Prem Shankar Jha

Why Narendra Modi Fears the AAP’s Delhi Model

With a focus on grassroots empowerment, transparency, and prioritising the needs of the poor, the AAP challenges the entrenched top-down system that has long dominated Indian politics.

Manish Sisodia at a Delhi government school. Photo: Facebook

In an unprecedented move on December 26, two departments of the government of Delhi – the women and child development, and health departments – sent out notices warning the public not to register for the “Mahila Samman” and “Sanjeevani” schemes, two schemes announced by Delhi’s elected Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government. The first promised a monthly cash transfer of Rs 1,000 to the accounts of allowances for women, and the second free health care for seniors.

In their public notices, these departments called the two schemes “non-existent” because no such schemes had been notified by the Delhi government. Notification of a scheme announced by an elected government is normally a routine matter. In this case, the subjects fell far outside the limitations prescribed in Article 239A of the Constitution, which reserves only three subjects under the jurisdiction of the central government in the union territories of Pondicherry and Delhi – police, law and order, and land.

Why, then, did the two departments insist on a public notification first? The answer is to be found in the unrelenting, no-holds-barred war that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have been waging against the AAP ever since its inception and capture of the national capital territory.

Why is Modi targeting the AAP?

These notices have, however, served a useful purpose, for they have highlighted the fear that the AAP is inspiring in the greatest tyrant that has governed India since the death of Aurangzeb. That V.C. Saxena, the lieutenant governor of Delhi who is perfectly aware of his duties under the Constitution, is willing to violate Article 239A at Modi’s behest, is a measure of the fear that this prime minister inspired in the officials who have the misfortune to serve the Delhi administration.

Why is Modi going to such extreme lengths – willing even to insult the Constitution – to crush one of the smallest national parties in the country?

The answer is an almost feline awareness of what this tiny party stands for; it is the very opposite of what the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is striving to create – an authoritarian government that rules its subjects from the top.

AAP’s vision: Trickle-up, not trickle-down

Modi’s government did not create ruling from the top. This was enshrined in the Government of India Act of 1935. Regrettably, the Constituent Assembly chose to use this Act as the base upon which to create the Constitution. As a result, nearly all the immunities from prosecution enjoyed by civil servants and the police under the British were kept intact.

When the Constitution did not create a legal and justiciable system for financing central and state elections, the criminalisation of politics became complete. Since government sanctions were necessary to implement the decisions of these criminalised legislatures, the corruption of the bureaucracy and police followed closely on the heels of the criminalisation of the legislature.

Over the past 75 years, these initial mistakes have created an inegalitarian, top-down, corrupt and criminalised political system, masquerading as a democracy. That is the political system that Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP is fighting to not merely defeat but eradicate.

It is the AAP’s commitment to create a clean political and administrative system that prioritises the needs of the poor that people have been welcoming in ever larger numbers. This has been demonstrated by the rapid rise of the party in Delhi, Punjab and Surat, in the heart of Modi’s citadel in Gujarat, within 12 years of the party’s inception.

What is Kejriwal trying to do that is evoking such an electrifying response from the people? It is his party’s unswerving belief that good governance must begin with meeting the needs of the poor. Prosperity needs not to trickle down from above, but to seep up from the poor till it palpably improves the lives of the rich.

It is the AAP’s unswerving adherence to this conviction in the face of every conceivable obstacle thrown in its way that explains the party’s meteoric rise from an idea to a ruling party in two states in a mere 12 years. The party’s rapid rise shows how desperately the poor of India have been yearning for this.

The AAP owes its rise to a guiding philosophy that Jasmine Shah, a senior member of the party, has described in a book titled The Delhi Model: A Bold New Road Map to Building a Developed India.

Kejriwal’s first act upon coming to power in 2013 was to set up a helpline for complaints on corruption that the public could convey to the government. That had to be suspended within days because 90% of the complaints it was receiving were against the Delhi police, over whom the state government had no control. When he set it up again upon his return to power in 2015, it took the Modi government only three months to send in the Delhi police, seize the building of Delhi’s anti-corruption bureau and confiscate all its files.

Transforming education in Delhi

But as Modi was soon to find out, Kejriwal had far more ambitious plans for Delhi. Within days, the new government increased the state’s education budget by 45% – taking it to a quarter of the government’s entire spending – and began a teacher training programme, selecting bright teachers from all the government schools, bringing in specialists from abroad to train them and sending the best of them for further educational qualifications to universities abroad.

Kejriwal’s reason for giving education the highest priority was that “if good education is provided to every child in the country, they can eradicate poverty in their families within one generation.” This is the very essence of the difference between the Delhi model of governance, as it has come to be called, and the traditional model of school and college education. The latter is designed for recruiters and managers to serve    a “trickle down” model of economic growth. In this model – a quintessential product of private enterprise-led economic development – the rich get the cream while the poor get only the dregs.

In his book, Shah gives a riveting description of the impact that Delhi’s “trickle up” model of governance has made. In the last decade, it has built 22,700 classrooms in government schools. For comparison, 24,700 classrooms had been built in the previous 70 years. The impact of its relentless emphasis on education for the poor has not taken long to become visible. Since 2016, more than 200,000 students have left Delhi’s private schools to join government schools. And since 2016, class 12 students from these schools have performed better than those from private schools.

Addressing basic needs

There have been similar dramatic improvements in health care. The Mohalla clinic initiative has been written about extensively but the number treated is still mind-boggling – over 9 years from 2016 till end of 2024, 540 Mohalla clinics have treated 70 million patients, an average of 60,000 persons per day.

In the provision of water, sanitation and electricity, the AAP has followed a recommendation made decades ago by the World Bank, to provide a “lifeline” amount free of cost. One of its least noticed but most humane enactments has been to allow free travel to women in city buses. One of them who lives outside the city limits told this writer that it had freed 30% of her income – Rs. 3,000 a month earned from cleaning homes in the city – to pay for her children’s school fees.

Shelter is a basic right of human beings but in large cities, it is one that is obtained only by default by the poor. The AAP’s greatest achievement has been to make shelter a central feature of its policies. It has therefore laid 2,100 kms of water pipelines and allowed 20,000 litres of water per month to be provided to each family free of cost. To ensure that the water reaches its consumers, the AAP government has laid over 5,200 kms of water pipelines in unauthorised colonies, giving 99.96% of them access to it.

There are other achievements of this kind listed in the book that will take too long to describe. Among these is making 1,627 industrial units which were using coal and diesel switch to natural gas and plant almost 30,000,000 trees of which a quarter were planted in a single year, 2021.

In March 2017, the Delhi cabinet approved a 36% increase in the minimum wages of Delhi’s five million workers. The legal minimum wage in Delhi now is therefore Rs 17,494 compared to the national minimum wage of Rs 5,340 per month. To sum up the Kejriwal government’s work, it has concentrated upon building human, as against physical, capital to improve the quality of life of its people.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the AAP has become the nemesis of the BJP, the largest national political party. It is also not surprising that Kejriwal has become Modi’s personal nemesis, and that he and his closest advisors have been charged with crimes, repeatedly denied bail and kept in jail for periods of more than two years, without having found a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.

The Modi government’s animosity is, at least, understandable. But what explains the sustained hostility to the AAP in the Congress party, particularly its Delhi wing? So deep does this run that despite being in some sort of an alliance with the AAP, not one party member has felt it necessary to raise even a murmur of protest against the victimisation of its leaders. If the INDIA bloc loses a general election that it should have won, it has only itself to blame for it. For however small the AAP may be, it offers a future to which the people are able to relate. Since the days of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, no party has been able to do anything of this kind so far.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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The One Mistake Manmohan Singh Made on the Economic Front Cost Him — and the Congress — Dearly

I have often wondered why Singh went back on his initial decision to fight the 2008-9 recession in the orthodox way by lowering the interest rate. By succumbing to the RBI’s demand for higher interest rates, he allowed industrial growth rates to crash. The rest is history.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a book release event in 2018. Photo: Press Information Bureau.

In the midst of the paeans showered on Manmohan Singh after his death there has been one dissenting note. This has been struck by the Radical Socialists , a small group that is a remnant of the grand socialist movement that had dominated public discourse in large parts of the world, including India, for four decades after the Second World War.

Today, half a century after the advent of economic globalisation, its destruction of state-directed socialism in economic policies, and the near-total eclipse of the communist parties in India, this movement stands politically depleted. But their moral voice remains strong, for these are now almost the only elements of the urban intelligentsia that still care, actively, for the fate of the poor in the new, somewhat heartless, world that globalisation has created . 

In a detailed critique of Singh’s contribution to the Indian economy shared on e-mail, the Radical Socialists have said that a proper evaluation of his record can only come from the poorest of the poor of this nation (where an) overwhelmingly large majority of people are struggling with poverty, hunger and unemployment. No one, not even Narendra Modi, can disagree with this, but it is their choice of yardstick, for measuring this, that is highly questionable, for it is not the work of even the most socially conscious of Indian economists but that of the French economist Thomas Pikety, best known for his seminal book Capital in the 21st Century

Citing UN data that had been analysed by Pikety and a colleague, L. Chancel, Piketty had found that :

This is a classic example of the selective use of data to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. Pikety and Chancel’s data tell us nothing about why this happened. 

The answer lies in the wrenching changes that the Indian economy went through in this period. India’s private industry, which had flourished during the Second World War and the first decade after independence, was severely stifled. This was due to a combination of two factors: the strangling controls imposed by the 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution, and a crippling shortage of foreign exchange. The latter was caused by the exhaustion of India’s sterling reserves, which had been built up during the second world war.

 The shift in investment from the private to the public sector, and from consumer to capital goods, that these two simultaneous developments caused not only strangled industrial growth but made industry more capital intensive. Hard on the heels of this shift came rising urban unemployment and under-employment, and consequently a drastic slowdown of improvements in the standard of living. 

Not surprisingly therefore, for more than two decades India had one of the six slowest growth rates in the world, of 3.6%. Employment growth was miserable, at less than 2% a year, and half or more of it was taking place through huge overstaffing in central, state and local government service, industry was not absorbing more than a fraction of the burgeoning youth population of the towns, let alone the villages. 

The developments in agriculture were the mirror opposite of those in industry. While employment growth in industry was being stifled by controls, agriculture was thriving. This growth was driven by – a rapid increase in cultivated land area in the 1950s, resulting from forest clearance in the Terai and other regions, and the subsequent onset of the Green Revolution in cereals, which began with wheat in the mid-1960s and rice in the mid-1970s.

The trends in real income growth identified by Piketty and Chancel were reversed only after India began to relax its regime of industrial controls in the late 1970s and 1980s. GDP growth rose to 4.5, then 5 and finally 6% in 1990, as controls on trade and manufacturing were relaxed. But since India’s strictly controlled exchange rate was too high, exports lagged further and further behind imports.

India met the deficit by borrowing abroad, increasingly relying on short-term money markets as long-term lenders became increasingly reluctant to provide further loans. The inevitable happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Oil prices went through the roof and India ran out of both foreign exchange and international lenders willing to bet on its future.

That was when Singh, as finance minister, managed the crisis in a way that landed him in the prime minister’s chair a decade later. His carefully phased economic liberalisation saved India from the shocks that other countries had had to endure. Growth accelerated to 7% in 1993-94, the second year of liberalisation, and remained at that level for four years. It then entered a mild five-year recession, from which India emerged in 2003-04, on the eve of Singh’s prime ministership.

Between 2004-05 and 2009-10, the economy grew at close to 8% a year, and industry and the services sector created 7 to 7.5 million jobs a year, drawing an average of 4 million workers, mostly youth, from the villages into the cities. But the honeymoon ended with the global financial crash of 2008 followed by the onset of global recession in 2009. 

Singh first fought the recession the orthodox way by forcing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to drastically lower its prime interest rates which had been rising steadily since 2007, back down to their pre-2007 level. The result was a greater than 10% growth in industry and a continuation of close to 8% growth of GDP for two additional years. However, in March 2010, he succumbed to the RBI’s pressure. The central bank had pointed to a small increase in the inflation rate as a harbinger of things to come, and ultimately got its way.

The impact this had upon the economy was immediate and catastrophic. Industrial growth crashed from 8.2% in 2010-11 to 2.8% in 2011-12. In the next year, it rose marginally to around 4% and remained there till well after the Covid lockdown. And, if one believes the calculations of  Arvind Subramanian, once the chief economic adviser to the Modi government, real GDP growth fell to 5% or less, and stayed there throughout the Modi years till the post-Covid rebound. 

Industry was hit hardest of all. By December 2015, sky-high interest rates of 12% or more, even for blue-chip companies, had forced the abandonment of nearly all infrastructure and heavy industrial projects due to their long gestation periods. As a result the country was saddled with Rs 880,000 crore worth of “stalled” i.e abandoned projects, and 415 out of 2300 operating companies that were heavily invested in infrastructure, were not making enough profit to pay the interest on their debt. 

Nine out of India’s dozen steel plants were insolvent and some of the biggest infrastructure companies, like Jaypee and Gammon India, that had piled up debts in excess of Rs 33,000 and Rs 15,000 crore respectively, were unable to service them. As a result, Public Sector Banks (PSBs) were saddled with Rs 400,000 crore of bad debt.. 

Not surprisingly the growth of non-agricultural employment shrank to 2 million a year, forcing millions of recently employed youth back to their homes in small towns and villages. 

Being the superb politician that he is, Modi sensed that this, and not the slew of corruption scandals that had surfaced in 2012, was the Achilles’ heel of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. He, therefore, promised to create 20 million jobs a year; 42% of the voters under 30, who make up almost a third of the electorate, believed him and voted for him. This, without a doubt, was the cause of the 12% jump in the BJP’s vote, from 19% in 2009 to 31% in 2014, that brought the Modi government to power, and has now endangered the future of Indian democracy. 

In the years that have gone by since then, I have often wondered why Singh went back on his initial decision to fight the recession in the orthodox way by lowering the interest rate. The only explanation I have been able to come up with is that after allowing the private sector to borrow money from international banks in 2008, India had by then accumulated $1200 billion in external debt and was relying upon short term capital inflows into the Indian money market to meet the interest payments and repayments that came due. Even the whisper that a devaluation of the rupee was possible, let alone imminent, would cause this highly volatile capital to disappear in a matter of minutes. 

Furthermore, in sharp contrast to the debt that had accumulated till 1990, a quarter of this was private debt, taken by around two dozen large companies with immense influence in the market and the RBI. Having lived through the trauma of one near-bankruptcy in 1991, Singh did not feel that India could weather another. 

In 2012 and 2013, I wrote repeatedly in one or another of my weekly and fortnightly columns that raising interest rates was a mistake. I argued that continued high industrial growth would restore the confidence of foreign investors in the Indian economy after the initial shock and bring back foreign investors. Furthermore, I stated that failure to restore employment growth would bring down his government. However, Singh had been through one foreign exchange crisis and can’t be blamed for being cautious about triggering another one. He ultimately succumbed to the RBI’s pressure, and the rest is history.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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If the Congress, which is, and will remain, the senior party in the alliance, continues to let its local minions make decisions that will become, by default, the national policy of the party, then Modi and his BJP will be the only gainers.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s failure to win an absolute majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha, and Narendra Modi’s refusal, so far, to descend from the high pedestal on which he had seated himself before the elections raises a crucial question: how stable will the present National Democratic Alliance government be?

Our experience of previous coalition governments – the Janata government from 1977 to 1979, the United Front government from 1996 till 1998, and the United Progressive Alliance from 2004 till 2014 – suggests that it will depend upon the major party’s, in this case Modi’s, willingness to compromise with his partners and make their concerns his own. 

Nothing that Modi has done in the 22 years that he has been the chief minister of Gujarat and Prime Minister of India, suggests that he will be able to do so. On the contrary Modi’s reaction to his sudden return to political vulnerability has been a combination of disbelief and rage. The disbelief is writ large in the composition of his new council of ministers, for its composition has shown no sign that he intends to change either his goals, or his methods of achieving them. Despite having secured only 240 seats and therefore being dependent for his government’s survival upon N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Modi has not given even one of the four most important portfolios in the Union government – home, defence, finance and external affairs – to either of them. 

Few observers had expected him to go so far, but many had expected him to offer the speakership of the Lok Sabha to one or the other of them. Modi has done no such thing either. The TDP ended with just two ministers. JD(U) also got the same number. By contrast Modi appointed 51 of the 78 ministers and deputy ministers in his government from within his own party. 

Modi’s Embrace Leaves Allies Weak and Voiceless

Modi’s reluctance to change his strategy almost certainly stems from the continuing strength of the BJP’s vote share. The BJP lost 60 seats, but its share of the vote fell by a bare 0.8%, from 37.36% in 2019 to 36.58% in 2024. On the other hand, although the Congress almost doubled the number of seats it won from 52 to 99, its share of the vote rose by a bare 1.7% from 19.49% in 2019 to 21.19% in 2024. Modi therefore probably believes that it is only a matter of time before the INDIA alliance disintegrates and leaves him free to continue ruling the country as he has so far. 

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah with invited NDA leaders. Photo: X/@amitshah

The other evidence of his refusal, or inability, to face an unpalatable reality has been his undiminished rage. As has happened over and over again in the past several years, whenever he has faced a threat , or a situation that he is not able to control, Modi has hidden his anger in silence. But the anger has been mirrored by the way that he has stepped up his vendetta against those who have dared, or continue to dare, to challenge his absolute power over the nation. The primary target of his vengefulness today remains the Aam Aadmi Party and its chief, Arvind Kejriwal

Kejriwal was the very first leader whom Modi had tried to destroy as far back as in 2015. His primary reason was that AAP had virtually destroyed the BJP in the 2016 legislative assembly elections in Delhi, winning 67 of its 70 seats, barely six months after the latter had won all the seven Lok Sabha seats from Delhi. Modi took this as a personal affront, for in addition to launching a relentless attack on Central and All-India service officers in Delhi who were carrying out the instructions of the new government, he lost no time in getting a complaisant judge of the Delhi high court to virtually overturn Article 239 AA of the Constitution and declare Delhi to be nothing more than another Union territory in which final executive power rested – as it did in all other union territories except Puducherry – with the Lieutenant Governor appointed by the Union government. 

It took Kejriwal almost three years to get this decision reversed by the Supreme Court, but what was even more galling for Modi was that barely a year after that AAP trounced the BJP again in the 2020 Vidhana Sabha elections, winning almost the same share of the votes and seats. 

No aspiring dictator would have taken such a double defeat lying down, but Modi’s grudge against Kejriwal runs far deeper and is more personal. It arises from the fact that while other political parties have taught their followers to fear Modi, Kejriwal has been inviting them to laugh at him. He did this 15 months ago through a 20-minute fairy tale recounted to the Delhi Vidhan Sabha, about the fumbling antics of a Chauthi-pass Raja. He did this with such good humour that even some of the BJP MLAs present in the hall were unable to conceal their amusement. 

In the year that followed, the YouTube video of Chauthi-pass Raja went viral. All, or parts of it, were replayed by a score of video channels, and collectively registered several million hits on the net. Not only did Modi find this intolerable, but he realised that Kejriwal was doing what the great comedian Charlie Chaplin had done to Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator, 80 years earlier. When Chaplin was asked why he had lampooned Hitler so, he had replied that the only way to defeat a dictator was to make people laugh at him. Given Modi’s exalted opinion of himself, it is hard not to conclude that this video turned political animosity into virulent, personal hatred. 

The yardstick of Modi’s hatred of Kejriwal is the extent to which the executive branch of the Central government is prepared to bend, or break, the law in order to carry out his diktats. The Enforcement Directorate and the CBI have dropped even the pretence of impartiality in their hounding of Kejriwal. The way in which the ED rushed to the Delhi high court to stay the bail granted to Kejriwal by the Rouse Avenue trial court shows that for it there is now no law but The Law as decreed by Modi. 

Nor, apparently, is there any other ‘law’ for the Delhi high court either, for it allegedly complied with the ED’s wishes even before reading the Rouse Avenue court’s decision. This illustrates the shameful extent to which both the executive and the judiciary have been turned into tools of fascist control by the BJP during the past decade. Both the ED and the CBI have ignored the fact that when the Supreme Court had granted Kejriwal bail from May 10 till June 2 to enable him to fight the election, it had directed him to go to the trial court, (i.e. the Rouse Avenue court) for further relief. So when the Delhi high court stayed the Rouse Avenue court’s decision, it tacitly overturned a sanction by the highest court of the land. More than any other single action of the executive under Modi, this is what shows how far, and how willingly, he, his ministers, and his bureaucrats and his judges, have turned India’s democracy into a shadow without substance. 

The Modi government’s move to charge writer Arundhati Roy now for a statement she allegedly made in a public forum in Kashmir 14 years ago, shows that Modi has also not lost his taste for persecuting members of civil society who have fearlessly opposed his government’s creeping advance towards tyranny during the past 10 years. Even if what Roy said in 2010 was accurately reported by the Hindu zealot who filed a case against her a decade ago, the fact remains that through decision after decision the Supreme Court had by then established that mere verbal statements or exhortations criticising the State do not constitute sedition. All previous Supreme Court judgements have been unanimous that only actions designed to destabilise or overthrow the state can be considered seditious. 

The Modi government only changed this through a spate of amendments in 2019. So it is now considering prosecuting her under a law that did not exist when she allegedly made her supposedly ‘anti-national’ statement. This is a huge perversion of the very concept of law. But that seems to matter little to Modi and his home minister Amit Shah. 

Unlike his vendetta against Kejriwal, Modi’s intention to punish Roy through a retroactive application of law is not personal. It is a message to the country that as far as he is concerned nothing has changed and he will continue to harass and imprison all those who oppose him at will, as he has done so far. 

Arvind Kejriwal during a roadshow in Delhi ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Photo: X/@ArvindKejriwal

His continuing assault on civil society, is also a veiled warning to Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu that despite their 28 seats they too do not matter because, should either of them decide to oppose his policies and actions, he will do to them what he has done to the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra, and earlier to the Congress in Bengal and Assam. 

That is to get the CBI or ED to fabricate cases against them or their MPs and give them the option of going to jail like Kejriwal and Hemant Soren, or joining the BJP as Suvendu Adhikari, Eknath Shinde, Ajit Pawar and others have done in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Assam and elsewhere in the past 10 years. 

His party’s task, of terrorising its opponents into submission has been made hugely easier by the ban Indira Gandhi imposed on company donations to political parties in 1970. Since her government created no alternative legal way of financing elections, it went a long way towards criminalising political financing in the ensuing decades. That has made it easy for Modi to justify whip-up cases against political leaders. Nitish Kumar got this message seven years ago. If Naidu has not, he soon will. 

The INDIA alliance. therefore, needs to learn that the task of saving India’s multi-ethnic democracy has only just begun. To complete it, the alliance needs to acknowledge, and learn from, the mistakes its members made during the formation of their coalition. Their very first was not to agree upon a basis for choosing candidates for the Lok Sabha elections at their Varanasi meeting itself. The obvious way was to offer the seats won by the BJP in 2019 to the party that had been the first runner up in those constituencies. This would have limited the number of seats in which disagreements could still have arisen because of changed circumstances, to a handful in each state. Their settlement could then have been left to the state party leaders. 

Doing that would have given the national leaders the time and leisure they needed to frame a common set of policies on critical national issues like inflation, rapidly rising unemployment and growing rural distress that Modi, despite all his grandiose promises, has not been able to resolve. 

With the elections behind us and Modi once more in power, the alliance needs to reflect on the tactical mistakes that made it miss seizing power by a hair this year. The one that jumps immediately to mind is the Congress party’s decision to launch Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Bengal, and take it through Bihar despite the entreaties of its powerful alliance partners, chief ministers Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar, not to do so.

Rahul Gandhi of Congress holds up a poster calling for justice for RO and ARO position examinees during the party’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. Photo: X/@INCUttarPradesh

The Congress ignored these requests, most probably because of the impact that Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra had had on the state assembly elections in Karnataka. But its planners chose to forget that in Karnataka it had happened in the legislative assembly elections, while this was an election for the Lok Sabha. As happened in Karnataka, any gain in Congress votes in these states would only take place at the expense of an alliance partner, and therefore benefit the BJP. 

Despite being ignored, Mamta Bannerjee did not leave the broad alliance, because she relied on Bengali sub-nationalism to win the elections in Bengal and the Congress had long ago been reduced to insignificance. But Nitish Kumar faced a far more difficult challenge in Bihar, so decided to play it safe and go back to the BJP. 

How expensive this decision has been for the INDIA alliance, and may prove to be for Indian democracy in the future, can be judged from the fact that had the alliance stayed intact in Bihar, the BJP would not have been even asked, let alone been able, to form the next government. 

Regrettably, the Congress seems to have neither learned anything nor forgotten anything from its mistake, for today its party leaders in Delhi have joined the BJP’s chorus of accusations against the AAP on the alleged Delhi liquor scam, with gusto. They seem unable to realise that doing so will not only weaken, but eventually destroy the INDIA alliance, for other parties will learn not to trust the Congress and to look for safer havens. 

The only way to stabilise the INDIA alliance is to accept the dominance of each of its members in its own territory. Only thus will it be able to create a stable, secular and democratic all-India alternative to the BJP. If the Congress, which is, and will remain, the senior party in the alliance, continues to let its local minions make decisions that will become, by default, the national policy of the party, then Modi and his BJP will be the only gainers and, sooner rather than later, democracy will become a fading memory. 

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By offering to reunite central and state elections, Modi has unwittingly offered INDIA a way out of its seat-sharing dilemma.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: Screengrab via YouTube/BJP

Opposing any decision that has been sprung on a country by its government without prior discussion is a reflex action among opposition parties in all democracies. So it comes as no surprise that Adhir Ranjan Choudhury, the only member of the INDIA coalition whom the Modi government has invited to join the eight member panel that it is setting up, ostensibly to study but in reality to whitewash, the re-unification of central and state elections, has refused to do so. 

Divorced from its present political context, it is difficult to not welcome the proposal to reunite central and state elections. The move will halve the presently crippling electioneering expenses for political parties. And by extension, the need to raise money, much of which has been coming from clandestine and criminal sources ever since the ban former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi put on company donations to political parties in 1970.

Reunification of the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections will also make it far easier for a future government to set up a state financed and publicly audited system of election financing. This would not only weaken and, over time, eliminate the nexus between crime and politics in the country, but also open the way for reforms in the police and lower administration that will cleanse the government of corruption and make it serve the people. It would also lengthen the time horizon over which government policies will need to bear fruit; restore the Centre-State co-ordination in policy making that was severely weakened by the separation of central from state elections, and facilitate structural reforms. 

If enacted with necessary safeguards, it will also put a brake on opportunistic defections from political parties. The most necessary of these safeguards will be an automatic declaration of President’s rule till the next general election in any state where the government has been brought down by defections. 

Prime Minister Modi’s reasons for taking this sudden decision, however, have little to do with better governance. He has taken it because he is aware that the BJP runs the risk of suffering the same fate in the Vidhan Sabha elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and possibly in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, that it suffered in Karnataka. 

He is therefore understandably wary of going into the next Lok Sabha elections with a string of electoral defeats in major states behind him. So he has decided to kill two birds with one stone – avoid four important state elections that his party could lose, and hold a combined national and state election with the prestige of the G-20 presidency and its grand conference in Delhi to buoy him, delivering both the centre and the state to his party. 

The INDIA coalition’s lack of enthusiasm for the one-election proposal is therefore understandable. But it is also short-sighted because unifying central and state elections will resolve the most knotty problem that the alliance is facing in the run-up to the next general election and greatly improve its chances of victory. This problem is the allocation of seats to its constituent parties in each state. 

As the Mumbai meeting showed, the coalition is determined to field only one candidate against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in each constituency. But it has yet to decide from which party, and on what basis the candidate should be chosen. At the Patna meeting, West Bengal chief minister Mamta Bannerjee had told the press that the alliance would set up coordination committees that would first decide the principles they would follow in the selection of candidates and then use these to choose the party and candidate for each constituency. Today, two more alliance meetings later, that process is only about to begin. 

This foot-dragging is taking place because the party leaders have not found a way to cross the main hurdle they face: how to retain the loyalty and support of their cadres in the constituencies that they have ceded to an ally in the Lok Sabha election. 

This problem would not have arisen if there had been a system of state financing of elections like the one Western Europe. In its absence, parties have come to rely on local financiers whom they offer government contracts and other favours if their party comes to power. This clientelist system starts breaking down if the financiers lose faith in the party, or in its candidate’s capacity to win. It ceases to exist when the party has no horse in the race. 

By offering to reunite central and state elections Modi has unwittingly offered INDIA a way out of its dilemma. This would confine the seat sharing between political parties only to the Lok Sabha elections, and allow full competition to continue between them sin the various state assemblies and also require them to make a clear demarcation between national and local issues. 

Party cadres can then be instructed to emphasise national issues in parliamentary constituencies where their party is fielding candidates for both the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha, and to place greater stress on state and local issues in those where the Lok Sabha seat has been allotted to another member of the alliance. 

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Understanding The challenge of the BJP

The Vidhan Sabha elections have confirmed what eight opinion, had predicted more than a month ago. The BJP has come roaring back in UP, gained hugely and won in Goa and Manipur, and also retained its hold, albeit tenuously, in Uttarakhand. Their prediction, that the Aam Admi party would lead, and possibly win in Punjab has also been vindicated. The Congress party has not only been the principal loser but has, in a word, been slaughtered.  With these elections whatever little claim it could make to being the leading party in the alternative to the BJP has vanished.

Before we get inundated with the  flood of explanations  that is bound to  follow, there is still time to reflect on the single greatest anomaly that both opinion and the exit  polls had  captured. This is  the  complete   absence of  any anti-incumbency sentiment against the BJP despite eight years of not only lawless, but also inept, government that this country has suffered. 

The Modi government should have had its first encounter with anti-incumbency in 2019.  By then GDP growth  had been falling for six  consecutive quarters and the number of new jobs being created in the non-farm sector had declined from 7.6 million a year between 2004-5 and 2011-12 to  2.9 million a year in the next 8 years, forcing 37 million recently urbanised workers back into agriculture. Six of these 8 years  were presided over by Mr Modi. 

The resulting pressure on rural wages and the need to feed a larger number of mouths in each family, had increased the number of people below the poverty line by a staggering 76 million by March 2019, of whom 66 million lived in the villages. This had reversed the trend of declining poverty rates the country had experienced for the previous six decades.  

The worst sufferers have been the poorest of the poor. Oxfam’s latest study of poverty in India has shown that the poorest 20 percent have suffered a 53 percent fall in their incomes in 2020-21,  even as the number of its dollar billionaires had increased from 102 to 142[1].

The main victims of the economic decline have been  the youth of the country, precisely those who had backed Modi, personally, for prime ministerin 2014 . Government data show that while the proportion of young people with a secondary ( i.e. till the 10th class) education who could not find jobs jumped from 4 to 16 percent between 2011-12 and 2018-19 and of those with a higher secondary (till 12th class) education,  from 7 to 22 percent,   it was those who had invested the most in education who were most comprehensively betrayed. For unemployment among Bachelors’ degree holders jumped from 20 percent to 38 percent, among post graduates from 19 to 43 percent,  and among those with technical degrees (mainly in engineering) from 19 to 38 percent. 

 By 2019 the non-farm  job famine had already lasted for 8 years. Five of these had been presided over by Mr .Modi.  So the BJP should, at the very least, have lost its absolute majority in the Lok Sabha , if not been pushed out of government. But for the first time in India’s 72 years of elections  the results  defied the logic of anti-incumbency and, instead of falling even if only by a few percent, the BJP’s share of the vote rose by more than six percent.  

Modi’s second term has so far been even more disappointing than the first. Not only did India’s GDP growth  continue to slide, and unemployment to soar, but  when  COVID struck the world Modi all but left e 60 million or more  migrant workers from other states, and the 71 million  micro, small and medium sized enterprises, to fend for themselves. 

When the first Covid wave ended , Modi ignored frantic warnings that a far more dangerous ‘Delta ‘ wave was coming, did nothing even  to equip hospitals with oxygen,  and went on an election rampage instead. For weeks the smoke from burning ghats darkened the sky and corpses floated down the rivers, but  a bare nine months later the election results show that all his might as well not have happened. 

Why is there no anti-incumbency sentiment against the BJP ? The standard explanation, — that Modi has been able to weaponize what the French Political scientist  Christophe Jaffrelot has labelled the Hindu ‘majoritarian inferiority complex’ towards Muslims and Europeanised  ‘sicularists’ – takes us only a small part of the way towards understanding it. For the  Sangh Parivar has weaponizing  this complex not since 2014, but ever since  the Godhra train fire in February 2002. 

There can be no doubt that in the past two decades it has  succeeded in inflaming Hindu sentiment against the Muslim population of India. But how great a part has this played in shoring up, let alone increasing, the BJP vote? Data for communal riots collected   by the National Crime Records Bureau since 2014, suggest not a great deal. For they show a steady decline in the number of communal incidents,  from 1227 in 2014 to 789 in  in 2015, 723 in 2017, 438 in 2019 and, if one excludes the Delhi riots which were clearly instigated politically,  337 in 2021[2].  How little communal animosity has infected  peoples’ everyday lives inspite of this relentless demonisation of Muslims can be judged from the fact that in 2020, the police registered 4. 25 million cases under other clauses of the Indian Penal Code.[3]

The virtual disappearance of the anti-incumbency vote therefore requires another explanation. But we do not need to look very far for it, for that too  lies hidden  inside these election results. The clue to it is the dramatic success of AAP in Punjab. 

From its inception in 2015 AAP has been an anomaly in Indian politics because it has not sought the people’s vote on the basis of caste , creed, loyalty to community leaders or in memory of the nation’s founding fathers. All these forms of appeal to the electorate are an extension of feudalism, for they treat  the vote as a gift conferred by the ‘Lord of the Manor’, on his or her  subjects,  to be exercised as directed by him or her . The reward has usually been the grant of a favour —  a government job, a petrol pump site, a gas agency, or a plot of land beside a highway. 

From its inception the Sangh Parivar  has offered Indians a different kind of state. In philosophy, if not practice, it has been against caste, and its mode of recruitment has through social service. Its conversion into a Fascist political movement has been gradual, and not even wholly intended. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad was not created till 1964, and did not become militantly anti-Muslim till 1983. The Bajrang Dal,   its ‘sword arm’, was not created till 1984.

 However much one may disagree with its goal of creating a Hindu Rashtra, a quasi- totalitarian nation state founded around religion and ethnicity, its method of gaining political support has throughout remained  the offer of a chance to serve ‘Hindu India’. 

So when Modi came to power in 2014 he did so with not a two but a three-pronged strategy. The first was economic revival, in which he failed miserably. The second was promoting Hindutwa by dismantling the pluralism and multi-ethnicity sanctified by the Constitution. The third was launching programmes that aimed at reaching the poor directly and empowering them, rather than the bureaucrats who had been administering  development and welfare programmes till then. 

Among these last are the Jana -Dhana Yojana which has universalised   bank accounts into which Direct Benefits to which the poor are entitled are now being transferred electronically, thus empowering them rather than the bureaucrats who had been administering these till then;  the Swachha Bharat Abhiyan which promised toilets in every rural home,  and the Gram Jyoti Yojana and Saubhagya schemes for rural electrification. To these Yogi Adityanath added the extermination of lawless elements through police ‘encounters’ in UP.  

AAP’s approach to governance is the secular , democratic  opposite to answer to the Sangh Parivar’s narrowly focussed Messianic approach. There is no hint of caste or religion in its politics. There never has been. Kejriwal founded the party around a single burning issue – the fight against all-pervasive corruption and bureaucratic extortion, in  government. Its 2015 election campaign  was crowd-funded and its message was spread by thousands of young volunteers, from among whom a core emerged as the party’s permanent cadre. 

Its success in Delhi in 2015 was utterly unexpected, but its return to power in 2017 was not. As it grappled with Delhi’s innumerable problems, it widened its focus till it embraced most other areas of governance. In all of them, but especially in the provision of health, education, power and water supply, slum regularisation  and urban transport, AAP has taken initiatives that have given the poor the security and legal standing that they had lacked before. 

In 2017 Narendra Modi recognised the threat that AAP’s ideology  posed not only to his government but to the Hindu Rashtra project,  and tried his level best to destroy it, but failed. Since then an accommodation of sorts has been reached, which was partially reflected in AAP’s  silence over the organised pogrom in East Delhi  in January 2020. But, all in all, it is  the BJP that has been forced  to coexist with AAP in Delhi  rather than the other way about.  

In 2019, after the decline in its share of the vote in Punjab, and its failure to get anywhere in Goa,  most people wrote  AAP off as a party that could not extend its reach beyond Delhi. Delhi was a special case, they concluded, because it was made up almost entirely of migrants who were mostly educated, and had already left caste and creed behind when they migrated to the Capital. But its spectacular success in Punjab in these elections has shown that there a more fundamental change taking place within the electorate. 

As Kejriwal emphasised in his victory speech after the results were announced,  the key word in his party’s campaign, and the word that was on everyone’s lips during the campaign was ‘Badlao’(change, or transformation) .  The badlao that people were referring to, and which his party has promised them,  is in the relationship of the state to its people. “Under the British and for 75 years after they left”, he pointed out, “the people had served the State. Now it was the turn of the state to serve the people”.  

Therefore  lesson that the opposition parties need to learn from the total absence of an anti- incumbency vote against the BJP is that the days of caste-based entitlement to the peoples’ vote are rapidly drawing to a close. The lesson they need to learn from AAP’s victory in Punjab, is that in future their victory will depend not upon their ability to build alliances around programs, and the  measures they will take to implement them. 

The victory of AAP shows what  kind of programmes they need to espouse and the kind of alliances they  need to make. They have  a bare two years left to learn these lessons and create the alternative to the BJP that the nation needs. 


[1] https://www.oxfamindia.org/press-release/inequality-kills-india-supplement-2022

[2] https://factly.in/the-intriguing-case-of-data-on-communal-incidents-in-india/

[3] NCRB: Crime in India 2020.   chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/viewer.html?pdfurl=https%3A%2F%2Fncrb.gov.in%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2FCII%25202020%2520Volume%25201.pdf&clen=7250741&chunk=true  

  

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Modi did not want only to prevent a second wave; he wanted all the credit for stopping COVID-19 in its tracks to go to him and him alone.

Modi's Gamble, and How Many Lives It Will Cost
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

In her heart-rending description of her desperate search for oxygen to save her father’s life, the celebrated TV news anchor Barkha Dutt ascribed his death to three features of governance that have defined Modi’s India: complacency, callousness and incompetence. She could have added a fourth – an insatiable, almost suicidal appetite for risk born of a compulsion to keep reinforcing an already swollen image of himself.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has displayed this penchant half a dozen times in the last seven years: his personal announcement of  demonetisation before the new currency notes had even been printed; his imposition of the Goods and Services Tax with immediate effect, denying India’s 71 million small manufacturers time to set up the required accounting systems; his sudden  confrontation of the Chinese at Doklam in Bhutan without consulting Thimpu, and his equally sudden removal of price and marketing protection from farmers without even a rudimentary examination of how it would affect them.

His appetite for risk surfaced yet again, within days of being told that the first wave of India’s COVID-19 epidemic had peaked in September last year. Of the 50 lakh Indians who had been infected until then, 81% had recovered. Some 10 lakh patients remained under medical care, most of them at home. A little over 84,000 people had died. The mortality rate of 1.68 % was about the lowest in the world and the envy of other nations (notwithstanding fatality undercounting and underreporting).

But everyone involved in the actual fight until then knew that it was too good to last. Scientists always knew of the danger that the ‘original’ virus could mutate into more dangerous forms. Second ‘waves’ of COVID-19 had already developed in the summer and autumn of 2020, spreading through parts of Belgium, Iran, South Korea, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain and the US.

When researchers in the UK reported the B.1.1.7 variant in December 2020, the country’s government immediately extended its existing lockdown. The variant was found to be more infectious but no more dangerous than the original. Within weeks, scientists reported two more ‘variants of concern’, from Brazil (P.1) and South Africa (B.1.351), in addition to numerous other strains and mutations. P.1 and B.1.351 have been found to be able to partially evade the human immune system, endangering prospects of vaccines being developed at the time.

Therefore, every government took the risk of a second outbreak seriously from the start. By early January 2021, the B.1.1.7 strain had been detected in samples in Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore. All of these countries took quick precautions, imposed lockdowns and/or stepped up their vaccination schedules.

There were only three exceptions – all in large democracies with insecure but ruthless leaders in power: Brazil, the US and India.

India’s scientific and medical establishment, and its health minister Harsh Vardhan in particular, were fully aware of the threat that later strains of the virus could pose. Vardhan had overseen the last phase of the polio eradication campaign during Prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s tenure, so he had an experience of disease control that no one else in the government did.

But from the very first days of the pandemic, the Modi government developed two conflicting aims. While the administration wanted to chart a course of action that would minimise the risk of a second wave, the political establishment – headed by Modi himself – was concerned only with extracting every ounce of political advantage from the crisis.

The conflict emerged in the very first week of the March 2020 lockdown. In speech after televised speech, Modi reminded his audiences that just as the Pandava had won the battle of Kurukshetra in 18 days, he would win the battle against COVID-19 in 21 days. He thus turned the lockdown into a personal battle between him and the virus.

As the days passed, and the number of new cases increased instead of declining, Modi began to look for something, or someone, to blame. Conveniently for him, the Tablighi Jamaat conference in New Delhi gave him just the scapegoats he needed – foreign religious clerics belonging to a religion he detested and had targeted to attain power. The strictest possible lockdown was therefore imposed on the entire Nizamuddin area of New Delhi and criminal cases filed against the organisers – despite the fact that the conference had ended two days before the government imposed the first travel restrictions on foreigners, on March 14.

But new cases continued to mount long after the event’s conclusion, so Modi sought help from the occult. To invoke the gods to come to his aid, he asked  people to turn off their lights and beat thalis at preordained times and used the Air Force to shower flowers over Delhi.

While he was monopolising TV time, his administration was setting up 11 empowered groups under the National Disaster Management Act, to deal with the material aspects of the forthcoming challenge. One of them, within days of being set up, warned the government in unambiguous terms that a second wave was likely and provided detailed recommendations on how to prepare for it, should it happen.

Among its most important recommendations was that India immediately import 60,000 tonnes of oxygen and upgrade 150 district hospitals – mainly by supplying them with 162 pressure swing adsorption plants to isolate oxygen.

The 162 plants were expected to cost Rs 200 crore. At the time the empowered group made these recommendations, the PM Cares fund, which Modi had set up to fight the pandemic, had already received Rs 3,076 crore, mostly from public sector companies. So Modi had the money he needed, in abundance.


A COVID-19 patient on oxygen support waits to be admitted at Patna Medical College and Hospital, during the second wave of coronavirus in Patna, Friday, May 14, 2021. Photo: PTI

But Modi did not want only to prevent a second wave; he wanted all the credit for stopping COVID-19 in its tracks to go to him and him alone. So when the  first wave peaked in September 2020, his propagandists immediately  proclaimed that Modi’s harsh lockdown had defeated the outbreak and saved India. From then on, it was business as usual for Modi, and business as usual had  only one goal: to wrest West Bengal from Mamata Bannerjee and the Trinamool Congress, no matter the cost.

In Modi’s highly centralised, PMO-centred decision-making process, this shift of attention sowed the seeds of today’s disaster. The government’s first act was to wind up five of the 11 empowered groups and discontinued the meetings of the group tracking the virus’s spread. The programme to upgrade district hospitals went into limbo – as did the plan to create an oxygen reserve by  importing 50,000 tonnes of oxygen.

Genome sequencing, which is essential to determine which mutations are spreading in which population, took the back seat. It was not till December 25, 2020, after B.1.1.7 had already arrived in India, that the health ministry created the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG) – a chain of 10 laboratories to sequence and analyse virus samples.

By March 24 INSACOG had tested 10,787 samples and found 771 instances involving three of the eight ‘variants of concern’ the US Centres of Disease Control had identified. Of them, 94% were of B.1.1.7.

This should have set the alarm bells ringing in every office in the PMO – but four state elections were imminent and Modi could think of nothing else but the stentorian speeches he was preparing to give in the 23 election rallies he intended to address in West Bengal and Assam.

In fact, the absence of any sense of urgency in the government after September was so complete that it took eight months, until November 2020, just to invite tenders for the oxygen plants. As a result, on April 18, 2021, only 11 of the 162 oxygen plants had been installed.

Also, none of these had been funded by the PM Cares fund. In fact, it was not till April 15 that the PMO coughed up a measly Rs 100 crores from its corpus to complete the construction of 59 more plants and bring the number up to 80 by the end of May.

There was a similar departure from responsibility  in the vaccination programme. From January 16, the government concentrated on vaccinating frontline and healthcare workers. Vaccination for those above 50 years began on March 1, but with that private interests and preferences came roaring back into play.

Pfizer was refused permission to sell their vaccines in India. The Centre also failed to strike advance purchase agreements with vaccine-makers and grossly underestimated Indian manufacturers to satisfy the domestic demand for doses.

The government also forced Covaxin, an ‘indigenously developed’ vaccine, on government hospitals before the latter had completed its crucial phase 3 trials. As a result, vast numbers of eligible persons refused to take the vaccine, slowing immunisation still further.

Despite this rampant irresponsibility,  Modi’s luck held for five months after September. Through these winter months, the number of active cases continued to ebb. When it reached a minimum in the week of February 11, 2021, there were fewer than 138,000 patients under treatment and a hundred or so deaths a day. The country heaved a sigh of relief. Markets, restaurants and malls began to function again and life was returning to a semblance of normal. But by then, the seeds of the second wave that is now ravaging the country had been sown.

The second wave

The first warning came, almost unnoticed, in late-February when the number of new cases daily began once again to exceed  recoveries, causing the number of active cases to start rising.  This was slow at the beginning: the first doubling of active cases, from 137,000 on February 14 to 273,000 cases on March 18, took   32 days. But after that, and within six days of INSACOG’s warning, the speed tripled and each doubling took only 11 days or so.

The number of active cases breached the 1 million mark on April 10 and the 2 million mark on April 21. Not until then did it register on Modi that there was something more important happening in the country than the West Bengal and Assam elections. But by then he had already addressed 10 million persons in  23 rallies, where neither he nor anyone in his audiences wore a mask.

Modi’s utter disregard for the consequences of his actions emboldened lesser leaders in his party to follow his lead. The chief minister of Uttarakhand not only refused to cancel the Kumbh Mela but put out advertisements to draw more devotees from around India.

When a special leave petition to the Supreme Court pointed out on April 16 that “there is no protocol in place to ensure that devotees who get infected do not go on to spread the virus when they return”, he retorted that “nobody will be stopped (from attending the mela). We are sure that faith in God will overcome fear of the virus”. As a result, an estimated 28 lakh persons attended the mela, took holy dips in the Ganga, jostled with each other in the crowded, polluted waters of the river, and then dispersed to all parts of India to spread the virus.


Devotees gather to offer prayers during the third Shahi Snan of the Kumbh Mela 2021, at Har ki Pauri Ghat in Haridwar, Wednesday, April 14, 2021. Photo: PTI

Therefore, to Modi’s surprise – and perhaps only his – there were three and a half million active cases on May 4. Hospitals were full to bursting, doctors couldn’t even reply to anxious calls from infected patients, helplines were overloaded and distress calls received no answer. An acute shortage of oxygen killed patients by the scores every hour.

Although the data has not been released, and may never be, I speculate from personal experience that more people have probably died because of the lack of oxygen than from any other single cause. In fact, the shortage of oxygen is therefore the one issue on which the world needs to hold the Modi government, and Modi in particular, criminally responsible. For there is not a shadow of an excuse for the shortage that has developed.

In a report a report submitted to the Lok Sabha in 2020, a committee headed by MP Ram Gopal Yadav pointed out that the country’s oxygen production capacity was 6,900 tonnes a day; that at the peak of the first wave the demand for medical oxygen had reached 3,000 tonnes a day, but as the wave subsided it had fallen to 1,000 tonnes a day. This allowed the remainder to be diverted for industrial use.

So in March, when INSACOG identified the B.1.1.7 strain as the main threat to the country’s population at the time, the government could have diverted at least 2,000 tonnes a day of oxygen back from industrial centres with a single stroke of the pen. But at the end of March, Modi’s fixation on winning the West Bengal and Assam elections was so complete that he ‘forgot’ to make that stroke of the pen. And by the time he ‘remembered’, it was April 19, and  people were dying in their cars and as their relatives took them desperately to one hospital after the next in search of oxygen.

So in March, when INSACOG identified the B.1.1.7 strain as the main threat to the country’s population at the time, the government could have diverted at least 2,000 tonnes a day of oxygen back from industrial centres with a single stroke of the pen. But at the end of March, Modi’s fixation on winning the West Bengal and Assam elections was so complete that he ‘forgot’ to make that stroke of the pen. And by the time he ‘remembered’, it was April 19, and  people were dying in their cars and as their relatives took them desperately to one hospital after the next in search of oxygen.

 

 

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The resignation of top academics from Ashoka University is reflective of the current atmosphere where centres of education that encourage us to question beliefs and prejudices pose a direct threat to the Hindutva state.

Hindutva's Dead Hand in Destroying India's Future: A Personal LamentIllustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The news of Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s resignation from Ashoka University has filled me with an immeasurable sense of loss. I have known Pratap since he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard in the mid-1990s. His field was moral and political philosophy and, even before he had completed the book whose peer-reviewed acceptance for publication is virtually a pre-condition for even applying for, let alone securing tenure (i.e lifetime professorship) at Harvard, his colleagues had taken it for granted that he would be among the very few post-docs who would be granted it when his fellowship came up for review.

But Pratap did not wait for the tenure review and returned to India because his heart had been set upon it from the very beginning. What pulled him back was, simply put,  a burning desire to serve his country. Soon after he returned, he submitted his first article to the Indian Express. I remember that one very well because on reading it I realised straight away that he had brought an element into political commentary that had been lacking before. This was an ethical yardstick, based upon his understanding of the moral and political foundations upon which great nations have rested, and whose betrayal has led to their downfall. Needless to say readers of the Indian Express, and its editors, also saw this, and Pratap’s column in the Indian Express, which he has sustained till this day, was instantly born.

When the founders and trustees of Ashok university chose him to succeed its first vice-chancellor, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, they could not have made a better choice. For not only had they chosen a renowned scholar, but one who had already shown, as the director of the Centre for Policy Research, that he has the self-confidence to allow an already well-governed institution to continue governing itself and grow through collective endeavour, and confine his role to protecting that growth.

Ashoka University’s haloed place at risk 

Among the several private universities that were set up in the glory days of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the distinctive feature of Ashoka University was its decision not to open the gates of admission wide to ensure its financial viability but to enrol only students who meet admission standards comparable to those of the best universities in the world. As a result, the quality of its student body, its faculty, the seminars they hold, and the research the PhD students do has been attracting growing respect in centres of higher education across the world.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Photo: Youtube screengrab.

This had not come as a surprise to me because, having taught as visiting faculty at Harvard, the University of Virginia, Sciences-Po in Paris and The New School University in New York, I had realised from my very first interactions with the faculty and students at Ashoka, that the quality of education it was giving, and of the research being done there, was second to none.

I was convinced that it was only a matter of time – and not much time at that – before Ashoka came to be recognised as one of a couple of dozen best liberal arts universities, something no Indian university has managed to do so far. I had also all but persuaded my daughter that to ensure a world class university education for my grandchildren, it was no longer necessary to look outside the country. That hope too is now fading as I look at the uncertain future that lies ahead.

Tragically, in a country with an unparalleled record of missed economic opportunities, and failed moral and political development, it is this single-minded pursuit of excellence that has endangered Ashoka’s future, for it threatens the very base of the edifice of power that the RSS has created for the Sangh Parivar. For that base is fabricated from ignorance, dogma, prejudice, an utter misreading of Hinduism,  and a twisted, sometimes fictitious rendering of Indian history from the Mauryan ‘Golden Age’ to the present day, and the perpetuation of the communal hatred that was Britain’s parting present to India.

Hindutva brigade aversion to knowledge

It has been apparent from the Modi government’s first days in power that it considers knowledge, and sincere, dispassionate debate to be its enemy, because it knows that the promotion of “Hindutva” and his government’s very survival, depends upon the relentless fostering of the myth, passion, and prejudice. Freedom to debate, and the right to disagree, are its enemies because they allow us to question existing beliefs and discredit myth and prejudice. Centres of excellence in education that encourage both are therefore direct threats to the Hindutva state.

Modi’s advisers have made no secret of their belief that knowledge is an enemy of the state. So it is hardly surprising that they have targeted liberal arts universities like Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and now Ashoka, in particular. They destroyed Delhi’s academic integrity first over the Ramayana issue;  they have all but succeeded in taming JNU by appointing an unknown professor from a different institution who is a known member of the RSS as its vice-chancellor and permitting him to hound dissident students, bring the police onto the campus, and systematically emasculate its academic council.

But the government’s bete noire has been a section of the print media and the proliferating online journals to which many of the best and brightest in civil society have migrated. So it is hardly surprising that its baleful gaze has now fallen on the digital media.

Chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian. Credit: Reuters
Following Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s exit from Ashoka University, Arvind Subramanian too followed suit. Photo: Reuters

Its favourite mode of attack has been the choking off of funds, through layer after layer of draconian and intrusive laws whose cumulative effect has been to ban foreign funding, open domestic donors to ever heavier and more intrusive investigation, and declare any criticism of the government or its policies an ‘unlawful act’ that opens the alleged perpetrator to a minimum of six months in jail without a judicial hearing, at the will and command of the police and its masters.

Ashoka University has so far escaped this fate, but the pressure upon it to bow to the government’s will has been mounting for at least the past four years. Pratap Bhanu Mehta has been the focus of this pressure because he is among the very few persons in the country who has the stature and credibility to defend the right of dissent in both academia and through his columns in the Indian Express. This has been far too much power for the government to stomach. Pratap Mehta has been at the head of this select list.

Pratap Mehta alleviated the pressure on the University for the first time in 2019 by resigning from the vice-chancellorship but staying on as a Professor. But the Modi government did not relent, so the government’s pressure on the university’s founders and donors continued.

Mehta has tried to save the university a second time by resigning from his professorship also. But this too will not suffice, because the government’s main purpose has not been to push him out of the university but stop his column in the newspapers. That is the request that the board and some of the trustees of Ashoka are believed to have made of him. Pratap has chosen the alternative of cutting all his remaining links with the university.

But instead of dousing the fire, this has added fuel to it. The resignation from its faculty of Arvind Subramaniam, Arun Jaitly’s former economic adviser, and the rebellion of the student body has seriously jeopardised Ashoka’s future. Other faculty members are presently awaiting the outcome of the struggle, but it is a safe bet that should the Trustees not rediscover the courage to stand up to the government, there will be more resignations and a fairly rapid departure of the best professors to  universities abroad.

Ashoka university may survive, but it will do so not as a liberal arts university comparable to Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge but as a successful skill imparting university comparable to Jindal University next door.  Should this happen far more will have failed than just another foray into higher education.

For one has only to look at the place that is occupied by the above-mentioned universities in the US and UK, and of Sciences-Po and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in France, to understand the role that liberal arts universities that have played in creating  the thinkers and policymakers  – Plato’s Men of Gold – who have guided the destinies of their nations.

Oxford and Cambridge were training colleges for the clergy before Britain became the archetypal nation-state

“Dissent is the safety valve of democracy,” our courts have intoned, most eloquently in Romila Thapar versus the Union of India. But it is Pratap Mehta again, who has described the constructive power of dissent in the making of a nation.

In the annual lecture he delivered for Project 39A on December 10, last year, he said,  “Dissent is not a freestanding value because it is grounded in moral judgment. It has, as George Elliot said, to speak in the name of a higher rule; it has to speak in the name of a common good; it has to be reaching for something better. Otherwise, it simply is a disposition to subvert, where the means become the ends (emphasis added).”

Today the BJP is on its back feet. In the past year, it has succeeded in alienating just about every important group in the country – the entire working class, especially its migrant component, the farmers, and the small and medium enterprise owners and their employees.

These are vast economic strata that cut across every ideological and religious grouping in the country, so its standard appeals to religion and hate are failing. It has fallen into this trap, not because of the COVID pandemic, but because it has choked off public debate and dissent. Ashoka university was primarily, and could still be, its best vehicle for bringing the global debate into India. But all that this government seems intent upon is to destroy its future.

Prem Shankar Jha is a Delhi-based former journalist and editor. He is the author of Managed Chaos: The Fragility of the Chinese Miracle, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger—Can China and India Dominate the West.

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If Modi wants to pull India out of the ‘Cereals Trap’, the path lies through the creation of infrastructure for agriculture.

The Remedy to the Agricultural Crisis That No One Is Talking AboutFarmers during a protest against the new farm laws, at Ghazipur Border in New Delhi, Friday, Dec. 18, 2020. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary

Five weeks after the Farmers agitation began, and a day after the Supreme Court urged the government to put the three farm bills passed in September on hold, Prime Minister Modi has finally agreed to hold talks with their leaders.

But what will he hold talks about when neither he, nor anyone else in his government, has shown any understanding of what has driven the entire community of farmers from North India to the edge of despair?

Their ignorance is writ large on his party propagandists’ attempts to ascribe political, even traitorous, motives to the farm leaders. That is the reaction of schoolyard bullies who, when they find themselves losing an argument, start hitting their opponents.

Now that Modi has decided to talk to the farmers himself, he would do well to understand the predicament that has driven them to desperation. In a nutshell, it is this: India is now a chronically food surplus economy. So while opening up the foodgrains trade to traders from all over the country will benefit rich farmers – who have the maximum bargaining power and can contact, or be contacted by, buyers in other states and countries most easily – the entire price shock of the foodgrains surplus will be felt by the small landholders who make up four-fifths of the farming community.

The government’s recent decision not to abolish the Minimum Sale Price system will cushion this shock, but no one knows to what extent it will do so if the thriving mandis of Punjab, Haryana, Western UP and northern Rajasthan lose the bulk of their business to private buyers and start closing down.

Even if the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees that manage these mandis survive no one can foretell how far their straitened finances will permit them to provide the small farmers with the host of ancillary services, such as advances to buy seed and fertiliser in time to sow the next crop, that they are doing today. In sum, these ‘reforms’ will plunge the largest, most vulnerable, segment of the country’s population into a sea of uncertainty, in which they presently have no idea, of how they will stay afloat.

Liberal economists are treating this as the unavoidable price of economic development. The solution, they say, lies in product diversification. The cereals market will automatically come back into balance if farmers divert some of their land to horticulture, dairy and poultry farming. What they seem to be unaware of is that farmers have been doing this since the early 1990s. Those with small and marginal holdings were the first to attempt it.

But the world they entered was frighteningly different from the world they were leaving, for it was one in which near-complete market security was replaced by equally complete market insecurity. While cereals are not perishable and can easily be stored for six months or more (wheat) to several years ( lentils), fruit, vegetables (other than onions and potatoes),  milk and eggs perish in days. Horticulturalists have therefore found that, from the moment they harvest their crop, they are at the utter mercy of the trader.

Despite this more and more farmers have taken to growing vegetables, fruit and flowers because of the rapid and unexpected growth of exports. Since exporters offer contracted prices to ensure, and often pre-empt, supply, a degree of income stability has been given to horticulturists. As a result, the area under horticulture has more than doubled in the past twenty years to 25 million hectares, and exports have grown eightfold from Rs 8,000 crores in 2000-01 to Rs 63,700 crores in 2018-19.


Farmers protest against the farm bills at Singhu border near Delhi, India, December 4, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis

But only traders, exporters and well-to-do farmers have benefited from this windfall.  To manage the growing volume of horticultural produce giant cold storages that can store up to 40,000 tonnes of produce, have sprung up all over India in the last two decades. In March 2019, there were an estimated 7,645 large cold storages with a refrigerated space of 150 million cubic metres, capable of storing  37 to 39 million tonnes of perishable produce.

But the small farmers, who have grown most of the fruits and vegetables, have been left out in the cold because, even today, almost three-quarters of a century after independence, there are no cold storages in the villages.

The following data from the agriculture ministry’s report, ‘Horticulture Statistics at a Glance 2018‘ shows how this single omission has chained the small farmers to poverty. In Punjab, one hectare under horticulture yields four tonnes of paddy and five tonnes of wheat, but close to 20 tonnes of vegetables.

But between 2013 and 2018, the wholesale price of onions, potatoes and tomatoes – the three principal horticulture crops – has averaged Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000 per tonne in March and April at the end of the growing season, when the farmers have no option but to sell their produce.  Since farm-gate prices average at most half of the wholesale price, the vegetable growers earn at best Rs 6,000 per tonne for their produce,  and a gross income, therefore, of Rs 120,000 in the year.

But the procurement price fixed by the central government for both paddy and wheat is over Rs 18,000 per tonne. So four tonnes of paddy and five tonnes of wheat a year fetch the farmer a gross income of Rs 162,000, one-third more than vegetables fetch the marginal farmers. Vegetable farming is therefore not only less secure, but also pays less than cereal farming. That is the second reason why the farmers are not only insisting upon the retention of the MSP but the repeal of all the three farm bills. If the present marketing structure is weakened or destroyed, all of them, from the largest landholders to the smallest, have no place to go but down.

The bitter experience of vegetable growers has shown the farmers who are surrounding Delhi today that the ‘market’ upon whose mercy Modi wants to cast them is exploitative and merciless. That is why they are not only insisting upon the retention of the MSP but the repeal of all the three farm bills as a prelude to negotiation.

If Modi wants to pull India out of the ‘Cereals Trap’, the path lies through the creation of infrastructure for agriculture that India’s governments and intelligentsia had promised to farmers when the Congress party made land reform its first national policy initiative in 1948, but subsequently forgot.

Prem Shankar Jha is a Delhi based former journalist and editor. He is the author of Managed Chaos: The Fragility of the Chinese Miracle, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger—Can China and India Dominate the West.

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These “reforms” bear exactly the same stamp of hubris, lack of consultation and foresight that has characterised all the major initiatives taken by the Narendra Modi government in the past six years.

The Protests Against the Farm Laws Present a Familiar Pattern
A farmer holds the tricolor at Ghazipur border during the protest against the Centre’s agri-laws, December 15, 2020. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary

If there is anyone who should not be surprised by the sustained and widespread opposition by farmers to the laws passed in September, it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For these “reforms” bear exactly the same stamp of hubris, lack of consultation and foresight that has characterised all the major initiatives his government has taken in the past six or more years.

This is not the first time that Modi has announced draconian measures that have far-reaching consequences, without prior warning, let alone consultation. He did this with demonetisation in 2016; with the Goods and Services Tax in 2017; with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Population Register in 2019, and with a hasty lockdown to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in March that proved a monumental failure but inflicted untold hardship on 40-50 million migrant workers this year.

The many failures that have followed his exaggerated promises, and the unrest that many of these have generated, have sown a growing scepticism in the people. So it is not surprising that the farmers distrust the government’s assurances that the Acts will help double their earnings and are demanding their repeal.


A farmer holding a flag stands on top of a truck during the ongoing protest against the Center’s new farm laws at Singhu
border in New Delhi, December 10, 2020. Photo: PTI/Arun Sharma

What is not so easy to understand is their refusal to discuss amendments to the three lawseven after the government reassured them that it will not abolish the minimum support price (MSP) system that has existed for the past five decades. This will allow the farmers to sell their rice, wheat and other MSP-covered crops in the open market while they enjoy the security of knowing that they can sell these to the government if the need arises.

So, predictably, Modi’s spokespersons have reverted to coercion and accused the farmers’ leaders of being ‘Leftists’, ‘Khalistanis’ and puppets of the ‘tukde tukde gang’ that wants to ‘dismember’ India on the pretext of protecting its ethnic, political and religious diversity.

These tactics will not intimidate the farmers for, unlike India’s English-speaking elite, and unlike even the thousands of Muslim women and their non-Muslim supporters in the Shaheen Bagh movement, they are, and will remain, the bedrock of India’s civilisation and politics for many more decades to come. So if the government really wishes to improve the lot of the farmers, it needs to understand the causes of their stubborn resistance first.

The benefits of the Green Revolution have been exhausted

These do not spring so much from doubt about the government’s intentions, as from their doubts about their own capacity to take advantage of these new ‘freedoms’. This capacity has declined sharply in the past three decades as the growth spurt given by the Green Revolution of the 60s and 70s has been exhausted and nothing has taken its place.

The Green Revolution was made possible by the development of hybrid varieties of wheat and rice, but India was able to take spectacular advantage of it only because of the immensely fertile soil of the Indo-Gangetic plain and the abundant supply of groundwater – often likened to an immense underground lake – beneath it.

By the end of the 1980s, both were being fully exploited. In 2015, 28.6 out of the 37.5 million hectares of cultivated land in these five states was irrigated, and all but a tiny part was growing both wheat and rice, or two crops of rice. The cropping intensity was greatest in Punjab and Haryana, where 7.2 out of their 7.6 million hectares of cultivated land was growing both rice and wheat every year. Uttar Pradesh was only slightly behind, with 14.5 million out of its 17.6 million hectares growing both wheat and rice.

Paddy farmers in Tamil Nadu. Credit: Feng Zhong/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Representative image of paddy farmers. Photo: Feng Zhong/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This relentlessly intense cultivation has exhausted the soil. The tell-tale indicator is the need to use more and more fertilisers for every tonne of output. While the production of foodgrains has increased by 134% – from 126 to 285 million tonnes – between 1977-78 and 2018-19, the consumption of fertilisers grew by more than 600%, from 4.2 million tonnes to 27.2 million tonnes.

This increase has turned India into a food surplus country, but caught farmers in a ‘scissors crisis’ of rising costs of production and falling market prices. To prevent a crash in the latter, successive governments have turned what used to be a compulsory procurement price in the 1950s and 60s, designed to ensure a supply of foodgrains at reasonable prices, into a support price that would sustain the real income of the farmers in the villages. This was the genesis of the MSP and Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC), that the government’s new farm laws will make redundant. What this will mean for the farmer can be gleaned from the statement of their purpose as spelt out by Wikipedia:

“An Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) is a marketing board established by state governments in India to ensure farmers are safeguarded from exploitation by large retailers, as well as ensuring the farm to retail price spread does not reach excessively high levels.”

The APMCs are the farmers’ shields against the stormy winds of the free market. It is no surprise therefore that state governments have tried, albeit with limited degrees of success, to extend the MSP system to 21 more agricultural crops.

But over time, this shield has turned into a trap: the more the farmers produce, the higher becomes the cliff from which they will fall if the MSP system is abolished and they are thrown into an open market. In such a market, the better off farmers, who have the means, the leisure and the contacts to make direct sales to traders in other states, and abroad, will prosper. But the small and marginal farmers will find themselves at the bottom end, forced to sell to middlemen who have none of the obligations that the state governments have imposed upon the APMCs.

And today, 125 million of the country’s 146 million farmers own or operate, an average of a little more than two hectares of land. For them, the abolition of the MSP and with it the disappearance or emasculation of the APMCs is virtually a kiss of death. Yes, given enough time many, perhaps most, of them will learn to survive and even prosper in a free market. But time is precisely what the farm laws will deprive them of. If they are forced through even with the retention of MSPs, the APMCs will survive: farmers will have the option to sell to them. But they will become progressively weaker. Many, probably most traders will migrate out of them. Those that remain will have a much smaller turnover and will therefore no longer have the resources to carry out the many functions, from warehousing to electrification to the construction of rural roads that they help perform now in Punjab and Haryana.

This is why the farmers are not satisfied with simply the retention of the MSP. They need much more support, but as of now cannot see how, and from where they will get it, if the laws are not repealed.

Unsold stocks of wheat and rice

In fairness to the government, it must, however, be admitted that the present system also is not sustainable. The warehouses of the Food Corporation of India (FCI) are bursting with unsold stocks of wheat and rice and this food mountain continues to grow. At the end of June, they held 27.7 million tonnes of rice and 55 million tonnes of wheat. Together these amounted to 42.1 million tonnes more than the stipulated buffer stock requirement on July 1. Wheat is hygroscopic, i.e sucks in moisture from the air. It cannot, therefore, be stored for more than a few months before it becomes inedible.

The only way out at present has been to export the surplus. As a result, India has been transformed from the chronically food importing country it was in the 1960s into the world’s largest exporter of rice. In 2019-20, it exported 12 million tonnes – one-third of global exports – and over 6 million tonnes of wheat, much of the latter as cattle feed after it had become ‘unfit for human consumption’ in the FCI’s granaries. There are no reports of what the wheat fetched the government, but the rice fetched 7.1 billion dollars, i.e $591, or Rs 44,325 per tonne. The MSP for rice in 2019 was Rs 1,815 per quintal, i.e. Rs, 18,150 per tonne. The net profit from paddy exports in 2019-20 was, therefore, $4.18 billion.

This is the golden apple that has prompted the government and its supporters in Big Business to pick. The immediate beneficiaries will be the large urban exporters to whom the FCI will sell its surplus stocks. No one knows how much the FCI will sell these surpluses to private traders at, but it has been selling some of its stocks at the MSP or a little above that already. So this is likely to continue. The annual bonanza may be somewhat reduced from the $4.18 billion of 2019-20 by the fall in world prices that increased supply will trigger, but it will still be huge and will come to the exporters and their political backers every ear.


Labourers carry sacks of rice after unloading them from a wagon train at an FCI godown in Jammu, April 16, 2020. Photo: PTI

I will be surprised indeed if this is not the main motivation behind this supposedly benevolent reform. But the reform itself is needed, so to be accepted, it needs to be made benevolent. The simplest way would be to levy a 10% state GST upon all sales made to private traders, and something like a 28% GST upon rice and wheat exports, and channel these back to the APMCs via the state governments to continue performing the functions they perform today.

There will be cracks, even in such a system, through which a few farmers may fall through. But the chasm that all but the richest among them are facing today will be closed.

 

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