While such electoral promises may garner votes, taxpayer money meant to safeguard India’s future is instead spent on an ever-expanding web of social welfare programmes that don’t really enable the poor.

Credit: Reuters

The approach of the next general election has reminded political leaders of the existence of the poor in India. This has set off a rash of competing promises to the electorate.

On January 28, three days before the budget, Congress president Rahul Gandhi announced that his party would guarantee a minimum income to every poor family in the country.

As of now neither Rahul, nor anyone else in Congress, has clarified precisely who will benefit from this scheme, but the cost will be prohibitive: At the prevailing minimum wage of Rs 321 a day (Rs 9,630 a month), covering 25% of the families of the country will cost the exchequer a whopping Rs 700,000 crore a year.

How the beneficiaries will be chosen is still unclear. The actual number could be much smaller – perhaps no more than 18% – if we count only those whom the National Sample Survey has placed in its residual category of ‘casual’ workers. But even casual workers make up 18% of the work force. So guaranteeing at least a minimum income will add Rs 500,000 crore to the central government’s expenditures.

The situation in Wazirpur is indicative of the plight of unorganised workers across Delhi. Credit: Amit Kumar

Not to be outdone, three days later, Piyush Goel – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s acting finance minister – announced in his budget speech that the BJP-led government would introduce an immediate income subsidy of Rs 6,000 a year to all farm families with less than two hectares of land. The government has estimated that 12 crore farmers operate on less than two hectares of land. This will therefore add Rs 72,000 crore to the Centre’s annual expenditure.

Goyal also unveiled an insurance scheme for unorganised workers in which the government will match the contributions of Rs 55 to Rs 100 a month of contributors starting from the age of 18, and guarantee them a pension of Rs 3,000 a month after they reach the age of superannuation. On the surface, this looks like a ‘pay as you go’ insurance scheme of the kind that continental European countries have adopted (but the UK and India have not). But it too bears the marks of haste and lack of study.

In ‘pay as you go’ schemes, the annual payout by the insurance company is met by the interest earned on accumulated pension contributions, supplemented by current premium inflows.

If such a scheme is open to anyone who is prepared to pay the required premium, a lock-in period of five to six years before contributors become eligible for its benefits is usually sufficient to make it solvent, without the need for any annual subvention from the exchequer.

But the imposition of a Rs 15,000 ceiling on eligibility for benefits will almost certainly pervert its purpose. For it will provide the employers with a big stick with which to dissuade workers who want a pay hike beyond Rs 15,000: “Stay below it or face the loss of half your pension when you retire”. 

Unwittingly, therefore, Goyal has made a similar mistake to what the Speenhamland Act made in England in 1795, when it promised to supplement private wages with a ‘filler’ to raise workers’ living standards to the minimum acceptable level. All that the Act succeeded in doing was to allow employers to lower their wage rates as far as the Speenhamland commissioners would tolerate .

The ‘Speenhamland Effect’ will also ensure that the total number of beneficiaries will far exceed the 10 crore that to the Modi government expects. There are more than 36 crore non-agricultural employees in the unorganised sector. Is there any good reason not to expect 30 crore among them to take out old age pension policies? 

If, or rather when, that happens, the government’s outgo on the scheme will rise to Rs 36,000 crore. If one adds to these two schemes the tax, and interest rebates that the interim finance minister has promised, this budget will increase budget spending by Rs 100-125,000 crore in a full year.

A woman tests LED bulbs after installing them onto a grid to make indicator lights inside an electrical manufacturing unit in Mumbai, March 22, 2018. Credit: Reuters/Francis Mascarenhas

A broke government

Where will this money come from? Neither the Congress nor the BJP has said a word about how it will raise it, so one must conclude that they expect the annual increase in the government’s tax and non-tax revenues to cover the extra spending. 

But even a cursory look at the government’s finances will show that while this can happen when the economy is growing at 8-10% a year and industry at 9-12%, as it did between 2003 and 2011, it cannot when industrial growth is stuck at 3-4% a year. 

The harsh truth is that the government is broke. To balance its budget in 2017-18, it had to borrow money to meet close to 29% of its expenditure by borrowing money from the public through the sale of bonds by the Reserve Bank of India. The preliminary estimate for 2018-19 is only marginally lower. 

Had the borrowed money been going into the creation of infrastructure, as it did in from the ’50s to the ‘70s, it would have given no cause for concern because the additional assets it created would have generated more money and more jobs. 

But in 2017-18, very little of the borrowing is being done for investment. Of Rs 5,91,000 crore in 2017-18, Rs 529,000 crore was used to pay the interest on past loans. This is thus a self-contained circle that comes into being in which fresh debt is incurred to meet the cost of servicing past debt.

In short, the government is running the largest Ponzi scheme of all time.

The budget does contain a small allocation Rs 263,000 crore for its capital account. But this money does not create new fixed assets. Most of it goes into the maintenance of the fixed assets – roads, bridges, power stations and the like that were built in the past. 

In sum, very little of the money that the government now raises from taxpayers is intended to safeguard the future of the country by creating more and better infrastructure. Nearly all of it is being spent upon salaries and pensions of a bloated bureaucracy whose income is adjusted every five years for inflation, come rain or shine.

What little remains is being spent on an ever-expanding web of social welfare programmes that create immediate relief and garner votes in the next election, but do nothing that will enable the poor to stand on their own feet.

That security comes only with the acquisition of stable, permanent jobs. Neither Rahul Gandhi’s minimum income programme, nor Mr Modi’s Rs 6,000 a year to the superannuated farmer will assure his or her son, daughter or grandchildren a job. To revert to economists’ jargon, every rupee that the government spends on boosting consumption instead of investment, denies someone a job on some date in the not too distant future.

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The tragedy of the crisis in West Bengal is that it pits the political freedom of regional parties against the mandate of the state to punish corruption and political pillage.

Mamata Banerjee at her dharna site in Kolkata. Credit: PTI

Seventy years after India gained its freedom, the Ashoka Chakra has become a symbol of national unity – one that every child in the country is familiar with. But there is a darker side to the unity that Ashoka created, which few care to remember.

Beginning in the 14th year of his reign, Ashoka attempted to make his subjects change their traditional customs to bring them in line with dhamma – the Buddhist ‘right path’. To oversee this, he appointed a socio-religious police, the dhamma mahamattas. Initially the dhamma mahamattas used persuasion, but as Ashoka grew more introverted later in life, they began to abuse their power and use coercion.

As the historian Romila Thapar has noted, their high-handedness created a wave of discontent. After Ashoka’s death, first the outlying and then the inner principalities began to ignore central edicts. In less than half a century, the Mauryan empire passed into history.

What happened then has been repeated many times since. It happened when Aurangzeb tried to re-establish Muslim pre-eminence in the Mughal empire and alienated the Rajput princes who supplied his army with most of its soldiers.

It happened when Achyuta Raya, the weak and self-centred son of Krishnadeva Raya, the greatest of the Vijayanagar kings, tried to hold together his father’s far-flung empire through the use of threats and force.

It almost happened to the British Raj, when Lord Dalhousie imposed the doctrine of lapse upon the princes who had entered into subsidiary alliance with the East India Company.

India is on another such fateful cusp today. Since the 1994 Bommai judgment of the Supreme Court, which practically ruled out the use of president’s rule to keep state governments in line, executive power has been shifting steadily from the Centre to the states.

Most of this shift has taken place in a spirit of cooperation, to the end of improving governance and strengthening democracy. But on February 3, that cooperation gave way to open conflict between the Central government and the state of West Bengal.

The CBI’s record in West Bengal

A fortnight earlier, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had accused the Kolkata police commissioner, Rajeev Kumar, of ‘deliberately delaying and diluting an SIT [investigation] of two notorious chit fund Ponzi schemes,’ the Sarada and Rose Valley scams. It said he was ‘absconding’, a clear warning that his arrest was imminent.

The CBI’s accusation was strongly refuted the very next morning. Javed Shamim, the additional commissioner of Kolkata police, pointed out that Kumar had been in office every day, including on weekends. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee accused the Modi government of resuming its campaign to bring the Trinamool Congress to its knees before the general election.

Mamata had good reason to believe this. In 2014, the CBI had come to Kolkata in a similar manner and arrested two Trinamool MPs, as well as the state’s minister for transport and sports, and the state director-general of police. They were subjected to intense cross-examination on charges of collusion in the chit-fund scams.

Thirty months later, on April 17, 2017, the CBI registered a first information report (FIR) against 13 persons – including 12 top Trinamool leaders – who were allegedly caught accepting cash on camera in a sting operation carried out by the news portal Narada News. The sting was carried out just before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and was made public in 2016, just days ahead of the Bengal assembly elections.

When the investigators are suspect

The West Bengal police had therefore been seething at the high-handedness of the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate for some time. So on Sunday evening, when a team of CBI officers arrived unannounced at the commissioner’s house, and asked to be let in for “official work”, the police at the bungalow asked them to wait.

Word spread through Kolkata police stations that the CBI was about to arrest their chief. In no time, the CBI officers were besieged by hundreds of state police. They had to call in the CRPF to be rescued.

Mamata went straight to the police commissioner’s bungalow, accused the CBI of being Modi’s political tools and began a dharna, claiming that this had become necessary “to save democracy, the Constitution and the country.”

Commenting on the confrontation, a senior official of the Kolkata police said, “The CBI and ED have always acted as agencies above law. There are certain rules which all agencies need to follow while investigating. If they look for cooperation from us, they too need to cooperate with us.”

Protection for new partymen

Narendra Modi’s misuse of the CBI and other agencies had also been exposed when the CBI dropped its investigations against the former Trinamool railway minister Mukul Roy, and Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, after they joined the BJP in November 2017.

While the evidence then was inferential, fresh evidence seems to have emerged that both Roy and Biswas struck explicit deals with the BJP to get the West Bengal and Assam police off their backs.

In a taped conversation apparently with the BJP’s general secretary for West Bengal, Kailash Vijayvargiya, Roy is heard asking him to ‘fix’ four West Bengal police officers who were creating trouble for him. Vijayvargiya denounced the recording as a forgery, but Roy has so far only accused the police of illegally taping his conversations – stopping short of challenging their veracity.

The TMC also claims that Sudipto Sen, the promoter of the Sarada chit fund, actually wrote to the CBI office in-charge in Kolkata to complain that Himanta Biswa Sarma took Rs 3 crore from him to facilitate the spread of his chit fund in Assam, and did not keep his promise.

Assam finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Credit: Twitter

Crushing the CBI’s autonomy

The conflict between Delhi and Kolkata widened into a more general conflict between the Centre and states only after the Modi government broke with all precedent and summarily removed Alok Verma from the post of CBI director in October 2018.

Verma was removed because he had locked horns with Rakesh Asthana, a “special director” chosen from the Gujarat police cadre. Asthana is known to be close to Modi, who almost certainly brought him in to be his eyes and ears in the CBI.

The sordid accusations that Verma and Asthana levelled against each other led to both being sent on leave. Verma’s place was taken by M. Nageswara Rao, whose first act as interim CBI director was to transfer 13 officials – many of whom were investigating a 2011 bribery allegation against Asthana.

A week later, the CBI cleared the former Madhya Pradesh education minister, Lakshmi Kant Sharma, of complicity in the Vyapam scandal, in which 42 persons mentioned in the police records had met accidental, or inexplicable, deaths. The CBI had also declared that there had been no conspiracy behind those deaths.

In the 77 days that followed Nageswara Rao’s appointment, and the 23 days for which he was brought back after Modi sacked Verma for good (on January 10, 2019), his decisions made it clear that the CBI would not stand in the way of Modi’s vendetta against political rivals.

Modi’s cynical vendetta Raj

Modi had already shown the lengths he would go in his sustained assault on Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, as on Mamata and the TMC in Bengal. (And earlier, too, by threatening to expose Nitish Kumar’s sources of funds, and forcing him back into the BJP’s fold.)

In November, sensing that he might be next on the list, M. Chandrababu Naidu took the fateful step of withdrawing Andhra Pradesh’s ‘general consent’ to Central enforcement agencies, to operate in Andhra without prior, specific permission, under the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act.

Days later, the West Bengal government did the same. On January 11, a day after Modi sacked Verma for the second time, the newly-elected Chhattisgarh government also followed suit.

This withdrawal of permission was not unprecedented: Deve Gowda had done it in Karnataka. But this is the first time that the Central government has faced three states doing so at the same time, with others ready to follow. In this moment, the Indian state confronts the rebellion that Ashoka, Aurangzeb and the British faced in the past.

The tragic cost of banishing the CBI

The tragedy of Indian democracy today is that the opposition’s battle to protect political freedom will simultaneously destroy the little capacity the state has left to prevent and punish crime.

This is demonstrated by the timing of Andhra’s withdrawal, only days before the CBI was to spring a trap to capture a ring of central government employees who were accepting bribes for permissions and favours.

When the CBI asked for specific permission to lay the trap, and asked the state to keep its plans secret, the state home ministry instead informed its own Anti-Corruption Bureau. What followed is not clear – but rather than capturing the entire ring, the CBI could make only one arrest. Its bitterness at the failure made it go public with a detailed statement about the cause.

The banner of resistance that Mamata has raised in Bengal will shelter an entire system for siphoning money from the poorest into the pockets of politicians and their henchmen – for there are at least 60 other ponzi schemes in Bengal alone, which have collected an estimated Rs 30,000 crore from around 1.7 million investors.

As the Cobrapost exposé of the Dewan Housing and Financial Scheme has shown, non-banking financial corporations are lending tens of thousands of crores to shell companies that finance political parties, among their other “investments”, but have directors with few, if any, assets. This means nothing can be recovered from them when these companies go broke.

Nearly all the major political parties joined Mamata’s protest against Modi, and reaffirmed their determination to put up a united front against the BJP in the coming elections. If they stay united, they will push the BJP out of power.

But if they do not follow up their victory by creating an election financing system that frees parties from the need to plunder money – as happened through the Sarada scam – then they will give the BJP a powerful platform fight from in 2024. And if the BJP resumes its attempt to create a monolithic Hindu rashtra, then India’s descent into the age of the later Mughals will be swift.

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The Emergency may be the most controversial part of her legacy but Mrs Gandhi’s greatest contribution to India was the way she handled the economic, political and foreign policy challenges the country faced after 1966.

This article was originally published on November 19, 2017. It is being republished on November 19, 2018 to mark Indira Gandhi’s birth anniversary.

Indira Gandhi is the most controversial prime minister that India has had. A third of a century after her tragic and untimely death, an older generation of Indians remembers her mainly for India’s victory in the 1971 war, and the Emergency. Scholars have also accused her of undermining democracy by splitting the Congress in 1969, repeatedly sacking chief ministers to concentrate power in her own hands, and splitting the party a second time for the same purpose in January 1978. But the poor of India remember her for her programme of ‘Garibi Hatao’ and still call her ‘Amma’. On the foreign policy side, all of us, without exception, remember with pride the way in which she stood up to Nixon and Kissinger during the run-up to the Bangladesh war. . .

The end of the Nehruvian honeymoon

So vivid is the image we have of the later Indira that very few remember the young and unsure, woman who came to power after the sudden death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1966. Even fewer, therefore, appreciate the difficult circumstances in which she did what she did and her immense contribution to stabilising the nascent India she inherited. For in January 1966, the country was in the grip of a multi-faceted crisis, and did not even know it.

The production of food grain had hit a plateau in 1961. The resulting food shortage had combined with two wars in 1962 and 1965, and the worst drought of India’s history in 1965, to generate the kind of inflation the country had never known and therefore had never dealt with. Inflation and a closed economy had landed us in a foreign exchange crisis – the first of many. Devaluing the rupee was the only way forward, and the World Bank had been urging India to do this since 1961. But the Nehru and Shastri governments had procrastinated till India had run out of time.

As if this was not enough, two wars in four years had emptied India’s coffers. And two successive droughts had brought the poor to the verge of starvation, to be saved only by PL 480 wheat from the United States.

The challenges she faced within the party were no less severe. In 1966, most people believed that Indira Gandhi had been chosen as prime minister because of her father’s charisma and because the “syndicate” believed that she would be more malleable than her seasoned opponent, Morarji Desai. But the party’s organisational leaders were also disenchanted with Nehruvian socialism. Huge sums of money had been sunk into heavy industries in the public sector that had yet to yield even a notional surplus on investment, let alone profits and dividends that could be ploughed back into growth and employment. The increasing uncertainty about finding jobs had created a rising wave of discontent among students. In mid-1966, this had turned violent.

These challenges could not be met without taking hard decisions, but the country was not aware of the need for them because it did not know that it was in a crisis. The glow of independence had not faded. The 1950s had been a honeymoon period in which almost nothing went wrong: food production grew rapidly because cultivation was extended to most of the remaining arable land in the country. Industrialisation was not hindered by foreign exchange shortages because of the sterling balances inherited from the war. Nehru had carved a niche for India on the world stage. People, therefore, trusted the government implicitly and could not imagine that the difficulties they had faced were anything more than temporary.

The first devaluation and after

Indira Gandhi’s first important decision therefore shattered this cocoon of security. In June 1966, she devalued the rupee by 57.5%. The move shocked the country and aroused bitter criticism in parliament from both Left and Right. Had it succeeded in rebalancing the economy speedily, her future economic policies might have been very different. But first, a $900 million aid package that the World Bank had promised to meet the increased cost of imports till exports picked up was held up in the US Congress. Second, India was hit by its second consecutive, and equally severe, drought in 1966. As a result, by the time the promised aid began to trickle in, prices had risen by a full 32% and neutralised the price advantage that devaluation had been intended to give to India’s exports.

Indira Gandhi taking her oath of office from President S. Radhakrishnan, 1966. Credit: YouTube

The devaluation did eventually boost India’s exports. From barely one per cent a year between 1952-53 and 1965-66, export growth jumped to 14% a year between 1968-69 and 1982-83. The Green Revolution, which had been piloted through a recalcitrant Congress by food minister C. Subramaniam, also took off in 1967. So good was the response of the economy in the years that followed that despite another drought in 1972 and a four-fold rise in oil prices the next year, India began to record balance of payments surpluses in January 1976, and continued to do so till the second oil price hike in 1979-80.

But it took two years for this recovery to begin. By then, the Congress had lost four major state assemblies and come within 10 seats of losing its majority in parliament in the 1967 general elections. This, and a pronounced leaning towards the left-wing of the party under the influence of ideologues like P.N Haksar and Mohaan Kumaramangalam, was the true reason behind the Congress split of 1969.

Who split the Congress?

Critics have accused Indira Gandhi of being an autocratic prime minister who weakened Indian democracy split, citing her splitting of the Congress in 1969 and her declaration of the Emergency in 1975 as proof. The truth is rather more complex. Space does not permit a study of the Emergency, but there is ample evidence that the 1969 split was forced upon her by the party organisation in an attempt to wrest control over economic policy

The spark that set it off was the selection of a successor to President Zakir Husain after his untimely death in 1969. The syndicate chose N. Sanjiva Reddy over the incumbent vice-president and briefly acting president, V.V Giri, and did it rather obviously without consulting Mrs. Gandhi. She had every good reason to oppose this. First, V.V Giri was already the acting president. Second, choosing Reddy broke an immensely important unwritten convention drawn from Westminster’s democracy, that like the British constitutional monarch, the Indian head of state had to be an eminent, non-political, person. V.V Giri fulfilled this requirement because, as vice-president, he had not only been far removed from current politics but was a highly respected veteran trade union leader. Sanjiva Reddy was, on the other hand, very much a practicing politician.

Morarji Desai, the Union finance minister, in conversation with John Foster Dulles, U.S. secretary of state at the time, when he met the latter in the State Department, Washington. (September, 1958). Credit: Photo Division, GOI

Despite this, Indira Gandhi first sought to avoid a showdown with the syndicate. She filed Reddy’s nomination but when Giri decided to compete as an independent, announced that she preferred an open vote. Had the syndicate agreed, there would have been no split in the party when Giri won. But by then, its members had the bit between their teeth so when Congress president S. Nijalingappa found that two-thirds of the Congress parliamentary party had declined Indira Gandhi’s implicit invitation to revolt against the organisation, he took the unprecedented step of expelling the sitting prime minister from the Congress party, nor renamed Congress (O) while Indira Gandhi’s party was called Congress (R). In the March 1971 general election, she won handily, securing 350 seats to the 51 seats won by the ‘National Democratic Front’ led by the Congress (O), Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the Swatantra and socialist parties.

Over the years, many personal motives have been ascribed to Mrs. Gandhi for defying the collective will of the party organisation and refusing to resign. But history will back her because she was defending not only the primacy of the prime minister over the party but the party in parliament over the party organization. As the eminent French political scientist, Maurice Duverger, pointed out in his classic 1957 work Party Politics, these are the two fundamental principles that distinguish democratic from ideological political parties.

The birth of Bangladesh

Indira Gandhi’s determination to be a prime minister in substance and not only in form was vindicated within only days of the 1971 election, when the Bangladesh crisis erupted. Only a leader with a clear vision of India and immense national pride would have been able to resist the subtle blandishments of western leaders who wanted India to absorb the 10 million refugees from East Pakistan and let sleeping dogs lie. The members of the syndicate were all seasoned politicians, but they were, in the end, provincial leaders without this vision. It is, therefore, doubtful whether they would have remained unmoved. Indira Gandhi, by contrast, had inherited a clear-cut idea of India from her father, and developed it through her own education and experience. So she had no difficulty in giving the West a clear-cut warning of her intentions and developing a multi-pronged strategy to safeguard India’s security.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman, Prime Minister of Bangladesh at Palam airport prior to latter’s departure on April 11, 1974. Credit: Photo Division, GOI

Contrary to a near-universal belief, Indira Gandhi did not have her heart set upon breaking up Pakistan from the very beginning. Confronted by a seemingly endless flow of refugees into West Bengal, Mrs. Gandhi first did her best to persuade General Yahya Khan to allow the Awami League of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman to form the government in Pakistan. When she failed, she sent emissaries to all major countries, and herself went to several European capitals and to Washington, to make they put pressure on Pakistan to release Sheikh Mujib. But to insure against failure she made the army train the Mukti Bahini, and draw up contingency plans to invade East Pakistan if it became necessary. This was her second use of both stick and carrot to achieve her goal, the first having been the election of V.V Giri as president. In both cases, force was her weapon of last resort.

The Bangladesh war, and the Congress’s sweeping victory in the state elections a year later, marked the high point of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. The Emergency is considered the lowest. But as I have argued earlier in these columns, it was the product of her understandable, and probably justified, belief that stepping down from the prime ministership then would have left the country in even greater turmoil than it already was in. She also redeemed herself in the peoples’ eyes by resisting every exhortation to extend the Emergency and holding a fresh general election in 1977 despite the near-certain knowledge that she would lose.

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Narendra Modi is seen as being unflinchingly loyal to his subordinates. In contrast, recent events have shown people that Rahul Gandhi is not a fighter.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi. Credit: PTI

Before commencing any analysis of the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections, it is necessary to lay one ghost to rest. The Election Commission needs to be congratulated on having achieved 100% transparency in its conduct of the elections, and putting a verification procedure in place that will become the gold standard for the conduct of elections in the future. By doing this, it has lifted the darkest shadow that had been hanging over Indian democracy since allegations of possible fraud surfaced after the Punjab and UP assembly elections – a fear in the populace that it was in danger of being deprived of its last weapon for holding its rulers accountable for their misdeeds.

It is not surprising, therefore, that days after the BJP’s victories in Gujarat and Himachal, celebrations are still going on at the BJP headquarters in Delhi and various regional capitals while, in sharp contrast, the Congress has begun to look for scapegoats to pin its defeat upon. Congress former minister Veerappa Moily has led the charge by singling out Mani Shankar Aiyar and Kapil Sibal as the prime architects of its defeat. “Of course, these two statements, by Kapil Sibal (on the Ram mandir) and Mani Shankar Aiyar (on Prime Minister Narendra Modi being a “Neech kisam ka aadmi“) have harmed the party,” he said, because they have allowed Modi to take “maximum advantage” of them. Had it not been for these two statements, Rahul Gandhi’s spectacular performance in the campaign in Gujarat would have yielded victory, he added.

Congress spokespersons have brushed off their defeat in Himachal Pradesh as a typical anti-incumbency vote. They have not asked themselves why anti-incumbency should have raised its head against the Congress after a single five-year term in Himachal, but not against the BJP after five consecutive five-year terms in office in Gujarat. The short answer to this question is the disheartening contrast between Modi’s ruthless will to win at any cost and Rahul’s tepid, fumbling leadership being passed off as ‘gentlemanliness’.

Moily has been joined in this by Rajasthan ex-chief minister Ashok Gehlot. Soon others will join in, and with every word they speak they will dig the Congress’s grave a little deeper. Indeed, the BJP’s spokespersons have already seized upon Moily and Gehlot’s attacks on the ‘rebel duo’ as attempts to save a leader who cannot save himself and is therefore unfit to lead a nation.

Taking responsibility

The contrast is all the more striking because in three and a half years of ruling India, Modi has never admitted that he has made a single mistake. His almost-daily statements during these years offer a chronicle of colossal policy blunders and unfulfilled promises. Modi promised a return to high growth – ‘achhe din‘ – but only statistical legerdemain has allowed him to hide the fact that GDP growth in the April to June quarter of the current year has been lower than at any time since 2001.

No such hiding has been possible, however, with industrial growth – which has continued to sink beyond the abysmal level it had reached in the last two years of UPA’s rule. Even with the vamped-up data, it is now below 3%.

Also Read: Rahul Gandhi Is Congress President. Now What?

Modi promised the youth ten million jobs a year, and has failed to create even one million. Jobs created in eight labour-intensive industries, which can be taken as a proxy for the rest of the economy, fell from 9.3 lakh in 2011 to 1.35 lakh in 2016.

Modi promised to revive industry but has speeded its descent into bankruptcy. He promised to destroy black money through demonetisation but unearthed less than 1% of it. Instead, he destroyed at least 300,000 small industries in the unorganised sector, sent the construction industry into a coma and forced tens of millions of migrant workers to flee the suddenly jobless towns and start making desperate bids to enrol themselves in MGNREGA in their home villages.

He carried through the UPA’s plan to consolidate all central and state indirect taxes into a single Goods and Services Tax but bungled it so badly that he pushed unorganised industry and trade to the edge of bankruptcy.

But there is one thing Modi has not done: he has never admitted that anything he or his government had done was wrong. He has never backtracked; he has never shifted blame; he has never said ‘sorry’.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Credit: PTI

He could have easily blamed Arun Jaitley for the poor economic performance, Suresh Prabhu for the huge rise in train accidents, Rajnath Singh for the return to civil war in Kashmir. He could have ‘let it be known’ that the bureaucracy was responsible for the  failure of the Swachh Bharat and Make in India programmes, the dilatoriness of the judiciary for the paltry rise in India’s ease of doing business ranking and the RBI for the rising volume of abandoned infrastructure projects.

Modi has not done even one of these things. Instead, he has taken full responsibility for everything he has done, and has told the people that he has taken these hard decisions, fully knowing the pain they would inflict, for their own long-term good. The small intelligentsia of this country, which understands the truth behind this facade, has dismissed Modi’s tall claims as theatre. Mystified by his continuing popularity, they have taken refuge in that old, old adage: “You can fool all the people for some of the time; some of the people for all the time, but not all the people for all of the time.”

But the people have chosen to believe him. This is not because they have been taken in by Modi’s inflated rhetoric, but because they have chosen to forgive him. What they are seeing in him is an unflinching loyalty to his subordinates. And they recognise this as the hallmark of a born leader.

Not a fighter

Compare this to the way Rahul and the Congress party have treated Aiyar and Sibal, both of whom were cabinet ministers in Manmohan Singh’s government. When Modi twisted Aiyar’s remark into a caste slur, he did not counterattack by exposing Modi’s misrepresentation (to use a word that fits into the Congress’s heritage). Nor did he remind Gujaratis that both B.R. Ambedkar and Jagjivan Ram were members of the Congress party; that it was the Congress that had made SC/ST reservation a part of the constitution and that it was the Congress that had put up a Dalit, Meira Kumar, to be the president of India last June. Instead, he went into a blind panic, hastened to distance himself and the Congress from Aiyar, and then asked him to apologise to Modi.

The lesson that Gujarat, and one suspects India, learned was not that Rahul is a gentleman, but that he is not a fighter. Not only will he not defend his foot soldiers on the battlefield, but he is also far more likely to cut and run at the first whiff of grapeshot. The contrast between him and Modi could not, therefore, be more stark.

Not surprisingly, Modi was the first person to sense this. That is why he made Aiyar the single point focus of every speech during the rest of his campaign, accusing him of going to Pakistan to take a supari (contract) for arranging Modi’s assassination; of hosting a “secret” dinner for Pakistani officials to meet high-ranking Indian leaders, including the former prime minister and vice president of India; and so on ad nauseam.

He did this because he knew that, having thrown Aiyar to the wolves, the Congress could only sit and watch as he and other BJP leaders savaged him into pieces till there was nothing left of him to tear into bits. Modi knew, moreover, that every time he mentioned Aiyar, his audiences would think: Congress, thus the appeasement of Pakistan and therefore appeasement of Muslims in general. So he threw truth, decorum and constitutional propriety to the winds and went for the Congress’s jugular, while Rahul and his sycophantic advisers stood on the sidelines and watched.

Rahul’s lack of leadership qualities is the real reason why the Congress lost in Gujarat. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s share of the vote had risen to a mammoth 60%, from 48% only two years before, because Congress voters simply did not cast their vote. As a result, Gujarat recorded the fifth-lowest voter turnout, at 63.7%, in 2014. This was 7.6% below the turnout in 2012.

Mani Shankar Aiyar. Credit: PTI

This year, both the Congress and the BJP’s share of the vote reverted to more or less what they had been in 2012, but its distribution was hugely different. The voting pattern shows that there was a huge anti-incumbency surge in Saurashtra and a smaller one in north and central Gujarat. Only in Bhuj, and south Gujarat, did the BJP vote remain utterly unshaken.

But the voting pattern also shows that the revival of the Congress vote remained incomplete, for inspite of the large anti-incumbency sentiment revealed by the pattern of victories and defeats, only 4.7% of the 7.6% who had boycotted the polls in 2014 returned to vote. Had even a small fraction of the rest done so, it is possible that the BJP would have lost its majority, for the BJP scraped through to a victory in nine constituencies in north and central Gujarat, and seven in Saurashtra, with margins of 5,000 or fewer votes. Nine of these were won with less than 2,000 votes. It is these seats that could have gone to the Congress, had the voters fully regained their confidence in the Congress.

The targeting of Aiyar occurred so late in the campaign – when the first phase of voting was already over – that it is impossible to tell how much it affected the morale of anti-BJP voters and dissuaded them from going out and being counted. But it could hardly have raised it, or reinforced their confidence in Rahul’s capacity to lead the nation.

That is why “seasoned leaders” like Moily and Gehlot have been pulled out of mothballs to defend Rahul’s ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour. But these are has-beens whose names have not even been heard in the past year. What Rahul needs to learn from is the silence of the leaders who have been most active in bringing the Congress back into the media limelight, such as P. Chidambaram, Sibal, Manish Tiwari, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot and Shashi Tharoor. They know the damage, tantamount to suicide, that Rahul and his cronies have inflicted not only on the Congress but also on India. Because after his tame acquiescence to Modi’s destruction of him through the instrumentality of Aiyar, there is once more no leader visible on the ‘secular’ horizon, who can make ordinary Indians feel safe as Modi has managed to do.

https://thewire.in/politics/gujarat-elections-bjps-congress-loss-rahul-gandhi