Beef eaters, pseudo secularism and...

Modi's India

by Stanley Mathews

Having failed to deliver on his main election promise to boost industrial production and job creation through massive foreign investment and to tone up the Indian administrative and legal systems to make investment possible, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has fallen back on the Bharatiya Janata Party's principal political plank - Hindutva - to salvage his sagging political fortunes.

While he receives accolades from Indians settled abroad, Modi is fast losing support at home. While foreign investors are yet to respond to his call to 'Make in India,' Indian entrepreneurs have been shying away from investing in manufacturing. India can hardly boast to being an "industrialized country" when manufacturing accounts for only 15 percent of its GDP.

Modi has coined a number of catchy slogans to put his Indian house in order, but their appeal is beginning to wear thin, in the absence of follow up action. He is rarely in the country and, under his highly centralized political and administrative system, his presence in the country is essential.

Modi did bring foreign policy to the center-stage of governance. While his moves to get Big Power support have not borne any tangible fruit - despite incessant globetrotting - relations with India's neighbours have deteriorated. Relations with Pakistan are at the nadir with India coming out openly in support of the Baloch rebels in Pakistan, even producing one of their leaders. Relations with Nepal are in knots after India's unabashed support for one particular community - the Mahdesias of Indian origin. In Sri Lanka, the Indian Railways project is being reviewed. There is a request to change the location of the proposed and much delayed coal-fired power plant from Sampur to Foul Point. Colombo has denied any intention to sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with India and has denied any knowledge of India's plan to build a bridge across the Palk Strait.

At the level of multilateral organizations, New Delhi's effort to reform the UN system to get a place for itself as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council was shot down in August with the US stating that membership can be considered only when a country agrees to shoulder the UN's responsibilities, including ensuring global peace and security. India has neither the resources nor the wish to taken on such a huge responsibility.

Although the 2014 Indian Parliamentary Elections gave Modi's BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) a huge majority in the Lower House, he is aware that it rests on a narrow voter base - just 31 percent. Its huge seats haul is thanks to the First Past the Post System. In 2014 elections to the State Assemblies, the BJP lost in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Sikkim but won in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. It is on a rickety seat in Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir depending on the unruly Shiv Sena in the former, and the Muslim Peoples' Democratic Party, in the latter. The BJP was routed in the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections. Presently, it is facing a tough challenge in the Bihar elections.

Rekindling Hindutva

Given these failures at home and abroad, Modi is trying maintain his prime position in the Indian political system by rekindling Hindutva, an emotive issue which in the past has paid political dividends, albeit in the short term. While maintaining a stoic silence on the campaign (in order to maintain the façade of a liberal, forward looking ruler), Modi has allowed his followers, party members and associates (the so-called Saffron Brigade), to launch vituperative, disruptive and often violent Hindutva campaigns targeting non-Hindu minorities and dissenters of every hue - whether social, cultural or political.

His government appointed a known Hindutva supporter, Dr. Y. Sudarshana Rao, as Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, creating much resentment among liberal Indian historians. Rao has written on the need to revive the caste system and claimed that the date of the Mahabharata can be ascertained when the epic is acknowledged as a myth. Modi then appointed party man Gajendra Chouhan as Chairman of the prestigious Film and TV Institute in Pune, leading to a long student strike and widespread condemnation from India's film fraternity. Some 190 film personalities, including actor Vidya Balan, signed a petition addressed to President Pranab Mukherjee. All this evoked no response.

Hindutva vigilante squads murdered Maharsahtrian rationalists Narendra Dhabolkar and Govind Pansare. In Karnataka, a Veera Saiva vigilante group shot dead dissenting writer M.M.Kalburgi. Recently, the Shiv Sena got a concert by Pakistani singer Ghulam Ali at Mumbai cancelled by issuing threats. When its threatened violent bid to stop the release of ex-Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri's book 'Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove' failed, it tarred the face of Sudheendra Kulkarni, the organizer of the launch.

Hindutva groups had simultaneously taken up the cause of cow slaughter and beef consumption. They filed a case in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court seeking the implementation of a pre-independence law which permits death penalty for cow slaughter and beef. This was done knowing well that 80 percent of Kashmiris are Muslims who consume beef. The case nearly brought down the coalition government in that state. A Hindutva mob thereafter lynched a 53- year- old Muslim, Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, not far from Delhi, for allegedly keeping beef in his fridge.

But all this seems to be boomeranging. Economist cum Reserve Bank of India Governor, Raghuram Rajan, expressed concern in a way the business-friendly Modi might understand when he said, foreign investments will not come in the absence of law and order.

Massive protests

The Indian intellectual class, long subservient to the State because of a passion for State awards and dependence on State patronage, came out of its traditional reserve and protested. Over 40 well-known writers from all parts of the country have so far returned their State awards. Scores more are likely to join this unique form of protest which was initiated way back in 1919 by Rabindranath Tagore who returned his knighthood following the massacre of hundreds of Indians by the British at a peaceful public meeting in Jalainwala Bagh in the Punjab.

"The writers'protest is the result of an accumulation of grievances against the State. While previously, writers had enjoyed the right to criticize and express dissent, that right is being taken away, with the State becoming a mute witness," said Gnani Sankaran, a Chennai-based writer and analyst.

Leading the pack of those returning State awards is Nayantara Sahgal, the 88- year- old 1986 'Sahitya Akademi' Award winner who wrote an open letter stating reasons for returning the highest Indian literary award. She said: "Anyone who challenges is marginalized, persecuted and murdered" and described Hindutva as a "dangerous distortion of Hinduism." Citing cases of State-backed intimidation, she said: "In all these cases, justice drags its feet. The Prime Minister remains silent about this reign of terror. We must assume he dare not alienate evil doers who support his ideology."

Sahgal said that she is returning her Sahitya Akademi award "in memory of Indians who have been murdered; and in support of Indians who uphold the right of dissent and who now live in fear and uncertainty."

She was quickly followed by Ashok Vajpayi, former Chairman of Lalit Kala Akademi, who described the Hindutva campaign as an "assault on life and freedom of expression." Malayalam writer Sarah Joseph said: "There is a fear engulfed in what we eat, when we express love. There is some sort of curb on what one wants to write and speak. This does not augur well." Joseph's allusion to expression of love stems from the violent Hindutva campaign against Valentine Day observances by young men and women. Salman Rushdie characterized the anti-dissent campaign as "a new form of thuggish violence."

Punjabi writer Gurbachan Singh Bhullar said that the Saffron (Hindu extremist) Brigade will destroy the social fabric of India. Kashmiri writer Ghulam Nabi Khayal said minorities are "feeling threatened by the campaign and feel that their future is bleak."

The Modi government has been dismissive about awards being returned.

Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma disdainfully said: "If they are unable to write, let them stop writing!" Establishment journalist Swapan Dasgupta said, the writers' action of returning of State awards is tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of the Indian State.

He was implying sedition. Modi, whose silence is one of the causes of the agitation, has not issued a formal statement. But he told a Kolkata-based newspaper that incidents like the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq and the cancellation of Ghulam Ali's concert are 'regrettable' yet asked how the Centre can be blamed for them when law and order is a devolved provincial subject.

Then, apparently to assure his Hindutva constituency that he is with them, Modi added: "The BJP has always opposed pseudo-secularism."