The Candidate of Transformation

The Candidate of Transformation

The implications of a union government led by a fourth consecutive term chief minister like Narendra Modi are wide, deep and transformational.

 It is something the Congress Party can never aspire to in the medium-term future, given the virtual reign of the Nehru- Gandhis, however undeserving and incompetent, and however many times they may claim democratic legitimacy for their grip on power.

The despair on the faces of their many  senior Congress ministers, experienced and brilliant people, many of them, who cannot aspire to the prime ministership because of the glass ceiling they work under needs to be rationalised anew every day. It is cast in the way all of us must deal with inevitability. But the tantalising truth is that the Congress –Gandhi shibboleth is not really all that inevitable. It is a self-inflicted injury that must evolve to its denouement. It could however, be a long time.

 As NaMo has said on more than one occasion, the Congress Party, before independence and after it, is not at all the same quantity.

Candidate Modi’s dramatic emergence on to the national stage, by way of contrast, in a presidential manner, though still within the confines of a parliamentary system, has all the hallmarks of a truly democratic ascent. It shows not only how this country has matured and changed, by enthusiastically signalling his acceptability around the country, but also how the old must give way to the new, even in traditionally conservative parties and their ideological underpinnings.

It is of course ironic that this dynamic shift towards democratisation in political parties should come from one long identified with much mocked Hindutva  in a dispensation embarrassed by its heritage, derided, colonial fashion, for being obscurantist and medieval; and not, after all, the ‘modern’ party set up in the 19^th century by an Englishman, and run by West- leaning leaders, albeit dyed an unmistakeable shade of pink if not red.

The question is, does the Congress Party leadership, for that matter any of our political leadership in this so- called poor country, really live the Socialist life? Is it not comical when Rahul Gandhi says the BJP does not care for the poor?

NaMo has come however, as we all know, all the way from an assistant in a Chai-stall outside the RSS office in Ahmedabad, to become the properly anointed prime ministerial aspirant after much debate and confabulation in the party . The parallels to the emergence of a black Barack Obama to fulfil Martin Luther King’s dream are palpable. 

That NaMo is from the OBC category, by no means a Delhi insider, is another great breakthrough in a BJP and Sangh Parivar long identified with the high caste Hindu and the politics of privilege. This despite its earlier and on-going initiatives to incorporate, amongst others, both Dalit leaders and followers in its fold.

And that the much maligned “hard-liner” is able and willing to reach out to and receive a favourable response from the Muslim community, a full 25% of whom in Gujarat have already voted for him, and the BJP, is cutting the ground from under the feet of the vote- bank politics, of the Congress and some of its supporting cast who sup off the same table.

The entire recent story of Modi’s rise to the chosen parliamentary pole position in his party while retaining his hold over Gujarat, shows that the status quoists, in the ruling government, among some prominent members of his own party, vociferous civil society groups who owe their standing to the present order, other interested pressure groups and lobbies both rural and urban, intelligentsia living on “The idea of India” etc. are a worried lot.  

They have had no cause in their complacence to update their ideas to suit a new resurgent India that wants exponential progress. Theirs is a design for incremental benefits that leave their power structure cosy and intact.

Modi, borne up on a groundswell of popular support, has crashed their party, despite their best efforts to keep him out, and they don’t know how to deal with their own marginalisation, both as power- brokers and privilege hounds.

Some of these resentful and fearful people have the temerity to suggest that popularity with the masses is not everything in a democracy, while whining that the BJP, the Sangh Parivar, its followers and supporters, and indeed NaMo himself, are all fascists.

So to these people, the voice of the people should be disregarded, because, the self-appointed, and not the masses of people, are to be taken for the true defenders of freedom and democracy. George Orwell could not have topped this kind of double-speak for its revisionism if he were to rewrite Animal Farm today! 

Paradoxically, these champions of progress and change and pluralism and the poor, are alarmed at the prospect of real change and transformation. They are alarmed at the more accurate definition of each of their oft repeated ideological positions.

They are afraid of the response Modi is garnering from the public wherever he goes around the country to his new definitions of secularism, security, development, poverty, progress, terrorism, governance, integrity and truth. 

Interestingly many important constituencies are not at all confused. in Modi’s corner we find, the youth across the board, a vast majority of our voters, the rank and file political cadres in the Sangh Parivar itself, the small band of right wing intelligentsia that have long been advocating his advent.

We also see the new “true secularist”, that believes in equal opportunity for all instead of Muzaffarnagar style vote bank politics that leads invariably to murder and mayhem.

We see a world of support from abroad, fed up with India’s policy paralysis. The foreign investor community, indeed the entire West, as also the newly independent nations of the former Soviet bloc, the Middle East, the Far East- even China and Pakistan, would like to do business with Modi.

The good-natured joke on the ‘right’ is that they are much easier to deal with than the ever prevaricating ‘left’, always tacking their positions to the prevailing wind. Even your enemies prefer a solid ground for their negotiations after all.

Take for example,  the much hailed Raghuram Rajan at the RBI, his straight- forward policy pronouncements, without  the trademark  ifs and buts, his impressive international credentials, his plain- speaking bias towards growth and the cutting of red tape,  his swiftness of action so far. He will fit in very well with NaMo’s style of functioning.

We may even manage to find subscribers to the Sovereign Fund he is backing to keep the home fires burning in the interim.

(1,101 words)

September 18^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee