political campaigns of a tenacious BJP, was added the ‘soft-Hindutva’ of the
Congress itself, and the duck shone in brighter light. The secular rabbit began to recede
slowly but steadily from the field of vision. The Hindutva duck began to claim significant
space in the Indian public mind. The Hindutva idea of India became the exclusive,
‘muscular’ option for a lot of people, and a legitimate political option for many others.
Soon, almost every major political party was jostling to lay some claim on it. Until we
reached a stage where Rahul Gandhi brought himself to say that he is a ‘ janeu-dhari’
Brahmin. Mamata Banerjee found it necessary to mention her ‘ gotra’ during an election
rally, and did a much-publicised recitation of the Chandi Path during Puja celebrations in
Kolkata. The CPM softened its stance on the question of women’s entry into the
Sabarimalai shrine in Kerala. Arvind Kejriwal built a miniature replica of the Ayodhya
Ram Temple at a sports complex in Delhi and conducted a Diwali puja with his entire
cabinet, which was telecast live on the AAP’s social media handles. Each of these acts
was but an acknowledgement of the inexorable transformation of India’s political
narrative. Beating up Muslims in the streets and forcing them to say ‘Jai Shri Ram’,
demands to amend the Constitution and declare India a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, calls for the
genocide of Muslims—none of these are aberrations anymore.
If the political implications of this deep reconfiguration of ground reality are not
grasped, electoral opposition to the BJP will be of little effect.
The challenge before the non-BJP-RSS political forces is not merely electoral. It is
cultural, political, psychological, religious and social. The BJP’s electoral strength and
political power today are a culmination of decades of diligent work and, in recent years,
shock-and-awe propaganda to build, nurture and consolidate a religious-cultural-social-
identity narrative of Hindu-Hindutva. It is in this sharply defined identity—which sells
bullying majoritarianism as empowerment to the common Hindu—that the present BJP
regime finds legitimacy.
The other day I saw an outstandingly articulate opposition politician calling out the
government’s unwillingness to discuss bills in the Parliament and the Prime Minister’s
reluctance to face the House and answer questions. This politician told a television
channel that he wanted the young people of the country to know this. Little does he
realise that only calling out the BJP for the dismal state of the economy, violating the
norms of good governance, disrespecting parliamentary processes, undermining
institutional integrity, mowing down dissent and refusing to be accountable to the
people are unlikely to hurt the government’s and its leader’s popularity. The 2014
promises of governance, economic development, creation of jobs, ending corruption,
bringing back black money from Swiss banks, eradication of poverty have all been
artfully left behind. They were used back then only to fire the launch vehicle that
carried the Hindutva payload into the governance sphere. Delivery on those promises is
not the benchmark that the ruling dispensation allows itself to be made accountable for.
Those promises now lie in a rubble. Any fire directed only at those old targets will not
touch the government. It is not from performance that the present dispensation draws
and renews its political legitimacy and power. It is from an assertion of Hindu identity.
From the process of othering non-Hindu identities. From the diabolical strategy of
reducing democracy merely to the rule of the majority and delinking it from justice,
equality and the principle of shared living. A lot of Hindus—across class and caste—
have bought into this idea of democracy as the rule of a homogenous mob.
If they are serious about a liberal India that celebrates diversity, that rejects flattening
of religious, linguistic and cultural identities, political formations opposed to the BJP-RSS
will have to restore the idea of genuine democracy in the popular consciousness. They
will have to show why it is in the interest of every citizen, Hindu or non-Hindu, and why
majoritarianism will end up doing grievous harm to India and all Indians. They will have
to introspect if they are willing and able to put in the labour to delegitimise and exorcise
the Hindu-Hindutva identity project from our body politic. In other words, to restore the
pre-eminence of the secular, inclusive narrative, the rabbit, in the Indian political
imagination. It is not an easy task. But a political engagement that overlooks this
strategic need will be futile. A fortuitous electoral win, if any, without such full-scale
head-on, deep and long-term engagement will be incomplete, tenuous, and short-lived.
India is truly at a crossroads. It has to soon decide whether to allow the Hindu-
Hindutva narrative to overwhelm the country’s political discourse completely or to
aggressively and confidently reclaim the lost space for the idea of India as a liberal
democracy that celebrates its diversity.

RSS
Stronger Presence, Wronger Vision
(A version of this essay first appeared as an episode of ‘Midweek Matters’ in October
2021.)
The Vijaya Dasami address of the Sarsanghchalak, or chief, of the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has become an important annual event since 2014. His
address to the would-be citizens of the Hindu Rashtra that is in the making is supposed
to be an occasion to guide them on how to think about the world around them. And
provide them with an agenda for action on the Sangh’s foundation day. For people like
us who are beyond the pale, it offers a clue to the Sangh’s—and, therefore, the ruling
BJP’s—thinking: what is likely to inform its actions in the course of the next year, and
equally importantly, what it chooses to ignore from among the host of issues that
bedevil India as a society and as a Republic. This essay is about what I understood
from the Sarsanghchalak’s Vijaya Dasami address of 2021. For this I rely on the English
version of the text given by the RSS on its portal. I recommend that you read it. It’s
worth your time.
Although every aspect that the Sarsanghchalak touched upon in his address is of
significance, I will limit my observations mainly to two issues: New India’s population
policy and the economy. The address had separate sections devoted to the economy,
the fight against COVID and the ‘Bharatiya’ view of health. It also had a section on the
situation on our north-western border. Issues such as price rise, rise in unemployment,
rural distress, the seizure of drugs worth thousands of crores in the country, bodies of
COVID victims floating in the Ganga, Chinese incursions into our territory did not merit
the Sarsanghchalak’s attention.
In the section devoted to population policy, the Sarsanghchalak began his discourse
with these words: ‘While reimagining the country’s development, one predicament
comes to the fore which appears to concern many. The rapid growth of the country’s
population may give rise to many problems in the near future.’
It is clear to anyone who would care to look at multiple data, including the
government’s own, that the country’s population is not growing rapidly. The latest
National Family Health survey data shows us that we have now more or less reached a
total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1, which is the ideal, replacement-level fertility for a
country. The Government of India’s affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court in late
2020 also clearly stated that the country’s TFR is at replacement level. So, we must
wonder who exactly are the ‘many’ who appear to be concerned, for there is actually no
predicament. The Sarsangchalak’s real intention becomes clear when he quickly moves
to quote at length from the 2015 resolution of the Akhil Bharatiya Karyakarini Mandal
(the meeting of the office bearers of the RSS) held in Ranchi. The resolution noted:
‘Vast differences in growth rates of different religious groups, infiltration and conversion
resulting in religious imbalance of the population ratio, especially in border areas, may
emerge as a threat to the unity, integrity and cultural identity of the country.’
There are three elements in this resolution of the Karyakarini Mandal. One, vast
differences in the growth rates of different religious groups. Two, infiltration. Three,
conversion resulting in religious imbalance in the population ratio. The second element
—infiltration—is not a matter of population policy. It is a matter of securing our borders,
pure and simple. The first element is not a matter of debate or perception. We have
reliable data to look at. The third element, about conversion, is something that we need
to deal with from the perspective of religious freedom. Again, strictly, it is not a matter
of population policy.
Let us begin by examining the first, and then put the third in some perspective. We
must do this in the context of the Sangh’s own oft-repeated formulation about the
common ancestry of all Indians, regardless of faith. For this one need not go and dig up
old records from the Sangh’s archives. There are passages in the Sarsangchalak’s 2021
speech that will throw light on the matter.
The first element of the 2015 resolution, referred to in the Vijaya Dasami speech, is the
statement that there are vast differences in the growth rates of different religious
groups. We have data on TFR available since 1950. TFR is the average number of
children delivered by women in their reproductive age. Here are the figures: The TFR
was 5.9 in 1950, and stayed at 5.9 till 1956. It declined slightly—by 0.2—in 1957. It
stayed at 5.7 till 1965. Then the fall gathered momentum, slowly at first, picking up
pace as the years rolled on. In 1992 the TFR touched 3.9, in 2002 it had dropped to
2.9. Today it stands at 2.179. Just a fraction above the replacement level, which is 2.1.
Replacement level is simply defined as the stage where a woman gives birth to 2.1
children to replace the children’s two parents, that is, she and her husband. If the TFR
is less than 2, the population begins to contract, leading to a complex web of problems.
Unless the Sarsanghchalak is aiming at a TFR of less than 2.1, he has no cause for
worry.
Maybe he is concerned that the TFR of Hindus and Muslims is uneven. Maybe he has
sleepless nights thinking about the prospect of Muslims, by ‘breeding’ more,
outnumbering Hindus and thereby upsetting the cultural identity of the country. What
does the data tell us? According to the survey findings of the latest round of National
Family Health Survey—round five (NFHS-5), 2019-21—the TFRs of both Hindus and
Muslims are steadily declining in every state of the Union. The survey noted that the
TFR is higher among the poor and less educated, irrespective of religion. Not a single
state has shown either a stagnation of TFR or a reversal of its steady decline. The
survey also noted that replacement level of fertility, that is, 2.1, has been achieved in
19 states/Union territories.
Even in a state like Uttar Pradesh, the Sarsanghchalak has no cause for worry. Let’s see
what the data from the state tells us. Between 2001 and 2011, the Hindu TFR in UP
declined by 1.5, from 4.1 to 2.6. In the same period, the decline in the Muslim TFR was
higher—it declined by 1.9, from 4.8 to 2.9. This shows clearly that the gap between
Hindus and Muslims in TFR is rapidly closing. In 2001 it was 0.7 and by 2011 the gap
had come down to 0.3. It would have come down further between 2011 and 2021. The
latest NFHS was not carried out in UP due to the pandemic. When it is done, the
Sarsanghchalak will be benefited by looking at the findings.
But before that, he might take a look at the affidavit submitted by the Union
government to the Supreme Court towards the end of 2020. In response to a PIL
seeking implementation of a two-child norm to check the country’s population, the
Union government said that the country’s TFR is ‘witnessing a constant decline’. The
affidavit further said India’s TFR is already down ‘substantially’ to 2.2 as per the 2018
Sample Registration System. The Sarsanghchalak is perhaps unaware of the data sets
that are available in the public domain, or he has been misguided by his advisers, or,
what is still worse, he is deliberately creating fear among his gullible flock that the
Hindus are in danger.
Now let us address the Sarsanghchalak’s concerns about conversions. I will give you
two passages from his address. The first one is as follows:
‘It is our culture to integrate Bharat’s varied linguistic, religious and regional traditions
into a comprehensive unit and to promote mutual cooperation among all while
accepting and honouring all as equal with identical opportunities for growth.’
The second one is this:
‘Every person is free to choose a way of worship she/he deems suitable for oneself. It is
a historical fact that along with the foreign invaders many religious sects too came into
our country. However, as of today, the followers of those sects are not related to the
invaders of the past but to the Hindu ancestors who struggled to defend the country
against those invaders.’
The first passage tells us that the Sarsanghchalak believes in promoting cooperation
among all religious traditions and honouring them with equal and identical opportunities
of growth.
In the second passage, the Sarsanghchalak tells us that every person is free to choose
any religion for herself or himself. And that the followers of different religious faiths in
India are all ‘related to…Hindu ancestors’. So if they are all of the same ancestry but
chose and are continuing to choose to follow a different way of worship, why should it
bother the Sarsanghchalak and his flock? Why should it matter which religious group
outnumbers which?
He also spoke the following line just before the passages I quoted:
‘We must dissolve the egoistic pride we derive from our parochial, political, religious,
caste-based, linguistic and regional identities.’
What is one to make of this? Did he really mean what he said? Or are all these words
only uttered to sound lofty and cover up an actual sinister intention to achieve a
homogenous religious identity for the country? In any case, what do ways of worship
have to do with a nation’s population policy?
Let me now briefly deal with the section ‘Our Viewpoint on Economics’ in the
Sarsanghchalak’s speech. I must quote a part of it to give you a perfect example of
what woolly economic thought sounds like. Here it is:
‘Our economic paradigm emphasises control over consumption. The human being is a
mere trustee of the material resources, not the possessor. It is deeply rooted in our
belief system that human being is but a part of the creation and while it is his right to
reap the resources that nature offers for his sustenance, it is also his responsibility to
protect and preserve it. Such a view is not solitary or one-sided.’
Now this grand vision signifying nothing is promulgated with the belief that the whole
world is looking at Bharat that is India for a new economic thinking. Here are the exact
lines which contain that wisdom:
‘The whole world is now looking to Bharat, expecting and awaiting new parameters of
economic system and development. Our distinct economic vision is evolved out of age-
old national experiences of life and incorporating objects of economic pursuits thought
about globally, wherein the source of bliss is said to be located within human
consciousness. Material things are not the source of boundless bliss. Nor is bliss limited
to physical pleasure. One that conceives of the body, mind, intellect and the soul as a
whole; one that facilitates the process of realising that divine source of supreme
knowledge through the balanced development of individual, collective and nature
together; where the human spirit has experienced pinnacles of freedom by pursuing
progress and pleasure bound by the principle of dharma or righteousness, such
economic model has been considered ideal in our civilisation.’
The entire section on economy in the chief’s speech gives us such priceless insights. I
would urge you to read it in full when you get time. Now, it is for the high priests sitting
in the NITI Aayog to interpret this grand economic vision for our Finance Ministry and
the various economic ministries and for the entire Union government so that all of them
may draw up annual plans to realise it.
The RSS today is a mighty organisation. It will celebrate its centenary in a couple of
years, in 2025—and make a national event of the celebration. It has people from its
stable as Prime Minister, President, Vice President, the presiding officer of the Upper
House, the speaker of the Lower House, chief ministers, Union ministers, members of
Parliament, state-level ministers and legislators. Its hold on the country’s polity is firm
and just short of absolute. Its annual report—‘Prativedan’—for 2021 gives you an idea
of the rise in its activities and the massive expansion of its sphere of influence. From
being a cipher in our freedom struggle—standing aloof from it when not actually
collaborating with the British—and from the fringes of independent India’s political and
cultural landscape, the RSS is now a hegemonic presence. It is a position it has
acquired through many decades of hard work and dedication to encourage and harness
the darkest, crudest sensibilities in the nation’s cultural and political spheres. It has
been able to brand itself as a patriotic organisation despite its dubious record during the
freedom movement and its contempt for the Constitution, which is the very basis of the
Independent Indian nation. While the RSS grows stronger, its vision becomes meaner
and wronger! Perhaps it can never be otherwise.

BJP’S POPULATION POLITICS

(This piece, retained largely as it was when first written in July 2021, extends the
discussion of the Hindu Right’s population-explosion bogey in the preceding essay,
‘RSS: Stronger Presence, Wronger Vision’. Therefore, there is some repetition of facts
and data.)
There seems to be fresh thinking on the population question. Barely three months into
his second term, our Prime Minister expressed concern over the growth of the country’s
population. Addressing the Nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on 15 August
2019, the PM said, ‘We need to worry about population explosion.’ He said it was
impeding development.
In fact, this thinking had begun to take shape in Assam about two years earlier. Now it
is in full play in Uttar Pradesh, where the Yogi government’s Law Commission released
a draft population control bill in July 2021, inviting suggestions from the public. BJP
governments in Karnataka and Gujarat are reported to be actively studying the UP draft
Bill.
I tried to examine the data on India’s population growth, the trends of total fertility
rates over the years, and the projections about our population growth in the years to
come in an attempt to understand the nature of concerns expressed by our Prime
Minister and his lieutenants in various states. I would like to share with you what I
found.
It is not difficult to see that most families are limiting the number of children. We only
need to look around. Or look back to our own families or the families in our
neighbourhood. Let me tell you about my own family. My maternal grandmother had
thirteen deliveries. Eight of the babies survived. Some of her children are younger than
her own grandchildren. In other words, a couple of my maternal uncles are younger
than my elder sister and my first cousins. My mother had five deliveries. One was a
stillborn. Four of us survived. My wife had only one delivery. All my siblings had only
one delivery in their families. I can see that 90% of my friends and classmates have
two children. Across religions. I’m not able to recall anyone who has more than three.
When we reached our fertility age, we didn’t need someone to force us. It was
completely of our own volition.
But you could, justifiably, accuse me of thinking that the world comprises only my
family, friends and social class. So I took a kind of dipstick survey of lower income
groups. Over four of five days, during my morning and evening walks, I talked to some
people who haven’t had even a fraction of the opportunities and advantages that
people like me have had. Construction workers, domestic helps, women who work as
ayahs in a nearby school, a middle-aged man who was minding his herd of sheep. Of
the 15 people I spoke to who had children, 12 had only two. One had three, and two
had one child each. A few of them were middle-aged, and those younger told me they
did not intend to have any more children.
I have worked professionally as a data scientist. I know that what I gathered from my
chats with these people, the examples from my own family and the families of my
friends and peers, or what I can see around in my neighbourhood are hardly enough to
come to any meaningful conclusions about the trends in our population growth. But
these observations are important. They give us a hypothesis, if not a heuristic.
I was prepared for a complete refutation of this dipstick survey finding. For, unless the
larger trends are showing a totally different picture, why would the Prime Minister of
India speak of his worry about population ‘explosion’ on a momentous occasion like the
Independence Day speech?
I began by looking at the total fertility rate. I looked at data from 1950 to 2021. Total
fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of children delivered by women in their
reproductive age. The TFR was 5.9 from 1950 to 1956, declined slightly in 1957, then
stayed at 5.7 till 1965. The TFR declined consistently after that, dropping to 2.9 by
2002. In 2021 it came down to 2.179. This is just a tiny bit above replacement level,
which is 2.1. This is considered the ideal level. If the TFR is under 2, the population
begins to contract and that creates huge problems—reduction in workforce; fewer
younger, productive people who can earn to feed and help sustain the growing number
of elderly; economic slowdown; rising healthcare costs. Many countries in the world
dread that prospect. The case of Japan is often cited as an example of this
‘demographic debacle’.
Our country is already almost at the replacement level. Is our Prime Minister unaware
of this? Did he say what he said in his Independence Day address without looking at
the data? Or did he simply ignore the data? Both possibilities should worry us.
Our PM is not alone in his ‘concern’—a concern that can appear baffling to any informed
and reasonable person.
The first government-level concern about population growth was expressed in Assam.
The BJP government there came up with a Population and Women Empowerment Policy
in September 2017 to deal with the ‘problem’. But Assam had reached near
replacement level in 2011 itself. The TFR in Assam was 3.2 in 2001. It declined to 2.2 in
just a decade without any such a policy. The present chief minister of the state,
Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was finance minister in 2017, had moved a resolution in the
state assembly and said, ‘Census data shows that the Hindu population has declined
while the minority has witnessed a sharp increase. We have to protect indigenous
people’s rights. The change in Assam’s demographics is a matter of concern.’
So this was the concern: ‘a sharp increase’ in the ‘minority’ population. After he became
chief minister, Sarma asked Assam’s Muslims to adopt ‘decent’ family planning
measures. He predicted conflicts over living space if their population continued to
‘explode’. I saw a television interview in which he said that if this trend were to
continue, his ‘own house may be occupied one day’. On 28 June 2021 he said, ‘The
Assam government will take specific policy measures to slow down the growth of
minority population with an aim to eradicate poverty and illiteracy.’ The target, in other
words, is not the general population stabilisation of the state, but to reduce the growth
rate of the Muslim population.
But what did data from the then latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5),
released in December 2020, tell us about the scene in Assam? Did the figures give the
chief minister cause for worry? The Muslim community’s TFR in Assam according to
NFHS-5 is at 2.4. It is indeed higher compared to 1.6 for Hindus and 1.5 for Christians.
However, the significant point is that it is not increasing—neither ‘sharply’, as the chief
minister wants us to believe, nor even modestly. In fact, the fertility among Muslims
has witnessed a sharp decline. It dropped from 3.7 in 2005-06 to 2.4 in 2019-20. That’s
just 0.3 short of the replacement level!
But who wants data? It pays to feed people’s fears, insecurities and apprehensions. If
such fears don’t exist, they must be created. Indeed, the strategy appeared to have
paid off in the 2021 Assam elections, when the BJP returned to power with a higher
number of seats in the Assembly. And after the elections, the scare-mongering finance
minister was promoted to chief minister.
The message was not lost on other state governments run by the BJP. What the Assam
BJP began doing three years before elections in that state, UP begins six months ahead
of the state election. Yogi Adityanath’s UP government claims that the draft bill
announced on 9 July 2021 was in the making for about three years. The government
has put it on the state law commission’s portal. It has invited suggestions on its
proposals. In the draft, the bill’s intent is not stated. But the chief minister filled in the
blank for us. On World Population Day, 11 July, he announced the objectives of the new
population policy of the state for the decade 2021-30. The chief one was ‘reducing the
fertility rate and ensuring population balance among various communities’.
The bill proposes a carrot and stick policy. There are incentives for people who follow
the two-child policy. Government employees who follow the policy will get two
additional increments in their service time, 12 months leave with full salary and a 3%
increase in the employer’s contribution to the pension fund. If the husband gets a
vasectomy done after the couple have their first child, a one-time financial assistance of
Rs 80,000 will be given if it is a son and Rs 100,000 if it is a daughter. There are also
incentives in housing schemes. On the other hand, people with more than two children
will be ineligible for government jobs, government subsidies, panchayat and local body
elections. Ration will be limited to four persons per family unit.
There are also long sections detailing how the law will be applied to cases of polygamy,
polyandry, and in case of adoptions.
But does UP need such a policy? What is the TFR in the state? Unfortunately, the fifth
round of the National Family Health Survey was not carried out in UP due to COVID-19.
We have to rely on the NFHS-4. According to that survey, in 2016, the state had a TFR
of 3.1. The World Data Atlas estimates that it was 2.9 in 2018. More importantly, the
UP government’s own estimate is 2.7 for 2021. The new policy’s goal is to bring it down
to 2.1 by 2026. Yes, to reduce it by 0.6 in five years. If the real aim is to reduce the
TFR by 0.6 in five years, the government need not strain itself to formulate and
implement a policy of such elaborate incentives and disincentives. The trend in the
state as well as in the entire country is anyway a steady decline in the TFR. Therefore,
it looks more like an attempt to bring about a ‘balance between different communities’,
meaning religious groups. In the chief minister’s words, ‘ Yeh prayas bhi kiya jayega ki
vibhinn samudayon ke madhya jansankhya ka santulan bana rahe .’ (‘Effort will be made
to ensure a balance in population among various communities.’)
Now let’s see if there is indeed such a worrying imbalance in UP. Let’s examine the TFR
gap between Muslim and Hindu women and see if that warrants a policy like this.
Between 2001 and 2011, the Hindu TFR declined by 1.5, from 4.1 to 2.6. In the same
period, the Muslim TFR declined by 1.9, from 4.8 to 2.9. It shows clearly that the gap
between Hindus and Muslims in TFR is rapidly closing. In 2001 it was 0.7 and by 2011
the gap came down to 0.3. Without any incentives and disincentives. The situation
could have further improved between 2011 and now. The NFHS-5 will tell us when it
finally collects data from UP. In any case, the latest survey has shown that in every
state, the TFRs of both Hindus and Muslims are steadily declining. It also noted that
TFR is higher among the poor and less educated, irrespective of religion.
No state, without exception, has shown either a stagnation or a reversal of the declining
trend. Looking at the data from NFHS-4 and NFHS-5, we see that all but five states
have already achieved replacement level of fertility. And even in these five—Bihar,
Jharkhand, UP, Manipur and Meghalaya—the TFR has been dropping consistently.
But again, who wants data? Who cares for the trends? What is needed is fear,
apprehension, insecurity among communities, a feeling that ‘our’ poverty is because of
‘them’. ‘Our’ unemployment is because of ‘their’ numbers. Such policy consolidates ‘us’
against ‘them’. When it paid in Assam, it will pay in UP.
You must see some of the online reactions to UP’s draft Population Control Bill to
understand that it is striking a chord with the target group. Here is a selection of such
reactions: (1) ‘Inka voting adhikar band kar dijiye, nahi to ye log agle election mein
hara denge.’ (‘Cancel their right to vote, otherwise they will defeat [us] in the next
election.’) (2) ‘Yeh law poori india mein hona chahiye.’ (‘This law should be
implemented throughout India.’) (3) ‘Jo log keval ek agenda ke tahat jansankhya
badhane mein lage hue hain, unko koyi farak nahi padta ki sarkari naukri mile ya nahi…
un sabhi ko koyi chunav ladna nahi hai, ataha agar aap chahte hain ki hakikat mein
jansankhya niyantran ho to teesra bachcha paida hote hi paanch laakh aarthik dand
lage…. Unka lakshya saaf hai…Hum isee prakaar tax dete rahenge aur apne liye hi
khaayi khodte rahenge.’ (‘For people who are bent on increasing their population as
part of an agenda, it makes no difference whether or not they get a government job or
can fight an election; if you really want to control population, then when a third child is
born slap a fine of 5 lakh rupees…Their aim is clear…Meanwhile, we’ll go on paying
taxes like this and digging ourselves into a deep hole.’)
Now, do you see? The policy as propaganda is doing its job.
Soon after UP made its draft bill public, a BJP national general secretary who is also a
legislator in Karnataka urged his state to bring a similar population control policy. ‘With
limited natural resources available, it will be difficult to meet the needs of every citizen
if there is a population explosion,’ he said. The Karnataka law minister said, ‘We will
look into the bill proposed by Uttar Pradesh and a decision will be taken after due
deliberation.’
A Union minister of state for home affairs who hails from Bihar said that his state
should also consider a population control policy as the benefits of welfare measures
have not resulted in the desired development due to population explosion. Reacting to
the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s address to the Assembly in which he said that
the fertility rate in the state had declined tremendously, the BJP MLA from Bihar’s Bisfi
constituency said, ‘It declined among Hindus and not among Muslims.’ He added, ‘[A]
law should be brought to control the population in the country. The resources in the
country are very limited but some people want to increase the population and capture
and turn India into an Islamic country.’
The deputy chief minister of Gujarat, where the BJP has been in power for three
decades, said that the government might introduce a similar bill in the next session of
the Assembly. In the Centre, two BJP MPs served notice to move a private members bill
to control population in the country…
It would appear that a disaster is at our door.
But the formal position of the Government of India—like a polished decorative object
displayed in a showcase—remains a shining example of an enlightened and data-driven
policy. Contrary to what the leader of the same government says in his Independence
Day address to the nation.
In response to a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking implementation of a two-child norm
to check the country’s population, the Union government said in its affidavit that India’s
population policy is ‘unequivocally against coercion in family planning’, and that the
country’s TFR is ‘witnessing a constant decline’. The affidavit further said, ‘…
international experience shows that any coercion to have a certain number of children is
counter-productive and leads to demographic distortions’. India’s TFR, the government
noted, was already down ‘substantially’ to 2.2 as per the 2018 Sample Registration
System. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had thus rejected the need to have
a mandatory two-child norm or frame a specific law on limiting the size of families in
the country.
This was said to the Supreme Court by the Union government in an affidavit a year and
a half after the Prime Minister’s address to the Nation on Independence Day in 2019 in
which he expressed concern about our growing population. More than two years after
the Assam population policy. And eight months after that submission to the Supreme
Court by the central government, the Uttar Pradesh draft bill was announced.
So what is policy and what politics?
What the government tells the Supreme Court on population is policy. What the PM
says on Independence Day from the ramparts of the Red Fort is politics. What the BJP
does in the states it rules is exactly the same politics. The politics of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.
So that ‘us’ feel insecure. So that ‘us’ fear ‘them’. And then ‘us’ reject ‘them’. ‘Us’ don’t
want ‘them’. So ‘us’ vote for the BJP. For the religion of ‘us’. For the language of ‘us’.
For the identity of ‘only us’.

RELIGIOUS INDIA, POLITICAL INDIA AND THE PEW REPORT

(This is a lightly edited version of an essay written for a ‘Midweek Matters’ episode of
July 2021.)
In the final week of June 2021, the Pew Research Center published the findings of a
survey it had conducted between 17 November 2019 and 23 March 2020. It was titled
‘Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation’. Understandably, it attracted a lot of
attention. Newspapers and television channels gave quick summaries of the report.
Many senior journalists and analysts commented extensively on the findings.
In this essay I would like to dwell on a few important findings from it and explore what
could be their implications for our polity. I want to tease out the not so very obvious
political messages those findings contain. And examine what they tell us about the
foundations of the present Indian regime’s political power. I will also try to explore what
they might portend for the future of the socio-political fabric of our country.
Newspapers and television channels had screaming headlines that ran on the following
lines: ‘India is a tolerant, largely conservative country’; ‘Indians are tolerant, enjoy
religious freedom’; ‘Interfaith marriage: most Indians oppose it’; ‘75% Indian Muslims
prefer Shariat over Indian laws’; ‘From prayer to politics, South Indians do things
differently’; ‘Most Indians value religious diversity’; ‘Indians live together, separately’.
Many readers may remember reading these summaries. But it may be useful to read
the original, full report, which is available online on the Pew Research Center site.
Before I dwell on the findings that I think have significant political implications, I would
like to quickly talk about the reasons why I am not very comfortable with the study
from the methodological point of view.
I have been in the business of conducting surveys and data analytics for almost three
decades. I design questionnaires, decide sampling, oversee execution, verify the field
data, weed out suspicious entries that could vitiate the data, assign weightage, and
finally interpret the data.
Allow me to take the liberty of talking shop for a bit. The organisation I am with has
never ever gone wrong in its election forecasts. Not only about winning and losing, but
also the winning/losing margins. When we published our forecast in 2018 that the
Congress was all set to form the government in Madhya Pradesh by a thin margin, we
put our head above the parapet. We described the 2012 Gujarat election as a Modi vs
Modi fight and forecast Modi’s return with a reduced margin. Rarely do we publish our
findings and forecasts, as we conduct these studies for clients who usually insist on
keeping them under wraps. As the clients who commissioned us for the Madhya
Pradesh and Gujarat elections allowed us to reveal the overall forecast but not the
details and seat tallies, we published those reports and they can be accessed online for
those who may want to see them.
The reason I mention our survey experience is to assure you that I know a thing or two
about opinion polling. And I have a few things to say about the operational parts of the
Pew research on India’s Religion.
Their sample of 29,999, to my mind, is too small for any conclusions about a country
that has over 95 crore adults who qualify as respondents. When you disaggregate the
sample region- and state-wise, you will know what I mean. For example, there are two
Telegu-speaking states with a population of about 8.5 crore between them. That means
about 6.3 crore adults. The methodology section of the Pew report tells us that they
conducted 1,708 interviews in Telugu. Even if we assume that there were also some
people who were interviewed in English and Urdu in these states, that still doesn’t take
the numbers very high. English interviews for the entire country are only 246, and Urdu
ones are 347. That means the survey spoke to less than 1% of the Telegu people. If
you look up the sample for other languages, you will understand how narrow the
sample base is. One needs extraordinary boldness to announce definite findings on an
important topic like religion based on such a miserly sample size.
I have no difficulty with the way their sample is spread as described in the methodology
section. If it really was spread that way, it is a competently executed sample spread.
I will halt my quarrel with the methodology here.
Let us take the findings at face value, as almost all commentaries on it did. Let us
assume that the findings would have been the same if they contacted about 20 times
more people to collect opinion: That a large majority of the respondents across religious
divides say they are tolerant towards other faiths, express the belief that diversity is the
strength of India, and say they believe in God, pray regularly, visit temples, mosques,
churches and gurudwaras; that a significant number of minorities and Dalits say they
don’t face much discrimination.
These findings are of less importance to me. That’s because most respondents tend to
be politically—well, in this case, religiously—correct in such matters when it comes to
public disclosure. It’s difficult to imagine that a large number of people would tell a
pollster that they don’t believe in God, don’t tolerate people from other faiths, or that
true Indian-ness to them means anything other than respect for all religions. These are
very predictable and platitudinous responses from any section of the general public in
India.
To me the most noteworthy points that emerged from the survey and give us a clue to
the current political scenario are the following:
Nearly two-thirds of Hindus surveyed, that is, 64%, say it is very important to be Hindu
to be ‘truly’ Indian. And 59% Hindus link Indian identity with being able to speak Hindi.
These two dimensions of national identity—being able to speak Hindi and being Hindu—
are closely connected and are politically relevant.
Among Hindus who say it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian, 80% also say
that it is very important to speak Hindi to be truly Indian.
And what was the political preference of this segment in the 2019 general elections?
Well, 60% of Hindu voters who think it is very important to be Hindu and to speak Hindi
to be truly Indian had cast their vote for the BJP.
Even of those Hindu voters who feel less strongly about both the Hindu-Hindi aspect of
national identity, as many as a third had voted for the BJP.
Overall, among those who voted in the 2019 elections, one thing emerges clearly from
the survey findings: three out of every ten Hindus take all three positions—one, for
them it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian; two, speaking Hindi is also a
marker of being Indian; and three, they support and vote for the BJP.
These three positions are considerably more common among Hindus in the largely
Hindi-speaking northern and central regions of the country. Roughly 50% of all Hindu
voters in these regions fall in this category. In the South, they are just 5%.
This clearly explains the BJP’s near dominance in north and central India since 2014.
Nearly two-thirds, that is 65% of this segment—Hindus who say that being a Hindu and
being able to speak Hindi are very important to be truly Indian and who voted for the
BJP in 2019—also say that religious diversity benefits India. These respondents see no
contradiction in saying they value religious diversity on the one hand, and on the other
hand saying that Hindus are, indeed, more authentically Indian than those who follow
other religions. This is either devious public posturing or to them diversity means people
of other faiths having to accept a position one rung lower in the hierarchy of Indian-
ness.
The percentage of these religious-linguistic-political Hindus, that is, Hindu-Hindi-BJP
Hindus, may even be larger than the survey could capture. At any rate, one can safely
say that it is a large and also a growing segment.
There are good reasons to believe that pollsters anywhere in the world are unable to
accurately and fully grasp divisive, communal, racial, hateful and sexual sentiments.
Because respondents usually don’t reveal their opinions on these topics explicitly. Either
they don’t exactly know what their own feelings on these are—and possibly lie to
themselves about them—or they don’t like to reveal their feelings to the pollsters.
Some respondents can also be mischievous and deliberately mislead a pollster. The
reason why nearly every poll was wrong about the US elections that Trump won and
the Brexit vote in the UK is precisely this. However, on both these occasions the
researchers who examined Google trends found unmistakable clues to the final
outcomes. The kind of questions people asked, the text they typed in the search bar of
the search engine revealed their preferences much more authentically than their
answers to questions by pollsters. Telling a pollster is a public act. Asking Google or
saying something on social media under the cover of anonymity or on messaging
platforms among like-minded groups is private. This information is called ‘new data’, in
contradistinction to the old kind—that is, data collected by pollsters with a questionnaire
in hand, knocking at the door of every nth house.
Asked by pollsters about watching pornography, an overwhelmingly high percentage of
people answer in the negative. But the new data reveals that searches on the internet
for sites like Pornhub are staggeringly high. This is one extreme example that shows
how people tend to reveal in private what they refuse to admit in public. The difference
between what people say in public and what is revealed by the new data holds true
about racist sentiments among white voters in the United States. Searches for terms
like ‘nigger’ and others with racial overtones are disproportionately high compared to
anything that a pollster could capture in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential poll.
That to a large extent explained Trump’s victory.
A substantial number of Hindus, who say that being Hindu is a more authentic marker
of being Indian and also say that they consider diversity as the country’s strength,
needs to be seen, therefore, in a new light.
This brings us to another important point that has significant political import.
Politicians who want to tap into and draw out dark sentiments which swim below the
surface in the consciousness of people, especially in a multi-religious, multi-ethnic,
multi-cultural society—sentiments that they can then manipulate for electoral dividends
—don’t need to actually speak or write the exact words for this themselves. They only
need to hint. Dog whistling is far easier now than ever before. Social media platforms,
various messenger apps and other digital platforms are then used to rapidly and
effectively broadcast their message to the target groups. Meanwhile, the public
proclamations of the leaders on the old media can look clean and sound pious.
In 2014 the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate could say from public platforms that
Hindus and Muslims are not enemies of each other; that poverty is the common enemy
that they have to fight together. But his party’s actual divisive and hateful messaging
could be widely circulated on various digital platforms by a professional social-media
army.
The leader of the RSS can say that those who indulge in lynching are going against
Hindutva, and look good in public. But at the same time hate messaging on WhatsApp
can continue unabated and keep the anti-Muslim drumbeat loud and constant.
Messages these days can be both broadcast as well as narrowcast. Fundamentalist
Muslims can say that they revere the Ganga and consider religious tolerance as a
defining marker of their faith. But militant Islamic parties and radicalised Muslim groups
continue narrowcasting their hate campaign to inspire vulnerable Muslim youth to join
ISIS. Call for direct action need not be shouted into megaphones anymore. Broadcasts
are for appearances. Narrowcasts are for real. New media and digital technologies
make this possible.
Attempts to fuse Hindu-Hindi into an—in fact, the only—Indian political identity are not
new. From the days of the Hindu Mahasabha (founded in 1915), determined efforts
have been made by very eminent and highly competent people to bring about this
fusion. The ground was also fertile for such attempts to fructify in the years soon after
the horrors of Partition. But Hindutva groups and leaders of the time did not have the
platforms available today that would have enabled them to tap deep into the religious
insecurities, animosities and linguistic chauvinism of a vast number of people night and
day. Saturation propaganda wasn’t possible, indoctrination was slow and hard work.
And they did not have the services of an articulate, affluent, English-speaking, globe-
trotting, academically self-confident, culturally assertive crop of elite who make bigotry
fashionable. Domains that were once dominated by people who believed in a pluralist,
liberal ethos are now taken over by this new elite. And sections of the old elite, too,
have struck a Faustian deal with the new order. The present regime has this enviable
human resource at its beck and call to legitimise its militant, exclusionary narrative.
Narrowcasting of messages has been crucial to the creation, spread and consolidation
of the Hindu-Hindi-BJP constituency in north and central India. That the BJP could
choose to not field a single Muslim candidate both for the Vidhan Sabha and the Lok
Sabha in Uttar Pradesh—a state where Muslims are almost 20% of the population—and
still sweep the polls shows the strength of the Hindu-Hindi-BJP tripod in supporting the
present regime’s political power structure.
Narrowcasting may help to spread the BJP-RSS agenda to the South as well, if the
‘Hindi’ element is dropped from the triad, downplayed or replaced with a suitable local
sentiment. There is no shortage of resources or people who can be recruited for the
purpose. The BJP has built a huge, dedicated, well-trained and highly effective digital
army across the country that only needs a simple dog whistle to spring into action.
In this context, if there is one important subtext in the Pew Research Center’s findings,
it is this: India is staring at the prospect of the fusion of Hindu religion, Hindi language
and BJP politics becoming the paramount and perhaps irreversible marker of national
identity. Unless those of us in civil society and the political sphere who understand how
disastrous this can be for the country—and, importantly, the fence-sitters and
indifferent ones among us, too—make serious efforts to counter this narrative
energetically and consistently.
I am reminded of a parable: A grandfather tells his granddaughter that in every one of
us there are two wolves, and they are locked in a fight. The granddaughter interrupts
and asks him: Which one wins? The grandfather replies: The one you feed.
It’s time to ask ourselves: which one do we want to feed?

ABNORMALISE AND EVENTIFY

(This piece was first written in September 2021. It is reproduced here with minor edits
but no updates because nothing at all has changed—the personality cult, the narcissistic
publicity overdrive has remained, and will remain, a constant of the Modi government.)
On 26 September 2021, the Press Trust of India (PTI) revealed to us our Prime
Minister’s three secrets to fix his sleep cycle and fight off jet lag. A Delhi-based national
English daily ran a full story about this, quoting sources that the news agency had
spoken to. Several other newspapers and magazines also carried versions of the story,
as did television channels and social media sites. In scores of well-choreographed
photographs, the tireless PM was seen inspecting Delhi’s Central Vista redevelopment
within just a few hours of landing in India after a three-day hectic visit to the United
States and 20 back-to-back meetings. He worked even during his flight, his own Twitter
posts told us.
Earlier, on the 17th of the month, the PM’s 71st birthday was marked in a grand
manner, and we are now almost two weeks into the three-week Seva aur Samarpan
Abhiyaan—Service and Dedication Campaign—to celebrate our Prime Minister’s ‘twenty
years in the service of the nation’.
In this essay I want to reflect on the obsessive attempts by the ruling party, the
government and, particularly, the PM himself to shun the ordinary and normal, and
embrace the hyperbolic and the abnormal. I want to examine their collective need for
eventification of everything done by the PM and his government—and what this need
both reveals as well as hides about him, the party he dominates, and the government
he leads.
On his return from the US, the Prime Minister was received at the airport by the BJP’s
national President, J.P. Nadda, and some state-level karyakartas or party functionaries.
Artists attired in different state costumes performed for the karyakartas who had
assembled to welcome the man who had once, briefly, described himself as the ‘Prime
Servant’ of the nation. The PM stood on a platform outside the airport and allowed
himself to be treated to an 11-minute eulogising oration by Shri Nadda. The crowd was
noticeably unresponsive. But the cameras and hand-picked press people were not. Nor,
of course, were the BJP’s PR and media cells. BJP’s press release said the party
president thanked the PM ‘for his magnificent address to the UN General Assembly,
where he guided the world…’ For Shri Nadda, it was ‘the address of a true statesman in
its true sense’. He said our PM ‘made the world aware about the issues of global
concern’. Most importantly, Shri Nadda said that the PM’s address to the UN General
Assembly has ‘established India’s ideological supremacy at a very important global
platform’. What is otherwise a normal international event—a routine visit by a head of
State to the UN and an address to its General Assembly—has to be talked up, dressed
up, abnormalised. So, naturally, the fact that our PM was one of 83 heads of State who
were at the UN and also addressed the General Assembly, is not mentioned.
This isn’t all. The return of 157 antique pieces by the United States—many of them
smuggled out by Indians themselves—was described by the BJP as ‘India’s lost glory…
being restored under Modi government’.
*
Before this, the Union government and BJP state governments had gone on an
overdrive to mark the PM’s 71st birthday. They joined forces to give Shri Narendra Modi
a special gift. COVID-19 vaccinations hit a record number on that day: 2.5 crore people
were given jabs on that single day. BJP ministers, leaders, functionaries and supporters
hailed this as a demonstration of Modi’s, therefore the Modi government’s, and
therefore India’s, prowess. That the numbers were far below the daily average during
the days leading up to the special day—and returned to those low levels only a couple
of days after—did not matter. All that mattered was ‘eventifying’ that particular day.
What does it say about this government and its vaccination programme—if such vast
numbers could be achieved in a day, why wasn’t this happening every day? Had the
already slow vaccination drive been slowed down further for some days to achieve this
record? What hubris and callousness does this speak of?
The Union health minister described the record in a tweet as ‘India’s gift to Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’. The Prime Minister himself got into the act of abnormalising
what should have been normal; of selling failure as a spectacular success. He described
the single-day 2.5 crore jabs as ‘a feat not even the most powerful nations have been
able to achieve’. Why did we have to wait till one man’s birthday—for, in the end, he is
just one citizen—to achieve this feat? Please take a look at the graph on the opposite
page. This was how the government’s own CoWIN portal showed the rise and fall in
vaccination numbers between end August and end September.
Do take a close look at the huge, sudden surge on that one day and the fall in numbers
just after. Why was such a high number not a consistent trend? The PM would not have
had an answer had anyone asked. But then, our PM does not believe in taking
questions or providing answers.
*
And now the BJP is in the midst of the three-week long Seva aur Samarpan Abhiyan to
mark Shri Modi’s 20 years in public life. The campaign began on his birthday and will
continue till 7 October. During this extended version of a birthday bash, the BJP is
arranging to have 5 crore people send post cards to the Prime Minister, thanking him
for all the good things he has done.
There is more:
Under its existing five-kilo free-ration scheme, the government will distribute 14 crore
ration bags with Modi’s picture and ‘Thank you Modiji’ printed on them.
People who have received vaccines and rations will be encouraged to record videos
thanking the PM and share the recordings widely.
Mementos Modi has received as head of State will be auctioned. People will be
mobilised to bid for them.

Seminars on Modi’s life and work will be held throughout the country and ‘prominent
personalities’ will be invited to speak in them.
Noted writers will contribute columns to newspapers and magazines in all the Indian
languages on Shri Modi’s life and achievements.
As the Prime Minister has turned 71, party karyakartas will choose 71 river-spots across
the country to clean.
Blood donations camps, health check-ups and food distribution to the elderly will also
be organised over a week, which has been labelled Seva Saptah, or Week of Service.
These are just some of the activities that are already eventifying the birthday
celebrations of the PM.
Newspapers reported one of the general secretaries of the party as having said in the
meeting which decided the Seva aur Samarpan programme, that ration bags with the
PM’s picture should reach ‘every home’ and ‘particularly women’, so that they would see
him as the ‘Messiah of the Poor’. The leader of the four-member team appointed to
oversee this activity is reported to have said: ‘Our focus will be to showcase the way
Modiji has worked to uplift the deprived sections of society. We will focus on his values
of service and sacrifice.’
Narendra Modi’s public life is also projected as exceptional. The initiatives he took,
according to the BJP president, Shri Nadda, ‘were considered impossible and none of
his predecessors dared to’ take such initiative. In Shri Nadda’s reckoning, because of
Modi, ‘all political parties have been forced to change track and work for the
development of the country and welfare of the people’. So we are to imagine that all
parties, every political leader, in all the years since Independence, were doing otherwise
before Shri Modi arrived on the scene.
Naddaji went further. He said, ‘Modiji has led the life of a saint…His only goal and aim is
to make India a Vishwaguru’. The Union education minister—who quit during the last
Cabinet reshuffle—also described Modi as a sage and a guru. So we have the
extraordinary combination of a saint, a guru, a statesman and a Messiah in Shri Modi.
A senior BJP leader also said that Modi is the first Prime Minister who also has been a
chief minister. In his enthusiasm to abnormalise and glorify the Supreme Leader, the
minister forgot not one, not two, but five PMs who had this achievement to their credit
—if it is an achievement at all.
Even Bal Narendra was abnormalised. But this wasn’t new. Seventeen stories of
Narendra Modi as a child were collected in a comic-book back in 2014. The stories tell
us of his courage, compassion, empathy, bravery, adventure and heroism. Among other
things, he helps his father run a tea stall, fights off crocodiles, saves a drowning boy,
reads Swami Vivekananda, feeds soldiers going to fight the Chinese Army in 1962,
writes a play against untouchability. Shri Modi was not an ordinary human even as a
child. The epilogue of the comic says, ‘These 17 real-life stories give you a glimpse of
the formative years of Narendra Modi—a leader the entire nation is looking up to with
great hope.’ The stories in the comic were passed for publication by Modi’s office when
he was chief minister of Gujarat. According to the Indian Express, the publisher of the
Bal Narendra comic-book had said, ‘…the authenticity seal has come from the office of
the chief minister’.
Is it any surprise, then, that the largest cricket stadium in the country, and one of the
largest in the world, is named after our present PM, the self-proclaimed Prime Servant?
That’s probably a first for an Indian leader, a facility being named after a leader in his
or her lifetime. And please remember whose name was erased and substituted with
Narendra Modi’s—until February 2021, the stadium was known as the Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium.
Shri Modi has many talents, about all of which we are repeatedly made aware. He can
guide children how to study and write exams. He wrote a book on the subject. He
advises adults on how to lead stress-free lives. He practices yoga, inspires others to
practice it through an app, and leads mass yoga events on International Yoga Day. He
loves wild life. His daily routine is extraordinary, he handles tough issues first thing in
the morning. He works 18 hours a day. He spends festivals with Army jawans on the
front. He’s tireless, and knows the secrets to beat jet lag. He can handle 20 back-to-
back meetings in 65 hours. And these are not ordinary meetings—bilateral meetings
with the US President and Vice President and the Japanese PM; a multilateral meeting
with Quad leaders; meetings with business tycoons; Cabinet and party meetings in
person or remotely, for nothing will move without his wise consent.
To top it all, Modi also delivers an address to the UN General Assembly to guide the
world, make it aware of its important problems, and establish the ideological supremacy
of India.
He is also an international mover and shaker unlike any other. He is supposed to be on
first name terms with leaders of the big powers. Barack, Donald, Emmanuel, Ben. And
he hugs them too. Xi Jinping is a special friend who came to India twice to meet him
and they sat together on a swing. His international feats go back some decades—he did
his bit when he was a young man in Gujarat for the liberation of Bangladesh.
The BJP’s portal has a section on Modi Merchandise. The offerings include mugs, COVID
masks, wrist bands, pens, notebooks, badges, stickers, magnets, caps, T-shirts. All
‘NaMo’ branded. Face masks to make you look like Modi are also on sale.
It is not just Shri Modi’s party. The government too works overtime to create and
spread the Modi cult. His picture greets us at every petrol pump. Citizens find him on
their COVID vaccination certificates. The Union government’s portals, advertisements by
Union government ministries and departments and those of BJP-ruled states feature his
pictures. There are even specially created apps!
Calculated fostering of a personality cult is not unfamiliar to history. Many leaders have
done that. Latin America has seen Juan Peron and Getulio Vargas. Europe has seen
Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. Africa has seen Nkrumah, Mugabe. Asia has seen
Sukarno, Mao. I have mentioned only a few examples from a long list. But two features
are common to all of them. They were all dictatorial, authoritarian, or totalitarian. And
none of them has enjoyed respect in his or her political afterlife, that is, in their life
after losing near-absolute power. History has not spared them, whatever the headlines
and sycophants around them said during their years in office. At home, a much less
aggressive but ill-disguised attempt by Indira Gandhi earned her an indelible blot on her
otherwise illustrious career.
The cult of personality is the enterprise of autocrats and demagogues. Such an
enterprise—such a leader, party, government—is inappropriate for a country like India,
if she is ‘the Mother of All Democracies’. The finest leaders of the world have had no
need for larger-than-life projection, for ‘abnormalising’ their personalities and
‘eventifying’ policy initiatives. They have achieved spectacular results in governance and
confidently led their nations for many terms in office without needing a circus of gala
events and 24x7 PR campaigns. Angela Merkel of Germany is a living example. Self-
confident, accomplished leaders and their parties do not show themselves as
extraordinary and superhuman. They don’t game performance indices, spin narratives,
and eventify routine governance. Only those who feel pitifully inadequate, lack self-
confidence and have failures to hide, do that.

‘EGOCRACY’, DIGITAL FREEDOM AND DATA PRIVACY

(Written in June 2021, this essay has been updated with a short postscript.)
Our Prime Minister addressed an extended session of the G7 summit as a lead speaker
this month [June 2021]. And then India signed the ‘G7 and Guest Countries: 2021 Open
Societies Statement’. The statement announced its signatories’ commitment to ‘Human
rights, both online and offline’, ‘Freedom of expression, both online and offline’. The
statement went on to say that there are threats to freedom and democracy, among
other things, from rising authoritarianism, manipulation of information, including
disinformation, online harms and cyber-attacks and politically motivated internet
shutdowns. Modi’s team, representing India, signed this statement.
When the magicians let you see something, be sure that it is an illusion and the real
action is happening elsewhere, away from the brightly lit stage. We are allowed to see
the fight between the government and what it calls ‘significant digital intermediaries’
like Facebook and Twitter. But the actual fight is not there. It is not government versus
the significant intermediaries, the tech platforms. It is, in fact, a fight between us—the
people—and the government. And between us and the tech platforms. The fight is for
our freedom of expression. Equally, the fight is for privacy and for possession of
personal data.
Notwithstanding what it said on the floodlit international stage, the Narendra Modi
government at home is tightening its grip on the digital arena, which is now almost the
only avenue for free expression of views. For dissent. At the same time, the
government has no interest in fighting the giant tech companies for our data privacy
and security.
There are three issues. One, the government’s attempts to throttle our freedom of
expression on the digital platforms; two, the tech companies’ unbridled collection of our
personal data without our consent; and third, the safety of our data in the hands of
both government and tech companies. Let us examine them one by one.
In 2020, there were 155 internet shutdowns in the world, of these, 109 were in India.
That is, we accounted for about 70% of internet shutdowns globally! We topped the list
of 29 countries that resorted to internet shutdowns. We led the internet shutdowns in
2019, too, with 121 disruptions. Access Now, a global body which tracks internet
shutdowns, said: ‘India had instituted what had become a perpetual, punitive shutdown
in Jammu & Kashmir, beginning in August 2019. Residents in [J&K] had previously
experienced frequent periodic shutdowns, and in 2020 they were deprived of reliable,
secure, open, and accessible internet on an ongoing basis.’
By March 2021 [when this essay was written] we had already crossed 11 shutdowns. It
was a steady rise since 2014. That year, there were 6 internet shutdowns. In 2015 this
was done 14 times. In 2016, 31 times. In 2017, 79 times. In 2018, 134 times. In 2019,
121 times.
While the data privacy bill is left to languish, the Modi government has brought in the
Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules,
2021. These Rules give enormous and unchecked powers to the government over
digital platforms. The government says that it is only ‘objectionable’ posts that will be
taken down within 36 hours. Posts that are related to the sovereignty and integrity of
India, the security of the State, public order, relations with foreign states, sexual
violence and sexually explicit content. But who decides which posts come under these
categories—especially public order, security of the state and the ‘integrity of India’? The
government has authorised itself to decide.
An inter-ministerial committee is the final forum for appeal. It has representatives from
the ministries of Women and Child Welfare, Law and Justice, Home Affairs, Defence,
Electronics and Information Technology, and the Indian Computer Emergency Response
Team as members. A clear case of the government being prosecutor and judge. The
Information Technology Rules, 2021 give the Information and Broadcasting Secretary
extraordinary powers. The Secretary can take down items from portals without notice.
No explanation needed. The digital platforms need to comply with either a court order
or, and this is important, the ‘certified authority’. An intermediary platform like Twitter
and Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram, will have to keep someone’s posts for 180
days even after they exit the platform. The originator of the message would have to be
tracked by the intermediary platform.
The government told the Parliament in March 2021 that 9,849 URLs/accounts/web
pages were blocked in 2020, up from 3,603 in 2019. It blocked 2,799 in 2018 and 1,385
in 2017. Of these, 1,717 orders were sent to Facebook and 2,731 to Twitter. All this
was done without the 2021 Rules. Imagine what the government could now do with
these new Rules under its belt.
In April 2021, after the Rules came into force, the government issued emergency
blocking orders to take down over 100 ‘inflammatory’ posts and accounts across
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that were related to COVID-19.
Let us now examine what our government is doing for our data privacy. The
government-appointed committee headed by Justice B.N. Srikrishna submitted its report
in July 2018. The report also contained a draft bill titled Personal Data Protection Bill.
The government promised to introduce the bill in Parliament in June 2019. But the
Union cabinet approved the bill with modifications only on 4 December 2019. The bill
was then introduced in Parliament on 11 December, and immediately referred to a
standing committee. The committee was to study the bill and submit its report on the
first day of the last week of the budget session of 2020. The deadline was extended up
to the second week of the monsoon session. Then further extended up to the second
week of the winter session. It was again extended up to the second part of the budget
session of 2021. As of June 2021, the bill is still languishing in the standing committee.
Clearly, the government is in no hurry to bring in a legislation for the protection of our
personal data.
We must also note—and this is important—that the government’s draft bill differs
significantly from the draft submitted by the Srikrishna Committee. The cause for
concern is Section 35. It gives exemptions to the government for data collection, stating
that exemptions can be made to collection rules and reporting requirements whenever
the government feels that it is ‘necessary or expedient’ in the ‘interests of sovereignty
and integrity of India, national security, friendly relations with foreign states, and public
order’. Even the language was changed: for example, ‘necessary and proportionate’ in
the committee’s draft was replaced with ‘necessary and expedient’ in the government’s
draft. An alarmed Justice Srikrishna said that the government’s draft was ‘dangerous’
and could turn India into an ‘Orwellian State’. This concern is very real and is shared by
many advocacy groups, activists and other informed citizens.
Let us now turn our attention to the tech companies. Today, tech companies know
more about us than we know about ourselves. This is no exaggeration. Advanced
algorithms are deployed to track every activity of ours, and sophisticated psychological
tools are deployed to analyse our personality. The tech giants know our likes and
dislikes; our preferences in shopping, eating, politics; our sexual orientation; our
payment history, mail history, call history, internet search history; our physical
movement, the state of our health, our sleep patterns, our physical and emotional
vulnerabilities…In short, anything and everything that we do in our lives is accessed by
these companies. Browsers, apps, social media platforms, instant messaging services,
and even the devices that we use, like phones and tablets, continuously track us and
supply enormous amounts of data to their servers.
This is the data exhaust that tech companies harvest to make what are called
‘prediction products’. They’re sold to advertisers, for them to better target their ads at
us. Unwittingly, we give consent to be tracked—when we download an app and click
the ‘I Agree’ button as soon as the notification asking us to agree to its terms and
conditions appears. I doubt any one of us reads the long document before consenting.
We allow cookies on the web pages. These companies ask our permission, saying they
use the data to improve their service to us and enhance our experience. But that is
trickery.
There is—or seems to be—a conflict between these tech companies and governments,
mainly for possession of data about people and groups. Governments want to possess
this data. They want the tech companies to share the data with them, or at least give
them access. The tech companies of course want to guard this data because it is their
true wealth; they use the data to maximise their revenues, earn profits. Governments
want the data for surveillance. Both want the data to manipulate and control
populations and make themselves more powerful. When tech companies refuse to share
the data with governments, they do so only because there’s some danger of losing their
customers’ confidence. But they dress up this purely commercial, self-serving policy as
something noble: they are defending our freedom of expression. Their refusal is for our
sake, they say. Governments also claim to be working in our interest when they compel
these companies to share data by invoking national security, public order, national
pride, accountability of the tech giants to laws of the land. Tech companies want us to
believe that they fight governments on our behalf. Governments tell us that they fight
tech behemoths to protect our lives and liberty. In fact, the motives of both are
suspect.
The present Indian government makes a great deal of noise about taking on evil tech
giants for the sake of national security and the rights of its citizens. If that were indeed
so, the government would have focused its attention on the Data Protection legislation
that has been consigned to the cold storage of the Parliamentary standing committee.
It would have considered the many concerns and anxieties expressed by internet
activists. Data hawking indulged in by the tech platforms, de-anonymisation and
monetisation of personal data, the use of apps to eavesdrop on our offline
conversations, picking up key words from private mails in order to push targeted ads
into our mailbox—all these should have been the concerns of our government. The
search engine giants should have been the wild horses that the government attempted
to rein in. Not its own citizens.
The government should have put in place much stronger cyber security practices. And
prevented hacking of databases that compromise our personal details. Instead, the
predominant aim of the government seems to be to push the platforms to give it our
data and take down our content. It not only wants the posts that are critical of it and
inconvenient to it to be taken down, but also for the originator to be identified. Why
would this latter requirement be necessary unless the government wants to intimidate,
persecute and punish its critics and ideological and political opponents? One can,
therefore, understand why the government summarily notified the Internet Rules 2021
without any discussion in parliament or in civil society.
There is a thriving data black market on the web. Our data that is in possession of tech
companies, service providers and the government agencies is continuously hacked and
sold for a price. I will give you a few examples of how unsafe our data is in the hands
of government agencies as well as business entities.
In 2021, 45 lakh Air India customer data records were compromised. In 2019 details of
about 13 lakh credit card holders from various Indian banks were put up for sale on the
dark web by the cybercrime site Joker’s Stash. In January 2019 it was reported that the
State Bank of India’s Mumbai server was exposed, and details of several thousands of
customers were leaked. In 2018, India was rocked by a reported massive breach of
Aadhar data. Although the UIDAI denied it, unidentified sellers on WhatsApp provided
unrestricted access to the database of the records for a price. In September 2019, the
Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant’s IT network was hacked. The authorities claimed that
the malware did not get access to the critical plant systems, but it had penetrated the
administrative network. In a major data breach, about 18 crore records of Domino’s
India customers were compromised in May 2021. In 2020 over 1 crore user accounts of
the Bangalore-based online learning platform Unacademy were compromised and the
data was up for sale on the dark web. In all these instances, email IDs, names,
addresses and phone numbers were revealed. This is just a small list of examples.
Let me now bring all the three elements together. Our data is less than safe both with
the government agencies and private entities. The government is not interested in
protecting our data privacy. And it is increasingly tightening its hold over the internet
and digital platforms, constricting our freedom of expression. It does not hesitate to
slap sedition charges on people critical not only of its policies but also its ideology—for,
the government and its Supreme Leader are now equated with the Nation.
The major print and visual media are more or less under the government’s control. Very
few publications ask the government any questions these days. They are either
cautious, risk-averse or have yielded to pressure. Some have evidently struck a Faustian
bargain. Some have become evangelists of the ruling dispensation. They aid the
government in its attempts to numb the nation to the rending of our social fabric, the
economic destruction, the COVID mayhem, the vaccine mess.
It’s the digital platforms that are holding out and pushing back against this onslaught by
the government. Critical voices from ordinary people like you and me are still possible
here. Using these platforms is not capital intensive and is therefore not dependent on
government patronage or vulnerable to its pressures. Nor are these platforms held
hostage to the advertising clout of big business. Digital platforms are the main hope for
freedom of expression. It is, therefore, the digital media that haunts the present
government. That’s the reason why the battleground now is the digital sphere. Today
we see increasing pressure from the government on the big tech platforms to take
down content that is uncomfortable to it. But mind you, the government’s onslaught
won’t stop with this. Soon, the pressure on the tech companies will be to share our
data. So that the government agencies can use it for surveillance, for psychological
manipulation, for political messaging. And for political behaviour modification. The signs
are unmistakable. It looks like our leadership is inspired by Xi Jinping’s template.
*
Postscript, February 2022
In January 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) announced a draft
amendment to the Information Technology Rules, 2021. According to the draft, any
news deemed ‘fake’ by the fact checking unit of the Government of India’s Press
Information Bureau (PIB) will have to be taken down by all platforms, including social
media platforms. The draft goes on to say that any content deemed misleading by ‘any
other agency authorised by the government for fact-checking’ or ‘in respect of any
business of the Centre’, will also have to be taken down.
To understand what this means, read this statement by the Editors Guild of India
expressing concern over the proposed changes:
‘At the outset, determination of fake news cannot be in the sole hands of the
government and will result in the censorship of the press. Already multiple laws exist to
deal with content that is found to be factually incorrect. This new procedure basically
serves to make it easier to muzzle the free press, and will give sweeping powers to the
PIB, or “any other agency authorised by the Central Government for fact checking”, to
force online intermediaries to take down content that the government may find
problematic…
‘Further, the words “in respect of any business of the Central Government” seem to
give the government a carte blanche to determine what is fake or not with respect to its
own work. This will stifle legitimate criticism of the government and will have an
adverse impact on the ability of the press to hold governments to account, which is a
vital role it plays in a democracy.’
Welcome to New India. Please leave all ideas of democratic citizenship and fundamental
rights at the door before you enter.

SUBHAS BOSE AND NEW INDIA’S LEGACY RAIDERS

(This is a lightly edited version of an article written in February 2022.)
New India’s leaders are successful legacy raiders. Their appropriation of Sardar Patel is
now nearly complete. Their latest raid is to appropriate the legacy of Subhas Chandra
Bose. That they’re able to do this easily, without facing any forceful challenge, is
unfortunate. What is troubling, however, is the way these legacy raids are presented to
the country. They are packaged as efforts to right the wrongs done deliberately to
historical personalities by those who presided over ‘Old India’, before Narendra Modi
and his team made it ‘New’.
One cannot have any quarrel with attempts to right any historical wrongs. But the
unspoken yet loudly suggestive subtext in the narrative of the present legacy raids is
that it was a petty-minded Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who made
sure that some personalities were not given their due honour. This narrative makes
clear that these attempts are in fact part of an ugly project to undermine or even erase
the place of Nehru as one of the foremost leaders of our freedom movement and the
primary architect of modern India. In this essay I want to share my reflections on these
dark attempts by New India’s leadership.
On 23 January 2022, on the occasion to mark the 125th birth anniversary of Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pressed a button to bring alive
Netaji’s hologram statue near India Gate in Delhi. Soon, a statue made of granite will
be installed there. What the PM spoke on the occasion gives us an idea of New India’s
legacy raid project packaged as righting the wrongs of Old India. I give an English
translation of lines from the PM’s speech delivered in Hindi:
‘It was unfortunate that after Independence, efforts were made to erase the
contribution of several great personalities, along with the culture and heritage of the
country. The freedom struggle involved the tapasya [sacrifice] of lakhs of people but
there was an attempt to limit their history. But today, after decades of Independence,
the country is correcting those mistakes.’
The Home Minister, Amit Shah, echoed the allegation. He said, and again I give an
English translation of his words:
‘There has been an attempt to push into oblivion many such personalities who struggled
for India’s freedom.’
There are two attempts here by the PM and his trusted deputy. First, to fire the gun at
Nehru off the shoulders of Netaji Bose. And second, to appropriate Bose and showcase
him as BJP’s icon. Both attempts show the New India leadership’s ignorance—or
deliberate corruption—of the history of our freedom struggle and Bose’s ideological
proclivities. There is also an insidious attempt to show the uneasy, and at times
antagonistic, relationship between Bose and Mahatma Gandhi as a clash between Bose
and Nehru. The fact is, there were hardly any differences between Bose and Nehru
except on the question of Gandhiji’s leadership of our freedom movement. However
serious the differences might have been between Gandhiji and Bose on the one hand
and Nehru and Bose on the other, neither Gandhiji nor Nehru had ever belittled the
contribution of Bose to the freedom movement. They never questioned Bose’s patriotic
credentials. It was Bose, at times, who was rash with his words in venting his anger
against them both. I will give you a few examples of exchanges between the three
leaders, and examples from their writings, to illustrate my point.
Bose was never comfortable with Gandhiji and remained unimpressed by the Mahatma’s
methods. Bose left his first ever meeting with Gandhiji in July 1921 in Bombay,
immediately on his return to India from England, with the impression that Gandhiji was
either confused or deliberately evasive in answering his questions. The first major clash
between the two took place in 1929 at the Lahore Congress. Bose moved a resolution,
which proposed the formation of a parallel government in the country by the Congress.
Gandhiji opposed it, saying, ‘If you think that you can have a parallel government today
then, let me tell you that the Congress flag does not at present fly even in one
thousand villages.’ He dismissed Bose’s proposal as ‘imprudent and unwise’.
The two men were united in their fierce opposition to British rule, but had very different
views about how it could be overthrown. Here is an example of Bose’s attitude towards
Gandhiji. He issued a public statement along with Sardar Patel that Gandhi as a political
leader had failed and the time had come for radical reorganisation of the Congress on
new principles and methods for which a new leader was essential. In his book, The
Indian Struggle, published in 1935, Bose attacked Gandhiji’s philosophy of non-violence.
He wrote:
‘As for the doctrine of non-violence, it had evoked some response in India, but in any
other country such as Italy, Germany or Russia, it would have led Gandhi to the Cross
or to the mental hospital…Gandhi has ceased to be a dynamic force; maybe it [is] the
effect of age.’
However, while Bose disagreed vehemently with the Mahatma’s methods for waging a
freedom struggle, he had immense respect for Gandhiji. He wrote to his German friends
in February 1934:
‘There is nobody I admire and respect more [than Gandhi.] He has changed the face of
India…Politically, however, I cannot agree with him anymore. He has certain ways of
dealing with the British…which endanger our political progress. We need firmer
methods to force the British from the Indian scene and to gain independence for our
country.’
As for Gandhiji himself, he was never bitter about Bose’s criticism. He was not even
averse to Bose leading the Congress as its President. In November 1937, the Mahatma
wrote: ‘I have observed that Subhas is not at all dependable. However, there is nobody
but he who can be the President.’ And so Bose presided over the Haripura Congress in
February 1938.
The clash between Gandhiji and Bose came to a head when the latter sought a re-
election at the Tripuri Congress the following year. We don’t need to go into the details
here. The point is that the differences between Bose and Gandhiji were deep and
ideological in nature, with Bose time and again questioning the Mahatma’s leadership.
Now let us turn to the Nehru-Bose equation. Before we proceed, I’d like to remind you
that Nehru published his autobiography around the same time as Bose brought out his
The Indian Struggle. In his autobiography, Nehru devotes two chapters and about 40
pages to openly discussing his differences with Gandhiji’s outlook and programme. But
unlike Bose, Nehru never questioned Gandhiji’s leadership nor did he consider the
Mahatma as out of step with Indian reality. Nehru and Bose saw each other as
comrades in arms, as like-minded. Nehru collaborated with Bose in everything except in
Bose’s defiance of Gandhiji’s leadership. They both collaborated in challenging the
Congress leadership on the question of Dominion Status versus Total Independence for
India. In 1936, when Nehru presided over the Congress session in Lucknow, Bose urged
Nehru to team up with him to rid the Congress of Gandhiites and thus radicalise the
party. In March 1936 Bose wrote to Nehru: ‘Among the front-rank leaders of today, you
are the one to whom we can look up for leading the Congress in a progressive
direction.’
But Nehru did not oblige.
After Nehru became President at the Lucknow Congress, he faced the same opposition
that Bose would face a couple of years later. At the Lucknow session, all members of
the Congress Working Committee, except three socialists, resigned saying that the
socialist agenda of class struggle proposed by Nehru would jeopardise the larger
political aim of the country’s independence. The crisis was averted when Gandhiji
intervened and pulled up Nehru for his overenthusiasm. And Nehru’s willingness to
defer to the Mahatma eased the situation.
Bose, however, unlike Nehru, saw himself as a challenger to Gandhiji. The relations
between the two younger men, however, remained close despite their differing views
about Gandhiji.
When Bose was arrested, Nehru gave a call to observe 10 May 1936 as ‘Subhas Day’ in
protest against the arrest. This was despite Nehru’s serious misgivings about Bose’s
perception of the international situation. While in Europe, Bose had met with Mussolini,
Goering and other Fascist leaders. In newspaper articles and in The Indian Struggle
Bose forecast that the next phase in world history would produce a synthesis between
Communism and Fascism. He also hoped that such a synthesis could be produced in
India. His position was, ‘Whatever strengthens Britain is bad for us; whatever weakens
her is welcome.’ Nehru’s politics and idealism would not allow him to countenance such
a position.
There is another important example of Nehru standing by Bose. Once, Vallabhbhai Patel
was at loggerheads with Bose on the question of the custody of funds left by his
brother Vithalbhai Patel. Nehru refused to endorse the statement issued against Bose
by Vallabhbhai Patel and others when Bose sought a re-election at the Tripuri Congress.
However, Bose felt that Nehru had let him down by not unequivocally supporting his
leftist cause. He wrote, ‘Nobody has done more harm to me personally and our cause
than Pandit Nehru.’ Bose accused Nehru of vacillation, of riding on two horses, and
joining the Rightist camp, which owed allegiance to Gandhiji. And this, really, was the
essence of the differences between Bose and Nehru: the question of Gandhiji’s
leadership. While Nehru deferred to the Mahatma, Bose wanted to dislodge him.
From 1928 until Bose’s death, it was not Nehru who stood in opposition to Bose. The
polar opposites of Bose were Gandhiji and Vallabhbhai Patel. But New India and its
legacy-raiding leadership want to erase this fact from out national consciousness.
They also want us to forget that ideologically Bose saw himself as a left-wing radical,
and had much in common with Nehru. His views on the Hindu-Muslim question were
completely opposite to the ones held by the leadership of New India. Let me quote
what Bose said in his The Indian Struggle:
‘With the advent of the Mohammedans, a new synthesis was gradually worked out.
Though they did not accept the religion of the Hindus, they made India their home and
shared in the common social life of the people—their joys and their sorrows. Through
mutual co-operation, a new art and a new culture was evolved[.]’
Had he been alive, Bose would have refused to be a part of the BJP’s pantheon.
In fact, Patel, who detested the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, cannot be part of this
cynical pantheon, either. And if Savarkar and Godse are the BJP’s and its Sangh
Parivar’s icons, Gandhiji certainly cannot be.
But the New India that was announced in 2014 has concocted a folklore, which recruits
Gandhiji, Patel and now Bose, along with Savarkar and Godse, to serve its crafty
narrative of patriotism. It is not troubled by the conflicting ideas of India these men
held, as long as it can fire the gun off their shoulders at Nehru, who they believe was
the person who denied them a Hindu Rashtra and who may do so again through his
continuing legacy.
This New India regime wants to acquire the credentials of patriotism despite staying
away from our freedom movement and even collaborating with the British against it.
Untouched by the legacy of the freedom struggle, it is a complete stranger to the
secular, liberal and pluralist idea of India that took shape during that glorious struggle.
New India’s pathetic legacy raiding is an inescapable consequence of its ideological
parents’ absence from the long, hard fight which gave us our freedom, our democracy,
our dignity.

AMRITMAHOTSAV, IMF AND REIMAGINING THE INDIAN STATE

(This is an updated version of an essay first written in April 2021.)
In the mornings I usually sit in the portico to have my coffee watching flowers, birds,
butterflies, bees and squirrels. Milk and newspaper vendors come along and quickly
disappear.
One such morning, in the second week of April 2021, I was looking at the reports the
papers carried on the World Economic Outlook that the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) had released the previous day. As I was reading the reports, and trying to
understand the IMF’s forecasts about the world economy and its estimates on the
damage COVID-19 had inflicted on the world, I noticed the young boy who comes to
collect the domestic trash.
His father pedals the rickshaw trolley and stays put in it while the boy walks in through
the gate and takes the trash bag. That morning, I look at the young boy closely. His
clothes are worn, he’s unwashed. I smile at him. He doesn’t smile back. Instead, he
looks at me in bewilderment. Suspicion, perhaps. Maybe he’s not used to people smiling
at him. I can only guess what’s going through his mind. He may be angry. Does he
resent me, this man sitting in clean clothes outside his comfortable home, having his
morning coffee? Does he wonder why his father can’t sit like I do, at leisure, sipping
coffee? And why he himself can’t be at home, in clean clothes, like so many other
children he sees every morning while on his rounds.
I wonder what he thinks of the privilege he stares at, the inequality he comes across
every day—indeed, I should imagine, every waking hour—the dirty work he does and
the clean tasks that the others do, the education that is faintly familiar to him, yet not
really accessible. I wonder what he thinks of governments that permit this to happen.
Does he expect, or even believe, that governments should work for people like him?
While he collected the trash, I tried speaking to him. I asked him his name. He told me
it was Ramesh. Then I asked him his age. He said he was 15. I doubted that. He looked
much younger. Maybe he had been tutored to lie about his age, so that his parents,
made desperate by poverty, would not be accused of child labour. I continued the
conversation and asked him for how long he had been helping his father. He told me
he’d been doing it for four or five years. So even if not now, he had been a child worker
until last year. What about school? He told me that even before the lockdown, he
wasn’t regular at school.
In April 2021, the schools are still closed. There are only online classes. But he doesn’t
have a smartphone or a computer. There’s no internet access for him. He can’t hope to
have any. He’s on the wrong side of the digital divide. Our Prime Minister’s Pariksha Pe
Charcha—Talking of Examinations—is irrelevant to him. He’s yet to be touched by the
‘Vikas’—development—that the Prime Minister and his government talk about so glibly.
The COVID ‘stimulus package’ has not yet trickled down to Ramesh’s dwelling and is
unlikely to make a difference to his life in any case, for it isn’t meant for the
dispossessed like him.
He’s beyond the pale of the discourse of our political economy. The heated debates on
our television screens, the bitter electoral battles that are now being fought or were
fought earlier do not make sense to him. Because he doesn’t figure in them.
He’s not relevant to the State and to the system.
But the question is: Shouldn’t he be?
He is not a lone statistic the government has inadvertently missed. About 75 million
people in our country had joined him in poverty in the 12 months leading up to April
2021. His country is home to nearly one third of the world’s poor—a pandemic-ravaged
world that is staring at the first ever rise in poverty since 1990. Already, 270 million
people are facing starvation globally. I wonder if Ramesh knows that while our
country’s economy may at some point get back onto the path of growth, yet the uneven
growth will more likely than not leave him and his family worse off than they are now.
Or perhaps he does know this in his bones. Perhaps he knows that the policy makers’
admiring and wilfully blinkered eyes are fixed on the increasing net worth of India’s
‘wealth creators’—the owners of big business who do indeed create wealth, but only for
themselves and their allies in the corridors of power. And looking at them, even the rest
of us convince ourselves that the country is on the path of recovery.
I’m looking only at Ramesh’s economic and educational handicap. I’ve not even begun
to go into his social disadvantage. And the consequential negative impact on his
nutrition, physical health and mental well-being, which could diminish his ability to
access even the meagre instruments of livelihood and subsistence that the Indian State
bothers to provide its common citizens.
What if Ramesh was one of the 39% of our children who suffer from childhood
malnutrition? Can we be certain that he was not? Can we be certain that he has
recovered from the debilitating effects of that early deprivation? Or that he ever will?
I’m sure Ramesh would like to be part of our grandiose ‘five-trillion-dollar economy’
project. He would also like to contribute a few dollars to it. But can he? Does the
existing architecture of opportunity give him a chance?
This child, Ramesh, his family, his neighbours, his street, the neighbourhood he lives in,
the village his family was forced to migrate from, should occupy the mind of our State
and our imperious rulers. They should not be reduced to dry data and statistics in
spreadsheets. Looking at faces and not at data makes a lot of difference. It humanises
our political, social and economic reality. That’s the reason why the talisman that
Gandhiji gave us is so powerful: Whenever you are faced with a difficult decision,
imagine the poorest of the poor and see if your decision brings a smile to their faces.
What can bring a smile to the face of young Ramesh—who could be Ahmad, Peter,
Gurmeet, Lalitha, Fatima, Mary. Who can ensure that he can go to school, not have to
collect garbage, wear clean clothes, eat well, be healthy, be treated and looked after
when ill, protected, not discriminated against, live peacefully in a harmonious and just
society, have the freedom to pursue his chosen spiritual and religious path, or the
freedom to reject all that is prescribed and chart his own course?
The future is going to be tough for Ramesh and people like him, families like his, and
for communities that he comes from.
The IMF report of April 2021 said that the world economy, which contracted by 3.3% in
2020, would reel under the impact of COVID-19 for at least another year, possibly
longer. Only after 2023 would even a large economy like India be within a striking
distance of pre-pandemic levels of growth. This, too, is an optimistic estimate,
according to many. And of course, we must remember that even before the pandemic
we were clearly in a slowdown—an emerging crisis that the Modi regime tried hard to
deny rather than make any plans to avert.
The IMF report also said that recovery would be uneven and stumbling, especially in
countries in the developing world. The Asian economy, excluding China, would be
smaller by about 8%, Latin America’s by 6%. We must keep in mind that developing
countries account for 58% of the global economy. In countries that are unable or
unwilling to invest substantially in social spending, the scars on the lives of the poor
and underprivileged would be deep. Poverty would worsen and become more
widespread. Women, young people and unskilled workers would be at a severe
disadvantage. As the crisis accelerated, many more jobs would be lost, not to be
recovered for years.
The global health crisis created by COVID-19 finally made the Fund-Bank neoliberal
priesthood realise that treasury spending and investment on welfare, healthcare,
housing, education, employment, skilling, income support and social security need to be
prioritised by governments. Sufficient resources need to be devoted towards reversing
learning losses among children who lost instructional time during the pandemic.
The 20121 IMF report was a clear indication that the 1980s’ Washington consensus had
finally broken down. It began creaking in the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis.
It took COVID-19 to unravel it completely. The IMF could not but admit that it was
large stimulus packages that made developed economies avoid disaster. Its report said,
‘Thanks to unprecedented policy response, the COVID-19 recession is likely to leave
smaller scars than the 2008 global financial crisis.’
It is clear that in India, as across the globe, the role of the State needs to be
reimagined now. Welfare and empowerment can’t be just slogans anymore.
Programmes can’t be limited to conducting dazzling events to grab media headlines,
which the Modi government spends so much time and such massive resources doing.
What this government needs to do instead, is a forensic examination of its much
publicised programmes: Stand Up India, Skill India, Startup India, Make in India. They
held out immense promise to many. Why are they not delivering? Why are they not on
course? Why are they not changing lives? Actually—where are these massively hyped
schemes? Where are their beneficiaries?
In 2021, we were readying to celebrate the ‘Amritmahotsav’ of our Independence.
Although the Modi government never let a day pass without broadcasting the
propaganda that nothing good at all had happened in India before 2014, there was
tremendous noise about the 75-year-old free India, a ‘Vishwaguru’—leader of the world.
But while it is true that we have come a long way, the fact remains that there are
many, many unfinished tasks. Many new challenges.
There are explanations, justifications for not being able to do what we had set out to
do. But excuses don’t wash. One thing is clear: We have underperformed. We have not
realised our full potential. East Asia and Southeast Asia, which were no better than us
even in the 1970s, overtook us and improved their people’s living conditions very
impressively. I wonder if our young fellow citizen Ramesh knows that our country once
resounded with the slogan ‘Garibi Hatao’. But it remained a slogan. Just a slogan that
rained votes. Exactly like Prime Minister Modi’s glib slogans. As Indira, so Narendra.
Amritmahotsav provided an occasion, an opportunity, for introspection, scrutiny,
examination, evaluation. One wanted to be optimistic, hopeful, although there was the
fear—for good reason, given the government’s record—that the grand Amritmahotsav
would end up becoming just a year-long series of dazzling events. That the government
would squander a huge opportunity.
Looking back in early 2023, as this book goes to press, that is indeed what has
happened.
The Modi regime failed to rise above petty narratives of identity and look at the faces of
Ramesh, Ahmed, Peter, Gurmeet, Lalitha, Fatima, Mary. It failed—it made no effort—to
bring smiles to their faces.

INDIA’S UNEMPLOYED, UNEMPLOYABLE AND UNSKILLED

(This is a lightly edited version of an essay written for a ‘Midweek Matters’ episode of
August 2021.)
In this essay, I want to examine our population policy, and the BJP’s population politics,
from the point of view of our demographic dividend. I want to look at the employment
and unemployment figures that came out a few days ago [ in August 2021], and also
place the demographic dividend in the context of our population’s skills and the labour
participation rate.
The demographic dividend that India enjoys today is incomparable. About 54% of our
population is below the age of 25. The Union government’s policy documents and
pronouncements from 2014-15 reveal that it is aware of the promise this holds for the
country. The policy documents also tell us that the government is aware of the
challenges the nation faces in harnessing this dividend. However, that awareness
doesn’t seem to prevent the ruling party from pursuing a politics that can potentially
obliterate this demographic dividend. This politics also runs counter to the government’s
declared policy of bridging the skill gap.
On the one hand, the government in its public documents, affidavits submitted to the
Supreme Court and policy pronouncements says that India doesn’t need a policy to limit
the family size. It told the apex court that it is against any coercive policy in this regard,
because the country’s total fertility rate (TFR) is on the verge of ‘replacement rate’—
below which the population begins to contract, and that can have very damaging
consequences for a country*. And yet, on the other hand, the Prime Minister says from
the ramparts of the Red Fort that population growth is a cause for concern. The state
governments run by the BJP begin to implement population stabilisation policies, which
aren’t needed at all. Their real aim is to signal to the Hindu majority that the high birth
rate of the Muslim minority is a danger and this danger will be dealt with. This high
Muslim fertility rate is of course a myth. Data that I have examined elsewhere in this
book (in ‘RSS: Stronger Presence, Wronger Vision’ and ‘BJP’s Population Politics’) clearly
shows that the ruling party’s claims about higher growth rate of the Muslim populations
in Assam and Uttar Pradesh are false. Year after year, data has shown that throughout
the country, fertility rates across regions and religious communities are rapidly
declining. But the BJP bashes on regardless.
Documents and policy pronouncements of the Union government that proudly
announce our massive demographic dividend also talk about the challenges this can
pose if skills are not imparted to our large young population. But, since 2015, the
government has hardly shown any seriousness about skill development. The ‘Skill India’
slogan has remained just that—a slogan, without any meaningful action.
Let us begin by looking at the structure of India’s demography. More than 62% of our
population is in the 15 to 59 years age group. That is, in the working age group. About
54% are below 25 years of age. The population pyramid is expected to bulge at the 15-
59 years slab in the coming decade. This puts us in a unique position in the world.
There’s another important thing that is in our favour. In the next 15 to 20 years, the
labour force in the industrialised world is expected to decline by about 4%. But in India,
it will increase phenomenally, by about 32%. Not only do we enjoy a huge demographic
dividend today, it is also going to last until at least 2040, maybe even 2050.
Our median age will be 31 years in 2025 and 38 years in 2050. The US median age will
be 40 and 42 for those years. China’s will be 39 and 44 years; Japan’s 50 and 53;
Europe’s 45 and 49. This means India is going to remain much younger even up to
2050 compared to the other major economies in the world. We have the potential to
outperform every economy and emerge as the biggest wealth producer in the world.
However, 32% increase in the country’s labour force means nothing if the labour force
is not skilled. They will not only be unemployed, but unemployable. At best, they will be
underemployed or deployed in the least productive way. The world of work has been
rapidly changing for the last decade or so. The COVID-19 pandemic has further
accelerated the pace of change. This rapidly changing world of work demands
completely different skill sets. The days of joining a job after college and retiring after
30 odd years without any learning are over. In the emerging scenario of work, on an
average a person would be required to undergo training and upgrade her or his skills at
least seven times before she or he retires. Just as there’s Research & Development for
industry, there’s now Learning & Development for individuals.
Although we enjoy a massive demographic advantage compared to the rest of the
world, our labour force hopelessly lags behind in skills and training. Only about 5% of
our labour force has undergone any formal skill training. Compare that with 68% in the
UK, 75% in Germany, 52% in the US, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea. A 32%
increase in our work force will yield little advantage to us if our skilling remains at this
abysmally low level as it is today.
Now, let us look at the government’s own estimates and projections of the skill gap. By
2022, there’s going to be a shortage of about 150 million skilled workers in the
infrastructure sector; 35 million in the auto and auto components sector; 33 million in
building and construction; 26 million in clothing and textiles. There’ll be a shortage of
about 18 million skilled workers in transport and logistics. Another 17 million in
organised retail. Nearly 14 million in real estate services. Around 13 million in
healthcare, about 10 million in food processing and 6 million in education. If the skill
gap continues, people will be available but they will be unskilled and unsuitable, and
therefore, unemployable. If employed, they will be less productive and bring down our
global competitiveness in those sectors.
In October 2018, the Government of India in partnership with the World Economic
Forum and Infosys constituted a Closing the Skills Gap Task Force. It was to involve 50
to 100 corporates and other groups in civil society to develop an action plan to address
the current and emerging skills gap. The progress achieved by this Task Force is as yet
unknown. The annual reports of the Ministry of Skill Development do not talk about this
Task Force. Its announcement was perhaps just for a couple of days’ headlines.
The National Policy on Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015 declared as its
objective that 25% of the country’s schools would integrate skilling with formal
education by 2020. But the government hardly has any progress to report on this score.
After the declaration of intent made a splash in the media, its utility seems to have
been over. The policy document was buried no sooner than the gala event announcing
it had concluded. The latest [2021] Annual Report of the Ministry of Skill Development
and Entrepreneurship doesn’t even see it fit to mention this policy.
The India Skills Report 2021 came up with disappointing findings. Among the formally
educated, employability is less than 50% across the board. About 47% of B Tech, 47%
of MBA, 43% of BA, 40% of B Com and 30% of BSc graduates had employable skills.
Only 22% of MCA degree holders could be considered employable. About 75% of ITI
pass outs did not possess employable skills. Unemployability among our B Pharma
graduates was at 67%. Adding other sectors too, it was estimated that 65% to 75% of
the 15 million young people who enter the labour market every year are unemployable.
The Report also found that 53% of Indian businesses could not recruit in 2019 owing to
the applicants’ lack of skills. This was even before the pandemic. The International
Labour Organization (ILO) forecasts that India is staring at a prospect of a massive skill
gap by 2030. Accenture, a global IT services and consulting company, estimates that
we are likely to lose about US $ 1.6 trillion in terms of GDP because of the skill gap.
Now let us turn our attention to the current employment and unemployment scenario.
CMIE’s 2021 data shows that by end of July 2021 the unemployment rate had risen to
6.95% with 8.3% unemployment in urban areas and 6.4% in rural India. [ In March
2023, as this book goes to press, the overall unemployment rate is 7.6%—8.3% in
urban areas and 7.3% in rural areas.] The Labour Force Participation Rate showed a
rise of just 0.6%—39.5 to 40.1—from June to July. A large portion of even that tiny
increase was actually in unskilled, low paying, low productivity jobs in the agriculture
sector. And July is the season when agriculture temporarily absorbs a huge labour
force. Once the season is over, however, these jobs disappear.
Another distressing signal comes from the core sectors. There is a significant shedding
of jobs in manufacturing and mining. Both are sectors where some skills are required.
Service sector absorption remains unchanged. A bulk of the labour force is either
unemployed, or employed in less productive tasks, or is unemployable due to absence
of skills.
It is bad enough that the Government of India ignores its own data on population and
its policy declarations about the skill gap. What is worse is that the ruling party at the
centre and in various states where it is in power is busy creating a phobia among the
Hindu majority about minority ‘population explosion’. Instead of celebrating and
harnessing the demographic dividend across religions and regions, its agenda seems to
be to create and deepen communal divides and unleash base political animal spirits in
order to win elections. This short-sighted agenda will only spawn armies of vigilantes
roaming the streets that are ready to respond to dog whistles of obscurantist religious
and political persuasions, which thrive on hate and violence.
If this continues—and there is every sign that it will—we can forget about becoming a
five-trillion-dollar economy.
With less than 5% of our labour force trained, a grand intent like Atmanirbharta—self-
reliance—is a pipe dream. Without a sincere attempt to skill our younger population,
slogans like Make in India, Stand Up India, Startup India, Digital India sound farcical.
They were useful for headline management for a while. But the cruel insincerity behind
those catch phrases has now begun to show. Governance is increasingly showing us
that election promises were merely a comical snake oil sales pitch. Why would a
government sincerely committed to Shrestha Bharat—a ‘Most Superior India’—need a
communal divide to win a popular mandate? Why would it need to subvert institutions?
Why would it need an insidious software to snoop on its citizens, opposition political
leaders, journalists, its own ministers and ruling party leaders?
A Shrestha Bharat and an Atmanirbhar Bharat is a skilled Bharat, with skilled people of
all religions, regions and languages. Not just people of a preferred religion, of regions
where a Hindutva electorate can be built, of a favoured and dominant language. A
government genuinely invested in the Indian Republic would have woken up at least
now to the urgent need to skill India. It would have started working sincerely for a
common, bright future for all the daughters and sons of India.

*See ‘BJP’s Population Politics’.

BONSAI UNIVERSITIES AND RIPPED JEANS

(This essay is based on a ‘Midweek Matters’ episode of March 2021.)
Two distinguished academics quit Ashoka University, the celebrated, oversold private
university. The wives of some of India’s corporate giants are invited to join Benares
Hindu University as visiting Professors. The Uttarakhand chief minister makes an ugly
remark about a woman wearing ripped jeans. A climate of uncertainty, unease, even
fear continues in Jamia Milia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University ever since police
and vigilante mobs attacked students there in December 2019 and January 2020. Many
of the students—all unarmed—who were arrested under draconian anti-terror laws are
still in jail.
These incidents are not as unrelated as they may seem. Connect the dots, and you see
a clearer picture of New India.
Developments at Ashoka University are disconcerting. A very respectable voice in our
nation’s public discourse, Prof Pratap Bhanu Mehta, quit the University in March 2021.
Arvind Subramanian, an eminent economist and former Chief Economic Adviser to the
Government of India, also decided to quit to show solidarity, and to protest the manner
in which Prof Mehta was eased out. Students and faculty of the university are angry.
Prof Mehta’s letter of resignation is telling. Its grimness is enhanced by its subtlety and
understatement. He wrote, ‘After a meeting with the Founders [of Ashoka University] it
has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the university may be
considered a political liability. My public writing in support of a politics that tries to
honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived
to carry risks for the university.’
I’m a regular reader of Prof Mehta’s columns and essays. I haven’t always agreed with
his point of view. But I respect him as an important voice in our nation’s public
discourse. Prof Mehta’s choice of words in his letter of resignation is not casual. Let’s
therefore deconstruct this part of his letter.
Let’s imagine the scene. Prof Mehta sitting down for a chat with the founders of the
university. A very sophisticated group of people, big guns of India’s corporate world.
They purportedly came together to establish Ashoka because they wanted to give
something back to our society after having achieved impressive financial success in
their business ventures. A noble mission (even if a lot of people who cannot afford the
extremely high fees for the superior education that their university undoubtedly
provides, may disagree). What could they have said to the professor that made it clear
to him that his association with Ashoka was a political liability? What political liabilities
could a university possibly have? Was Prof Mehta a political liability to one, many or all
of the founders? Were their business interests and financial interests threatened?
Threatened by whom? The district administration of Sonipat, where the university
campus is located? The government of Haryana, where Sonipat is located? The central
government?
And was the threat credible? Well, we are dealing here with financially successful
people in India’s corporate jungle. They couldn’t have got their signals wrong. The
threat must indeed have been credible. We are not clear about its source, but it must
have been from the top—state and local governments couldn’t really cow such people
down. That’s for sure.
Prof Mehta says that his writing in support of values of freedom and equal respect for
all citizens is perceived as a risk for Ashoka. What democratic government would have
any quarrel with such values of freedom? How can one person’s support to these values
pose any risk to a university?
Did the founders ask Prof Mehta to quit? We can only guess. But Prof Mehta gives a
clue in his letter to the students of the university. In that letter, he said that for him
leaving the university was the only honourable thing to do, consistent with his values.
So it would appear that the founders offered him a continued association with the
university if he stopped writing what he was inclined to write. The founders made Prof
Mehta an offer. But it was an offer he could only refuse. The professor denied the
mighty—yet fearful—founders their power over him and their power to silence an
‘inconvenient’ voice. I think this is no ordinary defiance. It could be the beginning of a
significant resistance.
Sooner or later, an Indian Spring will bloom, and Prof Mehta will be remembered as one
of those who planted the seeds.
In a way, so did Dr Arvind Subramanian. Dr Subramanian did not need to do anything,
because the development was no direct threat to him. But he reminded all of us that
we should not keep quiet because ‘they came for someone else’. He reminded us that
tomorrow they will come for you, me, and everyone else. He found the Prof Mehta
episode ‘ominously disturbing’. That this episode and others of similar nature in similar
establishments are muted signals of what awaits us is clear enough to Subramanian.
Now it is for us too to pick them up. And push back against the establishment’s
campaign to silence people, to punish them for what it considers ‘thought crime’.
Close on the heels of this development in a private university, was another, just as
revealing, in a publicly funded university. Banares Hindu University (BHU). The
University decided to invite Smt Nita Ambani, wife of Asia’s richest businessman; Smt
Priti Adani, wife of Gautam Adani (who added 16 billion US dollars to his net worth in a
single year, the pandemic year); and Smt Usha Mittal, wife of steel tycoon Lakshmi
Mittal. The spouses of the three women are all considered close to the Modi
government. The university wants the ladies to be visiting professors in its Social
Sciences faculty at the Centre for Women Studies. The Dean of Social Sciences said that
he thought that the students could benefit from the experience of these three ladies in
the field of women empowerment. The students have protested, and with good reason.
Although no one should have anything against the three personalities, but if the
purpose is to learn about women empowerment, surely one can find far more
accomplished, self-made women to teach and to inspire the students.
Before one could recover from these two shocks, came the ripped jeans remark by the
newly appointed chief minister of Uttarakhand, Tirath Singh Rawat. Speaking at a public
event, he criticised young people, especially women, for wearing ripped jeans and
bemoaned their lack of ‘values’. He was on a flight recently, and there was a woman
sitting next to him, wearing long boots and jeans ripped at the knees. She told him she
ran an NGO and had two children. The chief minister was shocked. Recalling the
incident, he said, ‘If this kind of woman goes out in the society to meet people and
solve their problems, what kind of message are we giving out to society, to our kids?’
I watched the footage of his speech. There was solid self-assurance on his face. He was
very sure that what he was saying was from the ultimate canon of Instagrammable
Bharatiya values. His wife came to his defence. A friend of mine said that he was
surprised that no woman from the government or the ruling BJP had come forward to
condemn that uncouth and insensitive remark. My friend was naive. To me, it was not
at all surprising that there had been no condemnation of the chief minister. The real
surprise was that no one had come forward to defend him and his low-grade hatred—to
say that anyone opposing the chief minister’s remark is anti-national, because ripped
jeans represent FDI, foreign destructive ideology. But I may be wrong. Perhaps
ministers and mobs are being mobilised, even as I write, to say that the chief minister
was right and what he said is consistent with the values of the present version of Hindu
Dharma.
Rewind to the time before the pandemic and try to recall the mayhem unleashed by
hired thugs in the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University while the police stood by as
idle spectators. And the police thuggery in Jamia Milia Islamia. Students in these
universities were beaten till they bled and their bones were broken. In one campus it
was violent goons with obvious Hindutva connections, and in the other the police
themselves.
This, then is the ‘value’ system of New India, its ‘Raj Dharma’. To attempt a dark
reorientation of cultural values. To muzzle voices, because dissent is dangerous and
branded as sedition. Academia, independent media, writers, social activists, students
who won’t stay away from ‘politics’—they are all under the scanner. ‘Wealth creators’
and their spouses are pampered and cultivated as allies in this project of hijacking an
entire nation, an entire people. (Do recall that in 2018 the Nita Ambani-led Reliance
Foundation’s Jio Institute was accorded the ‘Institution of Eminence’ status even before
it had been set up!)
The scenario in higher education is bleak. Teaching is poor. Research and publications
are pathetic. R&D is disappointing. In number and quality, academic output is dismal
both in public as well as private universities. A study revealed that not a single
academic journal published in India has an SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of above 1.
Internationally, a journal with an SJR value that is greater than 1 has above average
citation potential, and a value less than 1 has below average citation potential.
But the government is unconcerned with this backwardness. Its new education policy
leaves these scenarios unaddressed. Instead, the government works overtime to clamp
down on any protests on the campuses. It devises insidious strategies to cleanse
universities of faculty who question its policies.
This is no route to achieve a five-trillion-dollar economy. Or to make Bharat a
‘Vishwaguru’. Universities and research institutions should flower. They should be
battlegrounds for ideas, where conventions are challenged and dissent blooms. They
should be places of learning where questions are answered, but also where students
are free to question the answers. Every campus should be an anomaly; untamed, our
places of higher learning should stand up to authority’s dictates and society’s smugness.
They should not be Bonsai Universities, dwarfed and pruned, trained to grow to the
liking and comfort of our rulers.

OUR UNIVERSITIES
The Best Are Not Good Enough?
(A version of this essay was first broadcast in September 2021.)
I take special interest in the state of education in our country. I wait for two reports
every year. The Annual Status of Education Report by Pratham, which gives an
assessment of school education in the country; and the National Institutional Ranking
Framework (NIRF) Report, which gives us data about our universities. When I read the
latter, I quickly look up the global rankings of universities to see where our own
institutes of higher learning are placed. In this essay I would like to dwell on the
findings of NIRF 2021, and what they tell us about the state of our universities.
The NIRF, which assesses our universities and science and technology and medical
institutions and colleges, was put in place in 2015. The criteria that the NIRF adopts to
rank institutions are comprehensive. I think it is one of the best frameworks evolved by
our Union Ministry of Education. It assesses an institution on the basis of its
performance on five different parameters. An institution’s Teaching, Learning, and
Resources are looked at. This parameter includes student strength, student-teacher
ratio, the faculty’s qualifications and experience, the institution’s financial resources and
their utilisation. The second parameter is research and professional practice. This looks
at overall publications, patents—both published and granted—and professional
footprint, meaning projects and consultancy. The third parameter is graduation
outcomes. This looks at performance in examinations and the number of PhDs
completed. The fourth parameter is outreach and inclusivity. This looks at the
composition of the student body, the institution’s regional, gender, and economic
diversity as well as provision for physically challenged students. The fifth and final
parameter is peer perception. This assesses how the institution’s academic peers and
employers view it. In other words, the institution’s standing in academia as well as in
the job market.
Many of our IITs have scored top marks in the 2021 NIRF Report. Of the top ten
institutions in the overall category, seven are IITs: Madras, Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur,
Kharagpur, Roorkee and Guwahati. Another science institution, the Indian Institute of
Science (IISc), Bengaluru is second. Two institutions which are not devoted entirely to
science and technology have also found place in the top ten. At ninth place is my alma
mater, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the tenth slot is won by Banares Hindu
University (BHU). As I said, this is the overall ranking of institutions. However, when it
comes to universities per se, IISc Bengaluru tops the list. JNU is second. BHU is third.
Jamia Milia Islamia occupies sixth place, and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) is tenth.
Calcutta University, Jadavpur University, Amrita Vishwa Vidya Peetham, the University
of Hyderabad and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education are the other universities
in the top ten list for the country.
I must draw your attention to two things here. One, at least three universities that are
detested and targeted by the present regime are in the top ten: JNU, Jamia and AMU.
The assessment is done by the regime’s own Ministry of Education, on the basis of
criteria that it laid down itself. This means that the performance of these universities is
so compelling that they came out on top despite scrutiny that was most probably
unsympathetic. The faculty and student bodies of these universities have proved that
fierce assertion of independence, sharp socio-political consciousness do not dilute their
academic excellence. In fact, they are strong proof that socio-political consciousness
and academic excellence are inseparable. The story was the same in previous years too.
Almost all universities that are among the top 10 in 2021 have been in this band every
year since 2016, when ranking by the present Framework began. My alma mater, JNU—
against which the present BJP regime has waged almost a war—has been consistently
at number two, behind IISc, since 2017. In 2016, it was at third place.
The second thing I draw your attention to is that none of the five-star corporate funded
Bonsai universities—not a single one—could make it to the list of top ten universities in
the country. Details of the rankings are available on the NIRF portal. Do make the time
to look for these five-star universities in the rankings. It is a good exercise for those
who denigrate public universities.
There’s another reality check.
When we look at the global rankings, there isn’t a single Indian university in the top 10,
or top 50, or even the top 100. Quacerelli Symonds (QS), the world’s most widely
consulted education analyst, released its 18th edition of World University Rankings in
June 2021. Of the top 100 positions, 44 were taken by American and British universities
—US: 26; UK: 18. My other alma mater, the London School of Economics [LSE], was in
49th place. India’s top universities and institutions had to be content with low ranks:
IIT Bombay was at number 177, IIT Delhi at 185 and IISc Bengaluru at 186.
I say our top universities have to be content with low rankings because it is clear that
these public universities cannot expect any urgent assistance from the government.
Why do I say this? Because to devise and implement plans for improvement, there must
first be an acknowledgement that there is a problem. But this government does not
believe there can be any problem in New India. It lives in cuckoo land. When the QS
rankings were published, our education minister tweeted, ‘India is taking a leap in the
field of Education & Research and is emerging as a Vishwaguru. We are equally proud
to have a Guru like the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi…’ That’s the unseemly
ministerial puffery we hear after our best institutions settle for less than respectable
places globally.
It is necessary to note that the top slots in the QS rankings are not taken entirely by
Western Universities. In the report list released in June 2021, there were 12 Asian
universities in the top 50: four universities from China and two each from Japan, South
Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. And it is instructive to note that universities from
Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan appear on the
QS list before the first Indian university appears, at rank 177. The story is not much
different with other respected ranking bodies: The Times Higher Education Rankings,
the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Ranking, the Top Universities Ranking, and US News
and World Report Ranking. Our best are not good enough to be in the top 100 or 150
universities in these global rankings, either. Years of negligence and indifference to
standards of higher education in the country by successive governments have brought
us to this. But instead of acknowledging the problem our education minister uses the
embarrassing data to brand Narendra Modi as a ‘Guru’ and India as an ‘emerging
Vishwaguru’ (do note the hierarchy—the Supreme Leader is already The Teacher, while
the country is ‘emerging’ as one).
A majority of our universities are defunct. It might sound harsh but it is a reality that
teaching in our universities is poor. Research and publications are pathetic. In number
and quality, academic output is dismal. Both in public as well as in the privately-run
Bonsai universities. It is disappointing to know that all the journals published from India
have an SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) score of less than 1.* Our university presses, the
handful that exist in reality and not only on paper, release a pitifully small number of
publication. On the other hand, one cannot but be amazed at the number of new books
from reputed western academic and university presses that are advertised in a single
issue of a magazine like the New York Review of Books.
This sorry state of research and publications in India’s academic world has implications
for our science and technology prowess. As a consequence of the low quality of
teaching, learning and research in our institutions of higher learning, R&D in our
country is extremely disappointing. Take a look at the data from the World Intellectual
Property Office (WIPO) in Geneva. It can be accessed online. In patents filed and
patents granted, India ranks pretty low. The most common forms of intellectual
property are patents, trademarks and industrial designs. In the 2020 filings at WIPO,
China tops the list in all the three categories. In patents, the US is in second position,
followed by Japan, South Korea and Germany. In Industrial design, Germany is in
second position, followed by South Korea, USA and Italy. The WIPO portal also gives
the break-up of resident and non-resident applications for intellectual property by
nationality. Applications by residents rather than non-residents are the highest from
China, at 88.8%, followed by Japan at 79.7%, South Korea at 78.4%, Germany at
69.2% and Russia at 65.7%. Whereas for India, the scenario is the reverse of this:
63.7% of the patents filed from India are by non-residents, that is, by people living
outside the country.
Our spending on R&D at 0.65% of GDP remains abysmally low. Lower than much
smaller countries like Israel (4.9%), South Korea (4.6%), Taiwan (3.5%) and Singapore
(2.2%).
The Union government pledged to spend 50,000 crore rupees in the next five years
through the much hyped allocation to the National Research Foundation. But it falls way
below the needs of a country that aspires to be a five-trillion-dollar economy and a
‘Vishwaguru’.
Our New Education Policy is long on administrative tweaks and woefully short on
meaningful strategy to make our higher education achieve global standards in teaching
and research; to make our universities inclusive and vibrant. The ruling dispensation
does not help the cause of excellence in universities by sending police and masked
goons into the campuses to beat up students, and by slapping sedition charges on
those who are politically active. It says something about this regime’s idea of education
and learning that the universities, which have scored the highest in the NIRF of its own
Education Ministry are also the favourite targets of its militant ideologues and foot
soldiers.
Our universities need funds, investment in research facilities, inclusive admission
policies to accommodate diversity, better teacher-student ratio, an encouraging
ecosystem for innovation, an atmosphere conducive to questioning the status quo,
irreverence towards political, scientific, academic authority and religious dogma. Indian
universities can only excel and thrive in a liberal and tolerant society. If there’s one
message from the 2021 national rankings by the NIRF, it is certainly this.

*See ‘Bonsai Universities and Ripped Jeans’.

JNU SHOULD REMAIN AN ANOMALY

(The previous essay—‘Bonsai Universities and Ripped Jeans’—discusses the attempts to
make our universities tidy and obedient—Bonsai versions of themselves, where
independent thinking must be stamped out. Where students should only ‘study’ and not
be ‘political’—unless, of course, their politics is aligned completely with the politics of
the party in power. This essay extends that discussion with Delhi’s famed Jawaharlal
Nehru University, which has been in the crosshairs of the Modi regime since early 2016,
when some of its brightest students were arrested on charges of sedition. Since then,
there has been an unrelenting campaign, comprising intimidation, persecution, co-
option and capture of administrative and teaching positions by appointing people
handpicked by the Sangh Parivar. It is a clear attempt to destroy JNU as we knew it; for
JNU’s tradition of free thought and debate, and its insistence on equality—its challenge
to the hierarchies of class, caste and religion—are anathema to the Hindu right.
This essay—a slightly modified version of an essay that appeared in the 30 November
2019 issue of The Week—is a tribute to the spirit of JNU.)
News from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) reminds me of our May 1983 agitation. I
was then a student of this great university. We gheraoed the vice-chancellor over an
incident in Jhelum Hostel—a student, Jalees Ahmed, had been transferred out of that
hotel on disciplinary grounds. The resulting student protest snowballed into a
widespread agitation. Police entered the campus and swung us into trucks and dumped
us in Tihar jail. We spent two weeks in prison.
The case of Jalees Ahmed sparked that agitation. Just as the hike in hostel room fees
ignited the present [2019] protest. But if the matter were only to do with a Jalees
Ahmed then or a fee hike today, it would not have taken even a day to settle it. And
the regimes—Indira Gandhi’s then and Narendra Modi’s now—would not have
responded with disproportionate force. The true reason is that both agitations pelted
sharp questions at the establishment and unsettled it.
The present situation in JNU offers two options to the country.
One is to view it as an act of intolerable, ‘dangerous’ indiscipline and extirpate it with
force. This is the easier option. It only requires the authorities to vulgarise the protest
as an unreasonable demand for cheap accommodation and subsidised food and nothing
more, and a demand that incites violence and threatens to destroy the institution. Such
attempts seem to be underway now. But this option will be of no value to a country
that nurses the ambition of becoming an economic superpower and a world leader.
The other option before the country is to seriously apply its mind to the broad and
complex question of the place of higher education—and more specifically, the role of a
university—in our national life. If the rulers choose this latter option and field the
questions that are thrown up by the JNU agitation with honesty, the country can benefit
immensely.
The second option demands a willingness and maturity to redefine the objectives of
education in our society. This option requires that we spell out what kind of a student
the country wants, what relationship the country expects between the university and
the society, what resources it is prepared to spend on education, the place of market
forces in educating our young citizens, and what kind of outcomes the country desires—
whether it wants thinking minds or robots.
JNU is no stranger to unrest and protest. During my stay on the campus, we agitated
and responded not only to events in the campus. We reacted to events across the
country and the globe. In fact, we took out more protest rallies about the developments
in the country and the world than about campus issues. The JNU campus was alive to
the massacre of Sri Lankan Tamils, atrocities in Kampuchea, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the Khalistan movement, the removal of N.T. Rama Rao from office in
Andhra.
We did not bother so much about insufficient water in our hostels. When we had a
severe water crunch, a student leader roared in the University General Body Meeting
(UGBM), ‘Jab tak Hindustan ke har ek gaon mein paani nahi pahunchega, tab tak hum
JNU ke liye paani nahin maangenge.’ (‘Until every village in India gets water, we will
not demand water for JNU.’) The crowd gave him a thunderous applause. We always
looked beyond our noses. Our quotidian needs hardly mattered to us. Student
organisations wrote pamphlets, stuck hand-written posters, organised after-dinner
debates. Thought leaders from across the country came and spoke at JNU. After dinner,
our dining halls doubled up as meeting halls. Our campus was awake into the wee
hours of the morning and agog with discussions. We lost sleep over the country’s
problems.
Student Union elections were inexpensive affairs. Elections were conducted by an
Election Commission chosen by the General Body Meeting. That body conducted the
polls and declared the results. There was no hooliganism.
Teacher-student relationship was informal. Teaching and learning extended beyond
classrooms and spilled into teachers’ homes. We did not look at teachers as service
providers; and they did not look at us as customers. We did not treat the k aramacharis,
the support staff, as our servants.
This ecosystem shaped us, and in our post-university lives many of us are doing rather
well for ourselves and are serving the nation. A lot of us became university teachers in
India and abroad, scores among us became government officers, social activists,
political workers, journalists, scientists, writers, poets. Some of us entered legislatures.
And two of my contemporaries are members of the present Union Cabinet. One
alumnus received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2019.
We did not come to JNU because we were the richest and the brightest in the country.
We were from humble backgrounds and academically average. Yet the university’s
unique and egalitarian admission policy helped us get there. The university’s admission
policy gave weightage to the applicants’ deprived social background; it took into
account the backwardness of the regions we came from and the stressed economic
conditions of our families. Students and teachers together shaped that policy. Many of
us owe our upward social and intellectual mobility to the university’s unique and
enlightened admission policy.
Know this, understand this, and then consider the crux of the choice: How should we
look at a university? As an institution to nurture the next generation that takes our
country forward as a progressive nation that tries to ensure prosperity and dignity for
all sections of society? Or an enterprise that ought to make money? In a country
steeped in inequalities, what should be the role of education? How should India treat its
students? Does it want them to be conformists who work only to maintain the status
quo, or does it want them to challenge established dogmas and become iconoclasts
who will bring change for all and for the better? Answers to these questions should
decide our response to the JNU agitation.
JNU was an anomaly before my days and in mine. It remains an anomaly today, despite
attempts to tame it. I wish it remains an anomaly forever into the future. Indeed, all
universities should become and remain anomalies as long as our society is unequal.
They should think ahead, interrogate the received wisdom, learn by trial and error,
teach, practice, theorise, question the political, financial and intellectual power
structures. It is my wish that ruling dispensations feel ideologically secure enough to
cohabit with such institutions. Before the advent of the East India Company, our
institutions of learning were publicly funded and gave free stay and boarding to
students and teachers. The students were not called freeloaders. They freely
questioned and debated. That arrangement made India a remarkable knowledge
society. I would urge you all to read the book The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian
Education in the Eighteenth Century by Dharampal, which gives details of education in
India before the Company Raj. Only such arrangements can make India one of the
world’s foremost knowledge societies again. Persecution and ideological control by the
government will only take us back to the dark ages.

HIJAB Vs SAFFRON SCARF

(A version of this essay was first written in February 2022. It has been updated with a
postscript.)
February 2022
It is hard not to be deeply troubled by what is going on in Karnataka. Several schools
and colleges in the state have seen very ugly scenes with Muslim girls in hijab being
heckled and bullied. Schools and colleges were closed by a government order for a few
days. When some of them reopened, they did so with the condition imposed by the
High Court that students will enter class rooms only if they do not wear attire that is a
mark of religion. That was the court’s interim order before a full bench passes a final
one later.
In this essay we will not go into the larger and more fundamental questions about the
contentious question of the desirability or otherwise of the practice of wearing a hijab
or burqa. Do burqa and hijab constitute essential parts of Islamic practice? Are they or
are they not ordained as compulsory parts of Muslim women’s attire? Are they or are
they not regressive symbols of patriarchy, designed to confine women to homes? Do
these practices exclude women from full participation in society’s collective life, and
push them to subordinate roles in public life? We don’t go into these questions because,
let’s be clear about it, the present controversy and unrest are completely unconcerned
with and unrelated to those larger questions. In fact, the present controversy has
vitiated the atmosphere so badly that any civilised debate on these questions would be
impossible for some time to come.
Let us also bear in mind that the consequences and repercussions of what is happening
in Karnataka will not be limited to a few schools and colleges in that state. Whatever
may be the final decision of the Karnataka High Court and later of the Supreme Court,
the issue is unlikely to fade away from the political and social discourse of the country*.
It is certain to further sharpen the polarisation of Hindu and Muslim identities, a project
that is in the interests of extreme elements in both the religions.
Let us begin by quickly looking at the way the issue has snowballed.
What started as a small episode in Udupi, soon spread to Shivamogga, Mandya,
Bagalkot and Chikkamagaluru. Processions were taken out. Incidents of stone throwing
and bullying were reported. Schools and colleges were closed for a few days. Police
held flag marches in a few towns. Section 144 was imposed to prevent violence in
several towns. When educational institutions reopened after a few days, tension and
unease prevailed.
On 1 January 2022, Government Pre University College in Udupi disallowed the wearing
of hijabs in class by Muslim girls, saying it violated the uniform dress code.
Neighbouring Kundapur Government PU College followed suit. Many Muslims girls
complied with the college diktat, but six students resisted. The local BJP MLA then
wrote to the college administration that action should be taken against those girls. As
the controversy persisted, by the end of January the girls moved the Karnataka High
Court praying that they be allowed to attend classes wearing hijab. Until then the issue
was largely limited to one point: whether there was merit in the college managements’
decision to treat wearing hijab as violation of uniform dress code in an educational
institution.
But the issue did not rest there. Hindu students were now mobilised to protest against
Muslim girls wearing hijab. Processions of Hindu boys and girls wearing saffron scarves
were taken out in several towns to protest against Muslim girls wearing hijab. Video
footage of these processions showed young students shouting ‘ Jai Sri Ram’ slogans.
Many videos were circulated on social media platforms that showed activists of
organisations like the Bajrang Dal moving around in vehicles in different towns
distributing saffron scarves. In places like Chikkamagaluru, some Dalit students wore
blue scarves and shouted ‘Jai Bhim’ slogans to show their solidarity with Muslim girls.
In Mandya a Muslim girl who came to her college wearing hijab was bullied by a large
group of Hindu boys. The girl shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ in retort. The video went viral on
social media platforms. Some boys wearing saffron scarves hoisted a saffron flag on the
government college post in Shivamogga.
The Karnataka hijab row evoked responses from across India as well as from abroad.
Rallies were organised in Hyderabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Allahabad, Srinagar and other
places to protest against the ban on hijab in Karnataka’s educational institutions. Nobel
laureate Malala Yousafzai described barring students wearing hijab from classrooms as
‘horrifying’. An official body in the United States that monitors religious freedom in the
world said that hijab bans in schools and colleges violate religious freedom and
stigmatise and marginalise women and girls.
Let’s now try to understand the discriminatory sub-script in the hijab row. The
Karnataka government order barring girls who wear hijab from the class rooms is
contentious. Uniform dress codes do not proscribe men’s headgear even in the
uniformed services like the armed forces, paramilitary forces and the police. For
example, Sikh men wear the turban in all these services. They are exempted from
wearing a helmet when they drive two wheelers. Sikh boys are not compelled to give
up their headgear in any schools that prescribe a uniform dress code. All this is in
deference to their religious practice of wearing a headgear. When the male headgear of
one religion is exempt from uniform dress codes, can a female headgear of practitioners
of another religion be proscribed? This brings into the discourse questions about parity
among genders and religions. These questions need to be satisfactorily dealt with in
order to show that a ban on hijab is in some way justified in schools. Otherwise,
apprehensions that male headgear and female headgear of religious significance are
not treated on a par will remain. Also, the charge that Sikh religious practices are
honoured and those of Muslims are not. These apprehensions will rankle in the minds of
the Muslim minority, especially Muslim women, for a long time to come.
The hijab row is only the latest addition to a long train of events and developments that
have been alienating Muslims in our society and instilling a deep sense of fear in their
minds. These events are of two kinds. One is attacks on the Muslim minority, the other
is aggressive assertion of Hindu majoritarian identity. The list of attacks is long. Beef
vigilantism, lynchings, vandalising small shops and attacking petty businesses owned by
Muslims, roughing up of small traders such as bangle sellers, calls for mass murder of
Muslims by Hindu ‘dharma sansads’, ‘Sulli deals’ and ‘Bulli Bai’ apps that put up Muslim
women for auction, statements by chief ministers like UP’s Yogi Adityanath that
elections are a fight between ‘80% and 20%’, openly communal remarks like
Adityanath’s ‘abba jaan’ remark, insinuations of ‘love jihad’ and ‘thook (spit) jihad’,
population control legislations aimed specifically at the Muslim community, anti-
conversion legislations (euphemistically—and hypocritically—named ‘Protection of Right
to Freedom of Religion’)…I could go on. Before I even begin to list the targeted arrests
of Muslim men and women, from students and social activists to journalists and artists,
made by the partisan police force; the hate speeches by members of Parliament; the
engineered riots.
And I have not even mentioned the long list of attacks on the Christian community.
Now to the Hindu majoritarian assertion. The Prime Minister and other constitutional
functionaries belonging to his party openly display marks of Hindu religious identity on
their person. Massive publicity is given to their participation in functions that mark the
beginning of construction of temples and restoration of temple complexes, inauguration
of Hindu religious events, unveiling of massive statues of Hindu saints… And we must
also remember that we have elected representatives belonging to the BJP who have
publicly declared that a saffron flag will one day replace the Tricolour at the Red Fort.
Today, attacks on minorities and assertion of Hindu majoritarianism have become
normalised and mainstreamed. These attacks and the aggressive assertion are not
questioned, leave alone punished.
On the contrary, it is the resistance to them that is questioned by the government and
the ruling party and its ideological family. What is most disturbing is that children in
their early teens have been co-opted into the project of communal prejudice and hate.
Extremists in both the communities are having a field day. Children are their foot
soldiers. I have seen posts on microblogging sites by some Hindutva activists
triumphantly stating that the hijab row has yielded dividends to the Hindu community,
that it has consolidated Hindus in Karnataka against ‘those people’. I have not come
across similar writings or posts by Muslim groups, but I’m sure the extreme elements
among Muslims are also delighted by the polarisation and growing division between the
two main communities.
Should we hope that the courts—the Karnataka High Court and then, perhaps, the
Supreme Court—will intervene in a manner that could change this worrying state of
affairs? Sadly, what appears most likely is that the courts will hand down a sham
compromise. They’ll say that no one should wear any clothing that has religious
connotation. That Muslim girls will not wear hijab and Hindu students will not wear
saffron scarfs. That, in essence, will deprive the girls of their custom and make it look
like it is done in exchange for the Hindu children giving up on saffron scarf—which is
certainly not a required religious custom or practice. At any rate, the decision of the
courts is unlikely to put an end to this ugly contest between hijab and saffron scarf.
*
Postscript (March 2023)
In March 2022, the Karnataka High Court upheld the order of the Karnataka
government, saying that hijab was not an essential practice of Islam and therefore the
ban on wearing the headscarf in educational institutions was legally correct. The ruling
was challenged in the Supreme Court. In October 2022, a two-judge bench of the apex
court delivered a split verdict.
Justice Hemant Gupta dismissed all the appeals filed against the judgment of the
Karnataka High Court.
Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia, on the other hand, disagreed with and set aside the
judgement of the Karnataka High Court. To me, Justice Dhulia’s judgement is a strong,
logical and enlightened defence of democratic rights. It is worth reproducing some of
his observations:
‘The High Court took a wrong path. It is ultimately a matter of choice and Article 19(1)
(a) and 25(1). It is a matter of choice, nothing more and nothing less[…]
‘We have before us two children, two girl students, asserting their identity by wearing
hijab, and claim protection under Article 19 and Article 25 of the Constitution of India.
Whether wearing hijab is an [Essential Religious Practice] in Islam or not is not
essential for the determination of this dispute. If the belief is sincere, and it harms no
one else, there can be no justifiable reasons for banning hijab in a classroom[…]
‘Another question which the School Administration and the State must answer in the
present case is as to what is more important to them: Education of a girl child or
Enforcement of a Dress Code! We have been informed at the Bar by many of the Senior
counsels appearing for the Petitioners, that the unfortunate fallout of the enforcement
of hijab ban in schools in Karnataka has been that some of the girl students have not
been able to appear in their Board examinations, and many others were forced to seek
transfer to other schools, most likely madrasas, where they may not get the same
standard of education. This is for a girl child, for whom it was never easy, in the first
place, to reach her school gate.
‘One of the best sights in India today, is of a girl child leaving for her school in the
morning, with her school bag on her back. She is our hope, our future. But it is also a
fact, that it is much more difficult for a girl child to get education, as compared to her
brother. In villages and semi urban areas in India, it is commonplace for a girl child to
help her mother in her daily chores of cleaning and washing, before she can grab her
school bag. The hurdles and hardships a girl child undergoes in gaining education are
many times more than a male child. This case therefore has also to be seen in the
perspective of the challenges already faced by a girl child in reaching her school. The
question this Court would therefore put before itself is also whether we are making the
life of a girl child any better by denying her education, merely because she wears a
hijab!
‘All the Petitioners want is to wear a hijab! Is it too much to ask in a democracy? How is
it against public order, morality or health? or even decency or against any other
provision of Part III of the Constitution?…It does not appeal to my logic or reason as to
how a girl child who is wearing a hijab in a classroom is a public order problem or even
a law-and-order problem. To the contrary reasonable accommodation in this case would
be a sign of a mature society which has learnt to live and adjust with its differences…A
girl child has the right to wear hijab in her house or outside her house, and that right
does not stop at her school gate. The child carries her dignity and her privacy even
when she is inside the school gates, in her classroom. She retains her fundamental
rights. To say that these rights become derivative rights inside a classroom, is wholly
incorrect.
‘We live in a Democracy and under the Rule of Law, and the Laws which govern us
must pass muster the Constitution of India. Amongst many facets of our Constitution,
one is Trust. Our Constitution is also a document of Trust. It is the trust the minorities
have reposed upon the majority. Commenting on the report of the Advisory committee
on minorities, Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel made a statement before the Constitute
Assembly on 24 May 1949, which should be referred here. He said, “…. it is not our
intention to commit the minorities to a particular position in a hurry. If they really have
to come honestly to the conclusion that in the changed conditions of this country, it is
in the interest of all to lay down real and genuine foundations of a secular State, then
nothing is better for the minorities than to trust the good- sense and sense of fairness
of the majority, and to place confidence in them. So also, it is for us who happened to
be in a majority to think about what the minorities feel, and how we in their position
would feel if we were treated in the manner in which they are treated.”
‘The question of diversity, raised by the Petitioners before the Karnataka High Court,
was not considered by the Court [which] said, “Petitioners’ contention that a class room
should be a place for recognition and reflection of diversity of society, a mirror image of
the society (socially and ethically) in its deeper analysis is only a hollow rhetoric, ‘unity
in diversity’ being the oft quoted platitude….”
‘The question of diversity and our rich plural culture is, however, important in the
context of our present case. Our schools, in particular our Pre-University colleges are
the perfect institutions where our children, who are now at an impressionable age, and
are just waking up to the rich diversity of this nation, need to be counselled and guided,
so that they imbibe our constitutional values of tolerance and accommodation, towards
those who may speak a different language, eat different food, or even wear different
clothes or apparels! This is the time to foster in them sensitivity, empathy and
understanding towards different religions, languages and cultures. This is the time
when they should learn not to be alarmed by our diversity but to rejoice and celebrate
this diversity. This is the time when they must realise that in diversity is our strength[…]
‘Under our Constitutional scheme, wearing a hijab should be simply a matter of Choice.
It may or may not be a matter of essential religious practice, but it still is, a matter of
conscience, belief, and expression. If she wants to wear hijab, even inside her class
room, she cannot be stopped, if it is worn as a matter of her choice, as it may be the
only way her conservative family will permit her to go to school, and in those cases, her
hijab is her ticket to education.
‘The unfortunate fallout of the hijab restriction would be that we would have denied
education to a girl child. A girl child for whom it is still not easy to reach her school
gate. This case here, therefore, has also to be seen in the perspective of the challenges
already faced by a girl child in reaching her school. The question this Court would put
before itself is also whether we are making the life of a girl child any better by denying
her education merely because she wears a hijab![…]
‘By asking the girls to take off their hijab before they enter the school gates, is first an
invasion on their privacy, then it is an attack on their dignity, and then ultimately it is a
denial to them of secular education. These are clearly violative of Article 19(1)(a),
Article 21 and Article 25(1) of the Constitution of India.’
I would urge everyone to read the full text of Justice Dhulia’s judgement. It is the kind
of vision and direction our Republic—indeed, any modern, democratic republic—needs.
More power to such defenders of liberty and justice.

*See ‘Postscript’ at the end of the essay.

OXFAM’S INEQUALITY REPORT, PIKETTY AND NEW INDIA

(This is a revised version of an essay written for ‘Midweek Matters’ in January 2022.)
Some writings have the potential to shake us out of our complacency. They could
change the world. But the temptation, for an individual and a society, is to put such
literature aside and get busy with other, routine things in the hope that those writings
will no longer trouble us. We all do that and thus cancel their potential power. Business
as usual is reassuring. Coming face to face with our demons is unsettling. It shatters
our certitudes, colourful myths, received narratives, favourite political philosophies, and
dominant economic theories. In this essay I want to deal with two such works. One is
Thomas Piketty’s absorbing book, Capital and Ideology. The second is the recently
released [January 2022] Oxfam report, Inequality Kills. The report has an India
supplement, too, that is directly relevant for us. My plea to you is, engage with these
two works, prepare to be challenged by them. Even if we do not agree with them, we
should allow ourselves to be troubled by them both.
Piketty’s Capital and Ideology is a sequel to his earlier path breaking work, Capital in
the Twenty First Century. But it can be read independently, although reading them both
will be highly rewarding. Both are detailed works. The latest one is an enormously
lengthy one. A lot of us don’t really have the time or the patience to read such works.
Some of us don’t have the appetite for very long, weighty, serious, scholarly analyses.
So, at the risk of not doing full justice to Piketty’s work, I’ll briefly summarise his main
argument and then move on to the much more accessible Oxfam Report, both the
global one and the India Supplement.
Piketty tries to explore and understand inequality. He pores over what is currently the
largest database on inequality, the World Inequality Database. It contains data on
income and estate tax, distribution of wealth and income from the late 19th century or
early 20th century to the present. In some cases, like France, data is available since the
late 18th or early 19th century. To me the most striking and significant observation by
Piketty is, and I quote, ‘Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological
and political.’ He further says, ‘…elites of many societies…have sought to “naturalize”
inequality. They argue that existing social disparities benefit not only the poor but also
society as a whole and that any attempt to alter the existing order of things will cause
great pain.’ Mark these observations. We will return to them later when we talk about
extant mindless justifications of inequality in the name of encouraging wealth creators
and expecting a ‘trickle down’ to the bottom of the pyramid. Piketty’s work is riveting to
me partly because it explores how human societies justify their inequalities. Or are even
able to turn away from them, ignore them, or paper over them. He traces the current,
post-1980s hyper inegalitarian narrative to the failure of communism and the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
While Piketty’s broad-sweep, detailed, historical meditation on inequality may be
inaccessible to many, the latest Oxfam Report grabs us by the throat. It forces us to
confront not only highly troubling but also ugly, brutal truths of these post Covid times,
globally as well as here in our country. Sample these: a new billionaire is created every
26 hours since the Covid pandemic began; the wealth of the world’s ten richest men
has doubled, while the incomes of 99% of humanity have fallen, in most cases
drastically, because of Covid-19; The world’s 10 richest men together own more wealth
than the combined worth of the bottom 3.1 billion people in the world. And now,
imagine this: if the top ten richest men spent a million US dollars every day—yes, a
million US dollars per day—it would take them 441 years to exhaust their combined
wealth. There’s more: since 1995, the top 1% have captured 20 times more of global
wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity. Just 252 of the world’s richest men have
more wealth than all the one billion plus women and girls of Africa, Latin America and
the Caribbean combined.
This level of inequality has consequences.
Inequality contributes to the death of 21,600 people per day. That means, a person
dies every four seconds because of inequality. About 5.6 million people die every year
because of lack of access to healthcare facilities in poor countries. And about 2.1 million
people per annum die of hunger.
This is the global big picture. Let us now take a look at the situation at home, in our
own country. The years 2020 and 2021 were the worst years for India. The country’s
growth rate plummeted: the April to June 2020 quarter saw the economy contracting
by 23.9%. But, the Oxfam report tells us, the number of billionaires in the country grew
from 102 in 2020 to 142 in 2021. While the bottom 50% of our population’s share of
national wealth is a mere 6%, the top 10% holds close to 45%. Our country is home to
a quarter of all undernourished people in the world.
The Oxfam study also cites a report by Forbes which tells us that the collective wealth
of India’s 100 richest persons hit a record high of 775 billion US dollars. (A billion dollars
is 100 crore Indian rupees. And a single US dollar is about 80 rupees. Please do the
math.) And about one fifth of this increase is accounted for by one individual and his
business house—Gautam Adani and his Adani Group.
All this happened while 84% of the country’s population saw a steep decline in its
income. This period also coincided with a rise in the number of India’s poor from 59
million in 2020 to 134 million in 2021. Related to this, the share of indirect taxes in the
country’s gross tax revenue rose steadily, and we all know that indirect taxes burden
the poor disproportionately. Excise duties rose from 12% to 19.2% of the gross tax
revenue, but there was a sharp decline in corporate tax, from 27.7% to 22.6%. The
Union government collected 8 lakh crore rupees from taxes on diesel and petrol,
pushing up their prices to near unbearable levels. In the 2021 fiscal alone, the Indian
government collected 3.71 lakh crore rupees from VAT on petrol and diesel. These
taxes have a ripple effect, pushing up prices of food, vegetables, and other essential
commodities, causing further erosion of the real incomes of the poor. The National
Crime Records Bureau tells us that daily wage workers, the self-employed and the
unemployed are the three top categories that resorted to suicide during this period.
The Oxfam 2022 report also reveals that education, healthcare and other public goods
and services have become expensive and therefore inaccessible to the country’s poor.
The government’s abdication of its duty to provide public goods and services is starkly
evident. The proportion of Indian children attending government schools has declined
to 45%. The true import of this becomes clear when we consider that sending a child to
a private school is nine times more expensive than sending her/him to a government
school.
Private healthcare has proved to be just as exclusionary. In 2017 alone, over 55 million
people were driven into poverty on account of expenditure on private health care. This
is nothing but a structured economic violence against the poor in the country. The
Oxfam report notes: ‘While India is a top destination for medical tourism, the poorest
Indian states have infant mortality rates higher than those in sub-Saharan Africa. India
accounts for 17% of global maternal deaths and 21% of deaths among children below
five years.’
New India is indifferent to these inequalities. Economic inequality is not a part of its
political discourse. Old India’s political discourse, on the other hand, foregrounded it,
grappled with it. No doubt it was ineffective, it fumbled and was probably incompetent.
It even failed, as every other country in the world failed. But old India tried. Its political
discourse never justified inequality. And it made significant advances in addressing
another inequality—social and cultural inequality. It gave a sense of belonging to the
truly marginalized who were at the very bottom of the social ladder, and to the
minorities. It tried to reduce their alienation. Today, New India is not only indifferent to
economic inequality, it tries to justify the wilful injustice. It wants us to believe that the
rich are, somehow, the only wealth creators and they need to be given special
privileges. The country should be at their service. Their corporate taxes must be
reduced. Public goods must be given over to them. The narrative today is that the poor,
and the country at large, will eventually benefit from the swelling wealth of the richest
few, from their (imagined) efficiency and smartness. Inequality, in other words, is in the
interest of the poor. The poor may not even know of this, and may not agree even if
they did, but that, of course, is of no importance.
This is where we recall Piketty’s observation that inequality is neither economic nor
technological; it is ideological and political. And New India has added another inequality
—not an economic or technological one, but an ideological and political one in its most
base and rudimentary manifestation. People in New India are not citizens any more.
They belong to religions. ‘Native’ religions and ‘foreign’ ones. Those whose Punya
Bhumi—the land of religious merit and morality—is ‘Hindu’ India, and those whose
sacred land is elsewhere. The latter, therefore, are unequal. Those who belong to the
‘native’ religions—those whose religious texts and prophets happened to have been
born here—own this land. Others, even if they are born here, whose forebears, too,
were born here and lived here generation after generation, do not belong here because
of the way they worship. They are unwelcome. Should they choose to stay on, they
should be content with unequal, subordinate, and even inferior, status. They should not
fear, though. The ‘native’ religion and its adherents are benevolent and tolerant. Just as
the growth of the super-rich is good because some prosperity will trickle down to the
lower orders, New India argues that the hegemony of those belonging to the ‘native’
religion is good for the ‘others’. The poor, the marginalized, as well as those belonging
to the ‘non-native’ religions should discharge their duties and responsibilities obediently,
quietly, with heads bowed in gratitude. They should not demand their rights as citizens.
Demanding of rights by the marginalized weakens the nation—its economy, its society.
This is the philosophy of New India, articulated by our Prime Minister. You do not
believe me? Please think back to just the recent past. Every single mainstream news
platform reported what the PM said in a speech he delivered on 26th November 2022.
Addressing a gathering in the Supreme Court to mark Constitution Day, he said, ‘The
Azadi Ka Amrit Kaal is the time for duty towards the country. Be it people or
institutions, our responsibilities are our first priority.’ Speaking in the Central Hall of
Parliament the same day, he said, ‘Rights and responsibilities go hand-in-hand.
Mahatma Gandhi had explained this relationship well…Let us think about how we can
fulfil the duties enshrined in our Constitution…Gandhi Ji said that we can only expect all
rights when we perform our duties to perfection.’ That is certainly not what Mahatma
Gandhi implied. But in New India, where even saying that there is poverty, inequality
and suffering in the country—let alone demanding equality and basic civic and
economic rights—is treason, even the Mahatma can be made to sound like a neo-liberal
autocrat.

POVERTY DATA AND DATA POVERTY

(This is an edited transcript of a ‘Midweek Matters’ podcast of March 2021.)
The Pew Research Centre released a report this month [ March 2021]. It said that
during the pandemic, India’s poverty has increased and its middle class has shrunk.
While pundits can debate the methodology used to arrive at these conclusions, I want
to draw your attention to the absence of important data in our country, and the
questionable credibility of the data that is released by government agencies. What is
alarming is that the government is suspected of suppressing unflattering and
inconvenient data and it is increasingly felt that the country’s data systems are
subverted by political interference.
Pew’s report compared India and China. For our purposes, let us leave China out for a
while and look at the Indian numbers. Using World Bank’s projections made last year
[2020] and the current situation, Pew concluded that India added 75 million people to
the category of poor. In addition, the middle-income category in the country shrunk by
32 million. And over 35 million people from the low-income category were pushed into
poverty.
Viewed from a global perspective, 60% of those who fell into poverty worldwide during
the pandemic were people living in India. Of the number of people worldwide who
slipped out of the middle-income category, too, 60% were Indian. These are terrifying
developments. Because, as it is, even before the pandemic reached India, the country
was home to 28% of the global poor. In the UN’s 2019 Human Development Index
report—which measures a country’s social and economic development—India ranked
129 out of 189 countries. This was a year before the pandemic, and India had already
slipped one rank from the previous year.
Now, if we look at the comparison with the Chinese figures in the March 2021 Pew
report, we will learn that what happened in India were not inevitable consequences of
the pandemic. While India added 75 million to its poor in the first pandemic year, China
was able to limit the number to 1 million people. And while India’s middle-income
category shrunk by 32 million, China’s actually grew by 30 million.
We should all ask ourselves: Why were we not able to stem this tragic slide of such a
large number of people into the hell hole of poverty? When others could, why couldn’t
we? The reason, I think, is that we have been in denial. We are reluctant to face up to
the reality. Our government was pretending that there was no problem. And by
suppressing data, massaging it, the government tried to convince people that all was
well—and said so, through messages, advertisements and press handouts in almost all
our languages. And in some cases, by not collecting any data at all, it tried to bury its
policy-making head in the sand and convince even itself that all was well.
Even before the pandemic, the government refused to read the data on falling credit
offtake and consumption in both rural and urban areas. It denied the onset of an
economic slowdown. And then during the pandemic, it never bothered to collect data
about the numbers of migrant labourers, lives lost among frontline workers, including
healthcare professionals, farmer suicides, closure of small and medium enterprises, the
number of jobs and incomes lost. This uncaring, blundering government refuses even
today to collect and release figures on how many jobs have been generated by the
Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY)—the scheme it launched in 2015 to extend
affordable credit to micro and small enterprises. It only puts out the disbursement
figures. With almost 90% of the disbursements at Rs 50,000 (yes, fifty thousand
rupees) or less, the number, quality and sustainability of the jobs that may be
generated would be dismal.
We also have no figures for the number of people who were forced out of the
agriculture sector. And where did they go from there? What is the progress on the
Prime Minister’s own initiative of doubling farm income? There is no data on these,
either. And the data that was available, and which pointed to decline in rural
consumption, was suppressed. The finding that the wages in rural India had not grown
even in the period before the pandemic was too inconvenient, so the government did
not allow into the public domain.
This mala fide indifference to data, and its unforgivable suppression means that there
can be no evidence-based formulation for a stimulus package and its targeted execution
to alleviate the suffering and economic distress caused by the pandemic. Inevitably, the
overhyped scattergun package that the government came up with did not come to the
rescue of the most vulnerable and needy. It turned out to be an unremarkable and
hollow announcement which was soon forgotten. More than the devastation caused by
the pandemic, it is this insincerity and callousness of the present Indian government
that pushed 75 million people—that’s 7.5 crore people—into penury in a single year.
This was a sin, but the government is unrepentant.
There is no recent data available government sources on poverty in India. The last
authentic government figures are from the 68th round of the National Sample Survey
done in 2011-2012. Therefore, we do not know where we stand in terms of the
Sustainable Development Goals, the first and foremost of which is elimination of
poverty by 2030. The October 2020 World Bank’s biennial report, Poverty and Shared
Prosperity Report said that their estimate of global poverty was seriously handicapped
because of lack of data from India. The seriousness of this indictment is not lost on
those who know how to read the subtext in the mild reprimanding language of
intergovernmental global organizations.
This malady—the denial of reality and suppression of data malady—was most apparent
in 2019, when the government junked the figures on employment. Remember the
suppression of the Periodic Labour Force Survey data? The data showed that the
unemployment rate then was at a four-decade high. These figures were inconvenient to
the ruling party, which had promised to create ten million jobs. So the government cast
aspersions on the data collected by its own agency, withheld the findings from the
public and tried to justify its act by saying that the report needed some more work.
Expert members of the Statistical Commission quit in protest, reducing it to a rump
commission.
The government also dodged queries about how much so-called black money had been
unearthed after the mindless 2016 demonetization. Almost the entire demonetized
notes were deposited in banks. Black money had not been removed from the system—
almost all the banned notes had returned to the system. But the jobs that had been lost
did not come back. How many livelihoods were destroyed? The government will not tell
us.
In an open letter to the government, 108 economists and social scientists from around
the globe have expressed concern over the loss of credibility of Indian economic data.
The scholars felt India’s statistical machinery had ‘come under a cloud for being
influenced and indeed even controlled by political considerations’. They appealed to the
government to ‘restore access and integrity to public statistics’.
There was a time when India’s statistics and data collection were respected throughout
the world for their robust institutional architecture. Not just third world countries, but
the advanced economies too looked to Indian practices in collection, analysis and
interpretation of socio-economic data. Yes, there were healthy debates and
disagreements over methodologies, but never was the integrity of the process in doubt.
Never was its impartiality questioned. Never was the government allowed to interfere.
The NSS data release schedule was never dictated by the government. Even raw data
was put in the public domain for researchers to verify and analyse. This is no longer the
case. India’s data integrity is compromised.
Today, Indian corporates, bankers, foreign investors, economic analysts are looking
elsewhere for credible and dependable data. Because government data on vital
indicators such as GDP, inflation and employment is suspect. Even public sector banks
don’t doubt the credibility of government data. As recently as July last year, the
research group of India’s premier state-run bank, the State Bank of India (SBI),
questioned the government’s figure on retail inflation. And India’s former chief
Statistician, Pronob Sen, who now heads the standing committee on economic statistics
set up by the government itself, has said, ‘Suppression of data and the subsequent
leaks have progressively resulted in the “demonising of data” and ended up
demoralising the country’s statistical system.’
On the one hand, tech giants are amassing enormous amounts of our personal data—
what we do, what we buy, where we go, what our preferences are. They use this data
to grab our attention and to manipulate it. On the other hand, our government doesn’t
give us access to data that is vital to our collective lives, so that it can keep us in the
dark, keep us confused and thus manipulate the political discourse. Both the State and
Capital are working by stealth to construct an economic and political future for us—
without our consent. Both need to be combatted.
The government is readying to mark the Amrit Mahotsav of our independence. It’s an
occasion to celebrate, to feel proud of the long road we have travelled, the challenges
we have overcome and the achievements we have made. But it must also be an
occasion to take a measure of our continuing challenges and the impediments we face.
And to put our minds together and prepare a road map for our journey ahead. Poverty,
inequality, unemployment, have to be brought back into the Amrit Mahotsav discourse.
The discourse right now is mere empty rhetoric. There is not even an honest
acknowledgement of our challenges, leave alone any clear resolve and strategy to
overcome them.
For a meaningful discourse, for a roadmap that that will take us towards prosperity and
dignity for all Indians, we need data. Authentic, credible, dependable data,
uncontaminated by partisan political considerations. We need clean data.
In order for us to banish poverty, we need to first banish data poverty. We need to
banish insincerity.

PSU MEGA SALE AND VIZAG STEAL

March 2021
It is important that we turn our attention to the Government of India’s decision to
privatise Vizag Steel plant, Visakha Ukku. I will try and put it in the larger context of the
government’s intent to embark on a massive privatisation programme. I will ask
questions and challenge some of the assumptions behind this privatisation drive that
the government wants us to accept as an economic reform programme.
Vizag city is restless. Steel Plant workers and the general public are storming the streets
to protest against the Union government’s decision to sell off the public sector
undertaking (PSU). Every political party and civil society organisation—except of course
the BJP and its ally, Janasena—are opposing the move. Civil society in Andhra Pradesh
is angry, anxious and concerned about the development. The Andhra Pradesh chief
minister has written to the Prime Minister asking him not to go ahead with the
privatization of the steel plant.
It’s natural for workers of any PSU to be angry at a bid to privatise their unit. They see
it as a bid to steal, and they have good reason to feel this way.
Vizag Steel is different in many ways. It’s not the concern merely of the workers of the
plant. The entire civil society is alarmed over the central government’s announcement.
It is not just land, brick, mortar and machinery like in any other industry. It was won
after a prolonged struggle by the entire people of the state—32 people laid down their
lives from all parts of the then united Andhra Pradesh for its establishment. There were
fasts unto death. Police action. Strikes. Prolonged agitation. Resignations by MLAs and
MPs. They were real resignations. There was an unanimous resolution by the state
assembly. Eyeball to eyeball confrontation with the centre. Vizag steel plant symbolises
the victory of the Telugu people over the adamant central government then headed by
the mighty Indira Gandhi.
Sadly, now the ruling party at the Centre seems to be pitifully challenged in its ability to
understand this emotive aspect. Their apparatchiks in the state know this background.
But they have no courage to stand up and speak up on behalf of the people of the
state. It is not for emotive reasons that I’m saying that Vizag Steel should be left alone
and not privatised. No. That’s not my contention. My concern is much larger.
My intention in this essay is to interrogate the way the government is packaging the
privatisation drive; challenge the wisdom of this move; raise questions about its larger
theoretical premises, and air my anxieties about its practical implementation by the
current government, especially given its record of patronage to a few oligarchs.
The government, the pink papers and several corporate honchos want us to believe
that the Budget 2021-22 is a game changer. Not for any reason other than merely its
decision to sell off public sector undertakings. They want us to believe that this is a bold
reform move. The stock market rose after the announcement. It salivated at the
prospect of large-scale transactions of buying and selling.
The Modi government wants us to believe that selling PSUs itself is reform, not actually
reforming their functioning. In the last week of February 2021, the Prime Minister
declared in a webinar that the government has no business to be in business. As
though it was a moment of penny drop for him, an epiphany. He may not have known
that his speech writers had repurposed some lines from the speeches of Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher from the 1980s. And those leaders in turn had taken the idea
from the works of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. That economic philosophy is
unabashedly clear: Help the rich, and their investments will produce jobs and prosperity
for everyone else. And business is only about making short-term profits. Never mind
even if less 10% own more than 90% of a nation’s wealth.
But fortunately, that economic theology is now increasingly under fire. It resulted in
rapacious behemoths exploiting both labour and environment and sponging off natural
resources doled out by corrupt politicians.
There’s an alternative, however. Help the middle class and the lower-income sections of
society. Their purchasing power will power an economy towards an unprecedented and
sustained growth. If this is not ‘Atmanirbhar’—self-sufficient—in economic philosophy,
then I wonder what else is! Gandhiji would agree. Sardar Patel would agree. Deendayal
Upadhyay would agree. Let’s leave Pandit Nehru alone.
The world is coming around to this understanding. The 1.9-trillion-dollar stimulus
announced by US President Biden in March 2021 is in line with this thinking, not with
the thinking of Reagan, Thatcher, Fayek and Friedman. There were days when it was
fashionable to sneer at the public sector. To stigmatise it as inefficient. To portray the
private sector as a paragon of virtue and efficiency. But you see, meta data from across
the globe doesn’t support this fancy prejudice.
In India, only the top 100 large private companies do well. It is beyond dispute that the
largest non-farm non-performing assets (NPAs) are in the private sector. Also keep in
mind that during the last five years, fixed capital formation in the private sector has
fallen to 23.4% from 26.1%. So much for the efficiency of the private sector. Evidence
surely doesn’t support the slandering of the public sector. Take a look at the stock
markets. At least eight public sector undertakings are all-time favourites there.
No one quarrels with the need to further improve the efficiency of the PSUs. Some of
them are hopelessly inefficient. But so are many private units. Such PSUs need deep cut
reforms, not sale. Reform is heavy lifting. Sale is the lazy option for governments. The
thing to do is to reform the governance of inefficient PSUs. Appoint professionals to
manage them, not Babus. Eliminate government interference. Such Reform increases
the efficiency of the state enterprises. Sale has a risk of creating monopolies, oligarchs,
crony capitalists. It can distort our democratic polity. We don’t have to look farther than
Russia to understand what could be the nature of threat to democracy. Or even closer
at home at the opaqueness of the electoral bonds and the disproportionate advantage
the ruling party had in gathering them and garnering them. We must not forget the
Modi government’s eagerness to support, not so long ago, a company which didn’t have
experience even in making toy planes, to make war planes.
Those sceptical about the possibility of PSU efficiency can take a look at the scene in
Singapore. The state-owned enterprises there do exceedingly well. They’re large, too.
As in South Korea. Or take China: last year [2020], there were more enterprises in the
Fortune 500 list from China than from any other part of the globe. America is behind
China on this score. And a large number of those enterprises are state owned.
Let’s stop soap boxing about the inefficiency of the public sector. PSUs can be made
efficient. Reform, I repeat, is the need, not sale. Offload some stake, by all means, if
you want to. But why an outright sale? The Prime Minister said that ‘the government’s
focus should be on the welfare of society and policies related to the people’. To him it is
‘misusing the talent of our officers to keep them in the business of operation of public
entities’. But the point is: who is forcing the government to keep its officers tied down
to managing public entities? Professionalise their management. Let officers do
government work. Who’s stopping you, Prime Minister?
The PM sounded as though the thousands of migrant labourers were unattended to and
uncared for because scores of government officers were languishing in shop floors,
busy managing PSUs! He said he wants to use the proceeds from the sale of PSUs to
enhance ‘rural connectivity, supply safe drinking water and make provisions for cheap
housing’. Isn’t there someone around who can tell him that efficiently run PSUs will
actually give the government money every year, year after year, to do all these and
much more?
The government has a hopelessly weak case for privatisation. It stretches the definition
of reform beyond recognition. It makes no economic sense. It will spell doom for our
democratic fabric if a few cronies are favoured in this flea market sort of sale.
Remember the reports from January this year [2021], when the NITI Aayog, the
finance ministry and the Competition Commission raised red flags over the
concentration of power in India’s corporate world with regard to ports, airports, telecom
and Pharma? But they were overruled, and some companies were favoured. That’s the
danger, real danger, lurking in the bushes.
A secretary in the finance ministry said, ‘India is in a position where it must be less
sentimental about PSU sales.’ It is such unelected bureaucrats and some unelectable
politicians who show how insensitive the central government is to the emotions and
sentiments of the people—like the people of Andhra Pradesh.
Andhra Pradesh got a very raw deal during bifurcation in the division of assets and
liabilities. Special Category Status, which was promised on the floor of the Parliament
and during the election campaign, was denied. Andhra Bank was vapourised. And now
there’s an attempt to pick our pockets, to steal from us by privatising Vizag Steel.
This entire saga throws an unforgiving light on the coldblooded copy-cat economic
philosophy of this government. On its voodoo economics. On its indecent haste and
questionable intent to sell valuable public assets to a few chosen beneficiaries.
In the case of Vizag Steel, our rulers should know that people can be emotional about
industries too. Not just about mandirs.

WHO KILLED FATHER STAN SWAMY?

Terror and the Indian State

(Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist working in Central India , was
arrested by the National Investigation Agency for being a Maoist ‘sympathizer’. He was
booked under the draconian UAPA for alleged criminal conspiracy and sedition. He was
83 years old, frail and suffering from Parkinson’s disease at the time of his arrest. His
health deteriorated in prison but his requests for bail on medical grounds were
repeatedly rejected, and he died in prison.
This is a revised and edited version of an essay written in July 2021, days after Father
Stan Swamy’s death.)
Like, I’m sure, every one of you, I too was shocked on hearing of the death of Father
Stan Swamy. I’m still unable to get over the sorrow. With the initial shock followed by
sorrow is a deep sense of shame. An 84-year-old priest suffering from Parkinson’s and
now COVID-19, lying in a hospital, still under arrest, with no hope of getting bail and
seeing his own people in Ranchi again. What goes through is mind, especially when he
can sense that he is nearing his end?
Should he have died? Died in this way? Why did it happen? Who is responsible for it?
Was the Indian State threatened by this elderly, seriously ill man? Why was it
threatened? Is our Republic safer today with his death? These questions haunt me. I
tried to search for answers. I will write down here where my search led me to.
I noticed that a lot of people were outraged because Fr Stan Swamy had to repeatedly
plead for a straw or a sipper. What if he had been given a sipper as soon as he asked
for it? Or even before he asked? Would that have made things all right? Many people
found it inhuman that an 84-year-old was kept in prison for several months. What if Fr
Stan Swamy were in his forties? A lot of commentators pointed out the insensitivity of
our executive and judiciary to Stan Swamy’s ill health, and so many of us are moved to
tears because he died. Would it have been all right if Fr Swamy were a healthy man in
prison, without Parkinson’s; if the jail authorities had been sensitive to his ill health; if
he hadn’t died? Would it have been all right if he hadn’t been a priest, a man known for
his service and sacrifice, for his decades-long work for and among poor and
dispossessed Adivasis? Father Stan Swamy’s age, ill health, and finally his lonely death
—all of these showed us the ugly and cruel face of the Indian State. Even the
unquestioning nationalists who wear rose-tinted glasses would have had a disturbing
glimpse of the spiked iron fist behind the velvet glove.
The episode disturbed us, moved some of us to tears, lent a sharp edge to our outrage
and shook us out of our slumber and complacency. In other words, it took the death of
someone like Fr Stan Swamy to shock us.
But let our outrage not deflect us from the core issue. Let our focus not waver from the
brutal iron fist we have seen. That is what Fr Stan Swamy’s death requires us to do.
The plot that forged the iron-spike fist which crushed Fr Swamy began small. In 1967.
Our Parliament passed the Unlawful Activities (Prevention Act) that year, in the wake of
the Naxalbari armed uprising and the general rise in left-wing extremism. It was
amended in 2004, incorporating the provisions of the lapsed Terrorist and Disruptive
Activities (Prevention) Act 1985 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2002
(POTA)—both controversial, draconian laws that undermined fundamental rights in the
name of national security. More amendments—to make the laws even more draconian
—were made in 2008, and 2012. Successive governments, both the Congress-led UPA
and BJP-led NDA, told us that all these were necessary to meet the challenges of
terrorism. Please bear in mind that almost all major political parties of our country were
part of one alliance or the other, and therefore supported these amendments.
It was in 2008, during the UPA-I regime, that the plot thickened, with stringent bail
conditions slipped into the Act. Now, if the court had reasons to believe that the
charges against the accused were prima facie true, it need not grant bail. In 2012, the
same regime expanded the scope and severity of the Act. Both the 2008 and 2012
amendments were supported by the BJP, which was then the main opposition party.
Among the most significant insertions made in the Act through the 2008 amendment
was the extension of the pre-charge detention period from 90 days to 180 days. This
amendment also reversed the universally accepted principle of laying the burden of
proof on the prosecution. With this amendment to the Act, it was the accused who had
to prove his or her innocence, and disprove the court’s presumption, based on the
evidence presented to it by the prosecution that he or she was prima facie guilty. The
amendment also denied the accused the right to remain silent.
The 2008 amendment further provided that a person may be arrested by ‘any officer of
the Designated Authority’ on the basis of belief ‘from personal knowledge’, or
information furnished by another person, or ‘from any document, article or any other
thing which may furnish evidence of the commission’ of an offence under the Act. (Now
we know why, ever since, there have been attempts made to plant evidence in the
computers of various accused persons.) One more thing: the arresting officer, according
to the amendment, only needed to inform the suspects of the charges against them ‘as
soon as may be [feasible]’.
It was the 2008 amendment that made bail conditions stringent. The UPA’s Home
Minister, P. Chidambaram, said, while introducing the Bill in the Rajya Sabha, on
December 18, just a day after the Lok Sabha passed it: ‘Broadly, what we are doing is
imposing restrictions on the path of grant of bail.’ He made it sound palatable. The BJP
supported these provisions. That is why, when replying to the discussion on the 2019
amendments, the present Home Minister, Amit Shah, reminded the Congress that his
party had supported the amendments brought in by the UPA in 2008 and 2012 and
urged the Congress to reciprocate. A warm invitation to co-operation from across the
aisle.
The debates that preceded the passing of all these amendments, did see a few, just a
few, members of both houses express their concern about their potential misuse.
Successive governments assured them that measures would be taken to monitor the
implementation of the amended Acts to prevent their misuse. But, since the days of
TADA, misuse of provisions for detention have been continuously reported. Conviction
rates have been consistently low, under two per cent, as prosecutions were unable to
prove their charges in most cases. This reinforced the suspicions that arrests made
under these laws were arbitrary. Suspects were detained for long periods of time,
making their eventual acquittal meaningless as they lost many years of their precious
lives behind bars.
The latest amendments to the UAPA, in 2019, made the law much more cruel and
brutal. Now the plot becomes full blown. The BJP outperformed the Congress-led
government on this score. It moved far reaching amendments to UAPA in July 2019.
The bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 8 July. The government refused demands
to refer the bill to a Select Committee, and rushed its passage. The Congress-led UPA
government had at least sent its bills a Select Committee. The brute-majority Modi
regime wouldn’t waste time with such democratic procedures. The Lok Sabha passed
the 2019 amendments on 24 July—within less than a fortnight of the bill being
introduced. The speed was even greater in the Rajya Sabha—the bill was introduced in
the Upper House 2 August and was passed on 8 August. In a House where the ruling
party was not in a majority and would have struggled for numbers, the amendments
were passed with 147 votes in favour and 42 against. You will be surprised to see the
list of parties that supported the amendments. Please look up the division details, they
can be found on the net.
The most important change that the Modi government sought through these
amendments was to empower itself to designate individual persons as terrorists. The
law till then only provided for listing organizations as terrorist or unlawful outfits. After
2019, the Union government can declare any person anywhere in the country a
terrorist. It can do so almost at whim. It may designate as a terrorist anyone ‘who (i)
commits or participates in acts of terrorism, (ii) prepares for terrorism, (iii) promotes
terrorism, or (iv) is otherwise involved in terrorism.’
The 2019 amendment empowered an inspector of the National Investigation Agency
(NIA), which reports to the Union Home Minister, to conduct investigation, whereas the
Act until then required a DSP or ACP of the police force of the particular state to
investigate. The 2019 amendment also authorized the NIA to go to any state without
taking the consent from the state’s Director General of Police (DGP). The NIA could also
order the confiscation of assets of terror accused bypassing the state DGP.
For all the powers that this Act and the various amendments to it have given to the
executive, they did not provide a clear and precise definition of terrorism since the
beginning. The definition is so broad, so loose that in a sense any act, even an
everyday act or speech, that the government does not like a citizen doing can be
interpreted as an act of terror. A citizen can be locked up and left to waste away in
prison without trial for years. There is ample room for arbitrariness. Proving the
innocence of the accused could take years. In some cases, decades. Unless, of course,
the accused dies.
We must know that Fr Stan Swamy is not the only one who has died in custody as a
UAPA undertrial. In January of the same year, a 38-year-old tribal activist, Kanchan
Nanaware, accused of Maoist links and arrested in 2014 died of cardiac arrest and brain
ailment in custody. All her bail pleas were also rejected. In previous years, there were
others.
Let us look at some cases where a person was booked under UAPA and imprisoned on
evidence that eventually could not stand in the courts.
In March 2021, 122 people who were charged with terror links under UAPA were
acquitted by a trial court after they had been kept in prison for 19 years. Yes, 122
innocent people waited for 19 years to walk free. After their initial years in custody,
they had to regularly and repeatedly attend court and were summoned frequently to
police stations. Five persons died during the trial.
In May 2021, a Mumbai court acquitted Mohammed Ilyas and Mohammed Irfan of
charges levelled against them under UAPA after they had spent nine years in prison.
Basheer Ahmed Baba from Kashmir languished in a Gujarat prison for 11 years before a
court acquitted him of charges that he had links with Hizbul Mujahideen. In May of the
same year an auto rickshaw driver from Tripura working in Bangalore was acquitted by
a court after four years in custody.
Gaur Chakraborty spent seven years in prison before he was acquitted of UAPA charges
in 2016.
Human rights activist Arun Ferreira was arrested in 2007, acquitted in 2012, and
rearrested in 2018 and remains in prison.
Just this month [July 2021] peasant leader and RTI activist Akhil Gogoi was acquitted,
two years after he was arrested for giving a call for a blockade and delivering fiery
speeches against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
Journalist Siddique Kappan, arrested while he was on his way to Haathras, UP, to report
on the rape and death of a Dalit girl, is still in custody.*
There are many more cases. Well known to many of us because they grabbed media
attention: Khobad Gandhy, Binayak Sen, Natasha Narwal, Omar Khaled, and many
others picked up for the Bhima Koregaon gathering, anti CAA protests, North-east Delhi
violence. And then there are men and women arrested in Kashmir and languishing in
jails following the crackdown after the Union government scrapped Article 370.
This again, is a small list.
You might have your own opinion about each one of these accused persons. But should
the State and by extension the government of the day be allowed to go by subjective
and unsubstantiated opinions or presumptions and persecute and arrest people? Are we
not to have the rule of law, a due process of establishing someone’s guilt before we
curtail their liberty and inflict punishment? Do we allow the period of waiting for trial to
also become the period of unsanctioned punishment? In other words, let an accusation
itself become the sentence, and render acquittal meaningless? Is this what we want our
Republic to be? A brutal, unchecked leviathan?
All political parties have played a part in this gory plot. Yes, every one of them is
culpable. Some actively supported the terror laws and amendments to them and
participated in the process of forging them into evil instruments of repression. Some
others let that happen, only making half-hearted protests for the record in Parliament.
Or, at best, posting their opposition on social media or expressing it at press briefings.
The political parties that petitioned the President of our Republic to intervene and
instruct the government to fix accountability for Stan Swamy’s death want us to forget
their own complicity in his death. In the death of Kanchan Nanaware. In the
unforgivable incarceration, for years, of hundreds of so called ‘undertrials’. They don’t
question the Act itself and its brutal provisions. They only question their application by
the government of the day. Today, the Congress questions the BJP. Yesterday, the BJP
questioned the Congress. Neither with any sincerity. They created the evil together. The
present dispensation has outdone all the others, that is all.
I have no doubt about who killed Fr Stan Swamy.
Do you?

*Kappan was released in February 2023. He had been granted bail by the Allahabad
Hight Court on 23 December 2022, but it took his lawyer over a month to secure his
release due to procedural delays.

FARM LAWS
A Story of Hubris
(This essay comprises edited transcripts of two episodes of ‘Midweek Matters’. One was
broadcast in the summer of 2021, when the farmers’ protest against the three Farm
Laws passed by the Modi government in 2020 had been going on for almost a year. The
second was broadcast in December 2021, days after the laws were finally withdrawn
and repealed by the government.)
CABINET RESHUFFLE OR FARM LAWS RESET? WHAT’S THE PRIORITY?
June 2021
There are reports in news outlets, which have special access to the ruling party that
Prime Minister Modi is planning a rejig of his cabinet. That he is assessing his ministers’
functioning.
The exercise is unlikely to yield any significant results. It has been clear from the
beginning that he has a very limited pool of talent in his party to choose from. Some
people added to the cabinet, some dropped, and some changes of portfolios may be
necessary, but they will not amount to much except to send a message that the PM
seeks performance from his ministers—although it is obvious by now that loyalty rather
than skill gets you places in Mr Modi’s cabinet. So it isn’t surprising that most of his
ministers bring neither professional competence nor lend political weight to the cabinet
anyway. But optics matter, and the upcoming state elections [ in early 2022] may be the
real reason for the rejig—to induct MPs from those states to beef up his party’s
prospects.
But there are two aspects that deserve Mr Modi’s more serious attention.
One, he must introspect if he and his omnipotent PMO are allowing the ministers to
actually function with any reasonable amount of freedom. An impression has gained
ground that there’s little initiative possible by even those who are capable of taking
good decisions. The best judge of whether this is true or not is the Prime Minister
himself. If it is indeed true, he must address the problem. He must make what is now a
collection of mere ministers, remarkable only in their sycophancy, into a team of
performers. India needs that. Now, much more than ever before.
The second important thing that deserves his serious attention is policy. Sound policy,
formulated in the right way in a democratic country like ours. In democracies, often,
bad policy arrived at by a right process is less harmful than a good policy arrived at by
the wrong process. The mishandling of COVID has given us a lot of lessons. Had the
states, experienced and informed political representatives across parties, civil society
and people with professional expertise been involved in the assessment and
forecasting, and in policy formulation and implementation, we could have handled the
situation much more effectively. We could have avoided the vaccine mess, lakhs of
deaths, economic hardship, and the shameful, tragic sight of dead bodies floating in the
holiest river of ours. There can be no two opinions about this.
The belated and partial reset of the government’s vaccine policy, if it is an indication
that the government is learning to revise its policies and is prepared to shed its rigidity,
may be a faint ray of democratic hope.
After all, in a democracy a mandate once every five years is not to be interpreted by
any dispensation as unbridled licence to do as it pleases, without consultation and
accountability. Government should be a continuous expression of the opinions, spirit
and energies of the people of our nation.
There’s one more important policy issue that urgently needs a democratic approach
from the government: The anti-Farm Laws agitation by our farmers.
The Modi government’s Farm Bills were rushed though Parliament without discussion.
The bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha on 17 September 2020, and in the Rajya
Sabha just three days later, on 20 September. The President, Ram Nath Kovind, gave
assent to the bills on 27 September 2020. Bills of such far-reaching consequences, and
which concerned the security and livelihoods of tens of crores of Indian citizens,
became laws in a span of just ten days. There was rush and hurry and aggression in
the whole process even before the bills reached Parliament. The model bills that had
been prepared earlier by the Centre to be circulated to the states, were not properly
discussed. A committee of seven chief ministers was constituted to examine the bills,
but even before it could submit its report, the Centre promulgated three ordinances in
June 2020. And by the end of September, they were made laws.
Thus, bills about which the farmers’ groups had been expressing grave misgivings for at
least a year were rammed through Parliament and made laws. The farmers feared that
by deregulating the system of government-run mandis and opening the wholesale
agriculture market for all players, the Modi regime was in effect scrapping the
government-guaranteed Minimum Support Price (MSP). The private players would not
be bound by any fixed floor price, below which they wouldn’t be able to go. Thus,
farmers would be at the mercy of big corporate players who could monopolise the
market and dictate terms.
The misgivings of the farming community were not responded to in a conciliatory
manner. And when the farmers began to protest, the agitation was sought to be
demonised, portrayed as ‘anti-national’. The farmers did not back down, so the
government made a show of being open to discussion. But the government’s talks with
the farmers’ organisations were half-hearted and insincere. They came across more as
meetings to convince the farmers of the government’s point of view rather than to
listen to the farmers and address their apprehensions.
The Supreme Court stepped in, put the legislation on hold, and appointed a committee
to go into the issues raised by the agitating farmers. It was an avoidable kick in the
teeth for the government.
The committee’s composition, however, did not evoke confidence in the farmers. As a
result, the convenor of the All India Kisan Coordination Committee (AIKCC), which was
spearheading the protests, Bhupinder Singh Mann, who was also to be part of the
committee, quit.
Now, let’s quickly examine the proceedings of the committee. It met 23 times. Of these,
11 were its internal meetings and 12 were devoted to meeting with the stakeholders—
farmer organisations, state governments, officials of marketing boards, operators of
private mandis, food parks from various states, industry associations, professionals and
academicians. The committee’s press releases after each meeting listed the participants
in the meetings. The list did not name which farmers’ organisations attended the
meetings, nor the professionals and academicians who it claimed were at the meetings.
Only in the press release of its last meeting did the committee claim to have met the
office bearers of the AIKCC.
But why? Does that not smack of opaqueness?
The committee’s portal also has a photo gallery, which has pictures of some meetings.
But all of the pictures are taken in long shot. The participants are not clearly visible.
Only the photos with the committee members are in close up, sharp and clear. It is
strange, to say the least.
We also do not know the contents of the committee’s report. It was submitted to the
apex court in a sealed cover.
With this kind of opaqueness in the working of the committee we should not expect
that it will help in resolving the differences between the farmers and the government.
Let me now draw your attention to the larger agrarian question in India.
The last spirited debate and a comprehensive discussion on the agrarian question took
place sometime around 1965. Since then, agriculture gradually fell out of the attention
stream of the Indian economic imagination. In the early 1970s once again a modicum
of debate took place on the eve of the quickly aborted land reforms. After that there
has been hardly any meaningful debate on a sector, which continues to absorb the bulk
of our labour force and which is vital to our economy.
It’s important to note some critical facts to understand the state of our agriculture. It
gives us an idea of why the farmers are agitating. Their leaders may not be equipped to
express themselves in sophisticated language, present their case in a PowerPoint, or
provide data in spreadsheets to attract the attention of the economic priesthood that is
lodged in powerful places.
Please take note of the following.
After the major food crisis of 1965, Indian agriculture did well. Food production
multiplied 3.7 times. The population by only 2.5 times. As a result, today we are secure
on the food front. We have about 45% surplus food per person in the country.
But what is the state of our farmer?
A farm family’s average income was 34% of a non-farm family’s in the 1980s. Today it
is 25%. A farm family earns, on an average, just Rs 56,510 in a year from a hectare of
irrigated land. And from a hectare of non-irrigated, rain-fed land, the income is a
meagre Rs 35,352 per year.
Agriculture accounts for about 17% to our GDP. When almost every sector took a
beating in 2020-2021, the pandemic year, the farm sector grew by 3.6%. If not for
agriculture, our GDP decline could have been much worse than the minus 7.3% in that
fiscal.
Our agriculture absorbs 64% of our rural work force. But its productivity is low
compared to that of non-farm labour: the estimated worker productivity in the
agriculture sector was Rs 62,235 as compared to worker productivity of Rs 1,71,587 in
the non-farm sector during 2011-12, the last year for which data is available.
Therefore, workforce in the farm sector is dwindling. Between 2004-2005 and 2011-
2012, about 3 crore workers left agriculture. The number of cultivators too declined by
2 crores—from 16.61 crores to 14.62 crores—during the same period.
Where did these people go? Young, old, men and women; heads of families, sons and
daughters? They’re unlikely to have any skills outside farming—the majority of them, at
any rate. So, they would have ended up at construction sites, or as untrained cheap
security guards in the apartment complexes of our cities.
Add the reported and unreported suicides of farmers to this dismal scenario to get an
idea of the desperate state of our farmers.
The point is, all this happened while our food production increased. People whose
labour has made us a food-surplus country struggle to make a living. Vast numbers of
them have never known any financial security. Many of them go to bed hungry on most
nights. The farm family is helpless, impoverished, and forced to continue on the path of
further impoverishment.
Successive governments and the economic thinking in the country couldn’t care less.
They were and are focused on investment flows, foreign capital, capital markets, the
Sensex, interest rates, trade liberalisation, fiscal deficits, writing off of corporate debts,
business round tables, IPOs, rating agencies’ scores, ease of doing business rankings,
IT, e-commerce, smart cities. The country’s power elite has always had little time for
agriculture. Only farmers’ suicides were news worthy, holding our media’s temporary
attention.
Against this backdrop, in 2017, came the announcement of the Modi government’s
intention to double farmers’ income. The NITI Aayog released a document titled
‘Doubling Farmers’ Income: Rationale, Strategy, Prospects and Action Plan’. But the
document did not go beyond suggesting some market, technology and crop
diversification related strategies and action plans, without addressing the core issues
that bedevil the sector. There was no attempt to come to grips with the structural
issues, which are critical to the problem.
The most disappointing and even shocking prognosis of the NITI Aayog document was
the following: ‘If the number of cultivators keeps dwindling at the same rate as
experienced during 2004-5 to 2011-12, it will reduce their number by 13.4% between
2015-2023.’ And here comes the shocker: ‘This implies that the available farm income
will be distributed among 13.4% less farmers.’
The shadow text of the strategy seems more or less to be this: let the number of
cultivators dwindle so that it will be easier to double the farm income, as there will be a
lesser number of claimants to the agriculture pie. Is this not shocking?
There are serious issues in the agriculture sector that cannot be ignored any more.
Nearly 60% of India’s small and marginal farmers do not have access to institutional
credit from scheduled commercial banks. About 7.5 crore farmers have no access to
formal credit. Even among those who could get credit from institutional sources, 9%
borrowed from private money lenders also, perhaps because access to them is easier.
Small and marginal farmers operated 86% of the farm holdings, according to the 2015-
16 census.
The Green Revolution increased food production dramatically. But it also pushed up the
input costs—seeds, fertiliser, pesticides. The farmer became hostage to these inputs,
with little credit available. As a result, farmers became dependent on the Minimum
Support Price system. But even with the MSP support, farmers’ incomes have remained
abysmally low. We have already noted their meagre annual incomes. At the same time,
this model of agriculture has done great damage to the soil, environment, biodiversity
and sustainability.
Telling these impoverished, vulnerable small and marginal farmers that they can trade
in futures, can sell their produce on e-platforms to anyone, anywhere in the country
and get better prices makes little sense to them. Most of them have no secure rights on
the land anyway.
Speaking to the farmers about market access without first addressing basic issues like
credit, tenancy rights and minimum base price is insensitive in the extreme. Throwing
them, with their precarious livelihoods and slender resources, to the big, predatory
corporate wolves is sheer cruelty.
The government with its might may be able to suppress the farmers’ agitation and go
ahead with the implementation of its Farm Laws. But the question is: to what effect?
For whose benefit?
Let me list out some points from the charter of demands by a farmers’ union:
a) Abolition of all agriculture debts.
b) Redistribution of all cultivable wasteland vesting in the government to subsistence
farmers and landless labourers.
c) Occupancy rights for all tenant farmers.
d) Marketing cooperatives to eliminate private traders.
e) Cheap credit, seeds and fertilisers.
I can bet you will be stunned when I tell you who made these demands and when.
These were points in the charter of demands released by the All India Kisan Sabha
(AIKS) in 1936. Yes, in 1936. The AIKS was founded in Guntur, in the Andhra region of
the erstwhile Madras Presidency, by Acharya N.G. Ranga. It organised a 200-mile
march through the villages of Bombay Presidency that ended as an open session
attended by 40,000 farmers in Faizpur. Forty thousand farmers. Marching 200 miles. In
1936.
Those demands of the farmers are still unmet.
That is the issue to be addressed by the government if it wants to usher in a new dawn
in the lives of our farmers, double their income and make India a five-trillion-dollar
economy.
The neo-liberal clerics who dominate our economic establishment do not receive
wisdom from anywhere other than some western universities, from the corridors of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Their eyes are sewn shut to
the east.
They should look at the experience of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.
These countries addressed their agrarian question by undertaking redistribution of land,
making family farms, giving secure land rights, encouraging financial institutions to
supply credit. That was the origin of the cycle of their economic development and
manufacturing. Their countryside teemed with small owner-cultivators rather than
insecure tenant farmers, ‘squatters’ and landless labourers. Agriculture yields rose by
50-60%. Farm incomes rose by 100-150%—yes, 100-150%.
We have something to learn from such experiences. But our economic thinking is poor.
It is lazy, smug, and as ignorant as it is arrogant. It is unfamiliar with economists like
Wolf Ladejinsky. He was not a communist from the erstwhile Soviet Union or Eastern
Europe. He was an American consultant in East Asia immediately after the Second
World War. His ideas catalysed the agriculture reform initiatives I have mentioned
above. The World Bank published his selected papers on the unfinished business of
agrarian reform. When you read these papers—which can be found on the World Bank’s
portal—you will find that Ladejinsky’s ideas are no different from the 1936 All India
Kisan Sabha’s charter of demands.
Our government is strong. The Prime Minister, despite the COVID mess, still has
substantial political capital. But this strength and capital should not be squandered to
ride out storms like the farmers’ agitation by discrediting it or wearing it down. Nor
should it be used to force laws on the nation that will end up favouring big corporates
and food speculators. Mind you, it is food we are talking about. Not just any other
commodity.
What is good for the farmer is good for the country. Without prosperous farmers we
cannot have a prosperous India. They create wealth. Put food on our table. They don’t
loot us and run away to Antigua and London.
Cabinet rejigs are far less important than policy reset. Especially the Farm Laws reset.
Postscript
In November 2021, Narendra Modi withdrew the Farm Laws. It was a victory for the
agitating farmers. But in a speech with all the Bollywood-style theatrics and self-love
that are the hallmark of his addresses to the nation, Modi tried hard to make his retreat
sound like the personal sacrifice of a misunderstood patriarch. The fact was that the
Prime Minister had in fact made the only politically shrewd, face-saving decision
possible, especially with the crucial Uttar Pradesh elections just months away.
The following section is an essay written shortly after the Farm Laws were repealed.
*
FARMERS, ECONOMISTS AND DEMOCRACY
December 2021
I notice that there is an insidious project underway with regard to the now-repealed
Farm Laws. The ruling party, an influential section of our economists, a large and vocal
section of the urban middle class and the mainstream media are stealthily, but
effectively, pushing a narrative. It is this: The Farm Laws were necessary; they still are.
Agriculture is badly in need of reforms and these laws were in the right direction. They
were in the interest of our farmers. A small section—some ‘vested interests’—opposed
them, and the poor Prime Minister, a sincere and wise reformer, was forced to give in
on the eve of important state elections.
This discourse tells us how a desirable set of measures had to be sacrificed at the altar
of irresponsible democracy. The country’s grand reform project was derailed by an
organised and determined minority, which manipulated public opinion and used farmers
to push its anti-national agenda. So, in this discourse, the victorious farmers are shown
either as simpletons used by a crafty lobby of self-serving left-liberal anti-nationals, or
as hot-headed ignoramuses—stubborn, backward and incapable of understanding the
goodness of the Farm Laws. The government is shown as well-intentioned, and a victim
of mob politics. The farmers’ demand for MSP is demonised as something that messes
up the markets and in any case, is fiscally unviable.
I want to interrogate this narrative and show that the Farm Laws are merely aimed at
accelerating market dynamics in the agriculture sector, without addressing the core
issues that plague the sector in our country. And how this narrative’s understanding of
agriculture merely as an economic sector, the peasant as only an economic actor, and
food as nothing but a tradable commodity, is deeply flawed.
The BJP’s farmers’ wing, the Kisan Morcha, held its National Executive meeting earlier
this month [December 2021] in Gurugram near Delhi. One message from it is clear. The
party is reeling under the humiliation meted out to it by the farmers. The mighty Prime
Minister’s climb down on the three Farm Laws, his theatrical apology, and the
subsequent repeal of the laws in Parliament is something that the party is not able to
stomach. It forcefully and aggressively evangelised the goodness of the laws. It
branded the agitating farmers and their supporters as anti-nationals, terrorists,
Khalistanis. But in the event of their own Supreme Leader’s capitulation, how does one
put up a brave face? The Union agriculture minister who attended the Kisan Morcha’s
meet gave the template. He described the PM’s climb down as an unprecedented large-
heartedness—‘Aitihaasik Badhappan’. He told the Morcha’s leaders that the farm laws
were intended for the good of the farmers, but they were repealed because of a small
section of the farmers who were against them. Don’t miss his insistence on ‘a small
section’. The PM too underlined in his address to the nation that it was only a small
section that opposed the laws. The agriculture minister gave another dimension to the
spin. He said, as we are celebrating Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, the PM didn’t want any
disagreement in any corner of the country! So the task for the BJP’s own Kisan Morcha
is to convince the farmers of the country that it was the large-heartedness and benign
disposition of the PM as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of our Independence that
led him to repeal the laws. Quite a task!
Farmers don’t write columns in pink papers. Their leaders are not suave, many-tongued
talkers like our neoliberal economists, nor are they loud and angry debaters like the
ruling party spokespersons on prime-time television. They are not smartly-dressed
telegenic people. So the classist mainstream media is unkind to their cause. The
farmers’ arguments have not been heard or read as widely as they should be.
I will attempt to articulate them here. I won’t go into the specific clauses of the now
repealed Farm Laws and how they are detrimental to the interests of our farmers.
There’s already a huge body of writing on this, most of which you can find online. I will
take issue with only two points that our economists put forward. I will take the essay
published by Ashok Gulati and Shweta Saini in the Financial Express on 20 December
2021. This is not to single them out for criticism. But only because their writing is very
competently articulated and captures the essential elements of the narrative against the
agitating farmers. It’s a representative piece of writing. First, let me quote what it said
about the democratic process in policymaking. Especially policy that impacts a sector
that is so large and vital to our economy.
I was aghast at reading this paragraph. See if you also feel the same:
‘…in a democratic system, policies are not always framed on a scientific basis. They are
often influenced by various lobbies, including politicians who, at election time, offer
freebies like free electricity, farm loan waivers as “doles for votes”. This short-
sightedness results in suboptimal or even irrational policy choices, which, in due course,
harm the economy, environment, and even farmers.’
There’s a dark suggestion here that the democratic process is inimical to sound policy.
And that elections, which are an essential process of democracy, result in irrational
policy choices. Could their words mean anything else?
So what do our economists tell us? They tell us that they are the repositories of sound
policies and custodians of scientific choices, their judgements free of the ill effects of
democracy. The beneficiaries of their prescriptions may not even know how much good
those prescriptions do to them. This is a very arrogant view of policy-making, typical of
neoliberal economists and believers in techno-scientific solutions to socio-economic
issues. They don’t say it, but they’d be happy if an autocrat is in office and lends his or
her ear to the scientific advice they proffer. In fact, I suspect that our PM must have
fallen into some such a trap. Because the Gujarat chief minister Modi was a fierce
advocate of Minimum Support Price. Here’s what he said on MSP as chief minister:
He said:
‘I want to liberate the farmers from the oppression of the government. Brothers and
sisters, we have said in our election manifesto that the Minimum Support Price will be
worked out on the basis of clear parameters. In that the input costs of the farmer, like
water expenses, labour expenses, electricity cost, price of seeds, etc will be taken into
account. And over and above those costs, we will add 50% and that will be determined
as Minimum Support Price to the farmers.’
Prime Minister Modi didn’t care to share with the nation why, when, and how he got
converted to a completely opposite view on MSP.
Any leader, political party or government with an abiding faith in the democratic
process would have encouraged a robust debate on the Farm Bills inside and outside
the Parliament before passing them. So it must be the sinister belief that democracy is
inimical to sound policy that was behind the hurried passing of the bills without any
debate, in Parliament or civil society—or even, I would imagine, in the Cabinet—thus
resulting in the Farm Laws that brought the protesting farmers to the borders of Delhi.
The announcement of the withdrawal of the Farm Laws was evidently also done without
consulting the Cabinet. It approved the decision post facto. And there was again no
debate in Parliament.
Why do our economists who defend the Farm Laws feel that MSP is undesirable? This is
their reasoning, and I quote Gulati and Saini:
‘…this will not only mess up the economy but also ultimately turn out to be anti-farmer.
The reason is simple: it ignores the basic logic that prices are largely decided by the
overall demand and supply.’
They go on to say that if the procurement at MSP is not severely restricted, ‘giving a
better deal to farmers is likely to blow up the fiscal of the central government’. Yes,
these are their exact words. Their and their cohorts’ estimates of how much it costs the
exchequer may be disputed. But that’s not the point. The point is the overall attitude of
such economists towards agriculture, peasants and the human condition in our rural
economy.
Let me take you through some important details about our agriculture, the farmers,
their incomes, and their predicament.
It is important to keep in mind that about 54% of the country’s total workforce (and
64% of the rural workforce) is engaged in agriculture and allied activities. That means
when we deal with agriculture, we are dealing with more than half of our working
population. About 58% of our rural households are engaged in agriculture. That means,
when we deal with agriculture, we are dealing with six out of every ten families in rural
India. Slightly over 40% of our agricultural labour are women. And 30% of our
cultivators are also women. Now you begin to imagine the enormity of the section who
sustain themselves on agriculture. The number of people, households, elders, children,
their livelihoods, education, healthcare, well-being. Don’t imagine the sector. Imagine
the people.
Urban India and our urbanised intelligentsia need to understand the rural predicament.
I will give you just a small set of data to illustrate how unequal the incomes of farm and
non-farm workers are. And how this inequality has widened over the years. In the
1980s, farm cultivators’ average income was about 34% of non-farm workers’ income.
By 1993-94 it had worsened to 25% of non-farm income. During 2004-05 to 2011-12,
there was a slight improvement, but it was still no better than the 1983-84 level. The
growth of inequality is not because the agriculture sector was doing badly. All this
happened while the agriculture sector was doing quite well. From being food deficit in
the mid-1960s we are now a food surplus nation. We have about 45% more food
available in the country per person per annum. In other words, the peasant has given
us an abundant increase in food availability. But in return, he is further impoverished.
Distress is so great and widespread that in the last two decades alone about 2.5 crore
people have left agriculture. Unskilled as they are, they ended up in low-wage jobs in
construction and other such urban sectors.
What kind of farmers are these? The all India average of landholding is 1.08 hectares.
Small and marginal holdings, that is, 0 to 2 hectares, constitute about 86% of land
holdings in the country. A large proportion of the cultivators are unsecured tenants,
with little or no rights of title. They still depend largely on non-institutional sources of
credit. Another important point to be kept in mind is that only 10% institutional credit is
available to allied agricultural activities such as livestock, forestry, and fisheries. No
political party, no alliance, and no government can escape the responsibility for this
state of affairs in our agricultural sector and for the dire straits of our farmers.
Farmers have very little power over their products. No facility to store their produce and
wait for better market prices. They cannot stave off rapacious money lenders and the
fertiliser and pesticide vendors who advance money for farm operations. Now the Farm
Laws tell them that the government will not give them a support price. A farmer who
cannot really sell his produce locally is shown the promise that he now has the choice
and the opportunity to sell it anywhere in the country! The farmer who is unable to face
a small local middleman is told that he or she can now negotiate with a giant
corporation to get remunerative price. And s/he is also told that, impoverished as s/he
is, s/he can take on the corporate giant in a legal battle if it reneges on a contract.
If the newly ‘empowered’ farmers are still apprehensive, our economists castigate them
that they don’t understand how good the market forces are going to be.
The latest report of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) study tells us that
there is pessimism in our rural areas. The proportion of rural households that said that
their incomes were higher than a year ago fell from 14% in the week ended 14
November 2021 to 8.4% in the week ended 28 November. But our technocrats remain
blind to the distress in our countryside.
They also refuse to understand that agriculture produce is not just a tradable
commodity. It is food. And land is not just a factor of production like any other. It is a
live entity and the farmer has an organic bond and a sentimental relationship with it.
Without addressing issues like land ownership, title, availability of dependable seeds,
fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation, energy supply, infrastructure, research and
development, access to credit, storage, transportation and a host of other vital issues,
the government, and the brand of economists it favours, want to address the marketing
issues. They want us to believe that only marketing needs reform and not all the other
vital areas. On the one hand, farmers are told that loan waivers are bad for the
economy and the government can’t afford to pay MSP. On the other hand, data from
central banks reveals that in the period between April 2013 and March 2021, a
staggering Rs 10.83 lakh crore worth of non-farm-sector bank loans were waived. This
doesn’t inspire confidence about the government in our farmers.
It is high time that our Union government and expert economists who defend its farm
laws listened to the farmers, and reached out to them to understand their condition.
The country would be better off if they gave the farmers half the importance that they
give to the gods of the Market. An angry, disempowered, indebted, miserable farmer
does not help the country reach its goal of a five-trillion-dollar economy.

LAKHIMPUR KHERI
Modi-BJP’s Mann Ki Baat
(This is an edited version of an essay written in October 2021.)
October 3rd. Eight people were killed in Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh. Four of them
were farmers protesting against the Modi government’s three Farm Laws forced upon
the nation a year ago. The farmers were mowed down by an SUV that belonged to the
son of the BJP leader Ajay Mishra Teni, who was then also the minister of state for
home affairs in Mr Modi’s cabinet. In the violence that followed, a journalist and three
BJP supporters were killed. It is important that we carefully unpack the ghastliness of
the Lakhimpur Kheri event. Recall some incidents that took place before and after the
SUV ran over and killed the farmers. Connect them to understand the context of the
event. And to decipher the loud as well as the quiet message that it contains for our
Republic, it’s implications for our democratic polity and for us, the people, in general. In
this essay I will make an attempt to do that.
Let us recall the Lakhimpur Kheri event. The farmers were returning after staging a
protest demanding the withdrawal of the Farm Laws enacted by the Union government.
And they decided to register their protest by blocking the convoy of the visiting deputy
chief minister of UP, Keshav Prasad Maurya. Three vehicles from the convoy ploughed
into the march, running over the protesters. Two farmers died on the spot, dozens were
seriously injured, of whom two died in hospital. The dead had tyre marks on their
bodies. They were crushed under the vehicles. The convoy included an SUV that
belonged to the son of Ajay Mishra Teni, the Union minister. Onlookers claim it was the
first vehicle that was driven into the march, and they also claim to have seen the
minister’s son, Ashish Mishra, running away into the fields. Ashish Mishra, alias Monu, is
also a BJP leader in the area and an aspirant for an MLA ticket. Violence followed the
mowing down of the protestors. Another four people died in it. Three of them were BJP
workers and supporters and one a journalist. Of the three BJP supporters, one is said to
be Ashish Mishra’s driver.
Late night on 9 October, UP police arrested Ashish Mishra. He did not appear before the
police for questioning after the first summons were pasted on the gate of his residence.
His father, the Union minister, said that his son was at home but was unwell. The
Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the matter. The bench headed by the
Chief Justice of India pulled up the counsel representing the UP government. Under
pressure from the Supreme Court, Ashish was finally made available to the police the
following day. The police claimed that he was questioned for over ten hours. The senior
officer who conducted the interrogation told the waiting media persons that the police
felt that Ashish was uncooperative and his answers were elusive. They arrested him.
When presented in court, he was remanded to 14 days’ judicial custody. And on the
following Monday he was sent to police custody for three days for further questioning.
There are a few things that should not be missed about the saga up to here. After that
we will try to connect incidents that happened before the ghastly murder took place. To
begin with, Ashish Mishra was summoned by the UP police not as an accused but as a
witness, although every piece of circumstantial evidence from the scene of murder
pointed to him. Next, dishonouring of police summons was not taken seriously by the
UP police. Third, they had no intention of taking him into custody. The Union minister
simply said that his son was unwell and could not present himself before the police, and
he would go to them whenever they wanted after he got well. Fourth, the Supreme
Court of India took suo motu cognisance of the incident. Fifth, it was only after the
Supreme Court made harsh remarks and insisted that the accused, however high profile
and mighty, should be apprehended, that the state’s counsel assured the Court that it
would be done. Sixth, only after that kind of pressure from the Court was Ashish Mishra
sent to the police for questioning. Seventh, if there were no pressure from the apex
court, the state and Union governments would have hushed up the whole thing and
would have left the involvement of Ashish Mishra un-investigated. Eighth, opposition
leaders were detained to prevent them from visiting the town and meeting the families
of the deceased. Ninth, only after sustained pressure and uproar were they let in.
Tenth, internet services in the area were suspended, so that communications to and
from the area were snapped, thus isolating it from the rest of the country. Eleventh, the
Union minister of state for home affairs was present in the area, very close to the police
station, probably breathing down the police officers’ necks while his son was being
questioned.
There are two events of consequence that took place a few days before the Lakhimpur
Kheri murders that need to be recalled. One, in a constituency level party meeting just
a week before the killings, the minister, Ajay Mishra Teni, had warned protesting
farmers that if they did not mend their ways he would fix them in minutes. The video
went viral on several digital platforms. Two, a few days before this warning by Ajay
Mishra, the Haryana chief minister, M.L. Khattar, also a BJP man, told a party workers’
meeting that they should prepare to teach the farmers a lesson.
We should also remember that several BJP leaders and functionaries continuously
dubbed the agitating farmers as Naxals, Khalistanis and anti-national forces. The
farmers were also accused of acting at the behest of foreign interests out to destabilise
the Modi government. In both western UP and Haryana, where the farmers’ agitation is
strong and the BJP is in power, the party seemed to have made up its mind to break
the agitation by using force. Utterances to that effect by any other lesser functionaries
could be ignored. But the words of a member of the Union council of ministers,
especially one in the home ministry, and a state chief minister could not be taken to
mean anything else. Just a few days after their utterances, the murder of protesting
farmers takes place in broad day light and in full public view. Constitutional
functionaries such as a chief minister and a Union minister did not shrink from openly
declaring their intent of using extra constitutional methods. Their party ranks have now
carried out the threat.
Soon after the ghastly incident in which his son was seen to be involved, the senior
Mishra dashed off to Delhi and met the Union home minister, the custodian of law and
order in the country. We do not know what transpired in the meeting. But at the time
of writing, the junior minister still sits pretty in his position in the home ministry.
Evidently, the home minister of India thinks that an investigation can proceed
impartially with the father of the main accused continuing to hold office in his ministry.
The country is yet to know what the home minister thinks about the incident. He hasn’t
found time to express condolences to the bereaved families. Remember, three of his
own party’s workers have also died. Their families too have not merited the home
minister’s sympathy.
Even ten days after the brutal killings in Lakhimpur Kheri, we do not know whether the
Prime Minister felt sad at all about the terrible incident. The PM was moved to tweet
about the victims of a road accident in Barabanki, also in UP, and announce financial
assistance to the families of the dead from the PM’s Relief Fund. He also tweeted to say
that he was saddened and that his thoughts were with the families of victims of a house
collapse in Belgavi in Karnataka. But there’s no word from him on Lakhimpur Kheri. On
the day of the tragedy, the PM was in UP, attending an engagement about 150
kilometres from the scene of crime. This is not the first time he has been selective in
expressing his condolences. On the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, on the
murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, on the death of the brave Indian photojournalist
Danish Siddiqui in Afghanistan, and on several other occasions, the PM chose to stay
mum. Even his sadness over the death of tens of thousands of his fellow Indians due to
COVID had to wait until his address on Independence Day from the Red Fort to find a
perfunctory expression.
This is extremely disappointing. Completely at odds with the values of compassion and
valour that Bal Narendra, the child Narendra, is supposed to have stood for, risking his
life to fight off crocodiles and save people from drowning.
A far cry, indeed, even from seven years ago, when he did not brook the slightest
misdemeanour and tolerate even a sliver of impropriety. I’m sure most of you recall
what perhaps were apocryphal stories to build the image of an omniscient and no-
nonsense Prime Minister. They were aggressively propagated by the BJP’s mighty digital
establishment. One story went like this: a minister in his government was in a five-star
hotel restaurant, having a leisurely chat with a businessman. His phone rang. It was the
PM on the line. He told the minister that it was improper to socialise with that character
and he should immediately leave. The minister left. Another story told us that a minister
was on his way to the airport to catch a flight to a foreign country. He was in jeans. His
phone rang. It was the PM. He admonished the minister that now as a representative of
India, he couldn’t be seen in jeans. The minister turned his car around, went home,
changed and then took the flight. Another story: a woman minister’s phone rang in the
morning at 9.30. It was the PM, who asked her what she was doing at home. She said
she was meeting people from her constituency. He said she could meet them in her
office; she must always reach her office on time. The fourth story is even more
interesting. A minister and his son were summoned to the PM’s office. They were told
point blank to return the money they had collected from someone for doing a favour.
Before they could recover from their utter shock, the PM left the room.
The minister and his son from Lakhimpur Kheri cannot be told to return the lives of the
dead farmers to their shattered families. But at least the PM could have asked the son
to submit to justice and the minister to uphold the norms of propriety in public office.
Should he have needed the Supreme Court to intervene, and a public outcry, to remind
him of the high values he wants to be remembered for by the people? When such
things come to pass, it is ominous for our Republic. For our democracy, which we so
proudly boast about at international forums. And for the trusting people who imagined
their leaders to be tall and scrupulous, only to realise that it was all untrue, it was
myth-making, part of a gigantic PR exercise.

A PANDEMIC LOG BOOK, 2021

(This is a series of essays written over seven months in 2021, when the second and
third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic were sweeping across the country.)
INDIA IS CRYING FOR MAITRI—MAITRI FROM ITS GOVERNMENT
April 2021
In this essay I will examine the narrative of denial of the large-scale human tragedy
that’s unfolding before our eyes, the terrible and inescapable reality on the ground, and
then call out the Faustian bargain some influential sections of our civil society seem to
have entered into with the current regime.
I came across a video from a reputed international news organisation that showed a
cremation ground. Scenes of scores of burning bodies, the stoic narration of the gory
details of the scene by someone who probably was in charge of the place, the wailing
of a lady who had lost her young brother, people doing the pradakshinam of their
deceased kin before lighting the pyres. It moved me. I sent it to a few of my friends.
After a while, a friend responded. He said, the news organisation that put out the video
was anti-Modi. These organisations, he said, chose only such things to bring down the
Prime Minister’s and India’s image. I was surprised. I have known him for over two
decades. He is decent, educated, a thinking person. He reads, loves music and poetry,
and once in a while he writes too. He saw a representation of the current tragedy in
terms of a pro- and anti-Modi narrative. I set aside my anger, I thought I should
understand his mind a bit more. I continued the conversation. I asked him if we should
ignore the tragedy. He replied, yes. There was no hesitation, no ambivalence in his
tone. He was clear. Dismissive. Nonchalant.
I read a blog post by the newly appointed chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS). He wrote to caution people about anti-India forces trying to take advantage of
the COVID situation to defame Bharat. At his level, he too saw the issue as pro and
anti. Not primarily as a humanitarian issue. Not as a tragedy. Not as an issue of
Bharatiya people dying—mainly because of lack of oxygen, hospital beds, medicines,
ventilators, plasma, ambulances. To him the issue was attempts to damage India’s
image in the world. Not so much the loss of lakhs of lives of his fellow Indians.
A lot of people have responded to what I have been saying in my video blog on the
cruel and unforgivable indifference of the present regime to the misery of large sections
of our people during the pandemic. They have expressed their agreement with what
I’ve said. They shared my agony, anxiety, pain. They have no axes to grind. They are
not anti this or anti that, nor are they pro something. Just like me.
But there are as many people who struck a different note. Leaving out the cheap ad
hominem remarks, and below the belt comments, I will summarize them for you.
One said, ‘Well Parakala, instead of criticising the government do something
constructive to help people.’ Another asked, ‘What have you done? You’re just sitting in
an air-conditioned room and spreading negativity.’ He counselled me that it is time to
fully support the government, not to question or criticise it.
There was an interesting response to my separate post that referred to my article
published in The Hindu. In that post I said that the second wave of COVID was not
unanticipated. Its gruesome impact was not beyond our grasp. I was trying to suggest
that we could have been well prepared. But a corporate honcho gave me a sermon:
‘…“I said so” is looked down upon in the corporate world. Tell us what can be done now
and what you can do.’ I am old enough to know that this is the crafty moral high
ground of the C-suite incumbents in the corporate world to stave off criticism for
messing up the company. Their way of telling you that you need to carry the can. It’s
you who needs to do your bit to clean up after the elephants have walked past.
All these remarks have one thing in common. ‘Tell us, what have you done? Or tell us
what can be done. And what you will do.’ For them, I need to have done something, or
give them a power point plan, only then can I earn the right to be critical of the
government, to call a tragedy a tragedy. In other words, I have to prove my credentials
—to them.
I was also trying to see if our spiritual gurus had said some sane words on the present
misery. The gurus who hold forth for hours on what to eat, how to sleep, meditate,
achieve calm and peace, and engineer one’s inner self; the gurus who have a massive
following, who have made spirituality instagrammable, chic and trendy. I also tried to
see if the moral crusaders who once wanted to rid our country of corruption had
anything to tell us about the tragedy that is engulfing us. If they have any thoughts on
why we see what we see, why we ended up where we’ve ended up, who is responsible
for what we are experiencing. And if they’re getting ready to take aim at those
responsible for this mayhem.
I have not heard anything from these pretenders to the thrones of spirituality and
morality.
We can’t expect much from our business leaders, either. Predictably.
I will now come to our Prime Minister’s Mann ki Baat. The 75th edition, broadcast at the
end of March 2021. He spoke to two doctors—a Hindu and a Muslim. He also spoke to
two nurses, one North Indian and another a South Indian, to an ambulance driver, and
to a lady who recovered from the COVID-19 infection and is now well. A meticulously
curated guest list.
The PM has not betrayed the slightest sense of his awareness of the gravity of the
situation. His Mann ki Baat was no different. He chose not to speak to any family which
had lost a dear one. Or to members of the families of frontline workers who lost their
lives while serving COVID patients. The talk did not give us any sense that tens of
thousands of people are dying in our towns and cities and villages. It did not give us a
sense that they are dying because of lack of oxygen and ventilators. That they are
dying waiting for hospital beds, plasma. That they are paying large sums to get hold of
an ambulance, and many are failing to find one even then.
The PM gave us the impression that all is indeed well. The chosen doctors on his show
said there was no need to worry. One doctor told us that the mutation of the virus was
just like us changing our clothes. The pandemic was nothing much to worry about. The
nurses and the recovered patient too said so. The PM rested his case there and ended
his monthly talk. I wondered for a moment if it was I who is living in an unreal world.
The misery hasn’t moved the PM. He was lucid, energetic, didn’t struggle to find words
to express himself. I remember that the retirement of an opposition leader from the
Rajya Sabha some time ago had choked his voice. He struggled to control his tears. He
couldn’t find words to bid farewell to the man. But the tragedy that you and I see
around us has not moved our PM.
It seems to be a crime to think, write, speak about the tragedy that is overwhelming us.
The government was quick to order Twitter to delete posts that are critical of its
handling of the COVID situation. The microblogging platform promptly obliged. I saw
reports that in our largest state, Uttar Pradesh, people who have been critical of that
government’s handling of the situation have been slapped with charges under IPC.
What are we to understand from this phenomenon? Where have we reached?
To speak, write, and talk about the COVID misery, so much of which was avoidable, is
seen as anti or pro Modi. Anti or pro government. Anti or pro India. Not to talk about
the death and suffering, to pretend that all is well and the authorities have not failed
and that we need to learn no lessons for the future, is pro India, pro government, pro
Modi. We must always be positive. Constructive. We must lie. Then we are patriotic.
This is the narrative that can’t be wished away. It has taken a firm hold in the country.
It is held by my friend whom I consider an educated, professional, urban, and who is
not unfamiliar with the hard realities of life. It is shared by a significant section of those
who participate in the discourse on the various social media platforms. By virtue of their
presence there, they are influencers in their own right.
The chief executive of the RSS, putatively the largest volunteer organisation on the
globe, looks at the situation from the prism of this narrative. And his words carry weight
with millions of volunteers and sympathisers of his mighty organisation. A weight that is
difficult for ordinary observers to grasp. And that weight has serious political
implications.
I can’t guess the narrative of the moral and spiritual gurus. But their silence gives me a
strong indication of their co-option into the narrative. The caginess of our business
leaders lends strength to the narrative.
Is it a surprise then that the Prime Minister denies the obvious? How can we find fault
with him if he thinks that criticism of his government’s handling of the situation is
essentially mala fide, primarily meant to undermine him and his grand project of
building a Shrestha Bharat?
Meanwhile, unmindful of this narrative, the virus is spreading. By the end of day on the
last Monday of April 2021, the number of cases registered on a single day was
3,19,329. Deaths were 2,762. The number of deaths were 1,97,880. Infected cases
were 1,76,25,749. We had the second highest daily fatalities in the world after Brazil.
The pandemic’s second coming is showing its impact on the economy. The International
Monetary Fund upgrade of growth forecast for country from 11.5% to 12.5% no longer
seems to hold. The country’s premier bank is now forecasting a modest figure, 10.4%.
The State Bank of India estimates show decline in business activity, the lowest in five
months. Lockdowns and restrictions resulted in about 1.8 lakh crore rupees loss of GDP
so far this year. Unemployment has gone up from 6.52% to 7.8% in one month
according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Urban unemployment now
stands at 9.2%.
Data coming from the industrial nerve centre, Maharashtra, is unsettling. The state lost
82 thousand crore rupees worth of economic value. Migrant labourers began the
journey back to their homes again. Railway data revealed that about 15 lakh people left
Mumbai in the last two weeks. Other states’ data is yet to come. Karnataka has
announced a lockdown. Other states are likely to follow suit. Yet another scary picture
on the economic front is looming.
The pace of vaccination slowed down. We administered only 9 lakh 95 thousand and
288 doses in the 24 hours ending 7:00 am on 25 April 2021. That’s the lowest in nearly
a month. It’s 15.4 lakh doses less than what was administered in the previous 24 hours.
We are seeing a decline in the rate of vaccination in the second half of April. Even the
most efficient efforts to administer vaccines cannot keep pace with the rapidity of the
spread of the virus. That’s what experts tell us. This tardy and declining pace of
vaccination is alarming.
Studies on the spread of the virus in the country tell us that we are not yet near the
peak of its virulence. The University of Michigan’s epidemiology department’s modelling
suggests that by the middle of next month the daily number of infections could be
between 8 and 10 lakhs. And daily deaths might be around 4,500. The model done by
our IIT experts tells us that peak timing is May 14th to 18th for active infections, and
May 4th to 8th for new infections. Peak value, according to them, is 38 to 48 lakh for
active infections and 3.4 to 4.4 lakhs for daily new infections.
The University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)
projects the daily infections at a staggering 50 lakhs, both reported and unreported,
and daily deaths at 5,500 by 10th May, and a total of 6,65,000 lives lost to the
pandemic by August. One should not dismiss these worst-case scenarios.
The government is scrambling. There is a massive shortage of oxygen—not that it isn’t
available, but the system to transport it to hospitals where it is needed is in a shambles.
The pharmacy of the world is struggling to vaccinate its own people. The Centre has
left the state governments to fend for themselves. They are free to procure vaccines,
they are told. But at an unfair and higher price than the Union government. Reports are
pointing out that there’s partiality in allocating vaccines to the states from the central
pool; that states ruled by the opposition parties are being discriminated against. I hope
they’re wrong.
There’s this vast gap between the tragic reality and the government’s grasp of it. In
fact, it is not the government’s incapacity to grasp the reality, it is its denial of reality
that’s our real tragedy. A significant part of our civil society is the government’s partner
in this criminal denial.
Some of them, I think, genuinely believe that the Supreme Leader is infallible. They’re
under a spell. I have no problem with them. Only sympathy for them, despite the
damage they are doing to our great country.
But I have a serious problem with those others who do see the vast damage that is
being done. They completely understand it. Yet they endorse the narrative of denial,
they actively promote it. Some others stay silent, but they are also culpable.
I saw the open letter of employees and former employees of an English television
channel addressed to their editors in April 2021. In it they pointed out that instead of
asking questions of the Prime Minister for his callous attitude and misgovernance, the
editors are hell bent on saving his image and protecting him from getting a bad name.
Can that letter not wake those editors up? And the editors and managements of other
media houses?
What’s the dark bargain here? Why do these sections need it? For a few perks?
Positions? Awards? Is it so difficult to break out of the Faustian bargain? Even when so
much suffering surrounds them?
India is crying for Maitri. Crying for friendship, companionship from its own
government. From the leader it trusted as its saviour. It is crying for oxygen Maitri,
Vaccine Maitri, Plasma Maitri, ICU beds Maitri, ambulance Maitri. Maitri for a dignified
cremation of its deceased sons and daughters.
A cry for Maitri is India’s Mann ki Baat. After hearing 75 editions of our PM’s Mann ki
Baat, it now wants him to listen to its Mann ki Baat. It’s first edition. Delivered in pain.
*
COVID-19, GOVERNANCE AND MOTHERS’ DAY
May 2021
I want to talk about Amma, my mother, and about the condition of migrant labour,
whom I see every day on my street. And try to understand what governance means to
their lives in these deeply troubling times.
I live with my mother. Mother’s Day somehow doesn’t figure as a special day in my
calendar. Only the feed in the timeline of my social media alerted me to it. The Mother’s
Day alert started me thinking about her. The impact COVID-19 could have on her. And
my fears, anxieties about her in the present uncertain and helpless times.
Amma stepped into her 91st year in the middle of April. For her age she’s pretty
healthy. No diabetes or hypertension. Only a little hard of hearing of late, and a little
forgetful. Recent happenings don’t register well in her mind. However, she has robust
memory of past events. Mobility is reasonably okay. Her sense of humour is intact.
She’s bewildered why we haven’t had many visitors for the last one year. Even when
someone comes, they stand at the threshold of her room, mouth and nose covered,
speak to her from far and go away. She’s not able to understand why the domestic
helps are moving around with their mouth and nose covered with a mask. She’s faintly
aware that there is some disease spreading nationwide. While her concern is primarily
to make sense of these happenings, my anxieties are serious, far deeper.
If she were tested, she would increase the total number of tested people by one. If she
were infected, it would be another number added to the national total. For people who
think in terms of meta data, she’d be another number in the 14.74 lakh total daily tests
carried out in the country a day ago [11 May 2021]. If she were to test positive, hers
would be one of 3,05,284 active daily infections, the average number for the month of
May so far. And one among the 2,29,67,832 cumulative number in the country thus far.
She would be data-fied.
We take ample care of her. But what if she were to be infected despite all the care?
Would she get a hospital bed? Get a bed with oxygen? Would she get a ventilator if she
required it? What are the chances of us moving her to a hospital in a properly equipped
ambulance with a paramedic attending to her? I saw video footage of people falling at
the feet of doctors and hospital administrators, pleading with them to admit their kin.
Would I also need to do that? Could I do that? Would she like to see me doing that?
Would the hospital authorities show compassion if I did that? Would I be able to pay
the exorbitant and rapacious hospital charges even if I managed to get her an
admission and a bed? What would I do if the hospital told me that their oxygen stock
was depleting, that it would last only for an hour or so? Where would I run to? Whom
would I beg?
You might say, ‘Well, you know a lot of people, you’re well connected.’ But should I
jump the queue? Would I be right in thinking that my mother is more important than
someone else’s mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband or friend? Would
Amma be happy to be treated out of turn, by denying someone else their fair chance?
How would I resolve that moral dilemma? Can I walk past many who would be waiting
in the line, to carry my mother into the ICU ward, or to a bed with an oxygen cylinder,
a ventilator. I cannot do that. I simply can’t throw my weight around. But then, can I
live ever in peace if I don’t do that to save her life? Wouldn’t that haunt me for ever if
the unthinkable were to happen to her?
Amma has led a tumultuous life. Her marriage to my father was an extraordinary event
in our area. It was at the dawn of independence, in September 1947. Inter-caste
marriages were nearly unheard of then. And a secular marriage, sans Vedic rituals, was
unknown. Thousands came to attend the wedding merely out of curiosity. Just to see—
how does it look, this secular marriage between people from two different and
supposedly unequal castes? The bride and the bridegroom formally garlanding each
other to become wife and husband. Followed by inspiring speeches by leaders and
social reformers.
Within a year my father and mother had to go underground. They were active
participants in the armed revolt against the Nehru government, following the passing of
the Ranadive Thesis at the Calcutta Congress of the Communist Party of India. My
father had shoot at sight orders against him. Jail was not new to him by then. He was
arrested under the Defence of India Rules during the Quit India movement. But his
young wife then had no clue of what it all was. They lived incognito, as a teacher
couple in the agency area among tribal people. Ever ready to move away from a place
at short notice, the moment the place failed the smell test of safety from police search
parties.
She had a long public life. She served a short stint as a legislator in the Andhra Pradesh
Assembly. Both her mind and body are battle scarred. Toughened by privations,
uncertainty, defeats, victories, failures, achievements, betrayals as well as loyalties. She
had and still has an iron-clad sense of self-worth.
Because of her long association with our native place and strong attachment to the
people there, she told me very long ago that she wanted to be taken to our hometown
after her death and cremated there. In the same samashaan where I lit the funeral
pyre of my relatively young father quite early in my life.
God forbid, if something were to happen to Amma during the present crisis, would I be
in a position to fulfil her last wish? Leave alone taking her to my hometown, would I be
able to give her a decent, respectable and dignified cremation at the place where we
now live?
On Mother’s Day, the question that pestered me was: Can I trust this governance, the
State as it stands today, with my mother’s well-being and life? I will return to this in a
while. Now, let me give you a brief narration of a conversation I had a few days ago.
A new house is under construction a few streets away from our house. Work is
happening briskly. Among the workers are about twenty young Hindi-speaking boys,
perhaps in their twenties. A few days ago I found that they had started sleeping at the
construction site. On one of my strolls, I struck up a conversation with them, asked
them why they were sleeping at the site. They said they left their accommodation
because too many people got infected there. Eight people died, because they couldn’t
get medical treatment. It wasn’t safe for them, they said.
After a few days, instead of twenty, I found only about four of them on the site. I
enquired about the rest. They said, most of their friends had left for their native places,
fearing another brutal lockdown. They told me that they were also planning to leave in
a few days. They said, the last time they had walked over a couple of hundred
kilometres into the interior of Chhattisgarh. They had no work, their meagre savings ran
out, they couldn’t pay rent or buy food. There was no transportation then.
They didn’t want to take a chance this time. While some transportation was still
available, they wanted to reach their homes. Remember, they said, if a cat has sat on a
hot stove once, it wouldn’t sit on a hot stove again. But it wouldn’t sit on a cold stove
either. There was no trace of anger in their tone. Only helplessness. Resignation. It
looked as if they had taught themselves not to expect anything from anyone. At that
young age they were not prepared to trust the system or the government, the society
or the State. If there is just one thing clear in their minds, perhaps it’s this: They’re not
prepared to trust this governance with their lives and livelihoods.
The Indian State is strong. With one late-evening announcement it could make 85% of
our currency no longer legal tender. It could ration the withdrawal of peoples’ money,
make them wait for hours in long queues for months outside banks, make families beg
the bank officers to withdraw their own money to perform the marriages of their
children. The State could pass laws in a few hours to demolish state governments, lock
up the entire opposition leadership of a state for months, with no questions asked of it.
The strong State could erect enormous statues at enormous cost, using up money that
should have been used for people’s welfare. Embark on the construction of a grand new
vista in our capital. A new vista at unimaginable cost to announce the arrival of a New
India.
But it is not able to fill confidence in the hearts of the poor, the frail, the vulnerable and
the weak. Its strength is of no use to arrest the sharp decline in vaccination. As on May
9th, only 18.44 lakh doses were administered in the country. This is much lower than
the 35.74 lakh daily doses recorded in the month April.
Some of the privileged among us look at data, meta data and make unemotional, cross-
country comparisons, and draw conclusions about how better off we are in India in
comparison to other nations. Our mortality per million is lower. Our rate of infection is
less, they announce. They debate whether it’s the Union or the states which are
responsible for peoples’ treatment, healthcare, basic safety. Some even indulge in
victim-blaming. People were infected, they say, because of their irresponsibility. What
could the government do about it? But they don’t realize that those ‘irresponsible’
people do not choose to infect themselves. They are forced to lock themselves in
cramped, crammed accommodations where physical distance is impossible. It’s not their
irresponsibility. They have no choice.
Unmindful of these debates and colourful data visualizations, real people resigned
themselves to their fate. Their jobs, their food, their incomes, their health, and their
lives and the lives of their kin are in danger and these are the realities that matter to
them. Not faceless numbers. Not comparisons with countries that they’re hardly aware
of. Their own lives are not mere numbers for them. They are not data, they are
suffering, broken, abandoned people.
They’re uninterested in who’s in charge. Centre, state, municipality or panchayat? They
paid no attention to who among these governments claimed to have won the war
against this deadly pandemic—because all of that was irrelevant. And they are now
indifferent to who among them is responsible for lack of treatment, lack of support. The
look of resignation in their eyes matches the stare of cold indifference from the steely
eyes of our rulers.
On Mother’s Day, this question gnawed at me relentlessly: Would I trust Amma’s well-
being and life to our governance, to our system of care? No, I’m not confident that this
governance and its system of care have the likes of her in mind. And certainly not the
likes of the migrant boys from Chhattisgarh whom I spoke to.
While I remain hesitant in my answer, the boys were unequivocal. My privilege,
perhaps, is behind my equivocation. At the back of my mind, I probably have this hope
that I could somehow swing the system to attend to my mother. Anger and frustration
coexist in me with hope.
But the hardscrabble lives of the boys had made them clear-headed, unequivocal. They
were not angry. They were resigned to their fate. They expected nothing from the
government. They just withdrew their trust from false gods.
*
VACCINE MESS, MORAL PARALYSIS AND AN ‘EGOCRATIC’ GOVERNMENT
May 2021
It is now clear for anyone to see. We are in a vaccine mess. Vaccination is proceeding
at a snail’s pace. The daily vaccination rate is in steady decline. Vaccine stocks in the
country are insufficient and dwindling. Supplies in the coming weeks and months are
highly uncertain. Many states of our Union are scrounging for vaccine doses. They are
floating global tenders. Foreign vaccine producers are refusing to deal with them.
However, these things are not clear to those who are still in denial. To those who are in
the grip of devotion. To those who are still under the spell of demagoguery, and
continue to be mesmerised by Egocrats. And to mindless, insensitive advocates of
‘positivity’, who want to sweep the dark reality under the carpet and pretend that all is
well.
Before we start dealing with the details, let me bring a few facts to the foreground. We
are the fifth largest economy in the world. We were the fastest growing economy
among middle-income countries, until we began slowing down post the mindless act of
demonetisation. Our declared ambition is to become a five-trillion-dollar economy. That
means, to overtake the German economy and become equivalent to the Japanese
economy in its present size. Our superpower ambitions are no secret, and we are eager
to claim the title of ‘Vishwaguru’, the guru of the world. We have a huge bank of past
experience, over several decades, of smooth and quiet administration of universal
immunization programmes. So mass vaccination that is required to fight the COVID
pandemic should not be a challenge to us.
Now let’s see where we are now.
There are 1,84,830 officially reported daily active COVID-19 infections, and 2,69,36,641
cumulative infections. On Monday [24 May 2021] alone, there were 3,224 deaths. There
have been 3,06,977 total deaths so far. That is the official figure; we all know about the
gross under-reporting.
To me these numbers mean real people. Families of these people. Dependents of these
people. Their spouses, friends, colleagues. These are not just numbers.
In the 24 hours ending at 7:00 am on Monday, only 9 lakh 43 thousand doses of the
vaccine were administered in the country. That is 6 lakh 61 thousand less than the
doses administered in the previous 24 hours. The decline in vaccination continues,
unabated. There is uncertainty all over about the stock of vaccines. Will we run out?
Have we already run out?
When I see this overwhelming mayhem, feel the stench of death around me, and watch
the vaccine muddle in dismay, I want to hold accountable whoever is responsible for
this tragedy. Even if they are gods. Even if they’re my own gods. I have no hesitation.
In fact, all the more if they’re my gods. Either temporal or celestial. They have to
answer. Why did you do this to our country? Why did you let us down? Why did you fail
us?
Let’s look at the vaccine mess in detail.
First, how did the vaccination begin? To start with, it was opened for healthcare and
frontline workers on 16 January this year [2021]. Then on 1st March for persons aged
60 and above and for people between 45 and 59 years with co-morbidities. Then, from
1st April it was opened for people aged 45 and above. And now, from 1st May, it’s open
for everyone who is 18 and above.
Let’s see the progress of vaccination. The CoWIN Dashboard tells us that there are
41,951 vaccination centres in operation in the country. Of them, 39,964 are
government centres and 1,995 are private centres. So far, we have been able to give,
in total, slightly over 19 crore jabs. Only 11% of our population has received one jab,
and just about 3% have had two jabs and are fully vaccinated,
Now let’s turn to why the pace of vaccination is slow and the rate is declining. The main
reason is that we don’t have enough vaccines. We have two producers in our country.
The Serum Institute of India, which produces Covishield and Bharat Biotech, which
produces Covaxin. Their production capacities are 7 crore doses and 5.8 crore doses
per month, respectively. The Serum Institute is a contract producer for Astra Zeneca
and its full capacity is not available to India. The orders placed with the two vaccine
producers by the government so far are only for 26 crore doses from the Serum
Institute and 5 crore doses from Bharat Biotech. The Serum Institute has already
supplied 15 crore doses.
One is at a loss to understand why the Union government has placed such small orders
with these manufacturers when it knew that the requirement was huge. And when
Pfizer wanted to come to India at the beginning of the year, why didn’t we let it in?
Our requirement is at least 180 crore doses, give or take a few thousand, for two jabs if
we have to vaccinate 80% of the target population. This excludes pregnant women and
children under 18 years. What we ordered, and what could be available to us in the
next few months, is woefully, woefully inadequate. If we are to depend only on these
manufacturers, we will not be able to complete our vaccination programme this year.
Another four manufacturers are in the process of developing vaccines, as reported on
the Indian Council of Medical research (ICMR) portal. But the outcomes of their efforts
are uncertain as of now.
There are other vaccine producers. Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, for one. Dr Reddy’s have
imported just 1.5 lakh doses of Sputnik, and are likely to increase their imports and
subsequently produce this vaccine in India.
The Chinese vaccine may not find favour in India for various reasons. So let’s take that
out from our list.
Then we have the western producers. Astra Zeneca anyway is being produced in India
by the Serum Institute. That leaves us with Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
Many countries have paid advances to these companies or invested in their efforts to
develop the vaccines as ‘at risk’ investments. Therefore, their order books are now full.
Even if they want to ramp up their production, it can’t be done at short notice. The
essential elements that go into the making of the vaccine depend on a long and
complex supply chain involving at least 19 countries. So, supplies to us from these
companies are extremely unlikely even in the medium term.
On 16 January, when we opened our vaccination programme, the government didn’t
think of ensuring supplies by paying advance. On 1st March, when it opened the
programme for people aged 60 and above, it didn’t pay advance to firm up orders. And
on 1st April, when it opened vaccination for those aged 45 and above, it failed to assess
the requirement and ensure adequate supply. And only on 19th April, just a fortnight
before opening vaccination for everyone above 18 years, did the government come
round to releasing money to the Indian manufacturers.
This is the supply side of the vaccine mess.
Now let’s turn to the demand side of the mess.
CoWIN, the central government portal and app, are the gateways to vaccination. You
log into them, register on either of them. They will allot a slot to you, send you an alert
about your appointment and after the vaccination is done, generate a certificate. A
certificate with our Prime Minister’s picture on it, as if the vaccine is a personal gift, a
favour from him.
The app crashed several times initially. It often sent sms alerts to the wrong people. It
mixed up names. People who got vaccinated kept getting messages in others’ names.
People to whom the messages were intended probably missed their slots. This is
awkward news from a software giant like India.
App and portal-based registration tended to exclude those without smartphones and
net connectivity. It made them dependent on the generosity of third parties. Poor,
marginal, illiterate people, especially in rural areas, faced hardship in accessing the
vaccination as a result of this. Tech savvy urban people took advantage of this. As the
urban slots were full, they booked slots in the sparsely booked rural centres. Suddenly,
vaccination centres in small villages around the metros saw urban crowds queuing up
outside.
So in accessing the vaccine, there’s a digital divide, there’s a rural-urban divide, and
there’s a rich-poor divide.
Even four months after the launch of the vaccination programme, the registrations on
the app or portal are only about 23.5 crores.
Apologists talk about vaccine hesitation. Well, the insensitivity of tech savvy mandarins
towards poor, rural and digitally ill-equipped people is the main reason for vaccine
hesitation. And the premature celebration of victory over COVID played no small a role.
Many people thought there was no need to bother getting vaccinated if we had already
chased the virus out of our country.
In addition, open endorsement of several quack remedies by ministers belonging to the
ruling party added to the complacency.
There’s another aspect to the mess—the Union government’s moral paralysis and
abdication of its responsibility to vaccinate the nation. And leaving the states to fend for
themselves, and at the same time not really helping them to do their job.
Let me explain what I mean.
Fifty per cent of all the vaccines produced in the country will be taken by the central
government at the rate of 150 rupees per dose. The manufacturers are free to sell the
remaining fifty per cent of their stock to the state governments and private hospitals.
While the centre gets both Covishield and Covaxin for 150 rupees a dose, states have to
cough up 300 rupees for Covishield and 400 rupees for Covaxin. Private hospitals will
have to buy Covishield for 600 rupees and Covaxin for 1200 rupees. These prices are
decided unilaterally by the companies. They initially announced higher prices but
moderated them after an uproar. This price structure clearly incentivises the companies
to sell where they can earn more profits, that is, to private hospitals and corporates.
Thus, the central government allowed the vaccine to be a product of the sellers’
market. It was no longer a national public good.
I’m not still able to figure it out how is it morally defensible that the Union government
pays a lower price and a state government pays a higher price for the same dose of
vaccine. And why should it be four to eight times higher if you go to a private medical
facility? For the same vaccine?
Every other country worth its salt has made vaccines available free of cost to all its
citizens.
This is not the end of the story. It’s the central government which decides the slots for
the jabs to be administered by the states and paid for by the states. The certificates are
issued by the central government for the jabs administered by the states and paid for
the states. And paid for at much higher prices than those paid by the Centre!
Again, that’s not the end of the story. As of now there’s no clear formula on which state
gets how many doses from the manufacturers. It’s another terrible mess—state
competing against another state. A dog-eat-dog world.
Let me bring it all together: The Centre pays less for a dose. States pay more for a
dose. The Centre allots the slots for people to be vaccinated. Doses are administered by
the states. Paid for by the states. Certificates are issued by the centre with the PM’s
picture on them. There are no clear guidelines on the quantity of the states’
procurement from Indian manufacturers. The Centre will only take care of the 45 years
and above category of people as well as healthcare and frontline workers. The states
are responsible for people in the age group of 18 and above.
The states are scrounging for vaccines. They have no supplies. Their global tenders are
going nowhere. Moderna has refused to deal with Punjab. It is reported that Pfizer and
Moderna said they didn’t want to sell to the Delhi government. If they refuse to deal
with Delhi and Punjab, they’re unlikely to entertain any other state government. These
companies want to deal only with the central government. But the Centre has washed
its hands off the matter. This further complicates the mess.
Differential pricing for Centre and states is an example of the moral paralysis of our
Union government. Dark-hearted abdication by the Centre of the responsibility to
vaccinate every citizen is absolute moral paralysis. If the Centre tightly controls the
already scarce supply and leaves the states to buy and reach the vaccines to their
people; if the Centre allots vaccination slots to people via its CoWIN app, and then puts
the PM’s picture on the vaccination certificate, it is an example of untrammelled
Egocracy.
States are already in financial distress. Almost all of them have pledged to give
vaccination free of cost to their people. Should they be penalised for this humane
approach by being forced to cough up higher prices per dose? Is this just? Is it morally
defensible?
When every major national government in the world gave investment support to
companies to develop vaccines, took the risk, advanced monies, ours slept at the wheel
and when it woke up, it did so only to get busy celebrating its ‘victory’ over the
pandemic, and encouraged electoral and religious super spreader events like the
Kumbh Mela. Not until 19th April did the Centre provide risk funding to the Indian
manufacturers. While most European and the two North American governments had
started pumping in advances to vaccine manufacturers by the middle of last year, even
before their trials were successful.
Is this the way the fifth largest economy in the world handles its vaccination? Is this the
mark of foresight of a would be ‘Vishwaguru’? Doesn’t it shine an unflattering light on
us—that we disregard decades of experience in administering vaccines? Is this the way
the government of a country with superpower ambitions conducts itself? A government
that wants to make us a five-trillion-dollar economy heartlessly abandons its people.
Can the country afford the government’s moral paralysis? Can it thrive under this
unabashed Egocracy? Why does this not trouble us all deeply?
*
WE NEED AN INDEPENDENT PUBLIC INQUIRY
June 2021
I will begin by quoting from a news report.
The report said that the Prime Minister had announced ‘an independent public inquiry
into the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic will begin’. He said, ‘Amid
such tragedy the government has an obligation to examine its actions as rigorously and
as candidly as possible [and] learn every lesson for the future.’ And he added that ‘this
inquiry must be able to look at the events of the last year…and identify the key issues
that will make a difference for the future.’ He continued that the inquiry would be ‘free
to scrutinize every document, to hear from all the key players and analyse and learn
from the breadth of our response’. He said he expected the inquiry to put the
government’s actions under the microscope. He also volunteered to give evidence to
the inquiry under oath if asked to.
I must hasten to tell you, before you wonder, that it was not our Prime Minister who
made this announcement. It was Mr Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of a smaller
democracy, the United Kingdom.
In this essay I want to argue that there is an inescapable need to immediately
constitute an Independent Public Inquiry to scrutinize the roles of our central and state
governments, as well the conduct of the public in handling the tragic situation arising
out of the COVID-19 pandemic in our country.
Britain is not the only country willing to examine its government’s role in handling the
COVID crisis. Sweden has announced a commission of experts led by a former
president of the supreme administrative court to investigate the country’s controversial
‘liberal’ approach to virus containment. It will issue a final report in early 2022 and two
interim reports before that. The Swedish prime minister ordered the public inquiry into
his government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis after the country recorded about
5,000 deaths. Yes, you read that right—after about 5,000 deaths.
Norway has set up an independent commission to assess the overall adequacy of its
COVID response. In Italy, prosecutors from the northern province of Bergamo spent
three hours questioning the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in June 2020 as they
deepened their inquiry into whether officials’ missteps caused one of the world’s
deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in the country. Yes, again, you read that right: they
questioned their PM for three hours. They also questioned the health and interior
ministers about how the government handled the pandemic.
A special French court has ordered an investigation into the government’s handling of
the coronavirus crisis. French police searched the homes of health minister Olivier
Véran, former prime minister Edouard Philippe and other officials in May 2020 as part of
the inquiry. Véran is one of several current or former ministers under investigation over
their response to the pandemic following complaints that they were too slow to act. The
present Prime Minister Jean Castex is also a subject of the investigation, as are his
predecessor, Edouard Philippe, as well as Véran’s predecessor at the health ministry.
In Brazil, the Supreme Court ordered the Senate in April this year to investigate the
government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. The Parliament of Victoria, an
Australian state, inquired into the government’s handling of the pandemic and
submitted its report in February this year. An independent inquiry has been launched
into the European Union’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, after one of its
agencies observed that confusion, complacency and lack of coordination plunged the
continent into crisis. The European Ombudsman Report on European Institution’s
response to COVID was published on 18 May 2021.
The World Health Assembly, the governing structure of the World Health Organisation
(WHO) voted last year to have an independent evaluation ‘to review experience gained
and lessons learned from the WHO-coordinated international health response to COVID-
19’. India supported the resolution. The report was submitted last month [ May 2021].
India’s cumulative infections by the second week of June 2021 were 2,81,69,970. And
the deaths in the country were 3,31,871. Experts tell us that the infections had peaked
sometime in the first week of May. But deaths are yet to decline proportionately.
By the end of June 2021, the total daily infections reported are 1,22,964. And the daily
deaths are 2,743.
Expert epidemiologists like Prof Bhramar Mukherjee of the University of Michigan and
media persons reporting from the ground tell us that the deaths are under reported by
a factor of 4 to 5. About 7 in 9 deaths are going unreported or undetected. Or to put it
another way, only two out of every 9 deaths are reported. The New York Times Covid
Tracker says a more likely scenario is 16 lakh deaths and a worst-case scenario is 42
lakh deaths. Not 3.3 lakh deaths, as the official figures tell us. Should it just be an
expert’s word against the government’s word? Shouldn’t the nation know the truth?
Shouldn’t we take the help of an independent public inquiry to know the exact extent of
the loss of lives in our country?
The government told Parliament that it did not have data on the deaths of doctors,
frontline health workers and migrant labour. In the absence of credible official figures,
there are all sorts of estimates doing the rounds. Should we not put an end to that?
Shouldn’t an independent inquiry go into it and tell us, the nation, what is the toll?
Should it be just anybody’s guess?
Many people believe that gatherings such as the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi
and the Kumbh Mela as well as election rallies in 2020 and 2021 were the super
spreader events. There were many such gatherings, especially religious gatherings, and
people and the media select just one or two from among them as events responsible
for a massive spread of the virus, depending on their persuasion, prejudice or limited
information. Shouldn’t we know for sure which events were responsible and to what
extent, so that we can prevent such spreader events in future?
The minister of state for health gave data to Parliament some time ago on the number
of ICUs, hospital beds and beds with oxygen facility that were added during the
lockdown to deal with the expected requirement. Some people allege that these
preparations were inadequate and the result has been large scale deaths during the
second wave of the pandemic. Others feel that public health was neglected for the last
70 years and this government could not have done much in just a year to prepare for
the massive outbreak during the second wave. Again, one word against the other.
Shouldn’t we have an independent public inquiry to settle this? And also suggest
measures for the future?
There is a feeling that some peoples’ utterances caused vaccine hesitancy and hindered
the government’s efforts to fight the pandemic. Is that true? Were they able to cause
such large-scale disruption to government initiatives? Only an independent public
inquiry could throw light on it. Otherwise, we will be left with allegations and counter
allegations and learn nothing. The inquiry should also examine the role of the general
public, political parties, influencers such as the media, celebrities and volunteer
organizations during the pandemic.
Government ministers tell us that there’s no problem with the vaccination drive. But the
rate is clearly sluggish, uneven and inadequate. Experts tell us that given the rate at
which the vaccination is going, we may not be able to complete it even by the end of
this year [2021]. The government rubbishes that claim. We heard from a NITI Aayog
functionary that the government made all efforts to procure vaccines. The member also
said that the government was in active engagement with vaccine producers from the
very beginning. Shouldn’t we know the details of that active engagement and it’s
outcome?
Supporters of the ruling dispensation at the centre argue that it’s the states that are
responsible for the lack of medical infrastructure, and therefore for the inadequate
response to the COVID crisis. But there are others who contend that since it’s a
pandemic, the main responsibility is of the Union government. Shouldn’t we have clarity
about this, a credible assessment of the response of each state government and the
Union government in this crisis? Won’t that be good for our governance as a federal
democracy?
Some people argue that the differential pricing of vaccines—the Centre buying at a
cheaper price than the states—is unjust and indefensible. Even the Supreme Court
raised the issue. The Centre probably feels that’s it is justified. Why would it act
unjustly, say its supporters. But it does appear to have done so. Shouldn’t an
independent public inquiry help us know the truth?
Digital activists feel that the CoWIN app structurally excludes the digital exiles such as
the marginal, poor and rural people from accessing vaccine slots. Technology experts of
the Centre disagree. Shouldn’t an independent public inquiry examine the issue and tell
us the efficacy of the app and the portal that register the people for vaccination?
There’s a sharp controversy surrounding the availability of medical oxygen and other
facilities. People died, thousands of them for lack of oxygen, ventilators, ICU beds, and
even ordinary hospital beds. They died outside hospitals waiting to be allowed in. But
the government told courts, even the highest court of the land, that there was enough
oxygen and other facilities, even though some states had to go to the courts to wrest
higher allocations from the Centre. Only an independent public inquiry can credibly
examine the claims of the Centre and the states and help settle a policy framework, so
that in future we won’t be in a tragic muddle on such issues.
There were murmurs that we should have taken care in the initial stages itself, and
avoided gatherings like Namaste Trump, when our Prime Minister organised a massive
show for the American President. Did such events amount to negligence, deliberate or
innocent? We should have an independent public inquiry to settle the matter, instead of
us picking one version or the other from the noisy TV debates.
We have heard that the government constituted several task forces. We also saw
reports that some of them were then disbanded. We do not know what work they did,
what advice and support they offered the government and if it was of any use to the
government. Their meetings must have been minuted. A thorough examination of their
proceedings and their interaction with the decision makers in the government by an
independent public inquiry will be of much use to the nation in its future efforts to
combat a health crisis like this pandemic.
The government’s efforts to rescue the economy during the crisis came in for criticism.
The adequacy and appropriateness of its financial and economic response needs an
objective examination so that future responses can incorporate its best features and
modify or omit the ineffective ones. Shouldn’t we benefit from the assessment of an
independent public inquiry?
While announcing the setting up of the inquiry, the British Prime Minister said that
already about 50 parliamentary committees were going over the various aspects of his
government’s response. In addition, the national audit office had already published 17
reports of its findings. That raises the point about our Parliament. Does our Parliament
also have committees that are currently examining the way the executive is handling
the situation? I have not come across any reports. Or have I missed the reporting of
their important work in the media? If committees have not been set up, if they are not
working, shouldn’t we know why? An independent public inquiry would help here too.
I do not intend to give an exhaustive list of all the benefits of an independent public
inquiry. It could fill a whole book. I will mention only one more.
An objective scrutiny of the way our central and state governments have handled the
pandemic would be beneficial to the entire world. Other countries can emulate our best
practices and avoid the mistakes that we so clearly appear to have made. That would
be in keeping with our aspiration to be a Vishwaguru. Our experience can teach the
world.
Some governments, such as Norway’s, Sweden’s and Victoria’s in Australia have
constituted inquiries on their own. Their rivers did not carry the COVID dead. Britain
decided to set up an inquiry when a petition was submitted to its Parliament by the
general public. There were no dead bodies in the Thames. In France, Italy and Brazil a
strong and independent judiciary was instrumental in setting up inquiries. There were
no bodies in the Siene, Tiber and Amazon rivers.
The European Union responded to observations by one of its agencies. The WHO
constituted an inquiry as a result of a vote by its member countries.
With the massive scale of the tragedy that unfolded, India should not need a nudge. As
the biggest democracy in the world, with a strong, ‘muscular’ government, we should
be self-confident enough to have our practices, procedures, initiatives, policies
submitted to a rigorous examination by an independent body. I’m sure the Union
government has a more open mind and greater concern for the people of this country
than many of its critics are willing to grant it. Can we hope for an announcement by the
Union government about constituting an independent public inquiry into the way it and
the state governments have handled the COVID-19 crisis?
And if the government has inquiry hesitancy, and should it need a nudge, civil society,
or even the judiciary, must not hesitate to give it a good one.
(Postscript, March 2023: The government did not surprise us. I am convinced it never
will. There will be no independent public inquiry. There will be no inquiry at all.)
*
INDIA’S COVID CHILDREN
July 2021
I know two boys, Bhaskar and Kishore. Bhaskar is 12 years old, and Kishore is 10. They
have just completed their 6th and 4th standards and are going into the 7th and 5th. I
know them well because their parents work in our house. Their father is not literate,
their mother is just about. All four of them were infected and recovered from COVID-
19. Like 90 per cent of the children worldwide, Bhaskar and Kishore can’t go to school.
They are two of the 33 crore children of our country who have faced serious disruption
to their schooling since the pandemic began.
Observing their schooling as well as the lack of it prompted me to look at the larger
picture of what’s happening with our children across the country. I want to share with
you what I found and write down my observations about the direct and indirect impact
of COVID-19 on our children.
The much talked about remote learning—online classes, digital education, call it what
you will—is very unreal in the case of Bhaskar and Kishore, although they’re enrolled in
a so-called ‘public school’, the misleading term by which private schools are known in
India. Bhaskar and Kishore have just an hour of instruction a day, and never on all
working days of a week. Unlike how it was when they had regular physical classes, a
single teacher handles the classes of both boys, and all subjects. Most of the time.
Occasionally, another teacher makes an appearance. Very occasionally. The rest of the
teachers are probably on furlough. It is not a surprise that most small private schools
have not retained their teachers during the lockdown. Even during normal times, most
of these teachers are underpaid and untrained.
Both teachers and pupils are uncomfortable with this remote teaching and learning. The
boys tell me that attendance is poor. These boys have no problem with access to
internet because they live on our premises. But most of their peers have difficulty in
accessing the net. And they have little help from their parents.
UNICEF reports that out of the 33 crore children who are not able to attend schools due
to lockdowns in India, only 3.5 crore are able to access education through online
classes or radio programmes. The Save the Children survey showed that overall 62 out
of every 100 children in the surveyed households discontinued their schooling—67 in
the rural areas and 55 in urban areas. According to UNESCO, a large proportion of them
may not return to school at all. Even before the pandemic there were already nearly 3.5
crore children who should have been in school but were not. That’s what the 75th
round of the Household Survey 2017-18 by the National Sample Survey (NSS) said.
According to the 2019 report of the National Statistical Organisation (NSO), among
children aged between 6 and 17 who were out of school, 31 in every 100 had never
been to school. Reports from West Bengal show that there has been a 105% rise in
child labour in the state during the lockdown. Other states may not be far behind.
Even before the pandemic, India was among countries with the largest number of
malnourished children. The Global Nutrition Report, 2020 showed that the prevalence of
stunting among Indian children under 5 years was at 38%. This is much higher than
the developing-country average of 25%. The prevalence of wasting among children
under 5 years was at 21%, also greater than the developing-country average of 9%.
The pandemic is sure to have made matters worse for the nutrition of our children.
A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute shows that of all the states
and union territories of India, only 16 have taken steps to adapt the Mid-day Meal
Scheme to the changed circumstances post COVID. Save the Children reported that
nearly 4 in every 10 households did not receive mid-day meals or anything in lieu of
that. The mid-day meal portal of the Government of India tells us that at the time of
the first lockdown, nearly 11.5 crore children were registered for the scheme
throughout the country. There’s a high risk that a significant number of them will go to
swell the ranks of the already large number of malnourished children and young adults
in the coming years.
The lockdowns moved schooling to digital platforms. I’ve briefly told you about the
experience of Bhaskar and Kishore. Their online classes are hopelessly inadequate. But
at least they don’t have a problem with access to the net as they live on our premises. I
have also helped them with a smart phone. They don’t have any problem with power
supply, either. But that’s not the case with a vast number of children from
underprivileged families across the country.
The NSS Report on Education 2017-18 says that only 24% of Indian households have
internet connectivity. The situation might have improved marginally, but no radical
improvement could have been possible between 2018 and 2021. Just a little over 15%
of rural households have access to internet services, and it is about 42% for urban
households. A large percentage of our children are from rural households. The number
of households that have both a computer and an internet connection in the country is
abysmally small—just 8%.
The digital divide is not just between rural and urban India. Access to the internet also
varies greatly between genders, regions and economic classes. The digital divide
between genders is appalling. Only 33 of every 100 women have access to the internet
while 67 of every 100 men have it. The divide gets nastier in rural areas. The
percentage of women who have internet access is only 28% in our villages. We do not
have data specifically for boys and girls, but I won’t be surprised if the access is more
or less on similar lines.
Access to a computer is just 4.6% cent in Bihar. Kerala reports 24% and Delhi 35%.
Internet access is also very uneven and unequal. While states like Delhi, Kerala, Punjab,
Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Uttarakhand report 40% access, in states like Odisha,
Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh it is
only 20% or less.
Economic status is another basis for a digital divide. Only 2.7% have access to a
computer in the poorest 20% households, and only 9% have access to internet
facilities. Of the top 20% households, about 28 have computers and just over 50 have
internet access for every 100. There’s a spike in smartphone availability: the Annual
Status of Education Report 2020 (ASER) says that about 11% households bought new
phones since the lockdown began, of which 80% are smartphones. Of those who had
no smartphones at home, only 13% had access to someone else’s device. But without
the large screen of a desktop or at least a tablet, imagine the difficulties of children
attending online classes.
Even if there’s a computer and an internet connection, power supply remains a
challenge. Although almost every village in the country is now connected to the power
grid—as PM Modi never fails to remind us—supply in many regions continues to be a
problem. Only about 47 of every hundred rural households have 12 hours of power
supply.
Even when there’s access to the internet, in most places, especially in rural areas,
connectivity is poor. About 50% people complain of poor connectivity or bad signal.
This makes the digital experience frustrating. And makes the learning experience for
children very discouraging. Add to this the noisy environment in the household. Not
every child has a quiet and undisturbed place where s/he can concentrate on an online
lesson. About 37% of households in the country have only a single-room dwelling. And
during the lockdown every member of the household is at home. Not the best
environment for study.
Bhaskar and Kishore tell me that they never had any experience of online learning
before. And this is true for most of their peers across the country. Not only children,
teachers too were unprepared, untrained and therefore unskilled in conducting online
classes. Only 17% of government teachers and 43% of private school teachers are
reported to have received any training in online teaching. That impacts their teaching
ability and consequently the students’ learning levels.
The Economist reported that even in countries like the United States, UK, Belgium and
The Netherlands, digital classes are a disappointment. By March 2021, it said, primary
school students in the UK had fallen behind by three months. Belgium reported a similar
situation. Dutch students who were measured during eight weeks of online classes
revealed that they learnt nothing new at all in their classes. If that’s the situation in
countries where digital exposure and net penetration is near universal, it’s frightening to
think of the learning outcomes for our children.
Even before the pandemic, the learning levels of our children were very unsatisfactory.
ASER tells us that in 2018 about 73% of class 3 pupils could not read class 2 textbooks.
And only 73% of class 8 students could read class 2 texts. The numbers for arithmetic
are equally distressing. In 2018, about 72% of class 3 children could not do subtraction.
About 73% of class 5 children were unable to do division. About 66% of class 8
students were unable to do three digit by one digit division.
If those were the learning levels before the pandemic, we can imagine what staying
away from school and patchy quality of online digital classes could have done to our
children’s academic standards.
On top of these learning difficulties, children are facing mental health issues. They’re
confined to homes, their social interactions are limited, affecting their emotional
development. The research journal Indian Paediatrics noted that the situation will
induce acute panic, anxiety, obsessive behaviours, paranoia and depression, and may
also lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the long run.
In a study done by the think tank Health Parliament, 29% students reported disturbed
sleep and 26% said that they had lost interest in performing routine tasks. About 20%
said they had lost the motivation to study, and 15% reported loss of concentration.
Another 15% experienced stress and about 14% reported mood swings.
Students also reported weight gain and excess strain due to increased screen time.
Many helpline organizers said, when I spoke to them, that there has been an increase
in calls regarding domestic violence and child abuse. Underprivileged children also have
to contend with the stress of seeing their parents’ economic distress.
The ASER Report of 2020 shows that there’s a marginal but noticeable shift of
enrolment from private schools to government schools. It could be because of the
financial stress that families are experiencing. Another finding of the Report is very
worrying. There’s a huge increase in non-enrolment of students. In the band of 5- to 8-
year-olds, there was a huge jump of 6.8% from the 2018 figure of five-year-olds not
enrolling. It has to be verified if this is only because of school shutdowns. If it is on
account of financial distress which pushed a significant segment of our middle-class into
poverty, then it is indeed a cause for worry. Those children may not return to school
anytime soon.
Pardon me if I have bombarded you with too much data. But I thought it is necessary
that we come face to face with the situation of our children. Let’s not wish these stark
realities away. We need to think about them. We have to care for their education and
mental well-being. They can’t look after themselves, it is we who need to worry about
them, plan for them, act for them. Only if we have a clear assessment of the ground
reality and are aware of the various issues, can we think of meaningful ways to take
corrective action.
It is an extraordinary and worrying situation. The governments, both Union and state,
will have to urgently apply their minds and put together task forces to deal with the
challenges. Otherwise a whole generation is at risk of losing the opportunity to realize
its potential. A large number of underprivileged children might be pushed out of
education for ever and fall into child labour. Girls are at much greater risk—of being
confined to household chores and, worse, child marriage. Business as usual governance
will not reach these children and rescue them.
Malnourished, stunted, poorly educated, unskilled, digitally deprived, mentally scarred,
distressed and unsmiling children cannot make our country a superpower, or even a
developed nation. A country with Vishwaguru dreams should first teach its children well,
feed them well, and keep them safe and happy.
*
COVID SURGE, NATIONAL NUMBING AND ACCOUNTABILITY
July 2021
We are witnessing perhaps one of the largest surges of COVID infections in the world.
The death toll is mounting. This is a crisis. An unprecedented health emergency is
overwhelming us.
The death of a dear one is painful. Real, unlike the deaths of unfamiliar people, which
can be a data point, a statistic. I understood this way back in 1981. Until then death
meant nothing to me. It was merely news, a piece of information. I came face to face
with pain when my father died that year. I was quite young then. I have experienced
the dislocation death causes, the void it leaves, the hardship it entails for the family.
My friends died, many of them in the last one year. They succumbed to COVID. I know
what it means to their families. To their wives, husbands, children, parents, relatives,
friends and colleagues. A dear friend died, leaving behind his helpless widow and two
daughters of marriageable age. They could not even see him cremated. No last rites.
The last time they saw him as father and husband was when he was admitted to
hospital. Days later, they were shown a wrapped-up corpse and told that it was him. All
their savings were vacuumed by the rapacious hospital. It’s nearly a year now, and the
family is yet to come out of the shock.
Another friend admitted his COVID infected 81-year-old father to a private hospital.
They charged him a lakh of rupees a day. He had to pay cash every two days for the
next two days’ treatment in advance. A few hours’ delay in payment and the hospital
would threaten to discontinue the treatment. My friend was not told what exactly was
the treatment given to his father. After 15 days in hospital the father died, leaving the
family in the red by 20 lakh rupees.
Many lost incomes, livelihoods. Families were scarred. Most of them have not yet
recovered from their financial loss. For many, jobs have not returned. No stimulus came
to their help. That was the effect of COVID’s first coming.
The second coming we are witnessing now seems to be even more virulent. The third
week of April ended with yet another massive surge in infections. Over 2,59,000 cases
in a single day, the highest ever till then. The death toll was 1,761—again the highest in
a single day. The country has so far reported a total of 1,53,14,0714 cases of infection,
and the cumulative number of deaths since the outbreak is 1,80,550. And we all know
that these are under-reported numbers. Cases are under-reported, deaths are under-
reported. Doctors in charge of hospitals tell us in private that the situation is far more
grave. Testing too has broken down. Hospitals and labs are refusing to take samples,
because they can’t test those samples before they go bad. Their capacities are
overwhelmed. Only 13.56 lakh tests were carried out on the Sunday of the week, that’s
about 2.1 lakh lower than the previous day.
Footage and pictures of ambulances waiting outside hospitals with COVID patients,
dozens of dead bodies burning in samashaans, scores of stretchers doubling up as
hospital beds, and relatives wailing helplessly are choking our social media timelines.
But our political and religious leaders are unmindful of this agony.
For political leaders, elections are important. For religious leaders, assertion of their
religious identity is important. Public health, people’s lives matter little to them. Our
televisions show us thousands of people mobilised for election rallies by political
leaders: the Prime Minister, Union ministers, chief ministers, opposition leaders. And a
dense gathering of lakhs of pilgrims for the Kumbh Mela’s Shahi Snan. After the
damage was done, religious leaders said the rest of the Mela would be symbolic. While
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi announced cancellation of his rallies, principal
contestants in the Bengal elections—TMC and BJP—continue their campaigns in flagrant
violation of COVID safety protocols.
There are experts, analysts and political leaders who justify election rallies and Kumbh
gatherings. Hearing them I felt anger for a day; disappointed the next day when such
irresponsible talk continued; and now it is disgusting to hear them. They say that we
are in a much better situation than other countries. Our rate of infection and deaths per
million are low compared to many countries. They indulge in heartless, meaningless,
insensitive comparisons. Selective comparisons. But being better off than other
countries means nothing to the families who have lost their loved ones, and to those
who are at risk.
We miss the whole point of this crisis if we look at dry numbers and ignore the faces
behind the numbers. The families behind the numbers. The grief and the mounting
agony behind the cold numbers in official spreadsheets and government dashboards.
But even the inter-country comparisons that are put out by the devotees of the lot who
are in power today, are flawed. Let’s look at how we are doing in comparison to our
immediate neighbours. In daily new infections, in confirmed deaths per million, in the
total number of deaths per day, in the cumulative confirmed cases between January
2020 and the end of April 2021, and cumulative confirmed deaths, we are much worse
off than Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, our less endowed
neighbours.
We have a massive task ahead of us. These are tough times. To fight the pandemic, we
need to vaccinate at least 70% of our population. Excluding pregnant women and
children, this means over 70 crore people. For which we need at least 140 crore doses
of the vaccines. Remember the counsel: if the pandemic doesn’t end everywhere in the
country, it doesn’t end anywhere in the country. Are we prepared? It is clear that we
are not. Against the world average of 11.61 doses per 100, we are able to do only 9
doses per 100.
The government seems to be in no mood to entertain any questions about our
preparedness. The uncivil and stunningly ill-tempered response by the union health
minister to a set of responsible and constructive suggestions by the former Prime
Minister Dr Manmohan Singh reveals that the government is out of its depth. It prefers
whataboutery and pulling political punches to putting its head down and getting on with
the serious business of containing the virus.
Asleep at the wheel, the government has squandered the lockdown period. It missed
the point that lockdowns are not a solution but merely a means to pause the spread of
the virus until a vaccine is available and the medical infrastructure is strengthened. In
other words, it’s not a solution but a responsible way of preparing for a solution. A kind
of buying time. Instead of concentrating on improving hospital infrastructure and
strengthening the national resolve, the government spent national energies on token
gestures like lighting lamps, banging thalis and clapping. The economic package that
the government put together revealed that it was more interested in headline
management than in any substantial help to the vulnerable sections. It tried to fool the
helpless nation with a counterfeit stimulus. Leave alone the demand side, it’s
inadequacy to address even the supply side has quickly become clear. The long
marches of migrant labour across the country—desperate to go back home because in
the cities they had been abandoned by the Indian State and by society—revealed the
heartlessness of governance.
In the event, our addition to the treatment facilities was negligible. We have added only
19,461 ventilators; 8,648 ICU beds and 94,880 oxygen supported beds since April 2020.
And these additions were uneven. States like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu added more
than others. About nine states actually showed a reduction in ICU beds and ventilators,
according to an answer given to a question in Parliament by the Union minister of state
for health. No wonder we see long queues of ambulances outside hospitals, and
stretchers doubling up as beds. There is no evidence of the government consulting with
a set of experts on how to navigate the choppy waters. No effort to tap into the vast
expertise that’s available in the country outside the government.
The Prime Minister’s popularity, political capital and communication skills seem to
indemnify him from the impact of the ineptitude, incompetence and heartlessness of his
government. He is able to escape accountability. The government and the ruling party
are now adept at outrage management. They understood that the initial sharp yelp
after the pain would quickly be followed by resignation; the country will become numb
to suffering. The government had already seen this—it had done well and contained the
fallout of demonetisation because of this numbing. So it is confident that it can ride out
the brutal effect on migrants of a disastrously planned lockdown; the collapse of our
public health system and medical infrastructure; the indefensible vaccine mess. All it
needs to do is to deny that there is a crisis, or any problem at all. It will drown the
nation in self-congratulatory noise. All is well and shining.
But popularity, political capital, have a habit of running out without giving notice.
Sooner or later, there will come a time when theatrics and oratory will begin to look like
pantomimes. And numbing will not last for ever. Humane and compassionate
governance, transparency, accountability, empathy—only these last. Only these
achievements and qualities can earn leaders a secure and respectable place in a
nation’s history.
The Prime Minister should exercise his choice, at least now.
*
ONE BILLION JABS: LET’S JOIN THE CELEBRATION!
October 2021
On 21st October 2021, India administered the billionth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The Prime Minister was present at a Delhi hospital when the injection was given to a
person from his Lok Sabha Constituency, Varanasi. The PM wrote an opinion piece for a
prominent English daily on his government’s achievement. He also addressed the nation
to mark the occasion. He made it one of the themes of his Mann Ki Baat talk on
national radio, delivered on Sunday [24th October 2021].
The Union government had made elaborate arrangements to celebrate the event well in
advance, and on the appointed day everything was brought together in a grand
choreography. A song was composed and sung by a well-known singer. One hundred
buildings were lit up in the colours of the National Flag. A number of heads of countries
and international organizations tweeted to congratulate India. The BJP’s national
president also wrote an article for an English daily. Another daily carried a column
penned by Bill Gates. A BJP chief minister too wrote an article in one of the pink papers.
A functionary of NITI Aayog who is in charge of vaccination also wrote a column.
Laudatory statements by BJP ministers and leaders were carried by newspapers in
every part of the country, in every language. The ruling party and its digital army and
supporters overwhelmed social media timelines with their posts hailing the
achievement. Smaller leaders led thousands of celebrations in villages and mohallas
across the country. Through four days and nights—from the 21st till the 24th—our print
and visual media, as well as social media, were inundated with news, views and
advertisements about the momentous event.
In this essay I want to share with you what I made of the core messaging contained in
these celebrations, what it set out to say as well as what it tried to hide. I also want to
dwell on what this entire affair tells us about the priorities and intentions of the present
regime and what it thinks of us, the citizens of India.
A billion is a big number. Administering a billion doses of a vaccine is surely a
milestone. But it is just that, a milestone and nothing more. Do we want to believe that
it is too big a goal for a country like India, and by implication make India small? Is it
really so high a bar for us as a nation? For a country with a robust record of
administering various vaccinations for at least the last four decades? For a country that
is the hub of global vaccine production? Is it necessary for the regime to frame the
objective as far too formidable and then tell us that it achieved it and make such a
noise about it, wasting time and money on an unseemly PR exercise? Are we in need of
certification as a nation that we are not an underdog anymore? Do we still need a
patronising nod from the big daddies of the world? Where does this school-boy sense of
inadequacy suddenly come from? We did not have it ten or twenty years ago.
Let me show you how our Prime Minister frames our achievement in his signed
newspaper article to illustrate what I mean. He traces the journey of a vial of vaccine
from its production centre right up to the vaccination centre, describing in detail the
logistics. He even talks about the time taken for this entire sequence, in order to drive
home the point of the humongous scale of the operation. He says: ‘…assume that each
vaccination took just two minutes for a healthcare worker. At this rate, it took around
41 lakh man days or approximately 11 thousand man years of effort to reach this
landmark.’
Aren’t these trite, commonplace supply-chain arrangements and delivery timelines that
one need not really boast about? The PM and the head of the ruling party don’t think
so. Both the leaders don’t find it necessary to mention the nation’s past experience in
carrying out such arduous tasks. At this point we must note what Bill Gates said in his
article published on the same day that our PM’s piece appeared, and in the same
publication. Gates wrote, ‘India, which has successfully implemented many mass
immunisation campaigns, has leveraged its longstanding experience, knowledge, and
infrastructure…’
Gates continued, ‘India’s Universal Immunisation Programme is one of the world’s most
extensive public health programmes. It vaccinates over 27 million newborns with
essential primary doses and over 100 million children aged 1-5 years with booster doses
every year. India has close to 27,000 cold chain facilities. These staggering numbers
demonstrate consistent investment over the years to build a robust health system and
deliver health services in the remotest locations in the country. During the pandemic,
this infrastructure has proved crucial.’
About the vaccine prowess of India, Gates said, ‘Before the pandemic, Indian vaccines
had already saved millions of lives from infectious diseases like meningitis, pneumonia
and diarrhoea.’
Note this: Our PM and the ruling party do not want to even acknowledge what to Gates
has been India’s remarkable strength over decades. By suggesting that the one-billion-
dose achievement is so historic and entirely the doing of the present regime, are the PM
and his party not belittling our great nation—our scientists, doctors, nurses, vaccine
manufacturers, administrators, public health pioneers and volunteers—who worked over
decades to make us a world leader in vaccination and immunisation?
The Prime Minister in his essay and broadcasts sets up straw hurdles and phoney
challenges. He then goes on to show how his mighty government overcame them.
Example: He pointed out that there was no VIP culture in the vaccination drive at all.
I’m not able to figure out what he meant by that. I myself know that a lot of VIPs and
those who think that they’re privileged did not wait in any queue to get their vaccine
jab. They walked straight into a centre and in a couple of minutes were out after a jab.
This is in the free centres. And many worthies I know had got their shots in private
facilities. This brings us to the PM’s claim that 100 crore vaccine doses were
administered free of cost. This is patently false. At least 25%, if not more, of the
vaccines administered in the country were paid for.
I will cite one more phoney claim and instance of too-clever-by-half word-play by the
PM.
First, the word-play. He said, ‘There are some among us who trust only foreign brands,
even for simply everyday necessities.’ Here, he refers to ‘some among us’. Then, in the
next sentence, he goes on to talk about ‘the people of India’. Here is what he says:
‘However, when it came to something as crucial as COVID-19 vaccine, the people of
India unanimously trusted Made in India vaccines.’ So, our PM ended up suggesting
that all ‘the people of India’ trusted foreign brands through our entire modern history
and only now, in 2021, did they unanimously trust something ‘Made in India’. Or did the
PM exclude the ‘some people’ of his first sentence from the ‘people of India’ of his next
sentence?
Now to the phoney claim. The most administered vaccine in India—Covishield—is a
foreign brand, it is only manufactured in India. The vaccine developed here and
therefore genuinely ‘made in India’ is Covaxin, which is actually the less administered
vaccine. By passing off Covishield as ‘Made in India’, the PM is faking an achievement.
Also, it is necessary to remember that the people of India have been trusting made in
India vaccines against various diseases, ranging from polio to smallpox, for decades.
This is not the first time.
The PM wrote about the CoWIN portal as if it were free of glitches and access
problems. I don’t have to repeat the well documented problems that the portal posed to
people in the rural areas and those with no access to the internet and smartphones.
This drew sharp comments from a Supreme Court Bench. It was only after this that
mandatory online registration was relaxed.
Let’s look at another passage from the PM’s article. He wrote: ‘In early 2020 when
COVID-19 was rampaging across the world, it was clear to us that this pandemic will
have to be eventually fought with the help of vaccines. We started preparing early. We
constituted expert groups and started preparing a road map right from April 2020.’
Let us believe the PM and accept that he knew at the beginning of 2020 that the
pandemic—which he and his government had not even acknowledged as an emergency
yet—was to be eventually fought with the help of vaccines. In the meantime, then, he
was probably trying to see if switching off lights, lighting diyas, banging plates and
clapping might also work, just in case. Perhaps it was this strategy that inspired some
of his Cabinet and party colleagues to propagate other, novel cures: using a particular
brand of papad and a medicine from the factory of a yoga guru; daubing cow dung on
the body, drinking cow urine, chanting mantras.
In that passage the PM also said that ‘we started preparing early’. I’m sure all of us
remember the mess that we were in when the second wave hit us hard. And the reason
was that we were not prepared. Everything that the country needed to fight COVID, to
save lives, was in short supply.
The government had not paid any advance to the two main vaccine producers in the
country. By April 2021, it had placed orders for just 31 crore vaccine doses—26 crore
with the Serum Institute of India (SII) and 5 crore with Bharat Biotech—when the
requirement was for at least 140 crore doses to fully vaccinate our eligible population.
While many countries had made ‘at risk’ investments in vaccine producers like Pfizer,
Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, we did not even advance money to our own
companies until very late. The Gates Foundation did what the Indian government
should have done. It provided at-risk funding of $150 million to SII in August 2020 for
about 100 million doses, which would be made available to India and other low- and
middle-income countries. However, when the situation went out of control, the Modi
government stopped SII from honouring its international commitments and forced it to
give its production for use in India.
That’s ‘preparing early’ by our PM’s reckoning.
We must also recall the resignation of a member of the COVID-19 task force in May
2020 lamenting the government’s ‘stubborn resistance to evidence-based policymaking’.
That should tell us something about the PM’s ‘expert group’ and its ‘road map’.
It was not until the Supreme Court pulled up the government in June 2020, telling it to
‘wake up and smell the coffee’, that the government got its policy right on vaccine
procurement and pricing. Until then, the central government had a patently unfair
policy that left the states to fend for themselves—and pay higher prices for the vaccines
than the Centre! The policy also appeared to incentivise the vaccine producers to sell to
private hospitals rather than to state governments. (I have discussed the details of this
policy in the essay ‘Vaccine Mess, Moral Paralysis and an “Egocratic” Government’.)
Despite criticism, the government stoutly defended its policy of differential pricing and
its own limited responsibility, and gave in only after intense pressure from the Supreme
Court.
The PM and his regime want us not to recall that phase of the shameful and tragic
vaccine mess in the country.
The PM and his regime won’t tell us how the 35,000 crore rupees allocated in the
budget for vaccination is being utilised. There is sure to be a sorry tale of inefficiency
and hubris hidden there as well.
The government also doesn’t want to reveal any details of the newly created PM Cares
Fund. It was created in late March 2020. The website says, ‘PM-CARES Fund is aimed at
strengthening the fight against COVID-19. It will further availability of quality treatment
and encourage research on ways to beat Coronavirus.’ It is a fund named for the Prime
Minister of India, who is also the chairman, and it uses India’s National Emblem, but it
is a private fund, privately audited. It is, therefore, not obliged to disclose details of its
funding. The Right to Information Act does not apply to it. Individuals and corporate
entities have made donations to the fund, as have government-owned public sector
companies and also foreign entities. But we do not know exactly how much money has
been received, how it has been spent and to what purpose. What is the need for
secrecy when it is a fund meant for the nation, for the fight against a national
emergency like the COVID pandemic?
Before the 21st October ‘billion jabs’ celebration, we had another little celebration of
vaccination achievement. That was on 17th September, when two crore doses were
administered on a single day as a birthday gift to the PM. In all the sycophantic noise,
the government wanted us not to notice the abnormally low doses administered on the
preceding and following days.
There is a lot the government wants us not to notice. The BJP national President wrote
in a newspaper column that while the entire world had administered 7 billion doses,
India alone had administered a billion. Well, no other country except China needs to
administer a billion doses and more. Take, for example, the United States. Even if it
fully vaccinates its entire eligible population with two doses and a third booster dose, it
still doesn’t need to administer a billion doses. So it is with every other country in the
world, except China.
Let’s now look at China, which is comparable in population size to our country. China
administered its billionth dose in June 2021, four months ahead of us. And by August it
had reached two billion doses—just two months after the first billionth dose milestone.
But our ruling party wants us to look at the wrong examples and to countries with
populations far, far lower than ours and then feel good and celebrate. The ruling party
president admonishes those who look at the percentage of population vaccinated and
insists that only gross numbers should be looked at. We should not speak about
percentages, because if we did, we would see how far we have to travel.
But the PM, the ruling party president and other government and party functionaries do
not mention China and its gross numbers. China is far ahead of us both in gross
numbers and in percentage. The Johns Hopkins University dashboard tells us that by
October 2021, China had fully vaccinated 104 crore or 75% of its population, whereas
we had fully vaccinate only 28 crores or 21% of our population. The important point is
that China did it and remains quiet and confident. Without making a song and dance
about a necessary task, and without bragging.
The PM and his government want us to celebrate. Celebrate every small thing. But
that’s not all. They also want us to delete the past from our collective memory. They
want us to believe that everything is happening only now and nothing worthwhile was
done in the past. They want to queer code anyone who points out their regime’s
negligence, the insensitivity, the unpreparedness, the fumbling, and the mess. They
don’t want us to remember even the recent past—what happened in March, April, May
and June 2021. They don’t want us to remember that in those horrific months of the
second wave of the pandemic, almost each one of us lost either a family member or a
relative or a friend or a neighbour or a colleague or an acquaintance. They don’t want
us to recall that almost all these people died because of lack of hospital beds,
ventilators, oxygen and timely medical help. They want us to forget the hundreds of
bodies that floated in the Ganga. They want us to erase from our collective memory the
dead bodies on the pavements outside hospitals, the long queues at crematoriums and
burial grounds.
Instead, they want us to celebrate a small milestone as a grand achievement.
They want us not to mourn, not to be angry, not to call them to account, not to
demand governance. Why remember the tragedy and be unpatriotic? Celebrate. Be
positive. Learn to move on.
What kind of regime projects a routine thing as a gigantic achievement? One that has
very meagre real achievements. Which regime wants us to forget the past? One which
lacks self-confidence and is unsure of its record. Which regime lies? One which has too
many damning truths to hide. And which regime attempts all these tricks? One which
has a poor opinion of its citizens; which thinks that it can manipulate them and they
won’t know.
This is what Nina Poblezova, a Muscovite, said about Stalin: ‘He stands in the balcony
and he lies. Everyone claps, but everyone knows he lies, and he knows we know. But
he continues spewing lies, and he’s happy that everyone is applauding him.’
We are not very far from the point in our national life when this will be our reality. But I
want to be positive, too. So I hope that we, as a nation, will change direction sometime
soon.

EPILOGUE March 2023

When governments declare that the people have ‘never had it so good’—that, indeed,
they are living in a golden age when rivers of milk and honey flow—we must suspect
their motives. We can be sure that they are manipulating public opinion, that they are
overwhelming the nation with noise and spectacle in order to divert people’s attention
from bad governance. There was once a government in the world that declared its
country a ‘paradise on earth’. India’s present government hasn’t gone that far yet. But
looking at its slick multimedia publicity blitz, its non-stop propaganda, it might well be
on its way to that level of self-congratulation which would be laughable if its implication
weren’t so tragic.
The government, especially the Prime Minister and the ruling party apparatchiks, tell us
repeatedly that we are having ‘Achhe Din’—good days—and that we are now in ‘Amrit
Kaal’—the ambrosial age. The essays in this volume would have given readers some
idea of how false and misleading these claims are.
When the Vajpayee-led NDA went to the polls in 2004 with the ‘India Shining’ slogan, it
was roundly defeated, because its claims were contrary to the reality on the ground.
But the Modi regime, whose slogans are far more outrageous and completely divorced
from reality, is unlikely to meet that fate. Unexpected and impressive victories in
successive state assembly elections, and strong electoral performances even when it is
defeated, provide us ample clues about the ruling dispensation’s strength and staying
power. It is important to train our eyes, ears and mind to see, hear and interpret these
clues. I will return to this in a little while.
We have recently celebrated 75 years of Independence and are now looking forward to
the centenary year of our liberation from the colonial yoke. In his Independence Day
address on 15 August 2022, Prime Minister Modi gave us what he termed as ‘ Panch
Prann’, or five pledges. These ‘mantras’, he said, were meant to regenerate our nation.
And what are the pledges we were asked to take? They were not to do with concrete
issues. They were vague declarations, grand and hollow. Here is what the PM said: ‘The
Panch Prann of Amrit Kaal—goal of developed India, to remove any trace of colonial
mindset, take pride in our roots, unity, and sense of duty among citizens.’ Nothing
about overcoming poverty, prejudice and inequality; or fighting hunger and hate. And
nothing about the rights of citizens, only their ‘duty’.
These ‘pranns’ or aspirational creeds for our national life don’t tell us the full story
about the PM’s and the ruling dispensation’s larger agenda for the next 25 years. They
only serve to deflect our attention from the very real crises our Republic is facing today
—rising inequality, communal hate, unacceptable levels of unemployment, a broken
public health system, a messed-up economy and crony capitalism of a kind and
magnitude that we have never seen before.
The noise about panch prann, Amrit Kaal, Atmanirbhar Bharat, Digital india, Vishwaguru
—this ceaseless noise is also an attempt to turn every solemn occasion in our national
life into a spectacular circus and thus trivialise it, and empty it of all meaning. This is by
now a habit with the Modi dispensation. The country seems to have learnt to live with
such circuses—with regular repetition, they have been normalised. There is no longer
any outrage at the eventification of solemn occasions. The real tragedy, however, is the
inability of the other political formations and civil society organisations in the country to
call out this craftiness. Their failure to make even feeble attempts to restore solemnity
to such occasions is saddening. They are no less to blame for the trivialisation of our
national discourse. The best that they seem to be able to do is make token gestures
and send out some clever tweets, when it is strong ideological challenge and
mobilisation that is needed.
As a people, we should use the occasion of marking the 75th anniversary of our nation’s
independence to do some serious thinking about our democratic processes, our
institutions and governance structures. I will have space here only to flag a few of the
issues that to me are of the greatest importance.
What is the state of our representative institutions, especially our legislatures? How
healthy are the processes by which we elect our representatives? By now it is clear that
they are deeply flawed, but we hardly engage in any serious debate about this.
Everybody knows about the huge amounts of money the candidates and political parties
spend during elections. Everybody also knows that what is shown in the returns of
expenditure submitted by candidates and political parties is patently false. This is where
the rot begins—alliances of convenience, legislators crossing the floor, horse-trading,
corrupt practices are inevitable after this. The hijacking of our legislatures—indeed, our
national democratic process—by a party awash with cash is then inevitable.
But there is an even graver problem with our electoral and parliamentary system.
The system and procedure for electing our legislators has led to a distortion of
democratic representation in our polity. As a result, none of the governments we have
ever had in the history of our Republic has had a decisive majority or truly popular
mandate. Our system is based on the ‘first past the post’ and ‘winner takes all’
principle; a win is not decided on the basis of the majority vote, but is based on ‘at
least one more vote than the nearest rival’. As almost every contest is a multi-cornered
contest, more often than not, the winning candidate polls only a minority of the popular
vote. The winning party at the state and national level, of course, always comes to
power with a minority of the popular vote.
Our system has room for another gross distortion when it comes to the reflection of
popular will in the legislatures. Imagine the following scenario: in all the 543 Lok Sabha
seats, there are multi-cornered contests. And the winner polls only a minority of the
total number of votes, and needs to win just one vote more than the nearest rival.
There is a possibility, then, that a party that got a mere 543 votes more than its nearest
rival party will take all the seats in the legislature. All 543 seats. This may not be a
probable scenario, but surely a possible scenario. And as a result, an overwhelming
majority of citizens will have zero representation in the House. This scenario may be
difficult to imagine at the Lok Sabha level. But one can easily grasp its probability at the
level of our grass-roots democratic representative bodies. The opinion and demands of
a very substantial section of the citizenry are shut out from our democratic
representative institutions as a result of this ‘first past the post’ system.
There is yet another element that introduces distortion into our democratic life and
merits serious debate: our system of territorial constituency. It leads to subversion of
fundamental democratic principles. Imagine the following scenario: a party has the
support and following of, say, 100 voters. But those voters are evenly spread over 100
constituencies in a state. The candidate will not be able to get elected to our legislature
and the party will not get a single seat. On the other hand, there is a party with the
support of only 50 voters, but they are concentrated in the geography of five or six
constituencies. That party is likely to win all those five or six seats. The result is that a
party with the support of 100 voters in a state ends up with no representation in the
legislature, but a party which has only half of that support can win 5 or 6 seats. This
distortion is much sharper and sinister in a stratified society like ours, where castes,
religions, linguistic groups tend to be concentrated in geographies.
The first past the post and winner-takes-all principle plus our territorial constituency
system have introduced subversive distortions into our democratic life. In effect,
minority governments in terms of popular vote can get brute majorities in terms of the
number of seats in legislatures. Percentages of popular vote have no meaning in our
nation’s democratic life any more. Only the number of seats won matters.
As a result, smart political operatives can and do game the system. The democratic
process can be and is being reduced to poll management by political parties with vast
resources and sectarian appeals. Every political party has been a beneficiary of these
distorted systems at one time or the other. Therefore, political parties and their
entrenched leaderships that have benefitted from this arrangement are unwilling to
upend these structures.
Another important issue that we need to examine in our democratic political life is the
nature of our political parties. These putative vehicles of the democratic expression of
the popular will are themselves utterly undemocratic, without exception, across the
board in our country. Most of the states in India are dominated by either family-run
political outfits or by parties that are pocket organisations of politically ambitious and
resourceful individuals who are capable of mobilising funds and securing caste bases or
making sectarian appeals in those respective states. Some are openly and brazenly so.
A few take care to maintain a democratic façade by handing over nominal charge to
different individuals while the actual levers of power in the party are operated by an
entrenched cabal. We have a paradoxical situation where utterly undemocratic bodies
are at the helm of a distorted democratic system claiming to be repositories of the
popular will.
These distortions and anomalies in the democratic life of our Republic are at the root of
the crisis that has assumed ugly proportions today with hate-mongering politics. With
just about 37% of the popular vote, the present ruling dispensation reaped a brute
majority in the Parliament, and it can claim to represent the country without a single
Muslim member of Parliament—not a single parliamentarian from a community that is
almost 15% of India’s population. It is the same story in several states where the BJP is
in power. In UP, where 20% of the population is Muslim, the BJP did not field a single
Muslim candidate in the 2017 and 2022 state elections, and won handsomely.
How can we claim to be the ‘Mother of Democracy’ when the country’s diversity is not
reflected and represented in our Parliament and many state assemblies?
In order to address this crisis, we need to rework our democratic ethos, our system of
representation, the sanctity of our representative law-making bodies and usher in the
strict separation of powers among legislature, executive and judiciary.
Now, let us go back to the issue we raised at the beginning of this essay: why the
Modi-Shah dispensation is unlikely to meet the same fate as that of the Vajpayee-led
NDA dispensation in 2004; and why it is not worried about its lacklustre performance in
governance, its mismanagement of the economy, its dismal record in dealing with the
pandemic, its inability to repel Chinese incursions into our territory, and its deeply
problematic relationship with crony capitalists. And why, despite evident failures on
every front, it continues to win elections so handsomely. Its abject failure to deliver on
its promises does not seem to dent its political strength or demoralise and shame its
leadership.
I think it is because the political strength of the present ruling dispensation does not
emanate from its performance record on any of the parameters that should matter. Its
political strength rests solidly on its emotive, divisive agenda that plays on the explicit
and implicit prejudice of the majority community. Its shortcomings are overlooked
because it is able to deliver on that intoxicating hate agenda. Let me relate my field
level observation on this score.
I travelled more than 3,000 kilometres in Gujarat just before the 2012 state general
elections to gauge the pulse of the electorate. My observations were published before
the election results were out. During my travels a lot of voters parroted the government
publicity lines like ‘development’, ‘Gujarat Model’, etc., and expressed their preference
for the Narendra Modi-led BJP—Modi was then the chief minister of Gujarat. When
questioned about rising unemployment, bad infrastructure and rural distress, the
respondents conceded that there had been no significant development. Yet, they stuck
to their preference for the incumbent government. They could give no logical reason for
this. I kept probing, and after everything was peeled off from the mythical ‘Gujarat
model’, their core reason emerged: ‘Isne un logon ko sabak sikha diya,’ they said. ‘This
government taught “those people” a lesson.’ What we are seeing in much of India
today—in northern and central India, in Assam and parts of Karnataka—is that aspect
of the Gujarat model. Not of vikas, or development, which anyway was unreal, but of
‘un logon ko sabak sikha diya’—teaching those ‘others’ a lesson.
Our polity can emerge from this crisis and begin to live again by our Republic’s founding
values of a plural, inclusive and liberal democracy if the opposition parties and those
elements of our civil society that haven’t cynically aligned themselves with the ruling
party push back with conviction, clarity and hard work at the grassroots. This isn’t
about winning or losing elections; it is about sustained efforts to excise the poison of
majoritarianism from the minds of a significant and vocal section of our people. Hand in
hand, we should also make changes in our kludgy democratic process. This may seem
like a lost cause, but we must start the debate and keep at it. To me, this is the only
way to ensure that such toxic tendencies will have no fertile political ground to sprout
and flourish in our Republic.€