THE

PARADOXICAL
PRIME MINISTER
 ALSO BY SHASHI THAROOR

NON-FICTION
Why I Am a Hindu
An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in Our Time
India: the Future is Now (ed.)
Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century
Shadows Across the Playing Field: 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket (with
Shahryar Khan)
India (with Ferrante Ferranti)
The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India in the 21st
Century
Bookless in Baghdad
Nehru: The Invention of India
Kerala: God’s Own Country (with M. F. Husain)
India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond Reasons of State

FICTION
Riot
The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories
Show Business
The Great Indian Novel
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 To
The People of India
Who deserve better
CONTENTS

Introduction

Section I: The Paradoxical Prime Minister

1. The Paradoxical Prime Minister

Section II: The Modi-fication of India

2. Fake History and Pseudo-Nationalism
3. A Growing Wave of Communalism
4. Sacred Cows and Unholy Politics
5. Minority Report
6. The Dangers of a National Holy Book
7. Changing the Constitution
8. Honouring Our Women
9. Section 377—the Supreme Court Saves the Day
10. No Sex, Please, We’re Indian
11. The Attack on Science
12. The Taj by Any Other Name
13. Trial of and By the Media
14. Standing up to Censorship
15. The Push for Hindi

Section III: Moditva and Misgovernance

16. Maximum Government, Minimum Governance
17. The Attack on Institutions
18. Conduct Unbecoming
19. Destroying Parliament
20. Governing Governors
21. Matters of Justice
22. Juvenile (In)Justice
23. Abolishing the Death Penalty
24. Dishonouring the Armed Forces
25. Failing at Education
26. Messing up Swachh Bharat
27. Our Fundamental Right to Privacy
28. North vs South
29. The Culture of Opacity
30. Civilizing the Civil Services?
31. Capital Spies
32. Two Fables About Fatalism

Section IV: The Failure of Modinomics

33. The Mirage of Achhe Din
34. The Dark Truth About Black Money
35. India’s Demonetization Disaster
36. Getting a Grip on GST
37. Unbalanced Budgets
38. Railroading the Railways
39. Boosting the Indian Economy

Section V: Flights of Fancy

40. Mr Modi’s Impromptu Foreign Policy
41. The India-Pakistan Yo-Yo
42. All Hat and No Cattle
43. Kowtowing to China?
44. Bargaining with Bangladesh
45. Have We Lost Nepal?
46. Let Us Be Humane to the Rohingyas
47. Looting and Scooting
48. Protecting Our Migrants
49. A Man of Destiny? Not Quite
50. The New India We Seek

Acknowledgements
 INTRODUCTION

I told you so.

In 2014, I published India Shastra , a volume of essays about
contemporary India. In it I examined the then new prime minister of India,
Narendra Modi, six months into his assumption of office. This is what I wrote
then:
There is a paradox at the heart of Mr Modi’s ascent to the prime ministership. His
speeches and rhetoric appear to recognize, and harness, a vital shift in our national
politics from a politics of identity to a politics of performance. Yet he has ridden
to power at the helm of a party, the BJP, which is ill-suited to the challenge of
delinking India’s polity from the incendiary issue of religious identity that it had
built its base on. And his rise to office has empowered the khaki-shorts wearing
‘cultural organization’, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose views
on every subject—economics, politics, history, culture, morality, gender relations,
even matters of appropriate dress or conduct—are totally illiberal. Mr Modi has
built his appeal by putting the focus on what the Indian people manifestly need—
more development, better governance, wider socio-economic opportunities. But
having won an election by attracting voters to these themes, he has given free rein
to the most retrograde elements in Indian society, who are busy rewriting
textbooks, extolling the virtues of ancient science over modern technology,
advocating protectionism and self-reliance against free trade and foreign
investment, and asserting that India’s identity must be purely Hindu. Mr Modi
cannot be oblivious to this fundamental contradiction, but he can only resolve it
by jettisoning the very forces that have helped ensure his electoral victory. I am
not sure whether such a fundamental contradiction can even be resolved, and in
that may lie the seeds of Mr Modi’s future failure. 1

Four years later, that failure is clearly apparent. The story of these last years
is a story of missed opportunities and dashed hopes, of waiting for ‘achhe
din’ that never came, of seeing expectations raised to the heights by lofty
rhetoric, only to come crashing down in the face of depressing reality. These
years have been an era of disappointment for believers, of vindication for the
sceptics, and of frustration for all who want India to thrive.
In writing such a book, of course, I cannot pretend to be a neutral
observer. I am a Member of Parliament from the Opposition Congress party,
and there will be some who will inevitably make the ‘well, he would say that,
wouldn’t he?’ argument about the analysis in this book. In extenuation I can
only point out that I have tried over Mr Modi’s years in office to be as fair to
him as possible, incurring the wrath of many of my own party colleagues by
accepting his invitation to join the first group of prominent Indians asked to
endorse his Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign, and being at the
receiving end of much political opprobrium for my initial willingness to give
him the benefit of the doubt. Part of this willingness was the hope I shared
with most Indians to see a changed man between the campaigner and the
victor—now that he was actually PM, perhaps he was prepared to govern for
all Indians? And part of it was respect for the electorate—they had elected
him and, as a democrat, I felt an obligation to respect their collective
judgement enough to see if Modi would live up to the voters’ faith in his
words and promises.
As I show in this book, he did not. But I do not regret that initial
suspension of criticism, though in some ways it was the worst of both worlds,
since I got the backs up of the government for my subsequent criticisms
anyway, while provoking the suspicions of some on my side who alleged I
was planning to switch my allegiance to Mr Modi (something that anybody
with the slightest familiarity with my more than three-decade-long paper trail
of trenchantly liberal opinions should have known was impossible). The
middle of the road, after all, is the place where you get hit by traffic from
both directions.
One of the things the twenty-first century is supposed to have taught us is
that few things in life are black and white, that much of human reality
involves complex, alternating shades of grey. The one field, however, that is
exempt from this simple principle is Indian politics. Our political life and
discourse are the last refuge of Manichaeism, the doctrine that divided the
world into mutually incompatible ideas of good and evil.
Consider the evidence from just one episode: in mid-2015, I found myself
launching and discussing a book by the scholar and columnist Raja Mohan,
Modi’s World , on the NDA government’s foreign policy. Since what was
expected was an overall assessment, I began by crediting the prime minister
for the personal energy he brought to the conduct of policy, with his wide-
ranging travels which had made a positive impression on the countries
receiving him, and for having leveraged India’s soft power as an instrument
of our diplomacy through such initiatives as International Yoga Day—though
I qualified this by observing that the pursuit of the Guinness World Records
was unnecessarily tacky and unworthy of a government. I then went on to
point out that the Modi government had not only continued the foreign policy
of the UPA but done so by reversing most of the BJP’s positions in
Opposition, on issues ranging from the Indo-US nuclear deal to the
Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement. Even the emphasis on economic
diplomacy with which the prime minister was being credited, I said, was
nothing more than the implementation of what I have dubbed the Manmohan
Doctrine, which posits that the overriding objective of Indian foreign policy
is the economic transformation and development of India. I added, for good
measure, that where the Modi government had departed from its predecessor
it had embarrassed itself and the nation—pointing, in detail, to the yo-yo like
pendulum swings of our policy pronouncements and actions on Pakistan and
Israel.
It was, in other words, a nuanced analysis, mixed but far more critical
than laudatory, as anyone present in the audience (or a glance at the video
—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xaOpGxnVvk where I start at 5:30
and go on for nine minutes) will confirm. What I wasn’t prepared for was the
slew of ‘Tharoor praises Modi again’ headlines that promptly followed my
remarks. ‘Tharoor sings Modi’s tune again, says he’s leaving “positive
impression”’, declared ANI. ‘PM leaves “positive impression” during foreign
visits: Tharoor’, echoed PTI. ‘Modi’s “Personal Energy” Brought New
Dimension to Diplomatic Relations: Tharoor’, announced Outlook . 2 There
were several more in similar vein, all omitting the 80 per cent of my speech
that fell short of praise. It was as if all I had done that evening was applaud
Mr Modi. There were a couple of exceptions. The Wire ’s description of the
event was ‘Book Launch Sees Sharp Debate on Modi’s Foreign Policy’;
IANS, referring to the foreign secretary’s remarks as well, wrote ‘Jaishankar
lauds Modi’s proactive foreign policy, Tharoor slams “yo-yo” on Pakistan’.
But these more accurate stories got far less traction; accuracy isn’t saleable in
the world of political news.
The reason is clear: our politics is not supposed to be nuanced. Our media
sees every debate in the binary terms made famous by George W. Bush: ‘Are
you with us or against us?’ (It is said, apocryphally, that when asked this
question by former US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Nehru-ji
replied: ‘Yes’.) Our media analysis admits of no other possibilities: one must
be either for Modi, or against Modi; seeing 20 per cent worth praising, 60 per
cent worth criticizing and 20 per cent neither-good-nor-bad in his statements
and policies is too complicated for our scribes and analysts to digest. Even
The Wire and IANS stories mentioned above fell into the same trap; where
other journalists had reported only my praise, these outlets had room only for
my criticism. Whereas I had admitted some positives before weighing in
strongly on the shortcomings of Mr Modi’s foreign policy, readers of the
news would only think that I had ‘again’ praised him or attacked him—
nothing in between.
The problem became more acute a few days later when Prime Minister
Modi was kind enough to speak positively at a public forum about a speech
of mine in Oxford that had ‘gone viral’. Immediately, speculation began that
I must be about to switch sides; indeed, television anchors asked me if I was
about to do so. I pointed out (again) that I had thirty years of published work
at odds with what Mr Modi and his party stood for, but this was irrelevant to
the commentators: the prime minister had praised me, so that must mean I
was on his side.
There’s something terribly wrong with this picture. Why shouldn’t our
politics allow for mutual expressions of respect across the political divide?
Why should we not, by praising politicians on the other side when they say or
do the right thing, raise the bar for the standards by which we can judge their
subsequent conduct? Why shouldn’t we be able to see or hear the good things
said or done by those we fundamentally disagree with and oppose? Nehru-ji
was remarkably cordial to, and respectful of, the Opposition parliamentarians
who routinely savaged him and his policies, notably winning the approbation
of future BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the process, and even
took criticism on the chin from some of his own party MPs. One could
disagree with a party’s ideology, worldview or policies as a whole, but find
common ground with it on some things. But we have reduced our politics to
black and white today: either for or against, nothing in between. Fifty Shades
of Grey could never be the title of a book about Indian politics.
This view of our politics, reinforced daily by the reports in our media,
vitiates our political discourse. It reduces democracy to a zero-sum game
where everything done by one side is automatically bad and unacceptable to
the other. It explains the destructive Opposition politics of the recent past,
when the BJP ferociously opposed even policies it had itself worked for,
merely because they were being implemented by the UPA. It precludes the
possibility of fair-minded debate and prevents the public from seeing our
politicians as well-rounded human beings with minds of their own. Instead,
everyone is reduced to a stock caricature, defined in absolute terms by their
party affiliation alone.
This is a disservice to our democracy—which, as the Nobel Prize-
winning economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, is supposed to be a process
of deliberative reasoning, resulting in the best outcomes for the nation as a
whole. Democracy is supposed to be an on-going process, one in which there
must be give and take, dialogue and compromise among differing interests.
Let us not reduce it to a game of kabaddi. Though unlike kabaddi, don’t hold
your breath expecting the score to change.
How then, as a fair-minded Opposition MP, does one look back at the
Modi years? What can one make of a man who speaks of tolerance and
accommodation while condoning hate speech by party members he has
appointed as ministers? 3 How does one interpret a PM who speaks of
‘minimal government, maximum governance’ but is in the process of running
the most centralized, top-down, bureaucracy-driven, personality-cult
dominated central government since Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule? What
conclusion can one reasonably derive about a leader who says, ‘the
government has no business to be in business’ 4 but has never said a word to
question the anomaly of his government owning and running airlines and
hotels? 5 How can one interpret the intentions of a prime minister elected on
a promise of delivering results, whose very fine speeches and liberal
pronouncements appear completely disconnected from any tangible action
plan, adequate funding or execution capacity? Economics is clearly a vital
prism to understand the answer: after all, numbers cannot be partisan. Mr
Modi came to power boasting about his prowess at economic development,
telling the nation he had been a successful CEO of Gujarat Inc. and was ready
to do for India what he had done for his state. Against that yardstick, we have
a checklist of spectacular failures, headed by a GDP growth rate that fell by
2.2 per cent as also the twin, self-inflicted blows of demonetization (a bad
idea implemented badly) 6 and the botched rollout of GST (a good idea
implemented badly). Manufacturing has contracted, exports have declined,
growth in industrial production has slowed, and agriculture is stagnating (or
worse, given the annual rise in the number of farmer suicides). Credit growth
stood at 5.3 per cent in 2016-17, the lowest in over sixty years. 7 After
declaring ‘no more tax terrorism’, the Modi government inflicted tax
demands on entire new categories of victims, shaking investor confidence. 8
A government that promised 2 crore new jobs a year—8 crore in four
years—has generated precisely 18 lakh jobs in that time, most of them
classified by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as vulnerable
employment, and the thrasonical prime minister has been reduced to claiming
that pakoda-sellers on sidewalks should also be counted in the employment
figures. The unemployment rate has gone up from 4.91 per cent in 2014 to
6.23 per cent in 2018. India has more unemployed people than any country in
the world. 9
During the campaign a popular slogan was ‘Bahut hui mehengai ki
maar/Ab ki baar, Modi sarkaar!’ 10 The BJP government earned a windfall of
US $40 billion or ₹233,000 crore in its first three years, thanks to a collapse
in benchmark crude oil prices from $108.05 to $48.82 (May 2014 to May
2017) whose benefits it refused to pass on to the aam aadmi. 11 Instead it
levied in extra taxes what might have been saved at the pump, failing to
produce a stimulus to the economy; it is estimated that the government
earned ₹4.5 lakh crore every year since 2014 through excise on petrol and
diesel alone. 12 Given the subsequent rise in global prices, the Indian driver
was left stuck with record high prices at the pump, even as the rupee tumbled
to record lows (crossing ₹71 to the dollar in August 2018). 13
Then there was the disastrous experiment of demonetization, to which
this book devotes an entire chapter. According to the Centre for Monitoring
Indian Economy, demonetization cost India 15 lakh jobs between January
and April 2017 alone. 14 As I point out, it achieved not a single one of its
objectives as announced by the prime minister; indeed, 99 per cent of the
money that was demonetized has now come back into circulation. 15 Worse is
the intangible damage done to investor confidence in India’s economy; the
fear of similar surprises has intimidated investors and depressed demand.
Demonetization was such a spectacular failure that Prime Minister Modi
chose not to mention it at all in his final pre-election Independence Day
address in 2018.
Instead of being a game-changing government, the BJP has turned out to
be a name-changing one. The only successes it can point to are of schemes
that were initiated by the UPA and often criticized at the time by the
Opposition BJP: MGNREGA (which the PM sneered at, but now seeks credit
for increasing its funding, even though states complain the promised
subventions from the centre have not come); Aadhaar (which Mr Modi
vowed to dismantle but has instead made compulsory, in many cases linking
it to such things as credit cards and mobile phones that often have no links to
government benefits); Direct Benefits Transfer, attractively renamed Jan
Dhan as if the BJP had not criticized its adoption; Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan,
now packaged as ‘Swachh Bharat’ with lower outgoes but five times the
publicity budget; FDI in retail, the Financial Inclusion Scheme, liberalization
of insurance and GST (Goods and Services Tax) itself, all of which the BJP
had ferociously opposed and now wants to be congratulated for adopting. The
UPA’s skill development mission has been renamed the Pradhan Mantri
Kaushal Vikas Yojana; the National e-Governance Plan is now ‘Digital
India’; the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana has been rebaptized
the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana; the UPA’s Accelerated
Irrigation Benefits Programme has become the Pradhan Mantri Krishi
Sinchayee Yojana; and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal
Mission has been shrunk to Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban
Transformation—while the Modi government pretends these are all new
schemes launched from the imagination of its visionary leader. One must
concede that the Modi government creates better acronyms than its
predecessors did—AMRUT is markedly more euphonious than JNNURM,
for instance—but it cannot demonstrate better results on the ground.
Other promises have been dashed with impunity. The PM
grandiloquently pledged to bring back the nation’s ‘black money’ stashed
abroad and put ₹15 lakh into every Indian’s bank account; neither has
happened. 16 During the sarkar of the man who promised to be the country’s
chowkidar, or watchman, there have been over 23,000 bank frauds amounting
to ₹1 lakh crore since 2014. 17 On the watch of the leader who said ‘na
khaunga aur na khane dunga’ (won’t take bribes, nor let others take them)
there have been a bewildering variety of world-class scams—from the
Vyapam scandal in Madhya Pradesh to a PDS scam in Chhattisgarh, a GSPC
scam in Gujarat and a mining scam in Rajasthan, as well as the suspected
defence scam on the purchase of the Rafale fighter aircraft 18 —even as his
own foreign minister bypassed official channels to seek protection for an
Indian fugitive in London and the Panama Papers were given a quiet burial.
Before 2014, Narendra Modi had supported the demand for an anti-
corruption ombudsman, or Lokpal—but four years later, he had still not
appointed a Lokpal.
The prime minister’s priorities—as reflected in his Budgets—do not
match his rhetoric. Agriculture has stagnated, with the agricultural growth
rate dropping to 2.4 per cent per annum between 2014–18 compared to an
average growth rate of 5.2 per cent per annum the preceding four years. 19 A
staggering 36,420 farmers committed suicide between 2014 and 2016; figures
for 2017 and 2018 were still awaited from the government at the time of
writing, but judging by media reporting, the suicide rate will certainly be
worse. The central government’s Budget spending on education has declined
dramatically during the Modi regime, from 4.57 per cent of the government
budget in 2013–14 to 3.71 per cent in 2017–18, and from 0.63 per cent of
GDP in 2013–14 to 0.47 per cent in 2017-18. 20 The private sector makes up
for some of it, but not nearly enough.
The plight of India’s women graphically illustrates the emptiness of many
of the prime minister’s slogans and speeches. He announced a scheme to
support the girl child through enhanced education—Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao
—but 90 per cent of the funds allocated last year remain unutilized. 21 In
2018, horrific rape incidents in Kathua and Unnao (and their politicized
aftermath, with BJP leaders rushing to protect the accused 22 ) are a stark
reminder of how unsafe India has become for women. The National Crime
Records Bureau (NCRB) found that, overall, rape cases had seen an increase
of 12.4 per cent from 34,651 cases in 2015 to 38,947 in 2016. 23 In just one
year, India slipped twenty-one places on the World Economic Forum’s
(WEF) Global Gender Gap index, from 87th to 108th—behind even our
supposedly notorious neighbours China (where aborted female foetuses have
contributed to a gender imbalance) and Bangladesh, where Islam has
allegedly made the society unfriendly to women. 24 Sadly, not only does
India remain unsafe for women, but in the Modi era there have even been
ministers who have supported or tried to protect perpetrators of such violence
towards women. 25 Today, India ranks 148th in the world for the number of
women in Parliament; Pakistan ranked 89th and Bangladesh 91st. 26 The
UPA’s Women’s Reservation Bill, which would guarantee women 33 per
cent of the seats in Parliament, still languishes in the Lok Sabha where Mr
Modi has a brute majority.
Among Mr Modi’s most emotionally-expressed commitments was to the
Ganga River, which he often describes as his ‘mother’, saying she has ‘called
him’ to serve her. But his Namami Ganga scheme to clean up the grossly
polluted river is a spectacular failure, and India ranks 177th in the
Environmental Performance Index out of 180 countries. 27 Modi’s own
constituency of Varanasi is a byword for dirt, grime and unmanageable
waste.
National security was an area that brought out the most bombastic
pronouncements in the election campaign four years ago. It has witnessed the
most palpable failures. Our borders have been rendered completely unsafe in
these years of BJP rule: repeated terrorist attacks, border ceasefire violations,
massive infiltration of terrorists from across the border, incursion into Indian
territory by Chinese and Pakistani soldiers and the frequency of terrorist
attacks on Indian army bases and military installations in Kashmir do not
speak well of the competence of our government in keeping us safe. The
domestic record is no better, with the continuing incidence of Naxalism
proving that the BJP’s claim of sorting out internal security issues is hollow.
Every proud Indian wishes to say a good word about foreign policy: I
have long argued that there is no such thing as a Congress foreign policy or a
BJP foreign policy, only Indian national interests which any government of
any party must uphold. Unfortunately, though the PM has undoubtedly
brought a great deal of personal energy to his extensive travels around the
globe, which have enhanced his image and marked India’s presence on the
world stage, few tangible gains can be seen for the country from his frequent
flyer miles. The government’s foreign policy record over the years of Modi’s
sarkar has been marked by the absence of a coherent policy on Pakistan,
where India’s approaches have featured more ups and downs than a child’s
yo-yo; the incapacity to define and achieve a stable relationship with China,
which continues to oppose India’s vital interests at every opportunity;
deteriorating relationships with indispensable neighbours like Bangladesh,
Nepal and Sri Lanka; the alienating of a time-tested ally like Russia; the
excessive deference to a right-wing administration in America; and indiscreet
and vainglorious rhetoric on subjects like the ‘surgical strike’ against
Pakistan and the raid on Myanmar, with the unwarranted TV bravado of
ministers causing consternation in the neighbourhood.
The Modi government has meanwhile wasted its limited time and
resources on grandiose statuary, announcing one large monument after
another: the Sardar Patel ‘Statue of Unity’ in Gujarat, which will cost ₹3,000
crore, the Shivaji statue off the coast of Mumbai, which will cost ₹2,500
crore, and the statue to Lord Rama in Ayodhya, which will cost ₹330 crore.
28 It is hard to see what benefit these statues will bring to the country. (The
statues won’t even help fulfil Modi’s ‘Make in India’ slogan, since reports
tell us that even the Statue of Unity of Sardar Patel in Gujarat has been
outsourced to a foundry in China!) 29 This is not to mention, of course, the
₹4,343 crore the government has spent on advertising and publicity the last
four years. 30
It says something about the prime minister that his taste is for the
extravagant and the flamboyant—for instance, agreeing to a wholly
unnecessary Japanese ‘bullet train’ project between Mumbai and Ahmedabad
that will cost ₹1.1 lakh crore 31 and is doomed to unviability, considering the
modest price of air tickets and the number of passengers who can afford a
ticket on the bullet train, in a country where frequent railway accidents have
occurred (even prompting the resignation of Modi’s railway minister)
because of a lack of resources for track maintenance and basic safety of the
railway infrastructure. ‘The bullet train is not moving’, observed Congress
president Rahul Gandhi during his interaction with the Indian Journalists’
Association in London in August 2018. ‘You can have a fancy poster of a
bullet train, but the cost of a ticket in a bullet train is more than an airline
ticket. If we were offered the bullet train money by the Japanese, our
response would be, give us the money and help us strengthen Indian railway
infrastructure,’ Gandhi added. 32
The saddest people in India must be those outside the core BJP fold who
took him at his word and believed his commitment to ‘good governance’ and
the transformation of the country. As I have written elsewhere, whether we
grow at 9 per cent or at 5 per cent, we have to ensure the benefits reach the
bottom 25 per cent of our population. Some of us deluded ourselves into
thinking that Narendra Modi intended to do this, and to connect millions of
our citizens in a functioning democracy to their own government: not just to
announce entitlements that they are expected to grasp for themselves, but to
create delivery mechanisms that ensure that these entitlements are not just
theoretical, but real and accessible. Prime Minister Modi seemed to
understand this in his speeches; but it has become painfully clear that in
Narendra Modi’s India, the right diagnosis does not always result in the right
prescription, and even when it does, there is no guarantee that it will cure the
condition—implementation has remained a crippling national weakness.
 Rather than make this introductory threnody twice as long and thrice as
painful, I will look at everything else that has been disastrous about the Modi
sarkar in various chapters in the book—among other things, the overt,
triumphalist majoritarianism that has set alarm bells off among the minorities,
the excesses of the ‘cow vigilantes’ and ‘mob lynchers’ and the subversion of
institutions. The Modi slogan ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ (together with all,
development for all) has found its reality: India’s minorities are daily being
made to feel unwelcome by the majoritarian discourse flourishing under the
BJP, with ruling party MPs, including ministers, uttering Hindu-chauvinist
sentiments never heard before from people in authority. Ghar wapsi,
saffronization, statues of Godse, Ramzade and Haramzade, have all entered
into and seared our political discourse, while the prime minister has largely
remained silent, refusing to discipline or dismiss his errant ministers. 33
In the essay which I cited at the beginning of this Introduction, I wrote
that ‘Prime Minister Modi’s speeches and sound bites since his election could
certainly have been scripted by a liberal, though the gap between articulation
and implementation, in his case, remains currently wide enough to drive a
rath through.’ The liberal mask has long since fallen off. The gap has
widened. The result is another paradox: a prime minister of lofty ambition,
laid low by underachievement.

In writing this book about Narendra Modi and his effect on India, I have
elected not to write a straightforward political biography or a history of
Modi’s sarkar. Rather, in order to give myself the widest possible canvas on
which to depict the contradictions within his personality, style of functioning
and methods of governance, I have adopted an editorial structure that owes a
lot to movie-making techniques such as cross-cutting, slow-cutting and jump-
cutting, which I hope has allowed me to probe my subject much more
effectively than a standard linear structure would have allowed.
This book is divided into five sections, each of which looks at a discrete
aspect of the prime minister’s personality or the way in which his
government has functioned. Each section is further sub-divided into various
chapters that provide an even more distilled examination of Mr Modi and his
followers. The five sections are i) ‘The Paradoxical Prime Minister’, a long,
probing profile of the PM; ii) ‘The Modi-fication of India’, which shines a
light on the myriad ways in which Mr Modi’s government and followers are
damaging India’s plural and secular nature, rendering the country unsafe for
minorities, liberals, Dalits and women, stifling freedom of expression,
enabling the faking of history and so on; iii) ‘Moditva and Misgovernance’,
which takes apart the fraudulent claims that Moditva has led to the overall
betterment of our lives and the strengthening of our institutions of
governance; iv) ‘The Failure of Modinomics’ which takes a searching look at
the damage Mr Modi has done to the economy; and v) ‘Flights of Fancy’
which gives the lie to his much-vaunted foreign policy initiatives. The book
concludes with the chapters, ‘A Man of Destiny? Not Quite’, which sums up
Narendra Modi and his contradictions and a final version of ‘The New India
We Seek’, and deserve—a country that is far removed from the one that Mr
Modi has given us. Together, the fifty chapters in the book are intended give
the reader a view that is both panoramic and in-depth of Narendra Modi, the
paradoxical prime minister.
‘You gave Congress sixty years,’ Mr Modi used to say, ‘just give me
sixty months and I will transform India’. His comprehensive failure to do so
has his followers now going around the country saying that he needs at least
ten years for the task.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. This
book relies on incontrovertible facts; the glowing polls being cited by Mr
Modi’s supporters are opinions. At this rate, the facts will continue to speak
for themselves in the only poll that matters—the one that’s coming in 2019.
Our only hope is that by the fifth anniversary of the BJP’s ascent, we won’t
need to worry about any of these, because this disastrous government will be
gone.

1 Shashi Tharoor, India Shastra , New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015, p. xv.
2 Vinayak Hegde, ‘When Tharoor speaks on Modi, headline-writers struggle’, sify.com ,
21 July 2015; ‘Seminal Shift or Continuity, Book Launch Sees Sharp Debate on Modi’s
Foreign Policy’, The Wire , 19 July 2015.
3 ‘A sinister campaign has been unleashed to create social and communal tension with the
objective of polarizing our society. The PM’s silence and inaction has only conveyed the
impression that he condones all that has been happening’, from ‘Sonia Gandhi leads protest
march, questions PM Modi’s silence’, Indian Express , 4 November 2015.
4 ‘Government Has No Business Being in Business, PM Modi Tells US Investors’, NDTV ,
1 October 2014.
5 As repeatedly pointed out even by a Modi supporter, Tavleen Singh, in her columns in
the Indian Express.
6 Mihir Sharma, ‘Truth is that on growth, Modi govt’s performance has been astoundingly
poor’, Business Standard , 27 August 2018; ‘It Turns Out, Manmohan Singh Was
Prophetic In His Growth Prediction After Demonetisation’, Huffington Post , 1 September
2017.
7 ‘Credit growth plunges to over 60-year low at 5 per cent in 2017’, Times of India , 16
April 2017.
8 Minhaz Merchant, ‘Biggest let-down of Modi government is its failure to end tax
terrorism’, DailyO , 28 March 2018.
9 Shreya Shah, ‘Three years of Modi govt: Job-creation promise falls short as
unemployment rate up’, Hindustan Times , 23 May 2017; Pragya Srivastava, ‘Where are
the jobs? Not in India; unemployment rate doubles, jobs decline’, Financial Express , 24
April 2018; ‘India is the nation of the most unemployed in the world: Labour Bureau
Statistics’, Outlook , 5 April 2018.
10 (We have had enough of being battered by high prices; it’s time for a Modi
government!)
11 Rajesh Pandathil and Kishor Kadam, ‘#Explained: If crude prices are at 2004 levels,
why are we paying double the price for petrol, diesel?’, FirstPost , 22 May 2016.
12 ‘Excise duty on petrol, diesel to give big boost to Centre’s revenue kitty’, Hindu
BusinessLine , 11 February 2018.
13 ‘Rupee continues steep fall, hits 71 per dollar’, Reuters, 31 August 2018.
14 Aanchal Magazine and Sunny Verma, ‘Demonetisation anniversary: New numbers are
in, 1.5 million jobs lost in January-April this year’, Indian Express , 8 November 2017.
15 Dinesh Unnikrishnan, ‘Demonetisation: RBI says 99 per cent banned notes are back;
where is the black money?’, FirstPost , 3 November 2017; ‘Mitron, your score: 99.3% My
score: 0.7%’, The Telegraph , 30 August 2018.
16 ‘What about 15 lakh in accounts promised by PM Modi, asked RTI. The reply’, NDTV ,
23 April 2018.
17 ‘Over 23,000 bank frauds worth ₹1 lakh crore reported in 5 years: RBI’, Times of India ,
2 May 2018.
18 Bhasha Singh, ‘Rafale Jet Deal: Mother of all defence scams’, National Herald , 18
February 2018.
19 ‘Four years of Modi govt: “Problem of plenty”, agriculture slowdown challenges for
NDA’, Hindustan Times , 26 May 2018.
20 Subodh Varma, ‘Budget analysis: Share of spend in government expenditure, GDP on
education falling for 3 years’, Times of India , 6 February 2017.
21 ‘90% of Beti Bachao Beti Padhao funds unutilised: Parliamentary panel’, Times of India
, 21 March 2017.
22 Sameer Yasir, ‘Kathua rape case: BJP ministers backing accused quit but not before they
mocked law, government and humanity’, FirstPost , 14 April 2018.
23 Azaan Javaid, ‘Crimes across India spike by 2.6%, rape cases up by 12.4% in 2016:
NCRB data’, Hindustan Times , 30 November 2017.
24 ‘India falls 21 places in global gender equality report, ranks 108 in 144-nation list’,
Scroll.in , 2 November 2017.
25 Shuja-ul-Haq, ‘Kathua rape case: 2 BJP ministers attend rally in support of accused’,
India Today , 4 March 2018.
26 ‘India ranks 148th in the world for number of women MPs, says a new UN report’,
Scroll.in , 16 March 2017.
27 ‘India ranks 177 out of 180 in Environmental Performance Index’, The Hindu , 24
January 2018.
28 ‘₹3,000-Crore “Statue Of Unity” of Sardar Patel in Gujarat to be ready for inauguration
on October 31’, Indiatimes , 14 February 2018; ‘L&T bags Shivaji statue contract for
₹2,500 cr’, Times of India , 1 March 2018; Alok Pandey, ‘Yogi Adityanath wants
corporates to fund ₹330 crore Ram statue in Ayodhya’, NDTV , 30 March 2018.
29 ‘Statue of Unity to be “made in China”, Gujarat govt says it’s contractor’s call’, Indian
Express , 20 October 2015.
30 ‘Modi govt spent ₹4,343 crore on publicity, reveals RTI query’, The Hindu , 14 March
2018.
31 ‘Narendra Modi, Shinzo Abe inaugurate India’s first bullet train project in Ahmedabad’,
Scroll.in , 14 September 2017.
32 ‘Bullet train ticket will be costlier than airplane’s: Rahul Gandhi’, Economic Times , 25
August 2018.
33 M. V. Rajeev Gowda, ‘A counter narrative’, Seminar , November 2017.
 I

THE PARADOXICAL PRIME MINISTER

Each of the five sections in the book examines a particular aspect of
Narendra Modi’s personality or the manner in which his government
functions. Taken together, they are intended to give the reader a clear
sense of his style of functioning as prime minister and of India under
his leadership. In this section, I take a close look at his life and times,
beginning with his humble beginnings in Vadnagar, Gujarat, and
ending with his ascent to the prime ministership of India. I have also
explained in the introduction and here why I think of him as a
paradoxical prime minister. This is because of the fundamental
contradiction within him as prime minister—he advocates liberal
principles and objectives, but if these are to be fulfilled he would need
to jettison the very illiberal forces that have helped ensure his
electoral victories. The tension between his indulgence of the
Hindutva brigades and his responsibilities as prime minister of India
has become increasingly apparent. He may say all the right things
himself, but he will not condemn the bigots in his own ranks, and by
his refusal to condemn them, he empowers and emboldens them. That
will prove to be his undoing, and if allowed to prevail, will destroy
everything that is good, noble and decent about our country.
 chapter one

THE PARADOXICAL PRIME MINISTER

The very first time I met Narendra Modi, it was entirely by accident.
Not yet in politics, I was invited to address, and chair a session at, the
Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in Chennai in January 2009. A ministerial friend
invited me to join him for lunch at a private room in the conference hall. I
arrived a little late—my session had run over time—and joined my host and
four other guests already seated at a small round table. Somewhat to my
surprise (since the minister in question was a Congress party stalwart), I
discovered that one of my fellow guests, in smart short-sleeved shirt, rimless
glasses and neatly trimmed white beard, was the chief minister of Gujarat,
Narendra Modi.
I knew of Mr Modi only from the media, and what I knew was not
flattering. He was seen by many as the chief villain of the Gujarat riots of
2002, which had killed over a thousand people, mainly Muslims, on his
watch. 34 Some of my friends routinely demonized him; just over a year
earlier, Congress president Sonia Gandhi had called him a ‘maut ka
saudagar’, a merchant of death. 35 And here he was, smiling amiably at me.
Unexpectedly, he greeted me by name; he knew who I was. Taken aback,
I reciprocated. But I am not one to leave well enough alone. I might not have
sought a meeting with him, given his reputation, but now that I was with the
man himself, I decided to question him.
The lunch soon became a dialogue between Mr Modi and myself, with
the others too polite to chip in. Regrettably, I did not write any notes that day
of our conversation, and many of the details are now lost in the mists of
memory. But one part of the exchange stays vividly in my mind.
I had asked him about the 2002 riots and his role in them, and he had
replied predictably that he had done all he could, and called in the army when
the police proved inadequate. I then switched to the present: what about the
lingering effects on the Muslims of his state? I had heard dismaying reports
of their being marginalized and ghettoized. How were they faring?
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Mr Modi replied, looking me straight in the eye.
‘The same question you are asking me, I was asked by some very important
people from Delhi. Some committee appointed by the central government had
come to see me. [I surmised this was the Sachar Commission, which had
been tasked by the UPA government to prepare a detailed report on the
condition of Indian Muslims.] So I received them in my office, and they said
to me, “We hear you have done nothing for Muslims in Gujarat.”’
‘You have done nothing for Muslims in Gujarat ,’ he repeated for
emphasis. ‘I replied, “Sit down, and please write this,”’ Narendra Modi’s
eyes glinted behind his glasses. ‘They all took out their notebooks and pens.
And I told them, “You are right. I have done nothing for Muslims in
Gujarat.” They all started writing this in their notebooks. Then I added,
“Write this also: I have done nothing for Hindus in Gujarat either.’’’ He
paused for dramatic effect. ‘“I have done nothing for Muslims or Hindus. I
have only worked for Gujaratis.”’
It was highly effective, as was much else that he said that day. He was in
Chennai to address non-resident Indian delegates about the investment
opportunities available in his state. It was clear he knew how to impress an
audience, even if, at our lunch, it was just an audience of five.
But there was another side to Mr Modi’s charm that I would not take long
to discover.
Less than a year later, by now minister of state for external affairs, I
found myself on an official visit to the United Arab Emirates. One of my
tasks was to urge my interlocutors to invest in India. But the UAE
government had a problem. Their company, Dubai Ports World, had acquired
the British P&O, and taken over all of P&O’s existing contracts relating to
the management of ports around the world. In three Indian states they had
had no problem converting the existing contracts with P&O to new ones with
Dubai Ports World. But in Gujarat, they were stuck; the state government
was simply not heeding their request. Could I help?
With the confidence borne of my lunchtime exchange, I telephoned the
chief minister of Gujarat. ‘We’re trying to get the UAE to increase their
investments in India,’ I explained, ‘but they say they have this issue in
Gujarat. What seems to be the problem?’
 There was no beating about the bush on the telephone. Mr Modi’s answer
was chillingly blunt: a company controlled by an Arab country could not run
a Gujarati port.
He went on: ‘You want these UAE people to invest in India? Tell them to
come to Gujarat. I will give them land, 24/7 electricity, good roads, all the
cooperation they want. But I won’t let them run a port.’
I mentioned that the same arrangement was working elsewhere in India,
but the Gujarat chief minister refused to see my point of view. He was
adamant that this would be detrimental to India’s national interest. 36
I felt this was irrational and tried to plead with him, but he was
implacable. I had to admit failure to my interlocutors.
II

Narendra Damodardas Modi was born in the Gujarati town of Vadnagar on

17 September 1950, the third of six children, to Damodardas Mulchand Modi
and his wife, Heeraben, a couple of modest means who belonged to the
Ghanchi caste, which had traditionally made their living as oil-pressers. (His
caste ought not to matter in a twenty-first-century profile, but Mr Modi
subsequently ensured that it would, by describing himself as India’s first
backward-caste prime minister, a claim that could more properly have been
made by H. D. Deve Gowda, prime minister 1996-97. 37 ) Like other
Ghanchis, the Modis seem to have practised this profession too, but
Damodardas Modi also operated a tea stall at the Vadnagar railway station.
Here, he had the help of his son, Narendra, from a young age. ‘The boy was
an average student,’ reported one of his biographers, Nilanjan
Mukhopadhyay, quoting one of his teachers, Prahladbhai G. Patel. 38
Prahladbhai Patel, who taught Narendra at the BN High School, remembered
him as ‘an argumentative child who would often defy teachers’. He said he
had once ‘asked Narendra to show his homework to one of the class monitors
and he refused—he said that if he has to show it to anyone for evaluation, it
must be the teacher himself or no one’. Patel was also unequivocal about
Modi’s performance as a student. He said Narendra was not ‘a very bright
student’ and ‘ranked medium and at best could have been called a mediocre
student’. He is said to have shown less interest in his studies than in debates
and theatre.
His prowess as a student may have been less than stellar but Narendra
was someone who never shied away from hard work. He would assist his
father during the busy hours before school started, while his mother and
siblings operated the oil mill. The experience taught him the value of hard
work and a respect for labour that are still cited among Narendra Modi’s
basic characteristics. Mr Mukhopadhyay says that Narendra Modi told him in
the course of an interview: ‘I sleep very less—just three-and-a-half or four
hours…[and I am up] about 4:30 to 4:45 a.m. If it gets late then 5 a.m. at the
latest.’
Narendra Modi took these attitudes with him to the organization that
formed him and shaped his beliefs, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), founded in 1925 as the vanguard of an aggressive Hindu political
revival after centuries of British and Muslim rule. The RSS emerged from the
prevalent ideological currents of the 1920s, believing in many of the ideas
Mussolini’s Fascists or Hitler’s National Socialists were propagating at the
same time, notably race pride, military discipline, effective organization and
fiercely chauvinist nationalism that targeted minorities and dissenters. Its
leaders were contemptuous of the secularism and pluralism of the freedom
movement led by the Indian National Congress, advocating instead an
uncompromising Hindu Rashtra. In the first few decades of its existence, the
RSS’s ideas did not acquire a wide following, but its adherents were
fanatically devoted to it.
The RSS regarded the partition of the country that accompanied
Independence as a betrayal, and blamed the Congress and Mahatma Gandhi
for it. It was a former member of the organization, Nathuram Godse, who
assassinated the Mahatma in 1948, leading to the RSS being banned for two
years. When it re-emerged, it focused on spreading its organizational wings,
seeking young recruits who could be moulded in the ideas and ethos of the
RSS. One of them, joining the organization as a bal swayamsevak (child
volunteer) on Diwali day in 1958 at the tender age of eight, was Narendra
Modi.
Narendra Modi immersed himself early in the teachings of the RSS.
Leaving home soon after high school—having left a child bride to whom his
marriage had been arranged when he was thirteen—he is reported to have
spent time in Rajkot, near Kolkata, Guwahati and Almora, living in ashrams
dedicated to the Ramakrishna Mission and Swami Vivekananda in an attempt
at self-discovery. (His authorized biographer, Andy Marino, claims that Mr
Modi was told by the missionaries at Belur Math that the life of a monk was
not suited to him. 39 ) This demonstration of independence and self-reliance
would mark him for all time. After returning to Gujarat and brief stints
working in his uncle’s canteen in Ahmedabad and operating a tea cart,
Narendra Modi became a full-time RSS worker.
It is a measure of his devotion to the cause that he spent at least a year
performing menial chores like cooking and cleaning for his superiors in the
RSS hierarchy in Gujarat. But he soon graduated to the role of a pracharak, a
full-time disseminator of the RSS message. His efficiency and appetite for
work soon impressed his seniors, and he was sent to RSS headquarters in
Nagpur for successive levels of training that equipped him for higher
responsibilities in the RSS setup. Mr Modi has stated that his experience as a
pracharak taught him that ‘your life should be disciplined’, and that ‘what
work you get, do it well’. 40
He did. He rose rapidly up the ranks, first of the RSS organization and
then of its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). During the
Emergency, when the RSS was banned, he disguised himself as a Sikh and
conducted a variety of subversive activities, including ferrying wanted
Opposition leaders to safe houses. In 1987, Mr Modi was deputed to the BJP
by the RSS as general secretary of the party’s Gujarat unit. Initially he was
entrusted with organizational responsibilities—managing events, marches
and rallies, including for two BJP presidents (a section of L. K. Advani’s rath
yatra in 1990 and Murli Manohar Joshi’s Kanyakumari-to-Kashmir Ekta or
Unity Yatra in 1991–92). He was also credited for his organizational role in
ensuring the BJP’s victory in the Gujarat state elections of 1995. He soon
rose to the national level as the BJP’s organization secretary, and became a
stalwart spokesman for the BJP on national television. But the day soon came
when he was entrusted with substantive political responsibilities in his own
right. In October 2001, after a crisis in the BJP-run state government in
Gujarat, the fifty-one-year-old Narendra Modi was despatched to Ahmedabad
by the party to serve as chief minister. 41 One story claims he was initially
asked to be deputy to the ailing chief minister, Keshubhai Patel; Mr Modi is
said to have replied that he would either be fully in charge of Gujarat or
decline to move there at all.
When Narendra Modi was made CM, the assembly elections were just a
year away. His principal challenge was to hit the ground running in order to
ensure his party’s re-election. ‘I have come here to play a one-day match,’
CM Modi told the press in the state capital, Gandhinagar, using a cricketing
metaphor. ‘I need fast and performing batsmen to score runs in the limited
overs game.’ 42 He made it clear that he himself would lead from the front—
the captain, opening batsman and fastest bowler, all rolled into one.
But just four months later, on 27 February, 58 men, women and children,
kar sevaks returning from a trip to Ayodhya—where they had travelled in
support of constructing a Ram Janmabhoomi temple on the site of the
destroyed Babri Masjid, on the tenth anniversary of its demolition—were
killed when a fire broke out on their train as it passed through the Muslim-
dominated town of Godhra, 160 kilometres east of Ahmedabad. Given the
widespread assumption that they had deliberately been targeted by Muslims
in Godhra for their political affiliation, 43 the authorities feared retaliation,
but the Modi government did little to prepare for it. A state-wide bandh was
declared and the bodies of the kar sevaks were reportedly paraded in public
(other accounts deny this, though it was widely reported at the time). Enraged
Hindu leaders began fanning the flames, taking out processions to condemn
what they denounced as a Muslim assault on Hindutva activists. They were
neither dissuaded nor stopped in their tracks by the government. Soon
tempers boiled over, and attacks began on Muslims, as well as on Muslim
homes and Muslim-owned shops. 44 In the frenzy of mob violence that
followed, over 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred in a pogrom
against that community that blighted the state’s normally tranquil capital,
Ahmedabad, and other places in Gandhi’s homeland.
The scale of the tragedy was horrific. According to an affidavit filed by
the then Director-General of Police (Intelligence) in Gujarat, R. B.
Sreekumar, before the Justice Nanavati inquiry commission, 1,044 were
killed, 2,500 injured, and 223 were reported missing; more than 4,500 houses
were destroyed and 18,500 damaged; Muslim Gujaratis suffered property
damage worth approximately ₹600 crore, and Hindus approximately ₹40
crore. 45 It was estimated a few months after the riots that 132,532 persons
had been displaced or forced to leave their homes. 46
The Modi government was accused of condoning—or at the very least
not taking prompt action—to stop the killings and destruction, which ceased
only after the army was called in three days after they began. Narendra Modi
has long had to battle the perception that he did not do enough to stop the
bloodshed, though it must be noted that a Supreme Court investigation found
there was no case for him to answer. He has consistently insisted, as he did
with me, that he did all he could to control the rioters. Others disagree.
Human Rights Watch, for instance, issued a report entitled ‘We Have No
Orders to Save You’ arguing that at best the police had been ‘passive
observers, and at worst they acted in concert with murderous mobs.’ 47 In her
book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future,
the American scholar Martha Nussbaum concludes, ‘‘There is by now a
broad consensus that the Gujarat violence was a form of ethnic cleansing, that
in many ways it was premeditated, and that it was carried out with the
complicity of the state government and officers of the law.’ 48
Narendra Modi’s authorized biography by Andy Marino describes these
events very differently and advances a compelling case that Mr Modi was
indeed blameless on the 2002 riots: ‘the facts show that Modi did not want
them to happen, did not help them to happen, and did everything within his
power as quickly as he could to stop them happening’. 49 This is far from a
widely accepted conclusion, but it must be recorded, in an environment
where too many are convinced of their own versions of the truth.
Narendra Modi’s actions may not amount to direct complicity in the
killings, but his attempts to downplay the tragedy—or at least his role in it—
have not helped either. His infamous declaration at the time that the riots
‘result[ed] from the natural and justified anger of people’ did not go over well
with world public opinion, and considerably damaged his reputation, not least
internationally. 50 (Instead of condemning those—mainly Hindu—who were
responsible for the violence and terror, let alone acting against them, he
accused the people of Godhra of possessing ‘criminal tendencies’ which had
instigated retaliatory violence. 51 Days after the riots, in an interview with
Zee TV on 1 March 2002, he said, ‘This is a chain of action and reaction. We
want both the action and the reaction to stop.’ 52 )
Modi later told Reuters (in what may be a poor translation of his Hindi):
‘We feel that we used our full strength to set out to do the right thing.’ Asked
if he regretted the violence, Modi compared his feelings to the occupant of a
car involved in an accident. If ‘someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting
behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not?
Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If
something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad,’ he said. 53
To compare the brutal massacre, rape and destruction of human lives and
property in 2002 to the accidental running over of a puppy betrayed a
heartlessness and a lack of proportion that many found unforgivable. His lack
of compassion for the victims is disappointing in a state chief executive: there
is only one known instance of Mr Modi visiting a relief camp. Instead, he
described the camps as Muslim ‘baby-making factories’. 54
Lawyer and Congress MP Kapil Sibal has further pointed out that ‘not all
the accused [in the riots] were brought to book and many were released on
bail during the course of the trial.’ 55 Some who were convicted of rioting
have been released on appeal; Maya Kodnani, a former BJP minister,
sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for leading the rioters in the biggest
single massacre, was acquitted by the Gujarat High Court in April 2018, after
having enjoyed several furloughs earlier during which she was spotted at
yoga retreats. 56 Some witnesses turned ‘hostile’, recanting their earlier
damning testimony, allegedly under duress. Some cases are still dragging on.
Given that the Godhra accused were denied bail, kept in jail throughout the
trial and justice was swiftly dispensed, the double standards are glaring.
It was reported that the late Prime Minister Vajpayee wanted to dismiss
Narendra Modi as chief minister for his failure to prevent the massacre, but
was dissuaded by the Hindutva hardliners in his administration. Senior BJP
leader, and current vice president of India, Venkaiah Naidu confirmed this
story on the record as an example of his party’s democratic decision-making:
according to Mr Naidu, Prime Minister Vajpayee wanted Narendra Modi to
resign as Gujarat chief minister after the riots, but had to give in to the party’s
‘collective decision’ against the idea. 57 Mr Modi prepared well to resist his
ouster, persuading senior leaders to back him: at the national executive
meeting of the BJP in Goa in April 2002, he theatrically offered to resign as
Gujarat CM, only to be drowned in a chorus of ‘No’s’, showing Vajpayee-ji
clearly how much influence he held within the party. 58 Vajpayee-ji gave in.
Be that as it may, the Gujarati public rallied behind him. Mr Modi was re-
elected as chief minister of Gujarat in elections later that year in a landslide—
the BJP winning 69.8 per cent of seats to the Congress’s 28 per cent, a
lopsided victory that bolstered Mr Modi’s image at a time when the BJP was
facing major defeats in other parts of the country—and returned to office
again with ever-larger majorities in 2007 and 2012. 59 (He is by far the
longest-serving chief minister Gujarat has ever had.) While his campaign
rhetoric vehemently expressed Hindutva ideas, he increasingly claimed to be
governing Gujarat effectively and promoting robust economic development, a
message that resonated well beyond his state and gave him a credible national
reputation for decisive and impactful leadership.
Indeed, Modi’s credibility as a prime ministerial contender rested largely
on his reputation for the excellent economic management of his own state. He
was portrayed as a hands-on chief executive, whose vaulting success—
showcased in a series of ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summits that attracted India’s top
businessmen and foreign investors—had created a ‘Gujarat Model’ that the
rest of India could learn from. (Narendra Modi himself declared that Gujarat
under him was the ‘engine of India’s economic growth’. 60 ) Mr Modi’s
‘Gujarat Model’ was anchored in generous encouragement for free enterprise,
more efficient and profitable public sector undertakings, state expenditure
targeted at identified deliverables, and an impressive growth rate—among the
highest in India (an average of 10 per cent a year during his dozen years as
chief minister 61 ). Mr Modi made it easier for corporate houses to use
agricultural land for industrial purposes in Gujarat and also eased land
acquisition and labour laws. It helped, of course, that CM Modi ran a tightly
controlled state government, which justifiably boasted that it had prevented a
recurrence of communal riots after 2002.
One episode sealed Narendra Modi’s image as a can-do ‘vikas purush’
(development man). When, in 2008, political violence and farmers’
opposition to the acquisition of their land to build a factory for Tata Motors
in Singur, West Bengal, erupted and prompted the Tatas to pull out of that
state, Mr Modi immediately stepped into the breach, offering the company
land, facilities and generous tax concessions to relocate to Gujarat. ‘I will
never forget the way he found solutions for a company that was looking for a
home,’ said then Tata chief Ratan Tata. ‘That just does not happen in India.’
62
All this was deftly portrayed through skilled marketing: the product was
the chief minister himself, the sales pitch was slick and tirelessly repeated,
and the ‘consumer’ was the Indian voter, first in Gujarat but thereafter across
the nation. Mr Modi did not hesitate to spend top dollar to rehabilitate his
image, which he knew had been tarnished by the events of 2002. Narendra
Modi’s Gujarat government engaged the services of an assortment of
domestic and foreign public relations agencies—in particular, APCO
Worldwide, one of the largest American firms in the field—to help his image
makeover. 63 In India he employed top-notch consultants to enhance his
brand, including some of the stars of the advertising business, such as Piyush
Pandey of Ogilvy and Mather, Prasoon Joshi of McCann, and Sam Balsara of
Madison World. 64 The objective was dual: to sell Modi to Indian voters
using the most advanced modern techniques, but also to make sure that
foreign governments thought better of him.
After Narendra Modi was again re-elected chief minister in 2007, his
nationwide projection gathered pace, and it intensified with his third election
victory in 2012, which clinched his reputation as the BJP’s most successful
national figure. A key part of his public appeal was his decision to bypass the
mainstream media, which he felt had been unfair to him in (and since) 2002,
in favour of reaching out directly to the public on social media. His Twitter
account became a key vehicle of his messaging—in the interests of full
disclosure, I should say, with due immodesty, that I had anticipated him in
this regard, but he eclipsed me on 4 July 2013 as the country’s most
‘followed’ politician on Twitter, and multiplied his lead several times soon
thereafter; he is now the third most followed current world leader on Twitter,
after US President Donald Trump and Pope Francis, with over 43 million
followers. 65 In addition to his Twitter page, Narendra Modi—or perhaps
more accurately, his personal social media cell—ran a Facebook page, a
YouTube channel, a LinkedIn account, and also posted widely on other social
media including, when they became popular, Pinterest, Instagram and
Tumblr.
Both through his choice of medium and the nature of his posts on these
social media services, Mr Modi projected a compelling picture of himself to
the world. His photographs showed a modern, hands-on man of action, laptop
at the ready, financial newspaper in hand, or wielding a DSLR camera. Other
images portrayed a cosmopolitan sophisticate—there was Mr Modi reading
an Obama biography, Mr Modi in a tracksuit, Mr Modi sporting a cowboy
hat. These social media images were a vital part of a larger branding exercise
designed to achieve the visual reimagining of Narendra Modi.
The photographs sought to portray a man who was both not what people
assumed he was, and was something people thought he might not be. The
first message was that he was not the typical ‘socialist’ politician, clad
hypocritically in khadi, whom the Indian public had seen too many of over
the years; and equally that he was not the khaki-shorts-wearing, lathi-
wielding RSS pracharak with antediluvian ideas about modern society and
economics. Instead, the new brand image showed Narendra Modi as a man
who comfortably occupied two spaces—that of Hindu values and traditions
embodied in his ideology and politics, but also that of globalized modernity
reflected in his activities as the progressive-minded CEO of Gujarat Inc.
Narendra Modi had, from childhood, a taste for different ways of doing
things, and saw himself as a man of innovation; this self-image was what the
pictures sought to project to the wider world.
The pictures spoke of a figure not associated in the public mind with the
RSS—a modern man adept at using the latest communications technology, at
home with international economic thought, and with titans of global business.
Mr Modi wished to convey that he had a globalized vision for the nation,
unlike most of the members of his old organization, the RSS, who were
associated with the nativist and protectionist ideas advocated by that body’s
Swadeshi Jagran Manch. As Mr Modi declared in an address to the Shri Ram
College of Commerce in Delhi in 2007 66 (in a metaphor he was to use seven
years later, as prime minister, in a memorable address in Madison Square
Garden, New York), Indians in the past had been known as snake charmers,
but Indian youth in the future were moving from the snake to charming the
mouse—the latter, of course, attached to a computer. As prime minister,
Modi told overseas Indians that his aim was to create a ‘technology-driven
society’ through ‘technology-driven development’. 67
This reinvention of the right-wing project by Narendra Modi and its
propagation by social media did a number of things at once. It challenged the
conventional wisdom about his and the RSS’s politics and economics. It
associated him with a willingness to learn and profit from the West, whereas
the RSS had traditionally been seen as resistant to the West and globalization.
It identified him with young India’s aspirations for modernity. In the process,
it allowed Narendra Modi to change the public perception of the party he
sought to lead. (It helped, of course, that much of his target audience were
young people, first-time voters, Facebook and Twitter users, hailing from a
generation that had grown up with little memory of the 2002 riots. It’s a
startling fact that half of India’s population is under twenty-five, and so the
oldest of the youths voting for the first time in the 2019 elections would have
been barely six years old when that tragedy occurred.) Many had seen the
BJP as a political vehicle for old men speaking in Hindi about the glories of
Hindu culture, preferably while wearing saffron and sandalwood paste on
their foreheads. Instead, here was a new standard-bearer, a smartly attired
modern man who could click a mouse with one hand while brandishing a
trishul in the other.
 But the Vibrant Gujarat summits, with their extravagant pledges of
investment and the associated hoopla, masked some unimpressive facts and
figures. In the eight editions of the summit, the state signed 51,738 MoUs
worth more than ₹84 lakh crore, most of which never materialized;
investment came in at about 10 per cent of the pledges, and the
implementation percentage of the projects promised and announced, as of
2017, was only 25 per cent. 68 Vibrant Gujarat—in a problem that now
afflicts Modi at the national level—was much more show than substance. It
was true that CM Modi’s state ranked fifth out of India’s big states in terms
of per capita income. But Gujarat was not exactly an economic backwater
before Narendra Modi’s ascent; it was already one of India’s most prosperous
states, long industrialized and with a hoary tradition of entrepreneurship—
despite this it attracted less foreign investment than five other Indian states
did during CM Modi’s rule. However impressive the state’s GDP growth
was, it was not significantly higher than in the previous two decades under
Congress governments. But Gujarat under Narendra Modi performed badly
on a number of key social indicators, notably malnutrition, child welfare,
education for girls, maternal mortality, access to health, the education of
minorities, availability of clean drinking water for the poor and the
percentage of its budget devoted to health-related expenditure. These were
not the chief minister’s priorities.
The figures are damning. Between 2008 and 2015, Gujarat slipped from
the 6th to 11th rank on the national Human Development Index (HDI) among
all states. When Mr Modi left office, the state was ranked 19th in the
availability of household TVs, Internet connections and mobile networks;
18th in terms of literacy; 22nd in primary school enrolment; 23rd in its infant
mortality rate; and 11th in its maternal mortality rate. The number of people
living below the poverty line has increased in Gujarat since the 1990s. The
daily income of farmers, ₹264 in 2016, was ₹77 less than the national
average. The number of educated unemployed in the state stood at 6.12 lakh
in 2016. 69 The state’s high rate of growth evidently masked several
inequities.
Yet the absence of progress in social development did little to dent Chief
Minister Modi’s popularity. His personal ‘stage presence’ had a great deal to
do with that. He was a compelling orator in Gujarati and Hindi, arguably the
best modern India has ever seen. The journalist Vinod K. Jose listened to one
of his speeches in his home state in 2012 and came away mesmerized: ‘On
stage before an adoring audience, Modi has a sure command of the theatrical.
He was loud, firm and confident: the kind of leader who makes his followers
sure that everything will be taken care of… He spoke extemporaneously and
flawlessly, his eyes constantly fixed on the audience before him. The tent fell
completely silent while he was speaking: no one played with their mobile
phones; there was no rustling of plastic bags. Many people had their mouths
wide open.’ 70
The powerful oratory was accompanied by a strong message: the country
was in a mess and he was the man to change it. The second term of the UPA
government had, for various reasons, run aground: the economy took a hit
from the global recession; the skyrocketing price of fuel (which reached as
high as $140 a barrel during the last year of the government) affected the
price of everything else and the cost-sensitive Indian voter blamed his rulers;
an effective anti-corruption campaign led by an octogenarian Gandhian, Anna
Hazare, captured the popular imagination and created an image of the ruling
party as entrenched in sleaze; and the soft-spoken but reticent prime minister,
Manmohan Singh, a highly respected economist, was widely portrayed as
weak, indecisive, silent and in thrall to the Gandhi family, whose matriarch,
the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, was depicted as pulling the strings behind the
scenes. Mr Modi, by contrast, claimed to be strong in every area where the
UPA was weak: he projected himself as an able, effective and decisive chief
executive, a true Indian nationalist, unbeholden to anyone else, who had risen
from the grassroots, and one without the baggage of a poor governance
record in national politics (glossing over the 2002 riots themselves, which by
now were more than a decade in the past).
Narendra Modi used his compelling oratory in Hindi to demonize the
UPA government, which he effectively blamed for every single failure or
misfortune in the country, while promising the voters everything they sought
if he came to power. He painted an arresting picture of the ‘achhe din’ that
would come if he was brought to power: he pledged to farmers that he would
end their suicides, give them more money for their produce and revive
agriculture; he told the millions of unemployed youth who thronged his
rallies that he would provide them with jobs; he assured urban women,
traumatized by the rising incidence of rapes and assaults even in the nation’s
capital, that he would create conditions of security for women; he convinced
the middle class, struggling to make do on limited means and eyeing the
mega-rich with resentment, that he would bring back billions of dollars of
‘black money’ stashed abroad, putting 15 lakh rupees into the bank accounts
of every Indian citizen; he assured the citizenry at large, shaken by the terror
attacks by Pakistan-sponsored jihadi groups, that he was not weak and soft
like the government and would stand up to Pakistani terror; and he assured
the business community that he would transform the investment climate and
send India soaring up the World Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ rankings.
The public lapped it up. The improbability of many of these promises, the
inaccuracy of the figures he was citing (notably for black money) were
overlooked and not seriously challenged; this was what people wanted to
hear. He established an emotional connection with his audiences: he told
various groups that he ‘would not be able to sleep at night’ until he had
resolved their problems. Narendra Modi might not have been the ‘maut ka
saudagar’ (merchant of death) that Sonia Gandhi described him as being in
2007, but he was undoubtedly a ‘sapnon ka saudagar’ (merchant of dreams)
by 2014.
III

In December 2012, soon after his resounding third election win in the state
assembly elections in Gujarat, Narendra Modi had clearly emerged as an
irresistible force, a man who could not be ignored. The changing perception
became apparent, for example, in New Delhi’s diplomatic corps, which had,
for the most part, ostentatiously avoided him. That month, at a social lunch, I
was approached by an old friend, German ambassador Michael Steiner,
seeking a private word. ‘How would you feel,’ he asked, ‘about the European
ambassadors meeting the chief minister of Gujarat, whom we have so far
ostracized?’
I was no longer in the External Affairs Ministry and this was a totally
unofficial conversation. I replied carefully that I was venturing a personal
opinion as a friend, not as a member of the government. I said that I felt there
was nothing inappropriate, in a democracy, in diplomats meeting a member
of the Opposition. ‘Why don’t you do it in an informal social setting,’ I
suggested, ‘rather than a formal meeting, which might seem to be giving him
a degree of official recognition?’ He thought that made sense, but was less
enthusiastic when I added that he might want to balance Modi by inviting
another politician or two of differing political views on the same occasion.
‘We need to know him,’ Mr Steiner said, somewhat helplessly; ‘…without
seeming to endorse him,’ I added. He nodded. In the event, Mr Steiner hosted
Narendra Modi, in January 2013, at a lunch at the German embassy with all
the EU ambassadors in New Delhi. The ice of Narendra Modi’s diplomatic
isolation was broken.
Domestically, the clamour for him became unstoppable. Mr Modi
eclipsed the former president (and defeated 2009 prime ministerial candidate)
of the BJP, the veteran Sangh leader, Lal Krishna Advani—who had been
assumed to be the party’s likely standard-bearer in 2014—by supplanting him
in that capacity at a meeting of the BJP national executive; the street-smart
Mr Modi comprehensively outmanoeuvred the veteran Mr Advani to be
officially anointed as the BJP’s candidate for prime minister in the 2014
general elections. He spent the next year in a nationwide campaign of
unparalleled reach, intensity and impact, which propelled him to an
unchallengeable position of dominance by the time ballots were cast.
Narendra Modi’s message resonated with those who had little and with
those who had much, and the latter helped sell it to the former. Business
houses, excited at the prospect of being able to flourish in the new Modi-
directed order, lent themselves willingly to the cause, with generous
campaign contributions. The print and electronic media, which was largely
owned by them, devoted themselves to an almost fawning dissemination of
the Modi message. There was no escaping his image, his sonorous speeches,
his ubiquitous slogans: ‘achhe din’, ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’, ‘ab ki baar,
Modi Sarkar’. 71 Mr Modi eloquently projected a decisiveness and can-do
attitude that people were yearning for; his omnipresence both reflected and
reinforced their dreams.
But Mr Modi still polarized opinions: passionate critics denounced him as
an extremist and even a fascistic would-be dictator; supporters, often even
more passionate in their views, believed he alone could transform India’s
economy into a larger version of Gujarat’s and, with his Hindu pride and
global instincts, make India the superpower his followers felt it deserved to
be. Opinions were divided, but so was the Opposition. Narendra Modi’s BJP
won just 31 per cent of the national vote—up from 19 per cent in 2009—but
it was enough to ensure a resounding victory in the parliamentary elections,
as the Westminster-style, first-past-the post system gave the BJP an absolute
majority with 52 per cent of the seats. 72 One of the most memorable
moments in Twitter history—and certainly the most ‘retweeted’ and
‘favourited’ message in India’s social media—came on 15 May 2014, when
the newly-victorious Narendra Modi issued the pungent tweet: ‘India has
won’. 73
It had been a spectacular victory; the BJP under his leadership had risen
from 116 to 282 seats of the 543 elected members of the Lok Sabha, the first
time in history that the BJP had enjoyed an absolute majority in the all-
important Lower House of Parliament. 74 Together with the BJP’s pre-
election allies, the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, led by Modi,
enjoyed 333 seats; plus they could nominate two more members from the
Anglo-Indian community. It was clear they would completely command, and
could get anything done by, the Lower House.
The Congress party had been decimated, falling from 216 seats in the
outgoing House to a mere 44 in the new one. 75 Though I had won my own
seat, my majority had fallen from 100,000 to 15,700; for the first time, a BJP
candidate had come second in my constituency, Thiruvananthapuram. It was
only in the evening, as the results poured in and the size of his majority
became apparent, that I issued a somewhat grudging tweet: ‘Still touring my
constituency to thank party workers, but before it’s too late, congratulations
@NarendraModi & BJP on an astonishing victory’. Within minutes this tweet
came back from him: ‘@ShashiTharoor: Many thanks. Congratulations for
your victory as well. Let’s work together to create a better India!’
This was remarkable, not least because it came at his moment of triumph,
when he could be forgiven for having other things on his mind than reaching
out to opponents. Narendra Modi’s extraordinary journey from chai-wallah to
prime minister had caught the imagination of the Indian people; he could
have been excused for savouring his victory rather than replying to an
Opposition MP. It even seemed to me an early sign that Mr Modi was
seeking to convey a willingness to work with the other side.
It didn’t last very long. As I have explained in the introduction, I was one
of those prepared to see some prospect of a Narendra Modi 2.0, reinventing
the old Hindutva warrior of the past as a development-oriented statesman
who would move his party away from a politics of identity to a politics of
performance. While critical of specific steps of the government, I was
therefore willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on initiatives I
considered non-political, and support such ideas as the International Day of
Yoga, the World Buddhist and Sufi conferences in Delhi, and the Swachh
Bharat campaign.
By inviting me to be among the nine prominent Indians associated with
the launch of his Swachh Bharat initiative, Narendra Modi showed a capacity
to reach out to the Opposition; as I have noted earlier, a few months later he
again surprised me by echoing the Lok Sabha speaker’s praise of my speech
in Oxford on British colonialism, declaring publicly that I had ‘said the right
thing in the right place at the right time’. It was with all this in the
background that, on his birthday in 2015, I tweeted: ‘Happy Birthday
@NarendraModi. May you continue to serve India with energy &
commitment. Will continue to disagree with your politics, but with respect!’
Again his response, barely a couple of hours later, impressed me: ‘Thank
you, Dr. Tharoor. And, what is our democracy without constructive criticism!
Debate makes us stronger.’
It was this capacity to speak across the political divide to opponents that
struck me at the time as the most unexpected personal characteristic of the
prime minister. I had, after all, used the occasion of his birthday to remind
him again of our political differences; yet he had not only taken that in his
stride, but turned it around into a positive message of conciliation and
collegiality. That was the spirit in which I wished Narendra Modi a happy
birthday. As I declared in a public message to him: ‘Let us, Government and
Opposition, work together to create a better India. When your policies are
manifestly in the national interest, let us support you; and when, in our view,
they are not, let us take opposition constructively, respecting each other’s
sincere faith in different paths to India’s betterment.’
In saying this, I was perhaps being naïve, and certainly there has been
little sign of such a spirit on either side of the aisle since, not least in Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s own attitudes. The @PMOIndia twitter handle
tweeted on 18 April 2016, on behalf of the prime minister, words very similar
to those he had addressed to me: ‘I want this Government to be criticized.
Criticism makes democracy strong.’ And yet criticism has been unwelcome
to the government. Many Indians—teachers, students, businessmen, auto-
rickshaw drivers, and members of the police and paramilitary forces—have
been booked or even arrested for ‘insulting’ Modi. 76 The prime minister
himself has not been above sharp and often below-the-belt attacks on political
opponents; in 2018 he suffered the indignity of becoming the first prime
minister to have his words expunged from the parliamentary record, in the
course of a speech where he also seemed to mock Mrs Gandhi’s accent in a
demonstration of schoolboy insecurity rather than statesmanlike leadership.
77 Each passing year has made him more combative and truculent, the
political atmosphere in the country more polarized and intractable. Part of the
reason is Narendra Modi himself, or more precisely the congeries of elements
that collectively make up his ethos of governance—what some have dubbed,
in a conflation of ‘Modi’ and ‘Hindutva’, ‘Moditva’.
IV

Narendra Modi has emerged from the RSS and the Hindutva movement and
is unquestionably of them—his 2008 book, Jyotipunj , recounts the
biographies of sixteen people who inspired him, every single one of them a
male RSS leader. 78 But for all his deep immersion in the RSS, he has also
managed to be above the organization. It can be argued that he is no longer a
pure and simple RSS pracharak, and that what he stands for is Hindutva with
a personalized Modi ethos, immersed in muscular Hindu nationalism and yet
devoted to a cult of personality that has little to do with Hindutva. These
elements constitute what may be termed ‘Moditva’, at the centre of which,
towering over his followers like a Colossus, is the man himself.
‘Modi understands only one alphabet, and that is the capital I,’ declared
Gordhan Zadaphia, former minister of state for home affairs in Gujarat. 79
During his 2007 Gujarat election campaign, a national newspaper’s front-
page headline for its account of his speech was telling: ‘In 30 minutes, Modi
names himself 29 times, BJP 6, and in slip asks: me as PM?’ 80 The
personality cult he encouraged in Gujarat is in full bloom around the nation
today, but it really reached its apogee during the 2014 elections, when a
children’s comic book extolling his childhood in near-mythic terms was
released. The stories in Bal Narendra (Boy Narendra) range from the
relatively mundane (Narendra helping his parents with their work) to the
mildly heroic (Narendra freeing a pigeon entangled in a kite string) to the
hagiographic (Narendra using his meagre pocket money to set up a tea stall
for flood victims; Narendra swimming through a crocodile-infested lake to a
marooned temple). 81 The unabashed lionizing of Narendra Modi is a key
element that distinguishes Moditva from Hindutva.
If Modi’s authorized biographer, Andy Marino, is to be believed, Modi
was not a supporter of the Ayodhya movement and had a strong antipathy to
the Hindu extremism of the VHP and Bajrang Dal, whom he proceeded to
marginalize in Gujarat. 82 This makes it all the more puzzling that he did not
adopt the same approach in Delhi, instead empowering such forces by his
refusal to condemn their excesses as soon as they occurred—one more
example of the Modi paradox.
Of course, Modi remains strongly committed to Hindutva. As he told
Reuters in 2013: ‘I’m a nationalist. I’m patriotic. Nothing is wrong. I’m a
born Hindu. So yes, you can say I’m a Hindu nationalist.’ 83 This is clearly
part of his core beliefs. Moditva borrows from Hindutva the idea of a pristine
Hindu Rashtra, a nation emerging from the mists of time immemorial, the
Bharatvarsha of the Rig Veda ; it asserts a majoritarian nationalism in the
name of the Hindu people, marginalizing or vilifying minorities—particularly
Muslims and Christians—as interlopers; 84 it articulates a cultural
nationalism anchored in the Hindu dharma, but extending beyond it. Moditva
nationalism unabashedly declares that India is a ‘natural home for persecuted
Hindus’ while offering no similar welcome mat for other Indians; at the same
time it extends its appeal to Hindus living abroad, with whom Modi professes
a tie of blood that transcends a passport. 85 On top of this foundation of
Hindutva, it builds the idea of a strong leader, a man with a 56-inch chest,
powerful and decisive, who embodies the nation and will lead it to triumph.
This is the element that makes the ruling credo ‘Moditva’.
The 56-inch chest is an instructive detail. During the build-up to the 2014
election, Modi replied to criticism by Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh
Yadav with the words: ‘Netaji has said Modi does not have what it takes to
make another Gujarat out of UP. Do you know what making another Gujarat
requires?… It requires a chhappan-inch ki chhati (56-inch chest).’ BJP
sources indicated the figure was to be taken literally as representing what
Narendra Modi had to offer, but when Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar
University officials were asked to design an achkan for PM Narendra Modi to
wear, authorities said they were given a 50-inch chest size measurement to be
shared with the tailor. 86
Moditva is assertively masculinist, as the chest measurement (about
which Mr Modi himself boasted) implies, and chauvinist, contemptuous of
weakness and dissent, dismissive of rivals and resolute against enemies,
whether domestic or foreign. Mr Modi and the BJP have effectively invoked
the army and the ‘suffering of our jawans’ in any discussions where they are
losing on pure logic and facts (such as the suffering of people when standing
in ATM lines after demonetization, when an effective social media meme
asked the grumbling public: ‘If our jawans can stand at our borders 24/7 to
keep our country safe, why can’t we stand a few hours in a bank queue?’) For
Moditva, the sacrifice and suffering of the armed forces has increasingly
become a reliable weapon a tool for political point-scoring by the ruling party
to justify PM Modi’s actions, as opposed to serious topics that need redressal
in themselves. Military fervour and pride seem to have become mandatory
for any ‘self-respecting and patriotic Indian’ under a Moditva regime. That
the Indian military largely deserves the encomia that have been showered on
it is beside the point; it is the instrumentalization of the military for political
purposes (most brazenly after the so-called ‘surgical strike’ on terrorists
along the Line of Control with Pakistan) that marks Moditva as a departure
from India’s previous ruling ethos. The military always enjoyed deep respect,
if in a somewhat patronizing way, as the mid-1960s slogan ‘jai jawan, jai
kisan’ testifies. But this is the first time they have been exalted to near-mythic
proportions to serve the political objectives of the ruling party, such as when
the Modi government broadcast news of the army’s ‘surgical strike’ against
Pakistan in what was clearly an attempt to impress the electorate (although,
ironically, as I show in Chapter 24 , the military haven’t been treated
especially well by the Modi sarkar).
This is also a legacy of Hindutva, since Sangh Parivar thinkers have
consistently rejected Gandhian pacifism. The longtime RSS chief Golwalkar
rejected the identification of Hinduism with non-violence, pointing out that in
Hindu iconography, every Hindu god is armed. Hindutva leaders have often
spoken of abandoning the soft Brahminism of the Congress party, with its
emphasis on ahimsa and the devotional traditions of the Bhakti movement, in
favour of the tough Kshatriya warrior tradition, with its emphasis on shakti or
strength. It is no accident that in mid-2018 the Modi government floated a
proposal to provide military training to a million boys and girls each year, to
‘instil values of nationalism, discipline and self-esteem into the youth, which
in turn will help make India a “Vishwaguru” and achieve Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s vision of New India 2022.’ 87 Moditva builds on such
beliefs, and projects its leader as the embodiment of strength and power.
Moditva also adores its leader; on top of a purely BJP government, we see a
fiery and articulate ideologue, projected as all-knowing and infallible, the
hero on a white stallion who will gallop at the head of the nation’s massed
forces with upraised sword, knowing all the answers, ready to cut through the
Gordian knots of the nation’s problems. Since the leader represents the
nation, support for him is seen as patriotic and opposition anti-national.
This is not typical of the Sangh Parivar, but from his earliest days,
Narendra Modi did not conform to the anonymity required of RSS workers.
For all his talk of the importance of discipline, he seems to have stretched its
boundaries even within the RSS, acquiring a reputation as a headstrong figure
of stubbornly independent ways. As a former senior of his in the BJP,
Shankersinh Vaghela, 88 observed of his one-time associate: ‘He always used
to do things differently from others in the group—if all of us wore long-
sleeved kurtas, he used to wear short sleeves, and when all of us wore khaki
shorts, he wore white shorts. And I remember one day the visiting RSS leader
Golwalkar questioning Modi in public for keeping a trimmed beard.’ Modi
always had a penchant for the limelight; innumerable social media memes
have been spawned about his efforts to keep himself in the centre of
photographs and his keen awareness of the camera at any public appearance,
even unsubtly positioning himself to catch the lens during encounters with
world leaders. (On one occasion the prime minister was so annoyed when one
of his Special Protection Group personnel blocked him from the sight of the
cameras, that he barked ‘Yahan khade rehkar kya karoge? (Why are you
standing here?)’, before ordering the hapless guard to maintain his distance.
Discipline is most attractive to he who exacts it from others. Narendra Modi’s
eldest brother, Somabhai, has been quoted as saying that Modi wanted to join
the RSS ever since he was a child because ‘he was always greatly impressed
by the fact that only one person gave all the orders in the shakha and
everyone followed the command’. 89
Yet Narendra Modi has managed a complex modus vivendi with the RSS,
even while abandoning the personal restraint they might have expected of
him: as prime minister he has, for instance, initiated a practice whereby his
ministers dutifully report to the organization’s leadership about their
performance and are graded, admonished, advised or exhorted by senior
swayamsewaks before returning to their ministerial offices. 90 This
combination of outsize personal ego and institutional supplication to the RSS
is also a marker of Moditva.
Unlike Hindutva, Moditva has little patience for the economic autarchy
traditionally espoused by RSS frontal organizations like the Swadeshi Jagran
Manch; it seeks a globalized nation, deriving investment and profit from
association with the wider world, and allied with corporate interests within
the country who share the same worldview. It derives legitimacy from
evoking the glories of the past, but it seeks to update them with an eye on the
future, reconciling Hindu temples with high-tech, marrying the ancient to the
modern, and capturing futuristic technologies to serve its national mission.
This is the one significant way in which Moditva differs from the core
assumptions of the Sangh Parivar.
The vocabulary of Moditva is therefore very different from Hindutva
pure and simple: it speaks of good governance, economic growth,
infrastructure investment, service delivery, and ease of doing business. These
are not terms likely to have been employed by RSS leaders in the past, but
they are applied to the same ends; economic development is portrayed as part
of a nationalist awakening, prosperity is a means to establishing the glorious
Ram Rajya long promised by the votaries of Hindutva. ‘Vikas’, the Hindi
word for development often cited by Modi in his speeches, is simultaneously
slogan and trope; it redefines Hindu nationalism in terms of the well-being of
the people, and associates it with the personality of the leader, the vikas
purush. ‘The rising [level of] aspiration is the biggest strength of Indian
development,’ Modi declared. ‘When aspirations get proper leadership…
aspiration in itself is achievement.’ 91
To Leftists, Moditva economics and Moditva cultural nationalism have
come together in a new form of assertive conservatism. By seeking its
success through foreign investment and ‘Make in India’, Leftists say, it is
obliged to sell India as a land of cheap labour and affordable skills ready to
serve the global financial system; but for India to remain attractive, labour
must be kept cheap and skilled workers affordable, which requires clamping
down on social unrest in the underclass. Thus, keeping the Dalits in their
place and the minorities on the margins serves both a cultural and an
economic purpose. Crony capitalism at home and quiescent collaboration
abroad require no less. Moditva does not shrink from the violent imposition
of social conformism by upper castes or by employers; it is silent in the face
of communal violence or anti-Dalit atrocities, because both serve to assert the
social order that facilitates Moditva. This analysis explains why opposition to
Narendra Modi extends beyond the widespread concern about his politics; his
economics raises multiple concerns too.
V

Some, particularly on the Left, have gone further than this, evoking the
dreaded term ‘fascism’ for Moditva. In a now-famous essay published in the
magazine Seminar soon after the 2002 riots, sociologist (and trained clinical
psychologist) Professor Ashis Nandy, who had interviewed Narendra Modi in
the late 1980s, well before he began his spectacular political rise, laid out this
chilling diagnosis. The future prime minister, Prof Nandy wrote, at the time
‘a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP
functionary’, gave him a ‘long, rambling interview’ that ‘left me in no doubt
that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist.’ Prof Nandy added, ‘I never
use the term “fascist” as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category
comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits
and motivational patterns contextualizing the ideology. Modi, it gives me no
pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists,
psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on
the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity,
narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection,
denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all
set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still
remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic
conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and
a potential terrorist.’ 92
Prof Nandy is a respected scholar and there is no reason to doubt the
objectivity of his analysis. Some elements he identifies are in fact avowed by
Modi followers themselves, though as virtues, not failings: the ‘puritanical
rigidity’, for instance, is a Modi attribute—he told me himself that, as prime
minister, he sees no movies, for instance; he is known neither to drink nor
smoke, eats non-spicy fare, enjoys a simple khichdi (usually alone) and
frequently observes fasts on specific Hindu occasions, in particular during the
Navratri festival, when he only drinks nimbu paani and a cup of tea during
the day.
Another is the ‘narrowing of emotional life’ Prof Nandy mentions.
Narendra Modi lives alone, and maintains little contact with his mother, four
brothers or sister, though he has not been above demonstrating his filial
devotion by seeking his mother’s blessings on his victory or being
photographed wheeling her chair around the prime ministerial garden (before
returning her to a life of anonymity away from him). Mr Modi has no
relationship to speak of with his blood relatives, and advertises this as part of
his incorruptibility. At an election rally in Hamidpur in Himachal Pradesh in
February 2014, PM Modi said, ‘I have no family ties. I am single. Who will I
be corrupt for?’ adding, ‘this mind and body is totally devoted to the nation.’
93 His siblings are less enthusiastic about his rectitude. ‘I wish he would help
the next generation of our family. But I am sure he won’t,’ his younger
brother, Prahlad Modi, said after Narendra Modi became PM. ‘He won’t even
offer tea to someone without a reason—especially his family.’ 94
Prahlad Modi is also the source of one of the few negative anecdotes
about PM Modi as a youngster. When he was younger, Narendra Modi liked
to fly kites. Being the younger brother, Prahlad would hold the spool of
string, or manja, while Narendra Modi did all the flying. ‘If I refused, he
would get angry and he would hit me,’ says Prahlad, ‘I am still scared of him,
even today.’ 95
As has been noted, Narendra Modi has said he sleeps about four hours a
night; he rises at about 5 a.m. every day to do yoga and meditate, spends
fifteen minutes reading the news on his iPad (this seems suspiciously little)
and has not taken a holiday in nearly two decades. An official response to an
RTI (Right to Information Act) petition filed in 2016 asking about the
number of days of leave Modi had taken since becoming PM informed the
applicant—in terms unusually obsequious for an RTI response—that he had
not taken a single day of leave since coming to power: ‘the Prime Minister
can be said to be on duty all the time’. 96
Much of this display of austerity and devotion to work is real—even Mr
Modi’s critics acknowledge he is a workaholic whose tireless energy amid a
punishing schedule is remarkable—but it is also at odds with his expensive,
rimless Bvlgari designer glasses, his Mont Blanc pens and luxury Movado
watch, and his trademark half-sleeve kurtas and ‘bundy’ jackets tailored for
him since 1989 by a bespoke Ahmedabad designer, Bipin Chauhan of Jade
Blue, who now markets Modi’s signature look as ‘Modi kurtas’ and ‘Modi
jackets’. (There was also the embarrassing episode of the ten-lakh rupee suit,
with his name embossed on every pinstripe, which he wore to a meeting with
President Obama in January 2015: he was mocked so mercilessly for this that
he declared it to be a gift, reportedly from a manufacturer of diamond
jewellery, Rameshkumar Bhikabhai Virani, and promptly auctioned it off for
four crore rupees to benefit the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. 97 )
But there are two things that must be said about this. First, personal
grooming and meticulousness about appearance are no sin. They also seem to
be a lifelong characteristic: Modi’s uncle, Jayantibhai, remembers that when
Modi was young, he ‘liked to dress properly and took care of his clothes—
did not allow them to get frayed and ruffled like other children. He spent a lot
of time in grooming.’ 98 He is said to always carry a comb in his pocket, and
has never been photographed with a hair out of place. Some have described
him as obsessive about personal hygiene; he is said to change his clothes at
least four or five times a day. He is conscious of the impression he makes on
people, and this is not just about appearance: he reportedly never drinks cold
water and takes great care of his voice. ‘Modi had once told me, he cannot
compromise on three things—his eyes, voice and clothes,’ Bipin Chauhan
has declared. 99 Second, if anyone has earned the right to such small signs of
luxury as a handful of expensive accessories, it is surely Narendra Modi, who
has devoted himself completely to his cause—or, as his followers see it, the
cause of the nation. Mr Modi once told me that he has given away most of his
salary to charity ever since becoming chief minister, a practice he continues,
and there is no reason not to believe him.
It would be churlish to suggest that Mr Modi should not be given credit
for his lack of acquisitiveness since he has, after all, disavowed the family
obligations that inspire cupidity on the part of other Indian politicians. Still,
many Indians are troubled that, after abandoning his wife in her childhood, he
has been so neglectful of her. Narendra Modi’s first mention of his wife,
Jashodaben, whose existence he had failed to acknowledge for years, was in
the poll affidavit he was obliged to submit when he filed his nomination for
the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. 100 Divorce being unthinkable in their
community, Mrs Modi has been condemned to a life of spinsterhood since
her teens, eking out a living as a schoolteacher on a meagre government
salary, with no financial support coming her way from her husband. She has
had to travel by bus or on foot, for instance, even after he became prime
minister; when she was provided a security detail by the government in
keeping with standard protocols, she found herself in the absurd position of
being tailed in a police vehicle by her guards while she herself used public
transport. 101 No voter would have begrudged PM Modi providing his wife
the basic comforts and dignity to which a prime minister’s wife is entitled;
his denial of it seems an inverse form of ostentation, as if it is more important
to demonstrate rectitude than decency.
It is said that Narendra Modi acquiesced in his marriage to Jashoda
because of his reverence for tradition and abandoned it because he was
rejecting a choice that he had not made and a way of life that had been
imposed upon him. This contradiction is not surprising. Mr Modi’s attitude to
women generally seems an odd compound of old-fashioned patriarchy and
enlightened sloganeering. Just before being elected prime minister he
dismayed an audience of businesswomen and female entrepreneurs
assembled by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry
(FICCI) by talking about every clichéd stereotype inflicted on Indian women
—‘subservient wives, sacrificing mothers and cooking wizards’, in the words
of one observer. 102 While most of his audience consisted of women
entrepreneurs, well-paid professionals and high-ranking corporate executives,
Mr Modi hailed ‘stree-shakti’ (the strength of women) with examples of the
housewife who burns her fingers making chapattis for her husband and
another who hastily abandons a sari sale to run home and save her child from
a fire. 103 As PM, he once praised his Bangladeshi counterpart, Sheikh
Hasina, for her courage in fighting terrorism ‘despite being a woman’. 104
The hashtag #DespiteBeingAWoman started trending on social media, but
the prime minister was unfazed. 105 He has announced a number of women-
friendly slogans and schemes, notably in favour of girls’ education, while
slashing the budget for the rape-crisis centres that had been intended for
every district to such a level that revised plans would provide only a handful
in the whole of India. 106 Women’s empowerment appears to be a credo
without conviction in Moditva.
Moditva certainly relies on radiating an impression of strength: it follows
a policy of ‘never apologize, never explain’. Unlike the Congress-led UPA
government that preceded the NDA government he heads, Mr Modi has
never allowed the Opposition, the media or even widespread public
disapproval to force a member of his government out of office. When his
external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, was revealed to have gone behind
the back of her own foreign secretary and the Indian high commissioner in
the UK to privately advise the British high commissioner in Delhi that her
ministry would not object if a travel document were provided to an Indian
fugitive economic offender in London, Lalit Modi—a resigning offence in
any democracy, especially since the fugitive was her lawyer husband’s client
—Modi refused the Opposition clamour for her resignation, and prevailed.
107 He similarly stuck with two ministers who had made offensive public
statements (one of which divided the people of India into Ramzade and
Haramzade, or followers of Ram and bastards), despite an Opposition outcry
in Parliament. Mr Modi’s stubbornness in all these cases signalled that he
would not give in to pressure; this attitude of invulnerability itself shored up
the perception of strength around his government, by contrast with earlier
governments which had caved in to public pressure.
The prime minister was similarly unmoved by calls to ‘unfollow’ social
media supporters of his who had issued vile messages celebrating the murder
of journalist Gauri Lankesh in September 2017. Mr Modi’s silence amounted
to tacit support for abusive Hindu right-wing trolls, but he stood by them
even in the face of a social media uproar, with the hashtag
#BlockNarendraModi trending on Twitter. The PM was unmoved, and again
the campaign against him ran out of steam. His imperturbability and
resoluteness reinforced his strongman image, while on all these issues, his
critics subsided into a sullen silence.
None of this, however, necessarily adds up to a fascist personality,
though Prof Nandy is the expert, not me. It must be said, too, that Mr Modi
has not conducted himself in office in the manner Prof Nandy’s impressions
and analysis would have suggested. He has repeatedly spoken of being a
prime minister for all Indians; arguably his most effective slogan has been
‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’. But as I have pointed out throughout this book, he
has allowed free rein to retrograde and often violent forces who conform
collectively to Prof Nandy’s archetype. These elements in the Sangh Parivar
have been emboldened by Mr Modi’s continued silence in the face of their
repeated atrocities and empowered by his stirring rhetoric that implicitly, and
sometimes explicitly, attacks Muslims. 108
At this point, it might be instructive to cast a little light on what is best
described as the superstructure of Moditva. This aspect of Moditva is
borrowed wholesale from Hindutva; one of its central tenets is the
denigration and mistreatment of the Muslim community. 109 There are
numerous examples I could quote in support of the way in which Indian
Muslims have been excluded, vilified, or worse. There is, of course, the 2002
massacre, that took place on the watch of a BJP government, with CM Modi
at its head. There is also the fact that the BJP became the first governing party
in the history of independent India to come to power without a single elected
Muslim member of the Lok Sabha; the three Muslims who have served in its
council of ministers are all appointees to the Rajya Sabha, elected by pliable
BJP majorities in state assemblies, all representing states to which they do not
belong. 110 The very fact that the BJP finds itself unable to put up electable
Muslim candidates in any constituency speaks volumes about the party’s
attitude to Muslims and of the attitudes of Indian Muslims to it—as well as of
the views of its core voters, whose bigotry would not predispose them to vote
for a Muslim, not even one contesting on their own party’s symbol.
Strengthening this anti-Muslim bias is the fact that under Prime Minister
Modi, the BJP has a sizeable parliamentary majority on its own that it had
never enjoyed before and is, therefore, not obliged to dilute its agenda to
accommodate less Hindutva-minded coalition partners, since it does not need
any of them to make up its majority. (This has led one ally, the Telugu
Desam Party, to leave the NDA, and another, the Shiv Sena, to publicly
express its dissatisfaction, even abstaining in a vote of no-confidence in the
Modi government of which it is a part. 111 ) Also for the first time, Indian
democracy finds itself facing the reality of its top three constitutional
positions—president, vice president and prime minister—all being held by
RSS members of the same ideological disposition.
Below this Hindutva superstructure, worrying in itself, is the ethos of
Moditva that suffuses it. Mr Modi embodies the prejudices about Muslims
that are the marked characteristic of these forces. During his election
campaign Mr Modi alleged that the Congress party-led UPA government was
pro-Muslim and therefore ‘anti-Hindu’; he deplored what he portrayed as the
Congress’s policy of ‘Muslim appeasement’; and he condemned it for dealing
too softly with Pakistan and feeding chicken biryani to visiting Pakistani
grandees. 112 After becoming prime minister, Modi initially seemed to seek
to outgrow his own prejudices, for instance inviting the former prime
minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, to his swearing-in, exchanging saris and
shawls with Nawaz Sharif (if not serving him chicken biryani!) and adopting
a more statesmanlike posture towards the UAE than he had betrayed in his
2009 conversation with me. And yet in domestic politics he did not hesitate
to exploit the same majoritarian bigotry he sought to conceal, or disavow,
abroad.
There is no doubt that Mr Modi has a blind spot about Muslims. While he
has made the occasional statement to demonstrate his impartiality, while
donning various types of colourful and exotic headgear on his travels in India
and abroad, he has never agreed to put on a Muslim skullcap (which he has
called a ‘symbol of appeasement of the minority’). 113 In his campaign
speeches he has relished using overtly Muslim honorifics for those he was
attacking, speaking derisively of ‘Mian’ Musharraf or ‘Mian’ Ahmed Patel.
114 When he sought to deride the Congress’s Rahul Gandhi as a princeling,
he never used the Hindi term ‘rajkumar’, preferring the Persian and Urdu
‘shehzada’, as if to further damn Rahul Gandhi by association with Islamic
terminology. 115 He remains unapologetic about the ghettoization of the
Muslim community in Gujarat, as in the township of Juhapura in which
almost every Muslim in Ahmedabad is now confined: he told me (in the
lunchtime conversation that began this chapter) that ‘they prefer it that way’.
The mere fact that his fellow Gujaratis were now living proof that a minority
community could seek trust and assurance only among people of their own
religion, and that this was shameful, a blow against the development of a
civic society and a recipe for psychological separation with incalculable
negative consequences for the country, does not seem to have struck him at
all.
Moditva grows out of Narendra Modi. And Narendra Modi in turn is
rooted in the RSS. However, as I have pointed out earlier, in some ways Mr
Modi seems to have outgrown his RSS prejudices. One of the most striking
of these departures from the RSS way of thinking is in his views of Mahatma
Gandhi. 116 He had to have been schooled, like other RSS pracharaks, in an
intense dislike of Mahatma Gandhi, whose message of tolerance and
pluralism was emphatically rejected as minority appeasement by the Sangh
Parivar, and whose credo of non-violence, or ahimsa, was seen as an
admission of weakness unworthy of manly Hindus. 117 Savarkar, whom Mr
Modi has described as one of his heroes, had expressed contempt for
Gandhi’s ‘perverse doctrine of non-violence and truth’ and claimed it ‘was
bound to destroy the power of the country’. 118 But Prime Minister Modi, for
all his Hindutva mindset, his admiration of Savarkar and his lifetime
affiliation to the Sangh Parivar, has embraced Gandhi, hailing the Mahatma
and even using his glasses as a symbol of the Swachh Bharat campaign.
This may or may not represent a sincere conversion to Gandhism. PM
Modi is hardly unaware of the tremendous worldwide reputation that
Mahatma Gandhi enjoys, and is too savvy a marketing genius not to
recognize the soft-power opportunity evoking Gandhi-ji provides, not to
mention the global public relations disaster that would ensue if he were to
denounce an Indian so universally admired. There may, therefore, be an
element of insincerity to his newfound love for the Mahatma, as well as a
shrewd domestic political calculation—wrapping himself in the mantle of
other distinguished Gujaratis, notably Gandhi-ji and (Sardar Vallabhbhai)
Patel, would enable some of their lustre to rub off on him at home.
A digression here: in the Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s brilliant novel
of his native country under communist rule, The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, he tells the story of a Party stalwart, Politburo member and hero
of the Soviet-backed revolution that ended democracy in Czechoslovakia for
half a century. 119 The gentleman, Clementis, was among the select band of
leaders who stood on a balcony waving to assembled party supporters as the
annual military parade filed past in 1948. A famous photo shows him, sturdy
and stone-faced as befitted the communist apparatchiks of that era, on the
balcony, acknowledging the dutiful cheers of the throng, along with his party
boss, Gottwald. Since it is snowy and cold, and Gottwald is bareheaded,
Clementis has taken off his fur hat and solicitously placed it on his comrade’s
head.
But soon after the photo was published, Clementis fell out of favour.
Some ideological heresy, no doubt, led to him being denounced as a class
enemy, a traitor to the party and an enemy of the people. His fall was swift:
he was dismissed and executed. Once a hero of the revolution, he became a
non-person. His role in the revolution was not just forgotten; it was erased
from the official histories authorized by the party. His portraits were taken
down, his photos deleted from all communist documents. Then worse
followed: records of his participation in historic events were expunged. His
life’s work as a committed communist revolutionary ceased to be. It was as if
he had never done any of the things he had been hailed for doing before his
disgrace.
There remained one problem, however. He had been a participant, along
with those who were still in power, in a number of occasions that could not
simply be struck from the record, including the annual National Day events at
which he had joined the country’s communist leaders in waving to the
crowds. His presence in photographs of those events was a reminder that the
communist leaders had once nurtured an apostate in their midst. This was
intolerable.
Technology permitted a decisive solution to the problem. The original
negatives were retrieved, and Clementis was carefully airbrushed out of the
pictures in which he had appeared. The historical record no longer showed
him at all. Where Clementis stood, there was now only a gap, a void, an
absence. It was the ultimate communist repudiation: they not only destroyed
his future, they abolished his past.
The famous picture on the balcony was no exception. Where he had once
stood upright and unsmiling next to Gottwald, there was now a bare patch of
wall, as if he had never been there that day in 1948. The photo was
republished in various newspapers, documents and publicity materials, but
the only version of it allowed to appear was the doctored one. The
communists knew that human memory fades; only photographs remain. They
wanted to ensure that the photographic record told only the story they wanted
people to know.
But the diligent photographic artist who had applied his airbrush
techniques to the original photograph had omitted one detail in expunging
Clementis from the photograph. All traces of the man, his face, his upraised
hand, were gone. But the fur hat he had taken off remained resting on
Gottwald’s head. The man had been erased, but his hat was still there—a
silent reminder of his original presence.
Something similar has happened in our country. No, we are not yet a
dictatorship where only authorized versions of the past can be circulated. But
our rulers are busy airbrushing our history too: Maharashtra’s history
schoolbooks have now eliminated the Mughals altogether, and Rajasthan’s
tells us that Rana Pratap won the Battle of Haldighati. 120 Inconvenient facts
—even emperors and military defeats—can be erased from our memory if we
just don’t acknowledge they happened.
And we now have our equivalent of Kundera’s hat as well. Everything
that Mahatma Gandhi stood for is being trashed by our current rulers. The
apostle of ahimsa is betrayed daily by those who inflict violence on the
defenceless. The man who said noble ends cannot be served by ignoble
means is cited by rulers who will stop at nothing to get their way. The great
soul who worked tirelessly for peace and communal harmony is invoked by a
governing party some of whose MPs have said they want his assassin’s
statues installed in different places in India. 121
But despite all this, Gandhi the brand is too valuable to be junked by the
marketing gurus who now rule us. And so they have reduced his message to
that of sanitation: the symbol of the government’s Swachh Bharat campaign
is a pair of the Mahatma’s glasses. They adorn every advertisement, every
poster, every letterhead, proclaiming Clean India. The Mahatma said one
should start by cleansing one’s own mind and heart first. This, our
government is incapable of.
 So the Mahatma’s message, spirit and soul have vanished from today’s
India. His ideals are gone. Only his glasses remain.
And yet it is precisely Mr Modi’s willingness to leap beyond his
ideological past that makes one feel that a term like ‘fascist’ is too much too
soon. Fascism surely requires two elements—an outright rejection of
democracy and a ruthless definition and application of repressive law and
order—that are absent in Moditva. Living in democratic India, I am reluctant
to follow Prof Nandy in applying the label to Narendra Modi. But then I read
Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times on 21 July 2018 about the Western world:
‘Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get
people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial
runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to
something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and
calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
And then I wonder, applying these words to India, and to the “new normal”
that has dawned since 2014, are we also fools not to see it?’ 122
Historically there are certain aspects of fascism that do seem to have
appeared in recent years in India—the demonization of minorities within
society to the extent that they are made to feel insecure; 123 the condemnation
and reviling of critics to the point where the use of violence against them
seems permissible; the whipping up of nationalist feelings, coupled with an
identification of the ruling party with the nation and a disparagement of
dissent as anti-national and disloyal to the country; an assertive foreign
policy, especially towards neighbours, that is belligerent to the point of being
willing to risk war; and contempt for rules-based liberal democracy and its
independent institutions. O’Toole warns of ‘the generation of tribal identities,
the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities’ that have indeed
been a feature of Moditva. He warns, too, of the rigging of elections, noting
that, historically, fascism has come to power on a minority vote and then
consolidated itself through fear and intimidation. Seen through this prism, the
BJP’s 31 per cent certainly looks more ominous. ‘And fascism,’ he continues,
‘needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a
universe of ‘alternative facts’ impervious to unwanted realities.’ Again,
echoes of India resonate. 124
And the final ingredient O’Toole identifies is the intangible one: the
undermining of moral boundaries, which inure people to be accepting of acts
of extreme cruelty, particularly towards a despised ‘out-group’ that is
portrayed a threat. At a time when it seems it might be safer in some parts of
India to be a cow than a Muslim, is O’Toole right that the test-marketing for
something more ominous is already happening? With mob lynchings creating
an atmosphere of fear among many in the country, the BJP has given rise to a
culture of impunity.
The thoughtful Indian columnist Santosh Desai, without mentioning the
word fascism, writes of the ‘atmosphere of fear’ being ‘achieved not only
through harsh punitive measures, but through a complex and elaborate
network of actions, real and symbolic…The sense of threat is more palpable.
This government is deemed capable of much more than what it has actually
done; the fear is evoked by latent violence in the body language of the
government rather than in its actions alone. “Violence in the air” is a more
effective way of fostering self-censorship than any direct method…Fear
reproduces itself thanks to the elegant design of the ecosystem of intimidation
that is in place today… Showing signs of fear itself becomes proof—unless
you are an anti-national, why should you be afraid?’ 125
It is difficult to argue that Desai is being alarmist. His tone is measured as
he goes on: ‘The calibrated use of reward and punishment, the taking of
action against victims rather than perpetrators, the penetration of virtually
every institution that matters, the creation of voluntary and vocal cheerleaders
for the actions of the state, the regular encouragement given from the highest
level of the government to those that carry out intimidation, the periodic acts
of brutal violence that indicate that the threats are not only symbolic in
nature, the breeding of several kinds of private armies that publicly display
their muscle, the succession of violently intemperate statements made by
minor party leaders, and actions like the arrest of activists on charges that
align with the larger narrative that is being built—these are all part of this
ecosystem of fear.’
If one were to look for an Indian echo to O’Toole’s anxiety about the
West, Desai’s ‘ecosystem of fear’ is troubling enough. Fear is as worrying an
‘f’ word as fascism.
It is a measure of my own concern about the substance of Prof Nandy’s
charge—rather than my ambivalence over the word for it—that I was struck
by a paragraph in Madeleine Albright’s recent Fascism: A Warning , in
which she warns the readers about the lasting damage that has been caused to
her nation by President Trump. He has ‘degraded political discourse…shown
an astonishing disregard for facts, libelled his predecessors…touted
mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies, vilified immigrants and
the countries from which they come and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward
the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions’. 126 Much of this
description finds resonance in present-day India: the degrading of political
discourse from the very top, the disregard for facts (of which more below),
the constant denigration of his predecessors (Mr Modi speaks as if Indian
political history before him was a black hole of failure, and claims that
Indians became proud of India only after his victory), the mindless economic
policy of demonetization (which, as I describe in Chapter 35 , all but
destroyed the Indian economy), and the vilification of immigrants and
minorities—it helps that the two can be conflated, since the Bangladeshi
migrants are overwhelmingly Muslim). 127 If, as Albright suggests, all this
amounts to warning signs of looming fascism, then Indians must consider
themselves warned.
One phrase of Albright’s especially struck me in particular: the
‘astonishing disregard for facts’. This has been a particular characteristic of
Moditva, starting from the man himself and extending (as I explain in a later
chapter) to many of his well-placed followers. Narendra Modi is an
undoubtedly intelligent man: he is a quick study, masters a vast array of
information and retails it with impressive recall. But he does not have the
educational credentials of many of his predecessors and contemporaries: the
prime minister claims to have obtained a formal degree by correspondence
from Delhi University, but the university was unable to trace any record of it.
Doubts were also raised over his MA degree in ‘Entire Political Science’
from Gujarat University, a subject that apparently does not even exist at the
university. 128 And as his reading has been narrow, ideologically biased and
selective, he often seems unaware of the contextual basis for evaluating the
‘facts’, real and imagined, that come his way. As a result, the prime minister
has often played fast and loose with fact-based ideas and theories.
The best-known example is of his claim, soon after his election, that the
appearance of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha or Ganapathi was
proof that the ancient Indians had mastered plastic surgery. 129 I have written
before that it does not seem to have occurred to him that the smallest
imaginable elephant head could not possibly fit onto the largest available
human neck; worse, in saying what he did, he discredited ancient India’s
genuine accomplishments in surgery, which included the world’s first known
rhinoplasty operation to reconstruct a human nose, by Susruta in the first
century CE, whose records and instruments have survived. This is not the
only instance of Mr Modi’s factual errors; there have literally been dozens.
He has been known to mix up the dates of the Maurya dynasty and to place
Taxila, which is in today’s Pakistan, in Bihar instead. He once claimed that
the thirteenth-century Sun Temple at Konark is 2,000 years old. 130 In a 2018
speech in Maghar, Uttar Pradesh, he mentioned that ‘this was the place where
Sant Kabir, Guru Nanak and Baba Gorakhnath sat together and discussed
spirituality’. The three were undoubtedly spiritual giants of India’s medieval
era, but Gorakhnath was born in the eleventh century, Kabir at the end of the
fourteenth century and Guru Nanak in the fifteenth century, and they could
not possibly have met and discussed anything together. 131
Mr Modi claimed in a 2015 town hall meeting at San Jose with Mark
Zuckerberg that the Indian economy was $8 trillion, whereas India’s GDP is,
in fact, less than a third of that, at $2.5 trillion—an elementary error but one
hardly becoming of a head of government. 132 Exaggeration seems to be a
recurring weakness of Mr Modi’s: he claimed in Davos in 2018 that ‘600
crore voters’ had given him a mandate in 2014, a figure that amounts to 6
billion, which would include most of the human race; in fact, India had 81.5
crore (815 million) registered voters in 2014, of whom about 60 per cent
voted, and of whom 31 per cent voted for his party—in other words, 17.98
crore, approximately, voted for him, not 600 crore. 133 And in Parliament,
rebutting a motion of no-confidence against his government in 2018,
Narendra Modi delivered a string of far-fetched numerical arguments for his
employment-generation claims (claiming, for instance, that each car sold
implied the employment of two new persons for it) that confirmed his
cavalier attitude to figures as well as facts.
These may be harmless errors and should arguably be excused, even if
they reveal a worrying penchant for making tall claims. Some other factual
errors, however, seem to be maliciously and politically motivated, and recall
O’Toole’s warning that fascism ‘creates for its followers a universe of
“alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities’. Two recent examples of
such misrepresentation arose in 2018: during the course of the election
campaign to the Karnataka Assembly, Mr Modi claimed that Jawaharlal
Nehru and the Congress had mistreated two generals who hailed from the
state, Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa and Gen. K. S. Thimayya, whereas both
had in fact been honoured and promoted. 134 He also alleged that Pandit
Nehru had never called on the incarcerated revolutionary Bhagat Singh in
jail, whereas pictorial and archival evidence of Nehru-ji’s doing just that
exists. 135 These allegations, relying on ‘false facts’, are part of the Hindutva
playbook against the Congress party and the Nehru family, as are the
allegations (mercifully not yet voiced by the prime minister himself, but
widely circulated by his followers on social media) that Feroze Gandhi,
Indira’s husband, was actually a Muslim and that Jawaharlal Nehru, who died
of a stroke at the age of seventy-four, had in fact succumbed to syphilis.
Fantasies, conspiracy theories and invented facts are the staple of extremist
movements everywhere, and the worry, when a prime minister utters a
falsehood, is what else lurks where that came from.
VI

The media has tended not to make too much of such errors; in an era where
politicians are frequently and widely lampooned for the slightest slip,
Narendra Modi has largely preserved an aura of infallibility. Yet PM Modi
has had a fraught relationship with the press. He sees them as instruments of
his interests, but not as an institution to which he is in any way accountable.
They can be useful in promoting his image and his message, which is why
they sometimes need to be cajoled; they can also be harmful in undermining
his image and his message, which is why they sometimes need to be
cudgelled. PM Modi monitors the media almost obsessively, but he does not
indulge it, rarely gives interviews (except to pliant journalists who ask him
embarrassingly unctuous questions) and (in India) has never held a press
conference. When it is necessary to humour the media, he will do so,
addressing a media organization’s ‘summit’, delivering a media foundation’s
lecture or giving away journalism prizes; when it is necessary to curb the
media, he will not hesitate to use the powers of his government to do so,
though rarely overtly. A word to the wise is all it takes; since most media
houses are owned and run by corporate houses with other business interests
than their publications, the media’s paymasters are vulnerable to pressures
that a mere editor might have been inclined to resist. Thus several senior
journalists and editors—most recently (in August 2018) three leading
journalists from the popular Hindi TV channel ABP—are said to have lost
their jobs after the government conveyed its displeasure with their reporting.
136 Some subjects tend to arouse the government’s hostility: the editor of a
prominent national daily was allegedly asked to leave for publishing a regular
‘Hate Tracker’ listing incidents of communal violence, and though cause and
effect are speculative, the Hate Tracker was discontinued immediately upon
his defenestration. 137 On at least half a dozen occasions, articles critical of
highly placed figures in the ruling party have disappeared overnight from the
websites of major media organizations. 138 Indeed, some stories have not
been reported at all, outside the web-only outlets that are so modestly funded
that their donors cannot be pressured.
The journalist Karan Thapar has the distinction of conducting Narendra
Modi’s most famous, or most notorious, television interview. It took place in
2007, and lasted all of three minutes.
Thapar began by recalling that Mr Modi had been hailed by independent
voices as ‘the most efficient chief minister’ of ‘the best-administered state’.
But he went on: ‘And yet despite that, people still call you to your face a
mass murderer and they accuse you of being prejudiced against Muslims. Do
you have an image problem?’
Narendra Modi briefly seemed willing to engage with him on this, but
when Thapar continued in his distinctive (some might say combative, some
condescending) style—‘Even five years after the Gujarat killings of 2002, the
ghost of Godhra still haunts you… Why can’t you say that you regret the
killings that happened? Why can’t you say maybe the government should
have done more to protect Muslims?’—Mr Modi’s forbearance snapped. He
pulled off his microphone and walked off the set. 139 The resultant news
story did far more damage to Modi than the interview itself (which would
inevitably have moved on to other subjects) might have done, and continues
to enjoy viral status on YouTube.
There is a footnote to the Karan Thapar interview story that reveals Mr
Modi to be, as many of those who have fallen out with him allege, a man who
holds deep grudges. In his recent book, Devil’s Advocate , Karan Thapar
reveals that Narendra Modi and he parted gracefully, but that despite several
attempts, Thapar was never able to meet him again; Mr Modi refused to see
him. When he became prime minister, Karan Thapar alleges, he ordered a
boycott of Karan Thapar’s show by all BJP officials and spokespersons,
severely undermining the veteran journalist’s broadcast career. 140
The Karan Thapar episode is revelatory of a broader attitude. After
becoming prime minister, Mr Modi refused to hold a single press conference.
He let it be known that he did not feel the need to connect with people
through the media ‘when he is already in direct touch with the people’. To the
time of writing (August 2018), he has only appeared before the press when
on visits to presidents and prime ministers abroad, where the local customs
involved a media appearance for the visitor with his host. (PM Modi is
sensitive about the foreign media; he is said to veer between exaggerated
pride at articles from foreign sources praising him and thin-skinned anger at
negative stories abroad, though his supporters prefer to dismiss the latter as
products of ignorance or bias.) In India, he holds neither formal press
conferences nor informal engagements with the press. Instead, Mr Modi
communicates with the public through social media, especially Twitter, his
favoured medium, and on monthly broadcasts on radio and YouTube called
Mann ki Baat (‘Words from the Heart’ 141 ) which lay out his thoughts for
the month. Whereas all of Narendra Modi’s predecessors have taken a press
pool with them on their aircraft, Mr Modi has refused to do so, and there are
no media briefings, neither informal nor on the record, on board the prime
minister’s flights.
To compensate, as it were, for the neglect and ‘management’ of the
mainstream media, PM Modi has focused his time and attention generously
on social media, which has become a ferocious echo-chamber for the ruling
Sangh Parivar’s orthodoxy. It is astonishing to observe the extent of moral
policing and right-wing trolling that Moditva and the BJP’s supporters have
unleashed on social media in India. This is so powerful and so overwhelming
that it in effect acts as a community censure of any dissenting voices or
liberal-leaning criticism of Mr Modi and his policies. Though the Sangh’s
political opponents, notably the Congress party, have finally begun to strike
back in the same forum, the pattern was established early in PM Modi’s
tenure: organized and orchestrated social-media voices, many operating
hundreds of ‘bot’ accounts to repeat their views, hail the new Caesar and
drown out his critics, while the few people who seek to challenge PM Modi’s
actions on social media end up being angrily branded as ‘anti-national’ or
‘anti-Hindu’ and worse, being subjected to vile threats of assault, rape or
murder if they persist in their views. 142 Some of the targets of their bile have
been the handful of professional journalists who have bravely continued to
wage their lonely individual battle for their own and, by extension, society’s,
freedom of expression. 143
 The concern about, and influence over, what is said in the media also
appears to extend beyond the news media. Comedian Shyam Rangeela—
whose video imitating Narendra Modi (with ‘Rahul Gandhi’ making a ‘guest
appearance’) went viral on social media—complained that a leading Hindi-
language television channel, Star Plus, refused to telecast his act on its show,
The Great Indian Laughter Challenge . 144 Apparently, he was told that he
could rerecord his mimicry of Rahul Gandhi but not that of the prime
minister. Stand-up comic Kunal Kamra found himself suddenly disinvited by
a prominent university in Mr Modi’s home state of Gujarat on the eve of his
appearance there, because the content of his act was deemed too critical of
the ruling party. 145 Actor Prakash Rai, better known as Prakash Raaj, whose
trenchant denunciations of Modi have attracted a loyal following on
YouTube, has found himself ostracized in Bollywood. 146
It is hardly surprising, then, that during the four years of Narendra Modi’s
rule, India’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index has plummeted to
138th in the world, a poor reflection on the media environment in the world’s
largest democracy.
VII

Comparisons are, of course, always invidious, all the more so when they
involve political leaders from different countries. But there’s something about
the trajectories of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and India’s Narendra
Modi that makes comparisons irresistible.
Erdoğan rose to power eleven years before Narendra Modi, but their
parallels are eerie. Both came from humble backgrounds and were born in
small towns (Rize on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, Vadnagar in India’s Gujarat
state): Erdoğan as a child sold lemonade and pastry in the streets, Mr Modi
helped his father and brother run a tea stall on a railway platform. Both were
associated young with deeply held convictions that tied them to religiously
oriented groups at odds with the secularism sanctified by their countries’
dominant official narratives.
The modern nation states of Turkey and India had both emerged from the
collapse of multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires, and had been led for
decades by a secular elite whose ideology had been derived from Western
sources of inspiration. Both Erdoğan and Modi led parties—the Justice and
Development Party (AKP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) respectively
—that claimed to be anchored in a more authentic, religiously inspired
nationalist tradition than the ruling ideologies they sought to supplant.
Both won their first elections by uncannily similar margins in their
respective electoral systems: Erdoğan with 32.26 per cent of the popular vote
and 363 of 550 seats in Parliament, Narendra Modi with 31 per cent and 333
of 543 seats (including those of allies who won on his coat-tails).
Both did so, too, by appealing beyond their religiously driven support
base. Erdoğan and Narendra Modi expressed pride in their Islamic and Hindu
rootedness, respectively, but campaigned on modernist platforms, arguing
that they could bring about greater economic prosperity than the
establishment they sought to overthrow. They both claimed to be more
business-friendly, less mired in the corrupt ways of the past, and determined
to shake their countries out of the sloth with which younger voters had
become impatient.
Both were self-made men, energetic and physically fit (Erdoğan was a
pro footballer, Narendra Modi thumped his 56-inch chest), and highly
effective orators. Both, for all their parties’ religious-cultural atavism,
presented themselves as dynamic, forward-looking men of change—larger-
than-life colossuses striding their political worlds while dwarfing both their
rivals and their allies.
The two men’s political messaging fell on receptive ground because
popular discontent was high when they began their rise. The religious-
chauvinist discourse of both the AKP and BJP, their emergence as the parties
of the middle-classes of the hinterlands and second-tier cities and towns, their
narratives of grievance and resentment against the established secular elites
who had ruled too long, their dabbling in deep historical revisionism, built on
a kind of chip-on-the-shoulder political appeal. Both Erdoğan and Narendra
Modi portrayed themselves as outsiders who would transform their societies:
they promised an identitarian validation for the ‘real’ Turk or Indian who had
been marginalized by the cosmopolitan secularists.
Erdoğan, coming to power at a time of booming global growth, soon had
economic success to bolster his popularity, which emboldened him to
transform the country’s polity. Narendra Modi, whether consciously or
unconsciously, sought to emulate the Erdoğan formula. This consisted of
seven key elements: assertion of religious identity, triumphalist
majoritarianism, hyper-nationalism, authoritarian rule with increasing
dominance of the country’s institutions, challenging and curbing of the
media, and strong economic growth, all embodied in the seventh key element
—a personal image of ‘the man who gets things done’. Erdoğan managed all
seven elements and succeeded in being re-elected three times. PM Modi
wished to reshape India the way Erdoğan has reshaped Turkey, but has been
tripped up by only one of the list: the sixth. He has mismanaged the economy
and denied himself the political benefits of strong economic growth
(ironically, Erdoğan, too, is now facing the challenge of dealing with an
economy that seems to be going into a tailspin).
Today, the parallels continue. Both men rule vast multicultural
democracies while practising forms of illiberal nationalism. Erdoğan has
demonized and suppressed Kurds just as Narendra Modi’s BJP has sought to
marginalize Muslims. In India, the minorities feel beleaguered, the excesses
of the ‘cow vigilantes’ and ‘mob lynchers’ have alienated many on the
fringes of Indian society, dissenters in the media and the universities are
intimidated, political loyalties are all too often purchased by rampant
financial corruption, and the subversion of institutions to serve a narrow
sectarian political agenda gathers pace. The nationalism espoused by PM
Modi excludes all who do not conform to the new orthodoxy. The
majoritarian language and sentiment, the polarization, the dangerous belief
that the BJP’s opponents are traitors, all echo similar sentiments pronounced
by the AKP in Turkey.
Both history and the future are pressed into service by the two leaders.
Erdoğan extols the old Ottoman imperial legacy and campaigns telling voters
they would ‘not only be choosing a president and deputies’ in parliament, but
‘making a choice for our country’s upcoming century’. 147 PM Modi
constantly evokes the achievements of ancient India and claims to be reviving
those past glories in a golden future under his rule. Both men conduct activist
foreign policies built around boosting their image at home, and both have
cultivated diaspora audiences: Erdoğan’s speeches in the Balkans might
antagonize the US and Europe, and even Serbs and Croats, but they raise his
stock with Turks; PM Modi addresses stadiums full of Indian expatriates on
his visits to other countries in speeches aimed entirely at audiences back
home. Erdoğan evokes potent Islamic symbols abroad; PM Modi worships at
temples in Nepal to influence Hindu voters in India.
Even the words of a Turkish author, Soner Captagay, to the Washington
Post about Erdoğan could be applied to Narendra Modi without change: ‘Half
of the country hates him, and thinks he can do nothing right. But at the same
time, the other half adores him, and thinks he can do nothing wrong.’ 148
To be sure, there are obvious differences. Turkey is 98 per cent Muslim,
India only 80 per cent Hindu. Islamism, as Hindu chauvinists never tire of
pointing out, is a global problem; Hindutva is not. Turkey has no equivalent
of Mahatma Gandhi, with his message of non-violence and coexistence
infused into every Indian schoolchild. India was colonized, Turkey was not.
India was partitioned on religious grounds (to create Pakistan), Turkey was
not (though the exchange of populations that accompanied the separation
from Greece comes close). Turkey has undergone bouts of military rule;
India has not. Turkey’s population, at 81 million, is less than half that of a
single Indian state, Uttar Pradesh (210 million). Turkey is more or less a
developed country; India has a far longer way to go on the path of
development.
True, parallels can be taken too far, and the two countries are far from
identical. India is a far more diverse and complex society with an entrenched
democracy, much less amenable to capture by one-man rule. It is still difficult
for many Indians to imagine their country becoming what Turkey seems to
have become, a majoritarian illiberal democracy with open traces of
autocracy. But Narendra Modi and the BJP, in power for only four years, are
at an earlier stage of ‘state capture’ than Erdoğan, in charge for fifteen. And
the trajectory chosen by their current political leaders is similar enough to
invite comparison—and provoke concern.
Erdoğan has had some success with the results of his policies, PM Modi
considerably less. Every major Modi initiative has remained at the level of
exhortation—Make in India, Skill India, Start-Up India, Digital India—but
the slogans are yet to find their reality. Even the otherwise admirable Swachh
Bharat campaign can only be credited for raising public awareness about
sanitation and hygiene and increasing the number of toilets built, but India
remains as dirty as ever, many of the toilets are unused because of a lack of
water or maintenance, and open defecation is still rampant. Erdoğan won
elections to a newly created executive presidency in July 2018, whereas PM
Modi faces Indian voters (and a more united Opposition) in parliamentary
elections in early 2019. It would be interesting to see if, thanks to the voters,
the parallels finally diverge.
VIII
Narendra Modi runs a parliamentary system in a presidential style. This gives
Indians the worst of both worlds: an unfettered executive with an automatic
parliamentary majority which, unlike true presidential systems, is not held in
check by an independent legislature.
The Modi government’s two most dramatic decisions—the overnight
demonetization of 86 per cent of India’s currency in value, and the so-called
‘surgical strikes’ across the Line of Control between India and Pakistan—
were taken and announced by the PM with a handful of unelected advisers,
rather than, as would be expected in a parliamentary system, by the cabinet.
Both were unilateral decisions made by the executive without any legislative
input, not even by those legislators entrusted with formal executive authority
in his own government. They were implemented by a small handful of
bureaucrats, who enjoyed the PM’s trust, in total secrecy, in a manner that
involved what former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali once
called ‘stealth and sudden violence’. Such dramatic and stunning actions,
conceived and conducted essentially in and by the PM’s office, appear to be a
hallmark of Mr Modi’s leadership style. From his days in Gujarat, when he
reputedly bypassed his cabinet to work entirely with a trusted group of
unelected officials, he has demonstrated more faith in bureaucrats who are,
after all, trained administrators, than in politicians, who only know how to
win elections. 149 In his last major cabinet reshuffle, it was telling that four of
his five new ministerial appointees were all former bureaucrats, two of whom
had subsequently to be elected to the Upper House as required by the
Constitution.
None of the usual constraints of the parliamentary system inhibit
Narendra Modi. He has a majority in the Lok Sabha and does not need to
waste time in legislative deal-making. His cabinet meetings are said to be
exercises in one-way communication and top-down decision-making;
ministers make presentations and proposals on demand, conduct themselves
deferentially and never challenge the prime minister’s position. He has a few
token ministers from his allies in the cabinet, but they have very little
authority and if they bridle at that, they are dispensable, since he does not
need their parties to make up a majority—and they know that. He spends a
large proportion of his time travelling—fifty-nine foreign countries visited so
far at the time of writing, and countless destinations in India, the latter almost
entirely in perpetual campaign mode. (On his international visits he has
demonstrated a tendency to envelop his unsuspecting foreign interlocutors in
a bear hug, while maintaining a stiff reserve on his domestic travels where he
greets all and sundry with a formal namaskar.)
Though it was an American president, Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke of
his office as a ‘bully pulpit’ to preach to the nation, it is an Indian prime
minister who has now discovered his position gives him a ‘bully pulpit’ too.
Whereas it should be in Parliament that the prime minister exercises his
considerable skills of oratorical persuasion, Narendra Modi has spoken more
often in foreign assemblies than in his own Lok Sabha. He disdains the
legislative fray, for which he reveals thinly veiled contempt. As he has
already demonstrated in Gujarat, in his view a legislative majority exists only
to enable and legitimize his executive power; once he has that, he does not
need the legislature, except for the unavoidable task of passing his Budget
and pushing through laws, both of which his majority enables him to do
without serious legislative input. The number of sittings of Parliament have
declined precipitously, and when it meets disruptions are frequent (and
sometimes engineered by the government itself, which in 2018 passed its
Budget without debate amid the din. 150 ) It is Narendra Modi’s wilful
railroading of the Indian Parliament that makes the case for a genuine
presidential system amply clear—never has the separation of powers between
executive and legislative organs been revealed to be more necessary than
today.
Parliament is not the only institution he has undermined, as I describe in
Chapter 19 . Though Narendra Modi promised ‘minimum government,
maximum governance’, the opposite has occurred: government control that
many would describe as authoritarian, decision-making centralized in the
Prime Minister’s Office to a point that has disempowered the ministries, and
an administrative style that some of his own party men have criticized as a
‘tendency to control everything’. The Modi government has been accused of
subverting institutions like the Reserve Bank of India, Central Vigilance
Commission, Central Bureau of Investigation and the judiciary, coupled with
attempts to emasculate the Fourth Estate through various attacks on freedom
of speech and expression. 151 Mr Modi and his handpicked BJP president,
Amit Shah, have been described as running both the government and the
party as it suits them, pushing anyone who opposes them to the sidelines.
It would be useful here to digress briefly to take a look at Amit Shah,
who can, without exaggeration, be called PM Modi’s consigliore. Mr Modi is
famous for being a man who keeps his own counsel and takes decisions
independently. So the immense amount of trust he reposes in Amit Shah is
remarkable, and unique. Mr Shah has stated that he was only ‘sixteen or
seventeen’ when he first met Mr Modi 152 ; that suggests a very long
relationship, which both explains and reflects the bond. Their friendship
became strong in the early 1980s, when Mr Modi was a pracharak and Amit
Shah a junior worker within the RSS. Narendra Modi was impressed by Amit
Shah’s abilities, and in 1986, began assigning political tasks to him, starting
with booth management during polls. Amit Shah’s election campaign
experience grew and with it, his responsibilities. His record for effectiveness
and loyalty were such that when Mr Modi became chief minister in 2002, Mr
Shah was made one of the youngest ministers of state in his cabinet at thirty-
eight, and rapidly established himself as his mentor’s alter ego. 153 In 2012,
he was handling seventeen portfolios in the state cabinet. When Narendra
Modi was anointed his party’s prime ministerial candidate in 2013, he
ensured that Amit Shah became the BJP general secretary in charge of his
campaign; Mr Shah is generally credited with masterminding the BJP’s
thumping majority in the elections of 2014. Shortly after that election victory,
he was appointed BJP president at Narendra Modi’s instance, and
reappointed for a second three-year term in 2017. The massive win in the UP
state election in 2017, as well as the party’s gains across the Hindi heartland
and in the Northeast, and adroit coalition-making in those states where the
BJP did not win a majority—all of which put it in control of twenty-one of
India’s twenty-nine states as of mid-2018—were credited to Mr Shah’s
political statecraft and ruthless cunning. 154
Amit Shah enjoys almost absolute immunity as Mr Modi’s closest aide.
Though he was named as one of the accused in the ‘fake encounter killings’
of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, Kauser bi and Tulsiram Prajapati in the Ishrat Jahan
case, and though he allegedly misused state machinery to monitor the
movements and meetings of a woman, reportedly at ‘sahib’s’ behest (the
‘Snoopgate’ controversy) and has been held responsible for fanning
communal tensions during the Muzaffarnagar riots, and though at one point
he was even banned by a court from setting foot in his own state, Gujarat—
most of the problems that he has faced in relation to these charges appear to
have magically disappeared. 155 In the Sohrabuddin case, for instance, a
judge who criticized Mr Shah’s non-appearance was summarily transferred,
and another, Judge Loya, died suddenly. 156 Mr Shah has skipped many
recent hearings on the case, saying he is too busy to attend.
When Mr Shah, who enjoys the admiration of many of his colleagues
(sometimes unabashed, more often grudging) was appointed as BJP
president, there was dissent in the party from within as well as outside—all to
no avail. The critics understood that Amit Shah was there to ensure that
Narendra Modi’s writ ran in the party, and that he spoke with the top man’s
authority as no one else could claim to. He was Narendra Modi’s permanent
campaign manager, the man who breathed his boss’s vision and who
executed the strategy as well as determined the tactics to carry it out. When
Amit Shah was appointed to the Rajya Sabha in 2018, there was idle
speculation within the party that he would give up his party post for the
higher-ranking position of defence minister. But insiders knew that idea was
always fanciful: others could be cabinet ministers, but only Amit Shah could
run the party for Narendra Modi. As one senior BJP leader was reported to
have commented wryly, ‘Why would you give up the second-most powerful
position [in the country] to take the job of a mere mantri (minister)?’ 157
Shah is seen as the kingmaker—the man who engineered the surprise
appointment of Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister of UP, India’s largest
state—as well as the one man whose advice the prime minister takes. It is a
position in which he brooks no challenge.
At the same time, while combative and pugnacious on the stump and now
in the Upper House of Parliament, Amit Shah has been careful to always
defer to his boss, never to challenge his authority and never to steal any of his
limelight. He is the ideal number 2, strong enough to command respect in his
own right but self-effacing enough to pose no threat whatsoever to his boss.
At the time of writing, Amit Shah’s lustre had dulled a bit on account of
reverses in some states and Lok Sabha bypolls in 2018, but he will, without a
doubt, be the architect of the BJP’s poll campaign in the run-up to the 2019
general election.
Amit Shah aside, PM Modi is notorious for rebuking his party members
if they oppose him or do not work to his rules, and sidelining his rivals if they
seem to pose a serious challenge to him. This style of functioning had already
been prefigured in Gujarat, where three BJP leaders who spoke out against
CM Modi in 2002 saw a swift end to their political careers. Former minister
Haren Pandya, who gave a deposition to a private inquiry commission led by
Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer regarding the Gujarat riots, was ostracized, and
later died, murdered in mysterious circumstances while on his regular
morning walk in 2003. Sanjay Joshi was forced to resign when a CD
containing compromising pictures of him (later revealed to be doctored) was
circulated among BJP leaders. Gordhan Zadaphia was pushed out of the
cabinet for disloyalty to Narendra Modi, and later removed from the party,
though he has now returned. 158
In Delhi now, Mr Modi reigns supreme, brooking no challenge. His party
colleagues have been cut to size: those more senior and experienced than
him, the pillars of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet the last time the BJP was in
power, including former party presidents Advani, and Murli Manohar Joshi,
have been relegated to a Margdarshak Mandal (Guidance Council), which
has, by design, never met since neither the government (Narendra Modi) nor
the party (Amit Shah) has convened a single meeting of it. 159 One prominent
face of that era, former finance minister and foreign minister Yashwant
Sinha, has even resigned from the Modi/Shah-led BJP; another former
minister, Arun Shourie, has been vocal in expressing his disenchantment with
the Modi government. 160 There is only one centre of power in the council of
ministers, and that is PM Modi. His office calls Secretaries in the various
ministries directly on pending issues, bypassing and thus undermining the
ministers, who are sometimes reduced to mouthing decisions made behind
their backs.
Not everyone in the BJP, or even in the RSS, is therefore entirely happy
with Narendra Modi. In his 2012 profile of Mr Modi, the journalist Vinod K.
Jose quoted an unnamed RSS leader describing his feelings about the Gujarat
supremo with ‘a bitter sigh’: ‘Shivling mein bichhu baitha hai. Na usko haath
se utaar sakte ho, na usko joota maar sakte ho.’ (‘A scorpion is sitting on a
Shiva lingam, the holy symbol of Lord Shiva. It can neither be removed by
hand nor slapped with a shoe.’ 161 ) Try to remove the scorpion, and it will
sting you; slap it with a shoe and you will be insulting your own faith. That
remains a brilliant summary of the RSS’s dilemma with Narendra Modi. A
new book 162 by respected scholars of Sanghi politics asserts that the RSS
leadership is currently struggling with a critical dilemma—whether or not the
Sangh Parivar should continue to support the Bharatiya Janata Party in the
2019 Lok Sabha elections, despite its disapproval of the ‘personality cult’
around Narendra Modi. Even if this assertion proves to be true, those in the
Hindutva movement who might prefer another leader find themselves
helpless: they cannot remove or displace Narendra Modi because, at least for
now, their own project would be destroyed with him.
And one must not forget that the electorate has continued to reward
Narendra Modi so far. The BJP now rules, either by itself or with a partner,
twenty-one out of twenty-nine Indian states—the highest such proportion
since the Congress held power in eighteen states a quarter of a century ago.
The psephologist Yogendra Yadav has remarked that ‘the BJP today is
perhaps the most formidable election machine that this country has witnessed
in the last 70 years.’ 163 When the failures of demonetization and the botched
implementation of a new Goods and Services Tax (see chapters 35 and 36 ),
along with anti-incumbency and an effective Congress party campaign,
brought the BJP in Gujarat perilously close to defeat in the state assembly
elections of December 2017, Modi made the vote a referendum on himself.
He dramatically asked his fellow Gujaratis to demonstrate their pride in
having him, their representative, as the nation’s prime minister. ‘Do you trust
me?’ he asked; ‘Will you let me down? When everyone is against me, will
you stand by me? Who else but me, sitting in Delhi, can work for you?’ 164 It
worked; the BJP scraped through by the skin of its teeth, albeit with a sharply
reduced majority. Modi’s honour was saved.
But then he also has ‘the people’. As I have noted, Narendra Modi excels
at direct communication with the masses, using his compelling oratory,
monthly broadcasts and extensive social media presence to reach out directly
to the masses. In the 2014 election, the lavishly funded Narendra Modi spent
a small fortune on a hologram technology that projected a three-dimensional
image of him addressing an audience to multiple locations simultaneously,
enabling him to give several crowds the illusion of ‘seeing’ him at the same
time. He single-handedly started the ‘selfie’ craze in India by tweeting his
selfies and encouraging visitors to take them. The hashtag #SelfiewithModi
encouraged Indians to tweet their selfies with their prime minister even when
they couldn’t meet him personally. Photo booths were set up across Delhi, for
instance, in which people could have their picture taken with a cutout of him.
165 He has introduced a mobile telephone app, the Narendra Modi app, which
the BBC called, in a reference to the international dating app, ‘a Tinder for
good governance’. 166 The app lets users share news of PM Modi, receive his
updates and take part in polls. It includes a video game in which the user
scores points for approving Mr Modi’s policies.
So Moditva is a combination of Hindutva, nationalism, economic
development and overweening personal leadership. It is carefully packaged
and marketed, with considerable attention (and expense) being paid to
disseminating its message to the public. It is always sold in terms of ideals—
Narendra Modi is selfless and devoted, a man who has given up all personal
interests for the nation, a man with no Swiss bank accounts or hideaway
homes, a man with no sons or nephews to groom as successors, a man
dedicated solely to the greater good of India. Even his mistakes are presented
as well-meaning and motivated by his sincere convictions of the national
interest. If some see him as power-hungry, many Indians prefer a leader who
is motivated by power rather than money. Even as a politician, the message
goes, his mission is to serve the people, never himself.
His populism, direct appeal to the public and personal image of
selflessness have proved huge political assets in a period of failing policies
and economic setbacks. ‘People are ready to trust what he says,’ observed
Jitendra Singh, minister of state in the PMO, with quiet satisfaction. This
enabled him to get away with his calamitous demonetization decision (see
Chapter 35 )—‘there may have been hardship involved in the transition
phase,’ Singh admits, ‘but people were ready to cooperate because they
thought if Modi is saying so, it is for the benefit of the country.’ 167
Moditva is careful not to appear to be in contradiction to Hindutva;
rather, it builds upon it. But by identifying the message so completely with
the personal life, values, and behaviour of the leader, Moditva has
transformed Hindutva into something more than it ever was—a cult devoted
to the greater glory of one man, in the name of exalting values that he
epitomizes as no one before him has. In the process Hindutva itself is
modified, or as some might have it, Modi-fied.
Of course, Narendra Modi is careful not to challenge the basic
assumptions of Hindutva; rather he portrays his efforts as extending the
conceptual reach of Hindutva and thus ensuring its ultimate triumph. He
wants to be seen as strong and powerful, decisive and able, but he also wants
to be considered honest, self-denying and above all, nationalistic.
As chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi had already portrayed
himself as embodying the identity and pride of the Gujarati people
—‘Gujarati asmita’. Now he seeks to do the same to, and for, the Indian
people. He is the nation. And the nation’s own self-identification must
undergo a change to internalize his embodiment of it.
It was once said of US President Woodrow Wilson that his biggest
problem was that he believed his own press releases. Narendra Modi seems to
buy into his own personality cult, at least judging by the evidence of his
government websites, which depict him in larger-than-life terms, using
language rarely seen in government publications before. His personal
website, narendramodi.in , is full of articles describing his ‘heart of gold’,
‘simplicity’, his ability to never lose his cool, and stories of his exemplary
childhood. 168 It is clear that Mr Modi wants his supporters to view him as a
messianic figure, a superman who can save them from their problems. It
would not surprise me to see the Bal Narendra comic book of 2014 being
succeeded by a Superman Modi comic book in 2019.
IX

Today, Narendra Modi ranks 9th on the Forbes 2018 list of ‘The World’s
Most Powerful People’. 169 And yet there is little doubt that for all his
evident self-confidence, Narendra Modi bears a massive chip on his shoulder.
Something he said to me was revelatory in this regard. When, in a rare one-
on-one conversation in late 2017, I raised an aspect of Opposition criticism of
something he had said or done, the prime minister replied: ‘You know, in
some parts of India, if a man of low caste sports a moustache or dares to ride
a horse, he is beaten up by the higher castes for his presumption. That is what
is happening to me. Some people will never accept that a man like me is the
prime minister of India. That is why they keep attacking me.’
It is a curiously insecure comment for a man who radiates confidence, but
it helps partly explain what drives him. A sense of resentment, a keen anger
at economic and social deprivation, allied with a burning sense of mission to
reverse the traditional narrative, displace the old elites and stamp his
authority on the country, all impel Narendra Modi and Moditva. The chapters
to follow examine in greater detail how he has gone about it, and why, in my
view, he has failed. But the final verdict on whether Narendra Modi’s
government proves just a blip in Indian democracy’s long and complex
history, or whether what we have witnessed is merely the first stage of a
profound transformation that will create a nation unrecognizably different
from that in which he assumed power in 2014, must await the electorate of
2019.
34 ‘Timeline of the Riots in Modi’s Gujarat’, New York Times , 19 August 2015.
35 Javed M. Ansari, ‘Who coined “maut ka saudagar”?’, DNA , 18 December 2007.
36 Shashi Tharoor, ‘Beyond Beijing and Delhi’, India Today , 30 November 1999.
37 ‘”Modi is a Teli-Ghanchi OBC”: BJP’, Times of India , 23 April 2014; Sowmya Aji, ‘I
was India’s first OBC PM, not Narendra Modi: H D Deve Gowda’, Economic Times , 13
July 2015.
38 Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times , New Delhi:
Tranquebar, 2013.
39 Andy Marino, Narendra Modi: A Political Biography , New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014,
pp. 25–27.
40 Ross Colvin and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, ‘Special Report: The remaking of Narendra
Modi’, Reuters , 12 July 2013.
41 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan , 1
March 2012.
42 Ranjit Bhushan, ‘Cadre Raj, Phase Two’, Outlook , 19 November 2001.
43 Some suggest the train fire could well have been accidental. However, the police did not
agree, and trials were held of 94 accused; 31 were convicted, 11 sentenced to death, 20
received life imprisonment, and the rest were acquitted.
44 Shreeya Sinha and Mark Suppes, ‘Timeline of the Riots in Modi’s Gujarat’, New York
Times, 19 August 2015.
45 ‘Gujarat riot death toll revealed’, BBC , 11 May 2005; ‘NHRC Reports and Timeline’,
CJP.org.in , 7 June 2017.
46 Report of the Parliamentary Committee on the Empowerment of Women, August 2002.
47 ‘“We Have No Orders To Save You”: State participation and complicity in communal
violence in Gujarat’, Human Rights Watch, April 2002.
48 Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s
Future , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 51.
49 Andy Marino, Narendra Modi: A Political Biography , New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014.
50 ‘Overview of the attacks against Muslims’, Outlook , 1 May 2002.
51 Vidya Subramanian, ‘SIT says Ehsan Jafri “provoked” murderous mobs’, The Hindu ,
11 May 2012.
52 ‘Modi “action-reaction” statement not sufficient to make a case: SIT’, Indian Express ,
11 May 2002.
53 Ross Colvin and Sruthi Gottipati, ‘Interview with BJP leader Narendra Modi’, Reuters ,
12 July 2013.
54 ‘Should We Run Relief Camps? Open Child Producing Centres? ’, Outlook , 30
September 2002.
55 Kapil Sibal, Shades of Truth , New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2018, p. 39.
56 ‘BJP’s Maya Kodnani Cleared Of Charges In Worst Massacre Of 2002 Riots’, NDTV ,
20 April 2018; ‘Gujarat riots convict Maya Kodnani takes selfie at yoga retreat; Twitter
gets angry’, Catch News , 25 November 2015.
57 ‘Vajpayee wanted Modi to quit over Gujarat riots, but party said no: Venkaiah Naidu’,
Indian Express , 9 March 2014.
58 Ibid.
59 Darshan Desai, ‘The Gujarat vote share trend conundrum’, Economic and Political
Weekly , Vol. 51, Issue No. 28, 9 July 2016.
60 Ross Colvin and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, ‘Special Report: The remaking of Narendra
Modi’, Reuters , 12 July 2013.
61 ‘Bursting the bubble’, Business Standard , 24 January 2013.
62 ‘Ratan Tata votes for Narendra Modi; says, Prime Minister capable of delivering New
India’, Financial Express , 20 September 2017.
63 Binoy Prabhakar, ‘How an American lobbying company Apco Worldwide markets
Narendra Modi to the world’, Economic Times , 9 December 2012.
64 Shamni Pande, ‘Just the Right Image’, Business Today , 8 June 2014.
65 ‘PM Modi third most followed world leader…’, Indian Express , 11 July 2018. (Former
President Obama, though no longer a current ‘world leader’, remains number one.)
66 ‘We are a nation of mouse-charmers now: Narendra Modi at SRCC’, NDTV , 7 February
2013.
67 Speech to Indian community in Washington DC, 25 June 2017, www.narendramodi.in .
68 Rutam Vora, ‘Vibrant Gujarat—Brushing up the numbers’, Hindu BusinessLine , 16
January 2017; Virendra Pandit, ‘Vibrant Gujarat summit. Wait, where’s the “investor”?’,
Hindu BusinessLine , 6 January 2017.
69 Maitreesh Ghatak, ‘Gujarat model: The gleam of state’s high growth numbers hides dark
reality of poverty, inequality’, Scroll.in , 25 October 2017; Christophe Jaffrelot , ‘Gujarat
model?’, Indian Express , 20 November 2017; ‘Gujarat model is Modi model supportive of
crony capitalism: Prithviraj Chavan’, Economic Times , 3 December 2017.
70 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan , 1
March 2012.
71 ‘good days’, ‘together with everyone, development for all’, and ‘this time, a Modi
government’, respectively.
72 Ian Bremmer, ‘How far can Modi take India—and how fast?’, Reuters , 21 May 2014.
73 ‘Victory tweet “India has won!” creates record’, The Hindu , 17 May 2014.
74 G. S. Mudur, ‘Quirky outcomes from the box’, The Telegraph , 19 May 2014.
75 Shubham Ghosh, ‘May 16: Three years since Congress was reduced to 44 seats in a
general election, its all-time low’, IBN Times , 16 May 2017.
76 Piyasree Dasgupta, ‘What happens to the people arrested for insulting Modi?’,
Huffington Post , 13 February 2018.
77 ‘PM remark expunged in rare decision’, The Telegraph , 11 August 2018; Ashok Swain,
‘Modi Mocking Sonia Gandhi’s Italian Accent In Parliament Is Disgusting And Shameful’,
NewsCentral , 22 July 2018.
78 ‘Narendra Modi On MS Golwalkar, Translated By Aakar Patel—Part 1’, Caravan , 31
May 2014.
79 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan , 1
March 2012.
80 Indian Express, 13 December 2007 (front page).
81 ‘“Bal Narendra” in pics: comic book shows “fearless” young Narendra Modi saving
drowning boy, taking on crocodiles, bullies’, News18.com , 27 March 2014.
82 Andy Marino, Narendra Modi: A Political Biography , New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014.
83 Ross Colvin and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, ‘The Remaking of Narendra Modi’, Reuters
,12 July 2013.
84 Ramachandra Guha, ‘The guru of hate’, The Hindu , 26 March 2012.
85 Speech to Indian community at Wembley Stadium, London, 13 November 2015,
www.narendramodi.in
86 Isha Jain, ‘PM Narendra Modi’s chest now said to measure 50 inches’, Times of India ,
21 January 2016.
87 Ritika Chopra, ‘To instil discipline, nationalism: Govt discusses military training plan
for disciplined 10-lakh “force of youth”’, Indian Express, 20 July 2018.
88 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan , 1
March 2012.
89 G. Sampath, ‘The Man in the Modi Mask,’ LiveMint , 25 July 2013.
90 ‘BJP chief, ministers meet RSS top brass; deliberate over policies’, 28 May 2018.
91 Modi speech to Indian community in Washington DC, 25 June 2017,
www.narendramodi.in .
92 Ashis Nandy, ‘Obituary of a culture’, Seminar , May 2002.
93 ‘“I am single, who will I be corrupt for?” says Narendra Modi’, NDTV , 17 February
2014.
94 Andrew North, ‘Narendra Modi keeps family and hometown at arm’s length’, BBC , 16
May 2014.
95 Ibid.
96 ‘Narendra Modi has not taken a single leave till date; PM always on duty’, Economic
Times , 12 October 2016.
97 ‘Rahul slams Modi for wearing “₹10 lakh suit”’, The Tribune , 30 January 2015; ‘PM
Narendra Modi’s auctioned suit enters Guinness Book of World Records’, Times of India ,
20 August 2018.
98 G. Sampath, ‘The Man in the Modi Mask’, LiveMint , 25 July 2013.
99 ‘Bipin Chauhan: Meet Narendra Modi’s personal tailor’, Economic Times , 17 June
2013.
100 Haima Deshpande, ‘“I am Narendra Modi’s wife”’, Open , 11 April 2009.
101 ‘Jashodaben speaks out: Three reasons Modi’s wife is upset with her security’,
FirstPost , 25 November 2014.
102 ‘What the woman audience thought of Modi’s Ficci speech’, FirstPost , 20 December
2014.
103 Ibid.
104 ‘PM Narendra Modi draws flak for “despite being a woman” remark on Sheikh
Hasina’, Economic Times , 5 June 2015.
105 Rama Lakshmi, ‘India’s Modi just delivered the world’s worst compliment’,
Washington Post , 8 June 2015.
106 ‘Modi government says no to rape crisis centres in every district’, DNA , 25 February
2015.
107 Suparna Singh, ‘New Lalit Modi Emails Renew Conflict of Interest Charges for
Sushma Swaraj’, NDTV , 2 July 2015.
108 M. K. Venu, ‘If Left can condemn Maoists, why is Narendra Modi silent on Sanghis?’,
FirstPost , 19 August 2014; ‘Modi needs to do more to condemn hate mongers within
Sangh Parivar’, Times of India , 24 April 2014.
109 James Traub, ‘Is Modi’s India Safe for Muslims?’, Foreign Policy , 26 June, 2015;
Zoya Hasan, ‘4 years of Modi: Ostracisation of Muslims a hallmark of “new India”’,
National Herald , 27 May 2018.
110 Anubhuti Vishnoi and Seema Chishti, ‘BJP’s Muslim score: 7 of 482 fielded, no
winners’, Indian Express , 19 May 2014.
111 ‘Andhra Pradesh’s Telugu Desam Party quits the NDA’, Times of India , 16 March
2018; ‘Shiv Sena, to publicly express its dissatisfaction, even abstaining in a vote of no-
confidence in the Modi government’, The Telegraph , 20 July 2018.
112 ‘Narendra Modi slams UPA’s “biryani’ foreign policy”, FirstPost , 13 May 2013.
113 Zahir Janmohamed, ‘The rise of Narendra Modi: the man who doesn’t wear dark
green’, Boston Review , 28 June 201; Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, ‘A turban and a cap—India’s
national image is being reduced to that of the ruling party’, The Telegraph , 17 June 2017.
114 Manoj Joshi, ‘In his attempt to win elections, Narendra Modi does not seem bound by
propriety—or even dignity’, Scroll.in . 12 December 2017.
115 ‘Narendra Modi mimics “Shehzada” Rahul Gandhi at Chhattisgarh rally’, NDTV , 15
November 2013.
116 A. G. Noorani, ‘The RSS and Gandhi: A Necessary Backstory’, The Wire , 24 July
2016.
117 Ibid.
118 Rachel Fell McDermott et al (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition , Vol. II, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 439.
119 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , New York: HarperPerennial,
1994.
120 ‘Mughals disappearing from textbooks across the country as history seems subject to
change’, FirstPost , 7 August 2017; Manoj Ahuja, ‘In Rajasthan’s revised history,
Maharana Pratap defeated Akbar in Haldighati’, Hindustan Times , 23 September 2017.
121 ‘Install Nathuram Godse’s statues at different places in India: Hindu Mahasabha to
govt’, FirstPost , 19 December 2014.
122 Fintan O’ Toole, ‘Trial runs for fascism are in full flow’, Irish Times , 26 June 2018.
123 Nazia Erum, ‘BJP is done marginalising Indian Muslims. It has now started
demonising them’, Scroll.in , 21 July 2018.
124 Ibid.
125 Santosh Desai, ‘An Ecosystem of Fear?’, Times of India , 3 September 2018.
126 Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning , New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.
127 ‘India will not take Rohingya refugees, they are a security threat, says BJP’, Deccan
Chronicle , 17 September 2017.
128 Ashok Swain, ‘Controversy over PM Modi’s degree damages reputation of India’s
education system’, DailyO , 2 March 2018.
129 Maseeh Rahman, ‘Indian prime minister claims genetic science existed in ancient
times’, The Guardian , 28 October 2014.
130 Adrija Bose, ‘Sun Temple is 2000 years old? 7 times Prime Minister Narendra Modi
got his History wrong’, Huffington Post , 8 June 2016.
131 ‘Prime Minister Modi gets history wrong again, this time in Maghar’, India Today , 28
June 2018.
132 Puja Mehra and Mehboob Jeelani, ‘Congress says PM got it wrong on GDP’, The
Hindu , 29 September 2015.
133 ‘6 billion Indian voters: PM Modi commits faux pas at WEF’, Times of India , 23
January 2018.
134 ‘Karnataka polls: Modi accuses Congress of insulting Cariappa and Thimayya’,
Business Standard , 4 May 2018.
135 ‘Twitter gives Modi a history lesson after he claims that no Congress leader met Bhagat
Singh in jail’, Scroll.in , 10 May 2018.
136 Amrita Nayak Dutta, ‘Top ABP editors quit, staff say Modi govt may have “arm-
twisted channel for criticism”’, The Print , 3 August 2018.
137 Anuj Srivas, ‘Hindustan Times Editor’s Exit Preceded by Meeting Between Modi,
Newspaper Owner’, The Wire , 24 September 2017; ‘After Editor’s Exit, Hindustan Times
Pulls Down Controversial “Hate Tracker”’, The Wire , 25 October 2017.
138 ‘Newspaper pulls down article critical of Amit Shah, Twitter outrages’, FirstPost , 13
July 2014; Karnika Kohli, ‘Times of India Takes Down a Story the BJP Finds
Embarrassing, Again’, The Wire , 26 September 2017.
139 ‘Modi walks out of TV interview after being quizzed on riots’, Rediff.com , 20 October
2007.
140 Karan Thapar, ‘Why Modi Walked Out in 2007 and the BJP Now Shuns Me’, The Wire
, 22 July 2018.
141 This is an unsatisfactory translation, since ‘heart’ is actually ‘dil’ in Hindi, and ‘mann’
means ‘mind’. But there is a connotation of ‘feelings’ and ‘spirit’ in ‘mann’ which would
be absent in the English ‘mind’, hence ‘Words from the Heart’ is closer to the thought
evoked by the phrase Mann ki Baat. A non-literal translation could be What’s On My Mind.
142 Swati Chaturvedi, ‘General Narendra Modi and His Troll Army’, The Wire , 8
September 2017.
143 Annie Gowen, ‘In Modi’s India, journalists face bullying, criminal cases and worse’,
Washington Post , 15 February 2018.
144 Karnika Kohli, ‘Star Plus drops telecast of comedian mimicking Modi on “Great Indian
Laughter Challenge”’, The Wire , 26 October 2017.
145 Suhit Kelkar, ‘Kunal Kamra: Indian comedian riles ruling party with edgy humour’, Al
Jazeera , 21 June 2018; ‘“Anti-national content”: MS University cancels comedian Kunal
Kamra’s show’, Indian Express , 24 July 2018.
146 ‘Not getting Hindi film offers after criticising Modi: Prakash Rai’, Times of India , 5
May 2018.
147 Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Erdogan’s push for power creates new chaos’, Washington Post , 24
May 2018.
148 Ibid.
149 D. P. Bhattacharya, ‘Meet Narendra Modi’s core team of four bureaucrats who drive
the Modi-machine’, Economic Times , 25 April 2014.
150 ‘Lok Sabha passes Union Budget without debate’, Times of India , 14 March 2018.
151 ‘CBI is “Captive Bureau of Investigation” under Modi govt, says Congress on FIR
against Lalu’, Indian Express , 16 March 2018; Hartosh Singh Bal, ‘India’s Embattled
Democracy’, New York Times , 30 May 2018.
152 Patrick French, ‘The “Shah” of BJP’s game plan who wants to alter India’s political
culture’, Hindustan Times , 17 July 2016.
153 Uday Mahurkar, ‘Power duo: of Narendra Modi-Amit Shah’s unbeatable electoral
machine and wins’, India Today , 20 December 2017.
154 Gyan Verma, ‘Historic verdict, BJP’s footprint increasing with every election: Amit
Shah’, LiveMint , 4 March 2018.
155 ‘Narendra Modi aide Amit Shah used police to spy on woman at “saheb’s” behest,
accuse Cobrapost, Gulail’, Indian Express , 29 November 2013; ‘Amit Shah is
chargesheeted in election “hate speech” case’, Indian Express , 11 September 2014.
156 Aarefa Johari, ‘Sohrabuddin Sheikh case: Fresh questions as judge who lifted media
gag and slammed CBI is replaced’, Scroll.in , 27 February, 2018; Nikita Saxena, ‘Death of
Judge Loya: Post-mortem Examination Was Manipulated Under Directions of Doctor
Related to Maharashtra Cabinet Minister’, Caravan , 2 April 2018.
157 ‘What Modi wants with Amit Shah’s election to Rajya Sabha’, NDTV , 28 July 2017.
158 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan , 1
March 2012.
159 ‘Margdarshak mandal: Shabby treatment of seniors, or a brave new BJP?’, FirstPost ,
27 August 2014; Panini Anand, ‘How Modi’s rivals in the BJP have been cut to size’,
Catch News , 10 July 2015.
160 ‘Arun Shourie says falsehood is hallmark of Narendra Modi government, alleges
centralisation of power at PMO’, FirstPost , 27 November 2017.
161 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan , 1
March 2012.
162 Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar Damle, RSS: A View to the Inside , New Delhi:
Penguin Books, 2018.
163 ‘Modi’s growing domination of Indian electoral politics’, National World , 4 March
2018.
164 ‘PM Modi comes to BJP’s rescue, yet again’, Hindustan Times , 18 December 2017.
165 Isabelle Fraser, ‘“Selfie diplomacy”: How India’s prime minister Modi became such a
hit on social media’, The Telegraph , 12 November 2015.
166 ‘Narendra Modi app is “like Tinder for good governance”, BBC , 7 July 2015.
167 Aman Sharma, ‘On a roll, PM Narendra Modi made 775 speeches in 41 months’,
Economic Times , 24 October 2017.
168 ‘Biography’, www.narendramodi.in .
169 ‘The World’s Most Powerful People’, Forbes , 31 May 2018.
 II

THE MODI-FICATION OF INDIA

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000), one of the world’s great statesmen, who
served as the prime minister of Canada for over fifteen years, once
tried to define ‘a just society’. Among other things, he said, ‘The Just
Society will be one in which the rights of minorities will be safe from
the whims of intolerant majorities.’ If there is one thing that
Narendra Modi will be remembered for when he is no longer prime
minister, it is the intolerance his victory has let loose—and he has at
least condoned—in Indian society. Diversity, acceptance of difference
and cultural harmony are indispensable elements of the Indian ethos,
but the current atmosphere of violence and persecution, for which the
prime minister must take a large share of the blame, has jeopardized
these integral values. The rise of gau-rakshaks, the assassinations of
rationalists, mob lynchings, episodes of beef-related violence,
virulent attacks on all and sundry by BJP trolls on social media and
in various public forums, are some of the things he has enabled
through his unwillingness to condemn fundamentalists and through
his own criticism and broadsides against minorities and opponents.
In this section I take a close look at the impact Prime Minister Modi
and his followers have had on some of the most fundamental ideas
and values of India.
 chapter two

FAKE HISTORY AND PSEUDO-NATIONALISM

For almost three quarters of a century now, the Hindu right wing has been
trying to assail the very idea of India. Its ideologues, notably K. B.
Hedgewar, M. S. Golwalkar, V. D. Savarkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya,
have propagated various theories to prove that India was and should again be
a Hindu Rashtra. In my last book, Why I Am a Hindu , I laid bare many of
their falsehoods and exaggerations, but my fear is that in Narendra Modi’s
India they will leave a permanent mark on the country’s psyche, and on its
collective historical imagination, because of the support they receive from the
prime minister and the BJP leadership. While assorted Hindutva thugs and
goons are busily engaged in assaulting minorities, Dalits, liberals and women,
another battle is being fought for the hearts and minds of all Indians. This
accounts for the spread of false history and pseudo-nationalism. Not for
nothing is ‘feku’ (congenital teller of tall tales) one of the epithets used for
Mr Modi. It, therefore, seems appropriate to begin this section with a chapter
on the dangerous falsehoods that are being propagated by Narendra Modi and
his associates about our history, nationalism, pluralism and other core beliefs
and constructs that objectively form our idea of India.
The essence of India is its diversity and concomitant secularism and
pluralism—and this is why this characteristic is being attacked by the
Hindutva right from the beginning. Since India: From Midnight to the
Millenium (1996), and in many of my other books and articles, I have written
at length about the reasons why the essence of India—the basic ‘idea of
India’—is wholly and unequivocally secular, or more accurately, plural, and
it is worth repeating some of these unalterable truths in order to give the lie to
what the right wing is trying hard to bring about.
The irony is that India’s secular coexistence was paradoxically made
possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus.
Their acceptance of difference characterized the Hinduism propagated by
Vivekananda and other visionary Hindu seers. This meant that it came
naturally to Hindus to coexist with practitioners of other faiths. In a plural
society, religious pluralism was merely one more kind of difference everyone
accepted, just as we knew that around us were people who spoke different
languages, ate different foods, dressed differently and had different shades of
skin colour from ours.
Secularism in India, therefore, did not mean separation of religion from
state. Instead, secularism in India means a state that was equally indulgent of
all religious groups, and favoured none. There was no ‘established’ state
religion; the adherent of every faith was a stakeholder in the Indian state.
Nor did it mean secularity in the French sense, or laïcité. The French
concept keeps religion out of governmental institutions like schools and
government out of religious institutions in turn, whereas Indian secularism
cheerfully refuses to forbid such religious interpenetration. Whereas it is
impermissible to sport any visible sign of religious affiliation in a French
government school or office (a Catholic may not wear a crucifix, a Muslim
sport a hijab, or a Sikh don a turban) all these are permitted in the equivalent
Indian institutions. Conversely, the Government of India embraces the
practice of providing financial support to religious schools and the
persistence of ‘personal law’ for different religious communities.
Until fairly recently, an Indian’s sense of nationhood lay in the slogan,
‘unity in diversity’. My generation was brought up to take pluralism for
granted, and to reject the communalism that had partitioned the nation when
the British left. In rejecting the case for Pakistan, Indian nationalism also
rejected the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood.
We never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had
established a state for Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus. To
accept the idea of India you had to spurn the logic that had divided the
country.
In some ways, this kind of Indian secularism has ancient roots in our
history. Admired monarchs from Ashoka, in the third century BCE , to
Harsha, in the sixth century CE , gave their recognition and patronage to
different religions. Ashoka’s Rock Edict XII forbade people from honouring
their own sects at the expense of others, and condemning the beliefs of
others. Citizenship and political status in his state were never linked to one’s
religion. The coexistence of religions is evident from the fact that the Ellora
Cave temples, some Jain, some Hindu and some Buddhist, were carved next
to each other between the fifth and tenth centuries. While this traditional
approach to secular or pluralist practice was not that of the Islamic kingdoms
that established themselves from the twelfth century onwards, even Muslim
rulers bound to uphold the less welcoming tenets of their faith had to
reconcile themselves to ruling an overwhelmingly non-Muslim populace and
accommodating prominent Hindus in government and the military. One
monarch, the Mughal Emperor Akbar, went so far as to create his own
syncretic religion, Dine-Ilahi, to meld the best features of Islam, Hinduism
and the other faiths of which he knew into a new ‘national faith’. It did not
outlast his reign, but the attempt was extraordinary. And Akbar’s
contemporary, Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, was a Sunni Muslim who
saw no contradiction in also styling himself ‘son of Guru Ganapati and the
pure Saraswati’ and wearing rudraksha beads. 170
The concept of sarva dharma sambhava—accepting the equality of all
religions—was propounded by great Hindu sages like Ramakrishna and
Vivekananda and upheld by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian nationalist
movement. While it was an axiomatic tenet of the post-Independence India in
which I grew up, sarva dharma sambhava has been increasingly rejected by
some proponents of Hindutva who spurn the notion of religious universalism
in favour of a more robust assertion of Hindu cultural identity and Hindus’
political rights. They are unembarrassed about rejecting ‘unity in diversity’;
the farthest the Sangh Parivar is prepared to go is to accept ‘diversity in
unity’, or variations of practice within an all-encompassing Hindu identity.
171
Yet the lived reality of Indian syncretism is difficult to deny. Indians of
all religious communities have long lived intertwined lives, and even
religious practices were rarely exclusionary: thus Muslim musicians played
and sang Hindu devotional songs, Hindus thronged Sufi shrines and
worshipped Muslim saints there. Northern India celebrated what was called a
‘Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb’, a syncretic culture that melded the cultural practices
of both Hinduism and Islam. Indeed, the reality of syncretism runs deep into
social practice. Muslim artisans create the masks for the major Hindu festival
of Dussehra in the holy city of Varanasi; the Ram Leela could not be
performed without their work. Muslim Patachitra painters sing and paint pats
(scrolls) about Hindu divinities. And among the most famous exponents of
Hindu devotional music are the Muslim Dagar brothers—not to mention the
Baul singers, a legacy of the Bhakti tradition, who sing Sufi-inspired folk
songs in praise of a universal God. Muslim sociologists and anthropologists
have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense
that the faith as practised by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the
considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between
Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives. Everywhere in this remarkable land
you will find quotidian examples of this sort of syncretism.
So the idea of India is of one land embracing many. As I have written
before, it is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed,
colour, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally
around a consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a
diverse democracy you don’t really need to agree—except on the ground
rules of how you will disagree. The reason India has survived all the stresses
and strains that have beset it for over seventy years, and that led so many to
predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to
manage without consensus.
But the twentieth-century politics of deprivation has eroded the culture’s
confidence. Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for
resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians of all faiths across India
seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities; by seeking votes in
the name of religion, caste and region, they have urged voters to define
themselves on these lines. As religion, caste and region have come to
dominate public discourse, to some it has become more important to be a
Muslim, a Bodo or a Yadav than to be an Indian.
III

As I wrote at length in Why I Am a Hindu , Hindutva ideologues find the

principles of tolerance and acceptance emasculating. The RSS
sarsanghchalak and ideologue M. S. Golwalkar wrote that India’s
independence from colonial rule in 1947 did not constitute real freedom
because the new leaders held on to the ‘perverted concept of nationalism’ that
located all who lived on India’s territory as equal constituents of the nation.
‘The concept of territorial nationalism,’ he wrote, ‘has verily emasculated our
nation and what more can we expect of a body deprived of its vital energy?
…And so it is that we see today the germs of corruption, disintegration and
dissipation eating into the vitals of our nation for having given up the natural
living nationalism in the pursuit of an unnatural, unscientific and lifeless
hybrid concept of territorial nationalism.’ 172 M. S. Golwalkar’s Bunch Of
Thoughts argues that territorial nationalism is a barbarism, since a nation is
‘not a mere bundle of political and economic rights’ but an embodiment of
national culture—in India, ‘ancient and sublime’ Hinduism. It sneers at
democracy, which Golwalkar sees as alien to Hindu culture, and lavishes
praise on the Code of Manu, whom Golwalkar salutes as ‘the first, the
greatest, and the wisest lawgiver of mankind’. 173
This is why the development of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ and the resultant
change in the public discourse about Indianness is so dangerous. The
suggestion that only a Hindu, and only a certain kind of Hindu, can be an
authentic Indian, is an affront to the very premise of Indian nationalism. An
India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us.
The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their homeland is
unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul
would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil.

Hindutva sees culture differently; as Golwalkar wrote, culture ‘is but a

product of our all-comprehensive religion, a part of its body and not
distinguishable from it’. 174 For the Hindutvavadis, India’s national culture is
Hindu religious culture, and cultural nationalism cloaks plural India in a
mantle of Hindu identity. Since Hindutva’s conception of nationalism is
rooted in the primacy of culture over politics, the historian K. N. Panikkar
has pointed out, the Hindutva effort is to create an idea of the Indian nation in
which the Hindu religious identity coincides with the cultural.
As the Hindutva ideologue David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri)
explains, after being ruled by Westernized Hindus for many decades after
Independence, today, Hindus are rediscovering their roots. ‘This movement is
not simply a regressive return to medieval Hindu values, but a rediscovery of
the validity and importance of Hindu culture and spirituality for both the
future as well as the past. It includes discovering the importance of Hindu
Yoga, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Vedic astrology, classical Indian art and culture,
and the Hindu view of society and government’. 175 What he calls ‘the
Bharatiya spiritual urge’, he says, after extolling Yoga and meditation, ‘did
not arise from the suppression of other human urges but from a full flowering
of human nature in all aspects, including the arts and the sciences. This we
see lavishly embodied in Indian music and dance, mathematics and
medicine’. This sounds reasonable enough, except when he adds that ‘Hindus
must learn to project a united front and reclaim the greater field of Hindu
Dharma that covers all aspects of life and culture’. 176 This call for unity
replaces variety with uniformity and dissent with dogma—a notion of Hindu
dharma that is all-encompassing and covers ‘all aspects of life and culture’
has no room for difference or for heterodoxy, let alone for deviance.
The inclusive, self-interrogating Hinduism propagated by the thinkers
like Vivekananda, Dayanand Saraswati, Aurobindo and Mahatma Gandhi is
not acceptable to the Sangh Parivar. The Hindutva premise, in Panikkar’s
words, is ‘that national regeneration and resurgence would require the
recreation of an authentic culture by reclaiming the indigenous and purging
the exogenous. Hindutva’s cultural project, encoded in the slogan
“nationalise and spiritualise”, therefore, is twofold: First, to retrieve and
disseminate the cultural traditions of the “golden” Hindu past; and second, to
eliminate all accretions that had become part of the heritage.’ 177
IV

In 2016, the Ministry of Culture appointed a committee to examine ancient

Indian history. Its members included the National Museum chief, B. R. Mani,
Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha vice chancellor, R. K.
Pandey, retired Delhi University linguistics professor, R. C. Sharma, and
Sanskrit scholars Santosh Kumar Shukla from Jawaharlal Nehru University
and Balram Shukla from Delhi University. By all accounts, the committee is
being coordinated by the Archaeological Survey of India, whose former
director general, Rakesh Tewari, is a member as well. 178
The committee’s chairman, K. N. Dikshit, told Reuters, ‘I have been
asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects
of ancient history.’ The committee’s creator, Culture Minister Mahesh
Sharma, confirmed in an interview that the group’s work was part of larger
plans to revise India’s history.
Balmukund Pandey, the head of the historical research wing of the RSS,
said he meets regularly with Culture Minister Sharma. ‘The time is now,’
Pandey said, to restore India’s past glory by establishing that ancient Hindu
texts are fact not myth. 179
 Mahesh Sharma told Reuters he expects the conclusions of the committee
to find their way into school textbooks and academic research. The panel is
referred to in government documents as the committee for the ‘holistic study
of origin and evolution of Indian culture since 12,000 years before the present
and its interface with other cultures of the world’. 180
The rewriting of history to better represent its worldview, and execute its
objectives, is a major project of Narendra Modi and his government. When I
published my book, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, I spoke
critically of 200 years of foreign rule. In their turn, the Hindutva brigade, led
by Prime Minister Modi himself, condemned 1,200 years of foreign rule. To
them, the Muslim rulers of India—whether the Delhi Sultans, the Deccani
Sultans or the Mughals (or the hundreds of other Muslims who occupied
thrones of greater or lesser importance for several hundred years across the
country)—were all foreigners. I responded that while the founder of a
Muslim dynasty may well have come to India from abroad, he and his
descendants stayed and assimilated in this country, married Hindu women,
and immersed themselves in the fortunes of this land; each Mughal emperor
after Babar had less and less connection of blood or allegiance to a foreign
country. If they looted or exploited India and Indians, they spent the proceeds
of their loot in India, and did not send it off to enrich a foreign land as the
British did. The Mughals received travellers from the Ferghana Valley
politely, enquired about the well-being of the people there and perhaps even
gave some money for the upkeep of the graves of their Chingizid ancestors,
but they stopped seeing their original homeland as home. By the second
generation, let alone the fifth or sixth, they were as ‘Indian’ as any Hindu.
This challenge of authenticity, however, emerges from those Hindus who
share the late novelist V. S. Naipaul’s view of theirs as a ‘wounded
civilization’, a pristine Hindu land that was subjected to repeated defeats and
conquests over the centuries at the hands of rapacious Muslim invaders and
was enfeebled and subjugated in the process. That Modi subscribes to this
notion is clear from the way he has unhesitatingly articulated it, especially
when he is in campaign mode. In speech after speech he has talked about the
iniquities of Muslim India. To Modi and his followers, Independence was not
merely freedom from British rule but an opportunity to restore the glory of
their culture and religion, wounded by Muslim conquerors. Historians like
Audrey Truschke, author of a sympathetic biography of Aurangzeb,
Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth 181 , have argued that this account of
Muslims despoiling the Hindu homeland is ‘neither a continuous historical
memory nor based on accurate records of the past’. But there is no gainsaying
the emotional content of the Hindutva view of the past: it is for them a matter
of faith that India is a Hindu nation, which Muslim rulers attacked, looted and
sought to destroy, and documented historical facts that refute this view as
grossly incomplete and partial are at best an inconvenience, at worst an
irrelevance.
In this Hindutva-centred view, history is made of religion-based binaries,
in which all Muslim rulers are evil and all Hindus are valiant resisters,
embodiments of incipient Hindu nationalism. The Hindutvavadis believe, in
Prof Truschke’s words, ‘that India was subjected to repeated defeats over the
centuries, including by generations of Muslim conquerors that enfeebled the
people and their land…their sentiments [are] often undergirded by modern
anti-Muslim sentiments.’ 182 K. N. Panikkar has pointed out that liberal and
tolerant rulers such as Ashoka, Akbar, Jai Singh, Shahu Maharaj and Wajid
Ali Shah do not figure in Hindutva’s list of national heroes. (Indeed, where
many nationalist historians extolled Akbar as the liberal, tolerant counterpart
to the Islamist Aurangzeb, Hindutvavadis have begun to attack him too,
principally because he was Muslim, and like most medieval monarchs, killed
princes who stood in his way, many of whom happened to be Hindu.)
The debates over history are not confined to the distant past alone.
Narendra Modi chose the anniversary of the 1942 Quit India movement to
launch a campaign called ‘ 70 Saal Azadi: Zara Yaad Karo Qurbani’
(‘Seventy years of freedom: remember the sacrifices’). The BJP which, led
by the PM, has sought to drape itself in the mantle of nationalism, is now
seeking to appropriate the freedom struggle for its cause. Ironically, the Quit
India movement is an occasion the BJP could well have chosen to criticize
rather than celebrate, since it resulted in the jailing by the British of all the
leaders and thousands of workers of the nationalist movement, a resultant
free hand to the Muslim League to build up a support base it had lacked in
the elections of 1937, and thus, strengthened the hands of those who wanted
Partition.
But the Modi government has no intention of repudiating Quit India as a
Congress folly. It wants to make heroes of freedom fighters, by implication
placing them on its own side in a contemporary retelling of history. The
complication is that the political cause to which the BJP is heir—embodied in
the Jana Sangh, the RSS, and the Hindutva movement—had no prominent
freedom fighter of its own during the nationalist struggle for azadi. The BJP
traces its origin to leaders who were not particularly active during the
nationalist movement. The lack of inspiration for the people in the parent
body of the BJP means people like Mr Modi have to look for role models
elsewhere. Thus they extol the Marxist Bhagat Singh, various young men
who (unlike Gandhi) resorted to violence against the British and were
martyred, and other nationalists who they claim have been marginalized by
the Congress’s glorification of the Nehru dynasty.
The process had already begun, lest we forget, when then Chief Minister
Modi moved aggressively to lay claim to the legacy of one of India’s most
respected founding fathers, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, before the 2014
election. As I have mentioned earlier in this book, in his quest to garb himself
in a more distinguished lineage than his party can ordinarily lay claim to, Mr
Modi called on farmers across India to donate iron from their ploughs to
construct a giant, nearly 600-foot statue of the Iron Man in his state, which
would be by far the tallest statue in the world, dwarfing the Statue of Liberty.
But it will be less of a monument to the modest Gandhian it ostensibly
honours than an embodiment of the overweening ambitions of its builder—
who, as I have mentioned, decided to get a Chinese foundry to cast it, for his
ambitions exceeded India’s capacities.
Modi’s motives are easy to divine. As his own image was tarnished by
the communal massacre in Gujarat when he was chief minister in 2002,
identifying himself with Sardar Patel (who is portrayed as the leader who
stood up for the nation’s Hindus during the horrors of Partition and was firm
on issues like Kashmir) is an attempt at character-building by association—
portraying Narendra Modi himself as an embodiment of the tough, decisive
man of action that Sardar Patel was, rather than the destructive bigot his
enemies decry.
It helps that Patel is widely admired for his extraordinary role in forging
India that gave him an unchallenged standing as the Iron Man. Sardar Patel
represents both a national appeal and a Gujarati origin that suits Modi. The
Modi-as-latter-day-Patel message has been resonating well with many
Gujaratis, who are proud to be reminded of a native son the nation looks up
to, and with many of India’s urban middle-class, who see in Narendra Modi a
strong leader to cut through the confusion and indecision of India’s messy
democracy.
But Sardar Patel’s conduct during the violence that accompanied
Partition stands in stark contrast to Narendra Modi’s in 2002. Both Sardar
Patel and Narendra Modi were faced with the serious breakdown of law and
order in their respective domains, involving violence and rioting against the
Muslims. In Delhi in 1947, Sardar Patel immediately and effectively moved
to ensure the protection of Muslims, herding 10,000 in the most vulnerable
areas to the security of Delhi’s Red Fort. Because Sardar Patel was afraid that
the local security forces might have been affected by the virus of communal
passions, he moved army troops from Madras and Pune to Delhi to ensure
law and order. Sardar Patel also made it a point to send a reassuring signal to
the Muslim community by attending prayers at the famous Nizamuddin
Dargah to convey a clear message that Muslims and their faith belonged
unquestionably on the soil of India. Sardar Patel went to the border town of
Amritsar, where there were attacks on Muslims fleeing to the new Islamic
state of Pakistan, and pleaded with Hindu and Sikh mobs to stop victimizing
Muslim refugees. In each of these cases, Sardar Patel succeeded and there are
literally tens of thousands of people who are alive today because of his
interventions.
The contrast with what happened in Gujarat in 2002 is painful. Whether
or not one ascribes direct blame to Narendra Modi for the pogrom that year,
he can certainly claim no credit for acting in the way Patel did in Delhi. In
Gujarat, there was no direct and immediate action by CM Modi, as the state’s
chief executive, to protect the Muslims. Nor did Mr Modi express any public
condemnation of the attacks, let alone undertake any symbolic action of
going to a masjid or visiting a Muslim neighbourhood to convey reassurance.
183
There is a particular irony to a self-proclaimed ‘Hindu nationalist’ like
Narendra Modi laying claim to the legacy of a Gandhian leader who would
never have qualified his Indian nationalism with a religious label. Sardar
Patel believed in equal rights for all irrespective of their religion or caste. It is
true that at the time of partition Sardar Patel was inclined to believe, unlike
Jawaharlal Nehru, that an entire community had seceded. In my biography,
Nehru: The Invention of India , 184 I have given some examples of Nehru-ji
and Sardar Patel clashing on this issue. But there are an equal number of
examples where Sardar Patel, if he had to choose between what was the right
thing for the Hindus and what was the right thing morally, invariably
plumped for the moral Gandhian approach.
An example, so often distorted by the Sangh Parivar apologists, was his
opposition to Jawaharlal Nehru’s pact with Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime
minister of Pakistan, on the question of violence in East Pakistan against the
Hindu minority. The Nehru–Liaquat pact was indeed criticized by Sardar
Patel and he disagreed quite ferociously with Jawaharlal Nehru on the matter.
But when Pandit Nehru insisted on his position, it was Sardar Patel who gave
in, and his reasoning was entirely Gandhian: that violence in West Bengal
against Muslims essentially took away Indians’ moral right to condemn
violence against Hindus in East Pakistan. That was not a Hindu nationalist
position but a classically Gandhian approach as an Indian nationalist.
The only true nationalism that deserves to be inculcated in each and every
one of us is Indian nationalism; anything else is fake or pseudo-nationalism.
Indian nationalism grows out of an idea of India that celebrates diversity, but
our ruling party prefers uniformity, built on a triad of Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva,
all of which are essential to India but not sufficient to exhaust the idea of
Indianness. In doing so they are undermining the basic ethos of India, which
recognizes the nation’s diversity and celebrates multiple ways of being
Indian.

170 Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans : The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji , New Delhi:
Juggernaut Books, 2018.
171 Valson Thampu, ‘The RSS, Pranab and Adi Shankara’, New Indian Express , 15 June
2018; For a fuller discussion of the issues summarized over the next dozen pages, see
Shashi Tharoor, Why I Am a Hindu , New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2018.
172 M. S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined , 3rd edition, Nagpur: Bharat
Prakashan, 1945, pp. 52–53.
173 M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 4th impression, Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan,
1968, p. 156.
174 M. S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined , 3rd edition, Nagpur: Bharat
Prakashan, 1945, p. 22.
175 David Frawley, Arise Arjuna: Hinduism and the Modern World , New Delhi: Voice of
India, 1995, p. 15.
176 Ibid., p. xxv.
177 K. N. Panikkar, ‘In the Name of Nationalism’, Frontline , 13 March 2004.
178 Rupam Jain and Tom Lasseter, ‘By rewriting history, Hindu nationalists aim to assert
their dominance over India’, Reuters , 6 March 2018.
179 Ibid.
180 Ibid.
181 Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth , New Delhi: Juggernaut Books,
2017.
182 ‘Hated in the Present for Digging Into the Past: Audrey Truschke on Writing About
Aurangzeb’, The Wire , 26 May 2017.
183 ‘Modi modern-day Nero: SC’, Times of India , 12 April 2004; ‘Narendra Modi trying
to protect Godhra riots perpetrators: Minority minister’, DNA , 5 December 2013.
184 New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003.
 chapter three

A GROWING WAVE OF COMMUNALISM

The ways in which Narendra Modi and his cohorts are seeking to modify
India and its essence is not limited to redefining nationalism, rewriting
textbooks, reshaping history or making incendiary speeches. Not a week
passes without news of some new outrage. This is why it was startling to hear
the union minister for minority affairs, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and the home
minister, Rajnath Singh, announce in 2018 that there have been ‘no big
communal riots’ in India over the past four years. 185 Mr Singh even asserted
during the no-confidence debate in the Lok Sabha in July that year that
communal violence had decreased during his government’s tenure. He was
wrong, of course, but it is instructive to analyse how wrong he was.
Since the ascent of the BJP to power, the forces unleashed by the
dominance of Hindutva have resulted in many incidents of violence. In one
grim reckoning, more than 389 individuals have been killed in anti-minority
acts of violence since mid-2014, and hundreds of others injured, stripped,
beaten and humiliated. 186 Particularly haunting is the story of fifteen-year-
old Junaid Khan, returning home on a crowded train after buying new clothes
for Eid, who was stabbed repeatedly because he was Muslim and thrown off
the train to bleed to death on the tracks. 187 Headlines have spoken
continually of riots and killing, Hindu against Muslim, of men being
slaughtered because of the mark on a forehead or the absence of a foreskin.
As I have remarked earlier in this book, and as has been widely observed,
following the BJP’s victory in the 2014 elections, a wave of Hindu-
majoritarian triumphalism has swept the land. In its wake have come new
laws to protect cows and vociferous demands for their strict enforcement.
Gau-rakshak or cow protection societies, which I will write about in greater
detail in the next chapter, have been revived, and many have taken it upon
themselves to compel compliance. In the process, not only have they taken
the law into their own hands, but they have perpetrated grave crimes,
including murder, in the name of protecting the cow. Seventy cases of cow-
related violence have been reported in the last eight years, of which 97 per
cent (68 out of 70) have occurred during the first four years of BJP rule and a
majority of these have occurred in BJP-ruled states. 136 people have been
injured in these attacks and 28 killed: 86 per cent of the victims were, of
course, Muslim. 188
Many of the incidents are well known: the case of a dairy farmer, Pehlu
Khan, transporting cattle legally with a licence, being beaten to death on 1
April 2017 while his tormentors filmed his pleas for mercy on their mobile
phones, is particularly egregious. A cattle-herder in Haryana, Mustain Abbas,
was murdered and mutilated a year earlier for doing his job, transporting
cattle. Truckers, cattle traders and alleged cow smugglers have also been
killed by ‘cow protection’ groups. A sixteen-year-old Kashmiri Muslim boy
was murdered for having hitched a ride on a truck that was transporting
cattle.
In 2015, when a Muslim, Mohammed Akhlaq, father of a serving Indian
Air Force havildar, was lynched by a mob in Uttar Pradesh on suspicions of
having killed a cow, the authorities launched a forensic investigation into
whether the meat in his refrigerator was beef (it was not). The fact that a man
had been killed and his son nearly beaten to death was equated with an
unfounded allegation of beef consumption, as if the latter ‘crime’ could
extenuate the former. 189 Worse, when a man who was part of the lynch mob
died of natural causes a few weeks later, his coffin was draped with the
Indian flag and a serving union minister who attended his funeral hailed him
—an unspeakable act, and coming from a high office-holder of the secular
Indian state, an unacceptable one.
Muslims have not been the only targets of the cow vigilantes, of course.
There are also Dalits. But the communal colour that marked each of these
incidents speaks to the inaccuracy of the ministers’ statements. Perhaps they
would take refuge behind the assertion that these were isolated incidents
rather than mass communal violence. Yet they speak of a pervasive pattern
that has deeply affected society across the country. And when another
minister is accused of condoning such incidents by garlanding members of a
lynch mob, society shivers. 190 (He says these individuals were framed and
are out on bail, but regrets having garlanded them: the damage, though, is
done.)
 There is a tragic vocabulary to the analysis of communal violence in our
country. A ‘major’ communal incident is one that results in more than five
deaths or leaves over ten people injured. An incident that results in one death
or ten injured is termed as ‘important or significant’. Mr Naqvi spoke of ‘big’
communal riots, but ‘big’ is not a term of definition in our national
lexicology. ‘Major’, however, is surely ‘big’, and there are three ‘major
communal incidents’ that have been reported during BJP rule—Saharanpur,
Uttar Pradesh, in 2014, Hazinagar, West Bengal, in 2016 and Baduria-
Basirhat, also in West Bengal, in 2017. 191
When we move from ‘major’, however, to merely ‘important’, the
number of ‘communal incidents’ in the last four years rises to 2,920, in which
389 people were killed and 8,890 injured. My source is Rajnath Singh’s own
government: these figures come from a reply by the Home Ministry to
questions in the Lok Sabha. According to the government, Uttar Pradesh
(UP), somewhat predictably, reported the most incidents over the last four
years, a staggering 645. UP also reported the most deaths in these communal
incidents (121) between 2014 and 2017, followed by Rajasthan (36) and
Karnataka (35). The venues for communal rioting on the BJP’s watch ranged
from Ballabgarh, Haryana, in 2015, to Bhima-Koregaon, Maharashtra, in
2017. 192
The Home Ministry’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) collects
and maintains nationwide crime records, which naturally includes riots.
NCRB data confirm that over 2,885 communal riots were reported between
2014 and 2016. Many others may not have been recorded as communal; as
many as 61,974 riots were reported in 2016 under sections 147 to 151 and
153A of the IPC (the latter records cases relating to ‘promoting enmity on
ground of religion, race and place of birth’). In 2016, 869 communal riots
were reported, the largest number in Haryana (250). 193 The figures for 2017
haven’t been released yet, more than halfway into 2018; I dread what they are
likely to reveal.
We have a government that seems to believe it can issue statements with
utter disregard for the truth and people will believe them. This is the only
explanation for the two ministers’ breathtaking assertions. It matches the
prime minister’s claims on the economy and the government’s blandly
disingenuous PR pronouncements on everything from electrification to
women’s empowerment. But facts and figures matter. And the numbers
simply do not add up to the picture the government seeks to portray.
According to NCRB data concerning incidents of rioting, the years under Dr
Manmohan Singh’s rule were the most peaceful in independent India’s
history. 194 That record appears in no danger of being rapidly overturned:
‘peaceful’ is not an adjective that can be applied to India under Moditva.
The context against which such violence is occurring is a noticeable
change in the communal climate across the country. A Shiv Sena worker
shoves a chapatti down the throat of a fasting Muslim caterer. 195 A BJP
leader casts doubt on the national credentials of India’s leading woman tennis
player, because she is Muslim and married to a Pakistani. 196 The Bharatiya
Shiksha Niti Ayog has been constituted by the RSS-affiliated Shiksha
Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, under the leadership of the notorious Dinanath Batra,
with a mandate to ‘suggest corrective steps’ to ‘Indianize’ the education
system. 197 All of these incidents invite no rebuke, let alone punishment.
Intangible factors have also contributed to the sense of communal
polarization across our country. Election campaigns have showcased
egregious instances of such rhetorical transgressions. Bihar BJP MP Giriraj
Singh declared during the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign that ‘those who
want to stop’ BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi would soon
have ‘no place in India…because their place will be in Pakistan’. 198 BJP
president Amit Shah reportedly claimed in a speech that the election was a
chance to seek ‘revenge’ for the ‘insult’ inflicted on the Hindu community
during the riots in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013, in which nearly 60
were killed, hundreds raped and thousands displaced. (Most of the victims
were Muslim.) 199
Electoral victory has emboldened Hindutvavadi voices across the
country. Goa State Cooperation Minister Deepak Dhavalikar told his state
assembly, ‘If we all support it and we stand by Narendra Modi
systematically, then I feel a Hindu Rashtra will be established.’ 200 Goa
Deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza, supporting his party colleague, said
‘India is already a Hindu nation’ and ‘all Indians in Hindustan are Hindus.’
He added that he considers himself a ‘Christian-Hindu’. 201 In July 2014,
BJP MLA and party national executive member C. T. Ravi had issued a tweet
advocating the ‘Gujarat Model’ to stem the Saharanpur riots. He said ‘Only
the Gujarat model, that worked from 2002 in containing their [i.e. Muslims]
rioting elements, can work. Apply across Bharat.’ 202
It is easy to discount such verbal violence—and there have been worse
from the likes of Pravin Togadia and Ashok Singhal, whom the BJP prefer to
dismiss as fringe figures—but the words in fact reflect a harsher reality. As I
have mentioned earlier, the first time in the history of India, the ruling party
has no Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha. Indeed, the state that has
historically sent Muslims to Parliament after every single general election,
Uttar Pradesh, with a 20 per cent Muslim population, failed to do so in 2014,
when the BJP and its Apna Dal ally swept 73 seats out of 80 there. 203 There
is no starker evidence of polarization imaginable.
Prime Minister Modi has been either ambivalent or utterly silent on all
these incidents, including the Muzaffarnagar riots, and has not expressed
disapproval of any communal actions taken by groups within the Sangh
Parivar. He has missed several opportunities to reach out and reassure the
Muslim community. He has not even made the simple gesture of attending an
iftar during Ramadan, let alone hosting one as his predecessors did.
On the rare occasion that he has actually condemned communal violence,
his statements have been blandly reassuring, if belated. Early into his reign,
during a video conference with NRIs in the US, PM Modi said: ‘My
definition of secularism is simple: “India First”. Whatever you do, wherever
you work, India should be the top priority for all its citizens. [The] country is
above all religions and ideologies.’ 204
In February 2015, Narendra Modi spoke more clearly on the subject.
Addressing a Christian congregation in New Delhi that was meeting to
celebrate the elevation to sainthood of two Catholic figures, Kuriakose Elias
Chavara and Mother Euphrasia, and doing so in the wake of mounting
concern over the vandalization of six Catholic churches in and around the
capital, Mr Modi said his government would not ‘accept violence against any
religion, on any pretext.’ He declared unequivocally. ‘I strongly condemn
such violence. My government will act strongly in this regard.’ 205
This was undoubtedly because of the concern many of us had expressed
about the damage the irresponsible statements and actions of the Hindutva
brigades were doing to the country. The attacks on the churches were
symptomatic of a far larger problem that was leaving all minorities feeling
insecure. Foreign leaders were taking note too, with visiting US President
Barack Obama telling a Delhi audience that ‘India will succeed so long as it
is not splintered along the lines of religious faith,’ and commenting adversely
on religious intolerance in India at a Prayer Breakfast on his return to the US.
This was clearly not the way the prime minister wished his government to be
perceived.
‘We consider the freedom to have, to retain, and to adopt, a religion or
belief is the personal choice of a citizen,’ Mr Modi averred. ‘My government
will ensure that there is complete freedom of faith and that everyone has the
undeniable right to retain or adopt the religion of his or her choice without
coercion or undue influence. My government will not allow any religious
group, belonging to the majority or the minority, to incite hatred against
others, overtly or covertly. Mine will be a government that gives equal
respect to all religions.’ 206
While foreign reporters were quick to portray this as a gesture to
Christians and other minorities, rebuking his own followers in the BJP and
Sangh Parivar, who had gleefully led the ghar wapsi and love jihad
campaigns and repeatedly affirmed that India was a Hindu country rather
than the pluralist land of constitutional practice, some Indian commentators
saw it also as PM Modi signalling to the minorities that they too should look
beyond minority rights to India’s ancient heritage of tolerance. After all, he
said: ‘My government will not allow any religious group, belonging to the
majority or the minority [italics added], to incite hatred against others, overtly
or covertly. Mine will be a government that gives equal respect to all
religions.’
It was striking, in this context, that the PM used the words ‘without
coercion or undue influence’, which some saw as a swipe at alleged
inducements offered by Christian proselytizers to low-caste Hindus. On the
whole, though, there was less here for the Hindutva elements than for others:
this was the speech every Indian pluralist was waiting for the PM to make.
‘Equal respect for all religions,’ he went on, ‘must be in the DNA of every
Indian… I appeal to all religious groups to act with restraint, mutual respect,
and tolerance in the true spirit of this ancient nation which is manifest in our
Constitution.’ 207
Lest his speech be seen as responding to Obama’s tutelage, the PM was
firm in affirming the indigenous roots of Indian religious tolerance. ‘Our
Constitution did not evolve in a vacuum. It has roots in the ancient cultural
traditions of India. The principle of equal respect has been a part of India’s
ethos for thousands of years and that is how it became integral to the
Constitution of India… As Swami Vivekananda said: “We believe not only in
universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.”’
That was a welcome reminder to those Hindutva activists who have been
advocating Hinduism as a badge of identity rather than a set of principles and
traditions which are at odds with their narrow-minded bigotry. Narendra
Modi reminded them that ‘We believe that there is truth in every religion.
Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti (There is one truth, but the sages call it by
many different names).’
The speech was welcome, but the real challenge for Prime Minister
Modi, as I tweeted soon after he made the speech, would be to get the Sangh
Parivar to live up to it. Unfortunately for us all, there is no sign of this; and
the prime minister’s advocacy of tolerance and repudiation of sectarian
violence has too often been too little too late. Instead his more frequent
response has been silence—an obdurate refusal to speak, let alone to
condemn the atrocities. Mr Modi’s silence when violence has occurred has
emboldened its perpetrators to believe the prime minister condones their
actions, thus empowering the worst elements in our society. 208 It is a central
element of the Modi paradox that whenever he is torn between being a
Hindutvavadi leader and an Indian statesman, his sectarian instincts prevail
more often than his prime ministerial duty.

185 ‘‘‘No big communal riot” in past 4 years, claims BJP: Data shows 389 dead in over
2,000 incidents since 2014’, FirstPost , 6 July 2018.
186 Ibid.
187 Saumya Lakhani, ‘On Eid, fear grips Junaid village: Kuch mat bolo, chup chaap sab
sun lo’, Indian Express , 27 June 2017.
188 ‘Cow vigilantism in India: 2017 sees 26 cases of cattle-related violence; most in 8
years’, FirstPost , 29 July, 2017; Delna Abraham and Ojaswi Rao, ‘86% killed in cow-
related violence since 2010 are Muslim, 97% attacks after Modi govt came to power’,
Hindustan Times , 16 July 2017.
189 ‘Lynchistan: Mob Lynching Cases Across India’, The Quint .
190 ‘Minister In Modi’s Cabinet Garlands Cow Vigilantes Convicted For Lynching A
Muslim Trader In Jharkhand’, Huffington Post , 7 July 2018.
191 ‘‘No Big Communal Riot’ In Last 4 Years: BJP Minister. Fact: 389 Dead in Over 2,000
Communal Incidents’, FactChecker.in , 5 July 2018; Alok Mishra, ‘“Communal violence
up after BJP came to power”’, Times of India , 9 October 2015.
192 Ibid.
193 Ibid.
194 Shivam Vij, ‘Riot after riot: The Manmohan years were the most peaceful, data shows’,
Scroll.in , 5 August 2014.
195 ‘Indians MPs “force-fed” fasting Muslim worker’, BBC, 23 July 2014.
196 Ayesha Perrera, ‘Dear Mr Laxman, sorry but Sania Mirza will always be India’s
daughter’, FirstPost , 5 August 2014.
197 Dhirendra K. Jha, ‘RSS sets up panel to supervise saffronisation of education’,
Scroll.in , 2 August 2014.
198 ‘Modi’s critics will have to live in Pakistan, not India: BJP leader Giriraj Singh’,
FirstPost , 20 April 2014.
199 ‘Amit Shah is chargesheeted in election “hate speech” case’, Indian Express , 11
September 2014.
200 ‘India is a Hindu nation, I’m a Christian-Hindu: Goa Dy CM Francis D’Souza’,
FirstPost , 25 July 2014.
201 Ibid.
202 ‘Karnataka BJP MLA wants Gujarat model in Uttar Pradesh’, Deccan Chronicle , 29
July 2014.
203 Mohd Faisel Fareed, ‘No Mulsim MP from Up’, Indian Express , 16 May 2014.
204 ‘“India First” is my definition of secularism: Narendra Modi’, Economic Times , 10
March 2013.
205 ‘“My govt will ensure complete freedom of faith,” PM says’, Business Standard , 18
February 2015.
206 Ibid.
207 Ibid.
208 ‘Sonia Gandhi leads protest march, questions PM Modi’s silence’, Indian Express , 4
November 2015.
 chapter four

SACRED COWS AND UNHOLY POLITICS

Typhon was the most terrible creature in Greek myth. In the words of Hesiod,
the Greek poet (circa 700 BCE ), ‘from his shoulders grew a hundred heads of
a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the
brows of his eyes in his marvelous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from
his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which
uttered every kind of sound unspeakable, for at one time they made sounds
such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing
aloud in proud, ungovernable fury; and, at another, the sound of a lion,
relentless at heart; and at another, sounds like whelps…and again, at another,
he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed.’ 209 This fearsome
creature was invoked by a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in 2018,
to decry the monstrous phenomenon that has gained ground in the country
ever since the Modi government came into power. The judgment, written by
Chief Justice Dipak Misra, deplored ‘lynching and mob violence’ and warned
that there were ‘creeping threats that may gradually take the shape of a
Typhon-like monster as evidenced in the wake of the rising wave of incidents
of recurring patterns by frenzied mobs across the country, instigated by
intolerance and misinformed by circulation of false news and false stories.’
210
The judges added, ‘There has been an unfortunate litany of spiralling
mob violence and agonized horror, presenting a grim gruesome picture that
compels us to reflect whether the populace of a great republic like ours has
lost the value of tolerance to sustain a diverse culture.’ In its judgment the
court directed the government to pass a special law to deter such crimes. It
said the ‘recurrent pattern of violence…cannot be allowed to become the new
normal.’ 211 (As a Member of Parliament, I have, together with a colleague
from the Upper House, the senior advocate K. T. S. Tulsi, submitted the draft
of such a law to the government.)
The court’s stepping in to voice its concern over lynchings was just the
latest indictment of the Modi government’s appalling track record in the
matter. What is ironic about most of the lynchings is that the central
protagonist in most of these incidents is that most peaceable and innocent of
animals, the cow.
Many orthodox Hindus, particularly in the northern Indian states that
comprise the so-called Cow Belt, venerate the cow as gau mata, the ‘mother
of all’, which provides nourishment and sustenance through its milk—not its
meat. Refusing to eat beef is common in these states.
But it is not always a personal choice. Several Indian states have passed
laws outlawing cow slaughter, and some have prohibited the possession and
consumption of beef altogether. Cow slaughter and beef consumption are
fully legal in just five of India’s twenty-nine states, mainly in the south and
northeast. 212
In the previous chapter, I have detailed various instances of the murder of
innocent people just because they happened to be Muslim and were rumoured
to have eaten beef or were accused of supplying cows to slaughter. Ninety-
seven per cent of all such incidents in the seventy years of independent
India’s history have occurred in four and a half years of BJP rule under the
Modi government. 213
Indeed, a signal illiberal achievement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
BJP regime has been the revival of the cow as an instrument of political
warfare. And the spate of attacks in the past few years reveals a serious
problem with the country’s trajectory under Mr Modi.
Of course, the cow has long had a place in Indian politics: the country’s
Constitution includes a provision explicitly urging a gradual movement
towards the full prohibition of cow slaughter—a ban that has already been
implemented in most states.
For most of India’s existence, however, the default approach has
essentially been ‘live and let live’—make your own choice about beef, and let
others do the same. Where beef was legally available, it was consumed not
just by Muslims and other minorities, but also by many poorer Hindus, who
could not afford other kinds of meat.
But that response was possible only so long as relatively liberal or
moderate officials (including an earlier BJP-led coalition government) were
in power. The Modi government does not fit that description. Instead, it is
full of leaders who seem more concerned with what goes into other people’s
mouths than what comes out of their own.
II

One of the worst aspects of this repellent phenomenon that is sweeping

across parts of the country has been the rise of the gau-rakshaks. Gau
Rakshak Samitis, or ‘cow protection societies,’ saw a revival in India after
the BJP’s 2014 electoral win. Gaurakshaks took it upon themselves to ensure
that cows are not slaughtered or eaten.
Making matters worse, the cause of cow protection has now been linked
to another persistent and destructive custom in Indian society: violence
against Muslims and Dalits. Indeed, the Cow Belt, where cow vigilantism is
most rampant, is also a hub of atrocities against Dalits, 63 per cent of which
occur in just four states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and
Rajasthan. 214 It is no coincidence that these are also the states where the BJP
fared best in 2014.
The link between cows and Dalits is well known. Cows may be
considered holy, but they are not immortal, and when they die (ideally of
natural causes), someone must dispose of their carcasses. For centuries, that
job has fallen to Dalits, who collect the carcasses, skin them and sell their
hides to tanners and leather-makers, deliver the meat to Muslim butchers
(where it is legal), and bury or cremate what remains. It is a livelihood for a
group with few economic opportunities—one that benefits the many Hindus
who would not want to perform such an unpleasant task.
But several recent incidents have shaken the foundations of this
arrangement. In the state of Gujarat, four Dalit youths caught skinning a cow
were stripped, tied, and beaten with iron rods by cow vigilantes who accused
them of killing the animal (they had not). 215 In BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh,
two Dalit women were assaulted for supposedly carrying illegal cow meat (it
was legal buffalo meat). 216 In Haryana, two Dalit men were beaten and
forced to eat cow dung for the same ‘crime’. 217
Such incidents have heightened the sense of vulnerability felt by many
who do not necessarily share the vigilantes’ reverence for cows. They have
also led to serious economic challenges for some groups.
Farmers who raise their cows with care and respect may not be able to
afford to continue caring for those that are too old to produce milk. In the
past, they would address this by quietly selling the aged cows either to local
butchers or to those who would transport them to states where cow slaughter
is legal. But, because that would be far too dangerous in the current political
climate, many farmers are being driven into debt caring for old cows, or
simply abandoning them, while the cow population in India becomes
increasingly unsustainable.
Moreover, Dalits are increasingly refusing to dispose of cow carcasses.
After the Gujarat incident, one group of Dalits in the state declared outright
their intention to suspend their traditional duties. ‘If the cow is your mother,’
they challenged upper-caste Hindus, ‘why don’t you bury her?’ 218
Where was the central government when all of this has been happening?
Initially, it did not condemn cow vigilantism. India’s social justice minister,
whose principal responsibility is to promote the welfare of India’s Dalits,
expressed regret not for the vigilantes’ violent actions, but for the fact that
they were spurred by ill-founded rumours.
In August 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally broke his silence
on the issue, warning people to beware of the fake gau-rakshaks who are
trying to create social conflict, declaring that ‘all states should take stern
action against these people’. There were fifteen cases of mob lynching in the
first half of 2018 alone. 219 But BJP-ruled Rajasthan has instituted rules that
make it legal for ‘civil society groups’ to enforce cow protection, and there is
little appetite for curbing them.
In July 2018 came the Supreme Court’s condemnation following which
Home Minister Rajnath Singh also spoke about how his government would
be taking steps to curb the menace. But all the government’s barely visible
actions to prevent lynchings and mob violence have taken too long to come
about, and this is indisputably because the cow has become the current
instrument of choice in the ruling dispensation’s relentless drive to promote
its ideology of Hindutva.
III

For the longest time, all those who did not subscribe to this ideology strongly
resisted attempts to impose it on the rest of the country. Calls during the
constituent assembly deliberations to ban cow slaughter, opposed by a vocal
minority, were finally reduced to a ‘directive principle’ anchored in
economics and not religion: Article 48 of the Constitution says that ‘the State
shall endeavour to organize agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and
scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and
improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and
other milch and draught cattle.’ So this ‘endeavour’ (stopping well short of a
ban) was related specifically to the needs of agriculture and animal
husbandry, not of worship.
Gandhi-ji himself said that though he did not eat meat and was personally
opposed to cow slaughter, in a multi-religious country like India, he could not
justify imposing his Hindu views on the many who did not share his faith.
Many Hindus feel the same way; I am a vegetarian and abhor the idea of
consuming the corpses of animals, but I do not judge those who, for cultural
or other personal reasons, do so. I only ask that animals be treated decently
and without cruelty, and that even their slaughter, for purposes of
consumption, be conducted humanely and with minimal pain and suffering
for the poor creatures.
The furore that accompanied the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act
(Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2016, rolled out by the Ministry of
Environmental Affairs, polarized opinion across the country, especially in
beef-eating states like Kerala. In Kerala, the new rules produced a strong
reaction from an indignant chief minister, invited condemnation across the
local political spectrum, forced the state to drag the central government to
court, united warring student union factions to organize beef festivals across
the state and even gave Twitterati a field day with #PoMoneModi (Go Away
Modi)—used last when the prime minister compared Kerala to the African
nation of Somalia—resurfacing as a popular hashtag.
The debate over the cow has raised fundamental questions the
government cannot escape, even as it tries to shift the focus to the
misbehaviour of a few young men.
The first issue is constitutional—the decision to institute the full
prohibition of cow slaughter is a prerogative of the states, not the government
at the centre. Entry 15 of the State List of the Seventh Schedule of the
Constitution provides for the ‘Preservation, protection and improvement of
stock and prevention of animal diseases, veterinary training and practice’,
empowering state legislatures to legislate prevention of slaughter and
preservation of cattle.
Different states have different approaches to cow welfare. Some states
like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi have strict laws while others
such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland
have milder rules or no rules governing the welfare of cows. The blanket new
rule is clearly an infringement on the rights of the states, undermining the
federal rights guaranteed by our Constitution.
The second objection is practical. The Constitution rightly speaks of
milch and draught cattle. Cows produce milk for about eight years, at which
point they are too old for either milch or draught purposes. But they go on to
live another eight years. Farmers have to spend at least ₹60 a day on the food
and fodder requirements and other maintenance costs of a cow. 220 That is
₹22,000 a year, or ₹1,76,000 for eight years, as the minimum expenditure for
a poor farmer on a non-productive investment, which is a fortune for farmers
who often live barely above subsistence level. This is why they sell non-
lactating cows, normally for slaughter.
Even our highest courts, despite their variety of views on the matter, have
recognized that ‘a total ban on cattle slaughter [is] unreasonable if, under
economic conditions, keeping useless bulls or bullocks be a burden on the
society and therefore not in the public interest.’ 221
India is already home to nearly 512 million cows, according to the 19th
National Livestock Census 2012. 222 Aside from maintaining them decently,
India would also have to deal with deforestation and overgrazing, as well as
the problems caused by cattle abandoned by farmers who cannot afford to
maintain unproductive animals and are no longer able to sell them for
slaughter; these cows stray onto the streets and in many cases die of
malnutrition in their old age. The previous policy recognized that banning
cow slaughter would impose an economic burden on farmers, who, given the
paucity of resources at their disposal, would struggle to maintain these
animals.
As a result, India is also the largest exporter of buffalo meat in the world
—a multibillion-dollar business. 223 Since the sale and transfer of animals is
integral to keep this going, the new rules are likely to severely cripple the
meat export, dairy, leather and other allied businesses, which provide
employment for over a million individuals within the country, mainly from
minority communities.
Take for instance, the state of Maharashtra’s 2015 beef ban, which has
already destroyed the livelihoods of around 3 lakh Muslim butchers and
truckers in that state; a nationwide ban would push more people into poverty
who are currently leading economically productive lives.
As I’ve noted, where beef was legally available to people, it was eaten
not just by Muslims and other minorities, but also by sections of poorer
Hindus, who could not afford to buy other kinds of meat. Statistics suggest
that just 2 per cent of the Hindu population consume beef, but this 2 per cent
translates to 12.5 million individuals, making them the second largest
consumers of beef in the country. 224 And, in reality, many others who do so
do not admit to the practice. Scheduled castes and tribes (SC/ST) comprise
the overwhelming majority (more than 70 per cent) of the beef-eating Hindu
population, while 21 per cent hail from the OBC community. 225 The
government decision is therefore socially discriminatory, since it specifically
and disproportionately harms the poorer and less privileged sections of Indian
society.
But the real concern about the government’s rules is not just about beef
or the welfare of the cow, but about freedom.
Indians have generally felt free to be themselves, within our dynamic and
diverse society. It is that freedom that the BJP’s followers are challenging
today.
In fact, Hindus who eat beef can, like those who abjure it, find support
for their beliefs in the religion’s ancient texts and scripture. (There are
chapters and verses from the ancient texts supporting cow slaughter and beef
consumption, as well as others which decry it as the worst of all sins.)
Narendra Modi’s government has fostered what is a form of subjective
intolerance, with supporters, emboldened by the BJP’s absolute majority,
imposing their particular view of what India should be, regardless of whom it
hurts. This is why the reaction has been so visceral, even from non-beef
eaters like myself. Our resistance is to the way India is being changed into
something it never was—an intolerant majoritarian society with no place for
minority tastes. There is no better symbol of the Modi paradox of extolling
democracy while undermining its basic tenets than what he has allowed to be
done to India in the name of the cow.

209 From Hesiod’s Theogony in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English
translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press; and
London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.
210 ‘SC’s Lynching Order: A Gentle Reminder That Law Still Exists’, The Quint , 19 July
2018.
211 Ibid.
212 Saptarishi Dutta, ‘Where you can and can’t eat beef in India’, Wall Street Journal , 6
August 2015.
213 Delna Abraham and Ojaswi Rao, ‘97% cow-related attacks after PM Modi came to
power in 2014’, Business Standard , 29 June 2017.
214 Vikas Pathak and G. Sampath, ‘U.P., Bihar lead in crimes against Dalits’, The Hindu ,
18 October 2016.
215 ‘4 Dalits stripped, beaten up for skinning dead cow’, Times of India , 13 July 2016.
216 ‘Gau rakshaks on the rise: MP mob targets Muslim women over beef rumour, 26th
attack this year’, Hindustan Times , 29 July 2017.
217 Nitin Jain, ‘Two “beef transporters” forced to eat cow dung by Haryana’s Gau Rakshak
Dal’, India Today , 27 June 2016.
218 Asees Bhasin, ‘“Your mother, you bury her”: Gujarat Dalits abandon cow carcasses’,
The Quint , 29 July 2017.
219 Sneha Alexander and Jency Jacob, ‘At least 15 deaths due to mob lynching in 2018 so
far, NCRB to address data gap’, Boomlive.in , 13 June 2018.
220 Harish Damodaran, ‘What it might cost to save gauvansh countrywide’, Indian Express
, 24 April 2017.
221 Abusaleh Shariff, ‘Why India must not disrupt its balanced bovine economy with a ban
on beef’, The Wire , 22 June 2015.
222 Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries’ report, ‘Salient features of
19th livestock census’.
223 ‘Where Indian buffalo meat exports go’, Indian Express , 12 April 2017.
224 Roshan Kishore, ‘Who are the beef eaters in India?’, LiveMint , 20 October 2015.
225 Ibid.
 chapter five

MINORITY REPORT

The magic of Indianness is that you can be a proud Bihari, a believing

Muslim, a convinced leftist and a good Indian all at once. Indeed, all these
identities are rendered secure by the overarching Indian identity that
subsumes them all. Our nationalist heroes created a nation built on an ideal of
pluralism and freedom; we have given passports to their dreams. The BJP
would sadly reduce the soaring generosity of their founding vision to the
petty bigotry of majoritarian chauvinism.
Since Narendra Modi came to power, there has been the overt declaration
by RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat that all Indians are Hindus, and by
implication that those who do not consider themselves Hindus aren’t actually
Indian, and don’t belong here. 226 There was the statement by Giriraj Singh
that those who don’t vote for PM Modi should move to Pakistan, and the one
by Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti that people are either followers of Ram or bastards
(‘Ramzade ya Haraamzade’)—both these offenders were rewarded with a
place on Prime Minister Modi’s council of ministers and neither was asked to
resign. 227 The inflammatory statements hailing Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram
Godse, made by the BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj, 228 did not affect the BJP’s
allocating him the chair of a parliamentary committee or his selection to lead
his party in prestigious debates on the floor of the Lok Sabha.
In the face of such implicit political approval, there have been the
numerous incidents of communal violence I described earlier, which have
instilled fear in the targeted minorities. And in December 2014, there was the
episode of the mass conversion of fifty-seven bewildered Bengali Muslims in
Agra by the Bajrang Dal, through a mix of intimidation and inducement,
under the Sangh Parivar’s newly revived ‘ghar wapsi’ scheme. 229
Prime Minister Modi must know that there is a great deal of concern
throughout the country, and particularly among our Muslim fellow-citizens,
about whether the Bharatiya Janata Party and its fellow travellers have the
desire or the willingness to work for all of India’s communities, or whether
they seek to profit from dividing the nation on sectarian lines. A few words of
reassurance to the Muslim community, in particular, from the master orator
could go a long way towards calming their disquiet. Instead, as I have said
earlier, the prime minister has mostly chosen to stay silent whenever insults
are flung at Indian Muslims or they are invited to go to Pakistan (along with
intellectuals, scholars, writers, and anyone else who happens to disagree with
Mr Modi and his government).
His lack of empathy has emboldened those who follow him to demonize
the minorities, especially the Muslim community. In 2016, I was at a hugely
attended conclave in Delhi where a prominent television anchor began a
discussion with Amit Shah by telling his audience to repeat after him, ‘Bharat
Mata ki jai!’ Then he asked those in the audience who had done so to raise
their hands. Almost everyone did.
I hadn’t, and didn’t. Not that I have any problem shouting this particular
slogan: I had done so on numerous occasions, most notably with a busload of
transiting Indian pilgrims on a European airport tarmac a few months earlier.
It’s just that I don’t like the idea of doing so because a chauvinistic politician
demands it of me in a public place.
When the anchor went on to ask those who would refuse to say the words
to raise their hands, I did not do so either, because I wouldn’t refuse to do so
every time. I just believed in my right to choose whether and when I would
say those words, or any other.
That seems to me to have been the principle at stake in the controversy
that erupted over the refusal of MP Asaduddin Owaisi and a Maharashtra
MLA belonging to his party, Waris Pathan, to chant this particular slogan.
Both took their oaths as legislators in the name of God and swear by the
Indian Constitution. They aver that they have no problem in hailing the
nation with a robust ‘Jai Hind’ or ‘Hindustan Zindabad!’ 230 But to them,
‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ sounds overtly Hindu, the deification of the nation as a
mother goddess, and as Muslims they don’t feel comfortable with it. They
pointed out, not unreasonably, that the Constitution does not require them to
raise this slogan, and they should not be compelled to do so.
The other side of the argument—the side passionately advocated by Amit
Shah and the BJP—says that every Indian nationalist should say these words
upon demand, and the ‘one per cent’ who don’t should be made to understand
that their opposition to the slogan is unjustified. The BJP and its fellow
travellers have made something of a fetish of nationalism (as they define it)
as the major issue at stake in the country today. ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ appears
to have become the latest acid test of Indian nationalism.
As I said, I have nothing against the slogan. I believe, as Javed Akhtar
memorably pointed out in his farewell speech on exiting the Rajya Sabha,
that many Muslims don’t have a problem with it either. But some do, and the
issue is their right to dissent from this test of loyalty.
Let’s accept that Mr Owaisi and his AIMIM party deliberately exploited
this issue for political purposes—as part of their efforts to differentiate
themselves as the only authentic and courageous voices of the Muslim
community who are willing to stand up against the majoritarian chauvinism
of the ruling party. So what?
Indian politics affords plenty of examples of principles being advanced to
mask simple political opportunism, and I am prepared to concede that this
might have been yet another example of this. Still, however, the principle
remains valid, and should not be vitiated. No Indian should be compelled to
mouth a form of nationalism he does not feel.
India must protect its largest minority population, empower them
politically, and enable them to partake fully of the opportunities the state
offers. This would require education, training and the resources to take
advantage of such opportunities—from recruitment to the police forces to
seed capital for entrepreneurship. If the BJP disdains quotas for Muslims, it
could offer them a helping hand through special training schemes that equip
Indian Muslims to, for example, take the entrance examinations to the police
services. The government consciously needs to send regular signals of
reassurance to minorities—and to Muslims in particular, since their
vulnerability is accentuated by the circumstances of India’s Partition, and
because so many terrorist groups derive support and funding from Islamist
groups across the border.
The Modi regime does not appear to fully appreciate the importance of
this. In professing to be religion-neutral, but giving free rein to Hindu
chauvinists to spew bigotry and division for petty political purposes,
including electorally useful ‘polarization’, the government is missing an
opportunity to embrace the Muslim minority in its narrative of aspiration.
Promoting development and integration of minorities into the national
mainstream is essential for India if it wishes to minimize the numbers of
those who might be seduced by the siren call of terrorism.
Whether India has the second or third largest Muslim population in the
world (depending on the exact numbers in Pakistan), there is no doubt that
India’s is by far the largest Muslim minority in the world, both in numbers
and as a proportion of the population. At the same time, Islam is deeply
rooted in Indian soil, with few Indian Muslims—even those who claim
relatively recent Persian, Afghan or Arab descent—having links, or owing
allegiance, to the lands of their forebears. Though conservative Islamist
doctrine has sprung from Indian minds (the Deoband School, whose doctrines
inspired the Taliban, is situated in India), 231 none of the dozens of prominent
Islamic seminaries or theologians in India has ever advocated armed
insurrection against the Indian state.
The migration to Pakistan, upon Partition, of a significant proportion of
the Muslim elite and its educated middle class, meant that India’s Muslims
were always disproportionately poorer and less educated than their
counterparts in other communities. Successive governments have tried to
address this problem with only a modest degree of success, and many
Muslims objectively suffer from unfavourable socio-economic conditions—
which some ascribe to discrimination against them. If a narrative of injustice
and discrimination gains ground across the community, it can provide
propitious conditions for terrorists to exploit. It is all the more in the interests
of the Indian state to ensure that the economic development of India fully
embraces its Muslim minority.
An India led by rational, humane and open-minded ideas of itself must
develop a view of the world that is also broad-minded, accommodative and
responsible. Prime Minister Modi has shown signs of understanding this in
his many ‘U-turns’, from embracing the Bangladesh Land Boundary
Agreement to shelving his party’s irresponsible line on Article 370 in the
election campaign in Kashmir. A policy of inclusion and respect for India’s
Muslims must follow. That would be in keeping with the aspirations that the
predecessor he prefers to disown, Jawaharlal Nehru, launched us on when he
spoke of our tryst with destiny.

226 ‘Everyone living in India is a Hindu: Mohan Bhagwat’, The Hindu , 25 February 2018.
227 ‘Niranjan Jyoti: A VHP “katha vachak” with an unpopular reputation’, FirstPost , 3
December 2014.
228 ‘BJP Lawmaker Sakshi Maharaj Calls Gandhi Assassin Nathuram Godse A “Patriot”’,
Then Retracts’, NDTV , 11 September 2014.
229 Pheroze L. Vincent, ‘350 Bengali Muslims “purified”, says Bajrang Dal leader’, The
Hindu , 11 December 2014.
230 ‘I won’t say “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”: Asaduddin Owaisi to Mohan Bhagwat’, NDTV , 14
March 2016; ‘Asaduddin Owaisi prefers to say “Jai Hind”’, Times of India , 27 May 2016.
231 Celia W. Dugger, ‘Indian town’s seed grew into the Taliban’s code’, New York Times ,
23 February 2002.
 chapter six

THE DANGERS OF A NATIONAL HOLY BOOK

Hand in hand with the victimization of minorities goes another aspect of the
majoritarian project—trying, in every way possible, to endow the country
with overt trappings of Hindutva, a precursor to its ultimate goal of making
India a Hindu Rashtra. One of these initiatives is the advocacy of the
Bhagavad Gita as a ‘rashtriya granth’, or ‘national holy book’. This was most
prominently proposed by Sushma Swaraj, the external affairs minister, with
whose overt support of this idea I have publicly disagreed. 232 Let me
enumerate a few of my concerns.
The first is that to cite no less a source than Prime Minister Narendra
Modi himself, we already have a national holy book: it’s called the
Constitution of India.
The second is that we are a land of multiple faiths, each of which has its
own holy books; on what basis would we pick any one of them in the
capacity of a national holy book? Which Sikh would put the Gita ahead of the
Guru Granth Sahib, for instance?
And if the answer to that question is, as Sushma-ji suggests, that it is the
holiest book of the overwhelming Hindu majority of our population, the
proposition is contestable, like most things in Hindu philosophy. As a
practising (and reasonably widely-read) Hindu myself, I find a lot of ideas in
the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas that are not in the Gita. I see Hinduism as
a pluralistic faith of many holy books and many ways of worshipping the
divine.
You don’t have to agree with those Hindu scholars who argue that the
Gita, being Smriti (that which is heard and remembered, orally), is inferior to
the Vedas and the Upanishads, which are Sruti (memorized and recorded
divine revelation). But arguments about superiority and inferiority apart,
there is no doubt that there are many views of the relative merits of several
Indian holy books.
Sushma-ji, like Gandhi-ji before her, may be inspired by the Gita, but
other, equally devout, Hindus might have other preferences. Why not the Rig
Veda , for instance, the primordial revelation text of the Hindu faith? Why
not the Smriti text known as the Srimad Bhagavatam , or Bhagavata Purana ,
which is recited for an entire week (saptaham) every year in many Hindu
temples and homes? The quest to anoint a national holy book will not just
divide Indians—it will divide Hindus as well.
But it’s the fourth problem that’s most relevant to a political discussion of
the issue. For a government minister to raise the idea of a national holy book
serves to ignite not just controversy, but fears—fears of a majoritarian project
that will slowly but surely erode India’s ‘pluralist’ identity and replace it with
an overtly Hindu one.
Sushma-ji’s statement may well have been relatively innocent—she was
speaking, after all, at an event to celebrate the Bhagavad Gita, and was
recalling a recommendation she had made in Parliament a few years ago,
when the Russians had banned the Gita and India had protested—but her
comment adds to a long list of statements and actions by our new rulers that
cumulatively have stirred disquiet across the country.
Just as investors tend not to come to war zones—which is why peace on
our borders is in our national interest—so too do investors prefer to risk their
capital in harmonious societies that are focused on the future rather than
divided by the past. The BJP and its government should heed one simple
dictum: leave religion to the personal space and preference of every Indian.
Let us have no national holy book, just as our Constitution does not permit us
to have a national religion.

232 ‘Sushma Swaraj Pushes for declaring Gita as National Book’, NDTV , 7 December
2014.
 chapter seven

CHANGING THE CONSTITUTION

With the BJP now in direct or indirect control of twenty-one states, and in the
process of creeping up to majority status in the Rajya Sabha to add to its
overwhelming numbers in the Lok Sabha, the question of what the party
intends to do with its dominance assumes urgent importance. A close reading
of the works of its principal ideologues, notably Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, a
Modi hero, suggests that amending the Constitution is likely to be high on the
ruling party’s priority list.
Whether or not the BJP goes full tilt at rewriting the entire Constitution to
establish the Hindu Rashtra of its dreams (which may still require numbers it
doesn’t have in the Rajya Sabha), an obvious first step in that direction is
probable. The easy target our ruling party may aim at is to reverse the 42nd
Amendment of the Constitution, which in 1976 added two words the BJP
doesn’t like—‘secular’ and ‘socialist’—to the preamble.
During the constituent assembly debates, Prof K. T. Shah had tried and
failed on 15 November 1948 to achieve inclusion of the words ‘Secular,
Federalist, Socialist’ in the Preamble. 233 In the eventual compromise, the
majority of the assembly took the view that the Indian state would indeed be
secular but that it was not necessary to use the word in the Preamble.
The word ‘secularism’, after all, was explicitly Western in origin,
emerging from the political changes in Europe that accompanied the
Protestant Reformation and the era called the Enlightenment. But many
twentieth-century leaders outside Western Europe were attracted to the
concept, notably Kemal Ataturk in Muslim-majority Turkey and Jawaharlal
Nehru in Hindu-majority India, both of whom saw a secular state as a crucial
hallmark of modernity. In India’s case, secularism also seemed to Jawaharlal
Nehru the only way to avoid the religious and communal antagonisms that
had partitioned the country when the British left.
 The constituent assembly debates show the extent to which this logic was
accepted by our founding fathers. ‘I accepted this secularism in the sense that
our State shall remain unconcerned with religion, and I thought that the
secular State of partitioned India was the maximum of generosity of a Hindu
dominated territory for its non-Hindu population,’ said Lokanath Misra in the
debate on 6 December 1948. 234
But was it necessary to include the word itself in the Constitution? The
chairman of the Drafting Committee, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, thought not. Dr
Ambedkar said ‘what should be the policy of the State, how the Society
should be organized in its social and economic side, are matters which must
be decided by the people themselves according to time and circumstances. It
cannot be laid down in the Constitution itself because that is destroying
democracy altogether.’ 235
Still, the adoption of Articles 25, 26, 27 and 28 of the Constitution,
guaranteeing freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise, and
propagate one’s religion, to manage one’s own religious affairs and to enjoy
the freedom of religious worship, confirmed that the concept of secularism
was unarguably implicit in India’s constitutional philosophy. It isn’t the word
‘secular’ that makes ours a secular Constitution, but rather the various
provisions that ensure equal rights to people of all faiths and creeds. But
India’s wasn’t Western-style secularism. Rather, secularism meant, in the
Indian tradition, a multiplicity of religions, none of which was espoused by
the state.
The theory of secularism, as Prof R. S. Misra of Banaras Hindu
University has argued, is based on dharma-nirpekshata (‘keeping apart from
dharma’), which is impossible for any good Hindu to adhere to. BJP
politicians like Rajnath Singh and Yogi Adityanath have argued that Indian
governments cannot observe dharma-nirpekshata but should follow the
precept of panth-nirpekshata (not favouring any particular sect or faith). In
this they are not far removed from my argument—which I have made for
several years before my entry into Indian politics—that ‘secularism’ is a
misnomer in the Indian context of profuse religiosity, and what we should be
talking about is ‘pluralism’. As I have long argued, I believe the roots of
India’s pluralism can be found in the Hindu philosophy of acceptance of
difference: ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti— there is one truth, but the sages
call it by many different names.
No matter whether it’s called secularism or pluralism, it is something
Hindutva-minded Sanghivadis do not like, as it does not privilege Hinduism.
They are therefore determined to do away with the concept as a significant
step towards the Hindutva project of transforming India into a Hindu state, or
at least a state with a distinctively Hindu identity. To hear their point of view
is to take in a litany of complaints—the uncritical acceptance by the Indian
establishment of regressive practices among the Muslim community while
demanding progressive behaviour from Hindus, the support for minority
education while denying such aid to Hindus, the promotion of ‘family
planning’ among Hindus but not among Muslims, the cultivation of ‘vote
banks’ led by conservative Muslim leaders but the disparagement of their
Hindu equivalents, and so on.
The result is a widespread denunciation of the ‘appeasement’ of Muslims,
which seems bizarre when one looks at the statistical evidence of Muslim
socio-economic backwardness and the prevalence of discrimination in such
areas as housing and employment. Muslims are under-represented in the
nation’s police forces and over-represented in its prisons. Yet Hindutva
leaders have successfully stoked a perception that government benefits are
skewed towards minorities, and thus justified their campaign for Hindu self-
assertiveness.
It is for such reasons that Hindutva ideologues like K. N. Govindacharya
want the word secularism removed: in his words, it ‘implies opposition of
Hindus and appeasement of Muslims or other minorities. We should get rid
of this word as soon as possible. It is completely irrelevant in the Indian
context.’ 236
One can credibly argue that the 42nd Amendment merely put a word into
the Constitution whose spirit was always deeply embedded in it, and reified
in governmental practice. The loss of the word ‘secularism’ will not
necessarily make the country less secular, since successive Indian
governments had practised the peculiar Indian variant of secularism anyway
before the 42nd Amendment. Nor can we protest a further amendment to a
constitution we have already amended a hundred times before. As
Anantkumar Hegde, minister of state in the Modi government, has
unambiguously declared: ‘the Constitution…will change in the near future.
The Constitution has changed many times before. We are here and have come
to change the Constitution.’ 237 But this would be no ordinary amendment—
it would attack something fundamental and intrinsic to the way our
Constitution-makers intended India to be.
 Hegde, a blunt-speaking politician who has a long record of preferring
valour to discretion, was merely voicing one of the fundamental dreams the
Hindutvavadis have long had—the reshaping of the Constitution to suit their
own ends.
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, who is honoured and exalted daily by the BJP
government today, identified the fundamental flaw: by adopting a concept of
territorial nationalism, India had written a Constitution imitative of the West,
divorced from any real connection to our mode of life and from authentically
Indian ideas about the relationship between the individual and society. Deen
Dayal Upadhyaya felt the Constitution should embody a Hindu political
philosophy befitting an ancient nation like Bharat, that reducing the Indian
national idea to a territory and all the people residing on it was fallacious.
Instead, he argued, a nation is not a territory but a people, and the people of
India are the Hindu people; the Constitution should have embodied this
notion of Hindu nationhood. 238 The RSS’s founder leader, Dr K. B.
Hedgewar (whose Marathi biography Upadhyaya translated) had pointed to
the ‘ideological confusion’ created by the secular approach. Muslim
communalism, in his and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s view, had become more
prominent and aggressive, while Congress leaders bent over backwards more
and more to accommodate them.
In building his case for a Hindu Rashtra, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya
specifically disavowed the existing Constitution of India. But in Deen Dayal
Upadhyaya’s view, the failure of the founding fathers to conceive properly of
the nation led them into error when it came to drafting the Constitution. ‘We
aped the foreigners to such an extent that we failed to see that our inherent
national ideals and traditions should be reflected in our Constitution. We
satisfied ourselves with making a patchwork of theories and principles
enunciated by foreign countries… The result was that our national culture
and traditions were never reflected in these ideologies borrowed from
elsewhere and so they utterly failed to touch the chords of our national
being.’ 239
Having rejected its premise, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya was scathing about
the Constitution’s drafting and adoption: a nation, he argued, ‘is not like a
club which can be started or dissolved. A nation is not created by some crores
of people passing a resolution and defining a common code of behaviour
binding on all its members. A certain mass of people emerges with an
inherent motivation. It is,’ he added with a Hindu analogy, ‘like the soul
adopting the medium of the body.’
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya asked three questions: were the people who
framed the Constitution endowed with qualities of selflessness, an intense
desire for public service and a deep knowledge of the rules of dharma as the
rishis were? Or did they formulate this Smriti of a free India under the
influence of the unsteady circumstances prevailing at the time? Did these
people possess originality of thought or did they have a tendency to primarily
imitate others? Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s implicit answers to these questions
were in the negative: the Constitution-makers were not figures imbued with
selflessness and dharma, they were overly under the thrall of the turbulent
politics of that era, and their minds had been colonized by Western ideas. The
founding fathers of the Republic of India were largely Anglophile Indians
schooled in Western systems of thought; their work revealed no Indianness,
no Bharatiyata. The Constitution, therefore, was to him a flawed document,
one incapable of guiding India towards the path of raj dharma. In fact, it
condemned Hindus to slavery: ‘Self-rule and independence are considered to
be synonyms. A deeper thinking will bring home to us the fact that even in a
free country, the nation can remain in slavery.’ 240 The Hindu nation had
been enslaved by inappropriate Westernization.
The Constitution’s core conception of the nation, in his view, was
fundamentally not Indian at all. The absence of the Hindu Rashtra idea in the
Constitution was unacceptable for him, as it is to those who revere him. So
what might they do about it?
The more conformist of the two BJP prime ministers India has had, the
late Atal Bihari Vajpayee (in office from 1998 to 2004), took a moderate
approach to constitutional change, arguing that ‘even in the mightiest fort one
has to repair the parapet from time to time’ (while V. P. Singh cautioned that
the ‘tenants’ should not go for ‘rebuilding in the name of repairs’). His rule
saw no dramatic change in India’s constitutional arrangements, though his
government did conduct a constitutional review that produced a 1,979-page
report, largely unread.
There has so far been no dramatic challenge to the Constitution under the
second BJP prime minister, Narendra Modi. Indeed, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya,
who rejected the Constitution of India in conception, form and substance,
would be astonished to find his supposed acolytes extolling its every line and
holding special commemorations in Parliament with grandiloquent speeches
to mark the anniversary not just of its adoption—which, after all, is Republic
Day—but even of its passage by the constituent assembly in a newly anointed
‘Constitution Day’. What would Deen Dayal Upadhyaya have made, I
wonder, of a prime minister, who swears by him, saying that this Constitution
—the very document that Deen Dayal Upadhyaya found fallacious,
Westernized, un-Indian and devoid of chiti and virat shakti—is his ‘holy
book’?
It is, of course, difficult to know whether we should take the
Hindutvavadis’ claims to be admirers of the present secular, liberal, Western-
influenced Constitution of India to be as sincere as their professions of
devotion to Upadhyaya. Will Modi and his tribe, after consolidating their
hold on both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, and after taking over most
of the state governments, feel emboldened to tear up the very Constitution to
which they have so far so enthusiastically pledged allegiance?
There are already hints that the Constitution in its present form cannot
long survive unscathed. K. N. Govindacharya has declared that the
Constitution must be transformed: ‘We are doing it very silently. Discussions
and debates have been taking place for some time… There may be many gaps
which need deliberations, and a cool, calm, dispassionate discussion needs
the right atmosphere and a mechanism. However, this is just not possible in
the media glare.’ 241
Would a Hindutva-inspired revision of the Constitution, for example,
move the issue of cow slaughter from the Directive Principles of the
Constitution, where it is linked specifically to the preservation of milch cattle
and scientific principles of animal husbandry, to somewhere more binding,
and anchored more explicitly to religious sanction? Mr Govindacharya is
clear: ‘The cow is part of our civilizational past and it reflects those values, it
should be a civilizational continuity in the preamble. The cow, environment
protection, all this requires constitutional protection. It is part of Hindu ethos,
culture—like Bishnois who embrace death by hugging those trees, this is all
“Bharatiya” culture. Instead of assuming man is conqueror of nature, it is the
duty of humans to protect nature, and all this must be incorporated in the
Constitution.’ 242
Environmentalists may well approve, but the key question remains
whether a Hindutva-modified Constitution, assuming that it ever comes
about, will retain the core principle of independent India, that all adult
Indians are deemed equal, irrespective of religion. Or would it consciously
embrace the central theme of Hindutva, which would discriminate against
non-Hindus? If it did so, it would be true to Hindutva as expounded by V. D.
Savarkar, M. S. Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, but not to the
Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda or Mahatma Gandhi, who did not define
citizenship or Indianness in terms of the gods one worshipped, what one ate,
the way one dressed or where one went for pilgrimage. But if it did not do so,
it would betray a century’s worth of political philosophizing in the name of
Hindutva, surrendering its tenets to the dominant nationalist stream it had
long derided as ‘pseudo-secular’.
This will be a crucial dilemma for the Hindutva ideologues. Do they take
the opportunity given to them by their crushing political majority—which
might not endure if they wait too long—to remake the Constitution as their
principal thinkers had advocated? Or do they accept that the reality of ruling
a multi- ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious polity makes their goal of a
Hindu Rashtra unattainable?
Another litmus test would lie in whether a revised Hindutva Constitution
would mandate a Uniform Civil Code for all the citizens of India. Leaders
subscribing to Hindutva have long argued that differential laws based on
religion—essentially the personal laws governing marriage, inheritance and
divorce for Muslims, and also for other religious minorities—violate Article
44 of the Indian Constitution and have sowed the seeds of divisiveness
between different communities; if we are all Hindus (albeit ‘Hindu
Muhammadans’, ‘Hindu Christians’ and so on) why should we not all be
subject to one civil code? Secular Congress leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru
onwards have argued that while a Uniform Civil Code might be a desirable
objective, it could only be adopted with the consent of the affected
communities. This could not be obtained by pressure or by legal coercion; it
required persuasion. Since minority leaders, especially Muslims, showed no
inclination to be persuaded, seeing a uniform civil code as the imposition of
majoritarian Hindu sensibilities, the idea needed to be deferred indefinitely,
until the time was ripe. Hindutva leaders have long mocked this approach as
caving in to minority prejudices; accepting Islamic personal law, they argue,
violates the human rights principles of gender equality by discriminating
against Muslim women and allows unelected and in some cases self-
appointed religious personalities to interpret religious dictates and so ‘lay
down the law’. Could they now concede the permissibility of religious
personal laws without losing credibility?
And would a Hindutva Constitution preserve the anomaly of Article 370,
which grants a special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, to the extent
that no law passed by the Parliament of India can apply to that state without
being also passed by the constituent assembly of Jammu and Kashmir?
Would the advocates of Hindutva allow the state to continue to restrict
landholding to ‘state subjects’, a status a woman would lose, under Article
35A of the Constitution, if she married a man from outside the state?
India’s constitutionalists have long argued that it is a living document,
susceptible to amendment in keeping with the evolving demands of time,
subject of course to judicial interpretation, which has decreed that its ‘basic
structure’ cannot be tampered with. Would transforming an egalitarian and
secular Constitution into a document infused with the principles of Hindutva
not violate its basic structure? And yet, can the advocates of Hindutva—the
intellectual legatees of Veer Savarkar, M. S. Golwakar and Deen Dayal
Upadhyaya—afford not to try?
One more Modi paradox here: the very Constitution he swears by is in
the crosshairs of the most devoted of his followers. During the huge national
outcry in mid-2018 over my public statement that, if re-elected, the
Sanghivadis would turn India into a mirror image of the majoritarian state
next door—a ‘Hindu Pakistan’—I challenged the prime minister and his
acolytes to end the controversy by disavowing their avowed goal of a Hindu
Rashtra. None did. I put the proposition to a Modi government minister with
whom I shared a stage at a media-organized conclave; he evaded the
question. I tried on television as well: ‘Let the prime minister say,’ I declared,
‘that he admires Deen Dayal Upadhyaya but disagrees with him on the
Constitution.’ The prime minister said no such thing. It is clear that whatever
their lips enunciate about the Constitution, their heart remains with the
Hindutva doctrine that is antithetical to it. All of us who care about the spirit
of Indian pluralism and religious freedom, which are enshrined in our
Constitution, must resist attempts to change its fundamental character. For
the Constitution as it currently exists is a reflection of India’s pluralist soul.
To destroy that would be to dismember the very idea of India that animated
our struggle for freedom. A Sanghivadi India would no longer be the India
that Gandhi, Nehru, Dr Ambedkar and Maulana Azad fought to free. It would
merely be a Hindutva imitation of Pakistan.
233 Adrija Roychowdhury, ‘Secularism: why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-
word in the Constitution’, Indian Express , 27 December 2017.
234 Ibid.
235 Ibid.
236 Vishwadeepak, ‘We should remove secularism, socialism from the Constitution:
Govindacharya’, National Herald , 2 October 2017.
237 Apurva, ‘We are here to change the Constitution: MoS Anantkumar Hegde’, Indian
Express , 26 December 2017.
238 Shashi Tharoor, Why I Am a Hindu , New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2018, p. 159.
239 Pavan Kulkarni, ‘Deendayal Upadhyaya, Bigoted “Guiding Force” of a Hindu
Rashtra’, The Wire , 30 October 2017.
240 C. P. Bhishkar, Pt. Deendayal Upadhyay Ideology & Preception–Part–5: Concept of
The Rashtra , New Delhi: Suruchi Prakashan, 2014, p. 63.
241 Vrinda Gopinath, ‘RSS Ideologue Govindacharya: ‘We Will Rewrite the Constitution
to Reflect Bharatiyata’, The Wire , 20 June 2016.
242 Ibid.
 chapter eight

HONOURING OUR WOMEN

BJP rule has been appalling for women. It is a telling detail that the party has
the highest number of lawmakers accused of crimes against women.
According to a study by the Association for Democratic Reform (ADR) and
National Election Watch (NEW), as many as fifty-one BJP MPs and MLAs
have had cases filed against them for crimes against women, including those
alleging rape and abduction. 243
(It must however be stated, for the record, that accusations do not
necessarily amount to convictions, and that some charges may be unfounded.
The Delhi Police, functioning under the central government’s control, have
accused me of the crime of abetting my wife’s suicide; I am contesting their
charge vigorously, as one who believes there was neither suicide nor
abetment. My profound personal conviction remains that there is nothing
more contemptible than a man assaulting a woman or child, whatever the
provocation.)
To return to the political facts: the ADR/NEW study further said that
among the major parties, over the past five years, the party that had given the
highest number of tickets (forty-eight) to candidates who had been accused of
assaults and other crimes against women was the BJP. 244 With such a
record, is it any wonder that Modi’s sarkar has seen the incidence of attacks
on women and girls escalate sharply on its watch? It has responded to this
national shame with a combination of denial, defiance, blaming-the-victims
and attempted censorship, even as foreign countries increasingly issue
advisories to female tourists not to travel unaccompanied in the country.
Every single day, the media have a new horror story to report. The tragic
rape and murder of the student, Jyoti Singh (dubbed ‘Nirbhaya’ or Fearless
One) in December 2012 seemed to have crystallized public opinion on the
issue and given birth to a new national determination to deal effectively with
crimes against women. A law was passed, increasing the punishment for
rape. But the moment passed, and the country relapsed once more into its
disgraceful ways. Worse, the ruling party’s stalwarts tripped over themselves
to minimize the impact of the stories, and in some cases even to justify them.
According to the NCRB, in 2016 the rape of minor girls increased by 82
per cent compared with the previous year. 245 In 2018, two new cases
galvanized national attention: the repeated gang-rape and murder, in Jammu
& Kashmir’s Kathua, of an eight-year-old Bakerwal Muslim girl, apparently
to drive her nomadic people away from grazing grounds in a Hindu-majority
area; and the rape of a sixteen-year-old woman by a BJP legislator in Uttar
Pradesh to whom she had gone seeking help. The specific details of each case
were horrific enough—especially Kathua, where the nature of the atrocity
defied the most basic notions of humanity—but what made them worse was
the attitude of the ruling party. In Kathua, BJP ministers were deputed to
address a rally denouncing the police for proceeding against the perpetrators;
in Uttar Pradesh, the accused legislator brazenly blamed the victim as a
willing participant in her own humiliation. Public outrage finally brought
about ministerial resignations and the MLA’s arrest, but the initial attitudes
were revelatory of a problem the BJP has proved incapable of addressing. 246
We have often heard it said that the mark of a healthy society is the
treatment that is meted out to its women. Unfortunately, the BJP government
embodies a culture that either deifies or maternalizes women—as goddesses
and mothers, both to be worshipped and protected—but has no concept of
how to deal with women who are neither. In this, and in other chapters of the
book, I will explore some of the more horrifying examples of the present
government’s attitude towards women in particular and sex and sexuality in
general. The intelligent, autonomous, aspiring young woman with a mind of
her own, her own wishes, desires and ambitions, is an individual most Indian
men cannot come to terms with.
That has to change. Because if we don’t understand the nature and scale
of the problem of rape and violence against women in our country, and we
don’t change some of our own attitudes and responses to it, we will never
solve it.
Understanding it means acknowledging that some of the remarks made
by politicians about rape are simply wrong. It is wrong to claim that ‘rapes
take place in cities and not in villages’, as RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat did.
247 Some of the most horrific rapes have taken place in rural India, especially
of women who have gone out into the fields at night to relieve themselves.
Rural attitudes are often more backward, as numerous pronouncements by
khap panchayats and village councils have proved. In 2014, a Santhal woman
was raped by thirteen men for the ‘crime’ of having fallen in love with a man
from another community. This happened on the orders of a tribal ‘court’
called a salishi sabha. While the Supreme Court has been expanding the
rights of women in a series of recent judgments, traditional bodies without
constitutional sanction have been narrowing their freedoms. We politicians
must stand on the side of women and not with the khaps.
It is wrong to blame rape on the victims. Too many BJP politicians blame
the way women dress or behave for the violence inflicted upon them. It is
wrong to say, as Bhagwat did, that ‘women should refrain from venturing out
with men other than their relatives. Such incidents happen due to the
influence of Western culture and women wearing less clothes.’ 248 Equally
wrong was Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s view that ‘if a girl
is dressed decently, a boy will not look at her in the wrong way.’ 249 Why do
politicians place the onus on the girl to dress in a certain way rather than the
boy to behave properly? T. Babulal Gaur, a BJP leader from Madhya
Pradesh, went further: ‘The rate of crimes against women depended on how
completely dressed they are and how regularly they visited temples. Rapes in
the state of Chennai are comparatively less as their women are always
completely clad and visited temples regularly.’ 250 Sigh. Ironically, such
comments seem to share the perspective of one of the convicted rapists in the
Nirbhaya rape-murder, Mukesh Singh, who claimed the deceased victim was
to blame for wearing the ‘wrong clothes’ and being out with a boy late at
night. 251 But horrifyingly, a woman politician said the same thing,
explaining rape as a result of ‘a woman’s clothes, her behaviour and her
presence at inappropriate places… Did Nirbhaya really have to go to watch a
movie at eleven in the night with her friend?’ asked Maharashtra’s
Nationalist Congress Party leader Asha Mirje (a woman herself), adding:
‘Take the Shakti Mills gang-rape case [in which a freelance photojournalist
was gang-raped]. Why did the [victim] go to such an isolated spot at 6 p.m.?’
252
Our government does not seem to have realized that our job as politicians
is to work to create a safe society where a woman can go anywhere at any
time without having to fear assault. It is not to excuse the criminals who prey
on women in under-policed areas of our towns and villages.
It is also wrong to suggest that ‘child marriage is a solution to rape and
other atrocities against women’. 253 The political leader who said this, former
Haryana CM Om Prakash Chautala, is currently in jail, where I am sure he
has been told that child marriage is against the law, as is rape.
It would be wrong to blame the BJP alone; we politicians in general must
also stop making excuses for rapists. It is wrong to suggest [as Gaur did] that
rape ‘depends on the man and the woman. 254 It is sometimes right and
sometimes wrong.’ No, Gaur sahib, rape is always wrong. Mulayam-ji, I
hope you didn’t mean it when you said: ‘Boys will be boys, they make
mistakes. Two or three have been given the death sentence in Mumbai. We
will try and change such laws… We will also ensure punishment of those
who report false cases.’ 255 The law should be supported, Mulayam-ji, not
changed. And ‘boys’ should be responsible citizens of our society, not just
‘boys’.
Rape is not an acceptable response to changing social mores. Much
though I admire Mamata Banerjee, I cannot agree with her that ‘Rapes
happen because men and women interact freely.’ And I disagree even more
vehemently with BSP leader Rajpal Saini, who averred: ‘There is no need to
give phones to women and children. It distracts them… Why do women need
phones? My mother, wife and sister never had mobile phones. They survived
without one’. 256 Phones do not make women more vulnerable, Rajpal-ji;
they empower them, and perhaps that is what you are afraid of. But turning
back the clock on progress never actually changes the time.
All these comments point to the real problem: India’s politicians have not
fully been able to come to terms with the growing emancipation of women in
our society, the increasing freedoms they are enjoying, their autonomy from
male control—on everything from how they dress to where they go and
when, and with whom. When some criminal men react to unfamiliar
circumstances with violence and assaults on women, some political leaders
are reluctant to condemn and punish them, because at heart some of them
share the same resentment the rapists feel.
At the same time, many politicians, even the women amongst us, express
patriarchal attitudes to women. Our outrage at rape reflects our perception
that it is not just a physical assault but also a respect-depriving tragedy; the
trauma of rape is compounded by the level of social stigma attached to the
crime. The victim is made to feel that she has been defiled, violated and
shamed before the public at large, and that she is no longer fit to lead a
normal life—even a woman minister, Sushma Swaraj, lamented that a rape
victim was a ‘zinda laash’ (a living corpse). 257 This is a form of social
control of female sexuality that we must not encourage. The BJP government
must not reinforce the sense of male sexual entitlement that pervades our
society; but it does precisely that when, for instance, it opposes
criminalization of marital rape. Rape is not about sex: it is about violence.
Politicians have a duty to reiterate that message.
And though the government’s job is to protect women, leaders sometimes
act as if sexual violence is a not a priority for us. ‘You are safe, why are you
bothered?’ a former Uttar Pradesh chief minister asked a reporter who
questioned him about rapes increasing in the state. BJP leaders across the
board have tended to behave as if the issue of women’s safety is beneath
them, since they have so many more important things to deal with.
There is also a national tendency to dismiss rape as ‘a women’s issue’.
It’s not. It’s an issue that affects all of us, male or female, because it affects
all of society. The BJP government has done nothing to set an example; its
ministers have never spoken out against social attitudes that, by diminishing
women’s value in our society, could one day prompt or justify violence
against them. A 2011 survey found that 65 per cent of Indian men believed
that sometimes a woman deserves to be beaten; 37 per cent of men had
physically assaulted their intimate partner at least once; 24 per cent had
committed an act of sexual violence against someone in society and 20 per
cent had committed sexual violence against their partners. 258 Such attitudes
start in the home, and those in public life must speak out against them.
Here’s a prescription that all political leaders, particularly those in
government, must consider. We must deplore preferential treatment given to
boys over girls in our homes and workplaces. We must introduce gender-
equality lessons in our classrooms at an early age so that little boys are taught
that girls have just the same rights as they do. We must condemn the abuse of
women on social media and attacks on women journalists and writers. We
must seek an end to sexist portrayals of women in popular culture that
legitimize male harassment, whether the songs of Honey Singh or movies
that glamorize men stalking women (singing ‘tera peechha na chhodoonga’
259 all the way). We must stop confusing our idea of a family’s honour with
confining women behind a lakshman rekha which they must not cross. And
believing that if a woman transgresses it, she deserves what she gets. Such
attitudes must be fiercely opposed, and we are uniquely placed, by virtue of
our place as leaders, to challenge them.
Sadly, the answer does not lie in the one thing we lawmakers can easily
do, which is to write laws. Laws already exist. The law on rape and sexual
assault, in its amended 2013 version, is a strong one, but its implementation
still has a long way to go. Women are often reluctant to report rapes, and
policemen to record them. Successful rape prosecutions are all too rare.
Sexual violence in rioting is lost in the clamour around the riot itself. I myself
have introduced a Private Member’s Bill to make stalking a non-bailable
offence so as to reduce the vulnerability of women who find the courage to
complain to the police but find their stalkers immediately free on bail but
twice as angry at them. We politicians know that while we can make laws
that protect women, we have to also ensure that law enforcement agencies
actually enforce them. Too many politicians seek to undermine law
enforcement, rather than support it. This is where a responsible government
can set an example; the BJP’s, alas, does not seem to be doing so. Instead, it
seems bent on worsening the situation. Rather than acting firmly, it seeks to
justify crimes or brush them under the carpet. Take for example, a BBC
documentary about violence against women that the BJP government tried to
ban a few years ago on specious grounds.
I haven’t seen India’s Daughter , Leslee Udwin’s film on the tragic rape
and murder of Nirbhaya. With YouTube having been coerced into removing
the film from that site, I am unlikely to be able to see it now in India. But my
arguments relate to issues of principle and policy, not to the merits of the
film. After all, bad or mediocre films are screened every day in India. What
justifies a ban?
I have read the few reasonable objections to the film. Some are legal: that
such a film would prejudice the appeals process and the accused’s case for a
mercy petition. (Judges can weigh that consideration on merits, but it does
not seem to me an overwhelming one, given the saturation of coverage the
case has already had in our media.) Some are moral: that no one should give
a media platform to someone guilty of such a heinous crime. (That’s worth
debating, but the choice is that of the filmmaker and the organization that
chooses to screen her work—just as we are all free not to watch it.)
But the government’s and the ruling party’s arguments were, frankly, a
disgrace. We had the then parliamentary affairs minister, Venkaiah Naidu,
delivering the mother of all political clichés: ‘This is an international
conspiracy to defame India.’ 260 The BJP’s Meenakshi Lekhi protested that
‘this will certainly affect tourism’. 261 The ‘this’ she meant was the film, not
the reports of previous rapes of tourists, nor the advisories issued by every
Western country warning female tourists against travelling alone or after dark
in India. Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s statement invoked ‘the dignity of
women’ and fulminated that the government would ‘not allow any attempt by
any individual, group or organization to leverage such unfortunate incidents
for commercial benefit.’ 262 Indeed, to add hypocrisy to wrong action, the
restraining order obtained by the authorities against the BBC specifically
stated that one of the accused, Mukesh Singh, ‘had made offensive and
derogatory remarks against women, creating an atmosphere of fear and
tension with the possibility of public outcry [affecting the] law and order
situation.’ 263
In sum: it’s not the fact or prevalence of rape in India that bothers the
government. It’s not even the persistence of offensively misogynistic
attitudes across the establishment, also brought out in the documentary,
where aside from Mukesh Singh’s assertion that his victim was asking for it,
his lawyers put the onus for rape squarely on women’s behaviour, clothes and
social freedoms (one of them even declared that he would douse his daughter
or sister with petrol and set her alight if she ‘engaged in pre-marital activities’
264 ). No, it’s not the truth of such attitudes and practices in our country that
upsets the government. It is, instead, that if this truth were shown by the
BBC, India would be disgraced and tourists wouldn’t visit our country.
This is exactly the attitude we witnessed half a century ago when Satyajit
Ray was condemned by Nargis and others for showing India’s poverty to the
West in his masterpiece, Pather Panchali . It wasn’t our poverty that shamed
us, but its depiction to the outside world. On that issue, fortunately, the
Congress government of the day didn’t ban Satyajit Ray’s work. Nehru
positively supported it: ‘What is wrong about showing India’s poverty?’ he
asked. ‘Everyone knows we are a poor country. The question is: are we
Indians sensitive to our poverty or insensitive to it?’ With Ray, Nehru
declared, there was the most profound sensitivity. He understood that truth is
its own justification and that we need mirrors turned on us to understand
ourselves better. History has shown that such self-examination has only made
the world better.
 The horrific rape was the cause of nationwide protests and media outrage,
calling for change in our society’s attitudes towards women that underlie
crimes like rape. How can we bring about that change if we don’t see and
share the reality around us and bring people together to transform that reality
for the better? We can bring in any change only if we understand the roots of
the problem we want to change; if not, we will continue to be its victims.
Awareness is the first essential step towards transformation.
But our government, as usual, prefers to ignore the message and shoot the
messenger. In the case of India’s Daughter, the home of the BBC co-
producer in Delhi was ringed by police; the order of an Indian court was
sought to be imposed on the freedoms of other societies; and people
worldwide decried the thin-skinned intolerance of a supposedly democratic
government. And of course, far more people rushed to see the film than
would have been the case if the Indian government hadn’t reacted with such
juvenile petulance. So the government’s intolerance was actually self-
defeating: their conduct brought about the national disgrace they claimed they
were trying to prevent.
In the 2014 election campaign, India’s television screens were flooded
with BJP advertisements in which a female voter called for a BJP
government because she wanted to live in a country that would be safe for
her daughter. The BJP’s campaign cynically exploited the public outrage at
crimes against women. But as has become obvious over the last four years of
rhetoric divorced from results, the BJP government cares much more for
appearances than reality. Its budgets have cynically ignored women’s needs,
aside from slogans. Successive BJP budgets have savaged allocations for
women; to take just one example, funding for the national rape crisis centres,
which were set up in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya case, was slashed from
₹244.48 crore to a mere ₹18 crore in 2015. 265 Five years after the centre had
proposed 660 such crisis centres, funds had been allocated for only 151, and
were further reduced to permit the establishment of just two! In the national
capital, which reported the highest cases of crimes against women in 2016, as
per government data, only nine such centres were operational in 2018. 266
These cuts, though the BJP government would pretend otherwise, are far
more unkind than any made in the BBC’s editing rooms.
Nirbhaya’s father, Badrinath Singh, openly attacked the patriarchal
mindsets of the Indian establishment. ‘How will we protect our daughters if
we don’t tell our sons what is wrong and should not be done? Isn’t it time to
admit that there are both good and bad people everywhere and that certain
ways of thinking have led to the death of our daughters?’ he asked the BBC.
267 And he added, to the Economic Times , ‘Many men, even from good
families and with good degrees, seem to think like this. How can our
daughters study and work freely if society thinks like this?… We ask parents
to treat their daughters as they treat their sons. Educate them but at the same
time make them strong and, more importantly, teach your sons to respect
women.’ 268
This is the kind of wisdom our society sorely needs. A website called
‘The Political Indian’ lists statements by seven respectable, ‘mainstream’
politicians, many of whom are members of parliament, on women, and they
make chilling viewing or reading. The attitudes they reveal about women’s
place in society and to rape itself are the real problem reflected in the
documentary. The BBC shows a defence lawyer saying, ‘We have the best
culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman.’ 269 That encapsulates
the challenge, and it can only be met by a sustained campaign of education,
from childhood onwards, of our boys to make them into real men—men who
respect women.
The controversy over the film contributed in making us aware of the
mindsets in our midst, the attitudes and ways of thinking that enable and
legitimize rape. It is sadly not such a long leap from condemning girls’
clothes and believing a woman’s place is in the kitchen and the bedroom, to
assaulting them sexually and torturing them with iron rods. The fact that such
opinions are widespread, and the dangers they pose, are what films like
India’s Daughter reveal starkly to us. Rape, after all, is not about sex, but
about the violent assertion of power over women. How will denial, or
burying our heads in the sand, prevent Indian rapists with such views from
claiming new victims? Has the BJP government’s ‘see no evil’ attitude
eliminated evil from our country?
The government and political leaders need to speak of zero tolerance for
rape and sexual assault, and extend their rhetoric to concrete action to make
this a reality. Prime Minister Modi has spoken of his pride in India’s ‘matru
shakti’ and declared that ‘women’s empowerment is very crucial for our
development’. 270 If the prime minister and the government set the example
through their own actions and not just words, the nation will follow. The BJP
leaders are much given to empty slogans like ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. They need
instead to give Indian women a decent and safe country to live in: only this
would honour Bharat Mata and truly ensure her ‘jai’.

243 ‘BJP has highest no. of MPs, MLAs with cases of crime against women: ADR study’,
Hindustan Times , 31 August 2017.
244 Ibid
245 ‘Crying for help: 82% rise in child rape cases needs urgent attention’, Times of India , 2
December 2017.
246 Shuja-ul-Haq, ‘Kathua rape case: 2 BJP ministers attend rally in support of accused’,
India Today , 4 March 2018.
247 ‘Politicians tell us why rape is a woman’s fault’, The Quint , 7 January 2017.
248 Shailaja Neelakantan, ‘Indian politicians’ revolting comments about rape’, Times of
India , 2 August 2016.
249 Shibaji Roychoudhury, ‘Manohar Lal Khattar, who blamed women for India’s rising
rapes, is new Haryana CM’, Scroll.in , 22 October 2014.
250 ‘Fully dressed Chennai women safe as they visit temples: M.P. Minister’, The Hindu ,
10 January 2014.
251 Kounteya Sinha, ‘Nirbhaya gang-rape convict blames victim for the fatal assault’,
Times of India , 3 March 2015.
252 ‘India outrage after woman politician blames women for rape’, BBC , 29 January 2014.
253 Shailaja Neelakantan, ‘Indian politicians’ revolting comments about rape’, Times of
India , 2 August 2016.
254 Ibid.
255 Ibid.
256 ‘Ten excuses for rape in independent India’, DailyO , 13 August 2015.
257 Lakshmi Chaudhry, ‘Everyone’s favourite Mataji: Sushma Swaraj’s big bindi politics’,
FirstPost , 16 January 2013
258 Vasundhara Sirnate, ‘Good laws, bad implementation’, The Hindu , 1 February 2014.
259 ‘I shall never stop chasing you’, a Bollywood hit song of the early 1970s.
260 Tara Conlan and Maseeh Rahman, ‘India’s Daughter: BBC brings forward airing of
Delhi rape documentary’, BBC , 4 March 2015.
261 ‘India’s daughter: Chronicle of a death foretold by Udwin’, Bangalore Mirror , 7
March 2015.
262 ‘Govt plans legal action against maker of documentary on Nirbhaya’, Times of India , 4
March 2015.
263 Nirnimesh Kumar, ‘Court stay on telecast to continue’, The Hindu , 5 March 2015.
264 Yvonne Roberts, ‘India’s Daughter: “I made a film on rape in India. Men’s brutal
attitudes truly shocked me”’, The Guardian , 1 March 2015.
265 Ananya Sengupta, ‘Rape centres cut, 660 to 36’, The Telegraph , 24 February 2015.
266 ‘Rape crisis cell: Centre says no proposal from Delhi, West Bengal’, Indian Express , 6
September 2017.
267 ‘Ban wasn’t needed. For truth to be known, filth has to come out, says Nirbhaya’s
father Badrinath Singh’, Economic Times , 5 March 2015.
268 Ibid.
269 ‘Delhi rapist says victim shouldn’t have fought back’, BBC , 3 March 2015.
270 ‘Narendra Modi full speech today at GES 2017: PM says women empowerment vital
for India’s future’, Financial Express , 28 November 2017.
 chapter nine

SECTION 377—THE SUPREME COURT SAVES THE

DAY

Over seventy years after adopting one of the world’s most liberal
constitutions, India was able to finally celebrate the expunging of a nasty
colonial-era provision in its penal code, Section 377, which criminalized
‘whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with
any man, woman, or animal.’ The Supreme Court ruling of 6 September 2018
271 was not so much about sex as it was about freedom—the freedom of
Indian citizens to enjoy the rights of equality, dignity and privacy in their
personal lives, without government interference.
Section 377 made any sex apart from penile-vaginal intercourse between
a man and a woman—any sex the authorities in power decide is ‘against the
order of nature’—to be illegal. The Supreme Court ruling made it clear that
the personal sexual preferences of adults was indeed as nature made them,
and that it was lawful for them to be themselves.
Obviously this was great news for the LGBTQ community, whose idea of
what is ‘natural’ reflects their sexual orientation. But it also impacted married
heterosexual couples since, theoretically, an act of oral sex between a
husband and a wife is also illegal. And if you were not married to each other,
of course, it was worse. If Bill Clinton had been an Indian, he might have
survived impeachment after the Monica Lewinsky affair, but he’d have ended
up in jail under Section 377.
Though not widely used—there were fewer than a thousand arrests a year
under Section 377 272 —the law was a tool for the harassment, persecution,
and blackmail of sexual minorities within India. Beyond forcing millions of
gay men and women to live in fear and secrecy, Section 377 undermined
HIV-prevention efforts and contributed to depression and suicides. A 2014
study by the World Bank revealed that India suffers a loss of between 0.1 per
cent and 1.7 per cent of GDP because of such homophobia.
The Supreme Court’s decision recognized that by giving the state the
authority to control what Indian adults do, consensually, in their bedrooms,
Section 377 violated the constitutional rights to dignity, privacy, and equality
enshrined in Articles 14, 15, and 21, respectively. Its decision meant that all
consensual sex between consenting adults, irrespective of gender and
sexuality, was now legal. This did not imply, as ill-informed critics on social
media were alleging, that in the process it legitimized forced sex, sex with
animals, paedophilia or pederasty.
In 2013, the Supreme Court had overturned a liberal Delhi High Court
ruling which struck down Section 377 in 2009. 273 The heavens did not fall
after the High Court ruling; Indian society did not collapse. Yet bigots
petitioned to reverse that decision, ultimately succeeding in turning back the
clock for gay rights in India in 2013, when the Supreme Court overturned the
High Court’s decision.
Like many Indians, I found the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling antithetical
to India’s commitment to pluralism and democracy, which provides for the
embrace of a multitude of identities, including those based on sexual
orientation. So, in December 2015, I sought to introduce a Bill that would
have amended Section 377 and decriminalized all consensual sex between
adults, irrespective of their gender and sexuality, but a vocal section of
homophobes from the ruling party defeated my attempt even to introduce my
Bill in Parliament. The same thing happened when I tried again in March
2016. Sneering comments were made about my alleged personal interest in
the Bill, to which I responded that one does not need to be a cow to defend
the rights of animals.
The BJP’s vote was incongruous on several levels, but most glaringly in
its rejection of millennia of Indian practice in favour of a British colonial law
(which the British themselves have outgrown). The Indian ethos toward
sexual difference has historically been liberal, with neither mythology nor
history revealing the persecution or prosecution of sexual heterodoxy. In fact,
the Hindu epics are dotted with characters like Shikhandi in the Mahabharata,
who was born female and became male; many Hindus venerate the half-man,
half-woman Ardhanarishvara; and temple sculptures across India depict
homosexual acts. Yet the BJP, the party of Hindu chauvinism, chooses to
ignore this Hindu tradition.
In its 2013 judgment that reaffirmed Section 377, the Supreme Court said
that legislators, not judges, must decide its fate. Unfortunately, Parliament
proved itself unequal to the task; the bigotry and homophobia in the ruling
party and the indifference and prejudice in much of the Opposition, had
rendered the institution a temple of hypocrisy on this issue. Indeed,
legislative recourse for the injustice of Section 377 would not have been
available as long as the BJP was in power.
When I gave up my unsuccessful attempts to remove or amend Section
377 through legislative channels, I expressed the hope that good sense would
prevail in the judiciary and that this provision would eventually be struck
down by the courts. After all, whereas change via legislation would require
political courage—a quality sorely lacking in the current Indian government
—the judiciary is not hampered by such considerations. Still, one of the
judges hearing the case was moved to comment on the abdication of political
responsibilities to the ‘wisdom of the judiciary’. 274
The landmark judgment of September 2018 confirmed that India’s
Supreme Court has an exemplary record of interpreting statutes in a way that
expands human rights in the country. The hope remains that the Supreme
Court will consistently uphold an idea of India in which the law embodies
constitutional values of privacy, equality, dignity, and non-discrimination for
all citizens. During the case, the words of Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman, one
of the justices on the bench hearing the petitions against Section 377, were
especially heartening: ‘The whole object of fundamental rights is to give the
court power to strike down laws which a majoritarian government, swung by
votes, will not repeal. We don’t wait for majoritarian governments to repeal
laws. If a law is unconstitutional, it is the duty of the court to strike it down.’
275
The alternative—allowing Indian law to continue to serve as an iron cage
for some of our people—would have directly undermined the freedom of
identity and expression that constitutes the backbone of Indian democracy.
What is more, it would have left India out of step with much of the rest of the
international community, a country embarrassed before the world’s other
democracies.
The Modi government deserves no credit for the abolition of Section 377.
It allowed its MPs to twice thwart my attempts to raise the issue on the floor
of the House; it showed absolutely no inclination to address the issue itself;
and when the Supreme Court finally took up the question of the
constitutionality of Section 377, it failed to take a stand when invited to do
so, pusillanimously leaving the matter to the judiciary. Bigotry sadly runs
deep in the veins of the votaries of Moditva.

271 ‘“Gay sex is not a crime”, says Supreme Court in historic judgement’, Times of India, 6
September 2018.
272 Shibu Thomas, ‘14% of those arrested under section 377 last year were minor’, Times
of India , 29 September 2016.
273 J. Venkatesan, ‘Supreme Court sets aside Delhi HC verdict decriminalising gay sex’,
The Hindu , 11 December 2013.
274 Pritam Pal Singh, ‘Why do politicians sometimes hand power to court: Justice
Chandrachud on Section 377’, Indian Express, 9 September 2018.
275 ‘Court’s duty to strike down law if it violates fundamental right: Supreme Court’ Hindu
BusinessLine, 17 July 2018.
 chapter ten

NO SEX, PLEASE, WE’RE INDIAN

In a manner worthy of a regressive society, where women are objectified,

their sexuality constrained and the sex lives of their citizens policed, the
BJP’s leading lights, rather than sorting out the myriad problems afflicting
the nation, have decided to occupy themselves by policing the moral
standards of the country’s youth. The monk-turned-politician, Yogi
Adityanath, leads the pack. In 2017, ‘anti-Romeo squads’ in Yogi
Adityanath’s state, UP, questioned 21,37,520 people for being out with girls.
276 This has offered a sobering reminder of how far moral policing has gone
in today’s India. Worse, it turns out that of those questioned, 9,33,099 have
been officially ‘warned’ and 1,706 FIRs issued against 3,003 persons. 277 All
this happened in less than nine months after his inauguration; more recent
figures are hard to come by.
So this is what a once-free society has been reduced to: multiple police
squads, each consisting of a sub-inspector and two constables, patrolling
Uttar Pradesh’s university campuses, college yards, cinema theatres, parks
and other public places, looking for ‘Romeos’. The term seems to be loosely
defined, entitling the cops to stop and question any young couple. While it
may have once been intended to curb harassment by louts loafing in public
places to ‘eve-tease’ unwary women, the sheer numbers reported confirm that
the harassment is now coming mainly from the authorities and not from their
targets.
The term ‘anti-Romeo squad’ is itself telling. It traces its origins to the
‘Roadside Romeos’ of my own youth—raffish fellows in drainpipe pants,
wavy locks and rakish moustaches, usually unemployed, who lounged about
whistling at, or singing snatches of Bollywood film songs to, passing women.
They were usually ignored, and mostly harmless. Today’s UP police have a
far broader target: a Romeo is any young man aspiring to woo his own Juliet.
Shakespeare’s Romeo, after all, defied convention and evaded his
disapproving parents to pursue his love for a woman from the wrong family.
That is precisely what Chief Minister Adityanath does not want Romeo’s
twenty-first century imitators to do.
The anti-Romeo squads are merely the latest sign of the continuing
assault on any cultural practice deemed to be insufficiently Hindu by the self-
appointed guardians of Indian culture. As Valentine’s Day approached, CM
Adityanath’s squads doubled their vigil. Until he became CM of the state,
policing Valentine’s Day lovers was a task undertaken by lumpen activists of
assorted senas and dals; now, in a sort of reverse of privatization, it is a task
that has been taken up by the BJP-run state. And what of the freelance anti-
romance troublemakers? After years of attacking couples holding hands on
14 February, trashing stores selling Valentine’s Day greeting cards and
shouting slogans outside cafes with canoodling couples, Hindutva activists
changed tactics. The Hindu Mahasabha announced that it would send out
squads to catch any unmarried couples out for a tryst on Valentine’s Day and
promptly cart them off to a temple to be married. (And, if the Hindutvavadi
MP and Godse admirer Sakshi Maharaj has his way, they will be lectured on
the virtues of producing between four and ten children forthwith, in order to
give his fantasies a voting majority.) The Shiv Sena conducted a ‘lathi puja’ a
few days before Valentine’s Day this year, declaring that the sticks would be
useful to discipline couples engaged in public displays of affection. 278 They
warned restaurants not to organize special events to commemorate the day,
arguing that Valentine’s Day promoted ‘love jihad’, or Hindu girls falling
prey to the romantic attentions of Muslim men. Lucknow University issued a
circular banning students from campus on the day, purportedly on account of
Mahashivaratri, while also advising them not to celebrate Valentine’s Day as
it was ‘Western culture’—and threatening disciplinary action if they were
seen on campus. 279
The police-uniform-clad face of intolerance might be amusing if it
weren’t for the fact that all involved are deadly serious. The nativists argue
that Valentine’s Day is an imported celebration, which it is (but so is
Christmas, or Eid-ul-Nabi, or International Women’s Day, for that matter,
and they don’t have the nerve to attack those). They also argue that it is un-
Indian because it celebrates romantic love, and there they’re completely
wrong. Historians tell us that there was a well-established Hindu tradition of
adoration for Kamadeva, the god of love, which was only abandoned after the
Muslim invasions in medieval times. But then no one in the Hindu
Mahasabha has any real idea of Hindu tradition—their idea of Indian values
is not just primitive and narrow-minded, it is also profoundly anti-historical.
In fact, what young people today call ‘PDA’ or ‘public display of
affection’ was widely prevalent in ancient India. As late as the eleventh
century, Hindu sexual freedoms were commented upon by shocked travellers
from the Muslim world. Today’s young celebrants of Valentine’s Day are
actually upholding India’s ancient pre-Muslim culture, albeit in a much
milder form than is on display, for instance, in Khajuraho. In a sense, 14
February is their attempt at observing Kamadeva Divas. How ironic that they
should incur the disapproval of the self-appointed custodians of Hindu
culture!
But let’s face it: this is less about teenagers dating than about yet another
aspect of the ruling dispensation’s political project of transforming secular
India into their idea of a Hindu state. Tradition is sought to be upheld in the
name of culture: traditionalism benefits those who want to uphold the social
order, ensure discipline and conformity, and prevent radical change. Love
affairs, which may after all cross caste or religious lines, are to be
disapproved of for threatening this social order. Worse still, they reflect the
autonomy of the individual and her right to choose, which is anathema to
those who would prefer to make faceless cow-worshippers of us all.
All this is being done in the name of a notion of Indian culture whose
assertion is based on a denial of India’s real rather than imagined past. India’s
culture has always been a capacious one, expanding to include new and
varied influences, from the Greek invasions (which taught Hindus to make
temples to worship their gods) to the British (who created our censorious
penal code). The central battle in contemporary Indian civilization is that
between those who, to borrow from Walt Whitman, acknowledge that as a
result of our own historical experience, we are vast, we contain multitudes,
and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define—in
increasingly narrower terms—what is ‘truly’ Indian.
The Constitution is the only bedrock of true Indianness. All who cherish
the freedoms engraved in our Constitution must resist the pernicious menace
of the anti-Romeo squads.
‘Wherefore art thou?’ Shakespeare’s heroine asked. Wherefore are we?
We must stand up for Juliet.
276 Karan Thapar, ‘Love in the time of anti-Romeo squads’, Hindustan Times , 10
February 2018.
277 Ibid.
278 Moh Delshad, ‘Shiv Sena conducts “lathi puja”, says will use sticks against lovers on
Valentine’s Day’, Times of India , 13 February 2018.
279 ‘Why Lucknow University has declared Valentine’s Day a holiday’, Times of India , 12
February 2018.
 chapter eleven

THE ATTACK ON SCIENCE

Among the many ailments inflicted upon India by the BJP, the most cringe-
inducing (in a rather long list) must be its leaders’ boastfully ignorant
atavism. Not only do they claim credit, on behalf of their ancient Hindu
forebears, for every invention of the modern era; they assert their point of
view with a certitude that is immune to ridicule, or even common sense.
For example, the chief minister of the tiny northeastern state of Tripura,
Biplab Deb, cheerfully declared that Indians had invented the Internet some
two millennia ago. 280 The proof of this particular hasty pudding, he insisted,
lay in the fact that in the ancient epic the Mahabharata, one of the characters,
Sanjaya, was able to provide a detailed narrative to the blind king
Dhritarashtra of a battle that was taking place many miles away. This proved,
Mr Deb averred, that in ancient times India had invented and used both
satellite technology and the Internet.
The ridicule was swift in coming. American historian Audrey Truschke
asked wickedly why Sanjaya had bothered to narrate the story when he could
have used Siri instead—and why Lord Krishna hadn’t streamed the Bhagavad
Gita on Facebook Live. Another social media user hoped that ancient Indians
had better Internet bandwidth than their spectrum-starved descendants enjoy
today. One said the longevity of the Internet in India, no doubt, explained
why the country had the largest number of trolls in the world. A third dubbed
the ancient invention the ‘Indra-Net’, a reference to the Vedic god Indra, and
explained that the GPS used those days must have been the God Positioning
System.
The unfazed chief minister remained defiant. ‘Narrow-minded people
find it tough to believe this. They want to belittle their own nation and think
highly of other countries. Believe the truth. Don’t get confused and don’t
confuse others,’ he told the press. 281 The political uses of his claim were
never far from his mind; the BJP has been pressing ancient ‘achievements’ as
an integral part of its hyper-nationalism. ‘I feel proud that I am born in a
country with such an advanced technology’, the chief minister added.
India’s Constitution calls for the promotion of ‘scientific temper,
humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform’ amongst the populace. This
is the state’s responsibility, and also the constitutional duty of every citizen.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a passionate advocate of
science who argued that while religion tends to close the mind and produce
‘intolerance, credulity and superstition, emotionalism and irrationalism’, and
‘a temper of a dependent, unfree person’, a scientific temper ‘is the temper of
a free man’, and therefore indispensable in free India. 282
It seems, however, that such ideas are no longer fashionable in an India
ruled by the BJP. Its leaders and acolytes are busy attempting to keep the
theory of evolution out of school curricula, and insisting that the ancients had
already discovered or invented every scientific accomplishment in the Vedic
age, including jet aircraft (pushpak viman) and atomic weaponry. The
underlying message is that ancient India had all the answers, and that
traditional and indigenous practices and ways of life are vastly better than
imported modern scientific ideas.
The reverence for the past that is integral to the ruling ideology is also
reflective of a fear of rejecting the past, since the promotion of a faith-based
communal identity is central to the Hindutva project, and faith is seen as
emerging from the timeless wisdom of the past. Traditionalism benefits those
who want to uphold the social order, ensure discipline and conformity, and
prevent radical change. Science and rationality threaten such conformism.
This is why the ruling dispensation’s political project of transforming
secular India into a Hindu state requires the supremacy of religion over
science, and the assimilation of science into the Hindutva project as merely
something ancient India had had all along. Religion is no longer just a
question of your personal beliefs, a form of stretching out your hands to the
divine; it is part of the assertion of a politics of identity built around faith.
This requires an assault on science, since science challenges the established
verities as religion does not.
Another BJP stalwart, Rajasthan’s education minister, Vasudev Devnani,
dealt science another body blow by claiming that the cow was the only
animal that inhaled and exhaled oxygen. 283 As we have seen, the veneration
of the cow is something of an obsession for the BJP, whose followers have
assaulted human beings in the name of cow protection, but this was a step too
far even for many of its sympathizers among the educated public.
No greater proof of the BJP’s religion-trumps-science agenda can be
found than the prime minister himself. Narendra Modi likes to be portrayed
as a technology-friendly twenty-first-century leader, but as I have mentioned
earlier in this book, Mr Modi startled the world at the inauguration of a
Mumbai hospital with the claim that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh
was proof of ancient India’s knowledge of plastic surgery.
This was not the prime minister’s only offence. Before heading off for
the Paris climate change negotiations, Mr Modi told schoolchildren on
Teachers’ Day in 2014 that climate change was a myth because it was
actually human beings whose capacity to cope with heat and cold that had
changed, rather than the environment. Global warming, he explained on
national television, ‘is just a state of mind’. What made it worse was that this
came as an answer to a schoolchild’s question about climate change. ‘That’s
because as you grow older you are less able to withstand heat and cold. The
climate isn’t changing,’ he said, ‘we are.’ 284
The disease is catching. In May 2017, Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma of
the Rajasthan High Court, reportedly a science graduate himself, told a
television channel that India’s national bird, the peacock, ‘is a lifelong
celibate’ who ‘does not indulge in sex’ but impregnates the peahen by
shedding a tear. He cited Lord Krishna’s use of a peacock feather as proof of
its celibacy. 285 The idea of a peacock reproducing through tears may seem
laughable, but there is nothing lachrymose about the ruling dispensation’s
dominant Hindutva ideology, which has helped propagate an astonishing
amount of pseudoscience across the country. Narendra Modi associates like
the yoga teacher and Ayurveda entrepreneur Baba Ramdev are regular
offenders. Ramdev pronounces his pseudo-spiritual wisdom to the world,
seeking, for instance, to sell medicines to ‘cure homosexuality’. 286
There’s more in a similar vein. Junior education minister Satyapal Singh
said that Darwin’s theory of evolution was ‘unscientific’—on the grounds
that ‘no one has ever seen an ape turn into a man’. 287 This is a minister of
state responsible for higher education in the Government of India. More
worryingly, Mr Singh is an educated man (he is a Chemistry graduate) as are
most of the others whose examples I’ve cited. But then of course, we must
understand that Mr Singh’s statement had very little to do with the quality of
the science education he received, and more to do with the ruling party’s
ideology.
To reiterate the point I made earlier in this chapter, the ruling
dispensation’s political project of transforming secular India into a Hindu
state requires the supremacy of religion over science. When an education
minister questions Darwin or another minister asserts the miraculous powers
of the cow, he is not merely offering a choice between a scientific theory and
a faith-based one, he is reminding the public of their allegiance to a total
world view. That world view embraces a larger political project that
prescribes a set of beliefs and behaviours incompatible with science,
scepticism and enquiry.
Science and rationality threaten such conformism, because they
encourage scepticism, free enquiry, and testing of the traditional perspectives
that the BJP is so eager to entrench. That is why, as the BJP attempts to
transform secular India into a Hindu state, it must weaken the role of science.
It is difficult to overstate the tragedy that this trend represents. The
obscurantist and atavistic state that Narendra Modi’s BJP wants to create
would look nothing like the one that made India the scientific superpower of
the ancient age. It is enough to make one shed a tear. One can only hope that
there are no peahens around.

280 ‘India had internet and satellites during Mahabharata, claims Tripura CM Biplab Deb’,
Indian Express , 18 April 2018.
281 ‘Tripura CM Biplab Deb says narrow-minded people won’t believe internet existed
since Mahabharata era’, Indian Express , 18 April 2018.
282 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India , New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2004.
283 ‘The myth and reality of India’s heritage’, Economic Times , 21 April 2018.
284 Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘Is Narendra Modi a climate sceptic?’, The Guardian , 9
September 2014.
285 ‘“Peacocks don’t have sex”: Raj HC judge’s comment gets Twitterati chirping’, Indian
Express , 1 June 2017.
286 Poonam Agarwal and Abhirup Dam, ‘Curing homosexuality, Baba Ramdev way: The
Quint’s sting operation’, The Quint , 1 February 2017.
287 PTI, ‘Darwin theory wrong; no one has seen ape turning into man, says MoS Satyapal
Singh’, The Hindu , 20 January 2018.
 chapter twelve

THE TAJ BY ANY OTHER NAME

In a country where in recent times toxic politics has led to everything—from

festival firecrackers to animal husbandry (in this case, the care and protection
of cows)—taking on a ‘communal’ religious colouring, it shouldn’t be too
much of a surprise that its most famous monument hasn’t been exempt.
The Taj Mahal is India’s most magnificent piece of architecture. Built
nearly four centuries ago by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a
mausoleum for his beloved wife, who had borne him thirteen children and
died in the process of producing the fourteenth, it attracts tens of millions of
tourists and is by far the country’s most-photographed building. The exquisite
marble monument to love was hailed by India’s only Nobel Prize-winning
writer, Rabindranath Tagore, as ‘a teardrop on the cheek of Time’.
But this time the Taj has other reasons for tears. Its gleaming white
surface is yellowing as a result of rampant air pollution from factories and
cottage industries around it. Repairs are needed so frequently that scaffolding
often obscures its famous minarets. There has been a 35 per cent drop in
foreign tourists from the 743,000 who visited there in 2012 to the 480,000
tourists who came in 2015. 288 The crowded and grimy town of Agra, which
hosts the Taj, puts visitors off: American basketball player Kevin Durant
sparked a row with his graphic descriptions of the awful conditions around
the Taj Mahal after a visit there in 2017.
And worst of all, the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s BJP, has decided that far from being proud of its most
famous edifice, it wants as little to do with it as possible.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath began the controversy by deploring that
his government used to give models of the Taj as gifts to visiting foreign
dignitaries. Declaring that the monument did not ‘reflect Indian culture’,
Yogi Adityanath announced the government would be handing out copies of
the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, instead. 289
It got worse. The Uttar Pradesh Tourism Department issued a brochure
listing the state’s principal attractions—and omitted the Taj Mahal altogether.
290 The state’s (and the country’s) biggest tourism draw was denied any
cultural heritage funding in the allotments for the 2017–18 fiscal year. 291
Domestic tourists have also decreased significantly. Indian tourists
reportedly prefer the attractions of the holy city of Varanasi in the same state,
Uttar Pradesh. This mirrors and reinforces the monument’s neglect by the
state government in favour of Hindu religious tourism.
But the objection to the Taj is more basic. One extremist BJP legislator,
Sangeet Som, labelled the tomb ‘a blot’ on the fair name of his state, a relic
that had been ‘built by traitors’. The Taj Mahal ‘should have no place in
Indian history,’ he said, demanding that India’s history be ‘changed’ to
remove it. 292
The ruling party’s campaign against the Taj Mahal might seem bizarre;
after all, why would anyone undermine a universally admired architectural
marvel that is such a revenue generator? But those familiar with the tortured
prejudices of the ruling BJP would be less surprised. The attacks on the Taj
are part of their politics of hate towards anything associated with the history
of the centuries of Muslim rule in India.
That this is an unduly simplistic black-and-white rendition of a complex
history, in which there was far more assimilation and coexistence than
religious conflict, is irrelevant to Hindu chauvinists who constitute the bulk
of the BJP’s support base. To them, the Taj is an enduring symbol not of
love, but of conquest and humiliation.
Resentment that a monument built by a Muslim emperor is Hindu-
majority India’s most recognizable monument was, in the past, an obsession
of the extreme right-wing fringe. But the fringe is now in power in Uttar
Pradesh and its enablers rule the roost in Delhi.
Before becoming chief minister in a surprise appointment by his party,
Yogi Adityanath was best known for his incendiary anti-Muslim speeches,
laden with toxic rhetoric, and for leading a volunteer squad of hoodlums who
specialized in attacking Muslim targets. 293 He spent eleven days in jail in
2007 for fomenting religious tension through hate speech, earned notoriety by
calling India’s most beloved film star, Shah Rukh Khan, a terrorist, and urged
his party’s government in New Delhi to emulate Donald Trump’s travel ban
on Muslims. 294
But even he has been obliged by public and political opinion to surrender
to national outrage over the latest controversy. After stoking it in the first
place, the chief minister was forced to visit Agra officially to assure an
anxious public that his government was committed to protecting the Taj.
‘What is important,’ he conceded grudgingly, ‘is that it was built by the blood
and sweat of India’s farmers and labourers.’
This acknowledgement is only partly reassuring. It opens the door to
another divisive fringe view of the Taj, that of the chauvinist historian, P. N.
Oak, who argued that the monument was originally a Shiva temple named
‘Tejo Mahalaya’. 295 Some misguided Hindutva elements have already been
caught trying to perform a Shiva puja in the mausoleum. 296 The RSS, the
parent body of the ‘Sangh Parivar’ of organizations that includes the BJP, has
called for Muslims to be prohibited from praying there as well. 297
To many of us, in these circumstances, the BJP’s new-found love for the
Taj might be as alarming as its well-expressed hate for it.
The Taj Mahal is merely the latest victim of a political campaign over
Indian history that, as we have seen, seeks to reinvent the idea of India itself.
This ‘cultural nationalism’ by the Hindu right, stoking long-buried
resentments and promoting hatred for the Muslim minority, is not just deeply
divisive; it undermines the country’s soft power in the world and fragments
its political and social discourse at home.
The past should not be a blunt instrument to score petty political points in
the present. The BJP is yet to learn that one cannot avenge oneself upon
history: history is its own revenge.

288 Annie Gowen, ‘Is India neglecting the Taj Mahal because it was built by Muslims?’,
Washington Post , 3 October 2017.
289 ‘Taj Mahal doesn’t reflect Indian culture: Yogi Adityanath’, Indian Express , 16 June
2017.
290 Omar Rashid, ‘Taj Mahal missing in U.P. tourism booklet’, The Hindu , 2 October
2017.
291 ‘Taj Mahal left out of UP budget heritage plan, Adityanath govt draws ire’, Hindustan
Times , 13 July 2017.
292 ‘Taj Mahal, built by traitors, a blot on Indian culture, says Sangeet Som: supports UP
govt move to remove it from tourism booklet’, FirstPost , 16 October 2017.
293 Hugh Tomlinson, ‘Hindu who urged death to Muslims gets top state job’, The Times ,
21 March 2017; Ajit Sahai, ‘The UP Government’s Colossal Cover-Up Attempt to Protect
Adityanath’, The Wire , 27 July 2017.
294 Michael Safi, ‘Hardline Hindu nationalists campaign against Taj Mahal’, The Guardian
, 30 October 2017.
295 Aditya Dev, ‘Claims to Taj, based on nothing at all’, Times of India , 9 December
2014.
296 Hemendra Chaturvedi, ‘Hindu youths chant Shiva chalisa on Taj Mahal premises’,
Hindustan Times , 23 October 2017.
297 Anand Patel, ‘Ban namaz at Taj Mahal or allow Shiva prayers too, demands RSS
history wing’, India Today , 27 October 2017.
 chapter thirteen

TRIAL OF AND BY THE MEDIA

One of the hallmarks of a vibrant, thriving democracy is a free and healthy

press. The state of our media is yet another indicator of the poor job Prime
Minister Narendra Modi and his government are doing. As already
mentioned, in this year’s World Press Freedom Index Report by the
organization Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders or RSF),
India is ranked 138th out of 180 countries, a disgraceful score. The reasons
for the poor ranking are clearly visible—the murder and coercion of
journalists, fake news, hate speech and the intimidation of editors and
owners.
In its 2018 report, RSF said that among the reasons for India’s poor score
were the following—‘At least three of the journalists murdered in 2017 were
targeted in connection with their work. They included the newspaper editor
Gauri Lankesh, who had been the target of a hate campaign on social
networks… In India hate speech targeting journalists is shared and amplified
on social networks, often by troll armies in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
pay.’ The organization’s secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, also said:
‘Political leaders who fuel loathing for reporters bear heavy responsibilities
because they undermine the concept of public debate based on facts instead
of propaganda. To dispute the legitimacy of journalism today is to play with
extremely dangerous political fire.’ 298
As Narendra Modi’s government took power at a time of great change in
the media, in this chapter I intend to take a look at both the organic change
that has taken place, as well as the toxic influence the BJP and its army of
trolls have brought to bear on various forms of media.
Let’s start where everyone seems to end up these days, social media.
While there are invaluable benefits to the reach and transformative power of
social media, unfortunately, in recent times, one can’t but be alarmed by its
growing toxicity. The vilification to which Indian Foreign Minister Sushma
Swaraj was recently subjected by members and supporters of her own party
was a stark indication of the darker side of India’s social media space.
Ms Swaraj, who has developed something of a reputation for responding
to citizens’ appeals for her ministry’s services on Twitter, was viciously
attacked for the punitive transfer of a passport official who had made bigoted
remarks to an inter-faith couple when they applied for a passport. Her party
members, who through their unseemly protest showed they shared the anti-
Muslim bigotry the official reportedly expressed, blamed her for his
administrative punishment (a decision taken when she was out of the
country). They expressed their rage in a flood of excoriating tweets, including
referring to her disparagingly as ‘begum’ (a Muslim honorific) and urging her
husband to beat her for getting out of line. 299
In the last decade, the BJP has developed a powerful band of cyber goons
to propagate its message of Hindu chauvinism, contempt for minorities and
hyper-nationalism, coupled with a capacity for Rottweiler-like attacks on
political opponents. The social media ‘troll’ has become a vital foot soldier in
the party’s political campaigns.
This extremism began at a time when the party was in the Opposition and
felt its point of view was marginalized in the mainstream national media, but
it has developed into a well-organized machine with a formidable presence
on Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
Cyber cells of well-paid ‘trolls’ were set up in India and abroad to flood
the social media space at all hours, taking on ‘sickulars’ [secularists],
‘libtards’ [liberal ‘bastards’ or ‘retards’], ‘Khangressis’ (an allusion to the
allegedly pro-Muslim leanings of the Congress Party) and responding
ferociously to any statement or action deemed inimical to the BJP’s interests.
‘The reward for these non-official soldiers,’ Santosh Desai observed, ‘is a
dizzying rise from obscurity and in some cases, the promise of official
recognition and rewards.’ 300 Several are ‘followed’ by the prime minister
himself, a fact they advertise with pride. 301
A 2016 exposé, I Am A Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s
Digital Army , by Swati Chaturvedi, 302 bared the details of the well-oiled
and scurrilous machinery that has been set in motion. A virtual army of paid
political pawns operates multiple accounts geared to attacking anyone
deemed inimical to the BJP’s political interests or hostile to its Hindu-
chauvinist, anti-Muslim ideology. 303 The BJP’s cyber hit squads are indeed
so pervasive that it is difficult to express a liberal opinion on Indian social
media without being assailed by a flood of insults and abuse. 304
As a regular victim myself, I have experienced the daily mortification of
opening my timeline to be assaulted by a flood of vile negativity. But for Ms
Swaraj, a leading member of the BJP herself, it was a new experience to be
trolled by her own side. She rashly conducted a Twitter poll to seek her
followers’ support against the textual harassment; a startling 43 per cent
supported the trolls instead. 305
Ms Swaraj had merely discovered what the rest of us had long known:
that her party has poisoned the social media well with posts of such toxicity
that entering the social media space in India has become like stepping into a
mud-wrestling pit. As Dr Frankenstein discovered, you can create a monster,
but you can’t always control what it does.
Abuse of women journalists and political activists is particularly
widespread; not only are their morals called into question and aspersions cast
on their looks and sexual conduct, but rape threats are routine. A recent threat
on Twitter by a BJP activist to rape the ten-year old daughter of a Congress
party spokeswoman led to his arrest. 306 Many hope that this will discourage
future threats from similar social media misogynists.
But it may be too much to hope that the tide has turned. The Internet is
particularly fertile ground for abusive behaviour because of the anonymity it
often affords and the safe distance the perpetrators keep from their targets.
This, coupled with the sense of righteousness that pervades all true believers
in a political cause, seems to empower social media users to say anything
they like.
It’s not just sensibilities they disregard; it’s also facts. The ‘fake news’
phenomenon has taken over the social media world; falsehoods are routinely
asserted without the most elementary fact-checking. Sadly this has cost lives,
as rumours forwarded on social media, especially on WhatsApp, have led to
mob lynchings of innocent people wrongly suspected to be child-kidnappers,
cow-slaughterers or worse. Tens of thousands of Indians from the northeast
fled their homes and jobs in major Indian cities after fake social media posts
used pictures of victims of a Myanmar cyclone to claim they were Muslims
butchered in the northeast; Muslim activists, in revenge, started threatening
Northeasterners elsewhere in India. 307 Things have reached such a state that
even Amit Shah has had to publicly ask supporters to avoid making the
‘mistake’ of posting fake news on social media. 308
It is in the nature of social media, which thrives on sensationalism and
unverified information, that falsehoods go viral faster than sanity can be
restored by disseminating the truth. But attempts to regulate it should be
resisted, because regulating content on the Internet opens the door to
censorship of free expression on other media. There is no easy solution to the
conundrum. But it took a BJP leader to be trolled for the ruling party to
realize the horrors it has unleashed on the rest of us.
II

Social media constitutes the relatively new media frontier but massive change
has overtaken the rest of the industry, not always for the better. I am, in a
sense, a child of the Indian newspaper. My late father, Chandran Tharoor,
started in the newspaper business when barely out of college, representing a
pair of Indian papers in post-war London, and spent his working life as a
senior advertising executive for some of our country’s better-known
mastheads. His world fascinated me. My childhood in the 1960s and early
1970s was replete with stories of editorial meetings and battles between the
editorial and the advertisement departments, for my father injected newspaper
ink into my veins at a young age. I literally grew up with newspapers: from
about six or seven years of age, I can remember sitting with my father at 6.30
every morning drinking chai and reading multiple newspapers, a daily ritual
that gave me an early and abiding passion for the Indian press.
Those were more innocent times, when no one expected to find sex
scandals in the daily news, and editors always knew far more than they
shared with their readers. But those were also days when the papers were
filled with dull accounts of worthy events, and the front pages regurgitated
ministers’ speeches with little context, explanation or analysis. There was no
real engagement with the substance of what politics means to the Indian
people. Investigative journalism was unknown and revelations about errant
conduct on the part of our elected officials would only appear if they had first
been unearthed by the government.
Obviously newspapers have come a very long way since the days in
which I grew up with them. Technology is the most obvious change: today,
almost everything is done on computers. No one knows what compositors are
any more. Journalists do their own proofreading. Presentation and layout
have also dramatically improved. With colour, with newspapers so
attractively designed and presented, with lifestyle supplements and multiple
sections, anyone who remembers those days knows we are looking at a
different product being sold in a different environment.
The economics have also changed: newsprint is more affordable. A
twelve-page paper, the norm in those distant days, would be considered a
joke; multiple sections are now de rigeur. Circulations have shot up along
with literacy and disposable incomes, so that the Times of India today can
call itself the world’s most widely-read English-language broadsheet, and
Hindi newspapers boast readership numbers that would exceed the wildest
fantasies of any editor in the world outside Japan. This is happening when
newspapers in the developed West are falling by the wayside, unable to resist
the challenge of the Internet. Our Times is read by some 13.4 million people
daily, while the best-selling American paper, USA Today , has 2.5 million
readers. According to the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2017, Dainik
Jagran , in Hindi, had 70.37 million readers.
India now has the world’s largest number of paid newspapers, and the
number continues to grow, from 5,767 in 2013 to 7,871 in 2015. 309 (Over
those same two years, fifty newspapers ceased publication in the US, which
has less than a quarter of India’s print papers). According to the 2017 IRS,
the total newspaper readership in India shot up by 110 million, an impressive
39 per cent, over three years. Newspaper readership in rural India, which was
143 million according to a 2014 survey, had increased to 214 million by
2017. 310
This increase in newspaper readership can be attributed to our country’s
rising literacy rate, which has climbed to 74 per cent, owing largely to the
‘cow belt’ of the northern states—the Hindi-speaking heartland. In the 1950s
and 60s, when Hindi speakers were overwhelmingly less literate than those
who read in English, Malayalam, and Bengali, Hindi newspapers had low
circulations. Today, Hindi newspapers are on top and experienced the fastest
growth—from 121 million readers in 2016 to 176 million readers in 2017—a
45 per cent surge in readership.
Along with this growth have come other, more substantive, changes, both
good and bad. On the positive side, our newspapers are more readable, better
edited, better laid out and usually better written than they were. Investigative
stories are frequent and occasionally expose wrongdoing before any official
institution does so. The role of newspapers in rousing the social conscience of
the Indian public about apparent miscarriages of justice, most notably in the
Jessica Lall, Ruchika Girhotra and ‘Nirbhaya’ cases, has been remarkable.
Equally, their boosting of Narendra Modi’s image has served the prime
minister well.
Printed newspapers are a more reliable source of news than the Internet in
a country where access cannot be guaranteed all the time, owing to still-
patchy electricity supplies and weak broadband connectivity. So advertisers
in India have remained loyal to the appeal of newspaper ink over the
flickering cursor, and India’s newspapers are in no danger of becoming
financially unviable. There are still 280 million people yet to become literate.
311 And when they get there, they will want their own newspapers, too.
But still our newspapers also seem conscious that they have to compete in
a tight media environment, where it is not they, but TV and social media that
set the pace. They know that every morning they must reach readers who
have watched TV and read WhatsApp messages the previous day. So
newspapers too feel the need to ‘break’ news in order to be read, to outdo
their TV and social media competitors. Most are led by the nose by TV’s
perennial ratings war, and seek to reach TV-exposed readers each day with a
banner headline that stimulates prurience or outrage rather than increases
awareness.
III

TV news has far too many channels competing 24/7 for the same set of
eyeballs. Once dominated by government programming, India’s visual media
landscape is now brimming with numerous private offerings, with over a
hundred 24/7 TV news channels in multiple languages—the medium-sized
state of Kerala alone has thirteen all-news channels in Malayalam. TV news
has long since given up any pretence of providing a public service, with the
‘breaking news’ story privileging sensation over substance. Indeed, Indian
TV epitomizes that old crack about why television is called a ‘medium’—
because it is neither rare nor well done. The result of this evolution of TV,
print and online media is that most of our media, in their rush to air the story,
have fallen prey to the inevitable rush to judgement: they have too often
become a willing accomplice of the motivated leak and the malicious
allegation, which journalists today have neither the time nor the inclination to
check or verify.
The damage is done in a blaze of lurid headlines—and rectification, if it
comes at all, comes too feebly and too late to undo the irreparable damage to
innocent people’s reputations.
After three-and-a-half years of facing this myself, my patience finally
snapped, and I have sued the most lurid of the TV news channels for
defamation. But justice in our country moves at a stately pace far removed
from the breathless breaking news speed of television, and one’s character
can be assassinated before a judge has even scheduled a date for the next
hearing of a case aiming to prevent such character assassination.
We have had countless spectacles of unnaturally long drawn-out media
trials, fuelled by motivated leaks, with discussion shows on the voyeuristic
Indian TV channels debating accusations and imputations with zero evidence
or even elementary research behind any of the statements aired. In the
process justice itself is ill-served; not only is the climate prejudiced for a fair
trial, but even judges consume media, and they are human—they are bound
to be influenced by what they have seen, heard and read in the news.
And the standards and filters for what gets into the news have weakened
or disappeared in the chronic quest for sensation. Manipulated and malicious
claims are reported uncritically, without editors asking even the most basic
questions about their plausibility. One egregious BJP politician has spent
years saying the most outrageous things about matters he has absolutely no
clue about, and his absurd exaggerations are always reported uncritically by a
complicit media. No one even asks him the elementary question, ‘How do
you know what you claim to know?’ I once asked a journalist friend about
this, and she replied, abashed, ‘Well, he always makes good copy.’ So that’s
all it takes today—make things up and assert them with confidence, and the
press will report you because it’s good copy. It’s hardly surprising that trust
in the media is eroding.
This should be a matter of serious concern to all right-thinking Indians,
because free media are the lifeblood of our democracy. Media and journalism
provide the necessary information that enables a free citizenry to make the
choices of who governs them and how, and ensures that those who govern
remain accountable to those who put them there. Government needs a free
and professional media to keep it honest and efficient, to serve as both mirror
and scalpel; if instead we have a blunt axe, then society is not well served.
 IV

With rapidly changing technology, journalists now work across a multitude

of news distribution platforms. While many venerable publications now have
a multi-media existence—the Times of India , for instance, has three print
newspapers, two television channels and multiple Internet sites as well as
social media accounts—others are digital-only, including new entrants to the
news business such as The Quint, The Wire and Scroll.in . Of course, print,
radio and television also continue to flourish and require reporting. As a
result, these days, a journalist’s skill-set is not limited to just one medium,
and constantly needs to be enhanced to keep pace with the new ways of news
production and distribution.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, are
increasingly becoming the younger generation’s first port of call for news
coverage. With over 200 million users for WhatsApp, 241 million Facebook
users and close to 25 million active Twitter users in India, 312 it is no surprise
that a number of the leading news agencies across the country now push
content to their audiences through these channels. The media is increasingly
sourcing news stories directly from the public domain, from people’s Twitter
feeds and Facebook posts. (Mr Modi’s BJP too has discovered the benefits of
getting his messaging through to the Indian public on these platforms, which
are increasingly flooded by memes and jokes boosting the prime minister and
denigrating his opponents—though his critics have now also woken up to the
same possibilities.)
Today’s smartphones have made everybody a potential journalist. We are
all familiar with the major stories, usually of assault and violence, which
were filmed on a personal mobile phone and then made it onto our television
screens. Other such snippets bombard us on WhatsApp. If every citizen is a
source of news input in this way, the media business itself has changed
beyond recognition.
This has wider consequences, raising new ethical challenges in
journalism. How can we get at the truth when flooded by unverified
information, whether through a phone call, a tweet or even a message on
Facebook or WhatsApp? How do we preserve journalistic objectivity, which
is cherished all the more in India because so few media outlets possess it?
The pressure of keeping up with the relentless 24/7 breaking news cycle,
and now the rise of social media, prompts mainstream journalists to publish
without the traditional recourse to fact-checking. Indian media has found it
increasingly difficult to maintain a clear distinction between opinion and
reporting, commentary and speculation, unverified rumour and certified fact
—categories too often blurred in news coverage today.
Journalists must function as independents, and present news in an
objective fashion. However, their salaries are paid by the owners, whose
agenda must necessarily prevail. And it’s not just the commercial agenda:
more than a third of news channels in India are owned by politicians or
political affiliates, who use their channels to pander to the political interests
or ideology of the owner. 313 The new Republic channel, which claims to
now be Number 1 in English-language prime-time television news, trumpets
its muck-raking credentials but has never taken on a single misdeed of the
ruling BJP, whether the Vyapam scandal or the medical college bribery scam
revealed in Kerala. If that’s your only source of news, you would never know
these scandals have even occurred.
Couple this with the fact that we are currently ruled by a government that
has been accused of intimidating the media by, among others, RSF, the
organization with which I began this chapter, and you can understand India’s
embarrassingly poor performance in the World Press Freedom Index.
However, there is often no need for overt censorship, when a discreet phone
call can serve as a word to the wise. Much of the mainstream media is owned
by investors with other business interests, that make them vulnerable to
government pressure, whether in the way of inducements or threats relating
to their other ventures. Curbing their media outlets or dismissing journalists
and editors is a small price to pay for their businesses not getting on the
wrong side of a strong-willed government.
V

What can be done to make our media and the environment it operates in
better? A lot of the problems stem from a lack of a proper regulatory
authority in the press. The Press Council of India, a statutory body with
quasi-judicial powers, lacks any actual punitive power, rendering it a
toothless watchdog. The Broadcast Standards Authority is no less ineffective.
The free press is both the mortar that binds together the bricks of our
country’s freedom, and the open window embedded in those bricks. No
Indian democrat would call for censorship, or for controls on the free press:
what we want is not less journalism, but better journalism. But before I get to
suggesting how we might get there I’d like to mull briefly over a suggestion
made by one of Narendra Modi’s appointees to the Information &
Broadcasting Ministry, the ministry that oversees our media and runs the
state-owned media organs, among them Doordarshan and All India Radio
(AIR).
Speaking on television, Prakash Javadekar said that both ‘philosophically
and ideologically’ he believed his ministry ought not to exist, adding for good
measure that I&B ‘has no place in a democracy’, echoing what his one-time
predecessor, L. K. Advani, had said in 1977. 314
Mr Javadekar added, in the same interview, that he would consider
appointing a professional editor-in-chief for Doordarshan and AIR with full
freedom to cover the news as he or she thinks fit. He promised not to
interfere in appointments, transfers and promotions in Prasar Bharati, which
he said for good measure he wanted to make accountable to Parliament and
not ‘only’ to himself. If he had followed through on those intentions, he could
certainly have taken a meaningful step towards the withering away of his
own ministry. But when he left the job a year later, he had not even begun
such a process. His successors have ensured that the I&B Ministry remains
firmly under the control of government.
So what does I&B do that would no longer be done if it ceased to exist?
It would no longer run the government’s PR arm, the Directorate of
Audio-Visual Publicity (DAVP); presumably the government would have to
decide whether it needed a PR arm at all, or whether it would simply hand
out contracts to private sector PR agencies when it needed paid publicity.
(This could be done through the e-tendering route trumpeted by the Modi
government in the president’s address in 2014.)
It would also stop running Doordarshan and All India Radio (once
dubbed All-Indira Radio by the critics of that formidable prime minister in
the early 1970s), leaving that task to an autonomous, public-sector Prasar
Bharati; even Mr Modi’s most passionate acolytes have not taken his faith in
minimal government to imply that our venerable public service broadcasters
would be privatized. Some BJP ideologues want the Modi government to
deregulate news and public affairs on radio, which would give us the same
cacophony on FM that we currently get on TV. But the public-service duties
of a government-funded broadcaster—notably relaying information in the
border states and getting out authoritative and authentic official messages in
times of national emergency—would be lost if Prasar Bharati were
privatized.
There’s a case, therefore, for keeping Doordarshan and AIR in the public
sector, but not necessarily for preserving I&B to oversee them. If I&B were
abolished, an autonomous Prasar Bharati would no longer have a political
boss to be accountable to—but as long as it is even partly funded by
taxpayers, it needs political oversight. The solution is to make it answerable
to a committee of Parliament, which is also the body that votes its funding.
The I&B Ministry also plays a key role in the world of Indian cinema. It
appoints and runs the Film Censor Board, of which more in the next chapter,
conducts national and international film festivals, and funds and runs such
worthy institutions as the National Film Development Corporation, the Film
Finance Corporation, the Film and Television Institute of India and the
National Film Archives. These are all things that need to be done, but there is
absolutely no reason why, in the twenty-first century, they must be done by
the government. Why not oblige the film industry to do the job itself, by
creating a Cinema Corporation of India or a National Motion Picture
Association as in the US, with regional versions for each language in which
films are made in our country? The government could transfer its assets to
these bodies in return for equity, and ask the industry to finance itself
thereafter. Can the film industry be trusted to censor itself responsibly? Other
democracies have proved that it can, because the market is often a more
sensitive barometer of public tastes and of what society will tolerate than a
bureaucrat or politician might be. One area where the industry might be less
willing to do what the government has been doing is to finance and
encourage the making of experimental or innovative films with limited
commercial appeal. It could either be obliged to do so by law, or these
functions—and these alone—could be retained by the government under the
rubric of the Ministry of Culture.
One task we haven’t discussed is that of the I&B minister himself, as the
principal spokesperson of the government and boss of the Press Information
Bureau, which diligently puts out press releases daily about whatever the
government is up to (or says it is up to). The government obviously needs a
spokesperson, but this role could be performed by a minister in the PMO
instead, with the PIB assigned to his or her supervision. Or if that makes the
PMO too heavy, park the task in the cabinet secretariat, which after all has
the responsibility for coordinating the work of all ministries, and which could
easily house the government spokesperson too.
In other words, I&B could indeed be abolished, with other ways of
ensuring that its essential functions are still performed inside or outside the
government.
VI

But to get back to the ways in which the media in our country can be better,
here’s a checklist:
First, we must engender a culture of fact-verification and accuracy that
the industry currently appears to lack. Journalists should not feel pressed by
their employers to ‘break the news’, but empowered to hold stories until they
are sure their facts and accusations are accurate. The rush to judgement on the
basis of partial information must stop.
Second, we must insist on better journalistic training at accredited media
institutes that emphasize values of accuracy, integrity and fairness in their
students. These standards should extend to media organizations: when false
claims or intentionally misleading statements are published or broadcast, TV
and print news outlets should issue retractions with equal prominence.
Third, we must welcome different perspectives in our newsrooms and not
allow them to become echo chambers forcing an opinion onto their viewers
in the guise of ‘the nation wants to know’. Newsrooms must be required to
maintain a more diverse journalistic environment. Every story plugging a
point of view must be required to provide some space for the alternative
view, or for a refutation.
Fourth, journalists must welcome comments and feedback from their
viewers and readers, to generate both an environment of trust between the
consumers and the media, and the feeling on the part of the public that they
are not merely passive recipients of a point of view. The Hindu is perhaps
unique in India in having a Reader’s Editor who serves as a sort of
ombudsman for the newspaper and acknowledges mistakes of fact or
emphasis in the newspaper’s coverage. This helps drive a natural cycle of
loyalty and engagement between the paper and its readers.
Fifth, government must introduce laws and regulations that limit the
control of multiple new organizations by a single business or political entity,
thereby encouraging an independent and robust press in the country. A
powerful business interest, vulnerable to government pressure, will usually
override ethical journalistic concerns. India is one of the few major countries
where no restrictions currently exist when it comes to media ownership by
our own citizens. Too many capitalists own media outlets with a view to
using them to shore up their business interests. As Arun Shourie recently
observed by recalling a Zulu proverb, ‘A dog with a bone in its mouth can’t
bark.’ 315 Succumbing to government pressure is often a business necessity.
Finally, a single overseer for print and television news companies, as
recommended by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, would help
limit the power of corporate and political behemoths over our media and help
promote media standards.
The free press is like the parrot in a cage being sent down a mineshaft to
see if there is enough oxygen at the bottom; if it comes back dead, or choking
and spluttering for air, you know it is not safe for miners to go down. If the
media is choking or suffocated, that is a clear indication that society is no
longer safe for the rest of us.
The aim of journalism in times of change, especially when some changes
in society may be considered for the worse, is to offer us the most meaningful
record of how it would have felt to live during our era and how humane
values were kept alive—even if they couldn’t prevail over political
repression, intimidation or violence.
In an India assailed by gau-rakshaks and assorted vigilante squads, where
intolerance and bigotry have been unleashed across the land and seemingly
condoned by those who are in power, at a time when morality is tossed aside
and ethical values are sneered at, there has never been a more urgent need for
a journalism of principle and courage.
We do not have enough of that. Instead, the media’s current obsession
with the superficial and the sensational trivializes public discourse, abdicates
the watchdog responsibility that must be exercised by free media in a
democracy, and distracts the public from the real questions of accountability
with which the governed must confront the government.

298 ‘Media-bashing by politicians a threat to democracies, RSF warns’, Reuters, 25 April

2018.
299 Apoorvanand, ‘For whom the bells troll’, Indian Express , 10 July 2018.
300 Santosh Desai, Times of India, 3 September 2018, op.cit.
301 ‘PM Modi follows a number of the chief offenders on Twitter, the BJP social media
cell has waged battles against prominent actors for voicing concern against intolerance,
student leaders from opposition parties have been thrown into jail because of doctored
videos, verified accounts within the government have tweeted communal and hate
speeches, and prominent ministers have begun to use some of this offensive language in
public’, from Swati Chaturvedi, I Am A Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital
Army, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016, p. 140.
302 Ibid.
303 Nehal Ahmed, ‘Anti-Muslim bigotry has been normalized under PM Modi’, Al Jazeera
, 12 April 2018; ‘Communalism remains cornerstone of party’s ideology’, Business
Standard , 24 February 2018.
304 Swati Chaturvedi, ‘General Modi and his Troll Army’, The Wire , 8 September 2017.
305 ‘On Sushma Swaraj’s Twitter poll, 43 per cent approves trolling’, Indian Express , 1
July 2018.
306 ‘BJP’s “accounting assistant” arrested over threat to Priyanka Chaturvedi’, National
Herald , 5 July 2018.
307 ‘India’s north-east: A neglected crisis’, The Economist , 25 August 2012.
308 ‘Avoid posting “fake” items on social media, BJP chief Amit Shah to party workers’,
DNA , 21 June 2018.
309 Rishi Iyengar, ‘Newspapers are thriving in this country’, CNN , 11 May 2017.
310 Dibyajyoti Sarma, ‘39% of Indians read newspapers: IRS 2017 Report’, PrintWeek , 19
January 2018.
311 ‘India’s illiterate population largest in the world, says UNESCO report’, The Hindu ,
30 January 2014.
312 ‘No, Facebook user base in India does not beat the US; still at number two’, Indian
Express , 14 July 2017.
313 Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, ‘When politicians own the media’, Business Standard , 24
January 2013.
314 ‘Ideologically, I favour abolition of I & B Ministry: Prakash Javadekar’, Economic
Times , 7 June 2014.
315 ‘“A Dog With a Bone in Its Mouth Can’t Bark”: Arun Shourie on Mainstream Media’,
The Wire , 4 September 2018.
 chapter fourteen

STANDING UP TO CENSORSHIP

Censorship has a peculiar status in India. When it comes to news media, print
or broadcast, censorship is utterly unacceptable, even unthinkable. Yet all
films produced by India’s prolific film industry must be reviewed and
approved by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which has the
authority to demand that scenes be cut or language changed before a film can
be screened publicly.
The discrepancy is a matter of elitism. Decades ago, the supposed
guardians of India’s public morals decided that those with the education and
good taste to read a newspaper could handle its contents, but ordinary people
seeking diversion would have to be protected from the pernicious effects of
the ‘wrong’ kinds of entertainment.
To be sure, violence often makes it past the censors. But sexuality is
another story. While images of nudity appear in urban glossy magazines to
titillate the bourgeoisie, city-based censors make sure that villagers do not see
a woman’s bare breast on a movie screen. Until recently, not even a kiss
could appear in a Bollywood movie; instead, as the man and woman tilted
their heads towards each other, the camera would pan to two birds pecking or
two flowers touching onscreen.
Other perceived threats to Indian culture include offensive language, gay
themes, and unconventional views, especially on socially and politically
sensitive topics. Sentiments that we take for granted in the opinion pages of
newspapers rarely find their way into Bollywood blockbusters.
Even on television, entertainment is subject to rules that don’t apply to
news. A fashion show, for example, would be rigorously reviewed to ensure
that no non-conformist attire that shocks the sensibilities of Indian culture’s
custodians makes it onscreen. Fashion channels have been taken off the air
for showing models in revealing clothes.
India’s film industry has long suffered stoically under the pressure of the
paternalistic censors. But it was perhaps at its worst under Pahlaj Nihalani, an
appointment blessed by the prime minister’s more rabid followers (Mr
Nihalani had made a campaign video, ‘Har Har Modi, Ghar Ghar Modi’, for
Narendra Modi before the 2014 elections), who was chief censor from
January 2015 to August 2017.
To get an idea of the scale of the Nihalani-led review board’s moral
policing, a kiss in the James Bond movie Spectre was deemed too long (and
therefore trimmed). A sex scene in the superhero hit Deadpool got the same
treatment. Mr Nihalani went so far as to declare that engaging in a long kiss
‘means you want to do sex in your house with your door open, and show to
people the way you are doing sex.’ 316 Needless to say, that comment
attracted considerable derision.
Gay themes also met with Mr Nihalani’s disapproval, with the film
Aligarh , about the persecution of a gay professor, receiving an ‘A’ rating,
which restricted the film to adults, despite the lack of nudity or sex. The
board demanded that the word ‘lesbian’ be removed from another film.
Mr Nihalani’s reign of cultural terror came to a head with the review
board demanding 72 cuts from the big-budget Bollywood film Udta Punjab
(‘Punjab on a High’), a gritty tale centred on the drug culture that is prevalent
in the eponymous northwestern Indian state. That decision was, it seems,
entirely political.
At the time, Punjab was controlled by the BJP, in alliance with a
powerful regional party, the Shiromani Akali Dal, neither of which was
pleased by the film’s portrayal of the state they ruled. And, unsurprisingly,
the cuts largely targeted scenes and dialogue highlighting the government’s
failure to curb—and some politicians’ complicity in promoting—Punjab’s
widespread drug abuse. To add insult to injury, the censors asked the
filmmakers to remove all ninety-four references to Punjab in the film,
including from its title. 317
‘All the characters are negative,’ Mr Nihalani reportedly said. But when
he declared that the film would ‘hurt the whole community’, what he really
meant was that it would hurt the BJP and its allies. 318 The fact that the cuts
would have gutted the film—as would have happened if Woody Allen were
forced to remove Barcelona from Vicky Cristina Barcelona —was apparently
irrelevant.
 But Mr Nihalani failed to reckon with Udta Punjab ’s feisty producer,
Anurag Kashyap, a luminary of Bollywood’s avant-garde. Anurag Kashyap
launched a Twitter attack on Mr Nihalani, calling him a ‘dictatorial man’ and
an ‘oligarch’—and not stopping there. ‘I always wondered what it felt like to
live in North Korea,’ Kashyap tweeted. ‘Now I don’t even need to catch a
plane.’ 319
Anurag Kashyap continued his resistance offline, taking the almost
unprecedented step of suing the review board—and winning. The Mumbai
High Court ordered that the film be shown with only one scene cut. It was
promptly released, and went on to break many of India’s box-office records.
But even with Pahlaj Nihalani gone (lyricist and screenwriter Prasoon
Joshi, who had played such a crucial role in Modi’s image management and
makeover in 2013–14, was appointed CBFC chief in August 2017), the
review board went back to its old ways. India remains a modern democracy
engaged in the thoroughly undemocratic practice of limiting freedom of
speech, if only in the film industry.
The practice of film censorship is yet another relic of a bygone colonial
era, the values of which Indians have too readily internalized. Over seven
decades after independence, Indians must recognize that our democracy is
mature enough to end censorship.
II

Towards the end of 2017, Modi’s India was torn apart further by another
cultural controversy—this time over the film Padmavat . Padmavat tells the
story of an eponymous Rajput queen believed to have died, together with
16,000 other women of the Rajput warrior caste, by self-immolation in 1301,
in order to avoid being captured alive by the invading Delhi sultan Alauddin
Khilji. Even before its release, Padmavat (originally known as Padmavati)
had already inspired countless front-page stories and debates on the evening
news, hysterical threats of violence, and a ban in four states governed by
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. 320
The historical accuracy of Padmavati’s story is dubious: no contemporary
account of Khilji’s attack on Chittorgarh, including by historians
accompanying his forces, mentions the queen. Yet Padmavati has been a
figure of legend since 1540, when the Sufi mystic poet Malik Muhammad
Jayasi devoted his lyrical epic Padmavat to her story.
 It has been suggested that Jayasi did not intend his tale to be taken
literally, and that his work, instead, represented the Persian mystical-poetic
tradition of using romance to represent humanity’s search for the divine. By
this interpretation, the poem is an allegory for the union of mind and soul,
under attack from external forces. Jayasi may have chosen Khilji’s attack on
Chittorgarh as a setting for his epic because its name includes the word chit
(consciousness).
But literature, once published, acquires a life of its own. Jayasi’s tale was
retold countless times, by Bengali bards, Rajasthani folk-tellers, and even the
English Colonel Tod, who included Padmavati’s tale in his compilation,
Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana . Through those retellings, her self-
immolation (jauhar) became a noble act of resistance against the lustful
Muslim, making her an exemplar of unsullied Hindu womanhood.
Over time, Padmavati was effectively deified. The reputed site of her
suicide became a tourist attraction. The head of the Karni Sena, a Rajput
organization, claimed to be her direct descendent. (When confronted with the
view that she was fictional, he replied, ‘I am 37th in her direct line of descent.
Am I a ghost?’ 321 )
With so much riding on Padmavati’s image as a symbol of female honour
and purity, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the Bollywood filmmaker who set out to
make a film of her story, unwittingly became a target of historical passions.
The Karni Sena trashed the film set at Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur, and disrupted
further shooting in a new (less ‘authentic’) location at Kohlapur, accusing
Bhansali of filming a love scene between the Hindu queen and the Muslim
invader. The Rajput community is also rumoured to have delayed the release
of the film on the grounds that it ‘distorted history,’ though Mr Bhansali
denied this.
The film’s detractors, including the four BJP chief ministers who
instituted the preemptive bans (with not a murmur emerging from their
leader, the prime minister), did not even see the film before condemning it.
322 That is how defensive some Hindus in India have become over the
version of history to which they subscribe—even when, as in Padmavati’s
case, that history may well be nothing more than a figment of collective
imagination.
No less an ardent secularist than India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal
Nehru, summed up the phenomenon seven decades ago: ‘Facts and fiction are
so interwoven together as to be inseparable, and this amalgam becomes an
imagined history, which may not tell us exactly what happened but does tell
us something equally important—what people believed had taken place, what
they thought their heroic ancestors were capable of, and what ideals inspired
them.’ 323 This ‘imagined history’—‘a mixture of fact and fiction, or
sometimes only fiction’—becomes ‘symbolically true.’
This explains, in a nutshell, the opposition to Padmavat . For some
Hindus, the difference between historical fact and cultural myth does not
matter; what is remembered and believed is as important as what is verifiable.
And in today’s climate, where ‘taking offence’ is the name of the game and
‘hurting the sentiments of a community’ is the name of the crime, that
perspective is particularly relevant. The old Hindu boasts of expansive
tolerance and acceptance of difference—the very tenets that underlie India’s
remarkable diversity—are wearing thin these days.
But there is precedent for this response. A decade ago, hairdressers
objected to the film Billu Barber , arguing (absurdly) that the term ‘barber’ is
an insult to their profession. So they threatened to protest the film everywhere
it was shown—threats that forced the Bollywood star and producer to drop
the second word, renaming the film simply Billu .
While it may seem alarmist to suggest that freedom of expression in India
is in peril, the atmosphere of intimidation by inflamed mobs, to whom
governments surrender all too willingly, is palpable. By permitting these
intolerant bullies to get away with their lawless acts of intimidation, we are
allowing them to do violence to something vital to India’s survival as a
civilization.
I saw the film myself in a theatre in Thiruvananthapuram. Among the
fellow cine-goers who inevitably asked for selfies was a young family from
Rajasthan who regretted that the film could not be shown in their own state,
whose glories the filmmaker had done so much to promote in his film. The
government, they told me, should not have surrendered to the mob. As we
spoke, it emerged that they had voted for Mr Modi: they wanted a ‘strong
leader’. Shouldn’t a strong leader, I asked, denounce the thugs who want to
deny you the right to watch a film like this in your hometown? They agreed
that maybe on some issues, Mr Modi was not such a strong leader after all.

316 ‘You want to “do sex with your door open”: Pahlaj Nihalani on censor board cuts in
Spectre’, FirstPost , 23 November 2015.
317 How censor board made Udta Punjab bleed: Here are all the 94 cuts’, Hindustan Times
, 9 June 2016.
318 Vasudha Venugopal, ‘Udta Punjab, if released will bring a bad name to the Punjabi
community: Pahlaj Nihalani’, Economic Times , 8 June 2016.
319 ‘Udta Punjab censor row: Anurag Kashyap compares India with North Korea’,
Hindustan Times , 7 June 2016.
320 ‘Gujarat Becomes Fourth BJP-Ruled State to Ban “Padmaavat”’, The Wire , 15 January
2018.
321 ‘Padmavati: Rajput Karni Sena chief claims he’s a descendant of Padmini and says the
film must be burned’, Times of India , 24 November 2017.
322 ‘Padmavati row: Bihar, UP, Gujarat and other states where Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s
film faces hurdles’, Hindustan Times , 29 November 2017.
323 Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India , New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p.
101.
 chapter fifteen

THE PUSH FOR HINDI

The arrival of Modi on the national scene has seen his government pushing
Hindi with more enthusiasm than judgement. I got caught up in the undertow
of the new zeal for Hindi when in reply to a question on Twitter, in all
innocence, I asserted that Hindi was not our natural language. I was accused
of being anti-national, of being a slave to a foreign language—as if the
British had excreted their language on us as pigeons might spatter us with
their droppings. Unfortunately for them, I was right: the Constitution of India
provides for no ‘national language’. But being wrong rarely bothers a troll.
The ugly exchanges did, however, reveal two more essential truths about
our country. The first is that, whatever the Hindi chauvinists might say, we
don’t have one ‘national language’ in India, but several. The second is that
the Hindi zealots, including their recent Southern converts like Venkaiah
Naidu, whose assertion ‘Hindi hamari rashtrabhasha hai’ had provoked the
recent debate, have an unfortunate tendency to provoke a battle they will lose
—at a time when they were quietly winning the war. 324
Hindi is officially the mother tongue of some 41 per cent of our
population; the percentage has been growing, thanks to the spectacular failure
of population control in much of north India. It is also spoken by several who
claim primary allegiance to other languages, notably Punjabi, Marathi and
Gujarati. It is not, however, the mother tongue of the rest of us.
When Hindi speakers emotionally decry the use of an alien language
imposed on the country by British colonialists and demand that Hindi be used
because it speaks for ‘the soul of India’, or when they declare that ‘Hindi is
our mother, English is a stranger’, they are missing the point twice over.
First, because no Tamil or Bengali will accept that Hindi is the language
of his soul or has anything to do with his mother—it is as alien to him as
English is. And second, because injecting anti-English xenophobia into the
argument is utterly irrelevant to the issue at stake for those who object to the
idea of a national language.
That issue is quite simple: all Indians need to deal with the government.
We need government services, government information and government
support; we need to understand easily what our government is saying to us or
demanding of us. When the government does so in our mother tongue, it is
easier for us. But when it does so in someone else’s mother tongue with
which we are less familiar than our neighbour, our incomprehension is
intensified by resentment. Why should Shukla be spoken to by the
Government of India in the language that comes easiest to him, but not
Subramaniam?
The de facto solution to this question has been a practical one—use Hindi
where it is understood, but use English everywhere and especially in the
central government, since it places all Indians from all parts of our country at
an equal disadvantage or advantage. English does not express Subramaniam’s
soul any more than it does Shukla’s, but it serves a functional purpose for
both, and what’s more, it helps Subramaniam to understand the same thing as
Shukla.
Ideally, of course, every central government document, tax form or tweet
should be in every one of India’s languages. Since that is not possible in
practice—because we would have to do everything in twenty-three versions
—we have chosen to have two official languages, English and Hindi. State
governments complement these by producing official material in the
language of their states. That leaves everyone more or less happy.
Since the BJP came to power, however, they have not been content to let
sleeping dogmas lie. The move to push Hindi has required governmental file
notations to be written in that language, even where that undermines
comprehension, accuracy and therefore efficiency.
Obliging a south Indian civil servant to digest a complex argument by a
UPite subordinate writing in his mother tongue is unfair to both. Both may
write atrocious English, for that matter, but it’s the language in which they
are equal, and it serves to get the work done.
Language is a vehicle, not a destination. In government, it is a means, not
an end. The Hindi-wallahs fail to appreciate that, since promoting Hindi, for
them, is an end in itself.
This is what sustains the government’s futile efforts to make Hindi a
seventh official language of the United Nations. PM Modi’s Foreign Minister
Sushma Swaraj dramatically declared that her government was willing to
spend hundreds of crores of rupees to achieve this objective. 325 Now in the
United Nations, there are six official languages (used for formal speeches and
translations of documents) and two working languages (in which the
organization’s work is conducted daily). Similarly, in India, we have no
single ‘national language’: Article 343 of the Constitution makes it very clear
that Hindi is an official language. The Official Languages Act of 1963 says
that Hindi and English are both official languages of India and the Gujarat
High Court ruled in 2010 that Hindi is not the national language of India. So
for India to be spending significant government resources in seeking to
promote Hindi as a UN language has more to do with misplaced Hindi
chauvinism than with constitutional principle.
It also has little to do with practical efficiency. Six languages have been
made official languages at the United Nations because a number of countries
speak them. Arabic does not have more speakers than Hindi, but Arabic is
spoken as an official language by twenty-two countries, whereas Hindi is
only used as an official language by one country, India. When I questioned
her in Parliament, Ms Swaraj claimed disingenuously that Hindi is spoken in
Mauritius, Fiji, Surinam, Trinidad and Tobago, and Ghana. But she failed to
acknowledge that it is not the official language of any of these countries, and
therefore not a means of official communication with any of them.
Indian diplomats using Hindi at the UN would, in other words, be
speaking to themselves and to the Hindi-speaking portion of their domestic
audience. This narrow, essentially political objective, does not justify
expending vast sums of taxpayers’ money. If India were to have a prime
minister or a foreign minister who prefers to speak Hindi (as we do
currently), they can do so and we can pay for that speech to be translated at
the UN. But that is not the same time as making it an official language. Why
should we put our future foreign ministers and prime ministers who may be
from Tamil Nadu or West Bengal in a position where they are condemned to
be speaking a language they are uncomfortable with, merely because we are
paying for it?
The irony is, as I observed earlier, that the Hindi chauvinists should
realize they were winning the war. The prevalence of Hindi is far greater
across India today than it was half a century ago. The Parliament has become
a bastion of Hindi; you hear the language now twice as often as you hear
English, and three times as often as you did in the previous Parliament, when
stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjee and P. Chidambaram refused to speak
anything but English on the floor of the House. Our present prime minister
speaks only in Hindi, and his ministerial colleagues, with only a handful of
exceptions, try to emulate him.
But the inevitable triumph of Hindi is not because of Mr Modi’s oratory,
or Mulayam Singh Yadav’s imprecations, or the assiduous efforts of the
parliamentary committee on the promotion of Hindi. It is, quite simply,
because of Bollywood, which has brought a demotic conversational Hindi
into every Indian home. South Indians and Northeasterners alike are
developing an ease and familiarity with Hindi because it is a language in
which they are entertained. In time, this alone will make Hindi truly the
national language.
But it would become so only because Indians freely and voluntarily adopt
it, not because some Hindi chauvinist in Delhi thrusts his language down the
throats of the unwilling.

324 ‘‘‘When did we get a national language?”: Venkaiah Naidu criticised for calling Hindi
“rashtra bhasha”’, Scroll.in , 25 June 2015
325 ‘“India Ready To Spend Up To 400 Crore To Make Hindi An Official Language Of
UN”: Sushma Swaraj’, NDTV , 3 January 2018.
 III

MODITVA AND MISGOVERNANCE

Narendra Modi rode to power on promises of good governance and
assured his followers that his raj would witness the advent of achhe
din. Instead, the country has been given a succession of bad
initiatives like demonetization or good ideas that have been poorly
executed, such as GST and Swachh Bharat. Further, in various
chapters in this section, I show how this government has assailed
institutions such as Parliament and meddled with the judiciary and
educational institutions and dishonoured the armed forces. The
conclusion this section arrives at is clear—misgovernance has been
the hallmark of Moditva and almost everything he has turned his
hand to hasn’t quite worked.
 chapter sixteen

MAXIMUM GOVERNMENT, MINIMUM

GOVERNANCE

Many voters chose to give Narendra Modi the benefit of the doubt when it
came to governance. They had the misleading figures of his performance as
Gujarat chief minister to support their hope that here was a man who would
propel India into the front ranks of the higher performing countries and
economies. Sadly, Mr Modi has flattered to deceive, as we will see in this
section and the next.
Let’s start with the most basic unit of governance, the PM and his
cabinet. At first, being an unabashedly old-fashioned liberal, I confess to
being rather attracted to PM Modi’s oft-repeated maxim, ‘minimum
government, maximum governance’. I had no illusions about the fact that the
prime minister’s talent for sound bites was not often accompanied by
matching action. But his expansion of his cabinet in the course of his prime
ministership has confirmed that his definition of ‘minimum government’ is
rather stretchable.
When Modi began his innings in government with a council of ministers
of just forty-four, including the allocation of several related portfolios to
select ministers, it seemed he might actually be serious about reducing the
size of our central government. According to our Constitution, ‘there shall be
a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at its head, to aid and advise
the President who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance
with such advice’. But the Constitution is silent on the size of such a council.
Ministers are appointed by the president on the advice of the prime minister
(Article 75.1) and the PM decides not only how many ministers he or she
wishes to have, but what portfolios they will be allocated. There is nothing
immutable about the specific ministries of government, which can be created,
merged or dissolved by a PM at will.
 While this has made for varying sizes of councils of ministers over the
years, the Administrative Reforms Commission has regarded 10 per cent of
the total membership of the Lok Sabha (that is, fifty-four ministers, including
cabinet ministers, ministers of state, and deputy ministers, the three
recognized categories of ministerial office) to be the ideal size. 326 But this
has been exceeded in practice by every Government of India since Indira
Gandhi’s day.
Still, the question of the optimum size has never been properly addressed
in Delhi. A law passed during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee limits the
size of the council of ministers in state governments to 15 per cent of the
strength of the lower house of the state assembly. An informal convention has
sprung up that such a percentage should also be adhered to in the central
government, so that the council of ministers is not too large in relation to the
lower house of Parliament. Since the Lok Sabha has 543 members, that
suggests an upper limit of 81 ministers. The last government of Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh came closest to that number, with seventy-eight
ministers, but did not breach it. Mr Modi has exceeded his predecessor’s
total.
The reasons for the ballooning size of ministerial councils have nothing
to do with administrative logic; the calculations involved are unabashedly
political.
In a large and diverse democracy like India’s, ministerial appointments
need to reflect the range and diversity of the country: all regions of India
must be represented, whether or not the ruling party or coalition has worthy
candidates from all regions, and this being India, the same logic applies to all
religions and castes. Appointments are also made to reward long political
service, to quell brewing dissidence, to test mettle, to grant rewards and to
send a signal to the appointee’s state in advance of assembly elections.
Whether or not the recipient of such ministerial honour is actually capable of
doing the work allotted is often beside the point. It is accepted that the
country is really run by the bureaucracy and by a key group of top ministers
handpicked for powerful positions by the prime minister.
Over the years, the tendency to use the council of ministers to offer
political rewards to MPs meant that other practices developed which moved
the government away from administrative efficiency in the interests of
distributing ministerial rank to as many beneficiaries as possible. The
position of parliamentary secretary used to reward young MPs, usually first-
termers, who worked as understudies to their ministers, was discontinued.
More surprisingly, the slots of deputy ministers, commonly filled in the
Jawaharlal Nehru governments, fell into disuse as well. The intermediate
level of ministers of state (MoS) became the de facto deputy ministers,
devaluing the rank. Over successive governments, many MoS’s complained
of having no work allotted to them, and no authority over the work that did
come their way. While, as MoS for external affairs, I benefited from a
genuine division of responsibility and served as de facto minister for Africa,
the Middle East and Latin America, as well as for passport and consular
matters, policy planning and for the Haj, as MoS in the Ministry of Human
Resource Development (MHRD), no files stopped their journey at my desk
except on their way to the cabinet minister, with whom ultimate decision-
making on all issues resided.
This meant my role was limited to influencing and articulating policy, but
not to making it. (I could not resist tweeting, as the Modi government was
being sworn in, that ‘being MoS is like standing in a cemetery: there are a lot
of people under you, but no one is listening’.)
As I have mentioned at the outset, Narendra Modi’s first council of
ministers, which was the smallest one for decades, seemed a refreshing
change from this usual practice. It seemed he was determined not to worry
about giving ministerial office to his own party’s experienced seniors, many
of whom were sidelined, or to touching all political bases or even to stocking
his council with the right number of minorities, lower castes and so on. Many
of us grudgingly acknowledged that streamlined government might well mark
a major departure for a political class overly fond of the perks of ministerial
office—the cars with red beacons, the offices and extra staff—rather than
their ministerial duties. We looked forward to seeing what fewer ministers
could accomplish, apart from reducing traffic congestion in Lutyens’ Delhi.
But after his first pair of cabinet reshuffles, Prime Minister Modi
increased his council of ministers by more than 50 per cent, from forty-four
to seventy-six; by 2018 this had reached eighty. If his initial cabinet gave him
bragging rights over his predecessors in speaking of ‘minimum government’,
especially thanks to his placing some related ministries (coal and power, for
example) under the same minister, now his government looks little different
in size from the last several governments, all of which had between seventy
and eighty ministers. And despite that the south is still under-represented in
his ministry, as are minority groups (other than in the Minority Affairs
Ministry). But PM Modi’s minimum government has reached the maximum
permissible size.
So has Narendra Modi missed a trick here? I’d argue that he has, and
offer an alternative vision that really could deliver the ‘minimum
government’ he used to speak of.
What are the existing ministries that simply cannot be done without and
so should remain intact? The four ‘big ones’—home, finance, defence and
external affairs—brook no argument. Since agriculture still engages
(‘employs’ would be a disingenuous word) more than 40 per cent of our
population, an Agriculture Ministry is indispensable. 327 The core needs of
our people—health, education, transport, law and justice, and environment
follow; so do some of the core responsibilities of government, to provide our
nation with energy, and to steward our domestic commerce (including foreign
trade) and industry.
That gives us twelve indispensable ministries. But the list can’t stop here:
in a developing country, the government has to undertake to help the nation
grow and develop its urban infrastructure as well as meet the range of its rural
development challenges, as well as promote tourism and build tourist
infrastructure. Then we need a strong PMO to help keep the whole lot in line.
That’s sixteen ministries we absolutely can’t avoid retaining. Give each a
cabinet minister and one or two MoS (or deputy ministers), and you could
have a council of ministers totalling no more than forty to forty-five, with the
PM and a fifteen-strong cabinet at the helm.
So why do we have so many more today, and in earlier governments of
the last few decades? Simple—as I have noted, the more ministries you
create, the more political interests you placate. So functions that really belong
together were divided up amongst different political heavyweights, not
because they warranted a separate governmental machinery but because the
individual in question had to be given a chance to exercise authority over
something tangible, however undemanding that share of the pie might be.
So though we have a Ministry of Industry, we have managed, over the
years, to create separate ministries for heavy industries, micro-, small- and
medium-enterprises, steel, mines, textiles, chemicals and fertilizers, and food
processing, all of which, properly speaking, are merely different kinds of
industries. The heavy hand of regulatory and licensing authority in each of
these industries was then exercised by a different minister in each case,
spreading the clout (that comes from having the authority to grant
permissions) to many hands.
That’s anything but ‘minimum government’, and if PM Modi meant it, he
could have put a stop to it.
He seemed to have recognized this principle when he clubbed together
the separate ministries for power, and new (or ‘alternative’) and renewable
energy under one minister (but still as different ministries located in different
buildings). But coal sits with the railways minister, atomic energy is under a
minister of state and the largest source of India’s energy—petroleum and
natural gas—stands as a ministry by itself. Wouldn’t it have been more
logical to have one all-inclusive Ministry of Energy to ensure that the nation
has a comprehensive and coordinated energy policy—one that sees multiple
sources of energy as elements in one national energy mix, needing policy
direction from one minister? Instead of a single minister deciding, for
instance, to alter the proportions of that mix, increasing the national output of
solar, for instance, in preference to petroleum imports or incentives for coal
production, we have different government policies on coal, alternative energy
(wind and solar), and of course on the pricing of gas, petrol and diesel. Mr
Modi has foregone an obvious win here.
Similarly, shouldn’t the Agriculture Ministry subsume Food and Public
Distribution, while Consumer Affairs goes to Commerce and Industry? Yet,
currently these are three ministries (and Food Processing is a fourth). Forty
years ago all of them came under one food and agriculture minister.
Mr Modi’s decision to place the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs
under the MEA was wise, especially since the former relies almost entirely
on the latter to get its work done overseas, where its ‘clients’ are. The same
logic does not seem to have been applied, however, in keeping the Ministry
of Law and Justice separate from those of Social Justice and Empowerment,
Minority Affairs, Women and Child Development, and Tribal Affairs. Surely
a justice minister’s job is to ensure justice for all? Some functions of the
present ministries could then be placed in more logical departments—for
instance, maternal health issues could go from the Women’s Ministry to the
Health Ministry, minority education to MHRD, and so on. Where an issue is
of sufficient importance, the PM could always declare a national mission that
subsumes two or more ministries, and take the coordinating lead himself, as
he has done with the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. That could be the case with
Ganga Rejuvenation, for instance, which could be an abhiyan rather than a
ministry.
 I have already argued in Chapter 13 that the I&B Ministry can be
abolished, and that Prasar Bharati could be given genuine autonomy. We also
have a plethora of small ministries exercising functions that belong outside
government, or in specialized institutions not requiring ministerial
intervention. These include Science and Technology (for which few ministers
are qualified anyway) and Earth Sciences (which usually ends up in the
PMO, where it is understandably neglected). Couldn’t the latter just go to the
Geological Survey of India and the former to MHRD?
Indeed, the Ministry of Human Resource Development was conceived by
Rajiv Gandhi as an omnibus ministry, but over the years it has been whittled
down to just managing education. Why does PM Modi need separate
ministries of Skill Development, Labour, Culture, Youth Affairs and Sports,
all of which were once under a single MHRD minister?
I am not seeking to diminish the importance of the tasks being
undertaken, at least in some cases, by the separate ministries. But the answer
lies not in creating more silos that make for inefficiencies in policy
coordination and convey an impression of policy incoherence. The answer
lies in giving real work to the ministers of state to handle these portfolios
under the overall direction of powerful coordinating ministers. Give real
departmental power to ministers of state, and you solve two problems in one;
but also revive the post of deputy minister, and use it for the younger and less
experienced MPs to work under cabinet ministers and MoSs.
There, PM Modi, you would have ‘minimum government, maximum
governance’. But as with pretty much all he stands for, the phrase is not an
agenda for action, but little more than a slogan for the sound-bite era. What
he should have really said, as we will find out in the chapters in this section,
is that his administration really only stands for ‘maximum government,
minimum governance’.

326 Mohan Guruswamy, ‘91st Constitutional Amendment: Not quite adequate’, Hindu
Business Line , 20 July 2004.
327 Employment in agriculture (percentage of total employment) (modelled International
Labour Organization estimate), WorldBank.org , updated November 2017.
 chapter seventeen

THE ATTACK ON INSTITUTIONS

Mahatma Gandhi once said: ‘The truest test of a democracy is in the ability of
anyone to act as he likes, so long as he does not injure the life or property of
anyone else.’ 328 In order for this to happen, every institution that upholds a
healthy and vibrant democracy needs to be fostered and cared for by the
government of the day. The independence of these institutions needs to be
protected so they are able to dispense neutral decisions in the interest of every
citizen of India. A list of such institutions would include the judiciary, headed
by the Supreme Court; the Election Commission, which organizes, conducts
and rules on the country’s general and state elections; the Reserve Bank of
India, the nation’s central bank; the armed forces; the national exam-
conducting bodies that test tens of millions of schoolchildren every year in
highly competitive examinations that could make or break their futures; the
investigative agencies (notably the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s
equivalent of the FBI); the elected legislatures; and the free press. Every one
of these priceless institutions has come under threat in the last four years, as
an assertive Hindu-chauvinist BJP government moves to consolidate its
power in the world’s largest democracy.
The judicial system, traditionally above the cut-and-thrust of the political
fray, came under withering scrutiny in January 2018, when the four senior-
most judges of the Supreme Court held an unprecedented press conference to
question the decisions of outgoing Chief Justice Dipak Misra in allocating
cases to his favourite judges as ‘master of the roster’—their criticism seemed
to imply that this would lead to outcomes to favour the government. 329
Chief Justices of India are supposed to be free of political interests, but in
April several Opposition parties circulated an equally unprecedented
impeachment motion against the Chief Justice in the upper house, the Rajya
Sabha. Though this was rejected by the Rajya Sabha chairman, the vice
president of India, two MPs moved the Supreme Court itself to challenge his
rejection, only to find the Chief Justice naming a bench favourable to him to
hear their appeal. 330 They then withdrew their case, but the image of the
judiciary has taken a beating from all this, from which it will not easily
recover.
India’s Election Commission has also enjoyed a proud record of
independence and boasts decades-long experience of conducting free and fair
elections, despite its members usually being retired civil servants appointed
by the government of the day for fixed tenures. While in the past, election
commissioners have largely enjoyed a reputation for integrity, this took a
severe blow last year, when a BJP-appointed chief violated the convention of
announcing election dates for all impending state elections at the same time.
A quarter century ago, the commission had introduced a Code of Conduct
that prohibits government expenditure to impress voters once election dates
are announced. With the BJP, which is in power in both the centre and in
Gujarat state, scrambling to impress voters in Gujarat through last-minute
schemes and pre-election freebies, it was alleged that the EC came under
pressure to delay the election announcement there as long as possible. 331
Surprisingly, it declared the dates for elections in Himachal Pradesh, a state
that normally goes to the polls at the same time as Gujarat, thirteen days
before the latter, ostensibly in order to permit flood relief work in Gujarat
(which the Code of Conduct would not in fact have disallowed). 332
Former election commissioners condemned the decision unanimously,
even as the Gujarat government and the prime minister himself took
advantage of the delay to announce a series of pre-election giveaways. 333 It
does no good to Indian democracy to see a shadow fall over the very
institution that guarantees free and fair elections, especially at a time when
reports of data manipulation by the likes of Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica have begun to raise doubts over the security of the electronic
voting machines (EVMs) on which ballots are cast.
The concern that, under BJP rule, the Election Commission was behaving
like a government department, became more acute when the Delhi High
Court threw out an EC decision to disqualify twenty Aam Aadmi Party
(AAP) MLAs of the Delhi Legislature on technical grounds, an action that
could have benefited the BJP had by-elections to their seats followed. 334 The
court termed the decision ‘bad in law’, ‘vitiated’ and a failure to ‘comply
with principles of natural justice’. How had an institution widely hailed as the
impartial custodian of India’s democratic process allowed itself to be brought
to such a sorry pass? The answer lay clearly with the ruling party at the
centre, which was seen by many as pressuring the institution to act according
to its wishes.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the nation’s central bank, was
thoroughly discredited over the BJP government’s disastrous demonetization
of November 2016, when it was widely denounced for failing to perform its
fiduciary duties. The RBI, which did not appear to have been fully consulted
on the political decision, conspicuously failed to exercise its autonomy, to
anticipate the problems of Mr Modi’s scheme, to prepare its implementation
better, and to alleviate its impact. During the shambolic demonetization
process, the goalposts kept shifting: the RBI issued multiple notifications on
demonetization—some seventy-four in fifty days, each intended to tweak an
earlier announcement. 335 It seemed as if the Reserve Bank had been reduced
to a puppet on a string for the Indian government. Many began to refer to this
once-respected institution as the ‘Reverse Bank of India’ for its frequent
reversals of stance on such matters as the amounts of money permissible to
withdraw, the last legal date for withdrawals, and even whether depositors
would have their fingers marked with indelible ink so they could not
withdraw their money too often.
Demonetization caused serious and seemingly lasting damage to India’s
most important financial institution. The United Forum of Reserve Bank
Officers and Employees wrote to the government in January 2017, pointing
to ‘operational mismanagement’ which has ‘dented RBI’s autonomy and
reputation beyond repair’. 336 The inexplicable silence of its governor, Urjit
Patel, reduced him to a lamb. But this ‘silence of the lamb’ was cannibalizing
the RBI itself.
The Modi government has also not hesitated to politicize the armed
forces, not just bypassing time-honoured principles of seniority in appointing
the army chief, but by repeatedly using the army in its political propaganda.
The shameless exploitation of the 2016 ‘surgical strikes’ along the Line of
Control with Pakistan, and of a military raid in hot pursuit of rebels in
Myanmar, as a party election tool—something the Congress had never done
despite having authorized several such strikes earlier—marked a particularly
disgraceful dilution of the principle that national security issues require both
discretion and non-partisanship. As I’ve mentioned, the 2018 Karnataka state
elections saw the prime minister, no less, falsely denouncing India’s first
prime minister for allegedly having insulted two army chiefs from the state.
337 The principle that the army should be kept out of politics, and that the
military are above regional or religious loyalties, was disregarded in his
flagrant exploitation of the Indian military for short-term purposes.
A controversy over leaked exam papers for an important national school-
leavers’ examination cast doubt on another cherished national institution, the
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which conducts the test. The
faith of millions of schoolchildren in the competitive examination system is
vital for India’s social peace; in an environment where job seekers vastly
exceed jobs available, unimpeachable exam results are fundamental to any
perception of fairness. That the exam, which could make or break their
futures, might have been leaked in advance to a favoured few casts a doubt
on the entire culture of meritocracy that millions of young Indians aspire to.
Under the BJP, the federal investigative agencies (notably the Central
Bureau of Investigation) are widely seen as instruments of the government;
the CBI has even been described as a ‘caged parrot’. 338 Its investigations
and indictments, once seen as the gold standard of Indian crime-fighting, are
now too often seen as purely politically motivated.
As for the ‘temple of democracy’, the Indian Parliament, its work has
been reduced to a farce as allies and supporters of the ruling party brought the
Lok Sabha’s Budget session to a standstill through disruptions orchestrated
by the government. With the BJP-appointed speaker claiming she could not
count heads in the din, a motion of no-confidence moved by Opposition
parties was initially not debated, citing ‘lack of order’. 339 It seemed as if the
government was willing to destroy the temple rather than permit prayers
against its misrule to be heard there. (The motion was eventually permitted to
be introduced in the following session, but the damage was done.)
As we have seen, India’s free press, which ought to be calling the
government’s actions to account, has seemingly been cowed by the
overweening power of the government. In the chapters that follow I will go
deeper into the way in which our institutions are being assailed by the Modi
sarkar. If the deinstitutionalization of Indian governance proceeds like this,
the greatest danger facing India will be that of the public losing faith in the
system altogether—with incalculable consequences for the country’s biggest
asset, its democracy.
328 M. K. Gandhi, Young India , 1 August 1920, p. 4.
329 R. Balaji, ‘CJI is “master of roster”: CJI bench’, The Telegraph , 12 April 2018.
330 Bhadra Sinha, ‘On move to remove Chief Justice, Congress withdraws SC plea and
protests’, Hindustan Times , 8 May 2018.
331 ‘“Election Commission acted under moral pressure”’, The Hindu , 26 October 2017.
332 Sanjay Singh, ‘Different dates for Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections is
EC’s missed opportunity to try simultaneous polls’, FirstPost , 12 October 2017.
333 Meghdoot Sharon, ‘It’s Raining Freebies in Gujarat Since Himachal Poll Dates Were
Declared’, News18 , 26 October 2017; ‘Delay In Gujarat Poll Date Announcement Creates
“Ground Of Suspicion”, Says Former Chief Election Commissioner’, Huffington Post , 13
October 2017.
334 Aniruddha Ghosal, ‘Office-of-profit case: Delhi HC strikes down disqualification of 20
AAP MLAs, says EC order is bad in law’, Indian Express , 24 March 2018.
335 ‘Demonetisation: 50 days, 74 notifications’, Indian Express , 31 December 2016; T. K.
Arun, ‘View: 59th circular by RBI, how many more to come?’, Economic Times , 20
December 2016.
336 ‘“Humiliated” RBI employees write to Governor Urjit Patel, say bank’s image “dented
beyond repair”’, India Today , 14 January 2017.
337 ‘Karnataka polls: Modi accuses Congress of insulting Cariappa and Thimayya’,
Business Standard , 4 May 2018.
338 Ashhar Khan, ‘“BJP called CBI a caged parrot, but now it has become its long arm”’,
Asian Age , 21 May 2017.
339 Jatin Gandhi, ‘Parliament disruptions drown no-confidence motion again’, Hindustan
Times , 2 April 2018.
 chapter eighteen

CONDUCT UNBECOMING

When I was elected to the Lok Sabha in April 2009 and invited to join the
UPA government, I was coming off not just an extensive United Nations
career but a short stint in private life, during which I had served a number of
institutions in an advisory capacity. No sooner had I taken up my MoS
position in the Ministry of External Affairs than a request came from the
PMO, asking me to inform them of all such commitments and affiliations.
I duly listed them in a memo to the cabinet secretary. There were nine
such positions in all, mostly a legacy of my earlier international life. They
included serving on the board of trustees of my last alma mater, the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy; as an honorary adviser to the International
Committee of the Red Cross; as a fellow of the New York Institute of the
Humanities; and as the patron of an Indian school in Dubai. Within a few
days the cabinet secretary, K. M. Chandrasekhar, called. I would have to
resign from all of them.
When I expressed curiosity, since these were unremunerated advisory
positions in prestigious institutions whose activities and principles were
totally compatible with those of the Government of India, the cabinet
secretary sent over a document that explained his request. This was the Code
of Ethical Conduct for the council of ministers, adopted decades earlier—I
believe in the 1950s—and most recently reissued in the 1970s. The code
required ministers to relinquish not only their business activities, if any, but
also affiliations to other institutions, including charitable ones.
I accepted without demur, but sought further clarification of the way in
which the code was interpreted. The cabinet secretary was frank: no minister
of the government ought to risk being associated with an institution’s action
or position by the mere fact of his association with it. This applied to
charitable and philanthropic bodies too, even those engaged in a social
purpose with which the Government of India had no problem. After all, my
extending my patronage to one school would put me in an invidious position
vis-à-vis other schools; serving as the trustee of one institution could imply
favouritism in relation to other institutions.
And even if the position were honorary, he pointed out, if those
institutions did any fund-raising to conduct their work, the presence of a
minister’s name on their masthead could be misused. If someone donated
money to a charity in which a minister was involved, for instance, there could
be the expectation of a quid pro quo from the minister in his official capacity.
Even if the minister refused to provide any favours in return, the mere
perception could be damaging. A member of the council of ministers, he
explained, had to be above any suspicion of a conflict of interest, however
trivial.
The key provision of the code in this respect was Article 3.1, which
forbade a minister to ‘personally, or through a member of his family, accept
contributions for any purpose, whether political, charitable or otherwise’; and
denied him the right to ‘associate himself with the raising of funds’. There
was in fact a loophole, though: a minister could be associated with such
efforts ‘for the benefit of a registered society, or a charitable body, or an
institution recognized by a public authority’. 340 Exceptions would have to be
authorized by the prime minister.
I did not seek an exception. It was clear that on Dr Manmohan Singh’s
watch, his cabinet secretary was going to be a strict constructionist. I duly
resigned from all my positions, informing the institutions concerned that my
appointment as a minister required me to do so.
This was why I was all the more curious when a controversy arose in
November 2017 over four ministers (Nirmala Sitharaman, Suresh Prabhu,
Jayant Sinha and M. J. Akbar) serving on the board of the India Foundation, a
body closely associated with several luminaries of the ruling establishment.
341 Like me, as foundation head Shaurya Doval pointed out, they had been
associated with the foundation before they became ministers. Unlike me,
however, they had not been asked to resign.
It is not my place to question the Modi-era cabinet secretary’s
performance of his own duties. But the basic issue arises: has the prime
minister of India granted his ministers an exemption from the rules of the
code to continue serving the India Foundation? Was this explicitly sought and
approved through the cabinet secretary? And if not, has the government in
effect abandoned its own code—and with what authority?
The issue of conflict of interest is, in fact, a fairly simple one. In the
classic definition, a conflict of interest arises from ‘a set of circumstances that
creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary
interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest’. The primary
interest of any minister is, of course, meant to be his ministerial
responsibilities. Conceivably the ministers concerned could argue that there
is nothing in the work of the India Foundation that would influence their
professional work as ministers. But what about the other way around?
When the India Foundation raises funds for its conferences, publications
and other activities, doesn’t the presence on its masthead of a pair of
ministerial names prompt donors to be more forthcoming than they might be
to another foundation? When they invite foreign dignitaries to attend their
events, is it not possible that these foreigners accept because they are
attracted by the possibility of proximity to these ministers? And is it ethically
right for the India Foundation to benefit in these ways from the association
with it of ministers who are being paid by the Indian taxpayer?
Dr Manmohan Singh and his cabinet secretary had one kind of answer; it
seems Narendra Modi and his PMO have another.
In a country where we tend to be obsessed with corruption scams in
multiple crores, this kind of ethical dispute may seem somewhat precious, the
political equivalent of the old theological dispute about how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. But in a polity where there’s a desperate need to
uphold the standards we do have, it is only fair that the issue should be faced.
The Code of Conduct for ministers, after all, has not been modified; it still
figures on the MHA website. Shouldn’t it, then, be applied?
The marvellous thing about conflict of interest in India is how blissfully
our political class is completely unaware of it. We are all reared in a culture
where a good and upstanding pillar of society is identified by his fulfilment
of his duty to his family, clan and caste before anything or anyone else. In a
classic exchange in Haryana a prominent politician, criticized for favouring
his son in an appointment, retorted: ‘Of course I favoured my son! Then
whose son should I favour, yours?’ 342
We have seen earlier in the book how the External Affairs Minister
Sushma Swaraj thought nothing of intervening with a foreign government in
favour of an absconding Indian citizen, wanted by the law enforcement
agencies of our own country. 343 In any other democracy, even if such a
matter had come to her desk, she would have been expected to recuse herself
from all involvement because her husband and daughter happened to be the
legal representatives of the person concerned. 344 I doubt the thought of
recusal even occurred to her. Favours, after all, are done for one’s friends;
why step back from an opportunity to do one?
A conflict of interest exists when any official’s fiduciary responsibility to
the obligations of his or her official position clashes with a personal interest,
e.g. a sense of duty towards a friend. The Sushma Swaraj case fits so
obviously within that definition that it could almost be a classic example for a
case study on conflict of interest.
Or take Vasundhara Raje Scindia. It turns out the chief minister of
Rajasthan (then the once and future holder of that designation) also supported
the same individual’s residency application to the British authorities on the
‘strict condition that my [i.e. CM Raje’s] assistance will not become known
to the Indian authorities’! 345 The individual in question had transferred
₹11.63 crore to CM Raje’s son’s company by valuing ten-rupee shares at a
thousand times their worth. 346 Could that imply a conflict of interest that
would explain the extraordinary ‘unattributable’ support for his ‘leave to
remain’ beyond the reach of Indian law enforcement in the UK? Conflict of
interest? Perish the thought!
The home minister of India, no less, made it clear that such mundane
considerations as conflict of interest do not apply to the exalted panjandrums
of the NDA. ‘Resignations? That’s for the UPA government, not for us,’ he
declared. 347 ‘There will be no resignations over such issues in the NDA.’
Conflict of interest is something that happens to other people—those who
have a conscience. Not to us, who have been divinely ordained to rule as we
see fit.
I hope some intrepid soul will take the entire issue to the Supreme Court
and seek a direction that spells out conflict of interest duties and obligations.
These must be enforceable, unlike the existing code of conduct for ministers,
which was strongly upheld by the UPA but cheerfully ignored by the current
government.
As I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, when I joined the
government in May 2009 I was told by the cabinet secretary that I must
relinquish every one of my advisory board positions—every single one of
them honorary—because of a possible conflict of interest. I wonder whether
the new cabinet secretary has found occasion to enlighten the current external
affairs minister about her obligations under the existing code of conduct for
ministers and public servants.
But the real problem, of course, is implicit in the home minister’s defiant
stand that NDA ministers don’t resign. It’s part of an overall pattern we have
seen from this government. They have taken no steps to appoint a Lokpal or
ensure that the institutions created by the Lokpal Bill start functioning. They
have refused to comply with a record number of applications for information
under the Right to Information Act (RTI) which has been hollowed out under
four years of the Modi regime, with vast numbers of questions awaiting
replies. They kept the post of Chief Central Vigilance Commissioner vacant
for several months before finally filling it with an appointee who has yet to
find any grounds for action in the conduct of the BJP’s ministers. It’s not a
pretty picture.
The only hope is that the media exposure of wrongdoing will prompt
public interest litigation that in turn might give us a Supreme Court directive
on conflict of interest. But how sad it is that our democracy needs the
judiciary to do what any honest government ought to be able to do for itself.
Unfortunately ours is a government that proclaims its own virtue from the
rooftops, but declines to spell out the standards it holds its own leaders to.
Perhaps because it doesn’t have any. The BJP’s answer to charges of conflict
of interest appears simple enough: self-interest will always prevail over the
national interest. Then where’s the conflict?

340 ‘Code of conduct for ministers (both Union and State)’, Ministry of Home Affairs,
Government of India.
341 Swati Chaturvedi, ‘Exclusive: Think-Tank Run by NSA Ajit Doval’s Son Has Conflict
of Interest Writ Large’, The Wire , 4 November 2017.
342 Attributed to Devi Lal, former chief minister of Haryana, in Shekhar Gupta, ‘Poll-
bound Haryana flaunts its assets, liabilities, glory and muck like no other’, India Today , 9
October 2014.
343 ‘Helped Lalit Modi with travel papers on humanitarian grounds, Sushma Swaraj says’,
Times of India , 14 June 2015.
344 Utkarsh Anand, ‘Sushma Swaraj’s daughter part of Lalit Modi’s legal team in passport
case’, Indian Express , 15 June 2015.
345 ‘Vasundhara Raje “pushed Lalit Modi plea, said keep it secret”, documents purportedly
show’, Indian Express , 17 July 2015.
346 Pradeep Thakur, ‘Lalit Modi invested ₹11.63 crore in CM Vasundhara Raje’s son’s
company’, Economic Times , 17 June 2015.
347 This is not UPA; Smriti Irani, Sushma Swaraj won’t quit: Rajnath Singh’, Times of
India , 24 June 2015.
 chapter ninteen

DESTROYING PARLIAMENT

The BJP government’s undermining of Parliament is one of the most striking

examples of misgovernance apparent in the Modi era. Under his regime, the
government will propose. The Opposition will oppose. If matters come to a
head and a vote is called, the government’s brute majority will dispose.
The merits of the issue will matter little. There will be no reasoned
attempts to persuade the other side; or rather, when such attempts are made
by the well meaning, they will prove futile, since persuasion, reflection and
exchange are not the purpose of the exercise. Increasingly, parliamentary
debates have become a ritual, the obligatory airing of opposing views, until
the whip is cracked and MPs duly vote on party lines.
Even sensible suggestions by the Opposition—with which the treasury
benches do not in fact disagree—are never adopted, since to do so would
admit the possibility of flexibility into government legislation in the Lok
Sabha. The only time that Opposition views are taken into account is when
the outcome of the vote would otherwise be uncertain—in the Upper House.
And now, as we have seen, even that is changing, as BJP control of state
assemblies gradually assures the government a majority in the Rajya Sabha as
well.
But in the Lok Sabha, secure in its overwhelming majority, the
government simply chooses not to listen, or to listen with a closed mind. The
idea of Parliament as a forum for collective deliberation and agreed outcomes
has ceased to have any meaning.
I had a taste of this myself in 2017’s monsoon session, on a routine and
non-controversial Bill on labour rights, which my party (having initiated the
reform itself in the UPA days) had agreed to support. The Bill merely
required that employees in companies of a certain size had the right to be
notified of their rights, in writing. During its passage, I suggested that, given
that nearly a fifth of Indian men, and more than a third of Indian women,
were illiterate, two words should be added: ‘orally and in writing’. My logic,
as I explained to my fellow MPs, was that while the Bill’s objectives were
laudable—in giving labourers knowledge of their rights in writing, so they
could be legally enforceable—the substance of those rights should also be
conveyed orally, so that illiterate workers could understand what they were
entitled to. This suggestion was entirely within the spirit of the Bill.
I saw several BJP MPs nodding their heads affirmatively at this common-
sense suggestion. But when the amendment was put to a voice-vote, the
ruling party erupted raucously in a vociferous chorus of ‘No’. My proposal
was negatived. The whip was to vote in a certain way—common sense be
damned.
This is a small example of how little real give-and-take there is in our
parliamentary system, especially when the government in power rules by
brute majority. Enabling such an authoritarian way of conducting itself is the
Anti-Defection Law, 1985, which inaugurated a practice of party whips on all
issues, making receptivity to the ideas of the other side punishable with
expulsion from the House.
There was nothing about my idea that need have upset the ruling party, or
that went against its ideological interests or the substantive purposes of the
Bill. But the debate that was scheduled on the Bill was never intended to
influence the terms of its adoption. It was just a ritual. The outcome was
preordained: the Bill would be passed without change.
What, one might ask, is the point of such debates at all, other than to nail
one’s colours to the party mast? Why should a serious MP exercise his grey
cells to come up with constructive suggestions, if they are never going to be
considered, let alone adopted?
This was not how it was meant to be. Parliament, in the classic British
conception, was supposed to be a forum where individual MPs of ability and
integrity met to discuss common problems and come to agreed solutions.
Edmund Burke, in his famous speech to the Electors of Bristol on 3
November 1774, articulated most brilliantly and clearly the logic of
parliamentary representation. Burke was addressing the issue of MPs being
asked to advocate the wishes of their constituents, rather than themselves, but
his logic applies also to the issue of MPs parroting their party lines. He is
worth quoting in his own words:
 It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest
union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with
his constituents [or here, if you prefer, read ‘Party’]. Their wishes ought to have
great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted
attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to
theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But
his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought
not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not
derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a
trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your
representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays,
instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. 348

In other words, an MP betrays himself and his voters if he surrenders his own
better judgement to the dictates of either his constituents or his party
leadership. As Edmund Burke explains, ‘government and legislation are
matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of
reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which
one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the
conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the
arguments?’ 349
His final point is the clincher: ‘Parliament is not a congress of
ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must
maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but
parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of
the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, [one might add
today, “not party lines”] ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from
the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you
have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of
parliament .’ 350
This goes to the nub of the entire issue. What is our conception of what
Prime Minister Modi has called ‘the temple of democracy’? Is it merely a
place to ratify decisions made elsewhere in party cabals or cabinet meetings,
whose adoption is rendered inevitable by the previous general election
results? Or is it a chamber where the representatives of the Indian people
assemble to express their considered opinions and thoughtful disagreements,
before coming to an outcome in the interests not of a party but of the country
as a whole?
 The Anti-Defection Law was passed with good intentions—the same
good intentions with which, the proverb tells us, the road to hell is paved. It
was intended to stop the aaya Ram–gaya Ram practice of legislators crossing
the floor in pursuit of power and pelf, which saw state governments (and two
central governments) between 1967 and 1985 rise and fall like skittles. The
idea was noble, and rested on sound principles: governmental stability
matters; people must stay loyal to the party on whose platform they
contested; the intent of the voters must not be betrayed by defections. When
the law was first explained by its proponents, there was widespread support,
even enthusiasm, for its passage.
But how has the Act worked in practice? It has dramatically reduced
defections, but not eliminated them, as we have seen in Uttarakhand in 2017
and Manipur, Gujarat and UP in 2018. What it has done most effectively is to
stifle the voice of the individual legislator. Since every single vote in
Parliament sees a whip being issued, however trivial the subject of the Bill,
there is no room for honest differences of opinion. Disobeying a whip offers
grounds not just for disciplinary action by the party, but expulsion from
Parliament altogether. No MP who has struggled and strived (and spent) to
get elected to his seat lightly places it in jeopardy. His convictions become
secondary to the party line. The ‘argumentative Indian’ is often on display in
both Houses, but only when he is arguing strictly according to his party’s
position.
As a result, the Anti-Defection Law has reduced each MP to a cipher
during every vote, a number to be totted up by his party whip rather than an
individual of ability, conviction and conscience. This outcome has other
effects: it reduces the need for each MP to study an issue thoroughly and
come to a position on it, since his position no longer matters unless he is part
of the party leadership. In my experience, most MPs only study the Bills they
are assigned to speak on; the rest sees them dutifully voting as their whip tells
them to.
This is, in many ways, a travesty of the parliamentary process. In the UK,
where the system originated, no whip was issued even on so fundamental a
vote as to whether to authorize the government to proceed with the Brexit
negotiations. Earlier, no whip was issued on whether the UK should support
the US in the Iraq war. Dissent was freely and honestly expressed on both
sides of the aisle. Such freedom is unknown to the Indian MP after the
passage of the Anti-Defection Law.
 Ironically, the underlying logic of the Indian approach has been called
into question by the Election Commission itself offering a ‘None of The
Above’ (NOTA) option on the ballot for the recent vice-presidential election.
Every MP voting in that election was subject to a party whip; would not
voting NOTA violate his whip? If a NOTA vote was cast, then, would it be
grounds for disqualifying the voter from Parliament? If NOTA embodies a
constitutional right, then isn’t punishment under the Anti-Defection Law for
exercising that right itself unconstitutional?
At least in the vice-presidential election, there was a secret ballot. Some
cross-voting appears to have occurred. Votes in Parliament, however, are out
in the open. A dissenting vote is an act of defiance; under the Anti-Defection
Law, it will automatically attract sanction.
Part of the problem is that the main provisions of the Constitution
regarding the legislature were silent about the party system; the later addition
of the anti-defection clause in the schedule in 1985 was patently illogical
since it sought to punish the undermining of an institution which was itself
not mentioned in the main provisions. Surely the schedule cannot override
the main provisions of the Constitution? Did the founders ever intend the
party system to be paramount over the individual parliamentarian, obliging
him to subordinate his conscience to the party whip?
These are questions to which there are no real answers in today’s India.
But the right ones, in the words of the 2016 Nobel laureate for Literature, are
‘blowin’ in the wind’. We just have to grasp them firmly and bring them
indoors into Sansad Bhavan.
One such answer might be to amend the Anti-Defection Law to ensure
that party whips can only be issued for specific kinds of issues—those
involving the survival of the government, perhaps, and money bills. That
would lead to more open discussion on other subjects, but it is doubtful that
any MP would openly vote against his party line even on a minor issue. Even
if such a vote no longer attracts disqualification, it would attract the
disapproval of his party leadership, and that is disincentive enough for most
parliamentarians.
One of the consequences of the crisis of representation I have diagnosed
here is that Parliament itself has become less and less seminal an institution
in our democracy. Prime Minister Modi occasionally shows up to deliver
rodomontade speeches in Parliament, but he does not take questions, and has
refused to subject himself to any kind of parliamentary cross-examination of
his policies or statements. That junior ministers respond for him is also, in a
way, an effort to preserve an aura around him—something that takes him
beyond and ‘above’ such lowly concerns as Parliament and its squabbles—
and establish him, visually and in the general perception, as a PM who is no
longer just first among equals. In the process, the ‘temple of our democracy’
has been devalued to little more than its proscenium stage, with ministers and
MPs little more than sacerdotes hovering around with ritual offerings for the
head priest. Whereas in the early days a prime minister could even be
challenged by MPs from his own party—think of Jawaharlal Nehru being
attacked by Feroze Gandhi, Finance Minister T. T. Krishnamachari being
forced to resign by his own backbenchers, or Mahadev Mishra challenging
his prime minister’s China policy—today conformity, even unquestioning
obedience, rules the roost. So why give Parliament an importance its
performance does not warrant?
The result of this kind of thinking is apparent. The first three Lok Sabhas
saw as many 140 sittings a year; we are now at about half that number, and it
is reducing every year, since the BJP government clearly has very little time
for the distractions of Parliament. In the 15th Lok Sabha, 25 per cent of the
Bills were passed with scarcely any discussion at all and only 20 per cent
witnessed discussions of three hours or more. (These figures are almost
certainly lower in the current 16th Lok Sabha, which has met only for a grand
total of 287 days over a span of four years.) 351 . In the Modi-era Lok Sabha,
only 26 per cent of the Bills introduced have been referred to committees. 352
Barely 15 per cent of the Union Budget is discussed in detail; our government
is spending taxpayers’ money without the taxpayers’ representatives having a
meaningful say in how it is spent. (State assemblies are even worse: many sit
for fewer than thirty days a year, and in Haryana the average is twelve days!)
353
Once Bills are passed in a hurry, they become Acts, and Acts are
implemented through the promulgation of Rules, which are drafted by the
government and supposed to be placed on the table of each House. The Rules
really govern how the Act works in practice, and in theory are subject to
parliamentary scrutiny. Guess how many Rules have been discussed in the
current Lok Sabha? Precisely zero. 354
Such practices are destroying the role of the Indian parliamentarian as the
legislator he was envisaged to be by our founding fathers in the Constitution.
Our prime minister spoke of introducing minimum government, maximum
governance. In Chapter 16 , we saw that transmorgified into maximum
government, minimum governance. And here we have a system of minimum
Parliament, maximum government. The judiciary is eagerly stepping into the
breach, taking initiatives that should have been Parliament’s to take—
unelected judges substituting themselves for the people’s representatives. It’s
nobody’s fault but our own—but it’s not the democracy Dr Ambedkar and
his colleagues in the constituent assembly envisaged.
II

The other aspect of the functioning of Parliament today that deserves to be

reiterated here is parliamentary disruption, which has become a frequent and
ubiquitous feature of our democracy in the Modi era.
I am a conscientious objector to parliamentary disruptions. Sadly, my
belief that Parliament is a place where the elected representatives of the
people work uninterruptedly for the benefit of the people, doesn’t seem to be
shared by too many of my fellow parliamentarians. I think back to an
occasion when the House was in bedlam but the Opposition legislator was
unrepentant. ‘The disruption we have started in this session will be taken to
the people till we are able to restore fairness and some degree of
accountability,’ he said. ‘If parliamentary accountability is subverted and a
debate is intended to be used merely to put a lid on parliamentary
accountability, it is then a legitimate tactic for the Opposition to expose the
government through the parliamentary instruments available at its command.’
355
He was righteous in his indignation at the suggestion that by disrupting
Parliament he was not doing the work he was elected to do. ‘Disrupting does
not mean not doing work. What we are doing is in fact very important work.’
Asked whether Parliament should not be used to debate rather than
disrupt, the Opposition MP was categorical. ‘A national debate is on. Every
aspect is being debated, yet not in Parliament. This debate rages on
elsewhere, while the government runs Parliament. Our strategy does not
allow it to be debated in Parliament, that is all.’ 356
‘In a debate, you talk the issue out,’ he said dismissively to Open
magazine. ‘Sometimes, disruptions bring greater gains to the country.’ 357
Another senior Opposition figure, already then a former union minister,
was asked about the losses to the national exchequer from the disruption of
Parliament, which was wasting crores of taxpayers’ rupees. Yes, she agreed,
‘when Parliament ends this way, there is criticism—we are told that there is a
loss since the Parliament wasn’t allowed to function… By losing ₹10-20
crore from loss of Parliament proceedings, if we can build pressure on the
government, then that is acceptable.’ 358
Veteran leaders of the Opposition agreed. A former prime-ministerial
candidate of the party declared that, sometimes, blocking legislative action
‘yields results’. 359 A former finance and foreign minister added: ‘Because
the government has been silent on the issue we have decided to rake up the
issue… I would like to strongly demand that the government announce right
now a probe. If there is no announcement of a probe, then how can we let the
House function?’ 360
Were these Congress leaders defending the disruption of recent sessions
of Parliament? No, perish the thought. These are verbatim quotes from BJP
stalwarts (in the order quoted) Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, L. K. Advani,
and Yashwant Sinha. Except they were spoken in 2011–13, as the BJP
paralysed session after session with its clamour for resignations, for a joint
parliamentary committee on the telecom allocations, and for probes into
assorted alleged misdemeanours of the UPA government.
In a final irony, Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, in a speech on the
importance of legislatures, advocated the immediate suspension of legislators
who invade the well of the House. An admirable sentiment, especially for a
former parliamentary affairs minister of the current dispensation. Except that
just four years ago, the same Venkaiah Naidu, when asked about BJP
legislators doing the same thing, and asked if these were not unparliamentary
tactics, replied unapologetically: ‘Let us invent new tactics so that the
principle of accountability is not sacrificed. We will not keep quiet. We will
take the fight to the people.’ 361
Turnabout, it is said, is fair play. These were the arguments used, with
eloquence and even legalese, by the BJP leadership when, for the ten years of
UPA rule, they disrupted Parliament with impunity. More than 60 per cent of
the time of the previous Lok Sabha was lost to BJP-led disruptions. 362 It was
hardly surprising that—faced with the stubborn refusal of the government to
accept that the conduct of their external affairs minister and two chief
ministers warranted their resignations or at least a serious investigation—the
UPA members decided to emulate their predecessors in Opposition.
 Those of us who attended missionary schools learned the golden rule: ‘do
unto others as you would have them do unto you’. The new golden rule of
Indian politics has become: ‘do unto others what they did unto you’.
In a startling turnaround, the poachers have now become the
gamekeepers. The very politicians who had argued the case for disruption—
who had used sophistry and morality to obstruct the work of Parliament for
years in the cause of the higher principle of accountability—suddenly
decided that on this issue, where you stand depends on where you sit. Now
that they are sitting on the treasury benches, disruption is wasteful, even anti-
national.
I am sorry, but it won’t wash. Of course, two wrongs don’t make a right.
But it was the BJP who had set the standards of parliamentary conduct they
are now deploring. It was they who had declared ‘resignations first,
discussions later’.
Well before I entered politics, I had been invited by then-speaker
Somnath Chatterjee to a round table of eminent citizens (Narayana Murthy
and Shyam Benegal among them) to discuss the functioning of Parliament.
We had all called for strict enforcement of the rules to ensure higher
standards of decorum and debate, and been disabused by the speaker of our
illusions. Disruptions, he said, occurred because an outnumbered Opposition
saw them as part of their democratic rights; to thwart them by invoking the
rule book would be condemned by all parties, including the ruling Congress,
as undemocratic. So suspending, let alone expelling, MPs was not an option
he could easily exercise.
Matters got worse under the next speaker, Meira Kumar, whose decency
and gentility were shamefully abused by a belligerent BJP. Still, she echoed
the Somnath Chatterjee line: it would be wrong to expel unruly Opposition
members without an all-party consensus on doing so. So disruption
continued.
Whatever the merits of this method of parliamentary protest—and
personally, it is not something I have ever cared for—it has become part of
the convention of Indian parliamentary practice. So the shock when Speaker
Sumitra Mahajan expelled twenty-five of the Congress’s forty-four members
for five days in 2015, invoking Rule 374A, which had only been used three
times in the entire sixty-seven-year history of independent India (at the time),
was palpable. 363 Seven Opposition parties announced they were joining the
Congress in boycotting the Lok Sabha in protest against this deplorable
decision.
Certainly, let us create new standards of acceptable parliamentary
conduct, but by consensus with all parties. Expelling your Opposition is not
democracy. But Mr Modi knows that: he has done exactly the same thing,
repeatedly, in the Gujarat Assembly, passing laws with almost the entire
Opposition suspended from the House. 364
In his 2014 election campaign, Mr Modi had boasted that he would apply
the Gujarat model to the rest of India. We just have to ensure he doesn’t start
with Parliament.

348 The Portable Edmund Burke , New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
349 Ibid.
350 Ibid.
351 http://www.prsindia.org/media/articles-by-prs-team/parliament-logjam-part-2-
examining-legislative-avenues-available-to-keep-govt-accountable-exercise-necessary-
oversight-5300/
352 http://www.prsindia.org/media/articles-by-prs-team/while-in-session-good-parliament-
productivity-weak-examination-of-bills-5349/
353 M. R. Madhavan, ‘Put the houses in order’, The Week , 25 December 2016.
354 Ibid.
355 Anita Katyal, ‘“Disrupting Parliament is important”: BJP’s words from opposition days
come back to haunt it’, Scroll.in , 24 December 2014.
356 Jatin Gandhi, ‘Who Needs Parliament?’, Open , 30 August 2012.
357 Ibid.
358 Sabyasachi Dasgupta, ‘Prime Minister blames BJP for “wasted session of Parliament”;
BJP hits back’, NDTV , 7 September 2012.
359 ‘Sonia Gandhi lambasts India’s opposition’, BBC , 13 September 2010.
360 ‘BJP disrupts LS demanding probe, House adjourned for day’, FirstPost, 11 December
2012.
361 Raman Iyer, ‘BJP justifies disruption of Parliament over coal blocks allocation issue’,
TopNews , 9 January 2012
362 G. Pramod Kumar, ‘Parliament Logjam’, FirstPost , 25 July 2015.
363 ‘25 Congress MPs suspended for five days for disrupting Parliament, Sonia says “black
day”’, Indian Express , 4 August 2015.
364 “He once got 12 laws passed in 17 minutes in 2009 after getting the Opposition
suspended from the House. Under him, the Assembly would be convened once every six
months just to meet the constitutional requirement”, from Anita Joshua, ‘The one-man
show’, The Hindu , 22 May 2015.
 chapter twenty

GOVERNING GOVERNORS

Over the past four years the NDA government has repeatedly elicited the
resignations of several UPA-appointed governors and appointed its own
candidates. This prompts a number of interesting questions. Predictably, UPA
supporters have raised the issue of constitutional propriety (and a non-UPA
critic, CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury, has called it ‘politically unethical and
constitutionally incorrect’ 365 ) while NDA supporters have cited precedent,
not least pointing to a similar action by the UPA in removing four NDA-
appointed governors in 2004. There have also been allegations that the
replacement of governors is among the steps being taken to saffronize the
country’s institutions. Battle has been joined over an issue that ought to be,
ideally, beyond the realm of contention.
First, let’s get the blame game out of the way. If we go back far enough,
the practice of turfing out governors appointed by the defeated government
started in 1977, when the victorious Janata Party defenestrated a number of
Indira Gandhi appointees. Changes of government have often seen a
recurrence of the practice by all sides, though it is also true that many
governments have left governors appointed by their predecessors in place.
But what is happening today has happened before.
However, what is different this time is that since the last round of
gubernatorial musical chairs in 2004 (when Haryana’s Babu Parmanand,
Uttar Pradesh’s Vishnu Kant Shastri, Goa’s Kidar Nath Sahani and Gujarat’s
Kailashpati Mishra were replaced by the UPA government), the Supreme
Court has weighed in. Earlier decisions had been justified (though
justifications had not earlier been deemed necessary) by a principle advanced
in October 1980, when Tamil Nadu Governor Prabhudas Patwari was
dismissed on the basis of the argument that governors serve at the president’s
‘pleasure’ under Article 156 (1). At the time, given the precedent of 1977, it
was generally accepted that the prime minister of the day could dismiss any
governor for political reasons, and without giving any explanation, since the
PM alone decided when the president would grant or withdraw his ‘pleasure’.
But in 2010 the Supreme Court differed, concluding, on a petition moved by
one of the governors dismissed in 2004, that the government cannot
arbitrarily transfer appointed governors without ‘compelling’ reasons. It
declared: ‘Nor can he be removed on the ground that the Union government
has lost confidence in him. It follows, therefore, that a change in government
at the Centre is not a ground for removal of governors holding office to make
way for others favoured by the new government.’ 366
What reasons could the government advance that would be so compelling
as to pass the Supreme Court’s test? The BJP today is making the same
argument that the UPA did before the Supreme Court in 2004—that a
governor appointed by a defeated government would have a different view of
national policy than the new government, giving rise to conflict between the
governor’s views and the government’s. It is on this basis that UP Governor
B. L. Joshi and Kerala Governor Sheila Dikshit resigned, as did Governor of
Nagaland Ashwani Kumar, West Bengal Governor M. K. Narayanan,
Maharashtra Governor K. Sankaranarayanan, Goa Governor B. N. Wanchoo
and Karnataka Governor H. R. Bharadwaj. Assam Governor J. B. Patnaik
was said to have faced pressure to turn in his papers, but he served until the
end of his term.
But this argument had explicitly been rejected by the Supreme Court,
which wanted evidence of such conflict to be cited before a governor was
dismissed or even transferred. It is safe to assume that the Modi government
would consider such a requirement to provide evidence an inadmissible
interference in its executive prerogatives. Yet one could also make the
counterargument that the very same principle could, by the same logic, be
extended to a president of India elected under the previous dispensation, yet
no government has dared suggest the president should leave office when ‘his’
government loses an election. Any conflict between the president’s views and
the government’s simply has to be resolved in favour of the latter; that is
what our democracy requires. Why can’t governors be told that, whoever
appointed them, they must now follow the directives of the new government?
Surely that would end the issue of any potential conflict?
But the truth is that this really isn’t about a conflict of principles or
policies at all; it’s really all about jobs—jobs for ‘our’ people rather than
‘theirs’. Various defeated or superannuated BJP leaders need to be
accommodated in comfortable sinecures, and it galls them to see the
Congress party’s favourites enjoying the perks of palatial Raj Bhavans
around the country while they languish in semi-retirement, itching to be
appointed. So when Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad calls the NDA’s
decision ‘arbitrary and capricious’, using the Supreme Court’s words, the fact
is he’s right. It’s about emptying chairs for BJP people to occupy—nothing
more and nothing less.
As Congress leader Kapil Sibal has pointed out, the Modi government’s
idea of constitutional merit does not look beyond the Sangh Parivar. 367 He
provides a detailed list of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appointees to
substantiate his argument: Kalyan Singh, governor of Rajasthan; O. P. Kohli,
governor of Gujarat; Vajubhai Vala, governor of Karnataka; Ram Naik,
governor of Uttar Pradesh; Kesri Nath Tripathi, governor of West Bengal;
Balramji Dass Tandon, governor of Chattisgarh; Tathagata Roy, governor of
Tripura; P. B. Acharya, who held the additional charge of governor of Assam
till August 2016; and V. Shanmuganathan, former governor of Meghalaya,
who resigned from his post in January 2017 following allegations of sexual
harassment against him—have all been associated with the RSS. Indeed,
some of them have gone to the extent of saying that their loyalty to the RSS
comes before their other responsibilities 368 —a far cry from the quasi-
monarchical political detachment expected of governors in India’s federal
democracy.
Ghulam Nabi Azad found the removal of governors to be ‘against the
very grain of democratic traditions and constitutional propriety’. If taken
forward, he warned, the move would be ‘fraught with serious repercussions
and have a debilitating impact on our constitutional democracy’. 369 So what
can we do to ensure we don’t go through the same problems after every
election?
There are two alternatives. The first is to insulate the office of governor
from politicization altogether, by various measures that I suggest below. The
second alternative is the more radical one: to abolish the post of governor
altogether, as a colonial relic that democratic India can dispense with. Except
in the increasingly rare resort to president’s rule, the governor has little of
substance to do, and his few substantive and mainly ceremonial tasks could
easily be divided between the chief minister and the chief justice of the state.
But that would mean depriving the ruling party of twenty-nine
comfortably provisioned freebie positions to hand out to its loyal supporters.
And what are the odds of that happening?
I considered the first option in depth when Sheila Dikshit’s resignation as
governor of Kerala brought to eight the number of UPA-era gubernatorial
appointees who had been coerced by the BJP government into demitting
office prematurely. 370
As the MP for Thiruvananthapuram, I didn’t conceal my disappointment
at seeing her go. Sheila-ji brought to her office a wealth of political
experience and administrative ability, as well as the indefinable qualities of
style and grace.
Her tenure as governor lasted barely six months, but it was marked by
swift and impressive decision-making in the few areas under her direct
authority, as well as a genuine interest in Kerala and its cultural heritage.
Her decision to demand the resignation of the vice-chancellor of
Mahatma Gandhi University, against whom charges had been pending on her
predecessor’s desk for nearly a year, was one of several examples of the
former. Her active involvement in the promotion of the arts, and her regular
attendance at performances of Kerala dance and music, including at the Raj
Bhavan, confirmed the latter. She adorned her office, and was missed.
But ‘The Sad Case of Sheila Dikshit’ need not be the title of a tragic
opera if we use the situation her case epitomizes to review the entire problem
of governors, their appointment and what one may, not entirely jocularly, call
their dis-appointment.
Isn’t it time we developed an all-party consensus on a code of conduct
regarding governors, so that we can put an end to the unseemly and
unedifying spectacle we have all been forced to witness in recent years—the
slow-motion assassinations of some of the highest constitutional authorities
of our land?
Though the suggestion that the very post of governor be done away with
is tempting, it is going to be far more difficult to evolve a political consensus
on amending the Constitution to achieve that, than to reform the process and
criteria by which governors are appointed.
The governor represents in each of our states what the president of India
does in the country as a whole. The president is universally considered to be
above politics; even when a government changes, a president elected under
the previous dispensation remains above controversy, and, as I’ve said, no
government has dared suggest that a president should leave office when ‘his’
government loses an election. It doesn’t need to; the president clearly
understands, both as matter of constitutional principle and political reality,
that he may be the nation’s First Citizen for protocol purposes, but it’s the
popularly elected government that calls the shots. Indeed, what is known as
the President’s Address to Parliament is merely the performance of a
figurehead reading out a script given to him or her by the elected government
of the day. And that, in our parliamentary democracy, is exactly how it
should be.
It is true that the president is elected by MPs and MLAs, whereas
governors are appointed. But what the governor, as the president’s
representative in the state, must be is a carbon copy—just as apolitical as the
president, equally subordinate to the elected government (in his case that of
the state as well as that of the centre), owing primary allegiance only to the
Constitution of India.
Such an institution of governorship should ideally, like the presidency it
mirrors, be beyond the realm of contention. But we all know it’s not: the
practice of the last several decades has sometimes, though not always,
dragged the institution into disrepute. Amongst the reasons for the
plummeting stature of the office have been: the appointment of political time-
servers who conducted themselves in office as agents of their parties; the
profusion of decrepit sinecure-seekers long past their use-by-dates, who
brought neither energy not distinction to their posts; the elevation of a
number of active politicians who used Raj Bhavans as a rest-stop on their
way to resuming their political careers; and the occasional misuse of
governors by a party at the centre at loggerheads with one in the state to
dismiss elected governments on spurious (or at least contestable) grounds. If
all these practices span the range of evident transgressions of the intent of the
framers of the Constitution, there have also been men and women of integrity
and class who served their states, and the country, ably as governors.
How do we ensure that we get more such men and women to be
governors in the future? There is a crying need for an all-party consensus, to
be embodied in law, to achieve this.
The consensus would require agreement on insulating the office of
governor from politicization by adopting these principles, or something very
like them:

1. Anyone appointed governor must:

 renounce primary membership of any political party;
be ineligible for future appointment as office-bearer of any political
party;
be disqualified from election or appointment to any post, bar that of
president or vice-president of India, or Lokpal.
2. In turn, a governor shall be immune from being removed from office till
the completion of his or her term;
being transferred to another state, except by mutual consent;
receiving instructions from any functionary of the government other than
the president of India.
3. A governor may, of course, be impeached for gross misconduct or
dereliction of duty, but only through a procedure akin to that currently
governing the impeachment of members of the country’s senior
judiciary.

If such a code were to be adopted, it would elevate the office of governor to

the status intended by the founding fathers, which it no longer enjoys. It
would ensure the position attracts men and women of integrity and ability,
while simultaneously ending the spectacle of politicians taking a breather in
some Raj Bhavan before returning to the electoral fray for their parties, and
so conducting themselves in office with an eye on their own political future.
There should be no bar on former politicians becoming governors, as
some are advocating: it would be a pity to lose their political experience in
such an office. But these rules would ensure that upon appointment, they
cease to be politicians. Their lifelong allegiances would not disappear
overnight, but they would be empowered, and expected, to transcend them.
If the Modi government had ever been serious about reform, and about
working with the Opposition, fixing the institution of governor would have
been a good place to start. But as we have seen over the past several years,
the timeless and irresistible appeal of ‘jobs for the boys’ has ensured that the
BJP too, has carried on the practice of using Raj Bhavans as retirement
homes for their apparatchiks.

365 ‘Exodus of UPA-era governors: PM Modi begins mass clean-up’, FirstPost , 17 June
2014.
366 Maneesh Chhibber and Utkarsh Anand, ‘In 2010, SC ruled govt change not a ground to
remove Governors’, Indian Express , 18 June 2014.
367 A look at the credentials of those appointed as governors after 2014 suggests that many
of them are committed RSS functionaries, or sympathizers, who are, without being
cognizant of the high constitutional office they hold, involved in politics within the state
they represent. This vitiates the environment in the state’; from Kabil Sibal, Shades of
Truth , New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2018, p. 51.
368 Ibid., p.52; Sanjay Singh, ‘How to be a governor in the Modi sarkar: Be an obedient
RSS loyalist’, FirstPost , 15 July 2014.
369 ‘It’s political vendetta, says Congress, as Modi government asks UPA-appointed
Governors to go’, Indian Express , 17 June 2014.
370 ‘Kerala Governor Sheila Dikshit resigns’, The Hindu , 26 August 2014.
 chapter twenty-one

MATTERS OF JUSTICE

The judiciary is the third branch of government, besides the legislature and
the executive, which the Constitution has invested with powers to run the
country. Given the authoritarian tendencies and general dysfunction that
appear to be the hallmarks of this administration, the importance of the
judiciary to the well-being of the nation and the safeguarding of the
Constitution has risen even further. In earlier chapters in this section I wrote
about the crisis of many aspects of the legislature and the executive and
touched upon an issue that showed the judiciary in a poor light. In this
chapter I’d like to look at two key issues affecting the judiciary, on both of
which the government has been shown up. Both these problems affect the
efficient functioning of our courts, so it is critical that they are addressed
fairly and competently.
The first has to do with the appointment of judges to the higher courts of
the land. The process is simple. A collegium of the Chief Justice and the four
most senior judges decides on the appointments and sends its list to the
government for approval. Once this approval is given, the appointments are
made. In recent times, the smooth functioning of this process has been
interrupted on more than one occasion, with the government sitting on
nominations or questioning the collegium’s recommendations. One of the
ruling party’s most contentious actions was its holding up of the appointment
of Uttarakhand Chief Justice, K. M. Joseph, to the Supreme Court. To its
credit the judiciary stuck to its guns and several months of delay later, the
government gave in and appointed him, albeit with reduced seniority as a
result of the delay. But the widespread perception that Justice Joseph was
victimized because of his unfavourable verdict on a case directly affecting the
BJP’s political interests in Uttarakhand did no credit to the Modi government.
It is not the business of the government to hold up the appointment of
judges at a time when the judiciary is buckling under the strain of the huge
number of cases clogging the courts. At least half the high courts in the
country are functioning at 50 per cent of their strength—there are over 500
vacancies in the high courts alone. 371 Some of this has to do with delays
within the judiciary in coming up with nominations to fill existing vacancies,
others to do with dilatory government processes. Pointing this out, the
incoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, said
while addressing a gathering of judges in July 2018 that it was imperative
that the vacancies be filled as soon as possible. ‘If we are unable to fill [the
vacancies] I do not blame the government for embarking upon the idea to
centralize the recruiting system,’ he said. 372 At the same time, any attempt
by the government to block or influence the hiring of judges should be
strenuously resisted. On this depends the strength and fairness of our
democracy.
The horrendous backlog of cases in all courts of the land underscores the
old dictum that justice delayed is justice denied. At the moment there are
more than 3 crore pending cases in various courts—over 2.84 crore cases in
district courts, over 40 lakh cases in high courts and 57,987 cases in the
Supreme Court. 373 It is clear that something needs to be done to tackle this
crisis on a priority basis and the Modi government has missed a great
opportunity to help fix the problem, despite former Chief Justice T. S. Thakur
breaking down and weeping in front of the prime minister at the resultant
judicial crisis. 374
It would help, of course, if the judiciary got its own house in order,
refusing to admit frivolous cases (such as the recent petition to outlaw Sikh
jokes) and transparently mala fide ones (like the four-year-long persecution
of me for placing my hand across my heart during a rendition of the national
anthem, rather than standing stiffly to attention as the rules dictate). The
admission of a bewildering range of cases unworthy of the name, and their
repeated procedural adjournments, have added to the clogging of the judicial
system, resulting in interminable prosecutions that drag on for years. Some of
this can be remedied by the judges themselves; others clearly require the
government to exercise both imagination and political will.
One way to take the pressure off the courts is to set up an efficient
Alternative Dispute Resolution system (ADR) to sort out business disputes
and the like. No wonder foreign investors have shown great reluctance to set
up offices in India, citing our tedious legal system. Arbitration is an excellent
mechanism for speedy resolution of conflicts, but to our shame, international
businesses operating in India prefer to arbitrate abroad in places like
Singapore and Hong Kong. So inadequate is the Indian judicial system seen
to be that even Mauritius is offering itself as a place to settle disputes
affecting businesses in India!
To take Singapore as one example, apart from a strong legal framework,
it offers hefty tax breaks to law firms on income from arbitration cases and
has eased restrictions to enable foreign law firms to practise in Singapore.
Singapore is therefore attracting arbitration business from our country (India
is the country with the most number of cases at the Singapore International
Arbitration Centre). This is a standing reproach to our failure to deliver an
effective arbitration mechanism in India. We cannot urge businesses to ‘make
in India’ without encouraging them to arbitrate in India.
Mahatma Gandhi mentions in his autobiography, The Story of My
Experiments with Truth , how it struck him one day ‘that the true function of
a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder’. 375 This is perhaps the best
argument for arbitration, which has been an alternative system of justice since
ancient times. One doesn’t have to recall examples of arbitration in Roman
law, when even in ancient India disputes were often resolved by a single
headman or a village panchayat.
The economic reforms of 1991 ushered in an era of globalization and
created a need for an alternative forum to resolve disputes involving
international commercial transactions. The Arbitration and Conciliation Act,
1996, was introduced by the then Congress government to consolidate the
law on domestic arbitration and provide for international commercial
arbitration on the basis of the United Nations Commission on International
Trade Law model. But India has resisted adopting this practice widely, and
though the Act has been in force for nearly two decades now, the practice has
not kept up with the law.
When the BJP government finally promulgated the Arbitration and
Conciliation (Amendment) Ordinance, 2015, it was too little, too late. It did
not do enough to minimize the supervisory role of courts in arbitration
proceedings. Under Clause 15 of the Ordinance, for instance, arbitration
proceedings have to conclude within a period of eighteen months, or else the
mandate of the arbitrator will be terminated unless the court extends the time
period. But arbitration proceedings in our country take a minimum of two
years to conclude and vary depending on the nature, complexity, and stakes
involved in different disputes. For arbitration proceedings that exceed this
time period, the parties will have to apply to the court for an extension of the
mandate of arbitral tribunals. This has created an unnecessary interference of
the court and will defeat the very objective of arbitration by delaying the
arbitration process.
While the government wants to allow high courts in India to pass interim
orders for international commercial arbitrations seated outside India, it has
failed to specify the criteria for determining the jurisdiction of the high court.
Ideally the jurisdiction of a civil court or a high court is determined on the
basis of the place or territory of the subject. But when you are talking about
international commercial arbitrations seated abroad, involving transactions
conducted abroad, how do you decide which high court will have
jurisdiction? If we do not address this loophole, parties in dispute will have to
wait for the courts to decide the criteria—which will bring in more delays in
arbitration.
Additionally, the new law should have had a provision for recognizing
emergency arbitrators and their decisions. Decisions of emergency arbitrators
are now recognized in arbitration rules of most international arbitral
institutions to assist parties who want urgent relief. Countries such as Hong
Kong and Singapore have recently amended their arbitration laws to enforce
the decisions of emergency arbitrators. Our new law doesn’t do this.
The arbitration practice in our country should encourage academicians or
lawyers as arbitrators instead of only retired judges of the Supreme Court and
high courts. This is the practice in countries with successful arbitration
mechanisms, such as the US. While a judge would bring judicial experience
to a proceeding, arbitration doesn’t have to resemble a judicial hearing. There
is a need to create a pool of experienced professionals in arbitration who can
be formally trained and certified as arbitrators by a specialized body. In that
regard, the law also overlooks the need for a specialized body such as an
Arbitral Commission of India to encourage and create awareness of the
practice of arbitration as an alternate method of dispute resolution.
The objective of the law is supposed to put in place an updated and
modern practice of Alternative Dispute Resolution. Yet there are no
provisions that encourage the use of technology during arbitration
proceedings. Use of teleconferencing and video-conferencing to replace
formal sittings of the arbitral proceedings would save time and aid in a
smoother and more efficient conduct of arbitration proceedings.
While I welcome the government attempting to promote arbitration
through an amended law, I feel that it could have done more to modernize
arbitration in our country, especially when India is favourably placed to take
advantage of the shift in global trade and investment from the West. Instead
of taking the challenge from Singapore and Hong Kong head on, the
government has missed a golden opportunity to address and resolve issues
plaguing our dispute resolution system.
We need to reform our arbitration regime to bring it into the twenty-first
century. Sadly, the government’s new law doesn’t come close enough.
Instead of creating the legal equivalent of a bullet train, the Modi government
has simply missed the bus.

371 Abhishek Anshu, ‘24 High Courts short on judges by 43.6 per cent with 50.5 lakh
pending cases’, Outlook , 13 January 2017.
372 Bhadra Sinha, ‘Chief Justices of all high courts must speed up process of hiring district
judges: Justice Gogoi’, Hindustan Times , 28 July 2018.
373 ‘3.3 crore cases pending in Indian courts, pendency figure at its highest: CJI Dipak
Misra’, Business Today , 28 June 2018.
374 ‘An overworked Chief Justice TS Thakur breaks down in front of PM Modi’, Times of
India , 24 April 2016.
375 M. K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography , New
Delhi: Om Books International, 2009.
 chapter twenty-two

JUVENILE (IN)JUSTICE

The Modi government enacted the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of
Children) Act in January 2016. By changing the law to ensure that 16 to 18
year olds can now be tried, convicted and sentenced as adults to twenty years
in prison for ‘heinous offences’, it has regressively plunged our nation into
the darkness of nineteenth-century jurisprudence.
The Juvenile Justice Board will now have discretionary powers to
transfer a child in the age group of 16–18 years, accused of rape, murder,
kidnapping, robbery, dacoity, and other offences which are punishable with
imprisonment for a minimum term of seven years, to an adult criminal justice
system for trial and conviction. An excuse for this barbarism is not hard to
find. It is a reaction to the horrific Nirbhaya case of 2012, which shocked the
national conscience, especially when it was claimed in the media that the
most heinous acts in that criminal episode were allegedly the doings of a
juvenile. When the media suggested that it was likely he would get away with
minimum punishment, and that the system might leave a predator free on the
streets, there was understandable uproar in all quarters. Someone close to me,
naturally agitated and emotional, said: ‘If he is old enough to rape, he is old
enough to hang.’
The problem with such an approach is twofold. It treats children as
adults, which is wrong morally, legally, ethically, emotionally, and
constitutionally. A 16-year-old may physically be a man but does not have
the mental maturity of an adult. During the immediate aftermath of the
Nirbhaya tragedy, the UPA undertook extensive consultations in 2013, which
confirmed that the arguments for punitive action were based on fear, moral
outrage, misinformation, and ignorance. This is why we did not give in to
popular demand for such a change. And secondly, entire laws, which apply to
the cases of all juveniles across the board, cannot and should not be
determined on the basis of one bad example, no matter how horrifying or
terrible it might be. Laws should be studied instruments of justice; they
cannot be based on a specific instance alone, and it is the duty of the
government of the day to ask itself whether good law and good justice can
ever be born out of an impulsive reaction to emotional headlines.
This law defies all logic. International examples show that transferring
children to the adult system has failed to prevent repeat offences, failed to
reduce the juvenile crime rate and failed to promote public safety. In fact, it
will increase the risk to public safety because convicting a child in an adult
criminal trial will not just deny the child the fulfilment of his basic rights and
his physical, emotional and intellectual development—twenty years in jail
will eventually churn out hardened criminals rather than reformed adults,
defeating its declared purpose. A US study has established that 80 per cent of
the juveniles released from adult prisons go on to commit more serious
offences. 376 So jailing more children will be neither in the best interests of
the child nor of society as a whole.
Of the 446 million children in our country, only 0.008 per cent actually
committed cognizable crimes in 2016. 377 The number of children who
committed ‘serious and heinous crimes’ was miniscule. In 2016, of all the
children apprehended for crimes under the Indian Penal Code, 2.4 per cent
were accused of murder and 5.3 per cent were accused of rape. That is 2.4 per
cent of 0.008 per cent—a tiny figure for whose crimes we are turning our
system of justice upside down. These figures of the National Crime Records
Bureau account for the FIRs registered and not the children who were
actually found guilty. They do not justify this stringent and completely
retrograde step.
Worse, this law will predominantly affect the country’s poor and
marginalized sections of our society—OBCs, SCs, STs and minorities. A
majority of the children in conflict with the law come from illiterate families
and poor homes. Statistically, in 2013, 77.55 per cent of the arrested children
came from families with a monthly household income less than ₹4,200, and
87 per cent of the offenders had not even received a higher secondary
education. 378 Such socio-economic conditions only reiterate the urgency to
develop better reformative facilities for educating and reintegrating children
with criminal tendencies into mainstream society, rather than subjecting them
to a harsh justice system and twenty years’ jail, especially when such children
lack adequate legal representation. This would never succeed as a deterrent: it
will simply make them unfit for normal life after they are freed. The
government could have raised the punishment for heinous crimes by kids
from three to a maximum of seven years rather than taking the extreme step
of considering a child no longer to be a child.
It is really the government’s job to implement the existing provisions for
rehabilitating children in conflict with the law. It cannot shrug off its
responsibility by holding the children accountable for failures of the juvenile
rehabilitative system of our country. The government should fix the juvenile
justice system, not bypass it and victimize our children. Instead, it is trying to
brush the real issue under the carpet, to put behind bars the problem we face.
Political convenience for the BJP has trumped justice for India’s children.
The selective and unequal treatment of children between the age group of
16–18 years clearly violates the fundamental rights guaranteed under Article
14 and Article 15(3) of the Constitution. While Article 14 extends equal
protection of law and equality before the law, Article 15(3) allows the state to
enact special provisions for protecting children, for they are vulnerable and
require special care and protection. The existing juvenile system recognizes
that 16–18 years is a sensitive age, which requires greater emphasis on
reformation and rehabilitation than on punishment. The new law goes in the
opposite direction.
The law also creates a trial before the trial by giving the Juvenile Justice
Board one month for a preliminary assessment of whether the child should be
tried as an adult—a period so short that it could lead to a presumption of
guilt, which itself violates the Constitution. As the Justice Verma Committee
observed in 2013 while rejecting the case for a draconian new law, ‘We
cannot hold the child responsible for a crime before first providing him/her
the basic rights given to him by the court.’ 379
Ironically we can’t even be sure the child we’re trying really is the age he
appears to be. Our courts rely on the matriculation certificate of a child or his
birth certificate from a school or a municipal corporation. However, many
government and municipal schools often record age on the basis of the
physical appearance of a child, and in many cases parents give an earlier age
just to get the child into school (ask Gen V. K. Singh!) 380 The children who
would be immediately affected by this legislation were born at a time when
the level of birth registration was just 58 per cent (in 2001). 381 Since the
estimated age can have drastic repercussions on the life of a child, the
presumption should in fact be that the child is younger than the date
mentioned in his school certificate. The law makes no allowances for this
Indian reality.
This government may not be embarrassed to shame us before the world,
but the law violates India’s undertakings under the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989, the United Nations Standard
Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, 1985, or the
Beijing Rules, and the United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles
Deprived of their Liberty, 1990—all of which require a child or a young
person, accused of an offence, to be treated differently from an adult. This
law is an equal-opportunity offender: it violates every principle it can
possibly violate. Condemnation by the UN Committee on the Rights of the
Child may well follow.
Okay, forget the UN—what about India? There are no special provisions
or guidelines for either a female juvenile in conflict with the law or a juvenile
sex offender. Misuse is likely: if children are found indulging in consensual
sex, it is possible that the male can be charged with rape and sent to the adult
crime system.
Even though the law could bring about some much-needed reforms in
adoption and foster care, it disappoints in its inability to justly treat children
in conflict with the law. An important principle of jurisprudence that all law
students learn is ‘Lex iniustanon est lex’: ‘an unjust law is no law at all’.
Instead of passing such laws, the government should have focused on
actually protecting children.
In our country, child protection under the law has been marred by
insufficient investments, lack of adequate number of Juvenile Justice Boards
(JJB) and Child Welfare Committees (CWC), lack of institutional services
such as Shelter Homes, Special Homes, and Observation Homes, and the
absence of an effective monitoring and coordinating mechanism.
The BJP government has shirked its responsibilities to finance such
essential work. Budgetary allocations for the development of children have
faced drastic cuts over the years. The total allocations for children in 2018–
2019 remained stagnant at 3.23 per cent of the Union Budget. 382 In fact, the
Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS), the primary scheme for creating
a safe environment for children in need of care and protection, was allocated
just ₹400 crore in the Modi government’s first Budget, though this sum has
mercifully been increased in successive years. 383 Child Welfare Officers
have not been appointed in police stations across the country. Even though
the law now provides for a National Commission for Protection of Child
Rights and a State Commission for Protection of Child Rights for monitoring
the implementation of the provisions of the law, they could become as
redundant as the existing institutions, especially if this government starves
them financially.
The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, despite
a few positive provisions, makes one cardinal error: it forgets that our justice
should be about rehabilitation, not retribution. We must not sacrifice our
values and our children for political gain. That is what the BJP has done, and
the nation must rise against it. This is one law that must be amended the
moment Mr Modi is out of office.

376 Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, ‘A bill for juvenile injustice’, The Hindu , 27 April 2015.
377 ‘Crime in India 2016 Statistics’, National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home
Affairs.
378 Danish Raza, ‘Kids accused of heinous crimes to be tried as adults: Will the law be
misused?’, Hindustan Times , 31 May 2015.
379 Bindu Shajan Perappadan, ‘“Juvenile Justice Act has failed miserably”’, The Hindu ,
24 January 2013.
380 Gen Singh, as Chief of the Army Staff, waged an unsuccessful campaign (that included
taking his own government to court) to rectify his official recorded date of birth, which he
said perpetuated an error made at the time of his admission to school.
381 ‘Birth registration—the picture in India’, UNICEF, http://unicef.in/Story/1133/Birth-
Registration-the-picture-in-India
382 Komal Ganotra, ‘Budget for children: The story doesn’t change’, Down to Earth , 5
February 2018.
383 Ibid.
 chapter twenty-three

ABOLISHING THE DEATH PENALTY

Besides its failure to govern effectively, and uphold the institutions it has
been charged with safeguarding by the Constitution, the Modi government
has also missed the opportunity to do something good for the country by
repealing bad laws or refraining from promulgating new laws or Acts that
aren’t in the nation’s best interest. One law it could have done away with was
the one that allows the state to put convicted criminals to death. Let us
examine the law through the example of one of the most high-profile cases in
which it was used in the recent past.
On 30 July 2015, Yakub Memon, a chartered accountant and the brother
of a notorious gangster now living in self-imposed exile, was hanged for
complicity in the planning and execution of serial bomb blasts that killed 257
people in Mumbai in 1993. The hanging, India’s first for years, prompted
reactions ranging from dismay to scarcely concealed bloodlust. And it has
intensified the domestic debate over the death penalty.
To be sure, no one suggests that India’s judicial system did not function
properly in Mr Memon’s case. He was convicted according to the due process
of law, and his punishment was in accordance with valid statutes. During his
twenty-one years behind bars, Mr Memon exhausted every possible appeal
available to him, including one for presidential clemency. The Supreme Court
even held an emergency hearing at 2.30 in the morning, just hours before the
execution was set to occur, before deciding to allow it to proceed.
But the question remains: should capital punishment be on the books at
all?
As an Opposition legislator, I attracted considerable opprobrium for
voicing my opinion, on the morning of Mr Memon’s hanging, that it should
not be. I expressed my sadness that our government had killed a human
being, whatever his crimes might have been. State-sponsored killing
diminishes us all, I added, by reducing us to murderers, just like those we are
punishing.
My view is not popular in India, and my own party disclaimed my
statement. But my position is based on ample evidence that the death penalty
does not actually deter the crimes it punishes. Data collected by the Death
Penalty Project at Delhi’s National Law University demonstrates
conclusively that there is no statistical correlation between applying the death
penalty and preventing murder. 384 This evidence echoes similar findings in
other countries.
My statements were also motivated by problems with the way capital
punishment is imposed in India. The Supreme Court has declared that the
death penalty should be applied only in the ‘rarest of the rare’ cases. And,
indeed, the last three executions in the country stemmed from terrorist
offences that threatened or took a large number of lives. 385
But the decision to impose capital punishment remains highly subjective.
Indeed, whether the death penalty is meted out depends on a number of
variables, beginning with judicial and social biases. Public outrage—
potentially fuelled by inflammatory media coverage—can push for a harsher
sentence, especially in cases relating to terrorism or crimes against women.
Economic status also comes into play, with poor criminals being executed
much more often than wealthy ones, not least because they cannot afford
high-quality legal representation. And the president’s decision to commute a
sentence is subjective.
A 1980 case held that one way to determine whether a crime meets the
‘rarest of the rare’ requirement is whether the community’s ‘collective
conscience’ has been ‘so shocked’ that it expects those wielding judicial
power to inflict the death penalty, regardless of their personal opinions. 386
This leaves much room for the arbitrary and disproportionate application of
capital punishment.
Currently there are 477 people in the country who have been sentenced to
death. Lower courts hand down around 132 death sentences every year, but
the Supreme Court upholds barely three or four of these. 387 Many cases are
likely to remain in limbo for decades, with the tedious process of appeals and
approvals. As for the death sentences that have already been carried out—
three in the last decade—it is impossible to ascertain the objective criteria
that made the crimes in question more heinous or ‘rarer’ than those that did
not merit execution.
Ambiguity and subjectivity have no place in matters of life and death.
Yet, when it comes to the imposition of capital punishment, both are
prominent. That makes it all the more difficult to justify the practice.
Just a couple of weeks before Mr Memon’s execution, India’s Law
Commission, a government body composed of retired judges and legal
experts that works for legal reform, organized consultations to assess the
effectiveness of the provisions governing the death penalty in India and the
purpose of the penalty itself. Unsurprisingly, based on the evidence and the
opinions presented at the Law Commission’s hearings, there was a general
consensus that the courts are unable to adopt a fair and non-discriminatory
approach to the death penalty, and support for its abolition was
overwhelming. In August 2018 I introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the
Lok Sabha calling for the abolition of the death penalty in India.
That will not happen any time soon. The Indian public overwhelmingly
supports the death penalty, especially for convicted terrorists. The debate
over Mr Memon’s hanging was often emotional, with media interviewing
survivors of the Mumbai blasts.
Moreover, it has been suggested that the alternative to the death penalty
—life imprisonment—would make India vulnerable to hijackings and other
assaults by terrorist groups attempting to free their jailed comrades. In the
face of such security concerns, my argument that taking a human life is
wrong, and that the state should not compound criminal wrongdoing with its
own, found little resonance.
Globally, India is part of a dwindling minority. More than 130 countries
have abolished the death penalty. Twenty-five countries have it on the books,
but have not executed anyone for decades. That leaves roughly thirty
countries that still apply it.
India’s membership in this group has international repercussions; for
example, European Union countries will not extradite criminals to countries
where they may face execution. But the real problem is deeper: capital
punishment is, at its core, about nothing more than retribution.
It may be tempting to declare that anyone who kills (or participates in
killing) innocent people does not deserve to live. But is revenge a worthy
motive for a state’s actions, especially towards its own citizens?
India’s greatest son, Mahatma Gandhi, observed that ‘an eye for an eye
makes the whole world blind’. For now, India remains blind to the case for
abolishing the death penalty. One day, I am sure, it will see the light. Until
then, the lonely battle for its abolition must continue.

384 Amrith Lal, ‘Most on death row are poor, from backward caste groups, minorities: Law
University report’, Indian Express , 7 May 2016.
385 Chaitanya Mallapur and Devanik Saha, ‘10 years: 1,303 death sentences, 3 executions’,
IndiaSpend , 29 July 2015.
386 ‘What happens after a court hands down the death penalty in India?’, Scroll.in , 14
March 2017.
387 Coreena Suares, ‘In India, death row cases dealt extremely slowly’, Deccan Chronicle ,
11 July 2018.
 chapter twenty-four

DISHONOURING THE ARMED FORCES

Besides the three formal arms of the government, the load-bearing pillars of
our democracy, there is a fourth institution that is responsible for ensuring the
safety, integrity and well-being of our country, our armed forces. Our soldiers
give their all in the service of the nation—up to and including their own lives
—something that is not expected of the rest of us. This is one of the reasons
why it angers me to see the army treated shabbily.
The BJP government came to power talking big about its commitment to
the defence of our country and the armed forces, but it has fallen short of
providing one of the country’s most important institutions the support and
honour it deserves. To go through all the ways in which the army, navy and
air force have been short-changed by Narendra Modi’s government would
require a book to itself—a revolving door of ineffectual defence ministers,
shortage of equipment, outdated ammunition and technology, confused
signals and dangerous war talk, a dysfunctional procurement process and
much more. I will therefore limit myself to just two issues in this chapter on
which the government could have done a great deal more than it has done.
I

The first has to do with the One Rank One Pension (OROP) issue that led to
an unprecedented 320-day long agitation by armed force veterans, which was
eventually suspended in April 2016, when the ex-servicemen decided to
continue their battle in court.
What is OROP? This can be stated simply as the provision of pensions
that have not been indexed to inflation—a brigadier who retired twenty years
ago gets a lower pension than a captain who leaves the force this year. This is
what our retired military personnel are fighting to change.
Although the government finally decided to implement OROP in 2017,
the veterans were unsatisfied. Their main complaint is that instead of giving
the highest pension at any one rank, the government has decided to give the
average pension at that rank which ‘nullifies’ the meaning of OROP. Earlier
this year, Col Anil Kaul (retd), a spokesperson for the protesting ex-
servicemen, said ‘The protest will continue…and legal options will be
exercised.’ 388
I believe that it is a crying shame that Modi’s government is not prepared
to accede to the legitimate demands of our veterans, and I think it is
reprehensible for his ministers to make statements like the one former
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar did at a media conference in 2014. He
maintained that the ex-servicemen would get 80 per cent of the promised
pension, gratuitously adding that ‘100 per cent satisfaction to everyone is
never given in real life.’ 389 This is insulting. Would PM Modi say during his
election campaigns in 2018 and 2019 that we should not believe anything he
promises, but that he will try to deliver 80 per cent of it? If the Kargil War
had happened on his watch, would we have to be content with getting 80 per
cent of the heights back? For soldiers who give more than is asked of
practically any other citizen of this land, this is rather too much. Our soldiers
do not make an 80 per cent effort when performing their duties, they
routinely give 100 per cent; it would only be fitting for the government to
return the favour with 100 per cent of what they legitimately seek.
The government says that to give in to the veterans’ demands would cost
too much. Yes, it will cost the exchequer thousands of crores of rupees but
when PM Modi blithely says he will construct a statue of Sardar Patel at a
higher cost than OROP would amount to, it puts the whole issue into
perspective.
When the men and women of our armed forces have never counted the
cost of serving the nation how can we quibble about the cost of paying their
pensions, and humiliate them by making them sit in protest at Jantar Mantar,
where their dignity and rights are trampled upon? It is time to ask the
government of Messrs Modi and Finance Minister Jaitley: gentlemen, have
you no shame?
The government must fully honour the debt to our ex-servicemen. Not to
do so is an act of dishonour. It dishonours the nation and the flag these men
have fought to defend. And it thoroughly discredits those who would treat the
well-being of our jawans and officers as one more election promise to be
lightly cast aside.
 II

With all the understandable (and justified) focus on OROP, the media
appears to have missed another major development in the Ministry of
Defence—a decision to extend Short Service Commissions for fourteen
years.
The issue of recruitment and the shortage of officers in our country is
widely known. But the army appears to be addressing this by extending the
duration of Short Service Commissions in a way that is doing an injustice to
the officers concerned. In the old days, you would have a five-year
commission. You would then leave and you would still be in the prime of
your life; you would be able to find a job and move on. Today, they are
making these Short Service Commission officers stay for ten years, eleven
years, even fourteen years. These are people who have no pension; they have
no benefits. They leave the army late and, as a result, they are not in a
position thereafter to actually resume life in the civilian sector. In December
2014, I had raised the question in Parliament, asking the then Defence
Minister Manohar Parrikar, to explain what the government’s policy was on
Short Service Commissions. If they were going to do extend them for so
long, would it not be fairer to give them all the benefits that a normal officer
would be entitled to, pensions included?
Parrikar replied as follows (this is a verbatim transcript from the
parliamentary proceedings):
Madam, I entirely agree with the Hon. Member. Whatever was the original
concept of the Short Service Commission is being totally put upside down by
extending it to fourteen years. In fact, I had a discussion on this issue. We are
trying to address this issue very shortly. We will definitely take care of this
concept. There was 17 per cent shortage of officers by the year 2012. As of now,
we are recruiting more officers. Every year, we are addressing one per cent. So,
we are coming down by one per cent every year. I expect that by another ten
years, we should be able to ultimately fill up the vacant posts. As far as the Short
Service Commission is concerned, I will definitely address this issue because I am
also concerned with the same issue. I have asked for more details. There is some
reasoning given by them. Give me some time. I think, in a couple of months, I
should be able to address this issue. I understand your concern. The same concern
was expressed by me. You are virtually suggesting to convert them into a regular
Commission by taking it to fourteen years. The original idea was different.

That’s the point. The original idea behind the Short Service Commission was
a good one: it kept the armed forces young, gave men and women in their
twenties an opportunity to experience military life, while allowing them to
have the satisfaction of serving our motherland in their youth and going on to
pursue other careers thereafter. Those Short Service Commission officers
who sought it could seek a Permanent Commission, but few got one and the
vast majority was supposed to move on to other careers outside the Forces.
This is why the Short Service Commission was genuinely short—five
years in your twenties added to your experience without making a major dent
in your life or career plans. But there has been a gradual extension of the five-
year period to seven, ten, and now fourteen. As a former officer who brought
the problem to my attention observed to me, ‘The SSC ceased to be short
when it was made minimum seven years. It became exploitative when made
minimum ten years. Now that the minimum service is fourteen years, it is just
abuse of the youth.’ As this former officer, Mr Balakrishna, argues,
‘Anything more than seven years should be treated as a career option. And a
career cannot end abruptly after ten or fourteen years.’
The charge of exploitation or even abuse is not exaggerated. I recently
received a heart-rending email from a navy lieutenant on a Short Service
Commission, who shall remain nameless since he is still in service and I do
not want him to be open to reprisals. I am quoting from it in his own
language (without editing the English) to convey his genuine anguish: ‘The
charter of duties are same for SSC officers as of PC officers. If duties are
same then why there is a huge difference in benefits. We SSC officers will be
out from the service at ten or fourteen yrs. At that stage we will be at critical
stage we don’t have any further exposure of outside world. We SSC are
neither entitled for pension, ECHS and membership of any club… All
benefits is only for permanent commission officer and the other ranks who
does minimum fifteen yrs of service and gets all facilities. If we are also
relieved at the same age bracket then why this discrimination. Dear sir it is a
sad state of affairs, all veterans are busy in asking OROP, but they left their
brothers behind who had also spent their prime young time with them… Most
of us has just started our families. Few are about to become fathers. Sir we
are also human being and did nothing wrong while joining service
enthusiastically but some where it is getting diminished… Our future is at
stake.’
It is time that, as a nation, we thought about the human beings who don
uniforms to keep us safe. After fourteen years of service, SSCOs would retire
at the age of around 36–40 years, the time when job/financial security matters
the most. By this age, most would have married and have school-going
children; this is likely to be the case also for those released after ten years.
The chances of a Permanent Commission are minimal for most of the
SSCOs; indeed the policy on granting Permanent Commission is very vague
and decisions are left to the discretion—sometimes the whim—of the senior
officers concerned. Those in the executive branches of the navy and air force
are not granted Permanent Commissions even if their performance has been
better than their fellow officers who are permanently commissioned. It is a
criminal waste of India’s human resources that young officers, well-trained,
qualified, medically fit, and willing to serve, are simply let go because they
were hired under one category rather than another.
In fact many choose to extend their service to fourteen years because of
the uncertainty of a second career. And where can they go? There are no
special provisions for them, and the existing rules don’t help. Former SSCOs
who are 36–40 years old will not be eligible to most of the Group A
equivalent positions in the civil services or in public sector undertakings, as
the age limit at entry is 30 years (a relaxation of five years is sometimes
granted for ex-service personnel, but at 35 that prospect also disappears).
As young officers who joined the services in the first flush of idealistic
enthusiasm wake up to these realities, disenchantment sets in. Our country
cannot afford demoralization among SSCOs after a few years of service.
Worse, the government is beset with a large number of ongoing legal cases
and representations against the evident discrimination in terms of grant of
financial and other benefits on release.
The solution is simple. Keep Short Service Commissions short: in and out
in five years, no further obligations on either side. But for those who wish to
continue further in service—and whom the armed forces consider good
enough to keep—they should be converted to a status that gives them the
same benefits and entitlements as Permanent Commissioned officers of
equivalent experience. This would make the SSCO both a platform to give
motivated young people an opportunity to experience military life, and an
alternative route to filling the ranks of military officers and curing the chronic
shortages our armed forces are suffering from.
Those who quit after five years (typically in the age group of 27–30 years
when the pressures of family are much lower and the appetite for risk is
higher) will not find it difficult to embark on a second career; indeed the
experience will stand them in good stead in landing a job. And these officers
can be ambassadors of the armed forces in their second career and attract
more youth to join the services.
As for those who stay on for ten and even fourteen years, the government
should pay a pro-rata pension and related benefits, based on the length of
service. The government should also consider making arrangements for
lateral entry into the civil services, the central armed police forces, or public
sector undertakings, relaxing the rules that prevent this from being an option.
It has been four years since the then Defence Minister Parrikkar asked in
Parliament for ‘a couple of months’ to address the issue I had raised. The
Modi government’s failure to do so is yet another indication of the
fecklessness with which it has dealt with its responsibilities to the defence
services. These brave young women and men protect our nation with their
lives. We cannot let them down.

388 ‘One Rank One Pension: Ex-servicemen vow to continue agitation’, NDTV , 4
February 2016.
389 ‘At a recent Aaj Tak conclave, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said ex-servicemen
would get 80% of OROP and then added “100% satisfaction to everyone is never given in
real life”’, from Karan Thapar, ‘They defend us but there’s no one to defend their rights’,
Hindustan Times , 28 December 2014.
 chapter twenty-five

FAILING AT EDUCATION

As is well known by now, India is set to be the world’s youngest country,

with an average age of twenty-nine. The demographic dividend that awaits
our nation from its youthful population can only be reaped if we train and
educate our young people to be able to take advantage of what the world has
to offer them in the twenty-first century.
But the Modi sarkar’s performance in education does not inspire
confidence. For example, the overall education budget in 2015–16 came
down from ₹82,771 crore to ₹69,074 crore. 390 Whereas under the UPA, the
plan allocation went up by 18 per cent in 2012–13 and by 8.03 per cent in
2013-14, the BJP government reduced the plan allocation for 2015-16 by
24.68 per cent. There were savage cuts across the board: the flagship Sarva
Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) was reduced by 22.14 per cent, funding for the Mid-
Day Meal Scheme by 16.41 per cent, the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha
Abhiyan for secondary education by 28.7 per cent and the Rashtriya
Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan, to support state colleges, by 48 per cent. 391
Moreover, important bodies like the SSA, which funds schools across the
country, were hollowed out—MHRD had asked for ₹50,000 crore in 2015-
16; it received ₹22,000 crore from the Modi sarkar’s 2015-2016 Budget. 392
What is even more striking is that instead of investing in our future
through strengthening our higher education, what have we seen in the share
of budgetary outlay towards education? In the 2017 Budget, it was stagnant at
only 3.71 per cent and only a meagre 1.5 per cent had been allocated to
higher education altogether, 393 even though the need has risen year after
year, the population is growing year after year and inflation is also reducing
the value of the amounts year after year. The Standing Committee Report in
March 2017, which discussed the Demands for Grants of the Department of
Higher Education, made very strong and pertinent observations and noted
that though the government claims to have increased the expenditure for IIMs
and IITs, these institutions have been dealing with a chronic shortage of
resources and funds that deters them from competing with the global
institutions against which we must benchmark institutions like the IIMs. Only
three of our IIMs feature in the list of the hundred best management schools
in the world as per the 2017 Financial Times ’ ranking. 394
Considering the quality of students that we get in the IIMs—we have
very rigorous selection procedures in place in our country and strong
competitive examinations—it is clear that we are failing our young minds if
we cannot offer them access to the best universities of the world in our
country. These are young men and women who have to go out and compete
with the world where in a globalizing economy, Indian companies must hold
their own with multinational corporations and against the best that the world
has to offer. Why can we not offer them the best or even better educational
facilities than are available in some of these western countries? I believe that
having only three out of a hundred is a travesty, and I think that it reveals that
the government is not doing enough to bolster their development.
Let’s probe deeper into the existing state of affairs at the IIMs and the
IITs. Apparently, 26 per cent of faculty posts in the IIMs and 35 per cent of
faculty posts in the IITs are lying vacant. 395 Now, the race to create more
institutions in numbers, which is definitely necessitated by our population
growth, must not overshadow the aspects of quality of education. We cannot
make up in mindless numbers the glaring lack of quality in higher education
in India, but for quality we need resources; we need money; we need
facilities; and we need faculty. This is where I am sorry to say that the
government is collectively lacking.
However, let me say that despite all the problems facing institutions of
higher education in this country, brand ‘IIM’ has truly come into its own and
it is synonymous with world-class management education with a distinctively
Indian flavour. The story of our country’s economic resurgence would be
incomplete without acknowledging the critical role collectively played by the
IIMs in providing our country with an amazingly talented, motivated and
highly successful pool of managers who have gone on in many ways to
transform every area of our society and our economy with their exceptional
leadership. In my view, they have largely realized the hopes of the man who
established the IIMs—Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru—who had the vision to
realize that India needed management education and brought it into this
country. As in many other areas of our nation building, we must pay homage
to his far-sightedness in realizing that if India is to meet its tryst with destiny,
India would need world class leaders for business and industry as well.
But much more needs to be done to improve and extend the excellence of
the IIM brand. The BJP (in a step I welcomed in Parliament) has given the
IIMs autonomy, it has stipulated that there should be at least three women on
the board of governors of each institution, but it needs to do more. It needs to
insist that the IIMs recruit a lot more faculty from the weaker sections of
society, which are very poorly represented at the moment. Moreover, the
government needs to take a look at how it can regulate the fees of the IIMs
going forward so that students from poorer families wouldn’t have to
undertake the burden of very heavy loans just to be able to study in a
government institution, which is what an IIM is. There are several other
aspects of the IIMs that should be carefully thought about, such as the right to
award degrees, the tabling of the annual report of the IIMs in Parliament and
so on and so forth.
To move to the IITs: in 2014, the Modi government announced the
creation of five new IITs and IIMs with a grand total investment of ₹500
crore—but the government’s own Detailed Project Report specifies that the
cost of establishing an IIT is ₹2,200 crore over a period of seven years! In
other words, each new IIT needs an annual expenditure of around ₹310 crore
a year. 396 The Modi government’s allocations fell dramatically short of that
—and this excludes any amount which may be needed for completing the
construction of previously announced IITs. Inadequate funding has
compromised the quality of education in all newly established IITs and IIMs,
with the government rolling out more such institutions without strengthening
the existing infrastructure.
When it comes to higher education in the country, the BJP government
has shown complete disregard for the principle of quality in its quest for mere
quantity. It has created a profusion of universities with the stroke of a pen but
paid scant attention to whether they would actually be worth attending. In
July 2016, the motion for consideration of the National Institutes of
Technology, Science Education and Research (Amendment) Bill, 2016 was
discussed in Parliament. The house was informed that a new NIT in Andhra
Pradesh, with 900 students, was functioning out of a temporary campus. 397
There were no laboratories; no libraries; no high quality IT or engineering
tools for training; not to mention an acute shortage of infrastructure in terms
of accommodation as well. Can you imagine an engineering college without a
functioning laboratory or library books? We had a situation where we created
an institution which was not ready to be launched, but in a haste to erect the
foundation-stone as announced, they went ahead.
The NIT was permitted to commence activities, but do we want shells of
institutions, or path-breaking resource centres that would truly make a
difference? In contrast, around the very same time that this discussion took
place in Parliament, a fully functioning central polytechnic, the best-known in
Kerala, which was established in 1949, was derecognized by the AICTE for
not fulfilling a list of conditions that they deemed had to be fulfilled. If that
same list were applied to the NIT in Andhra Pradesh, it would have been
derecognized by the same AICTE.
Similarly, why can we not get more private sector money into higher
education? In the OECD countries, about 75 per cent of research and
development funding in the OECD countries comes from the private sector,
whereas in India, it is only 15 per cent from the private sector. Why does
everything in India have to be dependent upon the government’s largesse?
Having heard our prime minister’s speeches, we should expect that this
government would be infusing much more funding into our NITs and IITs.
Pending, when the UPA government left office, was our Research and
Innovation Bill which would have allowed the setting up of some fourteen
universities purely for research and innovation, including in the private sector
or funding on a PPP mode, or even on a sole ownership mode.
II

Moving from higher education to primary education, while the enrolment

picture is somewhat encouraging, it is offset by an alarming level of
dropouts. Our Gross Enrolment Ratio at the primary level is high (over 101
per cent) but so is the dropout rate—about 17 per cent drop out by the
secondary level Class IX–X. 398 You can’t educate children if they’re not in
school. The government has also released figures of 60 lakh out-of-school
children; according to the ministry’s ‘Education for All’ report to UNESCO
in 2012, this had declined to 30 lakhs just two years ago, which suggests that
the trend is reversing. 399
While on the subject of school enrolment and schools in general it would
be appropriate to talk about the Right to Education Act (RTE) which was
enacted about a decade ago. How is it faring? The truth is shocking.
Five states (Goa, Manipur, Mizoram, Sikkim and Telangana) have not
even issued notifications regarding admissions under the RTE. 400 Section
12(1)(c) of the Act mandates private unaided schools to reserve 25 per cent of
seats for children from economically weaker sections (EWS), in the age
bracket of six to fourteen years. This would enable economically
marginalized communities to access high quality private schools, at the
expense of the state. While Telangana may be excused due to its recent
formation, it is unjustifiable that the other states have failed to undertake the
most basic steps to implement Section 12(1)(c) of an Act passed over eight
years ago.
States have to notify per-child costs to pay the private schools, on behalf
of the children admitted under this provision. However, out of thirty-six
states and union territories, only fourteen of them have notified their per-child
costs. The provision does not apply to J&K and there are no private schools
in Lakshadweep; therefore, as per the data provided, a shocking twenty
states/UTs have still not notified the per-child costs, a blatant violation of the
letter and spirit of RTE.
It is also shocking to note that in 2017–18, out of the fifteen states which
submitted their reimbursement claims to the central government, only six
were approved. 401 Many of the claims of the states were not provided funds
by the centre, as they had not notified the per-child costs. In response to my
query regarding the number of children admitted, per state, under Section
12(1)(c) in the last three years, eighteen states have claimed that the question
is not applicable to them, without giving any reason for this response. This
could mean that in eighteen states, poor children are not even benefiting
under this Act. If there is no data to record the number of students being
admitted, it begs the question as to how states are reimbursing private
schools. The respective state governments and the centre should clarify this
specific point.
According to Indus Action, an organization which works in ten states
across India specifically on this provision, while there are higher order issues
like the methodology used by states to calculate the per-child cost and lack of
coverage of ancillary costs in the reimbursements, the absence of a
streamlined disbursement framework both at the central level and the state
level is one of the biggest reasons that reimbursements are not processed. 402
If the states are not provided sufficient funds, the private schools would be
forced to bear the costs of the children. Civil society activists have informed
me about instances of schools refusing to admit children under the RTE
provision, citing non-payment of dues by the state governments.
The data regarding the number of children admitted under Section 12(1)
(c) of the Act, in states which provided the figures, is also distressing. The
number of children studying under this provision increased by 6,12,053 from
2014–2015 to 2015–16, and by 5,02,880 from 2015–16 to 2016–17. This
means that there was a reduction of one lakh beneficiaries under this
provision during this period. The State of the Nation 2015 report by IIM
Ahmedabad, based on official data obtained from the District Information
System for Education, puts the total number of seats under this provision as
1.6 crore over the next eight years. 403 This means that 20 lakh seats should
be available annually for EWS children in private schools under the Act;
however, according to the answer of the minister, only 5-6 lakh seats are
being filled on an annual basis.
The preamble to the Constitution of India states that the democratic
Republic of India shall secure social, economic and political justice.
Education is undoubtedly the most important element in the movement to
secure this end. Although the Directive Principles of State Policy mandate the
state to provide children the right to access education, and the 86th
Constitutional Amendment and the RTE dictate its implementation, it will be
only be fulfilled if sincere efforts are made by the states under the guidance
and prodding of a committed centre.
The executive is responsible for the implementation of RTE and the
legislature has the duty to hold the executive accountable. Neither—judging
by the evidence—has done its job properly.
III

Of particular concern to me where our schooling system is concerned is the

way in which children from SC/ST communities and other disadvantaged
sections of society are being treated. It is clear that they are not taking
sufficient advantage of schemes like the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas
(residential schools in which 75 per cent seats are reserved for
SC/ST/OBC/minorities). The Modi government also says it will no longer
support states in building 6,000 model schools in educationally backward
districts. 404 Announcing central objectives and expecting the states to fund
them has been a peculiar hallmark of the Modi regime. But it is not going to
transform this country in any domain, least of all education.
Take Kendriya Vidyalayas. Demand for KVs has been going up: most
Indians want quality education that’s also affordable. But again, more central
investment is required in the scheme. For the six KV seats I was entitled to
allot under the MP’s quota in 2011, I had 459 requests from constituents;
when it went up to ten seats I could allot in 2018, I got 923 requests! The
increase from six seats to ten hasn’t come close to overcoming the
demand/supply mismatch. The only answer lies in creating 500 more KVs
across the country, as UPA wanted to do. The BJP has given no resources for
this. Nor does it plan to enhance the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, highly
sought-after residential schools for the mainly rural poor. It should ideally
create JNVs for specially disadvantaged groups, like the fishing community
in the coastal areas, but my proposal in this regard has been quietly buried.
We have a shortage of trained teachers as well as training institutes.
There are 6 lakh posts of teachers vacant under the SSA. 405 Even in the
KVs, 9,749 out of 42,640 sanctioned teaching posts are vacant; so are 50 per
cent of positions in teacher-training institutions. 406 Most teacher training
colleges, as the Justice Verma Commission report observed, are so bad they
should be closed down. 407 If we train teachers badly, they will teach
children badly. A serious initiative by MHRD is needed: urgent recruitment,
more teacher eligibility tests, remedial training. Instead we have a level of
governmental inattention to the crisis that matches our notorious culture of
teacher absenteeism.
The picture is even worse in higher education, as I have mentioned earlier
in this chapter. Central universities, IITs, NITs, IIMs, are all suffering
crippling shortages of teachers. According to the government’s own figures,
it is about 35 per cent in the IITs, but in the NITs, the shortage is now in the
glaring vicinity of 50 per cent of the authorized faculty. There are no teachers
and students are being herded into half-built campuses with half the faculty
strength to receive an education that can only be called half-baked. Frankly,
this is inadequate. We cannot run education like this.
On top of that, employers across the board are complaining about the
unemployability of Indian graduates. A FICCI survey showed that 62 per
cent of employers were dissatisfied with the quality of our engineering
graduates. Infosys and Tatas, among others, have set up their own campuses
to train the people they have already hired after an engineering degree, not for
on-the-job training, but to make up for the deficiencies of the education we
are giving them in our engineering colleges. They are getting nine months to
one year of new education because their actual college education is not good
enough. Of course, they are also paying teachers better, so that many teachers
are leaving and going to Tatas and Infosys and companies like that, rather
than staying in the NITs or the IITs.
A UGC survey of 1471 colleges and 11 universities found that 73 per
cent of the colleges and 68 per cent of the universities were of a standard that
the HRD/UGC considers to be medium or low quality. As a result, the quality
of education continues to suffer. Learning outcomes in our school system,
too, remain weak. The National Achievement Survey, PISA and other
measurements show that not even half the children in Class V can read a
Class II text. The government seems bereft of ideas to remedy this.
One of the areas the government should be able to have a direct impact
upon is infrastructure. But construction delays are affecting 177 KVs
(including Pangode in my own constituency). Only 52 per cent of schools
have a playground; only 83 per cent have a girls’ toilet. (MHRD’s own
figures show 2 lakh schools without toilets and 5.2 lakh without
playgrounds.)
Performance indicators make dismal reading. Take the scheme to set up
girls’ hostels in all Educationally Backward Blocks: 3453 were approved,
only 536 are functional. Only 69 per cent of the kitchens-cum-stores
sanctioned for the mid-day meal programme have been constructed; the
quality of food served remains a widespread concern, and not only because of
the Bihar tragedy of July 2013 in which dozens of children died. Teachers
remain reluctant to supervise the cooking or taste the food. These are all
issues the government could fix, but it will take resources, including more
honoraria to the cooks/helpers. Instead, the mid-day meal budget has been cut
by the Modi government.
IV

What is worse is that instead of improving the education system, this

government seems bent on saffronizing our universitites and institutes of
higher and secondary education by removing the heads of several of these
institutes and replacing them with others, who owe their advancement to their
allegiance to a particular ideology or to this government. 408
Worse, the BJP has tried to subvert Indian universities through its
irresponsible use of one of the most punitive weapons in its armoury—the
sedition law.
The freedom of speech and expression under Article 19 of the
Constitution is indispensable to our democracy. But sedition under Section
124A of the Indian Penal Code infringes upon this right by harassing citizens
who simply disagree with the government.
This archaic and oppressive provision is a legacy of our colonial masters,
introduced in pre-independent India. Even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had
stated that ‘the sooner we get rid of this provision, the better’. The constituent
assembly abstained from including it as an exception to Article 19.
Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, a remnant of British colonialism,
is in desperate need of revision. The ambiguities in Section 124A have led to
its misuse as a means of silencing dissent, with police arresting a variety of
victims from cartoonists to student agitators, ignoring the Supreme Court’s
stricter interpretation of sedition as requiring more than just sloganeering.
The Hon’ble Supreme Court has also ruled that acts of sedition should be
put through a test of ‘tangible evidence of actual harm’, to establish a direct
link between the ‘action’ and the ‘reaction’ before punishing individuals. In
December 2015, I introduced an amendment to Section 124A as a Private
Member’s Bill in the Lok Sabha to clarify and restrict the use of the law to
instances in which there is a direct and immediate incitement to violence, as
has been interpreted by the Indian Supreme Court as well as judiciaries
across the democratic world. This is, sadly, still pending, undiscussed.
The law was back in the news in early 2016 when hysteria was whipped
up following the arrest of student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and others from
JNU accused of shouting ‘anti-national’ slogans on campus. Two
fundamental issues were overlooked in the national uproar that followed.
First, universities are where young people find themselves—in many cases
through engagement, political passion, ideological fervour and personal
involvement—in causes larger than their own academic careers. Many—
perhaps most—students grow up in the process, and outgrow the more
extreme views they adopted out of youthful zeal. Two of my most obdurately
leftist classmates at St. Stephen’s, for instance, are now conservative pundits
who were both long associated with the BJP, though one has left them after
two terms as a BJP MP in the Upper House. They would undoubtedly be
embarrassed to be reminded of the fervour with which they espoused
positions that they would dismiss with scorn today.
Second, and perhaps more important, the Indian state is not so feeble that
a few irresponsible slogans shouted by misguided students can destroy it. But
undermining the democratic ethos of the Indian republic can destroy the
essence of the state, and of the grand national experiment our nationalist
leaders embarked upon nearly seven decades ago. By branding dissent as
‘anti-national’ and so illegitimizing it, our BJP rulers are betraying the
founding idea of the India that Mahatma Gandhi fought to free.
The events at JNU highlighted that the sedition law will need to be
amended. But the events of the past few years reveal that amendment alone
will not be enough to curtail today’s troubling tendencies. The BJP’s larger
political project to bring Indian universities to heel extends far beyond JNU.
Their apparent strategy involves a number of troubling behaviours: silencing
students who criticize the government’s policies, removing dissenting
teachers from their posts, and appointing, as I have pointed out earlier,
leadership at universities who are friendly to their political interests while
disregarding legitimate academic merit. 409
The use of the sedition law against Kanhaiya Kumar is but one example
of the BJP’s subversion of Indian universities and schools. From Dinanath
Batra’s RSS-supported curriculum in Haryana and Gujarat on ‘moral science’
(which, of course, is neither particularly ‘moral’ nor ‘scientific’ 410 ) to the
politically-driven harassment of Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad and the
sacking of Prof Sandeep Pandey for his dissenting views at Banaras Hindu
University, a deeply disturbing pattern emerges which points to an ominous
political project.
Dattatreya Hosabale, joint general secretary of the RSS, declares that ‘All
universities must be purged of all kinds of anti-national elements.’ 411 Mr
Hosabale’s regrettable use of the word ‘purge’ in reference to squashing
dissent is eerily reminiscent of Stalin’s infamous ‘Great Purge’ of the Soviet
Union and Hitler’s ‘purge’ of Jewish elements in Nazi Germany. What’s next
—the burning of books the RSS doesn’t agree with?
The university is often the first and foremost target of campaigns that
seek to derail democracy. Mao Zedong shut down universities entirely as he
launched his Cultural Revolution. The sorry history of twentieth-century
authoritarianism is pockmarked with examples of autocratic rulers
recognizing that universities threatened the legitimacy of their rule. To
control the universities is to capture the mind of the nation. In my earlier
book, An Era of Darkness (2016), I argued that colonialism was also a
colonization of the mind, from which Independence liberated Indians. But
what we see today is an Indian variant of ‘internal colonialism’, where a
patriarchal state, acting paternalistically, is trying to police thought and
abridge action.
Today’s market pressures focus our attention on the role of universities in
promoting access to economic opportunity. But we cannot forget the supreme
purpose of the university in our republic: to create well-formed minds which
can participate in a democracy whose future depends on citizens’ capacity to
scrutinize their elected officials. The purpose of the university is to help us
expand our minds in service of that democracy. In a deliberative democracy,
universities are meant to be hotbeds of argument, debate and dissent rather
than centres of conformity.
While our universities are the battlegrounds—the theatre of protests and
the target of arrests and censorship—Indian democracy is the real victim of
the government’s assault on intellectual freedom. Indian nationalism and
Indian democracy are inextricably linked. An attack on one is an attack on the
other. One can criticize the government of the day and be loyal to the nation.
To define dissent as anti-national is to betray the nationalism of a freedom
struggle that was itself built on dissent.
To make India’s democratic experiment work, we must embrace a wider
idea of our nation than the narrow conception put forth by chauvinists who
are attacking our universities. The wider and more robust notion of an India
that accommodates, rather than abandons, dissent and disagreement, can take
a few allegedly ‘anti-national’ slogans in stride. Democratic freedom includes
the freedom to be wrong.
V

There is much more I can go on about when it comes to this government’s

ham-handed and sometimes sinister actions in the field of education, but to
talk about all that is wrong would require much more space than a chapter
gives me, so let me wrap up my enquiry into education under Mr Modi with
just a couple more issues that deserve brief consideration.
The MHRD’s directive to educational institutions to observe 25
December as Good Governance Day, requiring the physical presence of
students on the Christmas holiday, was an anti-national step. 412 So was the
instruction to set up separate vegetarian canteens at the IITs. 413 (I am
vegetarian myself, but my intellectual contact with my fellow students was
never, and should not be, limited by what they eat.) We need an assurance
from the government that it will uphold the integrity of educational
attainment in India beyond religious considerations.
The supposedly autonomous University Grants Commission (UGC) has
become a poodle, being instructed to issue a directive to Delhi University to
withdraw its four-year undergraduate programme abruptly, and to disqualify
all other universities from offering such courses. (The UGC’s craven political
expediency in reversing its own previous decisions on laughable grounds was
another embarrassment.) In 2018, there was also an abortive proposal floated
to abolish the UGC altogether, replacing it with a grandly-named Higher
Education Council that would actually do less, surrendering its grant-
disbursal functions to the ministry’s own bureaucrats. 414 That was placed in
abeyance after a public outcry, but the need to rethink our regulatory
institutions for higher education remains urgent. I would personally have
welcomed the creation of a genuine Higher Education Council that subsumed
the myriad regulatory institutions in the field of higher education, and that
relinquished the UGC’s onerously intrusive bean-counting role in favour of
an emphasis on the quality of learning outcomes.
Our educational system is over-regulated and under-governed. I had
hoped the BJP government would rethink the disastrous course upon which it
had embarked, and revive the UPA proposal to abolish UGC and AICTE and
create an overarching Council of Higher Education to facilitate, rather than
restrict, educational autonomy. Excellence can only thrive amid freedom.
Sadly, the BJP government does not appear to believe either in promoting
freedom or financing excellence.
If further evidence were needed for this proposition, there was the
dismaying MHRD instruction that the ministry must be informed before any
MoUs with foreign universities are signed. This is contrary to the Acts
governing institutions like IITs, NITs, and central universities, which give
them the power to enter into academic collaborations with other educational
institutions, including foreign ones. The previous NDA government had done
the same thing; in August 2004, the UPA withdrew that requirement, saying
it was ‘unnecessary interference in the autonomy of institutions’. 415 With the
BJP back in power, autonomy once again became history.
Earlier in this chapter, I lamented the fact that only three IIMs featured
among the world’s best management schools; even worse, not a single Indian
university featured in the global rankings. One of the surveys was conducted
by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in 2014–2015. In
a presentation by its team about the weightage given to various aspects in
their rankings, they mentioned that 30 per cent weightage each is given to
research and citations (which are, of course, of published research). 416 Since
India’s universities are largely teaching institutions where little research is
done, and research is done in small institutions where there is very little
teaching, India starts off with 60 per cent of the weighting against us—an
obvious disadvantage in the global university rankings.
While these rankings remain a matter of debate, we clearly need to create,
across India, an ecosystem of research and teaching around related
disciplines. If we can bring several such institutions to life, we could also be
in a position to attract the best minds from abroad to work in our laboratories
and research think tanks and produce solutions which could answer the
foremost questions of the world.
Ironically, India has one of the largest higher education systems in the
world and ranks second in terms of student enrolment, exhibiting a healthy
growth in the number of institutions and enrolment over several decades
since Independence. India now has 864 universities and 40,026 colleges, 417
but only a few world-class institutions, including notably the globally
renowned Indian Institutes of Technology, which I have touched upon
briefly. But these are still islands in a sea of mediocrity.
But let’s look beyond the rankings. They’re a symptom of something far
more important to diagnose: what ails our higher education? There are many
maladies we could talk about, but the one we always gloss over is the basic
one of capacity. How do we create enough quality institutions to meet the
demand?
Given the size and potential of our population, foreign universities are
now showing a keen interest in creating institutions in India. But whereas
countries in the Middle East, and China, are going out of their way to woo
foreign universities to set up campuses in their countries, India’s regulatory
framework turns away the many academic suitors who have come calling in
recent years. Harvard and Yale would have both been willing to open
branches in India to offer quality education to Indian students, but have been
obliged to stay away. 418
Those Indians who choose to study abroad easily get opportunities to do
so—currently there are over 100,000 of them in the United States alone. We
made a huge fuss about Indian students getting beaten up in Australia. They
would not need to go abroad—nor their parents to spend an estimated $3
billion a year in sending them afar—if we opened up the higher educational
space in our country to institutions of international repute, and authorized the
setting up of double the number of universities as we currently have.
There is no question that the need exists, the demand is huge, and that our
growing and youthful population could easily fill several hundred new
campuses. Nor is there a shortage of able and willing institutions ready to
come into India. But many of these would not brook the interference of our
unimaginative and over-directive UGC, made worse by the political diktats of
the BJP government, which, as we have seen, has taken a hatchet to what
little autonomy our universities enjoyed.
And there’s another problem: foreign universities would offer stiff
competition to the vested interests, well-represented in our Parliament, who
have made the higher education sector their chasse gardée, a closed source of
largely illicit revenue flowing from a supposedly non-profit vocation. This is
one of the reasons we have university places available to barely 15 per cent
of those who clamour for them. Meanwhile, ordinary Indians would scrape
and save to buy their children the best possible education, but it’s simply not
available.
VI

Before I end, I’d like to touch upon a poignant and tragic consequence of the
crisis in education. In March 2018, Nikhil, a medical aspirant, ended his life
by jumping from the Chambal Bridge. In April, Rishabh, an IIT aspirant,
hung himself inside his hostel room. This was the eighth suicide in 2018. 419
In 2017, seven students had committed suicide in Kota, sixteen ended their
lives in 2016, seventeen in 2015 and forty-five in 2014. 420 More than sixty
student suicides have taken place in this coaching hub in the past five years.
421 In fact, the coaching institutions in Kota preparing students for the IIT
Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) are a symptom of a larger problem
hinted at by the city’s senior administrator, District Collector Ravi Kumar
Surpur, in an emotional letter he wrote in response to some of the deaths in
2016. Addressing parents directly, Surpur pleaded with them not to subject
their children to excessive stress in an attempt to live vicariously through
them. 422 (A memorable cartoon I posted on social media summarizes the
problem brilliantly: a grey elephant telling a baby elephant, ‘I expect you to
do all that I could never do. I was never able to learn to fly. You must make
me proud, my son.’ This is precisely the kind of unreasonable pressure most
Indian parents place upon their children.)
Indian parents are known for demanding academic excellence from their
children. They know that a professional degree in the right field is a passport
to social and economic advancement, so they push hard to ensure that their
children get one—something that India’s higher-education system does not
make easy. Given this deeply entrenched culture of academic ambition, the
planned administrative enquiry into conditions at the Kota coaching institutes
is unlikely to result in remedial action.
The toll this culture takes on young people is obvious. Students are
forced to pass brutally difficult examinations—only about 10,000 of the
500,000 who take the IIT-JEE each year score high enough to be admitted—
in subjects they often detest. And Indian students are far more likely to push
themselves until they crack than to drop out.
Engineering and medicine remain the subjects of choice for middle-class
Indian parents. As I have mentioned earlier, the country graduates far more
engineers than actually find jobs commensurate with their qualifications. But,
in a throwback to the mid-twentieth century, Indian parents view engineering
as the gateway to modernity, and continue pressing their children to study it.
Students who do not make it to an IIT end up in institutions of varying
quality, many of which do not equip their graduates for today’s labour
market.
But at least there are enough engineering colleges in India to meet
demand. Medicine, by contrast, is a frustratingly crowded field—and for no
good reason.
India’s medical profession is controlled by the Medical Council of India,
an opaque and self-serving cabal that has intentionally limited the supply of
available medical college seats. Medical colleges must be recognized by the
MCI, which has seen fit to permit only 497 to exist. 423 That leaves only
60,530 slots each year in a country of over 1.3 billion people—enough space
for fewer than 1 per cent of Indian students aspiring to attend medical school.
As if that were not bad enough, some of the seats are awarded against
‘donations,’ with the wealthy essentially purchasing positions that their
marks do not merit. Meanwhile, high-achieving students who just barely
missed the cut-off have to find alternatives—or pursue another field
altogether.
Those whose families can afford it often end up studying medicine
abroad. Many do not return to India, depriving the country of their much-
needed expertise. Some return after having attended obscure colleges in
countries like Georgia or China, only to have the MCI refuse to recognize
their degrees and block them from practising.
Yet India desperately needs doctors. According to the World Health
Organization, the country has just 0.7 doctors per 1,000 people. 424 In the
United States and the United Kingdom—two countries to which Indian
doctors often emigrate—the rate is 2.5 per 1,000 and 2.8 per 1,000,
respectively. 425 The crippling lack of capacity means that lives are lost every
day—particularly in rural areas—for want of medical attention.
India could be graduating four or five times as many capable doctors as it
does each year. Yet the MCI has been allowed to pursue its restrictive
approach, depriving poor Indians of adequate healthcare, while augmenting
the already huge pressure on students to gain a seat in a medical college.
It is in this context—with a huge population competing for a tiny number
of seats in professional colleges—that coaching institutes like those in Kota
thrive. When succeeding in tough entrance examinations is the only way to
fulfil one’s educational goals, test preparation becomes the be-all and end-all
of schooling. Eager to satisfy pushy parents, young people sacrifice their own
interests at the altar of a false god. The dozens of pyres lit in Kota over the
last few years are a tragic testament to how damaging this conception of
academic excellence can be.
The Modi government and those that follow should recognize that over
the next twenty years, India faces the challenge and opportunity of growing at
a rate of 8 per cent and more, with a youthful, productive working-age
population that vastly outnumbers those available in the rest of our ageing
world. A well-educated, highly skilled workforce will be an essential
prerequisite for driving this momentum. We know that the price of failure is
too high: the Naxalite movement shows what might become of frustrated,
undereducated and unemployed young men. We have to get it right; India’s
future depends on it. But that means taking far-seeing and courageous
decisions. Is that too much to expect from our system?
390 Zoya Hasan, ‘No acche din for higher education’, The Hindu , 20 May 2015.
391 ‘Modi-Smriti chemistry dangerous: Cong’, Daily Pioneer , 25 May 2015.
392 Tarun Cherukuri and Shijoy Varughese, ‘Budget 2018: India needs to focus on
inclusive education for development’, Business Standard , 31 January 2018.
393 Subodh Verma, ‘Share of spend in government expenditure, GDP on education falling
for 3 years’, Times of India , 6 February 2017.
394 ‘Global MBA rankings 2017’, ft.com .
395 Kritika Sharma, ‘Many IITs, IIMs, CUs without full-time heads’, DNA , 1 October
2017.
396 ‘Budget 2014: Finance Minister proposes 5 new IITs, IIMs and 4 AIIMS’, Indian
Express , 10 July 2014.
397 ‘Education is beyond politics, says Javadekar’, Indian Express , 22 July 2016.
398 ‘Trends in school enrolment and dropout levels’, LiveMint , 2 October 2017.
399 Oommen C. Kurien, ‘Still too many children out of school’, Hindu BusinessLine , 28
October 2015.
400 Shashi Tharoor, ‘Marginalised from school’, The Hindu , 20 April 2018.
401 Ibid.
402 Ibid.
403 State of the Nation: RTE Section 12(1)(c)—2015 (Provisional) Report by RTE
Resource Centre at IIM Ahmedabad, Central Square Foundation, Accountability Initiative
(Centre for Policy Research) and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
404 Prashant K Nanda, ‘Model schools: centre opts out, onus on states’, LiveMint , 4 March
2015.
405 Mihika Basu, ‘SSA: 63.44% teachers’ posts vacant in state’, Indian Express , 14 March
2014.
406 ‘More Than 3 Lakh Teachers’ Posts Vacant In KVS Schools, Reveals RTI Reply’,
NDTV , 17 May 2017.
407 The Justice Verma Commission (JVC) was constituted by an order of the Supreme
Court and, in 2014, submitted its almost 500-page report which analyses and gives
recommendations on teacher training colleges.
408 Praful Bidwai, ‘How the Sangh Parivar is taking over education and culture
institutions’, Scroll.in , 25 December 2014.
409 Ibid.
410 ‘Dinanath Batra’s moral science and verse will enter Haryana textbooks’, Indian
Express , 28 September 2015.
411 Mohammed Ali, ‘Universities must be purged of anti-national elements: RSS’, The
Hindu , 14 February 2016.
412 Abishek Choudhari, ‘Govt wants schools to observe “good governance day” on
Christmas’, Times of India , 15 December 2014.
413 ‘HRD ministry suggests IITs get separate canteen for vegetarian students’, Business
Standard , 31 October 2014.
414 Neelam Pandey, ‘HRD ministry to scrap UGC, replace it with new Higher Education
Commission to improve academic standards’ Hindustan Times, 28 June 2018.
415 Ruhi Tewari, ‘HRD to institutes: Follow MEA, inform us on foreign MoUs’, Indian
Express , 20 January 2015.
416 World University Rankings 2014-15 methodology, www.timeshighereducation.com
417 All India Survey on Higher Education (2016-2017), Ministry of Human Resource
Development, www.aishe.nic.in
418 Prashant K. Nanda, ‘Government puts on hold plan to let in foreign universities’,
LiveMint , 15 August 2017.
419 ‘17-year-old IIT aspirant commits suicide in Kota’, Hindustan Times , 19 April 2018.
420 Snigdha Poonam, ‘Why 57 Young Students Have Taken Their Lives In Kota’,
Huffington Post , 1 June 2016.
421 Ibid.
422 ‘After reading many suicide notes, Kota District Collector writes a moving letter to the
parents of IIT aspirants’, India Today , 4 May 2016.
423 www.mciindia.org/CMS/information-desk/for-students-to-study-in-india/list-of-
college-teaching-mbbs
424 ‘Density per 1000, Data by country’, WHO.int , updated on 21 August 2018.
425 Ibid.
 chapter twenty-six

MESSING UP SWACHH BHARAT

The PM picks up a broom, it is news; the country pays attention. By

launching his Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign on the occasion of
Gandhi Jayanti in 2014, the prime minister grabbed the nation’s attention.
But he simply hasn’t done enough with it—and the attention is, inevitably,
fading.
Nearly a year later, at the end of his lunch for the visiting Sri Lankan
prime minister, Mr Modi asked me, ‘Swachh Bharat kaisa chal raha hai?’
(How is the Clean India mission progressing?) I replied that though it had
raised awareness, action on the ground was lacking and he would need to
provide much more central funding. ‘Karoonga,’ he responded. ‘Karoonga’
(will do).
Unfortunately, as with the vast majority of Prime Minister Modi’s
initiatives, this too has failed to happen, and Swachh Bharat just hasn’t taken
off. This is a real pity as a clean India would benefit all of us, and I had been
pleased, at some political cost to myself, to support the prime minister’s
initiative when he asked me to be one of its original nine patrons or goodwill
ambassadors. At the same time, as I also said in accepting his invitation, I am
not a fan of tokenism, and I was worried the campaign would descend to
symbolic photo opportunities for grandees who would pick up a broom for
the cameras on Gandhi Jayanti, and never touch a broom again till the
cameras came back the next October 2nd. Clean India is a great campaign
idea, the kind of agenda-setting our prime minister excels at, but the real
challenge, as I said then, will be to sustain it beyond a week of photo ops.
The photo ops and speeches have continued, and yet India is no cleaner than
it was when Mr Modi first announced his scheme.
This is not the first time there has been a central government effort to
clean up India. What Swachh Bharat is trying to do, in its half-hearted way, is
give a fillip to a national effort by successive governments to make our
country a cleaner place. Congress gave the nation a Rural Sanitation
Programme, which in 1999 was changed by the first NDA government to a
Total Sanitation Campaign, with equally modest results. The UPA
government in 2012 subsumed that into a Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, with the
objective of making the nation Open Defecation Free by 2022. 426 Mr Modi,
who acknowledged the work of previous governments, advanced the UPA’s
deadline by three years. But there is no guarantee that it will succeed any
more than its predecessor programmes. The fundamental problem is not just
that funding has been limited; Mr Modi has actually spent less on sanitation
than UPA, but five times more on publicity. The problem lies in our people’s
ingrained behaviour patterns—and mindsets are the hardest things to change.
The government announced that it would spend about ₹2 lakh crore on
building more than 111 million toilets, and invited contributions to a new
‘Swachh Bharat Kosh’ (Clean India Fund) to attract contributions from
corporates and well-heeled individuals. (The government has given no
indication of the total sums in this Kosh and according to its very modest
website, it has made just six disbursements each in 2015 and 2016, and two
each in 2017 and 2018.) 427 The UPA named swachhata preraks or sanitation
coordinators who would work in the rural districts. The Clean India effort
should have make swachhata preraks of us all. Instead, it seems to revolve
around Mr Modi. The PM’s personal involvement, his websites and Twitter
feeds, his walkathon and the reach-out to nine Indians (who were each
supposed to reach out to nine more, and so on) were intended to enhance
national awareness of the campaign. That it has done. It reminded me of the
mass movement that brought Kerala to full literacy, as volunteers fanned out
to remote hamlets, leper colonies and tribal hutments to reach the unreached.
That’s the kind of sustained effort that was needed to make India clean.
Sadly, however, that has not taken place.
Moreover, our government has discovered that even when toilets are
built, people continue to defecate in the open, some because the toilets do not
have water, or have rapidly become too filthy to use, but most out of sheer
habit. An estimated 53 per cent of Indians still do so: one survey across
several north Indian states learned that 47 per cent found open defecation
‘pleasurable, comfortable or convenient’. 428 Litter is everywhere because we
are used to discarding things in public places—roads, pavements, beaches—
and because there are few public garbage bins anywhere. An attempt to
install wastebaskets at every street corner in Delhi and Mumbai found they
were being stolen; when they were replaced by iron or concrete bins that
could not be removed, those became tempting targets for terrorists to drop
lethal explosives into, or so the security-wallahs claimed. Thus ended our
very brief attempt at abolishing littering. As one who habitually carries
everything from used chewing gum to discarded wrappings in his pocket till I
can throw them into a bin, I can testify from personal experience how
difficult it is to find a public dustbin on the streets of India.
We also have a cultural problem: we are a nation full of people who live
in immaculate homes where we bathe twice a day, but think nothing of
littering public spaces, spitting on walls, dumping garbage in the open and
urinating and defecating in public, because those spaces are not ‘ours’. It is
this individualistic mindset and lack of civic consciousness that makes our
country a land of private cleanliness and public squalor. Educating Indians
about public hygiene must start in schools and be drummed into the minds of
adults through information campaigns, exhortations and warnings—as well as
fines and punishments for wilful disobedience. If we can fine people for
exceeding the speed limit or not wearing a helmet—on the grounds that such
behaviour is a menace to others and a cost to society—we should fine litterers
and despoilers of public spaces on the same grounds.
I am growing increasingly discouraged that any real progress will be
made. It is not just that the government needs money to actually build the
toilets, instal the dustbins, and improve the drainage facilities it is supposed
to establish. It also needs money to ensure that there is water in the toilets it
builds, so the toilets are worth using. As I have noted, studies suggest that
most of the toilets built since Mr Modi announced his scheme are unused or
unusable because they have no water to clean them.
If you clean up a street, or a park, or a beach (as I did), you need to create
viable alternative places for dumping the garbage and waste that people have
got used to dumping on the street, park or beach. If you don’t create those
alternatives, people will dump their garbage once again in the place you’ve
just cleaned up. Those alternative places should incorporate comprehensive
waste management systems, from collection to processing, perhaps
conversion to biogas or other products. A clean-up, in other words, can’t be
an end in itself, but a mere first step in a comprehensive effort to improve
public sanitation. This simply hasn’t happened under the Swachh Bharat
Abhiyan.
 After fulfilling my own cleaning drive in October 2014, I wrote to the
prime minister about why his government needed to do more to fulfil the
objectives of Swachh Bharat. I took the example of the Parvathy Puthenaar
Canal in Thiruvananthapuram, a once-beautifully-flowing water body where
boats plied, people swam and even drank the water from, till the 1930s or
40s. Now, however, the canal is choked with garbage, sewage and weeds; the
idea of stepping into it, let alone swimming in it, is unthinkable. I pointed out
that the canal could be cleaned, at considerable cost. But if it was not to
become a sewage dump again, steps would have to be taken to construct
effective sewage systems for the people living on both sides of the canal, so
their effluents didn’t flow into it; waste disposal systems would have to be
created so they didn’t have to throw their garbage into the canal. Otherwise
the crores spent cleaning it would prove a total waste.
But this would require a mammoth effort, which an MP or even a local
government would never be able to afford. It would need central funding, the
kind of thing that perhaps a Swachh Bharat Kosh—or even a larger NDA
sanitation budget—could have financed. It was a classic example of the kind
of substance that needed to lie beyond the slogans of Swachh Bharat.
Mr Modi’s response? The PM still hasn’t even acknowledged my letter,
let alone replied to it. The detailed project proposal prepared by the district
collector is presumably gathering dust somewhere in the Prime Minister’s
Office. Meanwhile, the canal remains choked up and filthy. And the Swachh
Bharat photo ops go on.
I don’t mean to imply that money is everything. There’s also citizen
involvement. When I cleaned up a section of Vizhinjam beach in my
constituency, I involved the local community as volunteers, because as the
local residents, they were the obvious stakeholders in the exercise, with most
at stake in the cleanliness of their immediate environment. Since it was a
largely Muslim community, I involved the mosque and the leadership of the
local Jama’ath (as well my local Congress party workers). With their
blessings, it became something everyone in the area could participate in and
could share the benefits of—the opposite of a few leaders sweeping a street
and disappearing.
My fear is that Swachh Bharat will again be reduced to one of those
empty rituals, a label without content, a slogan devoid of substance. If that
happens, it will be far worse than if Mr Modi had never devised Swachh
Bharat in the first place. Nothing corrodes a nation’s spirit more than empty
cynicism—but raising hopes without taking the basic steps to fulfilling them
produces the most cynicism of all.

426 ‘Making India an open defecation free country’, Press Information Bureau,
Government of India , 18 February 2014.
427 http://sbkosh.gov.in/swb_sanction.html
428 ‘53 per cent of Indian households defecate in open: World Bank’, NDTV , 19
November 2013.
 chapter twenty-seven

OUR FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO PRIVACY

India has little oil, no coltan or rare earths, and inadequate water. What it
does have, of course, is people—over 1.3 billion of them and counting.
Which means it is potentially rich in something that, in the twenty-first
century, has been described as the ‘new oil’ of our times: data.
India is generating valuable data at a dramatic pace. The country has led
an ambitious effort to issue every one of its residents a Unique Identification
Number, or Aadhaar, linked to your biometrics. Aadhaar was initiated in
2009 as a project to link a biometric-based unique identity with eligible
beneficiaries of various government schemes. It was envisaged, by the
previous Congress party-led government, as a method to eliminate the
number of ‘ghost beneficiaries’ of government subsidies and to reduce the
pilferage of state funds.
Ironically, the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who
vociferously opposed the project and pledged to scrap it if elected, has now,
as prime minister, become the greatest proponent of the scheme. Worse, he
has enlarged it to an extent never imagined by his predecessors, ordering
Aadhaar to be linked to virtually everything under the Indian sun—from birth
to death (hospital admissions and crematorium certificates), and from mobile
connections to bank accounts to school admissions to travel, all of which now
require an Aadhaar number, despite the government having assured the
Supreme Court that the use of Aadhaar would not be made mandatory.
This has raised serious concerns that the entire scheme is
unconstitutional. The very statutory foundation of the project is flawed, as the
government avoided the oversight of the Rajya Sabha by pushing through the
Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and
Services) Act, 2016, as a ‘money bill’. 429 It did so even though, in the
opinion of most analysis, the Act failed to meet the requirements for a money
bill under Article 110 of the Constitution.
The fact is that the Act states that every resident of India shall be entitled
to obtain an Aadhaar number. Its language also indicates that obtaining an
Aadhaar number is voluntary in nature. Even the Supreme Court, while
hearing the batch of petitions challenging Act, had noted that the Aadhaar
card scheme is ‘purely voluntary’ and it cannot be made ‘mandatory’. 430
However, the government appears to have blithely disregarded that order as it
continues to try to link Aadhaar with virtually everything.
The Act limited the purpose of authentication to establish the identity of
an individual in relation to the receipt of a subsidy, benefit or service incurred
from the Consolidated Fund of India. It begs the question as to how services
provided by private banks and telephone operators fall within these
categories. Why should we link our bank accounts and mobiles to Aadhaar,
then, in order to be able to use them? Yet phone companies and banks insist
we must.
The linking of Aadhaar with various services also raises the question:
what compelling interest does the State have to know whether an individual
has travelled by flight or by a train, whether an individual has opened a bank
account or whether she has a mobile connection?
By linking biometric data and other sensitive information of an individual
to a central database without providing adequate security to such a database
(judging by the data leaks reported in the media), one can argue that such
actions in effect violate the fundamental right to privacy. The right to privacy
can of course be limited by a compelling state interest. However, where the
state has a compelling interest, it must choose the least restrictive method to
achieve such goals.
But such fundamental concerns clearly do not matter much to this
government. It likes collecting data: biometric devices are being used to
identify the office attendance of government employees and the absenteeism
from school of students and teachers. 431 In the wake of Mr Modi’s
disastrous demonetization scheme, which I will explore in Section IV of this
book, he has urged Indians to make digital payments instead of cash, even for
small transactions. As prime minister he has led an enthusiastic drive for
digital governance, hailing its efficiency and extolling its capacity to
transform the country. He has unabashedly declared that data is ‘real wealth’
which would enable ‘whoever acquires and controls’ it to attain ‘hegemony’.
432
 But if Narendra Modi’s India is a country where Big Government meets
Big Data, it hasn’t handled the intersection very well. There have been
numerous incidents reported in the media where machines meant to
authenticate Aadhaar number holders have failed to do so, due to lack of
internet connectivity, electricity or other adequate facilities in rural parts of
the country. This has denied many poor people their Public Distribution
System (ration) supplies, in violation of their rights. A scheme meant to help
the poor is depriving people of their entitlements.
To make matters worse, Aadhaar leaks like a sieve. An intrepid
investigative journalist of The Tribune newspaper was able to purchase 5
million ID numbers for a mere 500 rupees. 433 A government oil and gas
company site made it possible for anyone with basic technical skills to
uncover the names, bank details and Aadhaar numbers of over 500 million
Indians. 434 Nearly 13.5 crore Aadhaar numbers were accidentally exposed
on government portals run by the national Ministry of Rural Development
and the Andhra Pradesh government. 435 The Modi government reacts to
each revelation with a combination of denial, complacency and cover-up. But
cumulatively, Aadhaar is more compromised than Facebook, which allowed
Cambridge Analytica unauthorized access to 87 million users’ data.
The inability to protect data starts with the PM himself. In 2015, Mr
Modi invited his followers ‘to receive messages and emails directly from the
prime minister’ by downloading the ‘Narendra Modi mobile app’ onto their
phones. ‘No intermediaries, no media, no officials, no red tape,’ he promised.
436 The Android version of the Modi app was downloaded over five million
times.
But there was a catch that didn’t appear in the fine print: the details the
prime minister’s followers trustingly uploaded when they signed up for his
app were shared, without their consent, with a US firm. According to the
Indian Express , these details were hardly insignificant: the Modi app sought
permission from its users to access their cameras and photographs, contacts,
locations and microphones. A lot of data changed hands that’s now in the
hands of Americans; who knows what they might use it for? 437 The app’s
privacy policy has since been changed. 438
The problem’s only going to get worse. At our current pace, it is
estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated every day and 90 per
cent of the world’s data was generated in just two years. In India, the
percentage may even be somewhat higher. As Indians get online in record
numbers, the increasing ubiquity of 4G services and the nose-diving prices of
the cheapest Internet-enabled smartphones means that millions are offering
up their personal information to obtain apps, play games, make purchases and
obtain online services.
India will clearly be the land of Big Data. Right now, it also looks like
the land of the Big Leak. The country lacks strong data privacy and
protection laws; my own attempt to introduce one in a Private Member’s Bill
has been repeatedly thwarted by disruptions that have stalled Parliament.
II

So why do I believe data protection is of paramount importance? For that,

let’s start with a statement made by the then Attorney General of India,
Mukul Rohatgi, to the Supreme Court. On 22 July 2015, he argued that the
right to privacy is not guaranteed as a fundamental right under the
Constitution of India. While the Supreme Court formed a constitutional
bench to determine the nature of the right to privacy in India, I had submitted
the Data Privacy and Protection Bill, 2017, a Private Member’s Bill which I
had drafted, on 4 July 2017, to the Lok Sabha for introduction and
consideration.
My Bill envisages a comprehensive framework to protect the right to
privacy of all, in furtherance of the recommendations of the Justice A. P.
Shah Committee and international best practices. Nearly two months after the
Bill was submitted, the nine judge bench of the Supreme Court in its
landmark judgment in Justice K. S. Puttuswamy v Union of India ,
unanimously and unambiguously held that the right to privacy is a
fundamental right guaranteed under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the
Constitution. While that should simplify matters for all of us—since privacy
is now recognized as a constitutional right—there is an urgent need to enact a
comprehensive data protection law to implement it. The Justice Srikrishna
Committee is looking into the matter and its final report has just been
released as this book goes to press. Meanwhile, it is important for policy
makers to be clear on certain essential principles on privacy, which I have
incorporated in my Bill.
The law must be clear on what it seeks to protect, which in this context is
the personal data of each Indian citizen. Personal data is the type of data
which, if linked to other information, can be used to identify the concerned
individual. Within the sphere of personal data, the law must recognize and
distinguish sensitive personal data, which encompasses information relating
to a person’s sexual preferences, political and religious views, ethnicity, race,
financial information, DNA, biometric data and so on. The level of protection
for sensitive personal data should be more stringent than in the case of other
personal data.
Consent is the cornerstone of any comprehensive framework on data
protection and it must be obtained by the data-controller or processor before
collecting, processing, using and disseminating personal data. The underlying
principle for a consent-based mechanism is that personal data is owned by the
subject—the person who generates the data. It is important to understand that
privacy, which arises out of the right to life and liberty, is not a creation of
the Constitution; instead ‘these rights are recognized by the Constitution as
inhering in each individual as an intrinsic and inseparable part of the human
element which dwells within’, as the Supreme Court has succinctly
explained. 439 So every one of us whose personal data is collected has the
right to be informed of the particular purpose in collecting the data, the
duration for which the data will be stored, the manner in which it has to be
obtained and how our consent can be withdrawn.
Once the consent to use the personal data is withdrawn, the data collector
should destroy any record of the data collected. There should be a general bar
on disclosing data except to the person to whom it pertains. The consent of
the subject should be required to transfer any personal data. The subject
should also have the right to access her own data at all times so that she may
check and update it as necessary. The law must prescribe fines or even
imprisonment for the handling or collection of data in contravention to the
standards prescribed under the data protection framework.
Consent should be meaningful. We must ensure that the subject can make
an informed choice and still retain control over the data collected, unlike the
prevailing scenario in which websites merely intimate the user that they use
cookies, or where they interpret the scrolling of a website or the clicking of a
banner as an act of giving consent. At the same time, the law must be flexible
to allow for exceptional circumstances due to which data may be collected
without prior consent, such as the prevention of commission of a cognizable
offence or a reasonable threat to the security of the State. It is essential that
the exceptions to the consent-driven regime are strictly and narrowly defined,
without leaving any elbow room for the crushing of dissent under the guise of
‘national security’.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has grudgingly accepted that maybe
his company’s activities should be regulated. 440 To ensure the effective
implementation of a data protection regime, the law must create an
independent regulatory body—let’s call it a Privacy Commission. The
Privacy Commission should be empowered to investigate complaints of any
breach of the data protection framework I have described above. The
Commission should be enabled to issue orders to those collecting data (like
Facebook) on activities that may be in contravention of the law, as well as to
take necessary steps to implement the law. All forms of interception and
surveillance should only be permitted if authorized by the Privacy
Commission, and they should be carried out strictly to the extent necessary
for the purpose of the surveillance or interception.
Industries dependent on data for their businesses may fear that a
regulatory body may end up as an overburdening behemoth, and therefore
may be in favour of a law which prescribes general principles of privacy for
self-regulation by companies. But we must not give in to their fears. We can
define the scope of powers of the regulatory body to reduce the risk of misuse
of its powers.
Since earlier laws (such as the Information Technology Act, 2000, and
the Aadhaar Act, 2016, as well as older laws) impact an individual’s right to
privacy, any proposed Bill on data protection must specifically require that all
existing laws relating to this subject should comply with the provisions of the
Bill.
The admirable Justice Chandrachud, while delivering his judgment on the
right to privacy, noted that a constitutional democracy can survive only when
citizens are provided an ‘undiluted assurance’ that the rule of law will protect
their rights and freedoms against any intrusions, and judicial remedies are
provided for the redressal of any unwarranted intrusion or violation of a right.
441 That’s what a data protection law should do.
The citizens of India deserve a strong and comprehensive statutory
framework to supplement the fundamental right to privacy as part of the
‘undiluted assurance’ of the State to uphold the rule of law. The way things
are going, my Bill may never see the light of discussion in Parliament, but the
government can surely prepare a law that does everything I have suggested. I
have offered them my draft in the hope that they will incorporate its
provisions into the Bill they say they will present to the country before the
end of the year.
The ball is squarely in the government’s hands. Let us hope that, unlike
the Australian cricket team, they do not scuff it so badly that it reverses the
direction the law should take.

429 Shruthi Radhakrishnan, ‘Is the Aadhaar Bill a money bill?’, The Hindu , 10 May 2016.
430 ‘Govt cannot “belittle” SC order holding Aadhaar voluntary’, Times of India , 5 May
2017.
431 Amit Gupta, ‘Biometric watch before pay’, Telegraph India , 8 June 2015.
432 ‘Data is real wealth: PM Modi in Davos’, Business Standard , 23 January 2018.
433 Rachna Khaira, ‘₹500, 10 minutes, and you have access to billion Aadhaar details’, The
Tribune , 4 January 2018.
434 Alison Saldanah, ‘Aadhaar security lapse could allow major chunk of information to be
stolen, says data security expert’, FirstPost , 30 March 2018.
435 Mayur Shetty, ‘13.5 crore Aadhar accounts compromised’, Times of India , 3 May
2017.
436 ‘Narendra Modi App: Here’s why you should always have it on your phone’,
Narendramodi.in , 1 November 2016.
437 ‘Narendra Modi Android app sharing personal info of users without consent:
Researcher’, Indian Express , 26 March 2018.
438 Krishn Kaushik, ‘Narendra Modi App asks for sweeping access: Camera, audio among
22 inputs’, Indian Express , 26 March 2018.
439 V. Shivshankar, ‘Privacy an essential aspect of human dignity, says Supreme Court in
historic ruling’, The Wire , 24 August 2017.
440 Josh Horwitz, ‘Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook should (maybe) be regulated’, Quartz ,
22 March 2018.
441 Anurag Bhaskar, ‘Key highlights of Justice Chandrachud’s judgment in the Right to
Privacy case’, The Wire , 27 August 2017.
 chapter twenty-eight

NORTH VS SOUTH

One of the big achievements that Mr Modi and Amit Shah and the rest of the
BJP leadership never fail to shout about is the fact that the BJP won an
unassailable majority at the centre and now controls the vast majority of
states. It is strong at the centre and strong in the states, something that would
help it, you’d imagine, work out a clear-headed, sensible way of dealing with
centre-state relations, as well as sensitively balancing the needs of the various
states within the Indian union. Prime Minister Modi has spoken of propping
up ‘co-operative federalism’. But being the BJP, they have been making a
hash of things here as well: there has neither been much co-operation nor any
tangible federalism.
It is not often that a seemingly technical issue points towards a potentially
grave challenge for the survival of our nation itself, but that is exactly what
happened in early 2018 when a letter sent to ten chief ministers and the prime
minister by DMK leader M. K. Stalin, questioning the ‘ill-conceived’ terms
of reference of the Fifteenth Finance Commission, revealed how a
thoughtless decision by the Modi government had opened a Pandora’s box
with incalculable consequences for the country. 442
The Finance Commission is one of the less well-known institutions of our
governing system. It is appointed every five years to review and decide how
the country’s revenue from taxation will be apportioned between the states.
The Finance Commission uses various criteria to determine this, including
each state’s percentage of the national population. But for more than four
decades, it has based itself on population figures from the 1971 census.
That may seem odd, since we have had four censuses since 1971 and new
numbers have been available to successive Finance Commissions. But the
reason for this is very simple, and it was made explicit in relation to a far
more vital issue—that of political representation in our Parliament. In 1976,
the omnibus 42nd Amendment to the Constitution decided to freeze the
allocation of Lok Sabha seats to our states for twenty-five years to encourage
population control, by assuring states that success in limiting population
would not lose them Lok Sabha seats. In 2001, the NDA government of
Prime Minister Vajpayee extended this arrangement for another twenty-five
years; its proposal, which became the 91st Amendment, was unanimously
adopted by all parties in both Houses of Parliament. 443
The reasoning behind this policy was clear: it was based on the sound
principle that the reward for responsible stewardship of demography and
human development by a state should not be the cause of its political
disenfranchisement. While there is some logic to the argument that a
democracy must value all its citizens equally—whether they live in a
progressive state or one that, by failing to empower its women and reducing
total fertility, has allowed its population to shoot through the roof—no
federal democracy can survive the perception that states would lose political
clout if they develop well, while others would gain more seats in Parliament
as a reward for failure.
This is the carefully balanced arrangement that the Modi government has
so carelessly undone. The rather abstruse Terms of Reference of the Fifteenth
Finance Commission (which was constituted on 27 November 2017 and will
submit its report on 31 October 2019) has deepened existing fault lines. In
March 2018 it was reported that the Modi government had instructed the
Finance Commission to use the 2011 census figures instead of the 1971
figures 444 , which had the southern states up in arms as they felt that states
that had failed to improve their governance, empower women and curb
population had been unfairly rewarded. An even bigger danger, as I have
pointed out, looms if the same logic prevails when the current arrangements
freezing political representation at 1971 population levels expires in 2026. If
at that time, new population figures are used, the South would face political
disenfranchisement to go along with its sense of financial victimization. This
would have serious implications for national unity.
It was Mr Modi’s instruction to the Finance Commission to use the 2011
census figures now that caused Mr Stalin to erupt. He was not alone. Then
Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah, in tweets and a Facebook post, also articulated
a strong case; and Pawan Kalyan, the former film star who has founded a
political party in Andhra Pradesh, did so as well. ‘Is the success of south
Indian states going to be used against them by Union of India?’ he tweeted,
expressing ‘genuine concern that population based formula for sharing tax
revenues between states & Centre would hurt south Indian states.’ 445
Former CM Siddaramaiah’s post went much further, raising a whole host
of issues relating to Indian federalism, from Karnataka’s ancient history and
its right to its own flag, to the importance of honouring the Kannada language
and the unfairness of the current tax distribution system: ‘Historically, the
South has been subsidizing the north… For example, for every one rupee of
tax contributed by Uttar Pradesh, that state receives 1.79. For every one rupee
of tax contributed by Karnataka, the state receives 0.47. While I recognize the
need for correcting regional imbalances, where is the reward for
development?’ He added his concern that population is an important criterion
for the apportionment of central taxes. ‘For how long’, he asks, ‘can we keep
incentivizing population growth?’ 446
These are important questions that the rest of India can ill afford to
ignore. The states of the Hindi-speaking heartland—once called the
BIMARU states—have comprehensively failed to improve their development
indicators, notably relating to female literacy and women’s empowerment. As
a result, their population growth has outstripped that of the southern states.
And thanks to the Finance Commission’s new formula, that makes them
eligible for a larger share of tax revenues.
While the furore raised by the Finance Commission has died down due to
some skilful bureaucratic compromises, the country should pay attention to
the greater dangers. While northern states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh had a decadal population growth rate
over 20 per cent between 2001 and 2011, southern states like undivided
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Kerala, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu grew at
less than 16 per cent in the 2001–11 period. My own state of Kerala has the
country’s lowest growth rate (4.9 per cent in 2001–11, and dropping, it is
estimated, to negative growth by 2021). 447 That is one-fifth of Bihar’s
growth rate. Why should Kerala be punished for its impressive performance
by losing seats in Parliament and thereby being forced to dilute its voice in
national affairs?
The answer, of course, is that those are the rules of democracy: one-
person-one-vote means the more people you have, the more political clout,
and tax rupees, you get. But in a country like India, whose diversity is held
together by a sense of common belonging but constantly under strain from
regional, religious and linguistic tensions, such an answer risks rupturing the
fragile bonds that hold us all together.
As it is, the politics of Mr Modi’s BJP is very different from the
conciliatory coalition-building of the Vajpayee era. Their blatant majoritarian
triumphalism, the brazenness of the Hindi supremacism that infuses their
discourse, and the culture of Aryavrat domination that infects their attitudes,
have already raised disquiet among many southern politicians.
The only remedy is to acknowledge that we need a more decentralized
democracy, one in which the central share of tax resources is not so crucial
and the political authority of New Delhi not so overwhelming. That could
make the concerns raised by the new census figures less relevant.
But as long as our system is what it is, we need to run it sensitively. That
is something that, on this occasion again, the Modi government has failed to
do.
Already some hotheads are calling for serious consideration of secession,
and some in the environs of Chennai have begun reviving the case for a
‘Dravida Nadu’. 448 Such an idea may have little appeal beyond a few limited
circles in Tamil Nadu, but that does not mean the underlying concerns behind
it should be ignored. How can we flesh out what a decentralized democracy
would mean? Former Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah argued that
India is evolving from a ‘union of states’ into a ‘federation of states’. 449 This
may, to some degree, be wishful thinking for now, in an era in which a glib
phrase like ‘co-operative federalism’ masks a reality of over-centralization;
but there is no reason for us not to consider how to take India in that
direction, even though we are not there yet. In our ‘quasi-federal’ system,
there is no doubt that the union currently enjoys the upper hand: after all, in
India the union created the states, rather than the states coming together to
create the union, and new states have been created in recent years by Acts of
Parliament. But that does not mean that the dominance of the union need
extend to the point where the states have little or no autonomy and feel
themselves the playthings of New Delhi. It is that perception that has stirred
the current unrest and made the seemingly technical correction of the Finance
Commission’s TORs such a major political issue.
But what would a more federal India look like? The first fear to set at rest
is that a more substantive federalism would loosen the bonds that tie all
Indians together in a shared nationality. When Karnataka approved its own
official state flag, alarms went off, and the cry arose that such a flag would
constitute a de facto challenge to the Indian flag. 450 But many other federal
nations have state flags and state symbols without their national governments
feeling in the least threatened. Indeed, recognizing strong regional identities
is a mark of a strong and confident state. It is only the weak who are reluctant
to empower their subordinates.
India has also been distinguished by its capacity to promote and celebrate
multiple identities. The great Malayali poet Vallathol wrote: ‘ Bharataam
ennu kettaal, abhimaana pooritham aavanum antharangam; Keralam ennu
kettalo, thilakan choara namukke njerambaglil.’ (‘If one hears the name of
India, one’s heart must swell with pride; if one hears the name of Kerala, the
blood must throb in one’s veins.’) Similarly the Kannada poet Kuvempu
composed ‘Jaya Bharatha Jananiya Tanujathe’, hailing Karnataka as the
daughter of Bharata, the Indian nation.
So the southern states are not really interested in secession; they want a
more genuine federalism. Siddaramaiah has argued the case for a system
where states receive a larger portion of the taxes collected from them; this
would permit the relatively well-developed southern states to retain a larger
portion of what they currently contribute to the centre. The difficulty with
that suggestion, of course, is that it reduces the quantum of funds available to
the central government to subsidize India’s poorer states. Former CM
Siddaramaiah argues that ‘the share of centrally sponsored schemes must go
down’. That could be the answer: yes, take some revenues from the more
affluent states to finance central schemes in the poorer states, but apply those
schemes more flexibly so that each state can judge whether it needs them,
and also be empowered to tailor these schemes to their needs. This in turn
would free more funds to be allocated to the states’ own priorities rather than
to the centre’s.
Former CM Siddaramaiah also laments that ‘the states do not have a say
in making of the country’s economic policy’. He cites the example of the
import of cheap pepper from Vietnam through Sri Lanka as the result of a
Free Trade Agreement that states like Kerala and Karnataka had no say in
negotiating, though it was their pepper farmers whose livelihoods would be
most seriously affected. He proposes a body ‘on the lines of the GST
Council’ to discuss ‘trade policy and agrarian issues so that we have a better
say in making policies that affect our farmers… We urgently need a
mechanism where the states get a greater say in [the] making of the nation’s
policies.’
This proposal is worth considering. It is time for a second liberalization:
just as the original liberalization of 1991 set Indians free from the restrictions
of the licence-permit-quota raj, so also we need to liberate the states to grow
according to their capacity and through good governance. ‘The states need
greater autonomy to run their economic polices,’ writes Siddaramaiah,
‘borrow internationally as long as they convince the lenders of their
creditworthiness, build the infrastructure of their choice without depending
too much for licenses from the centre, and design programs of their choice.’
451
This may sound like a radical idea to those who have been working in
recent years to pursue ‘Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva’ as India’s Volksgeist . But for
the rest of us, in Dr Manmohan Singh’s famous phrase, it is an idea whose
time has come.

442 Anna Isaac and Ragamalika Karthikeyan, ‘Stalin calls Centre’s allocation of funds to
states a “travesty of justice”, writes to 10 CMs’, News Minute , 21 March 2018.
443 ‘Freeze on LS seats till 2026’, Times of India , 24 August 2001.
444 Janane Venkatraman, ‘The Hindu explains: why the 15th Finance Commission has
riled some states’, The Hindu , 29 March 2018.
445 Pawan Kalyan, Twitter , 18 February 2018
<https://twitter.com/pawankalyan/status/965064871426445313?lang=en >.
446 Siddaramaiah, ‘Regional identity & federalism’, Facebook, 14 March 2018
<https://www.facebook.com/Siddaramaiah.Official/posts/602181456793987 >.
447 ‘What explains the obsession with the 1971 Census?’, Newslaundry , 8 June 2017.
448 B. Kolappan, ‘Dravida Nadu: from political oblivion to centre-stage’, The Hindu , 19
March 2018.
449 Siddaramaiah, ‘Regional identity & federalism’.
450 ‘Karnataka flag will not unfurl anytime soon’, Indian Express , 4 July 2018.
451 Siddaramaiah, ‘Regional identity & federalism’.
 chapter twenty-nine

THE CULTURE OF OPACITY

Historians and conspiracy theorists alike rejoiced when numerous files

revealing details related to the death of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose were
declassified. In the excitement of the much-anticipated release of the files, the
prime minister even launched a web portal at netajipapers.gov.in to publicize
the released files. The files revealed many details related to the mysterious
death of Netaji, including the location of his death, how his body was treated
and how his death was received in the international community. The story—
and all the ensuing conspiracy—dominated the news cycles during
celebrations of Netaji’s birthday in January 2016.
And yet, virtually no attention was paid to the structural barriers in the
Indian government that prevented the release of such documents of public
interest in the first place. The declassification of the Netaji papers was a
much-needed step towards transparency. But the Netaji declassification
demonstrated a larger problem: a culture of opacity in the Indian government.
The measures taken by the prime minister in response to the decades-long
Netaji controversy missed the forest for one set of trees. India still lacks
comprehensive and accountable routines for maintaining accessible public
records.
The wider lack of transparency across the government, which keeps
important information outside the discriminating gaze of public scrutiny,
harms India in two crucial ways. First, opacity undermines the democratic
process, which requires that an informed citizenry acknowledge the successes
and the failures of its governmental officials. Democracy demands
transparency; secrecy is essentially undemocratic. For voters to keep their
government accountable, they require access to critical information.
Assessment requires access, lest such restrictions—intentional or otherwise—
undermine the democratic apparatus. That is the principle behind the Right to
Information Act, and it’s ironic that the RTI exists alongside such a
regressive policy on declassifying public records.
Second, public records are critical to understanding national history,
culture and identity. Public records are the institutionalized embodiment of
Indian history, codified in the form of documents, records and archives. Our
understanding of yesterday’s events also enables us to solve today’s
challenges. The American statesman Henry Kissinger said, ‘[History] teaches
by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in
comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what
situations are in fact comparable.’ 452 Lacking access to yesterday’s public
records derails the current generation’s ability to shed light on today’s
pressing issues.
Underlying all of this is a lack of clarity and public consensus of the
purpose of public records. Public records currently function as the
prerogative of a government bureaucrat who can use records to retain some
level of tangible evidence of their industriousness in the event that their
productivity comes under closer inspection.
Public records serve as evidence of transactions between two parties,
serving a political purpose. For instance, an MP might write to a minister
advocating a favour for a constituent. The record of this action can be
paraded amongst the MP’s constituents to solicit public support. But the
private benefit of such records—i.e. the showcasing of personal activities—is
dwarfed by the potential public benefit of making all such records, by
default, part of the public domain. They are a living window to the historical
actions of an entire democracy. The benefits accrue to a larger collective.
Accessible records are part of the debt we owe to history. Much of what
we now know about the Soviet Union—a thoroughly undemocratic state—
was only discovered after a mass release of Soviet records and files following
its dissolution. The release of Soviet records in the early 1990s led to a new
era of scholarship and updated our understanding of contemporary global
affairs.
Indian law already governs the management of public records. The 1993
Public Records Act intended to accommodate the public’s interest in
maintaining records. However, many flaws in the original bill promoted
opacity, making it near-impossible for a layman to obtain public records. And
archaic classification rules allowed the government to keep records from
public access, most notably Netaji’s—but also material relating, for example,
to the wars of 1962 and 1971, far past any reasonable declassification
deadline in any other democracy.
The pending Amendment (2014) to the Public Records Act introduced by
me mitigates the numerous shortcomings of the antiquated 1993 Act by
introducing transparency and accountability to the management of India’s
public records. It redefines the role of the Public Records Officer from
‘regulating’ access to public records to promoting access. Transparency is the
expectation, rather than the exception. Classified records are to be
declassified by default within twenty years (reduced from twenty-five years).
The Amendment updates the original Act’s language to more
comprehensively include twenty-first century forms of digital records; it will
encompass every medium from parchment, palm leaves and birch bark to
modern-day optical drives. It also increases the number of historians on the
Archives’ Advisory Board—the governing board of India’s National
Archives—to advocate for the public historical and cultural interest in the
governance of India’s public records.
The Amendment is a critical first step to a more open and accessible
government. India remains critically behind some global standards in
encouraging its citizens to engage with government data more broadly. The
United States launched data.gov —a government website that improves
public access to digitized data—over half a decade ago. The online
repository, part of President Obama’s 2009 Memorandum on Transparency
and Open Government, resulted in a multitude of user-friendly apps that
leverage government data in the public interest. The apps help people
navigate college selection, dietary decisions and even consumer purchases
based on government data about product recalls. Two years later, in 2011,
India started data.gov.in as an open-sourced joint initiative between the
United States and Indian governments. The platform boasts thousands of
datasets for public use, but still faces a number of implementation problems,
including a weak infrastructure to facilitate the collection and management of
data in various government agencies and problems sharing the most recent
data sets with the public.
The Public Records Amendment and data.gov.in seek to reimagine the
ethos of how the government handles its data and records. Parliament must
support the Public Records Amendment to honour the simple notion that
democracy demands reasonable measures of accountability and transparency
from public officials. India needs more than belated declassification: it needs
an effective system of public oversight of the government’s work. This is
something the Modi government has throughout appeared reluctant to do. We
must demand that Mr Modi, and whoever succeeds him, remember they exist
to serve the public, not to hide whatever they are doing from them.

452 Quoted in Graham Allison, ‘The key to Henry Kissinger’s success’, The Atlantic , 27
November 2015.
 chapter thirty

CIVILIZING THE CIVIL SERVICES?

In Section I , I showed how PM Modi doesn’t seem to value the services and
abilities of his cabinet too much, preferring to operate through a cabal of
trusted bureaucrats. But Narendra Modi being Narendra Modi, even
bureaucrats are not safe from being buffeted by his whims and fancies.
During his term as PM, he committed one of the worst acts of politicization
of the civil service in living memory. This was the government’s decision to
disqualify those civil servants who had worked on the personal staffs of the
previous government from serving in a similar capacity under the Modi
government. 453 My own Private Secretary at MHRD, who had been
recruited in a similar capacity by a new MoS in the Home Ministry, was
abruptly transferred back to his parent cadre for this reason. This is a peculiar
interpretation of the role of the permanent civil service in our democracy.
Ironically, early in its tenure the Modi government promulgated an
amendment to the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968, by inserting
assorted sub-rules under the All India Services (Conduct) Amendment Rules,
2014.
Under sub-rule (1A), every member of the service shall maintain:

(i) High ethical standards, integrity and honesty;

(ii) Political neutrality;
(iii) Promoting of the principles of merit, fairness and impartiality in the
discharge of duties;
(iv) Accountability and transparency;
(v) Responsiveness to the public, particularly to the weaker sections;
(vi) Courtesy and good behaviour with the public.

Under sub-rule (2B), every member of the service shall:

(i) Commit himself [yes, good old linguistic sexism continues in the
Government of India] to uphold the supremacy of the Constitution
and democratic values;
(ii) Defend and uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India, the
security of State, public order, decency and morality;
(iii) Maintain integrity in public service;
(iv) Take decisions solely in public interest and use or cause to use
public resources efficiently, effectively and economically;
(v) Declare any private interests relating to his public duties and take
steps to resolve any conflicts in a way that protects the public
interest;
(vi) Not place himself under any financial or other obligations to any
individual or organization which may influence him in the
performance of his official duties;
(vii) Not misuse his position as civil servant and not take decisions in
order to derive financial or material benefits for himself, his family
or his friends;
(viii) Make choices, take decisions and make recommendations on merit
alone;
(ix) Act with fairness and impartiality and not discriminate against
anyone, particularly the poor and the underprivileged sections of
society;
(x) Refrain from doing anything which is or may be contrary to any
law, rules, regulations and established practices;
(xi) Maintain discipline in the discharge of his duties and be liable to
implement the lawful orders duly communicated to him;
(xii) Be liable to maintain confidentiality in the performance of his
official duties as required by any laws for the time being in force,
particularly with regard to information, disclosure of which may
prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the
security of State, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the
State, friendly relations with foreign countries or lead to incitement
of an offence or illegal or unlawful gains to any person; and
(xiii) Perform and discharge his duties with the highest degree of
professionalism and dedication to the best of his abilities. 454
Phew! Quite a list. But is there, in fact, anything new about them? Wasn’t the
civil service always supposed to behave this way? After all, were our civil
servants ever meant to be discourteous, partial, corrupt or anti-national?
There was a time when, as Jawaharlal Nehru memorably observed, the
colonial-era Indian civil service was neither Indian, nor civil, nor imbued
with any spirit of service; but that was all supposed to have changed with the
advent of Independence and the creation by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel of an
indigenous ‘steel frame’ for the Government of India. Very clearly, all that
these amendments do is to make explicit what has always been implicit.
Perhaps it is a reflection of our times that the government feels the need
to spell out the obvious in such excruciating detail.
But that’s hardly a crime, and the list of prescriptions and proscriptions is
in itself quite unexceptionable—what the Americans call ‘motherhood and
apple pie’, things that no one can oppose. All Indians would want their civil
servants to adhere to the code spelled out in Mr Modi’s nineteen
commandments. (Though nineteen does seem a bit much: as Clemenceau
remarked in a different context, ‘even the good Lord only needed ten!’)
But there’s more than a bit of irony to the fact that it’s Modi’s
government that, under sub-rule (1A) point (ii), urges ‘political neutrality’ on
the civil service. After all, it is this very government that—in an action
unprecedented in the history of Indian democracy—issued a circular
decreeing that any civil servant who had served on the personal staff of a
UPA minister was ineligible to serve in an NDA government. While the UPA
had earlier issued rules saying that no officer could serve more than ten years
on any minister’s personal staff, the NDA circular made length of service, or
indeed competence, irrelevant in its instruction: any personal staff who had
served the UPA government in such a capacity for any length of time had to
be removed from the offices of NDA ministers.
As a result, many officers of unimpeachable integrity and impressive
service records were rusticated from the personal staffs of NDA ministers.
Their sin was not a negative performance report or excessive length of
service on personal staffs—no, their only deficiency was that they had been
tainted by association with the preceding government.
This overtly political way of dealing with our civil service was a betrayal
of the fundamental principles on which our bureaucracy was constituted.
After all, governments may come and go, but the civil service is meant to be
permanent and immune to the vagaries of changing political fortunes. Some
senior civil servants in the mid-1990s ended up serving four prime ministers
in five years, without ever changing their own jobs!
As for myself, I had no hesitation in blessing my former aide’s wish to
serve an NDA minister: his duty was, after all, to the government, not to me
or my party, and I did not begrudge him the recognition of his administrative
talents by a different party. This was as it should be. In any government,
ministers will naturally exercise their powers in a politically partisan manner,
because that is what they have been elected to do—they arrive in their jobs
on a platform that requires them to cater to their political constituency and
voter preferences. But our system of democratic government, as the founder
of the IAS, Sardar Patel, made clear, requires that laws and rules be
administered without prejudice. Politicians make policies, but the actual
application of laws or rules underpinning those policies is meant to be done
by civil servants without any political bias.
That is the logic of our bureaucracy: a new government can announce a
new benefit it has advocated politically, but once that benefit is established
and funded by the Government of India, it must be given fairly to all eligible
beneficiaries, whatever their political persuasion. That’s why we are
supposed to have politically neutral civil services which are only accountable
to the Constitution and the laws for their execution of policies—and to their
political masters, the ministers, for their conduct and their impartial
functioning.
The NDA’s decision to make service to UPA ministers the sole grounds
for transferring officials is a disgraceful violation of that principle. It
establishes a new principle, that bureaucratic service will henceforth be seen
as evidence of political allegiance. When the NDA loses power, the
bureaucrats who served them will, by the same logic, be seen as having been
politically committed to the Modi government—because the NDA chose
them on that basis.
How hypocritical of the very same government to mouth pious homilies
about civil service neutrality!
These new rules appear to be a fresh example of the politicians’ PR
disease, ‘watch what I say, not what I do’. What the NDA says is civil
servants must be politically neutral; what it has ‘done’, in fact, is to move no
fewer than seven senior civil servants from Gujarat to the Prime Minister’s
Office in New Delhi, presumably for having shown their political
commitment to Mr Modi while serving under him there.
 We have learned to get used to more and more examples of the gulf
between proclamation and actual implementation in the Modi era. For a
prime minister who professedly admires Sardar Patel, it is a pity that
Narendra Modi has trashed one of the doughty Sardar’s most invaluable
legacies—the proverbial ‘steel frame’—while issuing rules codifying his
adherence to it. One can only hope that the bureaucracy will live up to the
new amendments and not to the hypocrisy of those who have issued them.

453 Rajeev Sharma, ‘PM Modi’s ministers defy orders on hiring personal staff from UPA
regime’, FirstPost , 2 January 2015.
454 Press Information Bureau, Government of India, ‘All India Services (Conduct) Rules,
1968 Amended’, 8 August 2014.
 chapter thirty-one

CAPITAL SPIES

One of the hallmarks of authoritarian governments and rulers everywhere is

the increase in surveillance of innocent citizens by a paranoid state. The last
time we had to deal with this sort of thing was during Indira Gandhi’s
Emergency about half a century ago, but Narendra Modi’s government has
shown that it can resort to blatantly unlawful snooping whenever it wants to.
455 Let’s take one of the most egregious examples of this dangerous
phenomenon as practised by this government.
On 2 March 2015, Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Shamsher Singh of the
Special Branch of Delhi Police Headquarters was found sniffing around the
Tughlak Lane residence of then Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi in
New Delhi, asking inane and suspicious questions. Confronted by the Special
Protection Group (SPG), which protects the premises and the staff of Rahul
Gandhi, to whom he was taken by the SPG, he produced a questionnaire he
was carrying. This required him to obtain various particulars about Rahul
Gandhi like the colour of his hair and eyes, birthmarks, any disabilities or
preferences, the type of clothes he wears, his shoes, photographs and the
names, addresses and phone numbers of his associates.
On 12 March, a beat constable came by the house, and on the 14th, two
police officers, an Additional DCP and an ACP, again visited the residence of
Rahul Gandhi at 12, Tughlak Lane, New Delhi. They spent about seven
minutes at the residence enquiring about the whereabouts of various Gandhi
aides.
The Congress party erupted in indignation at these developments,
alleging that this was a misuse of the Delhi Police personnel by the
government to obtain personal information about a prominent political
opponent. Given that not long ago, the ‘Snoopgate’ scandal involved a brazen
misuse of Gujarat state machinery for the surveillance of the movements of a
private citizen, a young woman, the Congress’s fear was that the same
process might be at work at the Centre. 456
The party dubbed the affair ‘Snoopgate2’ and demanded an explanation
from the prime minister and the home minister. After all, Rahul Gandhi is
protected by the SPG, and has been since his childhood; why would the Delhi
Police need such information about an SPG protectee, and if for some
innocent reason it did, why not just ask the SPG? And why did the police
need the telephone numbers and addresses of Shri Gandhi’s associates and
friends?
Faced with this controversy, the then Delhi Commissioner of Police,
Bhim Sain Bassi, held a press conference to state that this was a routine
enquiry; a beat constable had gone not only to the residence of Rahul Gandhi
but also to the residences of Veerappa Moily, P. C. Chacko and other
political leaders. 457 The police commissioner argued that the information
being sought was to prevent spontaneous demonstrations at the Congress
leader’s residence, to ensure his security and the maintenance of law and
order. He explained that various vulnerable persons could not be easily
identified by police officers, and it was for this reason that photographs and
other descriptive details were being sought. He averred that there was no
pressure from the prime minister or the union government to spy on Rahul
Gandhi.
This seemed reasonable enough, on the face of it, except for a few
inconvenient details. The beat constable’s routine security visit to the homes
of various political leaders was on 12 March, the Shamsher Singh episode
was on 2 March. The Congress stressed that it was objecting to the latter, not
the former. Why conflate a routine visit on the 12th with a suspicious episode
on the 2nd, if not to confuse and mislead the press? And can anyone seriously
suggest in the Information Age that any sentient Delhi policeman would have
difficulty identifying Rahul Gandhi without details of his hair, eyes and
birthmarks?
That was not all. ‘If spontaneous demonstrations against Shri Rahul
Gandhi or other VIPs are to be prevented by police,’ the Congress pointed
out, ‘information must be collected regarding those persons or organizations
who are likely to conduct such demonstrations’, not about Rahul Gandhi and
his friends. In any case, what was the logic or rationale of seeking
information regarding his associates or the colour of Rahul Gandhi’s hair or
eyes, and how did such information help in stopping spontaneous
demonstrations?
For the commissioner of police to suggest that the enquiries were being
made for the ‘safety and security of vulnerable persons’ 458 like Shri Rahul
Gandhi was, to put it mildly, inconsistent with the fact that he has been an
SPG protectee for nearly twenty years and is protected under the SPG Act,
which leaves no role for the Delhi Police in ensuring his security and safety.
How could the Delhi Police justify its spying on Rahul Gandhi in the name of
assessing the security of an individual for whose security it is neither
responsible nor accountable?
The statement by the commissioner of police that similar information was
being also sought in regard to Veerappa Moily, P. C. Chacko, other senior
Congress leaders and senior BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani further raised
Congress hackles: why was the police collecting information about senior
Congress and Opposition leaders, and also of BJP leaders known to be
opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi? In any event, both Veerappa
Moily and P. C. Chacko denied having received any security questionnaire
from the police, weakening the authorities’ alibi even further.
When I issued a series of tweets raising just some of these questions, I
received the inevitable invective-laden BJP backlash, but also some
reasonable-minded criticism, along the following lines:
—if it’s true the police came openly to the house, why is this snooping?
Isn’t objectionable surveillance supposed to be clandestine?
—if it’s true that the same pro forma has been given to other political
leaders, including Congressmen like Moily or Chacko, why is this snooping?
—how can the information sought be misused when it is so basic and
routine?
The problem is that there were two different visits: one open, one
clandestine; one as part of the routine work of the beat constable from the
local police station, one from an ASI of the Special Branch. The former was
fine, the latter objectionable. The ASI only revealed his questionnaire when
confronted by the SPG and Rahul Gandhi’s staff.
The pro forma reportedly given to other leaders had not been received by
the leaders named, but in any case that was not the issue. The issue was the
ASI’s snooping, not the overt pro forma, even though that too was
unnecessary for an SPG protectee (the SPG records all such details anyway
and also tracks the protectee’s movements). If it was routine information the
police were after, why not send the basic questions with a formal letter from
the commissioner of police and ask Rahul Gandhi and his staff to fill it in?
Why ask an ASI to sniff around the house making enquiries?
Finally, the question of how the information sought could be misused is
best left to the imaginations of those seeking it. Far more important is the
principle at stake. India is a democracy with a fragile tradition of respect for
personal privacy. Surveillance, telephone tapping and interception of
communications, are all too easily misused for political purposes that lie well
beyond law and order or national security. While previous governments,
besides the aberration of the Emergency, have been more or less respectful of
individual privacy rights, the track record in Gujarat of the progenitors of the
original Snoopgate is hardly reassuring. The Congress party’s concerns were
therefore hardly overblown.
Intrusive surveillance of political leaders is something no law permits in
India. As far as the Delhi Police is concerned, they should come clean and
state under which law and under the provisions of which clause, they carried
out this procedure of enquiry against Rahul Gandhi. To what purposes would
the information being collected have been put? Would the names and
addresses of all of Rahul Gandhi’s associates and related information be then
used to elicit further information about his whereabouts, location, visits,
preferences and habits? To what end?
There are so many other issues in Delhi for the police to be concerned
about, from widespread incidents of rape and violence to the daily challenges
of law and order. Surely the Delhi Police has better things to do than
snooping on political leaders? But the issue goes beyond the Delhi Police,
which, after all, is only following orders (though whose orders remains an
open question, since the home minister himself seemed unaware of the
directive for the ASI’s ill-advised expedition). It is the government that needs
to explain why politicians’ privacy is being invaded.
Our Constitution allows every Indian the right to disagree strongly with
the government without being intruded upon, subjected to surveillance and
enquired about intrusively in this manner. That Rahul Gandhi leads the
principal Opposition party makes ‘Snoopgate2’ that much worse, but it would
be a matter of concern to the Congress party even if he were just an ordinary
citizen of India.
455 ‘BJP orchestrated “political espionage and snooping” on Rahul, says Congress’, Indian
Express , 14 March 2015.
456 ‘From snooping to suiting: the controversies around Modi’, The Hindu , 5 May 2016.
457 ‘Cop’s Visit To Rahul Gandhi’s Home Was Routine Practise, Says Delhi Police
Commissioner’, Huffington Post , 14 March 2015.
458 Neeraj Chauhan and Raj Shekhar, ‘Used same pro forma for PM Narendra Modi, Amit
Shah, police say’, Times of India , 15 March 2015.
 chapter thirty-two

TWO FABLES ABOUT FATALISM

As we look back at what Narendra Modi’s government has been doing in the
years it has been in power, I find myself thinking of what is happening to our
country these days in the form of two parables that I am fond of recounting.
The first is an old story, from our ancient Puranas.
A man, the quintessential Indian one might say, is pursued by a tiger. He
runs fast, but his panting heart tells him he cannot run much longer or faster.
He spots a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing
stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls beneath him, but he feels he has
escaped its snapping jaws. But no, what’s this? The branch on which he is
sitting is weak and bends dangerously. That is not all; wood mice are
gnawing away at it. Before long, they will eat through it and the branch will
fall.
The man realizes this and sees the tiger waiting below him. But as the
branch bends, it sags over a well. Aha! Escape? Our hero looks hopefully into
the well, but it is dry. Worse, there are poisonous snakes writhing and hissing
on its bed, waiting for prey.
What is our hero to do? As the branch bends, he perceives a solitary
blade of grass growing out of a crack in the wall of the well. On the tip of the
blade gleams a drop of honey.
What action does our Puranic man, the archetypal Indian, take in this
situation?
He bends with the branch, and licks up the honey.
This story is at least 2,000 years old, but it could be told today. It speaks
of what the Orientalists saw as Indian fatalism, our self-absorption in the face
of impossible circumstances and our willingness to make the best we can out
of those circumstances.
That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight
against that which one cannot overcome, but seeks instead to find the best
way, for oneself, to live with it.
So, your life is messed up by demonetization, you spend hours in bank
queues, your elderly neighbour collapses and dies while waiting for his
pension money, no one can change the 2,000-rupee note you are stuck with,
and your wife’s life-savings in an atta tin cannot be encashed because you
can’t prove it isn’t black money—but you console yourself, saying the rich
have it worse. You find comfort in the belief that since the prime minister is a
bachelor, his only thought is to serve the country, and he could not possibly
be doing any of this for selfish purposes. In any case, what can you do about
it? You may as well adjust to what you can’t change.
You voted for Mr Modi hoping to get good governance, an efficient chief
executive, strong economic growth and a multiplicity of jobs to choose from
—but you got unemployment, lower growth, 120-rupee tomatoes, the gang
rape of little girls and women and cow vigilantes lynching poor Muslims and
Dalits. You ask yourself, ‘What’s the alternative?’ It wasn’t what you voted
for, but it’s what you are saddled with. At least the PM makes great speeches.
You may as well lick up that drop of honey.
The second parable is more troubling. It’s a modern one. If you throw a
live frog into a pan of boiling water, it will leap out, scalded, and hop
frantically to safety. But if you put a live frog in a pan of tepid water and
gradually turn up the temperature, it will keep adjusting to the heat until it is
cooked to death. 459
I hope and pray that is not what is happening to my fellow Indians. Are
we accepting each new sign of our new political reality like that Puranic man,
adjusting ourselves to it as the ‘new normal’, till the last spark of life is
snuffed out of us like the boiling frog’s?

459 This story may not be literally true: according to contemporary biologists the premise is
false, and a frog that is gradually heated will jump out of the pan. See Fast Company Issue
01, October 1995. Still, it works effectively as metaphor!
 IV

THE FAILURE OF MODINOMICS

In three successive terms, as chief minister of Gujarat, Mr Modi’s
relentless publicity machine extolled his virtues as administrator and
chief executive of one of India’s most prosperous states. Under him,
the quality of life and economic status of all Gujaratis were supposed
to have improved to unheard of levels. Mr Modi promised that if he
were elected prime minister he would use the experience he had
gained in Gujarat to magically dispel all the country’s ills. The
‘Gujarat model’ would be applied to the rest of India and all would
be well. As with all Mr Modi’s promises, this one too was a sham. A
rising economy was almost flattened by demonetization and the
shocks caused by the improper execution of GST, his attempts to
eradicate black money have been unsuccessful and his budgets and
implementation of taxation have been disastrous. In this section, I
delve deep into the multiple failures of what has come to be known as
Modinomics—Narendra Modi’s brand of economics.
 chapter thirty-three

THE MIRAGE OF ACHHE DIN

As we know, the Modi government was elected in 2014 on a promise of

‘achhe din’ for the Indian people. As I have shown, although the core
supporters of PM Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party belonged to the Hindu right-
wing, there is no doubt that what tipped it over the threshold of victory was
an upbeat economic message of imminent growth and prosperity. CM Modi
was portrayed as the dynamic CEO of his home state, Gujarat, who had
presided over unprecedented growth and development and who would be
able to do for India what he had done for Gujarat. A vote for the BJP, it was
said, would be a vote for rapid and effective economic development. ‘Achhe
din’ would soon follow.
It didn’t. As we come to the end of the Modi government’s term, we have
witnessed economic misgovernance on quite a spectacular scale, including
the recklessly irresponsible overnight demonetization of the bulk of India’s
currency with hugely negative consequences for the economy, lost jobs (I go
into this in detail later on in this section), closed businesses, extortionate tax-
collection and the botched implementation of one genuinely reformist
measure, the rollout of a nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST), which I
have looked at more closely in Chapter 36 . As GDP growth has slowed
dramatically, exports have declined, manufacturing has collapsed and
agriculture stagnated, the government has stopped talking of ‘achhe din’. Its
new slogan is ‘saaf niyat, sahi vikas’—clean intentions, true development.
But in a democracy, voters and taxpayers are unlikely to reward intentions
alone. Results matter, and the BJP has none to show.
Take demonetization, which I have excoriated in various forums,
including on the Lok Sabha floor and in Chapter 35 of this book. It was
sprung upon the nation as we were watching news of Donald Trump’s US
election win in November 2016. Over twenty months later, none of its stated
goals have been met: ‘black’ money is once again in circulation,
‘cashlessness’ remains a chimera, and even terrorists coming from across the
Pakistan border have been found to be carrying the new notes. It is clear that
demonetization has achieved nothing except causing immense inconvenience
to ordinary Indians, and the deaths of some hundred citizens, many aged
pensioners who collapsed in the interminable queues required to withdraw
their own money from banks. 460
As of 10 June 2018, the total amount of valid currency notes with the
Indian public amounted to ₹19.3 lakh crore, higher even than the ₹17.013
trillion figure reported ten days before demonetization was announced to curb
the menace of too many notes. 461 While credit and debit card usage is
reportedly up, the Indian public seems to be using the latter mainly to
withdraw record amounts of cash from ATMs. Though the number of ATMs
has risen only marginally since demonetization, the number of ATM
withdrawals and the amounts involved have increased to more than 22 per
cent of the levels recorded in pre-demonetization months. Cash in circulation
is at a record high, with the currency with the public doubling from ₹7.8 lakh
crore before demonetization to ₹18.5 lakh crore in April 2018. 462 In a
country where digital transactions are still to earn public trust (and where fees
for using cards arouse considerable reluctance from spenders), cash is still
king, whether for purchasing clothes or buying meals.
This is not a minor matter: it points to the failure of a key government
policy initiative, the kind of dramatically disruptive move that Narendra
Modi imagined would jump-start and modernize the economy.
Mr Modi campaigned in 2014 on the insincere but attractive slogan that
‘government has no business to be in business’. 463 But for four years he has
continued the government’s role in every business it ought not to be in, from
running hotels to making condoms. ‘Divestment’ consisted merely of selling
part of the government’s share of some public sector companies to other
public sector companies; thus the government-owned Oil and Natural Gas
Corporation bought the government-owned Hindustan Petroleum
Corporation, with Mr Modi crowing about disinvestment. 464 And when the
government finally attempted an important act of privatization—that of the
loss-making state airline Air India—it hedged the sale offer with so many
conditions, including the government’s retaining a 25 per cent stake, that not
a single bidder came forward. 465
 All of this, coupled with the sea of red ink listing bad loans at state-
owned banks (now at a record breaking ₹85,370 crore in 2017–18, with a
dozen major bad-loan defaulters in the bankruptcy courts), has dented the
investment climate in India. The bond market is in a mess; bank lending to
industry has declined to a mere 0.7 per cent growth rate, prompting industrial
growth recession; the banks are groaning under sovereign debt (and don’t
want to acquire any more). 466 There is practically no major private
investment by major Indian companies. And foreign investors are fleeing:
since January 2018, they have dumped more than $4.5 billion in Indian
government bonds. 467
Inevitably, the rupee has sunk to record lows. This in turn has hugely
driven up the cost of India’s energy imports at the very time that global oil
prices are increasing. As India’s energy-import bills rise, the current-account
deficit, already 2 per cent, will increase. 468 Before he became PM, Narendra
Modi saw any depreciation in the value of the rupee as an assault on national
pride and honour. If the rhetoric he used then were used against him today,
by his own logic, as the rupee tumbles to 72 to the dollar, he’d have to accept
blame for squandering more national pride than any PM before him. The
government is not on course to fulfil its Budget pledge to trim the fiscal
deficit in 2018–19 to 3.3 per cent of GDP from 3.5 per cent last year (itself
revised from earlier talk of 3 per cent). 469
The things the government could do—and boasted it would—haven’t
been done either. In his election campaign, Mr Modi made almost a fetish of
complaining about the crippling burden of regulation that was stymieing
business growth in India; he promised to streamline the requirements for
opening and running businesses, and to take India into the top fifty in the
World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings. Today he celebrates India
having risen from the rank of 131st in 2016 to 100th in 2017 instead. 470
Mr Modi promised the youth of India he would create 2 crore jobs a year.
He hasn’t managed 1 per cent of that. 471 Modi’s much-vaunted ‘Make in
India’ initiative to boost investment in manufacturing has had rather poor
results, with manufacturing actually shrinking as a proportion of GDP and
new project investment declining; manufacturing is clearly not going to be
the job-generator Narendra Modi had imagined it would be. 472 His close
aide, BJP president Amit Shah, admitted in 2017 that ‘it is impossible to
provide employment through jobs in a country with 125 crore people.’ 473 As
I have pointed out earlier in the book, the prime minister has been reduced to
arguing that selling pakodas on the street—something that many unemployed
graduates have been reduced to doing—is also a ‘job’. 474 He has made the
far-fetched claim in Parliament—during his reply to a July 2018 debate on a
motion of no-confidence in his government, no less—that the real problem is
lack of data on jobs actually being created; for instance, he claimed, every
vehicle sold in the country creates two new jobs. 475 In any other nation he
would have been laughed out of his own job by now.
Mr Modi is sounding increasingly desperate as he attempts to convince
himself and the world that things are not all that bad. He told the annual
general meeting of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank at Mumbai in
June that India was projected to grow in 2018 ‘at 7.4 per cent’, asserting that
inflation was under control and that India’s foreign exchange reserves of
more than $400 billion ‘provide us enough of a cushion.’ 476
The prime minister stressed that India had received $222 billion in
Foreign Direct Investment in the last four years. But he did not mention that
FDI in the last financial year had plummeted to a five-year low, despite the
government significantly relaxing the FDI norms. For the first time since
2015, India was out of the AT Kearney list of the top 10 economies for global
investors. 477
In other words, Narendra Modi’s India is heading towards precisely the
kind of crisis of economic confidence it was elected to resolve. With
elections looming, it is under pressure to increase minimum support prices
for farmers, finance the ambitious social welfare schemes it had announced
with much fanfare, lower the hefty taxes it has been levying on petrol and
diesel to balance its books and show some genuine progress on infrastructure.
It hasn’t a clue about how to do any of this. Instead of the promised ‘good
days’, India is facing plenty of bad ones.
With elections looming in three BJP-ruled states in December 2018, one
sign is telling: it seems the BJP is quietly abandoning the mantra of ‘vikas’,
since there has been none in four years. ‘Vikas Yatras’ have been renamed in
the poll-bound states: ‘Ashirwad Yatra’ in Madhya Pradesh and ‘Gaurav
Yatra’ in Rajasthan. After all, ‘Gujarati asmita’ worked in Modi’s home state;
he is now reduced to hoping it can do the trick everywhere else. When you
can’t show development, talk of pride instead!
In the ultimate irony, the RSS-affiliated trade union, the Bharatiya
Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), launched a nationwide agitation in September 2018
against the Modi government’s modest labour reforms—especially the
extension of contract labour to various sectors of the economy—that it says
have led to ‘extreme exploitation and harassment’ of the labour sector as well
as caused increasing unemployment in the country. 478 The principal Modi
labour reform has run up against his party’s principal labour organization and
been found wanting. On the economy, Mr Modi literally has no friends left.

460 Nishant Saxena, ‘Demonetisation death toll: 90 people & counting as note ban takes
tragic turn’, Catch News , 9 December 2016.
461 ‘Currency with public doubles from demonetisation low; hits record at over ₹18 lakh
crore’, Times of India , 10 June 2018.
462 Pragya Srivastava, ‘In India, cash is still king! ATM withdrawals up 22%, higher than
pre-demonetisation era’, Financial Express , 20 June 2018.
463 ‘Government has no business being in business, PM Modi tells US investors’, NDTV ,
1 October 2014.
464 ‘ONGC buys govt’s entire 51.11% stake in HPCL for ₹36,915 crore’, Economic Times
, 31 January 2018.
465 Mihir Mishra, ‘No taker for Air India stake sale as bids close without a single offer’,
Economic Times , 31 May 2018.
466 Pallavi Nahata, ‘Growth in credit cards, unsecured loans holds strong for a fourth year
running’, Bloomberg Quint , 30 April 2018.
467 ‘Vulnerability concerns: FPIs dump Indian bonds’, Financial Express , 24 May 2018.
468 Gayatri Nayak, ‘Current account deficit widens to 2% of GDP on higher oil import
bill’, Economic Times , 17 March 2018.
469 Asit Ranjan Misra, ‘Budget 2018: Govt revises fiscal deficit target for FY19 to 3.3% of
GDP’, Livemint , 1 February 2018.
470 ‘India jumps 30 places in ease of business, PM Modi says “historic”: 10 Points, NDTV ,
31 October 2017.
471 ‘Modi’s promise to double farmer incomes is “jumla”: Manmohan Singh’, The Quint ,
18 March 2018.
472 Prathamesh Mulye, ‘More layoffs likely as India’s manufacturing sales shrink’,
IndiaSpend , 27 February 2017.
473 Kumar Uttam, ‘Not possible to provide jobs to all, so we promote self-employment:
Amit Shah’, Hindustan Times , 31 May 2017.
474 ‘No Prime Minister, earning ₹200 a day by selling pakodas is not employment’, The
Wire , 22 January 2018.
475 ‘PM Modi junks criticism, says 1 crore jobs created in last 1 year’, Times of India , 21
July 2018.
476 ‘Address of the Prime Minister for the opening ceremony of the Third Annual Meeting
of AIIB’, Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 26 June 2018.
477 ‘India slips 3 notches to 11th spot in AT Kearney FDI Confidence Index’, Economic
Times , 2 May 2018.
478 ‘RSS-backed trade union says Modi government causing “extreme labour
exploitation”’, Economic Times , 4 September 2018.
 chapter thirty-four

THE DARK TRUTH ABOUT BLACK MONEY

One of the more popular campaign promises of the victorious Narendra Modi
campaign in 2014—and the most difficult to fulfil—was his commitment to
‘bringing back’ to India ‘within 100 days’ the billions of dollars of ‘black
money’ reputedly stashed abroad by tax evaders, corrupt officials and the
like. 479 No one in our country disagrees that black money is a serious
problem or that the black money squirrelled away abroad should be identified
and brought back, if possible. Black money is particularly pernicious for a
developing country like India, because it siphons away resources that could
be spent for much needed investments in health, education, roads and general
public welfare. There were debates on black money in each one of the first
eight Lok Sabhas, but despite learned judges like Santhanam and Wanchoo
heading Committees that issued voluminous reports, the problem seems only
to have got worse over the years.
Black money in India is generated by various practices: real estate
transactions, diversion of government resources from welfare programmes,
kickbacks on government contracts (especially those involving international
procurement) and malpractices in international trade, especially under-
invoicing.
What is the scale of the problem? Various numbers, including some
fanciful ones, were flung about in the course of the political debate on the
issue. One Internet and SMS allegation doing the rounds, and cited by the
yoga guru and black-money crusader, Baba Ramdev, claims that there is
about ₹500 lakh crore worth of black money. 480 This figure would be
equivalent, even at today’s depreciated Indian exchange rate, to some $7
trillion, whereas our entire GDP is only $2.5 trillion; we should probably not
learn our economics from a yoga teacher. The more realistic number of the
many generally cited comes from a widely circulated report called ‘The
Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India 1948 to 2008’,
published in November 2010 by the reputable US-based organization Global
Financial Integrity. It concludes that we have lost a total of $213 billion in
illicit money since 1948, the present value of which in today’s dollars would
be about $462 billion or 20 lakh crore rupees, which is still serious money.
Even when it comes to Swiss banks, the burden of the BJP’s song for
some years now, official Swiss bank figures show that Indians hold only 1.01
billion Swiss francs (₹7,000 crore) out of 1.46 trillion Swiss francs (about
100 lakh crore). 481 We are not, therefore, the country with the largest Swiss
bank deposits (‘more than all the other countries combined,’ one BJP MP had
alleged while in Opposition). Even one illegal rupee in a Swiss bank is
unpardonable. But the real dimensions of the problem should be understood
accurately.
The Swiss banks are a red herring in the black money debate. Swiss
banks pay less than 1 per cent interest at the most; it is highly unlikely that
Indians with black money are leaving it there, and far more probable that the
bulk is being reinvested more profitably elsewhere, including in our own
country. Why not? In India, in the last decade, housing prices have risen ten
times since 2000, the Sensex has gone up six times, and government bonds
offer 8 per cent while the best terms abroad are at 3 per cent. 482 This makes
India a very attractive investment destination for Indian money, which can be
routed back to the country in a practice called ‘round-tripping’—taking
illegal money out but bringing it back as a legitimate investment, especially
through investment havens like Mauritius.
In our desire to facilitate foreign investment, we have unwittingly made
‘round-tripping’ easier through, for example, the anonymity guaranteed by
participatory notes: in December 2017, investment in participatory notes rose
to a six-month high at ₹1.5 lakh crore, despite the measures taken by the
Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to check their misuse. 483
Whereas our domestic investors have to fulfil stringent ‘Know Your
Customer’ (KYC) norms, these are much more lax for participatory notes.
While we need productive investments from abroad, we must not allow them
to become a contemporary equivalent of the old ‘voluntary disclosure
schemes’ under which the government used to soak up black money.
At the same time, there are specific concerns. Forty per cent of the total
FDI coming into India comes from Mauritius. We have been trying to
renegotiate the Tax Treaty we have with Mauritius, but inevitably our
strategic interests in that country will affect how far we can push its
government to accede to our demands. The fact is, however, that there is no
taxation on capital gains in Mauritius, so that if an entity sets up a paper
company there, our Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement becomes, in fact,
a double non-taxation agreement for us. Our income tax department had the
power to examine and verify whether the resident status of a company in
Mauritius was genuine or not. The NDA government, whose leading lights
are today waxing indignant on the issue, withdrew that power by Circular 789
of April 2000, under which a simple certification from the Mauritius
government is now accepted. 484 This has rendered ‘round-tripping’ from
Mauritius much easier, because India no longer has the power to question the
residential status of a company there.
It is also mildly amusing that some of the BJP leaders seem to presume
that the tax haven countries are just waiting to hand over information and
money to us, if only our government is tough enough to ask. The opposite is
true. Whatever India can do in relation to the banks of foreign countries is
subject to the domestic laws of those countries and of course of international
law, including treaties to which India is a party. Under the Indo-Swiss DTA
Agreement, information on Swiss bank deposits cannot be revealed by them
until we provide the names of the individuals we are investigating, of the
banks where they have their money, and evidence of criminality; the Swiss
have made it clear they will not support ‘fishing expeditions’ for names in
their banks. 485 In addition, we are bound to secrecy clauses; releasing names
(except for prosecution) would violate our undertakings and jeopardize future
cooperation.
No wonder that Switzerland is ranked number one on this year’s
Financial Secrecy Index compiled by the Tax Justice Network. 486 Since
1934, breaking bank secrecy is a criminal offence in Switzerland, whereas tax
evasion is not a crime under their law.
To suggest that the Government of India under the UPA was not strong in
its efforts in this regard is particularly unfair because, since the Pittsburgh G-
20 Summit in 2008, India led the push in the G-20 against banking secrecy
and opaque cross-border financial dealings that protect black money. India
joined the Financial Action Task Force and pushed the G-20 to restructure
and strengthen the OECD’s Global Forum on Transparency and the
Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes. The head of the Global Forum on
Tax Transparency rated India ‘first in terms of promoting the standards, in
terms of fighting tax evasion, and having the international community lining
up behind it.’ 487 Similar praise came from the director of the OECD Centre
for Tax Policy and Administration.
The UPA government had also taken a number of related steps. It enacted
legislation incorporating countermeasures against non-cooperative countries,
whose companies, for instance, must pay a 30 per cent withholding tax. It
tightened provisions on transfer pricing. There is a provision in 30 of our
DTAAs requiring assistance for collection of taxes, including taking
measures of conservancy, and the government tried to put this into the other
agreements as well. Eight more income tax overseas units were set up, more
manpower was deployed to the transfer pricing and international taxation
units, and a large number of officers were given specialized training. 488
With all its efforts, the UPA government was able to make specific requests
in 333 cases to obtain information from foreign jurisdictions and obtained
over 9,900 pieces of information regarding suspicious transactions by Indian
citizens. 489
Many speakers in the Lok Sabha debate on black money in 2011 referred
to Hasan Ali Khan, the Pune stud farm owner with billions stashed abroad.
But though the case is shocking, he did get caught: his prosecution is
evidence of the government at work to pursue the holders of black money
abroad. The fact is that there is a lot of domestic black money too—notably
in politics. Election campaigns are awash in black money; most candidates
are reputed to spend far more than the permissible limits, and the difference
has to come in unaccounted (i.e. black) money. Root and branch reform is
necessary.
While it is very easy to shout slogans or to clamour for political change,
Mr Modi’s extravagant campaign promises on retrieving and curbing black
money have been revealed as hollow. Now the real question the country’s
political parties need to ask is what can we do together to resolve the problem
of black money. I would like to suggest a brief list: We have to tackle the
problem of tax evasion, which would require cooperation with the
government on tax reform and rationalization and on financial sector reform.
We need to incentivize compliance. We have to tackle black money coming
from real estate, which again requires cooperation on effective land titling, on
reformed land revenue and land record systems, and the elimination of policy
distortions, including rationalizing taxation, such as onerous stamp duties
which promote evasion. We have to tackle black money in education, which
means removing the scarcity of good education supply in our country, which
permits some colleges to take black money to provide access to good
education. We need effective implementation of government spending
programmes, especially their financial management. Action to strengthen law
enforcement and criminal justice will help eliminate terrorism-related
funding, which also relies on black money. And we do need to tackle
electoral reforms to ensure that politics does not remain a major locus of
black money. The Lokpal Bill is one of several measures that could
conceivably tackle corruption effectively, but four years after its passage, the
Modi government is yet to appoint a Lokpal.
In other words, I would respectfully say to the BJP leaders who
campaigned to bring the Modi government to power in the name of returning
black money that it would be far better to work together to deal with the real
problems facing this country. Instead of adjourning the House as the BJP
repeatedly did over the issue, we need to use the House to create the policies
and reforms that will enable us effectively to deal with black money here and
abroad.
During his 2014 election campaign Mr Modi grandly promised that he
would bring back all the black money stashed abroad by Indians and that
each citizen of India would, as a result, find ₹15 lakh per person deposited in
his bank account. No doubt this fanciful promise won him some votes, but
like many of Mr Modi’s promises it was never intended to be fulfilled. His
party president, Amit Shah, subsequently declared that the ₹15 lakh promise
was only an election ‘jumla’ and we should not take this figure too seriously.
490 At the very least one must hope that Mr Modi will stop trying to use
black money as a campaign issue in 2019.

479 I will bring back black money and distribute it to honest taxpayers’: Modi, Times of
India , 12 February 2014.
480 ‘Indians have ₹500 lakh crore black money, says Baba Ramdev’, DNA , 28 February
2011.
481 ‘Money of Indians in Swiss banks rise 50% to over ₹7,000 cr’, Times of India , 28 June
2018.
482 ‘Home prices rose 14.5% a year since Jan 2011: RBI’, Economic Times , 10 April
2017.
483 ‘Investment in participatory notes hits 6-month high of ₹1.5 lakh cr in December’, The
Hindu , 28 January 2018.
484 ‘Clarification regarding taxation of income from dividends and capital gains under the
Indo-Mauritius Double Tax Avoidance Convention (DTAC)’, Income Tax India , 13 April
2004.
485 ‘Black money: No fishing expedition, says Switzerland’, Hindu BusinessLine , 7
December 2014.
486 ‘Financial Secrecy Index - 2018 Results’, Financial Secrecy Index
<https://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/introduction/fsi-2018-results >.
487 ‘Initiatives taken by the government for unearthing and curbing black money: a fact
sheet’, Income Tax India , 10 August 2012.
488 ‘Government’s white paper on black money’, Income Tax India , 16 May 2015.
489 ‘Probe on into black money deals by Indians: Pranab’, Hindustan Times , 19 October
2011.
490 ‘What about 15 lakh in accounts promised by PM Modi, asked RTI. the reply’, NDTV ,
23 April 2018.
 chapter thirty-five

INDIA’S DEMONETIZATION DISASTER

Change comes in many forms to different countries. Some embrace change,

some resist change, and some have change thrust upon them. Take India,
which was plunged into chaos on the night of 8 November 2016, when Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, in a forty-eight-minute address, announced that
some ₹14 trillion worth of ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes—amounting to 86 per cent
of all the currency in circulation in India—would become illegal as of
midnight. People would have until the end of the year to deposit them in bank
accounts (and pay whatever taxes and fines the authorities decided to impose
on them), but they were no longer legal tender.
This unexpected shock-and-awe announcement, Mr Modi said, fulfilled a
declared campaign objective to fight ‘black money’ or, put another way, cash
made from tax evasion, crime and corruption. The prime minister declared
that his announcement would not only rid the nation of black money, it would
render worthless the counterfeit notes that were reportedly printed by
Pakistan to fuel terrorism against India.
The initial stunned reaction was followed by a panicky scramble to
unload the expiring notes: the very night of the announcement, people rushed
to petrol pumps to fill up their tanks, jewellers tripled their sales and loans
were hastily returned. There were unexpected consequences too: housewives
who had salted away their savings in biscuit tins for a rainy day found their
years of thrift would soon be worthless. In most cases, even their husbands
had not known how much their wives had saved.
But within days the real result of the Modi announcement became
apparent—the severe disruption of normal economic activity. Inept
implementation made a mockery of the initial shock-and-awe. Not nearly
enough new currency had been printed before the announcement (some
estimates were that only 4 per cent of replacement currency was printed), so
banks did not even have a fraction of the money needed to meet consumer
demand for new notes. Long queues snaked in, outside and around banks,
foreign exchange counters (including at the international airports) and ATMs
to change the old notes and withdraw new ones.
But the ATMs were largely empty, since the new notes had been made in
a different size from the old ones and did not fit the existing ATMs. These
needed recalibration, a process that took tens of thousands of engineers
several months to complete. The government had not thought of making the
new notes the same size as the old to avoid this obvious problem.
An additional complication was the fact that there are not enough ATMs
in India: the country has only 20 ATMs per 100,000 people, as compared to
77 in China, 114 in Brazil, and 279 in South Korea. Even South Africa has 70
ATMs per 100,000 people. 491
In the meantime, thanks to the slow speed of the Mint’s presses, cash was
in short supply. Banks did not have enough money and so restricted
withdrawals to small amounts of cash that most customers found insufficient.
Though the permissible withdrawal limits kept changing, being raised and
lowered confusingly, they went up with time—provided the bank had the
cash available when one asked for it.
Such restrictions are arguably illegal—under which provision of law can
an Indian citizen be denied access to the money in his or her own account?
When, in Parliament, I asked the finance minister to name one country in the
world that disallows people from withdrawing their own money from a bank,
he could give me no reply.
Thirty days after the prime minister’s speech (in which he had asked the
public to bear with inconvenience for just fifty days), only 30 per cent of the
currency in circulation had been restored. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
told the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament on 18 January that it was
up to 60 per cent. The State Bank of India estimated that it would go up to 70
per cent by the end of February. The government’s own annual Economic
Survey 2016–2017, released on 1 February, then claimed that replenishing
the cash supply would be complete by March 2017—but that target too
slipped. Cash shortages remained for months more; the rate of printing new
₹500 notes fell below target. It took another three months to remonetize the
banking system.
The initial replacement notes all came in the form of an unusually high
denomination (₹2,000) that most people did not find useful—especially since
the government’s failure to print additional quantities of smaller notes meant
that for weeks no one was able to make change for a ₹2,000 note. Since over
90 per cent of all financial transactions in India are made in cash, and over 85
per cent of workers are paid their incomes in cash, the everyday economy
was brought to a standstill in the last two months of the year. 492 The
recovery in the new year was slow, and official figures showed a marked
slowdown in the country’s growth rate in the first quarter of 2017. 493
If this points to an appalling lack of elementary planning on the part of
the government, the broader consequences have been far worse. The
economy plunged into chaos, and the decision looks more like a
miscalculation than a masterstroke.
The lack of cash reduced both consumption and demand across the board.
A booming economy that boasted the highest growth rate in the world
suddenly became a cash-scarce economy. Production went down in all
sectors. Small producers could not get working capital to keep their
businesses going, and many had to shut down. Daily-wage workers (a large
majority of India’s labour force) lost their jobs because firms did not have the
cash to pay them.
In November/December 2016, all indicators—sales, traders’ incomes,
production, and employment—were down; former Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh estimated that India’s GDP would shrink by around a full
percentage point for the fiscal year. 494
The Economic Survey 2016–2017 released by the Chief Economic
Adviser to the government itself stated that demonetization was an aggregate
demand shock, an aggregate supply shock, an uncertainty shock and a
liquidity shock. It said that the cash crunch ‘must have’ affected the informal
economy, which accounts for nearly half of the overall GDP and about 80 per
cent of the employment economy—one which runs on cash. 495
India’s unemployment rate shot up to a five-year high of 5 per cent in
2015–16. 496 According to the All-India Manufacturers’ Organization
(AIMO), macro- and small-scale industries and traders incurred 60 per cent
job losses and a 47 per cent revenue loss because of demonetization. Not only
were small-and medium-sized enterprises shutting down; medium and large
infrastructure companies surveyed by AIMO reported a 35 per cent drop in
employment and a 55 per cent drop in revenue. 497
Two years after demonetization, unemployment remains one of the
biggest problems the country is facing. The Centre for Monitoring Indian
Economy (CMIE) estimates that around 15 lakh jobs were lost between
January and April 2017. 498 The Labour Bureau’s Quarterly Employment
Survey for October to December 2017 showed that about 1.25 lakh casual
and 46,000 part-time workers were out of jobs. The ₹8 lakh crore
construction industry, which employs 30 million people, virtually ground to a
halt after demonetization, with a drop of 80–90 per cent in income. 499
Inventory piled up due to low consumer demand. Local industries—
footwear in Agra, garments in Tirupur—suspended work due to a lack of
money. Several enterprises are now struggling to their feet, whereas many
have not been able to resume at all.
The informal financial sector—rural moneylenders who provide loans
that amount to 40 per cent of India’s total lending—has all but collapsed.
Rural India was affected badly by demonetization. The fishing industry,
dependent entirely on cash sales of freshly caught fish, was one of the hardest
hit. Demonetization even affected coastal security, as I pointed out during
Question Hour in Parliament, because the cash shortage dramatically reduced
the number of boats going out to sea to about 10 per cent of previous levels,
thereby reducing the number of eyes and ears available to our intelligence
agencies monitoring suspicious activities in our waters.
Traders lost perishable stocks and farmers began unloading produce
below cost—since no one had the money to purchase their freshly harvested
crops. Peas that Punjabi farmers sold at ₹30 a kilo only a year before the
PM’s announcement were brought down to ₹7 a kilo two months after
demonetization.
The liquidity crisis deeply affected farm production, farm prices, and
agricultural credit repayments. A study by two economists at Delhi’s Indira
Gandhi Institute of Development Research found that in mid-November
2016, deliveries of rice to rural wholesale markets were 61 per cent below
usual levels, soybeans were down 77 per cent, and maize nearly 30 per cent.
The winter crop could not be sown in time, because no one had cash for
seeds, and the resultant harvest was lower than projected.
All this was hugely destabilizing in the short term. The prime minister
asked people to be patient for fifty days, but those fifty days came and went
and it soon became clear that the process would take much longer before
normal money supply was restored. As for the long term, as former Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh trenchantly observed, quoting Keynes, ‘in the
long run, we are all dead.’
The story of demonetization was of unnecessary suffering throughout the
country. As ordinary people clutching their savings wasted hours standing
patiently in queues that offered no assurance of money at the other end,
fatalism battled with exasperation. Stories of individual tragedies were
reported daily—of hospitals turning away patients who only had old notes,
children not being fed, middle-class wage-earners unable to buy medicines
for the sick, and, as I have noted, about a hundred people reportedly dying
after collapsing in bank queues or committing suicide. 500 Ironically, the rich
—more likely to hold credit cards and be ‘cashless’—were relatively
unaffected; the main victims were the poor and the lower middle classes, who
rely on cash for their daily activities.
Thus, those at the bottom of the economic pyramid were the principal
victims of this supposedly ‘pro-poor’ policy. Yet they reacted with stoicism,
swayed by the government’s assiduous public relations messaging that
portrayed their difficulties as a small sacrifice for the nation. ‘If our soldiers
can stand for hours every day guarding our borders,’ one popular, and hugely
effective, social media meme asked, ‘why can’t we stand for a few hours in
bank queues?’
The impact of the demonetization in terms of the cash deficit and its
consequences was particularly severe in Kerala, the state I represent in
Parliament, because of the distinct character of its banking sector, in which
the cooperative sector and primary cooperative societies play a central role.
Overall, the cooperative banking sector is much more active and vibrant
in Kerala than elsewhere in India. As a result, over 70 per cent of the deposits
in cooperatives in India come from Kerala; over 70 per cent of the non-
agricultural loans and advances made in India are made in Kerala; and over
15 per cent of agricultural loans and advances disbursed in India are
disbursed in Kerala. But the Reserve Bank of India prevented all 370 central
district cooperative banks and 93,000 primary agricultural credit societies in
the country from depositing or converting old notes after 8 November 2016.
They were allowed to exchange old notes only as late as June 2017. 501
Keeping the cooperative banks and societies out of the note exchange
process was particularly damaging for Kerala. Dairy, agriculture, and the
market for fish were all severely affected.
Tourism, vital for India’s economy, was hit hard, albeit briefly.
Foreigners were spared tragedy but not inconvenience, for they were only
allowed to cash a hundred dollars a day and often had to go from bank to
bank to get the money. In November 2016, for instance, tourists returned
without seeing the Taj Mahal because their notes were not accepted at the
ticket window, and travel plans were curtailed by lack of new money.
Tourism works by word of mouth: how will one regain the trust of foreigners
that have already spread the word of their harrowing ordeals in demonetizing
India?
While it is clear that the government had not done its homework before
launching the scheme—and in a manner typical of the Modi administration,
had consulted very few officials within it, and bypassed his cabinet—it is not
the prime minister’s style to be on the defensive. His propagandists boasted
about a ‘surgical strike’ on black money, corruption, terrorism and
counterfeiting. Over time, it became painfully clear that those objectives had
not been met. A ‘surgical strike’ is supposed to be precisely targeted, but it is
clear that the collateral damage is so extensive that the pain it has inflicted
outweighed any tangible gain, at least in the short term.
In the beginning of December 2016, new victims surfaced, ranging from
salary earners trying to get money out of their bank accounts and pensioners
unable to receive their monthly allowances, to fathers and brides unable to
finance long-planned weddings at the peak of the Hindu marriage season. As
late as the end of January 2017, Indians were surviving on less than half the
cash that had been in circulation at the beginning of November 2016. 502
Shockingly, this was all happening in a country where cash represented 98
per cent of all transactions by volume and 68 per cent by value. 503 While the
cash is now largely back in circulation, memories of demonetization have
shaken many people’s faith in the currency. As recently as April 2018, India
faced a shortage of cash with ATMs running out of money and banks placing
restrictions on withdrawals. 504
Indeed, the Modi government itself has effectively conceded that
demonetization has failed and has had a severe adverse economic impact on
India. In its list of achievements touted in the Economic Survey 2016–2017,
the list takes note of assorted schemes continued from the previous regime,
but fails to mention demonetization. The Survey also accepts that
demonetization resulted in ‘growth slow[ing], as demonetization reduced
demand (cash, private wealth) [and] supply (reduced liquidity and working
capital and disrupted supply chains), and increased uncertainty’ and ‘job
losses, decline in farm incomes, social disruption, especially in cash intensive
sectors.’ 505 The RBI’s Annual Report for 2016–2017 stated the cost of
printing notes doubled to ₹7,965 crore in the 2017 financial year, from
₹3,421 crore in the previous year as a result of printing the new 500 and 200
rupee notes. 506
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that any of the declared objectives of
the scheme will be attained. In a largely cash-fuelled economy, all cash is not
‘black money’ and all black money is not cash. In fact, as I have explained in
the previous chapter, most of India’s black money has been invested in real
estate and other forms of property, gold and jewellery, investments in
property abroad, and ‘round-tripping’ that has seen the money return to
India’s stock market as ‘foreign investment’ via countries like Mauritius. The
Modi move, therefore, touched only a small proportion of black money
assets.
Worse, the government had hoped that the sudden move would eliminate
a large portion of the black money holdings altogether from the government’s
liabilities, since it was assumed that many hoarders would destroy their
money rather than attract the attention of the taxman by declaring it. Various
agencies of the government had initially estimated that around 25 to 35 per
cent of the demonetized banknotes would not be deposited by the stipulated
dates. On 23 November 2016, the Attorney General of India told the Supreme
Court of India that the government expected that notes worth four to five lakh
crore rupees would be rendered worthless by not being deposited. But as has
been noted in this book and elsewhere, the RBI’s annual report declared that
99 per cent of the denominated 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes had been
returned by 30 June 2017. 507
And since corruption seems to be a way of life in India, it will not be long
before the old habits of under-invoicing, fake purchase orders and bills,
reporting non-existent transactions and straightforward bribery all generate
new black money all over again. The government’s plan is therefore likely to
be ineffective beyond the short term, since it does nothing to control the
source of black money.
Indeed, in the first six weeks after demonetization, the Income Tax
Department announced it had seized ₹3,185 crore in unaccounted cash from
people hoarding currency they could not explain. Strikingly, ₹86 crore of
their seizure happened to be in brand new ₹2,000 notes! 508 Cases of corrupt
officials, including bank managers, being caught red-handed in illegal
transactions have been reported, all of which involved the new currency.
Some bank managers worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. telling people they had no
money, and then from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. gave money through the back door to
money launderers for a fee.
Though I am by no means tarnishing all bank managers for the sins of a
few, the fact is that in its drive against corruption the government has created
new forms of corruption. Black money clearly continues to be generated—it
has merely changed its colour and shape. Black money has become white by
way of pink! And, of course, ₹2,000 notes will take up less space in the
briefcases of the corrupt than ₹1,000 notes did.
The prime minister’s other declared objectives have not been met, either.
Demonetization is not a necessary exercise to achieve the objective of
thwarting counterfeiting, and the government’s citing of such an aim displays
considerable overreach. Media reports confirm that counterfeit bills of our
freshly designed currency notes are widely in circulation. This could,
however, have been prevented by enmeshing strong security features with the
design. It seems that the government has missed the opportunity of ensuring
the adoption of such security features in the new ₹500 and ₹2000 currency
notes that it launched post-demonetization. This indicates a lack of foresight
and inadequate planning on the government’s part. There appears to be no
special new watermark, no security thread or fibre, no new latent image and
certainly no nano chip, as BJP supporters were boasting on social media!
Will a mere change of colour and size render the notes safe? Shockingly,
the RBI has admitted that two different versions of the ₹500 note were
printed in haste. 509 If both versions are authentic, one can reasonably
assume that this is going to confuse the public and make it easier for
counterfeiters to get away with their own fake versions.
But still, how big of a problem is this? A study conducted by the Indian
Statistical Institute in Kolkata, under the supervision of the National
Investigation Agency, estimated that the value of fake Indian currency notes
in circulation was about ₹400 crore, which amounted to only roughly 0.03
per cent of the withdrawn currency. 510
It also indicated that the ability of banks to prevent counterfeit notes
being deposited was limited, since their machines often fail to identify fake
notes and bank tellers—overwhelmed by the pressure of the astronomically
high level of deposit activity in the fifty-day window period—could not make
the manual effort to identify fake notes.
 As a result, every indication suggests that several fake currency notes
slipped through into the banking system and became legitimized. Thus, far
from hurting counterfeiters, demonetization may have helped legitimize fake
currency by having it exchanged, amid the chaos, for new notes.
Prime Minister Modi also cited among his objectives the undermining of
terrorist and subversive activities. He even went so far as to say, on 27
December, that ‘through the note ban, in one stroke, we destroyed the world
of terrorism, drug mafia, human trafficking and the underworld.’ 511
But empirical evidence collated from data on terrorist strikes and
fatalities from the Global Terrorism database and the South Asian Terrorism
portal shows that it is very difficult to establish a causal relationship between
the number of terrorist strikes on Indian soil and the absolute levels of
currency in circulation. In any case, we are seeing reports of terrorists being
caught or killed in Kashmir in possession of large quantities of new notes. So
where is the claimed effect on terror financing?
Meanwhile, the goalposts kept shifting: the Reserve Bank of India issued
74 notifications in 50 days after demonetization. 512 Each of these was
intended to tweak an earlier announcement. As I’ve noted, many began
referring to this once-respected institution as the ‘Reverse Bank of India’ for
its frequent reversals of stance on such matters as the amounts of money
permissible to withdraw, the last legal date for withdrawals and even whether
depositors would have their fingers marked with indelible ink so they could
not withdraw their money too often.
Demonetization has caused serious and seemingly lasting damage to
India’s fledgling financial institutions, most notably the RBI, which
conspicuously failed to exercise its autonomy, to anticipate the problems of
Mr Modi’s scheme, prepare its implementation better and to alleviate its
impact. The United Forum of Reserve Bank Officers and Employees wrote to
the government on 13 January 2017, pointing to ‘operational
mismanagement’, which has ‘dented RBI’s autonomy and reputation beyond
repair.’ 513 The inexplicable silence of its governor, Urjit Patel, reduced him
to a lamb, as I have said before, but the ‘silence of the lamb’ was eating
India’s citizenry alive.
In a late change of declared objective, the prime minister and finance
minister started talking about moving India to a ‘cashless society’—an idea
and a phrase that was not mentioned even once in Prime Minister Modi’s
original 8 November 2016 speech. (This was hastily amended to a ‘less cash’
society when the absurdity of the proposition was widely pointed out.) 514
But they seem blissfully unaware of the fact that over 90 per cent of retail
outlets do not even have a card reader at the point of sale, that half of India’s
population is unbanked 515 —India is home to 11 per cent of the world’s
unbanked adults—and that the overwhelming majority of their nationals still
function in a cash economy. 516 In fact, 97 per cent of retail transactions in
India are conducted in cash or by cheque. Only 6 per cent of Indian
merchants accept digital payments. 517
As columnist T. J. S. George asked: ‘Are we to assume that daily wage
earners, small-time farmers and sundry hawkers who don’t even know what
is a bank will be happy to see the country getting rid of cash, rather than
vague things like illiteracy and poverty?’ 518
The plain fact is that the digital infrastructure for ‘cashlessness’ simply
does not exist in India. The aforementioned Economic Survey acknowledges
that digital transactions face significant impediments.
Though the government hopes many will use their mobile phones for
cashless payments, the survey enumerates approximately 350 million people
without cellphones (the ‘digitally excluded’); 350 million with regular
‘feature’ phones, and 250 million with smartphones. 519 A mere 25 per cent
of the country has Internet access, and there are around 200 million users of
digital payment services. 520 A 2015 World Bank study of bank account
usage and dormancy rates across different regions found that only 15 per cent
of Indian adults reported using an account to make or receive payments. 521
In such an environment, a cash scarcity is economically crippling.
Moreover, most mobile applications and internet banking websites are largely
available in English, a language not understood by a majority of the people.
There are also appalling deficiencies in cyber security. Ours is a country
where cybercrime flourishes; the government’s drive for a cashless economy
may be creating new vulnerabilities and new victims. Expecting India to
become a ‘less cash’ economy at this point is like removing 86 per cent of a
person’s blood circulation and then asking him to dance.
Studies confirm that most Indians who use cards use them just to
withdraw cash from ATMs; making payments by plastic is still something of
a novelty. Multiple stories—which might have been hilarious, if they were
not so pathetic—have been told of people patriotically trying to use plastic at
the few outlets that do accept cards and being told ‘the server is down’; of
salesmen frantically rushing out onto the street from their shops with card
readers in hand hoping to catch a better signal; and of single transactions
taking a dozen minutes because the card reader keeps breaking down mid-
execution.
India offers some of the slowest broadband speeds in the world, and at
least a third of the population has no reliable electricity supply. It is all
reminiscent of Marie Antoinette: ‘if they do not have cash, let them use
plastic!’
The government seems to be engaged in an exercise to furnish the
penthouse of a building whose foundations it has not yet dug. As the Harvard
Business Review noted, ‘India’s digital state (it ranked 42nd out of the 50
countries we studied in our Digital Evolution Index), does not engender the
threshold of trust needed for cashlessness to take hold in a meaningful way.’
522
Worse still, there is a transaction cost involved in each digital payment
that is absent in any cash exchange—so using ‘less cash’ actually involves
more expenditure for the payer. This obviously affects ordinary citizens who
are used to cash, which involves no transaction costs for them. It is also
expensive for merchants to adopt digital payments, which affects them
adversely. Merchants highlight the high cost of even trying out these
machines as a factor that is driving down interest in acceptance of digital
payments.
The government is doing nothing to ensure point-of-sale machines are
made available to traders, small retail outlets and small- and micro-
enterprises, free of cost, as I suggested in Parliament, or to remove charges
for all cashless transactions.
The financial implications of moving to a ‘less cash’ economy have
raised related concerns. It has been said that the real beneficiaries of
demonetization are the handful of companies that specialize in digital
payments, especially by mobile phone. (The number of daily transactions
through e-wallets surged up to 300 per cent after demonetization, from
seventeen lakh on 8 November to sixty-three lakh a month later. 523 ) In
addition, digital transactions, by leaving a traceable record, add to the state’s
ability to monitor individuals’ expenditures. As former Finance Minister P.
Chidambaram asked, ‘Why should a young adult be forced to disclose that
she bought lingerie or shoes or he bought liquor or tobacco? Why should a
couple be forced to leave a trail of a private holiday? Why should an elderly
person leave a record that he bought adult diapers or medicines for his
ailments? Why should the government or its numerous agencies have access
to our lives through access to Big Data?’ 524
These are serious questions that call into account the government’s
insouciant announcement of objectives that were never presented to
Parliament for approval until three months later, when the policy was
irreversible and the damage had already been done.
Equally serious is the continuing concern about the legality of the
government’s action. The entire demonetization exercise had been conducted
by the issuance of gazette notification no. 2652 by the joint secretary,
finance, under Section 26(2) of the Reserve Bank of India Act of 1934. 525
This provision gives the union government the limited power to demonetize
certain series of the country’s currency through a notification. This provision
does not, however, give the government the power to freeze bank accounts
through limits on cash withdrawals, disrupt normal banking operations, and
impose mandatory disclosure requirements (such as identity cards) while
depositing cash into bank accounts or exchanging old notes.
The relevant provision of the aforementioned Act unambiguously states:
‘(1) Subject to the provisions of sub-section (2), every banknote shall be legal
tender at any place in India in payment or on account for the amount
expressed therein, and shall be guaranteed by the Central Government.’ 526
This means that the money every Indian holds in her hand or in the bank
is a debt guaranteed by the government to her. Currency thus represents a
‘public debt’ owed by the government to the holders of banknotes. ‘I promise
to pay the bearer of this note…’ vows the RBI governor on every Indian
currency note. Every currency note is a contract between the bearer and the
state, something that has been signed in good faith and ratified by the
prevailing law of the land. The questions that then arise—and have still been
left unanswered by the government and the courts—include: can this contract
be repudiated unilaterally by the state? On what legal grounds can the RBI
write off notes that it had promised to honour?
And while we are considering the issue of legality, why has the RBI not
placed in the public domain the minutes of the RBI meeting of 8 November
2016 that was supposed to have requested the prime minister to make the
announcement he did? Is it for fear that revealing the real nature of the
meeting would only confirm the Bank’s surrender of its autonomy to the
government? Only eight out of twenty-one directors attended, and four of
them were officials. Only four independent directors were present. 527
This entire decision-making process was a government exercise
trampling on the autonomy of the RBI, rather than a decision of the
institution meant to be in charge of India’s monetary policy.
Among the longer-term effects of this monetary disruption have been
unemployment and severe dislocation of India’s informal economy; the
collapse of many marginal businesses unable to survive the ongoing loss of
income; severe reductions in crop yields and problems pertaining to
agricultural credit; and the accelerated flight of investment out of India.
Even more worrying is, as I have pointed out earlier in the chapter, the
prospect of a long-lasting decline in India’s so-far robust economic growth,
and the danger that it will push more Indians who were in the process of
escaping poverty right back into it.
The burden of demonetization has undoubtedly been regressive, as it has
most negatively affected the poor and the unbanked who have had to lose
their daily wages to stand in queues or have lost their jobs because of non-
functioning markets; and they are the ones who are expected to transform
their financial habits. The truly cashless are the poorest Indians, who depend
on cash for their daily survival: as the Harvard Business Review puts it, ‘this
unfortunate crisis is a case study in poor policy and even poorer execution.
Unfortunately, it is also the poor that bear the greatest burden.’ 528
While many Modi fans are blaming the implementation rather than his
intent, the fiasco was inherent in the design of the policy.
It is clearly a ‘symbolic’ policy—high ambiguity, high conflict, top-
down, centralized and authoritarian. There was no ‘policy skeleton’ and,
worst of all, no cost-benefit analysis, no evidence that alternative policy
options were considered. It is clear no impact study was done, judging by the
blizzard of new official notifications that appeared every day, tweaking and
fixing the regulations.
The government has presided over a non-transparent policy environment
that seems entirely unconducive to the creation of a cashless society. In his
extravagantly emotional television address to the nation asking for fifty days
to implement demonetization, Mr Modi had promised that ‘if any fault is
found… I am willing to suffer any punishment’. But all the faults I have
enumerated above have been found, yet Mr Modi has escaped punishment.
Instead, his party members have prevented Parliament’s finance committee
(in which the Bharatiya Janata Party enjoys a majority) from adopting and
publishing a report on demonetization that reportedly criticized it as an ‘ill-
conceived’ exercise that ‘led to the lowering of the Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) by at least 1 percentage point’. 529
This debacle was a manufactured crisis. The government, for no public
benefit anyone can understand, threw a spanner into the works of the Indian
economy. It was indeed an ill-conceived scheme—ill-planned, poorly thought
through, badly implemented and disastrously executed. Demonetization
failed in its stated objectives. Deep-rooted problems, like corruption or
terrorism, are not amenable to blunt, one-off policy instruments.
Demonetization was the equivalent of an ‘anti-stimulus’ policy intervention,
and the consequent drag on demand has been significant.
Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 promising to boost growth, create
jobs for India’s youthful population and encourage investment. These
objectives lie in tatters with his ill-considered demonetization. He abolished
the central government’s Planning Commission to signal that the days of top-
down statist control of the economy were over, but his demonetization
decision brought back the worst days of government control. His reputation
for being an efficient and competent manager was irremediably stained by the
implementation disaster. How long it will take for India to fully recover is
anyone’s guess.

491 Aashiq Hussain Lone, ‘Demonetisation Drive: A colossal mismanagement’, Rising

Kashmir , 9 October 2017.
492 Wade Shepard, ‘A cashless future is the real goal of India’s demonetization move’,
Forbes , 14 December 2016.
493 Asit Ranjan Misra, ‘India GDP growth rate slumps to 5.7% in Q1 in challenge for
economy’, Livemint , 1 September 2017.
494 ‘Economics of note ban: Why this is Manmohan Singh’s turn to laugh’, Economic
Times , 1 September 2017.
495 Economic Survey 2016–17 , Government of India, Ministry of Finance, Department of
Economic Affairs, Economic Division, August 2017.
496 ‘India’s unemployment rate highest in 5 years in 2015-16’, Indian Express , 29
September 2016.
497 Arjun Janardanan, ‘Demonetisation: 35 per cent job losses, 50 per cent revenue dip,
says study by largest organisation of manufacturers’, Indian Express , 9 January 2017.
498 Mahesh Vyas, ‘1.5 million jobs lost in first four months of 2017’, Centre for
Monitoring Indian Economy, 11 July 2017.
499 Shweta Punj, ‘Down and ouch’, India Today , 24 November 2016.
500 Maninder Dabas, ‘Here are 9 incidents during demonetisation that marked people’s
suffering’, India Today , 13 January 2017.
501 ‘Govt allows district central cooperative banks to exchange old notes’, Times of India ,
22 June 2017.
502 Gayatri Nayak, ‘Post demonetisation: India running on half the cash’, Economic Times
, 12 January 2017.
503 Mayank Jain, ‘The Beginning Of The End Of The Parallel Economy In India?’,
Bloomberg Quint , 9 November 2016.
504 Somesh Jha, ‘ATMs run out of notes: Here’s the reason behind the massive cash
crunch’, Business Standard , 17 April 2018.
505 Economic Survey 2016–2017 , Government of India.
506 ‘RBI releases big demonetisation data; cost of printing notes doubled to ₹7,965 cr due
to noteban’, Financial Express , 30 August 2017.
507 ‘What was the purpose of demonetisation? RBI says 99% of banned ₹500, ₹1000 notes
returned’, Business Today , 30 August 2017.
508 ‘IT-raids uncovered Rs 3185 crore of undisclosed income since demonetisation’,
FirstPost, 22 December 2016.
509 Chethan Kumar, ‘Two variants of new ₹500 note surface, RBI says printing defect due
to rush’, Economic Times , 25 November 2016.
510 Rahul Tripathi, ‘Secret study pegs value of fake notes in circulation at ₹400 crore’,
Economic Times , 13 July 2018.
511 Kavita Upadhyay, ‘Terrorism, drug mafia destroyed by note ban: PM’, The Hindu , 28
December 2016.
512 ‘Demonetisation: 50 days, 74 notifications’, Indian Express , 31 December 2016.
513 ‘“Feeling humiliated” by post-note ban events, RBI employees write to Urjit Patel’,
Times of India , 13 January 2017.
514 ‘Instant recall: how Modi government kept changing demonetisation’s goalposts’, The
Wire , 31 August 2017.
515 Wade Shepard, ‘A cashless future is the real goal of India’s demonetization move’,
Forbes , 14 December 2016.
516 ‘19 crore Indian adults don’t have bank account: World Bank’, Times of India , 19
April 2018.
517 Sharad Raghavan, ‘Ninety seven per cent of retail transactions still cash-based, says
USAID report’, The Hindu , 22 January 2016.
518 T. J. S. George, ‘The cash mess. Changing goalposts, new exemptions raise doubts
about the government’s intentions’, Indian Express , 25 December 2016.
519 ‘Eco Survey: Inter-operability of payments system key to success of digitalisation’,
Hindu BusinessLine , 31 January 2017.
520 ‘Despite talk of digital India, only 25% of Indians access the internet: study’, FirstPost
, 20 June 2018.
521 ‘175 million new bank a/c in India in three years: World Bank’, The Hindu , 16 April
2015.
522 Bhaskar Chakravorti, ‘India’s botched war on cash’, Harvard Business Review , 14
December 2016.
523 Pankaj Doval, ‘Digital payments soar by up to 300% after demonetisation’, Times of
India , 10 December 2016.
524 P. Chidambaram, ‘Across the aisle | Cashless economy: A distracting mirage’, Indian
Express , 25 December 2016.
525 ‘Withdrawal of legal tender character of existing ₹500/- and ₹1000/- bank notes’, RBI
Instructions to Banks, Reserve Bank of India Circular dated 8 November 2016.
526 Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 (As modified up to February 28, 2009)
<https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIAM_230609.pdf >.
527 Himanshu Mishra, ‘RTI on demonetisation: RBI says it proposed note ban hours before
Modi’s speech’, India Today , 24 December 2016.
528 Chakravorti, ‘India’s botched war on cash’.
529 ‘BJP MPs stall adoption of contentious draft report on demonetisation’, Indian Express
, 26 August 2018.
 chapter thirty-six

GETTING A GRIP ON GST

In his 2017 Independence Day speech, the PM declared GST to be a great

success: ‘The world is in awe,’ he declared with his customary
grandiloquence, ‘seeing how we implemented the new tax system in such a
short notice.’ 530
Flabbergasted might have been the more appropriate word. Other
countries had taken at least a year between the announcement of a new tax
system and its implementation; Mr Modi had not even given Indians a month.
It is undoubtedly a relief that the farrago of some twenty-three central and
state sales taxes that had previously bedevilled Indian businesses have nearly
all been replaced by GST. But instead of the promised ‘One Nation, One
Tax’ the government has introduced three GSTs (IGST, CGST and SGST) as
well as seven slabs of GST—‘One Nation, Three GSTs, Multiple Tax Slabs’.
India is the only GST system in the whole world to have so many slabs. So,
instead of one nation, one tax, we have one nation, three taxes and multiple
slabs. The World Bank has dubbed it one of the most complex indirect tax
systems in the world, with the second highest tax rate in the world among a
sample of 115 countries which use a similar indirect tax system. 531
That is not a slogan that will trip so comfortably off the tongue of our
government propagandists. It also has created massive confusion. When the
GST came into force on 1 July 2017, many shops simply pulled down their
shutters and did not open for business: they did not know how to cope with
the GST that had been imposed upon them.
In fact this GST taxes different variations of the same product differently.
Take the case of milk, for instance, something millions of Indians consume.
There are actually four different rates for milk products. If we take flour,
generic flour is not taxed, but if you put a brand on a packet of flour, it
immediately attracts a tax of 5 per cent. Similarly, pastries, sweet biscuits and
cakes are taxed at 6 per cent, but if they have a chocolate icing or coating,
suddenly they go to 12 per cent. This is a recipe for chaos: for fudging, if one
may be excused the pun, and irresponsibly complicated. And, on top of that,
these tax slabs were only announced just as the tax was being rolled out,
which left little or no time for a small trader to prepare himself for the
changes that then became necessary in the accounting and filing of returns.
As a result, a simple business operating in only one state will now have to
make 37 tax filings. If you have offices in three states, you have to file 111
tax forms. 532 What is going on in this country? The finance minister who
told us that he was opposed to ‘tax terrorism’ has instead given us ‘tax-form’
terrorism.
The Congress party had asked for a flat rate, with an 18 per cent ceiling
on GST, but the government, in its greed for revenue, adopted a maximum
GST rate of 28 per cent. 533 This extortionate rate, instead of being imposed
only on a few luxury items, applied to as much as 226 goods when GST was
first rolled out, and will certainly promote tax evasion, corruption of tax
officials and arbitrage between categories. (A year after its introduction, the
government has rather sheepishly begun pruning the vast list of items that
attracted 28 per cent tax) 534 .
Businesses will also seek to have their goods assessed at the lowest
possible tax rate, and if they don’t get their way, the viability of their
ventures might require them to go to court.
GST could generate thousands of lawsuits in an already backlogged
system, with 3.3 crore pending cases choking the Indian judicial process. 535
Of these, 1.18 lakh already relate to indirect tax appeals, with a ₹3 lakh crore
loss in tax revenue from direct and indirect tax cases stuck at litigation. 536
But the problem with GST doesn’t end with its complexity. It also
requires firms to file about three online tax returns a month (up to 37 a year)
into the GST Network (GSTN), a massive IT system, the backbone of GST,
intended to process 3.5 billion invoices a month. 537
About 1.03 crore taxable businesses have so far registered with GSTN,
but the haste with which GST was rolled out raises legitimate concerns about
whether the software for the new system is ready. 538 There was little time to
test it. Reports showed that the system was not ready; it crashed repeatedly.
539
Through the GST, the government has figured out how to get people to
pay taxes they cannot afford, on services they do not need. ‘The best things in
life are free’, goes the old saying, but I am sure the Modi government is
working to fix that too.
There are other complications too. By extending GST to Jammu and
Kashmir, the centre gained effective control of the taxation in the state. That
was, of course, something reserved by the Constitution to the state
government. A state like Jammu and Kashmir must be approached with
sensitivity. There has not been much sensitivity in the Modi government’s
handling of Kashmir generally. J&K has been beset by terrorism and by
violence. It has very many security issues. Its principal revenue generation
comes from tourism, which has been affected by terrorism; now GST will
damage it further. The 28 per cent GST will affect all of the tourism in
Jammu and Kashmir. The adventure camp operators and house boat owners
have already protested. If this is not rolled back, it is likely to make Kashmir
uncompetitive in tourism. An economy that loses a large chunk of its
productivity to constant turmoil in Kashmir is now going to be burdened by
the centre’s over-enthusiastic experiments. And indeed, it is already making
parts of India unviable. My state, Kerala, has become uncompetitive in
tourism because the tax rate is driving up the cost beyond any of our
neighbouring states and Sri Lanka.
GST has been moved by the government in extreme haste. When GST
was introduced in Malaysia, the government gave the public and shopkeepers
and others affected one year after the announcement to get used to the
procedures before it came into force. India, a much larger country than
Malaysia, did not get one year, we got only two weeks. (Despite all the
preparation time, the Malaysian government abandoned GST in mid-2018).
Under the Modi government, GST is not applied to several items, notably
petroleum products. The International Energy Agency estimates that India
will account for 30 per cent of global energy demand growth by 2040 as
booming manufacturing and a bigger, richer and more urbanized population
will drive fuel growth. 540 It expects the country’s oil demand to reach 10
million barrels a day in the next quarter of a century. The Parliamentary
Standing Committee, considering this, pointed out that since crude oil and
natural gas will be kept out of GST, upstream companies like ONGC and
OIL cannot claim credit for their money spent towards VAT on services hired
and goods used for the production of petroleum products. 541 Further, during
the actual process of refining crude oil, it seems maddeningly inefficient that
some of the manufactured products would be kept under the ambit of GST
while some of them would not. There is a complete lack of consistency,
which will result in distortions in pricing of petroleum products as well as an
increase in the input cost of the oil companies. Industry experts have pointed
out that this will inevitably have a negative effect on the oil, petroleum and
petrochemical industries. The Modi government seems to expect the same
industry to follow two tax regimes: the existing model as well as its
successor, the GST. The present chaos would drive up the operational costs
of manufacturing and there is likely to be a cascading effect across the supply
chain, with either the customer or the manufacturer (or both) taking a hit. For
the Modi government to trumpet the establishment of GST on the one hand
while creating parallel taxation systems with the other points to how ill-
considered their approach has been.
Mr Modi tried to sell GST to the nation as a ‘Good and Simple Tax’. 542
If he had followed the UPA formula of a GST at one rate (around 15 per cent,
up to a maximum 18 per cent), covering all goods and services including
petroleum, alcohol and telecoms, and applicable in the same way everywhere
in India, it would have been—and it would, as many industry associations
suggested, have added 1 to 2 per cent to India’s GDP right away. But the
botched implementation of a good idea, so typical of the BJP government,
has turned GST into a tax that is anything but good or simple. Instead, as
Rahul Gandhi dubbed it, it is seen as a ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’—a reference to
the notorious dacoit in the blockbuster film Sholay . 543
Many traders from across the country went on strike in protest over
having to comply with GST, most out of fear that they would be badly
affected. Most small business owners, as well as traders and shopkeepers, are
not computer-enabled and have to scramble to acquire computer literacy and
register online on GSTN. The self-employed informal sector, a major
contributor to India’s economy, already badly wounded by demonetization,
was further affected.
The confusing tax rates, the excessive documentation, the inordinate
number of tax returns a year and anxiety over the implementation of
compliance requirements have prompted fears of a negative impact on
livelihoods. And although there have been, from time to time, attempts to fix
the GST, as I have said at the outset, this was an initiative that was badly
planned, executed in extreme haste and extremely complicated to deal with,
and has negatively affected a sizeable section of the business community.
The Modi government’s version of GST could turn out to be a second body
blow to the economy, after the disastrous demonetization exercise. After its
botched implementation, Mr Modi’s reputation for managing the economy
lies deservedly in shreds.

530 ‘Key highlights of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on India’s 71st
Independence Day’, Economic Times , 15 August 2017.
531 Asit Ranjan Mishra, ‘GST one of the most complex, has second highest tax rate: World
Bank report’, Hindustan Times , 15 March 2018.
532 ‘Bad news for small biz: GST forces you to file 37 tax returns instead of 13’, Business
Standard, 10 June 2017.
533 ‘BJP government has imposed highest ever GST in world: Randeep Singh Surjewala’,
Business Standard , 1 July 2017.
534 ‘Now, only 35 goods in highest tax bracket of GST’, Times of India , 23 July 2018.
535 ‘3.3 crore cases pending in Indian courts, pendency figure at its highest: CJI Dipak
Misra’, Business Today , 28 June 2018.
536 ‘Pending cases: Over Rs three lakh crore tax amount stuck in litigation’, Indian
Express , 13 April 2018.
537 Shruti Srivastava, ‘GSTN to handle 3.5 billion transactions a month: Chairman Navin
Kumar’, Livemint , 27 April 2017.
538 ‘Over 1.03 crore businesses registered under GST: Government’, Economic Times , 9
March 2018.
539 ‘GSTN glitches: Infosys asked to send more “technically qualified staff” to States’,
Hindu BusinessLine , 4 October 2017.
540 ‘World Energy Outlook 2017’, International Energy Agency , 14 November 2017.
541 ‘Operational costs of petro products will rise under GST’, Hindu BusinessLine , 20
March 2017.
542 ‘Modi calls GST Good and Simple Tax: 11 things prime minister said about India’s
landmark tax’, Economic Times , 1 July 2017.
543 Mahesh Langa, ‘Note ban, GST ruined the nation, alleges Rahul’, The Hindu , 23
October 2017.
 chapter thirty-seven

UNBALANCED BUDGETS

As soon as the Modi government’s second Budget speech was over,

mercifully in under two hours, the platitudes began to flow: ‘a breakout
budget’, said the bhakts. ‘A corporate-friendly budget’, sneered the Left. I
tweeted the latter charge, adding: ‘corporate-friendly but little for the aam
aadmi, and the poor completely forgotten.’ One can point to the elimination
of wealth tax and the phased reduction of corporate tax as evidence for the
latter charge.
This is the sort of thing that happens every year. The Modi government
issues an unremarkable Budget, bereft of vision or originality, and far from
inspirational; it is hailed by its supporters (and the craven fawning spokesmen
of industry) as if it were a revelation sent down from Mount Sinai; it is
equally denounced by the Opposition and independent critics for its
deficiencies and favouritism to special interests; the country adjusts to the
new numbers, and life goes on. We have seen this BJP-produced movie five
times already, and it never seems to improve in each retelling.
But this is well-ploughed ground: one must look beyond the obvious
criticisms and see how each Budget will or will not change the lives of
Indians for the better. Unlike the first year’s underwhelming laundry-list, the
second year’s Budget did contain a vision for the future, albeit once again
falling short of the ‘big bold ideas’ that Finance Minister Jaitley liked to
insist upon when he was in Opposition. We had already been warned, in the
government’s Economic Survey, not to expect any of the big-ticket reforms
the world had been hoping for: ‘Big-Bang reforms as conventionally
understood,’ the Survey had argued defensively, ‘are an unreasonable and
infeasible standard for evaluating the government’s reform actions.’ Instead,
it called for ‘a persistent, encompassing, and creative incrementalism’, which
is more or less what we’ve got in the Narendra Modi-led central government.
544
The finance minister’s speeches are usually fine; as is too often the case
with this government, words, rhetoric and sound bites are what they are good
at. But in the face of a lack of adequate resources abetted by low tax
collections, a dangerously high fiscal deficit and weak corporate spending,
it’s not enough. Implementation of the soaring vision of a growing,
prosperous and just India is where the challenge lies. Here the auguries are
less promising. Again and again, for instance, we hear a great deal about
infrastructure and investment therein. But how exactly is more investment in
infra going to transform India, at a time when incomplete projects costing
around ₹18 lakh crore (about 13 per cent of GDP) have tied up public and
private funds in stuck infra projects right now? 545 The only yardstick that
matters is change on the ground, not good intentions in North Block.
Here, ‘achhe din’ haven’t dawned yet. The decline in global oil prices
was partially responsible for the slight improvement in the economic figures
boasted about by the government for three years; once prices began to rise
again, the Modi administration was clueless. Every year India spends almost
12 per cent of its GDP in importing commodities such as petroleum, gold,
coal, vegetable oils, fertilizers and silver, which constitute 51 per cent of our
country’s total imports. A decrease in the global prices of these commodities
has benefited our economy by improving our current account, controlling
inflation and consequently increasing GDP growth. But when the prices go
up, since nothing has changed in the underlying ground reality, the economy
starts reeling. The government can hardly take credit for the earlier positive
numbers when it shamelessly used lower oil prices as an opportunity to
gouge the Indian consumer. It offset the declining oil prices by levying an
additional excise duty of nearly ₹20 per litre at the pump, up from ₹2 under
the UPA government 546 , which directly hit the aam aadmi.
From a macro-economic perspective, there are some real worries about
how the finance minister will achieve fiscal consolidation with his Budgets.
Put bluntly, Mr Jaitley’s tax numbers don’t add up. The fiscal deficit keeps
surpassing each year’s Budget Estimate. The higher fiscal deficits are mainly
because of the low revenue collections, which each year have in fact been
much lower than the figures projected by the government in its overambitious
maiden Budget for FY 2014–15. So where’s the extra revenue going to come
from? Mr Jaitley doesn’t say. Meanwhile the current account deficit had risen
to 2 per cent in the last quarter of 2017 and may well cross 2.5 per cent of
GDP in Mr Modi’s final fiscal year. 547
And what happened to the Expenditure Reforms Commission he
promised in his first Budget speech, in July? Where are the promised
reforms? To get a measure of the gap between promise and achievement in
the Modi era, one only has to contrast his finance minister’s first Budget
speech after his government was formed, with the stark reality of under-
performance that followed it and the government’s comprehensive failure to
fulfil any of its own intentions.
The long-term debt of the government saw an increase of multiple
billions each year, despite the government’s continuous criticism of the long-
term borrowings of the UPA. Where is the prudent financing that the
government had claimed it would deliver?
To take a few examples of the ‘successes’ touted by the government in
successive Budget speeches, Mr Jaitley regularly points to three ‘major
successes’ of his government: the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, the
transparent auction of coal blocks, and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. 548 Let’s
take each in turn.
The success of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana is questionable.
While the government claims to have achieved a financial inclusion of 100
per cent, the urban poor remain excluded. Beggars, ragpickers, small vendors,
slum dwellers and the homeless who live on the many streets of our large
cities have been completely overlooked by the government in all its schemes,
including the scheme for financial inclusion. More important, it’s all very
well to boast about 12.5 crore new bank accounts, but 24.13 per cent of the
Jan Dhan bank accounts have reported zero balance. How does an empty
bank account help change anyone’s life? The money deposited in operational
bank accounts isn’t an encouraging figure either, the average deposit amount
being ₹2,580 in April 2018. 549
Coal auctions—imposed by the Supreme Court rather than a policy
preference of the NDA—may have been a good idea, but their efficacy must
be judged by whether the coal gets to the power stations that are currently
starved of fuel sources, and by whether we can cut back on our imports of
coal, which were always absurd in a country with the world’s largest reserves
of the black stuff.
And as for Swachh Bharat, as I’ve noted earlier, this is increasingly
looking like a series of photo ops, with grandees picking up brooms for the
camera and never touching them again until the next camera is scheduled to
come by next year. Toilets are being constructed, but are they being used, and
are they being cleaned? Is there water and electricity in them? Surveys
suggested the real figures are dismal. From a Budget point of view,
considering the importance of the campaign, it should be granted funds from
core budgetary allocations to achieve reasonable targets. There aren’t any,
just vague talk of a possible Swachh Bharat Kosh or Clean India Treasury
financed by levying a cess, much of whose expenditure seems to go to
publicity campaigns. The government should focus on making hygiene and
sanitation about human dignity and a community initiative rather than a tax
liability. All credit to the PM for raising consciousness about this issue, but in
the absence of credible central funding and community adoption of the
scheme, it is bound to remain a laudable idea rather than a life-changer.
The finance minister regularly claps himself on the back over what he,
echoing the Economic Survey, called the JAM Trinity—Jan Dhan, Aadhaar
and Mobile—to implement benefits through direct transfer. 550 But this ‘jam’
was actually the UPA’s ‘bread and butter’—schemes devised by the UPA
government and sneered at by the Opposition at the time. I’m sure it was too
much to hope for Mr Jaitley to acknowledge this.
I don’t see any reforms to improve the financial health of the banking
sector, with an out-of-control Non-Performing Assets crisis which the
government spends most of its energies blaming its predecessors for, even
though the numbers have ballooned so much under Mr Modi that they are
four times worse than at the end of the UPA government 551 and bank stocks
across the country have been adversely affected. The government needs to
resolve this issue of bad debts so as to free the worst affected borrowers,
especially the power and infrastructure firms. But there has been no solution
to this vital issue.
One major reform suggested in a Budget speech was the creation of a
single market for agricultural goods, overruling individual states’ agricultural
produce marketing Acts. But given that the states have predictably resisted
this encroachment on their prerogatives, how exactly does the Modi
government hope to reconcile this reform with its much-vaunted spirit of
‘cooperative federalism’?
The economy under Mr Modi has also witnessed a slackening labour
market, with rural wages registering virtually no growth, after recording a
high growth between 2008 and 2013, peaking at 38 per cent in 2014. 552
Agriculture and allied sectors have registered a decline in their growth rate. A
fall in wages and employment opportunities will undoubtedly push rural
youth into our limited urban spaces, where the NDA government can only
offer them slogans about ‘Make in India’. They need to ‘make it’ in India, but
for that they need real jobs they can do. Where are these coming from?
Slogans and sound bites don’t make factories run.
Effective measures to help the poor, who constitute 29.5 per cent of the
total population, have still not been introduced. Of India’s total population,
30.9 per cent of the rural population and 26.4 per cent of the urban population
is still living Below the Poverty Line (BPL). 553 The government has to still
initiate schemes to fulfil its promise of creating slum free cities and little has
been done to provide for pucca houses for the poor in rural areas, besides the
UPA-created Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) which Mr Modi has renamed in
order to convey the impression that his is a new scheme. 554 In fact overall
allocations for housing and health have both been slashed since the UPA
budgets.
Key areas have been neglected. Ambitious targets have been announced
for new and renewable energy, especially vastly ambitious targets for solar
power, but no concrete measures have been announced in the Budget to make
them a reality: no tax-free bonds, specific allocations or tax incentives, for
instance.
In Opposition, Mr Jaitley had long attacked the UPA’s service taxes,
joking that he couldn’t use the ‘sulabh shauchalaya’ at Lodhi Garden on his
morning walks because toilet use would be taxed since it’s not on the
negative list of service tax exemptions. Now, thanks to the hasty rollout of
GST, the Modi government has in fact increased the number of items
attracting Goods and Services Tax, and at much higher rates (see previous
chapter), which will increase utility bills, food costs—and the cost of his
urinal. He has flushed his own objections down the toilet. That’s one thing he
won’t mind being accused of—taking Swachh Bharat too literally.
II

What does the aam aadmi look for in a Budget? At the personal level, he
would obviously like more income, lower costs. At the broader level, he
would like policies that will increase his job opportunities, reduce prices he
has to pay for daily essentials and widen his life prospects.
 What does the economist look for? At the macro level, he would look for
policies that will create growth and jobs, improve exports, promote economic
stability, tackle inflation and still help the government keep its fiscal deficit
under control.
What does the politician look for? He looks for sops that he can sell to
the voters. The government’s five Budgets have had much to disappoint the
aam aadmi, frustrate the economist and prove a mixed bag for the politician.
Any Budget must address five issues. One, fiscal consolidation, that is,
the policy aimed at reducing the fiscal deficit. Two, job creation, usually
through boosting manufacturing. Three, increasing savings in order to boost
investments. Four, inflation control in our country; this is obvious. And five,
improving investor sentiment, both domestic and foreign, so we can promote
growth. Mr Modi’s Budgets have fallen short on all these five criteria.
Yes, his are political Budgets. After a couple of years of gross pandering
to corporate interests, the government at last discovered the virtues of
attending to the needs of the agriculture sector and the rural poor. But this
had much more to do with upcoming state elections than with a coherent
economic vision. Real agricultural incomes have been stagnant since Mr
Modi came to power in 2014. The 2016–17 Budget, for instance, fell between
two stools, between sending reassuring signals to the rating agencies abroad
and sending even more reassuring signals to the voters at home. In other
words, it tried to satisfy both Modi’s interests and Moody’s interests.
Nowhere was this contradiction more apparent than in the alarming unreality
of some of the government’s numbers, especially the fiscal deficit, when it
was very clear from the Budget that there would be unplanned expenses and
unrealized revenue. When Modi’s government proclaimed a fiscal deficit
target of 3.5 per cent, it actually clocked in at 4.1 per cent in fiscal year
2014–15 and 3.9 per cent in 2015–16; it was only in 2016–17 that 3.5 per
cent was reached, by which time the target had come down to 3.3 per cent.
555
The finance minister knew that he must fund expenditure for rural
development, farmer welfare, housing for all, sanitation projects, grant of
‘one rank one pension’, recapitalization of stressed public sector banks. He
also had to eventually accommodate expenditure of 0.7 per cent of GDP for
the Seventh Pay Commission recommendations, 556 and a further investment
of about 2 per cent of GDP to fund massive infrastructure projects. What
about the additional expenses for implementing the National Food Security
Act? I predicted in Parliament in 2015 that this exhaustive shopping list was
certainly going to oblige the NDA government to breach Mr Jaitley’s
commitments of a fiscal deficit of 3.5 per cent. I take no great satisfaction in
having been proved right within months. Then the government promised 3.3
per cent, with scant credibility; it finally reached that figure in 2017, though it
had pledged to bring the fiscal deficit below 3 per cent by now.
More so, because the Modi government’s tax collection targets have
never been met. The revenue expenditure balance sheet is not encouraging. In
addition, the disinvestment targets mentioned by the minister in his Budgets
have been completely missed by the government every year, and what
‘disinvestment’ has happened has largely involved one public sector
company buying up another—taxpayers’ money essentially moving from one
head to another. The government’s desire to retain control even of its loss-
making ventures was reflected most starkly in the attempted sale of Air India
in 2018, which was so hedged about by conditions (including the
government’s wish to retain a 25 per cent stake) that not a single purchaser
bid for the asset. 557 But the PM Modi Finance Ministry keeps financing
itself by projecting ever-increasing tax revenue collections for successive
years. These rely heavily on indirect taxation and on multiple hikes on excise
duties (even as oil prices fell) which annually brings, of course, unpleasant
news for every middle class and lower middle class tax-paying citizen.
Any economist will tell you that indirect taxes are essentially regressive.
They hurt the poor more because the poor and the rich alike have to pay more
for the same essential services. A rich man is buying petrol for his stretch
limousine or a poor man is buying petrol for his scooter; they are paying the
same price. So the government has been meeting its fiscal deficit targets on
the backs of the aam aadmi instead of boosting the real incomes of the poor
by cutting indirect taxes. So oil prices drop; excise duties go up. The aam
aadmi in India gets no benefits while people in the rest of the world are
saving at the petrol pump.
The Modi government is so tax-happy that its Finance Ministry
undermines even the prime minister’s policies. Thus the onus created by Mr
Modi’s Paris Commitments to encourage sustainable and eco-friendly
consumption habits was defeated by Mr Jaitley levying 1 per cent
infrastructure cess on small LPG and CNG cars.
The Modi government rewards high ambition and aspiration with higher
taxes. The tax exemption on profits for start-ups was a far cry from the much-
needed rationalization of a tax on angel investors. In fact, let us face it, most
start-ups do not, actually, book profits in the first few years of their operation.
So, telling someone they do not have to pay tax on profits makes no
difference because they do not have profits anywhere in the beginning. What
you really need is to give angel investments, which are the bread and butter
of these cash starved start-ups, a removal of the angel tax, which would,
actually, strengthen the start-up ecosystem. (I suggested this in Parliament,
but to no avail).
Corporates were hoping for tax cuts, but that never happened. Where is
the proposed timetable for a roll out of the Direct Taxes Code? The UPA’s
last two finance ministers, Pranab Mukherjee and P. Chidambaram, had
proposed a new direct tax code to replace the cumbersome Income Tax Act
of 1961, but ran into obdurate resistance from the BJP and its chief ministers.
Mr Modi loftily pledged to do better; he doesn’t even seem to have tried. 558
Meanwhile indirect taxes are gouging the common man. If a middle-class
family of four in Delhi wants to go to a restaurant, they would have to expend
some five litres of petrol on an average, given our distances and traffic, at
over ₹80 per litre which would cost them ₹400 and which includes central
and state taxes of over ₹200. Additional service charges and GST on their
food bill, plus Swachh Bharat Cess of 0.5 per cent plus Krishi Kalyan Cess of
0.5 per cent, would ensure that this family’s tax payments for their meal costs
more than their dinner. The definition of success now in our country is when
you spend more to support the government than you spend to support your
family. For people living on fixed incomes and highly taxed salaries, that is
an onerous burden, enough to discourage such outings. No wonder the
economy isn’t thriving, when the government has taxed middle-class people
out of any incentive to spend.
Matters are worse if this family chooses to have an alcoholic beverage
with their dinner, for then extortionate ‘sin taxes’ kick in. The government
puts a high tax on liquor and then imposes such high taxes on everything else
that they drive people to liquor. With due apologies, the middle class in India
is reeling from a bad case of intaxication.
In a bid to achieve its ambitious GDP growth figures, the government
has, therefore, burdened the aam admi. But, has the Modi government done
enough to stimulate growth in the coming year and beyond? I am afraid not.
On the contrary, it seems that the finance minister each year makes a
conscious decision to tone down the previous years’ growth aspirations.
Given the sluggish environment of investment, there is an evident need for
both enhancing public investment in social and physical infrastructure and
also undertaking innovative measures to stimulate private investment. But
private investment is largely not happening. In the last fiscal year, 2017–18,
the announcement of new investments declined by 38.4 per cent and the
completion of new projects declined by 26.8 per cent. Corporate sector
profitability has been weak. The proportion of corporate debt that was owned
by stressed companies has increased each year since Mr Modi’s assumption
of office. Talk to Indian businessmen, and it becomes clear that the Modi
government’s policies have discouraged any plans they may have had to
invest in India. Many have done so abroad, and a startling number of well-
heeled Indians have relocated to foreign countries and become NRIs—over
23,000 dollar millionaires have officially left India during Mr Modi’s tenure
alone. 559
Growth, after all, depends on credit, and credit has been drying up in our
country. The ‘twin balance-sheet crisis’ means that companies have
unsustainable levels of debt, while banks, assailed by mounting non-
performing assets (according to the RBI, banks’ NPAs stand at a record 11.6
per cent of their total advances in March 2018 560 ), are reluctant to lend to
them. The result is that businesses can’t borrow to grow themselves out of
trouble. Growth in bank credit to industry, which was steady under UPA, has
never crossed one digit in most months under the Modi government, and by
mid-2016 it was flat or negative. Demonetization exacerbated the problem,
with credit to industry declining by 5 per cent in the first two months of 2017
and absolute annual declines every month since then 561 Small and medium
enterprises have been the worst hit; small- and micro-enterprises were already
battered by demonetization, since many of them depend on cash flows that
dried up when rupee notes disappeared. And the finance minister has failed to
offer the nation a credible roadmap on how he intends to recapitalize public
sector banks when his allocations for the purpose are a small fraction of the
amounts needed.
The stark truth is that Gross Fixed Capital Formation (or what is
commonly known as the investment ratio) has steeply declined from the 31.3
per cent it stood at in the last year of the UPA government, 2013–14, to just
28.5 per cent today after four years of stagnation. 562 Foreign Direct
Investment (FDI), which the Modi government loved to boast about, grew at
3 per cent in 2017–18, hitting a five year low. 563 Normally growth implies
that production, profits, wages, jobs and exports are all growing. That is what
we understand by growth. With the Modi government, we have a peculiar
situation where none of these elements is growing, production is not growing,
profits are not growing, wages are not growing, jobs are not growing and
exports are not growing. And yet we are the fastest-growing major economy
in the world!
So, how does the government still project a 7 per cent GDP growth? The
external debt of the country crossed the half a trillion mark at $529 billion in
March 2018, yet the finance minister carefully avoided mentioning external
debt figures in his latest Budget presentation. 564 Growth slowed in all the
key sectors—in manufacturing, in construction, in mining, in industries, in
electricity and in agriculture. The index of industrial production was in the
red, -1.3 per cent in December 2015. Though this picked up finally between
November 2017 and February 2018, it faltered again in successive months,
mainly thanks to a serious slowdown in manufacturing. The sale of consumer
durables and capital goods was also in negative territory in fiscal year 2017.
565
It has become increasingly clear that the official GDP data may well be
accurate but it does not reflect the actual state of the Indian economy. What is
worse is what lies ahead, which is that the battle is with the volatile global
economy, declining exports, increased oil prices (up to almost $80 a barrel,
more than double the anticipated $35 a barrel at which the Modi
government’s last Budget had been pitched), the risk of a poor monsoon and
static domestic consumption.
On top of that it has been apparent that Modi’s India is a laggard in
relation to global figures: for instance, Indian exports went down for two
successive years 2014–16, during a period when world trade actually went up
by a modest 3 per cent. It is a long established principle in India that a one
percentage point decrease in global economic growth normally translates into
a 0.42 per cent decrease in our domestic growth; but in the Modi era we are
seeing world trade and exports growing while India’s slip into negative
territory. The BJP government’s ‘Make in India’ slogan sounds increasingly
hollow since if we do not increase domestic consumption, we are not going to
push up our growth rates because foreigners are not buying our goods.
The fact is that manufacturing is down. For manufacturing to be
internationally competitive, India requires policies that would reduce the cost
of manufacturing, affordable interest rates, improved infrastructure, better
trade facilitation, lower cost of power and, in other words, an entire
ecosystem. Just having a slogan saying ‘Make in India’ will not do it. You
need all of these—but in any case, the budget for ‘Make in India’ was cut by
35 per cent in 2017. (It was raised again the following year.)
In its last year, if anything, the Modi government appears to have
abandoned much of its economic rhetoric and rediscovered the discredited
virtues of a top-down command economy. More controls are being
introduced, import substitution is being advocated, quantitative restrictions
on imports being imposed, tariffs raised and non-tariff barriers erected. The
government that once decried tax terrorism has dreamed up new retrospective
taxes and unleashed an army of tax inspectors with greater punitive powers
than ever upon the business community. Dirigisme has always been Mr
Modi’s preferred political style; it seems to have infected his economics as
well. The days of the candidate who blithely declared ‘the government has no
business to be in business’ are well and truly over.
The old joke is that only two things are inevitable—death and taxes. But
death only comes once, whereas in our country, taxes keep coming and
growing over and over again.
Having decried ‘tax terrorism’ under its predecessor, the Modi
government has worsened the prospects of tax terror through its laws that
permit administrative overreach. It has given customs and excise officials
excessive authority to levy punitive actions against several people,
individuals and even institutions like the Reserve Bank of India, the income
tax and state GST bodies, state electricity boards and so on. Revenue officials
will be exercising quasi-judicial functions as well, playing the role of the
judge in disputes over their own decisions. An inspector raj will now be
spread over other departments, causing the functioning of other departments
to become coloured by the opinions and actions of revenue officials. A
provision in the Finance Bill, 2017, allows excessive powers to IT officials
for ‘search and seizure’—this in a country where it is said that sharks
wouldn’t attack a tax inspector out of ‘professional courtesy’. 566 Dealing
with the Indian taxman these days is like dealing with a careless laundry—
either way you lose your shirt.
At a time, when the government is trying to broaden the tax net, creating
opportunities for the abuse of taxpayers is not wise policy. Allocating a
disproportionate amount of punitive power with one branch of the
government over the others is a recipe for strangling economic initiative.
Our taxes are already pretty onerous. Studying the ways in which they are
implemented, and the powers given to tax inspectors to fulfil their demanding
targets, really taxes the imagination—which was the one thing we thought the
government could not tax. No doubt Mr Modi and his Finance Ministry will
find a way to do that too.
Mr Modi’s Budgets have confirmed the fears of many foreign observers
that this government is not going to make any significant institutional
reforms. What will be the effect of all this on the rupee? During the election
campaign, Mr Modi was withering about the decline in the value of rupee,
but it fell 18 per cent on his watch. It was 58.50 when he became the prime
minister. He talked about it crossing the finance minister’s age, but now it has
overtaken his age. Having plummeted to the depths each successive month in
2018, the overall trend suggests that it will stay firmly on the wrong side of
the 70 mark (as has been noted, it crossed 72 in September 2018) and join the
BJP’s margdarshak mandal.
III

A look at the Modi government’s specific Budget priorities is also interesting

and instructive. Initially, the allocations of Swachh Bharat were below the
levels of the UPA sanitation budgets, but these have now gone up. About
MGNREGA, the finance minister claimed the 2016–17 Budget was the
highest ever allocation—it was not. It was still below the 2010–11 levels of
the MGNREGA Budget of the UPA. 567 But, as a member of the previous
government, I could not help feeling vindicated to see the government
embracing UPA ideas that it had bitterly opposed, from strengthening the
Aadhaar platform to MGNREGA itself, to welcoming 100 per cent FDI in
food processing.
Many of Mr Jaitley’s budgetary cuts over the years have been matters of
grave concern. Food Security, Fertilizer Subsidies, Women and Child
Development, Ministry of Minority Affairs have all been slashed, affecting
the most vulnerable and marginalized sections of our society. Promised
schemes like the one-stop crisis centres to deal with incidents of rape and
sexual assault after the ‘Nirbhaya’ case have had to be scaled down to
meaningless levels. 568 Where new ventures have been announced, funding
has been grossly inadequate—for instance, the grand total of ₹500 crore
allotted for five new IITs and IIMs, which seem doomed to being unworthy
of their brand label unless considerable new resources are found. 569
In the following paragraphs, I would like to repeat some facts and figures
that have been placed on the record in Parliament in the government’s own
Budget documents.
The merger of the Ministry of External Affairs with the Ministry of
Overseas Indian Affairs was seen as an opportunity to axe their combined
budgets. As the Standing Committee on External Affairs repeatedly pointed
out, the Ministry of External Affairs is already grossly underfunded.
Budgetary cuts have further eroded its credibility: development assistance for
the SAARC countries, for instance, had been cut in the 2016–17 budget. The
allocation for Nepal was reduced by 28.6 per cent, even though this is a
country still recovering from a devastating earthquake, a terrible natural
disaster, facing nation-wide shortages. 570 India makes commitments abroad
at the highest levels and then finds the promised funds slashed by the finance
ministry before they are disbursed. 571 After seeing the way in which every
request of the MEA is hacked by North Block, I was moved to declare in
Parliament that the biggest challenge for Indian foreign policy is not Pakistan
—it is the finance ministry.
The same problem is at work when the Central Plan Outlay for the
Ministry of Environment and Forests, including the National Afforestation
Programme, saw savage budgetary cuts of 66 per cent in 2016–17, just after
the minister had travelled to Paris and made extravagant commitments at the
Climate Summit. Not only were no additional funds earmarked for the
pledges made by India at COP-21; one cannot even find the faintest mention
about the reserves needed to start fulfilling our requirements of $2.5 trillion
announced by the Government of India for the Paris Commitments over the
next fifteen years. Now, if we are going to spend $2.5 trillion over the next
fifteen years, you had better start now, but the finance minister has not given
even a one paisa for these commitments.
Let us face it. Making promises with no intention to fulfil them is not
exactly unfamiliar territory for this government. In 2015, Mr Jaitley promised
that six crore toilets would be built. The actual achievement, a year later, was
barely 10 per cent, 62 lakh toilets and not all of those had water or electricity.
The government should have completed the mammoth task of laying pipes or
water supply for more than 60 per cent of rural households that do not have
piped water. While ₹5,000 crore for 2016 was a bit of an increase from the
previous year’s allocation for water supply, it was much less than the
allocation of ₹10,500 crore by the UPA in 2013. 572
Then, many of the government’s promises are not new. Even though the
government budgeted an increase in the central plan allocation for
agriculture, including the newly named Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, it
is still lower than the amount of ₹19,047 crore allotted by the UPA in its last
fiscal year 2014 Budget. At that time, already the UPA had provided for
weather-based crop insurance, agriculture insurance, the Rashtriya Krishi
Vikas Yojana and National Horticulture Mission. Clearly, there is nothing for
farmer welfare that was not already provided for earlier. In fact, the NDA
reduced the UPA’s allocations in 2015 and then increased them in 2016.
The finance minister also missed an opportunity to devote more
resources, in a targeted way, to something that his colleagues have trumpeted
repeatedly in the House—the need to instal broadband and increase Internet
speed in both rural and urban areas. The National Optical Fibre Network is
far behind its intended coverage of two and a half lakh gram panchayats.
After four and a half years of rule, they have only reached 1 lakh gram
panchayats. 573 The only progress has been in renaming the scheme as
BharatNet. We have often said this is not a game changing government, it is a
name changing government.
The Modi government’s budget rhetoric also embraces the prime
minister’s vision for digitization. Digitization through public Wi-Fi, hot
spots, e-books, online medical consultation, medicine supply, mobile
banking, e-courts, e-police—Mr Modi mentioned all this in Parliament. But
the reality is that rural India has just 13.7 Internet subscriptions per 100
people; 574 rural households often operate with barely any electricity, and
using mobile phones that do not have Internet connectivity. How can they
access any of these services? The minister has been proudly talking about the
so-called JAM trinity. I mean this may be JAM in the urban areas. But there
is no butter or JAM in the rural areas because only 27 per cent of the villages
in our country have a bank within a radius of five kilometres. 575 And, of
course, all the online services the government wants to bring on stream
require dramatic increases in bandwidth (rendered impossible by the miserly
amounts of spectrum it is willing to relinquish to public use) and improved
Internet speed, whereas India is struggling today with the connection speed of
8.80 mbps for mobile Internet speed, ranking 109 out of 122 countries, below
Nepal and Pakistan. 576 How are we going to be able to deliver these
services? Are Mr Modi’s targets credible or is it an example of, with this very
faith-based government, what one might call faith-based budgeting?
Some of the 2016–17 Budget’s other omissions were also interesting. The
government raised taxes on tobacco products—saying they cause cancer—
but not beedis. 577 So, was it signalling that it is okay for the poor beedi
smoker to die of cancer but the rich, middle-class and upper middle-class
cigarette smoker must stay alive so that we can tax him?
According to World Development Indicators data, public spending on
health and education is just 4.7 per cent of GDP in India compared with 7 per
cent in Sub-Saharan Africa. People think Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest
part of the world, but they are spending 7 per cent on health and education
whereas India is spending 4.7 per cent. East Asia is spending 7.2 per cent;
Latin America is spending 8.5 per cent and the rich OECD countries are
spending 13.3 per cent. So, it is not just a question of wealth or the amounts
of money countries have. The figure for all least developed countries is 6.4
per cent and India is only spending 4.7 per cent.
In regard to health, if you look at the fact that we need a colossal amount
of money in order to achieve anything remotely like the declared objective of
universal health coverage by 2030, the fact is that the public health system is
in a pretty bad shape. The government has taken so long to deliberate on the
National Health Policy, but the budget for the Transport Ministry is more
than two and a half times the budget of the Health Ministry. Even customs
duty exemptions on 76 life-saving drugs—cancer drugs, HIV drugs—were
withdrawn by the 2016–17 Budget. 578
When it comes to job creation—the grandest of Mr Modi’s campaign
promises, having pledged to create 2 crore jobs a year—some 31 million
people have found themselves unemployed under the BJP, with the
unemployment rate steadily growing, at 6.23 per cent in 2018. 579 The Centre
for Monitoring of the Indian Economy has reported that the number of
persons employed in the Indian economy went down to 406.2 million in
2017–18 from the 406.7 million employed in 2016–17; in other words,
instead of creating jobs, Modi’s India is shedding them. The labour force
participation rate has been going down—42.7 per cent in 2018–19. 580
Another 50 million will enter the workforce in the term of Mr Modi. What
work will his successive Budgets help them find? The female participation
rate is even lower at 27 per cent. 581 But there are no targeted measures to
help females work. The unorganized sector has been devastated by
demonetization (Tamil Nadu alone reported 50,000 SMEs closed down as a
result of demonetization, causing the loss of 500,000 jobs 582 ), and the wage
demands of the organized sector are not being met.
Mr Modi wrote an article in the Economic Times on the last Budget of the
UPA in which he said: ‘This Budget is a piecemeal exercise, and it appears
that the UPA wants to play safe.’ 583 He had repeatedly mocked the UPA for
not thinking big. It is all the more disappointing that his Budgets have
consistently failed to think big, tried to play it safe and approach the
country’s economic challenges piecemeal.
The joke going around about the 2016–17 Budget was that it was a good
Budget only for the Aadhaar Card holding beedi smoker in need of dialysis
who lost his degree certificate and planned to launch a loss-making start-up
in a gram panchayat with MGNREGA funds. For everybody else, it was a
huge disappointment. Something similar, alas, can be said about every one of
Mr Modi’s budgets.

544 ‘Time for “Big Bang” reforms to accelerate growth: Economic Survey’, Economic
Times , 28 February 2015.
545 ‘349 infrastructure projects show cost overrun of ₹2 lakh crore’, Economic Times , 18
February 2018.
546 The Modi government found the cess at ₹2 and gradually raised it to ₹20 per litre. The
UPA’s highest petrol cess was ₹3.90 per litre.
547 Gayatri Nayak, ‘Current account deficit widens to 2% of GDP on higher oil import
bill’, Economic Times , 17 March 2017 and ‘India’s current account deficit to widen to
2.5% of GDP in FY19: Moody’s, experts’, Economic Times , 19 August 2018.
548 ‘Full text of Arun Jaitley’s Finance Budget 2015-16 speech’, News18 , 28 February
2015.
549 ‘Banking for all: What lies beneath Jan Dhan Yojana’s apparent success’, Times of
India , 24 April 2018.
550 ‘Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, mobile ushered in a social revolution: FM’, The Hindu , 27
August 2017.
551 ‘Govt banks’ NPA write-offs double in three years’, Business Standard , 22 December
2014; ‘Banks’ gross bad loans in December stood at ₹8.41 lakh cr’, Business Standard, 9
March 2018.
552 G. Naga Sridhar, ‘RBI paper points to sharp fall in rural wages since 2014’, Hindu
BusinessLine , 1 May 2018.
553 C. Rangarajan Committee Report, ‘Report of the expert group to review the
methodology for measurement of poverty’, Planning Commission, Government of India,
June 2014, p. 10.
554 Vipul Vivek, ‘Modi has merely renamed 19 out of 23 Congress schemes’, The Quint ,
24 June 2017.
555 https://www.statista.com/statistics/802020/india-gross-fiscal-deficit-in-relation-to-gdp/
556 ‘Here are the highlights of the 7th Pay Commission report’, Indian Express , 22 July
2016.
557 ‘Mihir Mishra, ‘No taker for Air India stake sale as bids close without a single offer’,
Economic Times , 31 May 2018.
558 ‘Road to reforms: Government sets up panel to rewrite direct tax law’, Times of India ,
23 November 2017.
559 ‘23,000 dollar-millionaires have left India since 2014’, Economic Times , 19 March
2018.
560 ‘RBI sees gross NPAs at 12% by March’, Financial Express , 27 June 2018.
561 C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, ‘Why we should worry about the fall in bank
credit’, Hindu BusinessLine , 1 January 2018.
562 P. Chidambaram, ‘Across the Aisle: Debate, questions, but no answers’, Indian
Express , 29 July 2018.
563 ‘FDI growth hits 5-year low in 2017-18’, Economic Times , 1 July 2018.
564 Gayatri Nayak, ‘India’s external debt rises by 12.4% on higher overseas borrowing and
NRI deposits’, Economic Times , 29 June 2018.
565 Sahis Sharma, ‘India’s industrial output contracted by 0.1% in June’, LiveMint, 12
August 2017.
566 Shruthi Radhakrishnan, ‘The taxman now has more powers thanks to the Finance Bill’,
The Hindu , 25 March 2017.
567 Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, ‘Activists reject Jaitley’s claim of highest ever allocation
for MNREGA’, The Wire , 29 February 2016.
568 R. K. Vij, ‘One stop centres, which provide support services to survivors of gender
violence, need to be revamped’, Hindustan Times , 25 February 2018.
569 ‘Union Budget 2014-15: Five more IIMs, IITs to come up’, Business Today , 10 July
2014.
570 Suhasini Haidar, ‘Sharp drop in aid to SAARC nations’, The Hindu , 10 March 2016.
571 ‘Promises that he can’t deliver: Have Modi’s 18 foreign trips brought in the desired
results?’, FirstPost , 22 March 2015.
572 ‘Par panel expresses dismay over rural drinking water supply’, Times of India , 2 May
2016.
573 ‘One lakh gram panchayats become internet-service ready in Phase 1’, Economic Times
, 9 January 2018.
574 Aarati Krishnan, ‘How many Indians have Internet?’, The Hindu , 26 March 2017.
575 Shaji Vikraman, ‘Last mile banking’, Indian Express , 20 September 2016.
576 ‘India ranked 109 out of 122 countries in mobile internet speed; below Pakistan,
Nepal’, Business Today , 12 December 2017.
577 ‘Centre’s tobacco policy sclerotic? How else do you explain negligible taxes on bidis,
chewing tobacco’, Financial Express , 2 September 2017.
578 Vidya Krishnan, ‘As customs duty exemption goes, 76 life-saving drugs to get
costlier’, The Hindu , 6 February 2016.
579 Pragya Srivastava, ‘Where are the jobs? Not in India; unemployment rate doubles, jobs
decline’, Financial Express , 24 April 2018.
580 Mahesh Vyas, ‘Employment stagnates in 2017-18’, Centre for Monitoring of the Indian
Economy, 17 July 2018.
581 ‘India’s female labour force is declining’, The Tribune , 1 May 2018.
582 ‘Centre, Tamil Nadu blamed for 50,000 industries shutting down’, Indian Express , 9
June 2018.
583 ‘Budget 2013: UPA will always disappoint, says Narendra Modi, Chief Minister,
Gujarat’, Economic Times , 1 March 2013.
 chapter thirty-eight

RAILROADING THE RAILWAYS

In 2017, the Modi government which, as I have pointed out repeatedly, is

best known for empty gestures, came up with another one. For the first time
since we attained Independence, the practice of the railway minister
presenting the railway budget before the regular financial budget was stopped
and the finance minister presented a combined fiscal budget, including the
railway budget.
The curious practice of presenting the railway budget separately began in
the days of the British raj, when the railway budget rivalled that of the rest of
the Indian government. Of course, railway revenues today, at ₹48,642.68
crore in 2017–18, no longer dwarf the country’s budget, which now stands at
some $2.5 trillion. 584 But India’s railways still produce other mind-boggling
figures: 23 million passengers are transported daily (over eight billion per
year, more than the world’s entire population) on 12,617 trains connecting
7,172 stations across a 65,000-kilometre network. And, with 1.31 million
employees, the railways are the country’s biggest enterprise. 585
In short, the railways are the lifeblood of India’s economy, touching the
lives of every segment of society and playing a key role in moving people,
freight and dreams across a congested landscape. Yet much needs fixing.
India’s trains carry four times the number of passengers as China’s,
despite covering only half as many kilometres, but still lose about 30,000
crore rupees annually. 586 The problem is that a succession of railway
ministers, viewing the trains as poor people’s only affordable means of
transport, have refused to raise passenger fares, squeezing freight instead.
This has proved popular with voters but disastrous for the country.
Though freight transport still accounts for 67 per cent of railway
revenues, with 2.65 million tons carried every day, the higher fares needed to
subsidize passengers have deterred shippers. As a result, the share of freight
carried across India by rail has declined from 89 per cent in 1950–51 to 31
per cent today. 587
Instead, an increasing volume of goods is shipped by road, choking
India’s narrow highways and spewing toxic pollutants into the country’s
increasingly unbreathable air. By contrast, China’s railways carry five times
as much freight as India’s, even though China has a far better road network.
588
Making matters worse, politicians have continued to add trains to please
various constituencies—but without adding track. Indeed, owing to land
constraints, India has laid only 11,004 kilometres of rail track since
independence in 1947, adding to the 53,000 left behind by the British. 589
(China added nearly 80,000 kilometres to its rail network over the same
period.) As a result, several lines are operating beyond their capacity, creating
long delays. Exacerbating this inefficiency are slow train speeds, which rarely
exceed 50 kilometres per hour (and 30 kilometres per hour for freight), partly
owing to the need to stop at an ever-rising number of stations to appease
political interests.
But perhaps the biggest problem is how dangerous the railways are.
Aging rails, tired coaches, old-fashioned signals and level crossings dating
back to the nineteenth century combine with human error to take dozens of
lives every year.
Yet every railway minister had continued to insist on their populist
approach. With the government losing $4.5 billion every year by subsidizing
passenger fares, it has little money to spend on upgrading infrastructure,
improving safety standards, or speeding up the trains. 590 According to the
audit report by the CAG on the performance of railways in 2015, the total
planned expenditure of the Indian Railways has increasingly exceeded its
internal resources. In the 2013–14 period, total plan expenditure was nearly
₹54,000 crore, while the internal resource generation was ₹9,700 crore and
budgetary support it received was around ₹29,000 crore. 591 It is difficult to
imagine how the railways will finance its ongoing projects, much less invest
in new ones.
It must be said to the Modi government’s credit that it recognized the
problem and its second railway minister, Suresh Prabhu, was candid about
the need to eschew populism to focus on renewal. (Ironically, he was himself
the victim of his ministry’s failure to attend adequately to track safety, when
one railway accident too many forced his resignation in 2017.) 592 Mr
Prabhu’s reformism seems to be in safe hands under his successor, Piyush
Goyal, though it is yet far from clear where the resources will come from for
all that needs to be done to place railways finances on a sound footing.
And if all of this were not bad enough, India’s leadership seems not to
recognize the challenges that the railways present. In a country where rail
passengers cannot even expect a clean toilet, let alone an on-time arrival,
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken of introducing bullet trains—the
latest in a string of irrationally grandiose aspirations. The bullet train from
Ahmedabad to Mumbai will cost an estimated ₹1.1 lakh crore loaned by the
Japanese government and will result in an economically unviable
boondoggle, 593 whereas the 2018 budget for railways, focused on capacity
creation, allocated just ₹1.48 lakh crore for the entire Indian Railways. 594
The contrast is glaring, made worse by the prime minister’s rhetoric; his
priorities are still bullet trains, installing CCTV cameras and Wi-Fi inside
trains and announcing new world class trains, when the existing ones trundle
along at an average of 35 kilometres an hour and have smelly or defective
toilets.
Mr Prabhu had promised to raise $137 billion from market lenders,
without clarifying how exactly they can be paid back, at rates of interest high
enough to attract their investments in the first place. 595 The railways
currently have an operating ratio of 98.5 per cent, barely 1 per cent of the
amount needed to upgrade and modernize the network. 596 It is far from clear
how the grand vision of a safer, cleaner and speedier Indian railway system
will be achieved in practice. As one critic sardonically put it, this is a dream
budget—because it’s completely out of touch with reality.
But that has been the characteristic feature of the Modi government:
high-pitched aspirations, soaring rhetoric, ambitious vision and quotable
sound-bites, accompanied by few specifics, no implementation plan and no
improvements in execution capacity. India’s overburdened trains cannot run
on hot air, but that seems to be what they are being offered for now.

584 Faizan Haidar, ‘Railways posts highest revenue growth in three years’, Hindustan
Times , 28 April 2018 and Arun Jaitley, ‘Budget 2018–2019’, Government of India, 1
February 2018.
585 In 2016–17, Indian Railways carried 8.1 billion passengers (source: Facts & Figures
2016–17, Ministry of Railways, Government of India).
586 ‘Railways suffering losses in passenger sector every year’, Economic Times , 29 March
2017.
587 ‘Railway Budget: why you need to know these 10 numbers’, NDTV , 26 February 2016
588 Vishnu Saraf, India and China: Comparing the Incomparable , New Delhi: Macmillan
India, 2008, p. 112.
589 ‘Indian rail network added 11,004 kilometres in 62 years, NDTV , 14 December 2012.
590 Mahendra K. Singh, ‘Now, government wants you to give up rail fare subsidy’, Times
of India , 6 July 2017.
591 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, ‘Status of ongoing projects in
Indian railways’, 2015.
592 ‘Suresh Prabhu resigns; Piyush Goyal takes over as new Railways Minister’, Business
Today , 3 September 2017.
593 Arijit Barman, ‘Sanjeev Sinha named adviser for ₹1.1 lakh crore bullet train project’,
Economic Times , 11 September 2017.
594 ‘Rail budget 2018 highlights’, Financial Express , 2 February 2018.
595 Manoj Kumar, ‘India aims to invest $137 billion in railways in next 5 years’, Reuters ,
26 February 2015.
596 ‘Indian railways made its least ever profits in the last financial year, here’s what it
means’, News18 , 20 April 2018.
 chapter thirty-nine

BOOSTING THE INDIAN ECONOMY

What should India do to improve its ‘business quotient’, and make itself a
more desirable place for investors? For someone like myself, who believes
the Modi government hasn’t done enough to match the prime minister’s
promises, the answer is a complicated one.
Let’s acknowledge the unusual features of the Indian economy. First, that
policy choices are made in a democracy, and that too one with a majority of
poor voters—every MP represents a constituency where a majority of his
voters live on less than two dollars a day, and so the basic issues of survival
and redistribution assume a high priority.
Most other democracies grew first and became democratic later. There
was no real universal suffrage when most Western democracies were
beginning to prosper during the Industrial Revolution. So Indian economic
policy necessarily took the needs of the poor as a priority and sought to win
their votes by offering them economic incentives. Redistributive policies
have been high on the national economic agenda, because India has been a
democracy since the start, and as an MP I know there is no escape from the
political responsibility to pursue such policies.
Second, as a corollary of this, economic policy is driven largely by the
interests of the poor, rather than taxpayers, since taxpayers are relatively few
(less than 5 per cent of the voters) and non-taxpayers command more votes.
The BJP’s government’s former Chief Economic Adviser, Arvind
Subramanian, said taxpayers are only 4 per cent of voters. 597 In a
democracy, the politician’s accountability is inevitably more to the majority
of the voters than to the minority of taxpayers. Of course, as the economy
grows and the taxpayer base broadens, this will change, but that’s for the long
term.
Third, instead of developing through strong manufacturing, as most
countries have done, and exporting goods, India’s growth in recent decades
has been led mainly by services exports. I don’t think that’s true of many
other countries.
At the same time, India’s economic development strategy has been
affected by the fact that ours is a federal system.
Whereas the European Union is twenty-eight sovereign countries and one
common market, we were—until the Goods and Services Tax was adopted in
2017—one sovereign country and twenty-nine markets, with differing state
taxes and various limitations on inter-state commerce, including octroi and
long lines of lorries lined up at check-posts at state frontiers. The UPA
government tried to change this with a unifying GST, but ran into severe
problems with the BJP governments in the states. When the Modi
government finally did implement GST in July 2017, as I pointed out in
Chapter 36 , it made a thorough hash of it—among other things by multiple
tax rates and exclusions it destroyed the single market vision that animated
the GST idea.
Let us remember that since then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh
launched India on the path of liberalization in 1991, the country has visibly
prospered, and despite population growth, per capita income grew 5.6 times.
598 In the last twenty-four years, India has pulled more people out of poverty
than in the previous forty-four—averaging some 10 million people a year in
the decade between 2006–16.
After the US and China, India is the world’s third-largest economy,
having overtaken Japan in PPP terms. 599 It is expected to perform the even
more remarkable feat of becoming the world’s third largest economy in real
terms in slightly over a decade from now. India’s meteoric rise has been
fuelled by a remarkable shift in its economic fortunes. During a period when
growth remained modest or sluggish across much of the industrialized world,
India’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew a remarkable 7.4 per cent in
2014. 600
Even as the world has faced an unprecedented global economic crisis and
recession, India continued to grow at a time when most countries in the world
suffered negative growth rates in at least one quarter in the last four years.
Many reasons have been attributed for this success. First, our banks and
financial institutions were not tempted to buy the toxic mortgage-supported
securities and engage in the fancy derivatives and credit-default swaps that
ruined several Western financial institutions. Second, our merchandise
exports increased by 20.2 per cent in May 2018 from 2017 and our services
exports continued to do well. 601 Third, remittances from our overseas Indian
community remained robust, reaching $55.75 billion in 2009–10 and nearly
$69 billion in 2017, the bulk of which came from the hardworking blue-collar
Indian expatriate community in the Gulf. 602 Fourth, most of our GDP does
not come from the external sector but from Indians producing goods and
services for other Indians in India.
Half of our growth has come from private consumption, less than 10 per
cent from external demand; this compares with 65 per cent of China’s real
GDP growth coming from exports, and only 25 per cent from private
consumption. India has the highest household savings rate in Asia, at 32 per
cent of disposable income. In fact, 65 per cent of our national annual savings
come from households (it’s under 40 per cent in China). Indian banks have a
fraction of the bad loans that China’s banks suffer.
Around 4.75 million people are added to our workforce every year, while
China’s has grown at a much lesser rate while growing older. 603 However,
this demographic dividend will only work in our favour if we can educate and
train our young people to seize the opportunities available to them in the
twenty-first century—opportunities that entrepreneurs are creating. Our
demographic dividend could become a demographic disaster if we continue
to produce legions of uneducated (or undereducated) and unemployed (and
largely unemployable), and therefore very frustrated young men and women.
Since we have a huge middle class, larger than every country bar the US
and China, purchasing power is impressive. We have a big food grain
surplus. Declining oil and commodity prices have favoured us. Inflation,
which used to be very high a couple of years ago, had been contained, thanks
largely to the collapse in fuel prices, but is now rising again as fuel prices
rise. Our fiscal deficit has been going down. We have a manageable current
account deficit. With China slowing and providing multiple barriers to entry,
and Europe stagnating, there are very few places in the world that provide the
opportunities that India does to investors. The country that looks best placed
to provide the next engine for the world economy is India.
The Indian private sector is efficient and entrepreneurial and is
compensating for the inadequacies of the state. India is good at the art of
channeling domestic savings into productive investments, which is why it has
relied so much less on foreign direct investment, and is even exporting FDI to
OECD countries, as the sight of the British prime minister driving an Indian-
owned car (the Jaguar) epitomizes. India’s entrepreneurial capital and
management skills are well able to control and manage assets in the
sophisticated financial markets of the developed West.
It is possible for India to vastly step up its exports, be a hub of world-
class education and take major strides in the manufacturing sector. But for all
this a combination of policies is needed, ranging from exchange rate
management to micro-level stimuli.
The old joke runs that the Indian economy grows at night, when the
government is asleep. But if we are to see the light of a new dawn, the
government needs to wake up—and stay awake. The bad news is that it
hasn’t yet shown any signs of doing so.
Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in May 2014 was initially
hailed worldwide as marking the advent of a more business-friendly
government in the world’s largest democracy. Encouraged by Mr Modi’s pro-
market sound bites, investors rushed to praise him as a new messiah of
development.
Such talk continues, but it seems increasingly removed from the BJP’s
central preoccupations. In fact, as we have seen, Narendra Modi rose to
power at the head of a family of right-wing organizations that largely do not
share his economic priorities and that are obsessed with so-called ‘cultural
nationalism’—which is essentially just repackaged Hindu chauvinism.
The tension between Mr Modi’s avowed economic reformism and the
cultural nativism that animates his government’s electoral base is a major
impediment to progress. After all, the political majority that PM Modi needs
to pursue his economic policies depends on the organizational capacity of the
very people whose chauvinism is undermining him.
Investors are looking with mounting concern at Mr Modi’s inability to
manage this contradiction in his own support base. Foreigners are particularly
concerned. As negative press increased abroad, potential investors have
begun to feel skittish.
‘What to think about the recent anti-Christian and Muslim tirades and
conversion propositions?’ said one foreign chief executive to me, on the
verge of committing a major investment to India. ‘Conversion and
ethnic/religious cleansing doesn’t ring well here in Germany particularly. The
bizarre dream of a 100 per cent Hindu India would be an India with little or
no foreign support. That is not what India deserves.’ He added, in an email: ‘I
doubt the Middle Eastern investors would welcome an anti-Muslim policy
either. They could react by turning off the $-spigot. Europeans and
Americans certainly would scale back considerably if Christians are exposed
to an inquisition in reverse.’
Comments like these point to the dangerous economic implications of the
Modi paradox. A domestic policy of Hindu–Muslim polarization might win
the BJP votes and seats in Parliament but will grievously undermine the
image he needs to project to attract foreign investment—without which the
economic successes he needs to legitimize his rule will be impossible. What
India ideally needs is communal harmony at home and enlightened economic
policies that bring in goodwill and investment from abroad. With the Modi
paradox, it increasingly seems you can have one or the other, but not both.

597 Puja Mehra, ‘Only 5.5% who earn are tax payers: Economic Survey’, The Hindu , 27
February 2016.
598 Amit Mudgill, ‘Since 1991, Budget size grew 19 times, economy 9 times; your income
5 times’, Economic Times , 19 February 2018.
599 Devika Banerji and Rishi Shah, ‘India overtakes Japan to become third-largest
economy in purchasing power parity’, Economic Times, 19 April 2012.
600 ‘GDP growth (annual %)’, World Bank
<https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?
end=2017&name_desc=false&start=2014 >.
601 ‘India’s merchandise exports jumps 20.2% in May 2018’, Business Standard , 18 June
2018.
602 ‘India highest recipient of remittances at $69 billion, says World Bank’, Economice
Times , 23 April 2018.
603 Sabina Dewan. ‘Only 4.75 million join India’s workforce annually, not 12 million as
claimed’, IndiaSpend , 21 May 2018.
 V

FLIGHTS OF FANCY
Narendra Modi has spent over a year of his four years as prime
minister travelling around the world instead of attending to the
problems the country faces. His tireless energy is admirable,
measurable results few and far between. It would have been another
matter if his extensive travels, the most by any Indian prime minister
in history, had actually done the country much good. Not a chance.
Our relationship with Pakistan is rocky, China is pushing us around,
ties with the US are at a low ebb, Nepal mistrusts us and is moving
towards China, the Maldives refuses new visas to Indians, and so on.
The abandon with which Mr Modi hugs world leaders has clearly not
borne much fruit. In this section I take a look at the various foreign
policy failures of the prime minister and show how they could have
been avoided.
 chapter forty

MR MODI’S IMPROMPTU FOREIGN POLICY

As chairman of Parliament’s External Affairs Committee, I have always

proudly articulated our tradition that political differences stop at the water’s
edge—there isn’t a Congress foreign policy or a BJP foreign policy, only
Indian foreign policy. Yet I can’t help feeling that there are aspects of the
Modi government’s foreign policy in the last four years that are not easy for
many to swallow as India’s, rather than his.
As the BJP celebrated its fourth anniversary of assuming office, it was
safe to conclude that we have at its helm a prime minister whose foreign
policy report card has largely been a tale of much activity and few results.
Like most Indians, I acknowledge the energy Narendra Modi has brought
to his foreign travels—forty-one trips in four years to fifty-two countries, as
of June 2018. 604 (Even if it means that his office still owes an outstanding
amount of over ₹325 crore to the debt-ridden national carrier, Air India, as on
31 January 2018 605 ). Mr Modi’s desire to introduce himself to the world
was entirely understandable after many years of international ostracism
where the only country willing to grant him a visa seemed to be China. He
can be forgiven for overcompensating somewhat: the website Asia Times
calculated that Prime Minister Modi was out of his office every third day in
his first four years in power, spending 477 out of 1,491 days—up till
Tuesday, 26 June 2018—in his term as PM visiting other countries as well as
various Indian states. 606 This is equivalent to a year and three months out of
his four years as prime minister. (PM Modi’s favourite destination remains
China, which he has visited six times, including twice in 2018, but the United
States and Germany come close, with five trips each.)
While it is fair to depict the prime minister as an energetic salesman
abroad for the Government of India, his travels came at the expense of
domestic priorities, where—in an over-centralized government—key
decisions and appointments were kept pending because of the prime
minister’s unavailability. And as India itself underperformed, the credibility
of the star salesman himself increasingly came under question. After all, how
long can a salesman impress by the sheer force of oratory and cleverly
designed international spectacles if the package he is selling is empty?
Mr Modi has also proved unable to keep his domestic political interests
out of his foreign policy. In countries with a substantial Indian population,
including the US, UK and Australia but also the UAE, Philippines, Kenya,
Singapore and Israel, he had special events arranged for him to address the
resident Indian community, often in large stadiums like New York’s Madison
Square Garden. These events were designed to promote the greater glory of
Narendra Modi and to denigrate India’s achievements before he came to
power; on more than one occasion he claimed Indians had been ashamed of
their passports till his assumption of office. 607 This is scarcely a line
calculated to enhance the country’s image abroad, even if it served narrow
political objectives back home (and reportedly enhanced the BJP’s coffers
through generous donations from attendees and other well-heeled
expatriates).
Moreover, worryingly his visits inevitably sparked a justifiable fear
among many observers that the headlines and speeches surrounding his visits
were merely ‘feel good’ aspects that mask growing troubles elsewhere and
the serious lack of a cohesive foreign policy blueprint for the country.
This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that the ‘achhe din’ that were
promised to the people of India remain completely out of sight and the phrase
has now silently been supplanted by the equally vapid ‘New India’, an
anachronism if at all. Lofty foreign policy pronouncements have helped
divert attention from domestic concerns and preserved the image of Mr
Modi’s India to a large extent, but even here a feeling of being let down has
been mounting for some time. Even the most fervent sympathizers of the
prime minister are now beginning to tire of the photo ops and the ‘breaking
news’ stories of Mr Modi’s tireless travels abroad, seemingly with little
connection to the needs of the aam aadmi at home.
For a government driven by (and drawing political capital from) its
lavishly funded publicity machine, this is becoming a problem. India, as I
have said often, needs to strike a balance between its hard power and soft
power: it is not the country with the bigger army that wins but that which tells
the better story—at the moment, the story Mr Modi and his colleagues in
government are pitching to the world looks less and less convincing with
every passing month. If foreign policy were merely a question of making fine
speeches, then the prime minister would score top marks. But substance must
follow grandiloquent oratory and unfortunately for Mr Modi, he has very
little substance to show for his efforts abroad, and only a shipload more of
promises to add to the titanic stock already piled high at home.
Hindutva ideologues have tried to construct a distinctive “Modi doctrine”
in foreign policy. A book of that name, published under the auspices of the
RSS-affiliated Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, even lays
out its five principal features: ‘Samman—dignity and honour; Samvad—
greater engagement and dialogue; Samriddhi—shared prosperity; Suraksha—
regional and global security; and Sanskriti evam Sabhyata—cultural and
civilizational linkages.’ 608 But aside from the Sanskrit terms, it is difficult to
see how these five ideas differ from the policy principles of previous Indian
governments. Mr Modi’s foreign secretary for three years (2015–18), S.
Jaishankar, the senior civil servant in the Ministry of External Affairs,
famously suggested that India, earlier content with being a ‘balancing
power’, was now seeking, under Narendra Modi, to be a ‘leading power’. 609
But how precisely the Modi government has set about achieving this remains
a mystery. A grandiloquent speech by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, head of
the organization of which Mr Modi has been a lifetime pracharak, declaring
that India was on its way to becoming a vishwa guru (teacher of the world),
embarrassingly summed up both the pretensions and the embarrassment of
India’s global self-projection. 610 We have a government that believes its
own press releases even when those they are directed at ignore them. The one
concrete achievement of PM Modi’s foreign policy appears to be that of
getting the United Nations to adopt International Yoga Day, since it has
meant people around the world following an Indian practice in a highly
visible way that enhances our global image, with yoga events taking place at
prominent locations around the world (though the manner in which the
government subsequently pursued the Guinness Book of World Records over
the issue was, to put it mildly, unseemly). That, alas, is the extent of the
positive side of the ledger, where the PM’s efforts have borne tangible
results. For the rest, the report card is decidedly troubling.
India’s foreign policy appears to many observers to be created
impromptu, on the hoof, as it were, in the course of the prime minister’s
peripatetic travels. Key discussions which should have taken place in the
preparation of these visits seem to follow the prime minister’s
pronouncements, rather than precede and justify them. The announcements,
usually of investments to come, have largely failed to materialize. And stated
goals, such as those accompanying the impressive India-African Summit in
New Delhi or the bold promises of $100 billion in Chinese investments
during Xi Jinping’s visit in September 2014, do not seem to be accompanied
by the investment of adequate resources to fulfil them or coordination with
various government agencies to achieve their announced goals. The summit
showcased this government’s tendency to see such occasions as events to be
well managed, rather than part of a strategy requiring meticulous
implementation. And the $100 billion was eventually watered down to $20
billion, served with an embarrassing side of incursions by the PLA,
audaciously while Xi was still on Indian soil. 611 Very little of that $20
billion has actually arrived.
Indeed, the External Affairs Ministry does not appear to be involved in
much serious follow-up work to the PM’s tours. Fundamental decisions are
taken in the PMO, if not by the prime minister himself, along with his
national security adviser. And while the external affairs minister is herself a
respected and widely liked politician, her role in the formulation of foreign
policy appears to be so tightly circumscribed that diplomats in Delhi have
taken to referring to her, with a smile, as the minister for consular affairs. Her
time seems to be spent largely on Twitter, replying to voters’ complaints
about her ministry’s services, helping Indians who have lost their passports
abroad and Pakistanis needing heart surgery in India—not to mention the
totally pointless effort to splurge taxpayers’ money to secure Hindi as an
official language at the United Nations. Meanwhile, the ministry has had to
swallow the embarrassment of seeing ‘Yoga and Indian Culture Acharyas’
(well-versed in Sanskrit, yoga and the Hindu scriptures) appointed with
diplomatic status at Indian embassies to promote Hindu culture abroad, even
as its core diplomatic staff languishes at levels comparable to New Zealand
and Singapore, countries of considerably smaller population and modest
global aspiration. The gap between the aspirations Mr Modi loves to speak of
and the capacity of the Ministry of External Affairs to fulfil them has never
been more glaring. 612
Where has Mr Modi’s India been found wanting in the process?
The red ink on Prime Minister Modi’s report card begins with the
neighbourhood, which is where any government must act with the greatest
caution and sensitivity to balance our national interests with regional
circumstances beyond our control.
Since Mr Modi’s swearing in—a pageant of sorts that saw the premiers of
Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan in attendance and which was
lauded as the grand inauguration of a new chapter in our international
relations—India’s ties with Pakistan have witnessed more ups and downs
than a child’s yo-yo. The prime minister—a man who systematically
obstructed the UPA government’s peacemaking efforts with Pakistan and
whose campaign speeches thrived on demonizing that country—had
excoriated the Congress for ‘serving chicken biryani’ to a Pakistani visitor.
613 Now he was exchanging shawls and saris with his Islamabad counterpart,
along with sentimental letters to each other’s mothers. (I mischievously
tweeted my hope that chicken biryani would be on PM Modi’s dinner menu
for his Pakistani guest: it wasn’t.)
By inviting Nawaz Sharif to Delhi when he took office in 2014, Mr Modi
was believed to have turned a historic page and opened a new era of bilateral
relations. But less than two months had passed before both countries were
exchanging artillery fire across the still-sensitive border. Talks between our
respective foreign secretaries were called off when the Pakistanis proposed
meeting Indian Kashmiri separatist leaders on their proposed visit—
something our visitors had always done and to which earlier governments had
responded with confident official indifference. 614 In November of the same
year, at the SAARC summit in Nepal, Mr Modi pointedly stared at a brochure
to ignore his Pakistani counterpart as he walked past, though it was later
revealed that the two leaders had met privately in a hotel suite belonging to
an Indian businessman. 615 The pattern repeated itself in December 2015,
when Mr Modi made an impromptu visit to Lahore to attend a celebration at
Mr Sharif’s home; a week later relations turned frosty again after seven
Indians were killed by Pakistani militants at the Pathankot Air Force Base,
later followed by an equally condemnable attack on the Indian army at Uri in
September 2016 and at Nagrota the month after. 616 In retribution, the Indian
army conducted a series of ‘surgical strikes’, lightning precision attacks, on
terrorist camps operating out of Pakistani soil. While the nation rightfully
applauded the swift response of our armed forces, the present government
appeared to be more preoccupied with spinning the strike as the first of its
kind—a testament to the supposed iron mind of their prime minister. This
was blatantly untrue (it is now well known that similar strikes have been
ordered in the past). Worse, the entire approach reflects the lack of a cohesive
policy framework when it comes to negotiating the relationship with our most
turbulent neighbour.
India–Pakistan relations have swung back and forth, as though they are
determined more by the unpredictable moods of our leadership than on a
coherent foreign policy and vision for peace, let alone a practical roadmap.
One day the government declares its ‘red lines’ and twice calls off talks with
Pakistan because its representatives met with the Kashmiri-separatist
Hurriyat; the next day the red lines don’t matter. One day the ruling party
avers that talks and terror don’t go together and that Pakistan cannot be
rewarded with a visit till it makes progress on punishing the perpetrators of
26/11; the next day the PM is winging impulsively to Lahore, sending India’s
surprised high commissioner scurrying to the airport to receive his boss. 617
This is foreign policy by whim, not by design.
So too with Nepal—where New Delhi’s de facto blockade choked, which
I explain in some detail in Chapter 46 , the nation’s economy, cut off its oil
supplies, created genuine hardship and provoked a groundswell of hostility
among ordinary Nepalis. This, and the behaviour that accompanied the
episode, was a blunder of such Himalayan proportions that the only country
on earth whose relationship with us has been fraternal enough for us to
maintain open borders with it, now shows every sign of turning towards
China instead. Telling then, of the current strain in relations, is the fact that
once Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli was sworn into office for the second
time on February 15 this year, the first leader to visit his country was his
Pakistani counterpart Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. 618
One astute observer told me privately that ‘PMO took its eyes off the
ball’. But when decision-making has been so centralized in the Modi regime
that every ministry has to send its important files to the PMO for clearance,
how many balls can Mr Modi and his beleaguered minions keep their eyes
on?
India’s mess in Nepal adds to the growing sense of disquiet amongst
students of Indian foreign policy about the Modi government’s management
of relations on the subcontinent. A combination of arrogance and ineptitude
is all too often visible where subtlety and proactive diplomacy could have
delivered the desired results. A raid into Myanmar in hot pursuit of terrorist
sanctuaries had six precedents under the UPA, but each had been shrouded in
a discreet silence; the Modi government chose to announce their one raid
with such bellicose rhetoric that it embarrassed Myanmar, the violation of
whose sovereignty New Delhi was trumpeting. 619 Relations with our
neighbours—Pakistan, Nepal and most recently, the Maldives—are worse
than they have ever been. The Modi government’s fecklessness has caused
negative consequences for private Indian interests too. The Maldives has not
only cancelled projects involving Indian companies, but started turning away
Indian applications for employment visas, leading resorts to advertise posts
open to any nationalities but ‘Indians need not apply’. 620 Meanwhile China
has been signing contracts previously offered to Indians, and Chinese and
Pakistani warships have been calling on Maldivian ports. 621
On the wider global stage, the list of failures is dizzyingly high. The US,
for all of PM Modi’s visits, has been playing fast and loose with the so-called
‘2+2’ (where the foreign and defence ministers of both countries meet)
dialogue with India being postponed twice and tensions over trade tariffs
reaching an all-time high, with each country slapping tariffs on the other’s
products. 622 The US sent its Indian-origin ambassador to the UN, Nikki
Haley, to instruct the Modi government to cut back its links with Iran, a
principal supplier (and geographically the closest to India) of vitally-needed
oil and gas. 623 At the same time the Modi government’s unctuous currying
of favour with the US has led to a precipitous decline in relations with
Russia, with the much-touted joint fifth-generation aircraft project being
abandoned. 624 European relations are adrift and Britain remains bemused by
its dealing with our prime minister. Despite a few announcements of aid and
trade made during Mr Modi’s visit to Africa for the BRICS summit in July
2018, our engagement with the continent has proved to be a sorry tale of
high-level neglect.
China’s is a particularly disappointing story. Indeed the most glaring
embarrassment in our recent foreign policy has been the way Modi’s
government has handled India’s relationship with China, starting with the
fiasco of President Xi’s over-hyped visit in 2014 and culminating in the
complete mismanagement of the military stand-off between the two countries
in Doklam, which the government claimed had been resolved in a triumph for
Indian diplomacy in August 2017. The PR exercise that Modi Inc. managed
to spin from that event was undone a few months later when consistent
reports and publicly available satellite imagery all pointed to the likelihood
that the Chinese were consolidating their presence on the Himalayan plateau
that directly overlooks India’s strategic Siliguri corridor, and had been doing
so for some time. 625
But the inconsistency in this government’s foreign policy style and
narrative is not new. In the lead-up to and during his election campaign in
2014, Narendra Modi and the BJP had constantly berated the Government of
India for being unable to do anything about frequent Chinese incursions
across the disputed frontier. Two years later, the same Mr Modi not only
embarked on a stream of effusive meetings with both the Chinese president
(with whom he shared much publicized bonhomie on several occasions) and
foreign minister, but also invited China to help modernize the Indian railways
and has removed government restrictions on Chinese investment in sensitive
sectors like ports and telecoms. 626 As to the border incursions, the BJP
government echoed the very line it had denounced when the Congress
government uttered it—that since the two countries have differing
perceptions of where the border lies, each patrols in areas the other considers
to be theirs. What was excoriated by Mr Modi as pusillanimity and
appeasement in the Congress have now, overnight, become wisdom and
statesmanship in the BJP.
Meanwhile China has shown no inclination to make progress on the
intractable border dispute between the two countries; it has extended overt
protection to Pakistan after the Modi government’s belligerent PR offensive
on the ‘strategic strikes’ 627 ; it has displaced India in the Maldives; thwarted
an Indian deal to set up a naval base in the Seychelles 628 ; and through the
China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $62 billion project, it has outflanked
India by creating a strategic transportation link between the Pakistani port of
Gwadar (which China, to all intents and purposes, controls and runs) to its
own western provinces, partly through territory that India claims. 629
There have of course been some foreign policy successes, but these have
almost entirely been in areas where Mr Modi and his party chose to follow
the path already laid by successive previous governments without upsetting
the delicate balance upon which these relationships rested. One of the prime
minister’s greatest achievements is that he has reversed the BJP’s formal
opposition in Parliament to the Indo–US Nuclear Deal and to the seminal
land boundary agreement with Bangladesh—both of which were UPA
initiatives and both of which were wise policy reversals by the NDA
government of the positions the BJP had taken in opposition. In a
continuation of UPA policy and as a reflection of the country’s image as a
responsible nuclear power, India was subsequently admitted to three global
missile-nuclear technology groupings. 630
In the election campaign, Narendra Modi had breathed fire and brimstone
about Bangladesh, accusing it of sending millions of illegal immigrants into
India and promising that the moment he won the election, they would all
have to ‘pack their bags’ and leave India for home. 631 Bangladeshi officials
had publicly and privately expressed their disquiet that any attempt to do this
could be deeply destabilizing for their politically fragile state. Within weeks
of his victory, however, Mr Modi’s foreign minister was all smiles on her
first official visit abroad—to Bangladesh. Illegal immigration wasn’t even
mentioned in Dhaka. 632 However, the BJP government in Assam has
unwisely reopened the issue of deportations, and disquiet is mounting in our
friendly neighbour as the National Register of Citizens identifies individuals
to be ‘foreigners’ who are potentially deportees. There is, however, no
deportation agreement in place between India and Bangladesh. 633
The Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh concluded by Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh, which Indian diplomats had considered vital to
removing bilateral irritants, had never been implemented because UPA
couldn’t win the BJP’s support in Parliament to ratify the territorial swaps
required. But now the Modi government is the biggest votary of the Land
Boundary Agreement, which the Opposition cooperated fully in ratifying. 634
The BJP had been virulently critical of the Indo–US nuclear deal,
Manmohan Singh’s signature foreign policy triumph. They had even
supported a no-confidence motion against the UPA government on the issue
of the deal. 635 Yet, in a quiet and underreported move, the Modi government
wisely ratified the India-specific additional protocol, a UPA undertaking to
grant greater access to India’s civilian nuclear sites to the UN’s International
Atomic Energy Agency. 636
I would also say this government’s Africa policy has been a qualified
success, although a lot more could have been done and the level of
inattention is disappointing. Here again, though, what PM Modi is doing,
more often than not, is building on the foundations laid by the UPA
government.
I will explore some of India’s specific foreign relationships under
Narendra Modi in the chapters that follow. However, what is clear about Mr
Modi’s foreign policy is that his stance today, now that he is sitting in South
Block, is different from what it was when he was in Gandhinagar.
The cerebral American politician, New York Governor Mario Cuomo,
once memorably observed that you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.
Hard reality, he suggested, replaces the flights of policy fantasy that afflict
those without power.
Welcome to the foreign policy world of Narendra Modi.

604 ‘In 41 trips to 52 countries in 4 years, PM Narendra Modi spent ₹355 crore: RTI’,
Indian Express , 28 June 2018.
605 ‘Govt owes Air India over ₹325 crore for VVIP chartered flights’, Times of India , 11
March 2018.
606 Vishakha Saxena and Aritry Das, ‘Frequent flier Modi “goes missing on key issues at
home”’, Asia Times , 28 June 2018.
607 ‘PM Modi says Indians were ashamed of their country before he assumed office;
Twitter outrages’, News18 , 19 May 2015.
608 Anirban Ganguly, in Anirban Ganguly, Vijay Chauthaiwale and U. K. Sinha, The Modi
Doctrine: New Paradigms in India’s Foreign Policy, New Delhi: Wisdom Tree, 2016, p.
179.
609 IIS Fullerton Lecture, Singapore, 20 July 2015, www.mea.gov.in .
610 Manoj Anand, ‘RSS strength not to domineer but to make India Vishwa Guru: Mohan
Bhagwat’, Deccan Chronicle , 21 January 2018.
611 Nayanima Basu, ‘China dashes $100-bn hope, to invest $20 bn over 5 years’, Business
Standard , 19 September 2014.
612 Iain Marlow, ‘India’s Diplomat Shortage Leaves it far Behind China’, Economic Times,
31 August 2018.
613 Rajeev Sharma, ‘Modi’s swearing-in: Why Nawaz shouldn’t expect chicken biryani’,
FirstPost , 26 May 2014.
614 Suhasini Haidar, ‘India-Pak. talks are off’, The Hindu , 18 August 2014.
615 ‘When Nawaz Sharif went for his speech, PM Modi read SAARC booklet’, NDTV , 27
November 2014.
616 Shivam Vij, ‘Uri attack: Narendra Modi’s aggressive stand on Pakistan might make
India more vulnerable to terror’, Quartz , 19 September 2016.
617 Suhasini Haidar and Kallol Bhattacharjee, ‘PM goes to Lahore, makes a Christmas date
with history’, The Hindu , 25 December 2015.
618 Elizabeth Roche, ‘Why India is keeping a close eye on Pakistan PM’s visit to Nepal’,
Livemint , 5 March 2018.
619 Sanjeev Miglani, ‘India tries to assuage Myanmar after cross-border raid boasts’,
Reuters , 15 June 2015.
620 Suhasini Haidar, ‘Downturn in ties with Maldives hits Indians’ job opportunities’, The
Hindu , 13 June 2018.
621 ‘Maldives signs trade pact with China’, The Hindu , 8 December 2017 and ‘Pakistan
Navy ships visit Maldives’, Daily Times , 21 April 2017.
622 Yashwant Raj, ‘Why friction between India, US is rising when the two nations are
trying to improve ties’, Hindustan Times , 29 June 2018.
623 ‘US Ambassador to UN Nikki Haley meets PM Modi, calls for cutting dependence on
Iranian oil’, Indian Express , 27 June 2018.
624 Amrita Nair-Ghaswalla, ‘Russia drops “decade-old” stealth fighter project with India’,
Hindu BusinessLine , 17 July 2018.
625 Jonathan Marcus, ‘China–India border tension: satellite imagery shows Doklam plateau
build-up’, BBC , 26 January 2018.
626 Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury, ‘Chinese companies plan big investment across sectors in
India’, Economic Times , 26 May 2016.
627 ‘After Modi’s warning, China says international community should support Pakistan on
counter-terrorism efforts’, Outlook , 20 April 2018.
628 Vinay Kaura, ‘India’s Seychelles naval base plan hits wall: New Delhi must commit
greater economic, military resources to preserve its interests’, FirstPost , 30 March 2018.
629 ‘China-Pakistan sign new deals for Gwadar port’s development: CPEC may turn out to
be India’s security and strategic problem’, FirstPost , 31 January 2018.
630 ‘India and the clubs that control war tech exports’, Indian Express , 30 January 2018.
631 ‘Mamata dares Modi on Bangladeshi migrants issue’, Indian Express , 3 May 2014.
632 ‘Sushma bid to build Dhaka bridge - No breakthrough on two pacts opposed by
Mamata, say officials’, Telegraph India , 27 June 2014.
633 Annie Gowen, ‘India’s crackdown on illegal immigration could leave 4 million people
stateless’, Washington Post , 30 July 2018.
634 Smriti Kak Ramachandran, ‘RS passes Bill on land pact with Bangladesh’, The Hindu ,
6 May 2015.
635 ‘A look back at the 2008 floor test when UPA faced no-confidence’, Hindustan Times ,
22 July 2018.
636 ‘Nuclear deal: India to ratify additional protocol to Indian specific safeguard
agreement’, Indian Express , 23 June 2014.
 chapter forty-one

THE INDIA-PAKISTAN YO-YO

When Pakistan was created in 1947, its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
publicly expressed the hope (and the expectation) that its relations with India
would come to resemble those between Canada and the United States. 637 His
idea was of two countries with more in common than not—separate
politically but united culturally and linked by strong economic ties and close
human relationships. As we all know, that was not to be. Today, over seventy
years later, with a cricket hero the newly anointed prime minister of Pakistan,
how should we look back at this relationship, and look forward to the
uncertain future?
Pakistan was carved out of the stooped shoulders of India by the
departing British in 1947 as a homeland for India’s Muslims, but (at least
until very recently, if one can extrapolate from the two countries’ population
growth trends) more Muslims have remained in India than live in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s relations with India have ever since been bedevilled by a festering
dispute over the divided territory of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority
state. Decades of open conflict and simmering hostility, punctuated by
spasms of bonhomie that always seem to sputter out into recrimination, have
characterized a relationship that has circumscribed India’s options and
affected its strategic choices. The knowledge that our nearest neighbour,
populated as it is by a people of a broadly similar ethnic mix and cultural
heritage, defines itself in opposition to India and exercises its diplomatic and
military energies principally to thwart and undermine us, has inevitably
coloured India’s actions and calculations on the regional and global stage.
The resort by Pakistan to the sponsorship of militancy and terrorism within
India as an instrument of state policy since the 1980s has made relations
nearly as bad as in the immediate aftermath of independence.
 There is, in Indian eyes, a deep-seated pathology at work here. Former
Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqqani has written of ‘Pakistan’s near
pathological obsession with India’ and the ‘paranoia’ of its elite, fuelled by
the resentment of emigrés from India who developed ‘a national narrative of
grievance’. 638 These migrants, who did not hail from the territory of the
country they were ruling, had to develop and sustain an ideological narrative
about Pakistan, giving birth to a nationalism that was reductive: Pakistan’s
principal raison d’être became that it was not India and that it defined its
interests in opposition to India’s.
The ‘two-nation theory’ that Hindus and Muslims could not live together
and the notion of a thousand years of conflict between the two peoples had to
be created, justified and propagated, including through the ‘prescribed myths’
of tendentious history textbooks. As the Pakistani commentator Khaled
Ahmed observed: ‘Pakistani nationalism comprises 95 per cent India hatred.
They call it Islam because that is how we learn to differentiate between
ourselves and India.’ 639 Islam became central to Pakistan’s sense of itself: as
the academic Waheed-uz-Zaman put it in 1973, ‘If the Arabs, the Turks, the
Iranians, God forbid, give up Islam, the Arabs yet remain Arabs, the Turks
remain Turks, the Iranians remain Iranians, but what do we remain if we give
up Islam?’ 640 One Pakistani official answered the question to the New York
Times in 1980: ‘second-rate Indians’. 641
If this visceral hatred of India is, to Pakistanis, the main casus belli,
embellished by the ‘just cause’ of Kashmir, the horrors that were inflicted on
Mumbai by terrorists from Pakistan at the end of November 2008 remain the
starting point for any Indian’s discussion of Pakistan. They have left an
abiding impact on all Indians. India picked itself up after the assault, but it
counted the cost in lives lost, property destroyed and, most of all, in the
scarred psyche of a ravaged nation. Deep and sustained anger across the
country—at its demonstrated vulnerability to terror and at the multiple
institutional failures that allowed such loss of life—prompted the immediate
resignations of the home minister in Delhi and the chief minister and his
deputy in Maharashtra. But ‘26/11’ in Mumbai represented a qualitative
change in Pakistan’s long-running attempts to pursue ‘war by other means’.
The assault, and the possibility of its recurrence, implied that there could be
other consequences, yet to be measured, that the world will have to come to
terms with in the future—consequences whose impact could extend well
beyond India’s borders, with implications for the peace and security of the
region, and the world.
After the killings, the platitudes flowed like blood. Terrorism is
unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in
unreserved condemnation of this latest atrocity, and so mind-numbingly on.
Commentators in America tripped over themselves to pronounce the night
and day of carnage India’s 9/11. But India has endured many attempted
9/11s, notably a ferocious assault on its Parliament in December 2001 that
nearly led to all-out war against the assailants’ sponsors, Pakistan, and
continuing into a series of assaults on Indian installations in 2017. In 2008
alone, terrorist bombs had taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and
(in an eerie dress rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several
different places on one searing day in Assam. Mumbai, however, combined
all the four elements of its precursors: by attacking it, the terrorists hit India’s
economy, its tourism and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the
city’s openness to the world. So the terrorists hit multiple targets in Mumbai,
both literally and figuratively. They caused death and destruction to our
country, searing India’s psyche, showing up the limitations of its security
apparatus and humiliating its government. They dented the worldwide image
of India as an emerging economic giant, a success story of the era of
globalization and an increasing magnet for investors and tourists. Instead, the
world was made to see an insecure and vulnerable India, a ‘soft state’
besieged by enemies who could strike it at will.
This has been the fate of successive governments in India. Prime Minister
Vajpayee’s extraordinary overland visit to Lahore in 1999, his historic speech
at the Minar-e-Pakistan repudiating his earlier hawkish views, and the signing
of the Lahore Declaration were followed within months by the Pakistani
incursion into Kargil. While to his credit Prime Minister Modi made attempts
to reach out to his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif—particularly with the
invitation to his inauguration in May 2014 and the subsequent impromptu trip
to Pakistan on the occasion of Mr Sharif’s birthday on Christmas Day 2016—
this did not stop the Pakistani ‘deep state’ later sponsoring multiple attacks in
Pathankot, Uri and Nagrota.
India responded in kind with what it called ‘surgical strikes’, lightning
precision attacks on terrorist camps operating within Pakistani soil
(something which, as I’ve said earlier in this book, India has resorted to in the
past without boasting about it). 642 With the publicly-announced strikes,
India has made clear that inaction is not the only possible response to terrorist
provocations.
It is a brave and slightly risky strategy, because it obliges India to pursue
a similar course of action when the next significant terrorist strike occurs.
Still, a country that refuses to suffer repeated body blows earns more respect
than one whose restraint can be interpreted as weakness. If this
determination, and Pakistan’s ensuing diplomatic isolation, prompts Pakistani
generals to rethink their policy of sponsoring terrorism as an instrument of
state policy, peace between the neighbours could once again become a
possibility. But, for India, as subsequent attacks have demonstrated, such
hopes have been betrayed too often in the recent past for it to continue to turn
the other cheek.
II

For India, the central problem blighting the relationship between the two
subcontinental neighbours is not, as Pakistani propagandists like to suggest,
Kashmir, but rather the nature of the Pakistani state itself—specifically, the
stranglehold over Pakistan of one of the world’s most lavishly funded
militaries (in terms of percentage of national resources and GDP consumed).
643 To paraphrase Voltaire on Prussia, in India, the state has an army; in
Pakistan, the army has a state. Unlike in India, one does not join the army in
Pakistan merely to defend the country; one joins the army to run the country.
The military has ruled Pakistan directly for a majority of the years of its
existence, and indirectly for most of the rest. Until 2013, no previous elected
civilian government had been allowed to complete its full term 644 ; Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto was an exception but he was arrested (and later hanged)
immediately after he completed his initial tenure. The army lays down the
‘red lines’ no civilian leader—and not even the ‘free’ media—dare cross.
This situation goes back to the very founding of the country. At Partition,
Pakistan received, thanks to the lopsided application of the ‘martial races’
theory by the British, a larger share of undivided India’s military than of
either its population or territory. With 21 per cent of India’s population and
17 per cent of its revenue, Pakistan got 30 per cent of the Indian Army, 40
per cent of the Indian Navy and 20 per cent of the Indian Air Force, obliging
its government to devote 75 per cent of the country’s first budget to cover the
costs of maintaining this outsize force. The disproportionately large military
establishment had a vested interest in its own perpetuation; as Haqqani points
out, it ‘needed a threat if it was to be maintained’. 645 Sadly, instead of
cutting back on its commitments to the military, Pakistan kept feeding the
monster till it devoured the country itself. Even when Pakistan lost half its
territory in the disastrous Bangladesh war of 1971, the army continued to
expand.
In return, the military establishment enjoys privileges unthinkable in
India. In addition, serving and retired military officials run army-controlled
shopping malls, petrol stations, real estate ventures, import-export enterprises
and even universities and think tanks.
For half the country’s existence, the military has ruled Pakistan directly
after a series of coups; the rest of the time it has stayed in the shadows,
controlling the elected civilian governments and calling the shots on foreign
and security policy (especially vis-à-vis India) that no government dares
challenge. Even civilian leaders with a popular base, like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
bribed the military with generous allocations in the vain hope that this would
forestall a coup against them. No Pakistani leader has had the courage, or the
foolhardiness, to confront the military’s stranglehold on power. There is no
reason to believe Imran Khan, heading a minority government, will be any
different.
III

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that, like hundreds of

Indians, I do know Imran Khan, the new prime minister of Pakistan. I first
met him nearly three decades ago in New York, at the home of his sister
Rubina, a UN colleague. I have since encountered him a few more times in
India, and duelled with him on television. When I led an Indian parliamentary
delegation to Islamabad in 2017, he sought a meeting with me. When told
that security restrictions would not permit me to leave the hotel, Imran came
over and spent an hour with me and my colleagues. He wanted to talk mainly
about my book An Era of Darkness , which he had read and could cite
extensively.
The problem is that he has two faces—a liberal, cosmopolitan and urbane
one, which is seen in London and Mumbai—and an uncompromisingly
hawkish Islamist one, an image he reserves for his Pakistani audiences. This
is the man who, after all, has had Hafiz Sayeed address his early rallies,
consorted with extremist parties and movements like the Tehreek e-Labbaik
Pakistan and the virulently anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, opposed
repealing the blasphemy law, supports the de-recognition of Ahmaddiyas as
Muslims 646 —and called Nawaz Sharif a coward for not responding
militarily to India’s 2016 ‘surgical strikes’. 647 Imran Khan’s loudly-
expressed sympathy for the Taliban even earned him the nickname ‘Taliban
Khan’.
But after his victory, he reached out to India, decrying each country’s
habit of blaming the other for its misfortunes. ‘If India takes one step, we will
take two steps,’ Imran Khan said to New Delhi. 648
It is clear that the military, having encouraged and perhaps sponsored
Imran Khan’s rise, sees him as the most plausible and useful instrument for
whichever policy they decide to adopt towards us—and the ‘India policy’ has
always been the prerogative of the military, as every PM who was inclined to
cross the military’s red lines found out. This means that—if, as some recent
statements of General Bajwa suggest, Pakistan feels the policy of hostility
has stopped paying dividends and must be changed—Imran Khan will turn on
the charm and lean towards India. 649 But if the army’s general headquarters
in Rawalpindi decides it prefers to turn the screws on India again,
encouraging the Lashkar-e-Taiba to conduct another 26/11, Imran will be the
mediagenic face of a belligerent approach.
Indeed, there is no shortage of evidence for the proposition that Imran’s
views on foreign policy largely mirror the army’s. Both oppose the US
presence in Afghanistan, and have condemned US–Pakistan military
operations and drone strikes in the area. Imran dismissed US President
Donald Trump as ‘ignorant and ungrateful’ for his criticisms of Pakistan’s
double-dealing (accepting American aid against terror while financing
terrorists itself). 650 And Imran has rarely parted from the military’s position
on India.
But this Pakistan election wasn’t really about foreign policy. India was
barely mentioned by the candidates, other than the ritual references to
Kashmir. It was about the Pakistani public’s widespread disillusionment with
a corrupt and ineffective establishment in power for too long (all civilian
governments since 1971 have featured either the Bhuttos or the Sharifs).
Imran Khan built his victory on a promise of ‘clean, transparent and
accountable government’, fealty to ‘true’ Islamic principles, overt religious
devotion (epitomized in his marrying a spiritualist ‘pirni’), and a fierce social
conservatism that many find hypocritical, given his colourful personal life
and the sensational personal revelations of his former wife, Reham Khan.
Millions of hopes are riding on Imran Khan today. The dust is yet to
settle as these words are written, but the most significant aspect of Imran’s
win must lie in the excuse it provides for those who really control Pakistan to
promote a change. When Nawaz Sharif sought to reach out to India, the army
stopped him. If now the army wants peace with India, it knows that a change
of prime minister will justify turning the page—New Delhi would always
want to give a new government a chance. We will need to wait a while to see
if the page can be turned, and whether Mr Modi will show the wisdom and
statesmanship necessary to turn it.
Whether this will or will not happen is hard to guess because, since Mr
Modi took office in May 2014, India–Pakistan relations have experienced
more ups and downs than a child’s yo-yo. The victory of a Hindu chauvinist
hardliner—a man who had systematically blocked his predecessor’s peace-
making efforts while in Opposition and demonized Pakistan in his campaign
speeches—was naturally assumed to portend a bilateral chill. Instead, Mr
Modi invited the then Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his
inauguration. Since then the relationship has veered wildly from one extreme
to the other—moments of extreme cordiality succeeded by incidents of
virulent acrimony.
Now that there is a chance of a new beginning, a well-considered and
pragmatic approach should inform our way forward with Pakistan, not
brinkmanship and posturing as have been seen from the Modi government.
The challenge is, of course, that the nature of the Pakistani state makes
peace difficult. Since the only way to justify the military’s disproportionate
dominance of Pakistani state and society is to preserve the myth of an ‘Indian
threat’, the Pakistani military will, many in India believe, continue to want to
keep the pot boiling, even if Kashmir were to be handed over to them on a
silver salver with a white ribbon tied around it. In the analysis of the
Pakistani commentator Cyril Almeida, the army is not strategically interested
in peace; it may not want war (which general relishes dying?) but it does not
want peace either.
From an international perspective, support for Pakistan from other
countries has also dealt the country a great deck of cards. American backing
for Pakistan as a Cold War ally absolved the country of the obligation to deal
constructively with India—a practice continued till recent times (and the jury
is still out on whether things will comprehensively change under Trump).
More worryingly, China’s backing of Pakistan in multiple international
forums, notably the Security Council and its Sanctions Committee, as well as
its deep strategic economic commitment to Pakistan, has only strengthened as
American commitment appears to be weakening. The China–Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC), which India justifiably argues undermines its
sovereignty since it runs through territory in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir that
China itself recognizes as disputed, has been a significant cause of worry for
New Delhi.
Similarly, Pakistan’s strategic choice of drawing closer to Arab West
Asia accentuated the sense of inveterate Islamism within Pakistan and
brought petrodollars and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam into its
prevailing ethos. Pakistani clerics and worse, official (and officially directed)
mass media, evolved and assiduously reiterated the theory of the Ghazwa-e-
Hadith, under which the Prophet himself had predicted a ‘final battle’ in Hind
before the End of Times. Jihadi groups were spawned, nurtured and
indoctrinated with the belief that every one of their assaults on Indians were
part of the Battle for India promised by Islam’s Prophet. But as Dr
Frankenstein discovered when his monster escaped his control, such
doctrines can bite their own creators; some jihadi groups, notably the
Pakistani Tehreek-e-Taliban, realized that ‘Hind’ in the Prophet’s time
included what is today Pakistan, and used the same Ghazwa-e-Hadith to
justify terrorist attacks on ‘godless’ installations of Pakistan’s military
establishment in the name of Islam.
On the other side, Indians have learned to endure the unspeakable horrors
of terrorist violence ever since malign men in Pakistan concluded that it was
cheaper and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat it
in conventional war. There had, after all, been four unsuccessful wars—the
failed attempts by Pakistan in 1947–48 and 1965 to wrest control over
Kashmir, the 1971 war that resulted in the birth of Bangladesh from the ruins
of the former East Pakistan and the undeclared Kargil war of 1999, in which
Pakistani soldiers were dressed in mufti to conceal their identities when they
surreptitiously seized the heights above Kargil in Kashmir until being
repelled in a heroic but costly action by the Indian army. Attack after attack
on Indian soil since then has been proven to have been financed, equipped
and guided from across the border, including two suicide bombings of the
Indian embassy in Kabul, the first of which was publicly traced by American
intelligence to Islamabad’s dreaded military special-ops agency, the Inter-
Services Intelligence (ISI) and its ‘Directorate S’ that collaborates with and
directs terrorists and militants.
India’s response has been defensive, not belligerent. India is a status quo
power that seeks nothing more than to be allowed to grow and develop in
peace, free from the destructive attentions of the Pakistani military and the
militants and terrorists it sponsors. Pakistan has sought to obscure this reality
by seeking to convince the West and China that its militarism is in response
to an ‘Indian threat’, a notion assiduously peddled in Washington and
London by highly paid lobbyists for Islamabad. The rationale for this
argument goes back to 1971, when India, in their version of the narrative,
attacked and dismembered Pakistan. This action, it suggested, reveals India’s
intentions: it is simply waiting for the opportunity to do to what remains of
Pakistan what it did to the country’s old political geography.
Yet it is clear that we want peace more than Pakistan does, because we
have more at stake when peace is violated. To those who suggest that we
should simply ignore our dysfunctional neighbours, accept the occasional
terrorist blast (and prevent the ones we can), tell ourselves there is nothing
we need from Pakistan and try to get on with our development free of the
incubus of that benighted land, there is only one answer: we cannot grow and
prosper without peace, and that is the one thing Pakistan can give us that we
cannot do without. We cannot choose to be uninterested in Pakistan, because
Pakistan is dangerously interested in us. By denying us the peace we crave,
Pakistan can undermine our vital national interests, above all that of our own
development. Investors shun warzones; traders are wary of markets that
might explode at any time; tourists do not travel to hotels that might be
terrorist targets. We should be aware of this too, and we should ensure they
are aware that we are aware. And yet we must engage Pakistan because we
cannot afford not to.
The differences that bedevil our relations with Pakistan can be
surmounted if we can arrive at mutually acceptable parameters that can
define our relationship in the future. Terrorism is certainly not one of those
parameters. When Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore seemed to augur
a thaw, Pathankot, Uri, Nagrota were all great setbacks on the path of
normalization. It will take concerted and credible action by Pakistan on two
fronts to set things right: action to bring the conspirators and perpetrators of
the 26/11 attack to justice and action to begin dismantling the infrastructure
of terrorism, the platform from which so many attacks have been launched
against our country in the last two decades. If these are done, India will
respond. But only credible action by Islamabad will instil a modicum of
confidence in the people of India that dialogue is worthwhile and that our
neighbours are as determined as us to give peace a chance. If such action is
taken—for instance, against individuals and organizations known to be
fomenting violence against India—the basis for building trust again can be
laid.
And yet, at the same time, it is important to recognize that the problem
will not be solved overnight. Even if, by some miracle, the Pakistani civilian
and military establishment suddenly saw the light, concluded that terrorism
was bad for them and decided to make common cause with India in its
eradication, the task will not be accomplished with a snap of the fingers.
Extremism is not a tap that can be turned off once it is open; the evil genie
cannot be forced back into the bottle. The proliferation of militant
organizations, training camps and extremist ideologies has acquired a
momentum of its own. A population as young, as uneducated, as unemployed
and as radicalized as Pakistan’s will remain a menace to their own society as
well as to ours. As a former Indian high commissioner in Pakistan, Satyabrata
Pal, noted: ‘These jihadi groups recruit from the millions of young Pakistanis
who emerge from vernacular schools and madrassas, imbued with a hatred
for the modern world, in which they do not have the skills to work. So while
young Indians go to Silicon Valley and make a bomb for themselves, young
Pakistanis go to the Swat Valley and make a bomb of themselves, the
meanness of their lives justifying the end. Pakistan has betrayed its youth,
which is its tragedy.’
This is not a counsel of despair. It is, instead, an argument to offer a
helping hand. A neighbour full of desperate young men without hope or
prospects, led by a malicious and self-aggrandizing military, is a permanent
threat to twenty-first century India. If India can help Pakistan transcend these
circumstances and help it develop a stake in mutually beneficial progress, it
will be helping itself as well. In such an approach lies the slender hope of
persuading Pakistan that India’s success can benefit it too, that, rather than
trying to undercut India and thwart its growth, Pakistan should look to the
advantages that might accrue to it as a neighbour and partner of an upwardly
mobile and increasingly prosperous India.
 IV

A former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, G. Parthasarathy, once

famously remarked that promoting peace between India and Pakistan is like
trying to treat two patients whose only disease is an allergy to each other. 651
This allergy has to be overcome. India does not covet any Pakistani territory.
Because we wish to focus on our own people’s development and prosperity
in conditions of security, we remain committed to long-term peace with
Pakistan. If the civilian government in Islamabad sees that the need is for
concerted action against terrorists wherever they operate, whether in
Pakistan, in India or in Afghanistan, we can find common ground. Our
willingness to talk will best be vindicated by their willingness to act.
Trust can be earned, which is why peace must be pursued. But we must
pursue peace with our eyes wide open.
To do so is, in the words of the veteran Indian diplomat K. Shankar
Bajpai, the ‘right, rational choice for a mature power’. 652 One of the
problems in the India–Pakistan relationship is that it is the last one left with
sharply opposed binaries. The two sets of ideas in India for dealing with
Pakistan involve a choice between those advocating a military attack on the
sources of terrorism, and ‘peace at any price’. Our leaders are either
exchanging sentimental letters about their mothers or ignoring each other in a
stagnant silence. Too much of Indian public opinion is divided into sharply
polarized camps of hawks and doves—the former insisting on nothing less
than implacable hostility towards Islamabad, the latter advocating talks with
whoever is in office in Islamabad, through a process ‘uninterruptable’ even if
new terrorist strikes emanating from Pakistan were to occur.
Neither position, in my view, is tenable. Hostility is not a policy, and
hostility in perpetuity is neither viable nor desirable between neighbours. And
while the doves may be right that New Delhi’s visceral reaction to the terror
attacks is tantamount to giving the terrorists a veto over our foreign policy
choices, no democratic government can allow its citizens to be killed and
maimed by forces from across the border, without reacting in some tangible
way that conveys to Pakistan that there is a price to be paid for allowing such
things to happen. We have no choice but to punish each incident of violence
by freezing official talks: let the Pakistanis understand that if they want to
talk to us officially, they have to take credible steps to rein in Lashkar-e-
Taiba and Hafiz Sayeed, and they have to punish the 26/11 killers whose trial
has so far been a travesty.
At the same time, insisting that Pakistan must change fundamentally
before India can make peace with it is not particularly realistic. A creative
Indian government must seize on whatever straws in the wind float its way
from Pakistan to explore the prospects of peace. Foreign policy cannot be
built on a sense of betrayal any more than it can be on illusions of love.
Pragmatism dictates that we work for peace with Pakistan precisely so that
we can serve our own people’s needs better. So New Delhi must do its best to
ensure that the Islamabad establishment abandons the conviction that
terrorism is the only effective instrument that obliges India to sit up and pay
attention to Pakistan and engage with its interests.
But we must do this without illusions, without deceiving ourselves about
the existence of genuine partners for peace across the border and without
being taken in by the insincere press releases of the civilian rulers who are
occasionally allowed to don the masks of power in Pakistan. Imran Khan has
friends and admirers in India, but his charm and charisma cannot change this
reality. We must not be deluded into making concessions, whether on
Kashmir or any other issue, in the naive expectation that these would end the
hostility of the ISI and its extremist cohorts. As Haqqani says, Kashmir is not
a cause of the conflict between the two states, but rather a symptom of it. 653
We have to look beyond Kashmir.
V

What, then, is the way forward for our two countries? Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s first prime minister, had predicted of the two countries that ‘we can
either become more than friends or more than enemies’ 654 . The latter seems
to have happened. From the Indian perspective, the elephant in the room
remains the Pakistani army. Until the military men are convinced that peace
with India is in their self-interest, they will remain the biggest obstacles to it.
One hope may lie in the extensive reach of the Pakistani military apparatus
and its multiple business and commercial interests. Perhaps India could
encourage its firms to trade with enterprises owned by the Pakistani army, in
the hope of giving the military establishment a direct stake in peace. More
military-to-military exchanges, even starting with such basic ideas as sporting
contests between the two armies, might also help. Of course, advancing such
ideas in India would inevitably be seen as naiveté bordering on blasphemy,
since the military complex in Pakistan has shown no sign of changing its
policy of attempting to ‘bleed India to death by a thousand cuts’, to quote a
phrase from a Pakistani strategic document that has now passed into folklore.
Indeed, Indians accept that the very nature of the Pakistani state condemns us
to facing an implacable enemy in the self-perpetuating military elite next
door, for lasting peace would leave them without a raison d’etre for their
power and their privileges.
But in keeping with the hypothetical, though the idea of joint exercises
between the two militaries seems preposterous today, it may entirely be
feasible in a UN peacekeeping context: to take one example, several years
ago Indian aircraft strafed Congolese rebel positions in support of besieged
Pakistani ground troops as part of a UN peacekeeping operation, MONUC. In
my UN days I personally witnessed the extraordinary degree of comradeship
between Indian and Pakistani officers serving in the UN Peacekeeping
Department headquarters in New York; perhaps being among foreigners
served as a constant reminder of how much more they had in common with
each other, so that they were frequently lunching together, visiting each
other’s homes and seeing the local sights together. Such contacts can and
should be built upon to develop the right atmospherics for peaceful relations,
which unavoidably require engagement with the Pakistani military. Indians
are, understandably, among the strongest supporters of Pakistani democracy,
at least in theory, but we have to live with the realities next door, and that
requires us to see the Pakistani military not just as the problem, but as a vital
element of the solution.
An India striving for peace can build on the generosity it has often shown
—as witness the unilateral Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status it gave
Pakistan—by extending itself to its neighbour, offering a market for Pakistani
traders and industrialists, a creative umbrella to its artists and singers and a
home away from home for those seeking a refuge from the realities of
Pakistani life. 655 Many Pakistanis now realize that perpetual conflict with
India is hampering Pakistan’s own aspirations for economic growth and
development. Multiplying our channels of contact—with ‘backchannel
diplomacy’ conducted by ‘special envoys’ of the two leaderships (a formula
used effectively by Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh), direct contact
between the two militaries (of which there is very little) and extensive
people-to-people contact—is indispensable to the peace effort.
Non-governmental organizations and civil society—particularly those
that channel the energy of young people, who are impatient with decades of
hostility— can also play a useful role in developing relations that go beyond
the prescriptions and the proscriptions of governments. Trade is another
obvious area. Tell Pakistani businessmen that if they can get their
government to reciprocate India’s two-decade–old practice of MFN status in
trade relations, it will result in India taking concrete steps to reduce the non-
tariff barriers relating to security inspections and clearances that have limited
the extent of Pakistani exports to our country. India’s financial services
industry and its software professionals could also offer themselves to
Pakistani clients, giving themselves a next-door market and providing
services that Pakistan could use to develop its own economy. These are all
‘easy wins’ waiting to be pursued at the first opportunity.
Sadly India has reacted to 26/11 and other Pakistani provocations by
punishing the wrong people—tightening visa restrictions and restraining
other possibilities of cultural and social contact. The terrorists of 26/11 did
not apply for Indian visas before coming onshore with their deadly baggage.
Those who apply are genuinely people of goodwill towards, and interest in,
India. The advantages of openly issuing visas and enhancing opportunities for
Pakistanis in India outweigh the dangers; after all, almost every Pakistani
visitor here is entranced by the land that Partition has denied to them. This
may be an area in which risks are worth taking, since the advantages of
openly issuing visas and enhancing opportunities for Pakistanis in India
outweigh the dangers; after all, anyone who is willing to give his fingerprints
and biometrics to the visa section of the Indian high commission in
Islamabad is hardly likely to be a security risk.
VI

I am strongly in favour of a liberal visa regime, which would require India to

remove its current restrictions on which points of entry and exit the Pakistani
visa-holder can use, the number of places that may be visited and the onerous
police reporting requirements. To begin with, a list can be drawn up of
prominent Pakistanis in such fields as business, entertainment and media,
who would be eligible for more rapid processing and for multiple-entry visas.
It will be argued that Pakistan will not reciprocate such one-sided generosity,
but India should not care. Insisting on parity with Pakistan is to bring
ourselves down to their level. Let us show a magnanimity and generosity of
spirit that in itself stands an outside chance of persuading Pakistanis to
rethink their attitude to us.
After all, though it seems scarcely believable today, passports and visas
only became required for travel between the two countries as late as 1965.
Initially, despite Partition, national identities remained fluid: Pakistan’s first
nominee as high commissioner to India, Mohammad Ismail, wished to
remain an Indian citizen (to protect his properties in UP) while being
accredited to New Delhi as an envoy! 656 Though those days are long gone,
reaching out to Pakistanis is the right thing to do. We’ve tried everything
else.
The big questions—the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan’s use of terrorism
as an instrument of policy—will require a great deal more groundwork and
constructive, step-by-step action for progress to be made. Afghanistan is an
area of contention that, given a new climate of peace, could become an area
for cooperation rather than a site of proxy conflict. By showing
accommodativeness, sensitivity, foresight and pragmatic generosity in all the
ways suggested above, India might be able to turn the bilateral narrative away
from the logic of intractable hostility in which both countries have been
mired for too long.
From such a diagnosis, the only possible prescription is that of
cooperation, to build peace and security together. We hope that those who
rule Pakistan will also make that diagnosis and share the same prescription.
To reiterate the point made earlier in this chapter, accepting Pakistan the way
it is but pushing for peace nonetheless is, in my view, the only way forward.
It will mean isolating those elements and those issues that both sides consider
intractable and placing them on the back burner for now, in order to proceed
with those that can be solved. Trust and understanding can be built on the
basis of small agreements on seemingly marginal issues, thereby improving
the atmosphere within which the more difficult problems can be tackled.
Ultimately, the fundamental principle of relations between two foreign
and sovereign nations, even one sharing a history as tumultuous as ours, is
reciprocity. Dealing with homegrown terrorism, reforming the nature of the
military complex, providing actual negotiating power to the civilian
government of the day, accepting in letter and spirit the 1972 Simla
Agreement and the 1999 Lahore Declaration, the provision of MFN status in
return to India, are all important steps that must be taken by Pakistan before
one can contemplate getting the two countries back to the drawing board in
the hope of chalking out a lasting peace in our lifetime. It is widely known
that, during the latter stages of the Musharraf regime, the two countries came
extremely close to a definitive conclusion on a number of pending issues,
including Kashmir, until Musharraf’s mounting domestic political difficulties
made it impossible for him to clinch a deal. (Musharraf himself has implied
that an agreement was also close with the previous Indian prime minister,
Vajpayee, until the BJP called an election that it lost; the process had then to
start all over again.) 657
It is surely not impossible to pick up the threads, but it is very difficult to
pick up the threads in an atmosphere of violence, intimidation and mayhem.
This is where Pakistan, too, bears the major share of the responsibility for
making progress towards peace. No democratic government worth its salt,
and certainly no Indian government, will negotiate with a gun pointed at its
head. A New Delhi that is prepared to make concessions will not want to
make them if there is the slightest suggestion that it is doing so because it is
intimidated by terrorist action. If Pakistan can make serious efforts to curb its
extremists sufficiently to create a more propitious climate for a peace process,
India would more readily seize the opportunity. But the primary onus for
confining, if not destroying, the deadly virus that it has long incubated must
rest on the Pakistani state. If it seizes that responsibility, it will not find India
lacking.
Given the Modi government’s track record this far in its relationship with
our western neighbour, I am not holding my breath that the path I’m
advocating will be chosen. However, in the hope that some counsel will be
heeded, let me try and outline in this chapter some of the things that will need
to be kept in mind while dealing with Pakistan. First, it is important to
recognize that Pakistan has failed to fulfil any of the minimum requirements
for dialogue that Mr Modi himself has cited. It has not prosecuted the
perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai massacre or constrained the terrorist forces
that operate with the complicity of the military establishment on its territory.
It has not even handed over Dawood Ibrahim, the fugitive don of the Mumbai
underworld. There continue to be acts of aggression on the border. So am I
being unrealistic in thinking there is a way forward that will enable us to end
decades of hostility?
In a famous 1947 article in Foreign Affairs , George F. Kennan argued
that the Soviet Union’s hostility toward the United States was chronic and
incurable, since it was rooted not in a classic conflict of interest between two
great powers, but in deep-seated nationalism and insecurity on the part of
Russia which the US could do nothing about. Something similar could be
said about India and Pakistan. Straightforward disagreements between two
states can be resolved through dialogue and compromise. But how can that
work when Pakistan’s abiding hostility towards India is rooted in
fundamental insecurity about its national identity as the ‘not-India’ for the
subcontinent’s Muslims, and even worse, driven by the self-interest of a
rapacious military which commands a greater share of the national GDP than
the military of any other country in the world, and needs this hostility to
justify its power and privileges?
For two and a half decades, as has been noted, Pakistan has pursued a
policy of inflicting on India ‘death by a thousand cuts’—bleeding the country
through repeated terrorist attacks, rather than attempting an open military
confrontation which it cannot win against India’s superior conventional
forces. The logic is that India’s response to this tactic would always be
tempered by its desire not to derail its ambitious economic development
plans, as well as the Indian government’s unwillingness to face the risk of a
nuclear war.
But this predictable and repetitive pattern of India–Pakistan relations was
suddenly disrupted on 29 September 2016, when India’s Director-General of
Military Operations (DGMO), Lieutenant-General Ranbir Singh, announced
that Indian commandos had conducted ‘surgical strikes’ across the Line of
Control (LoC) in Kashmir, the de facto international border between the two
countries. The DGMO stated that the strikes, in the early hours of that
morning, had destroyed terrorist ‘launch pads’ and eliminated significant
numbers of militants poised to cross over for attacks on the Indian side, as
well as some who were protecting them (presumably a reference to Pakistani
soldiers). 658
The Indian public and the country’s notoriously fractious political class
reacted with great pride to the news, unanimously hailing the decisive action
as long overdue. For the preceding quarter-century, Indians had watched
helplessly as their attempts at peacemaking with their belligerent, military-
dominated neighbour had collapsed repeatedly, thanks to terrorist attacks
from Pakistan that the government in Islamabad seemed unable or unwilling
to prevent.
Pakistani reactions were a curious mixture, ranging from dismissive
declarations (backed by orchestrated bus tours of journalists to selected parts
of the LoC) that no surgical strikes had even occurred, to angry statements
declaring that irresponsible Indian firing across the LoC had killed two
Pakistani soldiers. For once, the Pakistani military appeared to have been
caught off guard by Indian action.
Indians braced themselves for the international community’s disapproval
—the fear of nuclear war between the subcontinental neighbours usually
dominates world opinion whenever bilateral tensions flare. But this time,
thanks in part to the DGMO’s measured and precise statement and an
absence of military triumphalism in India’s official tone (the braggadocio of
the ruling party’s publicists came later), the world seemed to consider India’s
response justifiable.
Pakistani attempts to seek support against India were widely rebuffed,
with Pakistan’s usual supporters, China and the US, mildly calling for both
sides to defuse the tensions.
India also tightened the diplomatic screws on its recalcitrant neighbour,
persuading other members of the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC) to call off a planned summit in Islamabad as
punishment for Pakistan’s bad behaviour. 659 India’s government also
announced that it was undertaking a review of the Indus Waters Treaty, under
which India has conceded to Pakistan, on generous terms, the waters of the
Indus River, which originates in India, not even using the share to which it is
entitled. 660
It has since emerged that the operation announced by Singh was not
India’s first military strike across the LoC; several had occurred under the
previous government as well, in response to military raids on Indian territory.
But the strikes were the first to be announced publicly, providing a clear
signal of intent and a bold statement that business as usual—Pakistani
pinpricks followed by Indian inaction—is no longer to be expected.
With its calibrated and targeted strikes, India made it clear that inaction is
not the only possible response to terrorist provocations. Although brave, the
strategy was not without risk, because it obliges India to pursue a similar
course of action when the next significant terrorist strike occurs. Still, as I
have said before, a country that refuses to suffer repeated body blows earns
more respect than one whose restraint can be interpreted as weakness.
VII

However, even as it is important to show our belligerent neighbour that we

cannot be attacked with impunity, the path of negotiation cannot be
abandoned. Too much of Indian public opinion is divided into sharply
polarized camps of hawks and doves—the former insisting on nothing less
than implacable hostility towards Islamabad, the latter advocating talks with
whoever is in office in Islamabad, through a process ‘uninterruptable’ even if
new terrorist strikes emanating from Pakistan were to occur.
As I’ve said earlier, it is time for a different approach: one that separates
the issue of political dialogue and a targeted military response to acts of
violence from that of trade and people-to-people contact. Yes, punish each
incident of violence by freezing official talks or by surgical strikes. At the
same time, whenever appropriate or when the drums of war have grown
muted, we should open our doors and hearts to Pakistanis who have nothing
to do with the military establishment. Multiplying our channels of contact
away from Track-I and Track-II to embrace the ordinary people of Pakistan
would put both countries back on the right track—towards genuine peace.
The late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had once declared that you
can change history but not geography. 661 He was wrong: history, once it has
occurred, cannot be changed. The time has come, instead, for the victims of
geography to make history.

637 Somak Ghosal, ‘Jinnah did not want India and Pakistan to be permanent enemies:
Husain Haqqani’, Huffington Post , 28 July 2016.
638 Hussain Haqqani, India vs. Pakistan: Why Can’t We Just Be Friends? , New Delhi:
Juggernaut Books, 2016, pp. 7, 9 and 21.
639 Ibid., p. 159.
640 Quoted in Haqqani. Waheed-us-Zaman, The Quest for Identity , Islamabad: University
of Islamabad Press, 1974, p. i.
641 Quoted in Haqqani. Michael T. Kaufman, ‘Pakistan’s Islamic revival affects all aspects
of life’, New York Times , 13 October 1980.
642 Prateek Joshi, ‘India-Pakistan relations: New Delhi signals strategic shift across LoC,
but escalating costs won’t deter Rawalpindi’, FirstPost , 22 January 2018.
643 Imtiaz Ahmed, ‘Pakistan defence allocation at $9.6 billion, up by whopping 18%’,
Hindustan Times , 28 April 2018.
644 Najibullah Azad and Aditya Manubarwala, ‘The Murder Of Democracy in Pakistan’,
Indian Express , 25 July 2018.
645 Haqqani, p.15.
646 ‘5 of Imran Khan’s most controversial positions’, NDTV , 30 July 2018.
647 ‘Imran Khan targets Modi, says Pakistanis not cowardly like Sharif’, Hindustan Times ,
1 October 2016.
648 ‘If India takes one step, we’ll take two to resolve Kashmir issue: Imran Khan’, Deccan
Chronicle , 26 July 2018.
649 ‘Pakistan Army chief backs India talks to resolve tangles, including Kashmir’, The
Hindu , 15 April 2018.
650 ‘“Ignorant and ungrateful” Trump has humiliated Pakistan: Imran Khan, Times of India
, 3 January 2018.
651 Quoted in Stephen B. Cohen. India: Emerging Power , Washington DC: The
Brookings Institution, 2001.
652 Quoted in David M. Malone, Does the Elephant Dance?: Contemporary Indian
Foreign Policy , New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 112.
653 Haqqani, India vs. Pakistan , p. 46.
654 Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches , Vol. 2, New Delhi: Publications
Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1983, p. 447.
655 Kanishka Gupta, ‘Most Favoured Nation status to Pakistan: What is it all about?’,
Indian Express , 27 September 2016.
656 Omair Ahmad, ‘The Gorakhpuri’, Hindu BusinessLine , 28 November 2014.
657 Uday Singh Rana, ‘When Vajpayee and Musharraf “Almost Resolved” the Kashmir
Dispute’, News18 , 13 February 2018.
658 ‘India destroys 7 terror launchpads in Pakistan in surgical strikes along LoC’, Deccan
Chronicle , 29 September 2016.
659 ‘Islamabad SAARC Summit cancelled, announces Pakistan’, FirstPost , 30 September
2016.
660 ‘Modi chairs meeting to review Indus Water Treaty’, The Hindu , 26 September 2016.
661 Quoted in World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography ,
Washington DC: World Bank, 2009, p. 120.
 chapter forty-two

ALL HAT AND NO CATTLE

The unpredictable and unruly actions of President Donald Trump have

shaken the world. And India has been buffeted too. Given the way he has
treated some of his closest allies, such as Canada, Britain and the EU, it
would be foolish to imagine that India is going to be exempt from Mr
Trump’s eccentric and combative politics. With the volatility that both our
countries have faced since early November 2016, the future of India–US
relations is certainly an important question to ponder, one which has left
many seasoned analysts and observers of relations between our two countries
perplexed. Indeed, it appears that for now the only thing that we can all be
certain of is how uncertain things seem to be in the Trump era.
The Indo–US relationship has evolved significantly over time. In the first
decades of India’s independence, its relations with the US were far from
close. This should have been surprising, since the two countries had a lot in
common then too, as they do today. Both are vibrant democracies that believe
in human rights, the free press, fundamental freedoms and more, besides
having both experienced colonialism and, thereafter, broken new ideological
and political ground in world history. As Henry Kissinger noted, the two
countries have ‘no conflict of interest in the traditional and fundamental
sense.’ 662 Mutual trade and investment are growing steadily. And people-to-
people relations, strengthened by a common language, by around 150,000
Indian students a year spending more than $6 billion ($6.4 billion in 2016–
17) on American educational and related services, and by nearly 2 million
people of Indian origin who have made their lives in the US, have been
characterized by friendship and warmth. 663
But in 1947, Indian Americans were just a handful, and there were two
major factors that didn’t help the cause of Indo–US amity: US ignorance and
Indian unwillingness to take sides in the Cold War.
 America’s initial indifference was best reflected in President Harry
Truman’s reaction when Chester Bowles asked to be named ambassador to
India: ‘I thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows round
streets, witch doctors, and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the
Ganges…but I did not realize anybody thought it was important.’ 664
If that was bad, India’s political orientation was worse. The American
preference for making anti-communist allies, however unsavoury, tied
Washington to Pakistan’s increasingly Islamist dictatorship, while India’s
non-aligned democracy drifted towards the secular Soviet embrace. The US
government regarded non-alignment with distaste; Eisenhower’s secretary of
state, John Foster Dulles, notoriously declared that ‘neutrality between good
and evil is itself evil’. In a world divided between two uncompromising
superpowers, India’s refusal to ally with its fellow democracies seemed like
appeasement at best, and aid and comfort for the enemy at worst.
India’s arch-enemy and perpetual irritant, Pakistan, on the other hand,
became an essential component in America’s strategy of containment of the
Soviet Union and in its later opening to China. From India’s point of view,
US indulgence of Pakistan became overt hostility when the US sent the
Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in support of the Pakistani military
genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. Tempers cooled soon enough, but India was
always regarded as tilting towards the Kremlin, hardly a recommendation for
warm relations in American eyes. Matters plumbed their depths during two
historic lows: 1971, when the US and India found themselves on opposite
sides during the Bangladesh war and India signed a treaty with the Soviet
Union; and 1998, when India tested its nuclear capabilities at Pokhran, the
US imposed sanctions on it. 665
But since then we have seen a sea change, with China’s rise, India
growing economically more vibrant and an increasing convergence of Indian
and US views of strategic priorities in the Indo-Pacific region. The Indo–US
nuclear deal signed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President
George Bush in 2005 marked an astonishing breakthrough. The 123
agreement for nuclear cooperation essentially recognized India as a de facto
nuclear state and enshrined an ‘Indian exemption’ that opened up an entire
new vista of security and defence possibilities. 666 The narrative today can be
seen as a remarkable success story: the record shows both how far the
strategic partnership has come, but also how much more can be done.
The nuclear accord simultaneously accomplished two things. It admitted
India into the global nuclear club despite its principled refusal to sign the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (which Indians overwhelmingly reject as the
last vestige of apartheid in the international system). More important, it
acknowledged that US exceptionalism had found a sibling. Thanks to the US,
which strong-armed the forty-five countries of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group
into swallowing their concerns that special treatment for India could
constitute a precedent for rogue nuclear aspirants such as Pakistan, North
Korea and Iran, there is now an ‘Indian exception.’ Few things could have
been more gratifying to a deeply proud nation that was tired of being
constantly hyphenated by Washington with its smaller, dysfunctional
neighbour, Pakistan.
Under Mr Obama, nothing quite so dramatic occurred. First of all, the
US’s grand strategic orientation inevitably focused on the rise of China,
which as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had indicated, was Washington’s
most important bilateral relationship on the planet. And on the subcontinent,
the Obama administration’s understandable concerns in Afghanistan
inevitably made Pakistan loom much larger in its consciousness than India.
To Mr Obama, it was clear that there could be no successful outcome in
Afghanistan possible without Pakistan, and was therefore attentive to
Islamabad’s priorities in ways that New Delhi occasionally found irritating. It
is fair to say that during Mr Obama’s Nobel Prize-winning first year in office,
sceptical India was largely immune to the wave of what one might
irreverently call ‘globama-ization’ that swept the rest of the planet.
Making things seem more difficult is what Narendra Modi stands for. He
shared an excellent personal relationship with Mr Obama, but his background
as someone who subscribed to illiberal, majoritarian ideas came in the way of
the India–US relationship making any real progress. As I have pointed out
earlier, it was telling that Barack Obama said pointedly in a Town Hall
speech in New Delhi in January 2015: ‘India will succeed so long as it is not
split along the lines of religious faith.’ 667 Mr Obama’s message was clear: if
India did not resolve the problems that were dividing the country, Mr Modi’s
proclaimed ambitious development plans would be thwarted. It is the central
element of the Modi paradox I have explored throughout this book. But
coming from a US President, whose visit was being hailed by the government
as a diplomatic triumph and whose ‘bromance’ with the Indian PM saw first
names and much friendly banter, it was a pointed reminder of the
fundamental contradiction at the heart of Mr Modi’s regime.
 The tensions between the two tendencies—the economic reformism
preached at the top and the cultural nativism that animates the majority
beneath—have affected the government’s agenda. What makes it worse is
that the political majority needed by the prime minister to pursue his
economic policies relies entirely on the political campaigns and
organizational capacity of the very people whose chauvinism is undermining
him. The Modi paradox we have mentioned throughout this book affects
Indo–US relations too: Mr Modi wasn’t elected PM in order for the
minorities to be vilified and assaulted, but to fulfil an aspirational
development vision he effectively articulated. Mr Obama’s speech was a way
of telling him he can’t do that without abandoning his old religious
intolerance that earned him those American strictures. If Narendra Modi
acolytes hoped that President Trump would be less ideological, the president
cannot be indifferent to the concerns of evangelical Christians, a key part of
the president’s ideological base, about mounting bigotry in Modi-run India.
Nonetheless, a certain affinity between Mr Modi and Mr Trump is hard to
escape. The journalist and commentator Varghese K. George summarized it
best, citing both men’s election campaign speeches: ‘Modi said India’s
election commission was acting against him; “illegal” immigrants from
Bangladesh were voting against his party. So he promised to deport them.
But he was of the view that Hindus coming from other countries must be
protected. Trump said “illegal” Mexicans were voting for the Democratic
Party and they would be deported, while Christian refugees [from Europe and
the Middle East] would be given preference. Modi said Manmohan Singh—
the first non-Hindu prime minister of India—was weak and indecisive and
foreign leaders did not respect him…. Trump said Barack Obama—
America’s first non-white President—was indecisive and weak and foreign
leaders did not respect him… Modi called journalists “news traders”; Trump
called them “the lowest form of life”. The more I heard Trump, the more the
territory felt familiar to me.’ 668
The similarities between both men and the nature of their appeal as
leaders harnessing a public disenchantment with their countries’ political
establishments can, however, only go so far. As heads of government, each
espouses the same assertive nationalism: Mr Modi speaks of ‘India First’, Mr
Trump of ‘America First’. The two slogans, though similar, cannot always be
compatible, as quarrels over trade policy quickly bore out.
The same contradictions affect not just government, but relations with US
civil society as well. In 2015, in what was widely hailed as a triumph, Mr
Modi not only made the first prime ministerial visit to Silicon Valley but met
with the CEOs of top cutting-edge tech firms like Adobe, Facebook, Google
and Tesla, pitching ‘Digital India’ to a receptive audience where ‘StartUp
India’ and ‘StandUp India’ went down well with the familiar ‘Make in India’.
His carefully pre-scripted Town Hall with Mark Zuckerberg, the
announcement that Google would bring broadband to 500 Indian railway
stations and the prime minister’s manifest interest in innovation and tech
entrepreneurship undoubtedly made a positive impact.
But to acknowledge this is not to tell the whole story. You didn’t have to
listen to the liberal protestors of the #ModiFail campaign or read the petition
signed by Indian Studies academics to know that Mr Modi’s sales pitch
battled a strong counter-narrative of his government’s own making. While Mr
Modi was smooth-talking in California, his government had shut down the
Internet in Kashmir for three days, repeating a similar action in Gujarat the
previous week. A Twitter report revealed that government agencies reporting
accounts for objectionable content rose from 15 in the last six months of 2014
to 341 in the first six months of 2017. There was also an increase in requests
from government agencies for information—a 55 per cent increase since
July–December 2016. 669 This instinctive illiberalism does not go well with
‘Digital India’. Sure, China has banned Facebook and Twitter altogether, but
India is a democracy, and will be held to different standards.
Mr Modi is a highly effective salesman for India, and there is no denying
the energy and dynamism he has brought to taking India’s message abroad.
But, as I have noted in this book and elsewhere, every good salesman is only
as effective as his product allows him to be, and this is where Mr Modi’s
sales pitch falls short of reality. It’s not just the openness of ‘Digital India’
versus the trigger-fingers of the BJP government’s censors. It’s also the lack
of substance behind his other claims. Bill Gates waxes eloquent on how
important it is for Mr Modi to expand healthcare spending in India, 670 but
Mr Modi doesn’t admit he has slashed the health budget. 671 Mr Modi
releases a carefully calibrated tear at the mention of his mother, but doesn’t
acknowledge his government has gutted the budget of the Women and Child
Development Ministry. 672 Mr Modi talks about the importance of the
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, but fails to concede that while its publicity budget
has gone up five-fold, his government allocates less money to sanitation than
UPA’s had done (with considerably less fanfare). 673
Mr Modi’s fundamental problem in America remains his growing
credibility deficit in India—the perception that he talks a good game but
delivers little (or, in the marvellous Texan phrase about cowboy braggadocio,
that he is ‘all hat and no cattle’.) He is an excellent salesman for his version
of India, but Americans are increasingly beginning to feel that behind the
packaging there is no product.
But there has been progress on other fronts—the small but significant
steps that add up to strengthening the sinews of any relationship. Agreements
on seemingly mundane subjects like agriculture, education, health and even
space exploration and energy security testified to enhanced cooperation, and
the two governments also proclaimed ‘initiatives’ on clean energy and
climate change as well as educational linkages between American and Indian
universities. 674
The problem is that the pattern down the decades has been one where
every few years, with much optimism, declarations are made, or at least
hopes loudly expressed, that India–US relations have entered a new, positive
era, only to be undone by one setback or another. In recent times, much has
been said and written in this regard about the meetings between President
Trump and Prime Minister Modi, both when Narendra Modi visited the US in
July this year and on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg.
For the first interaction, the bar of expectations was certainly set quite
low primarily because there was considerable uncertainty regarding President
Trump’s personal convictions on foreign policy. For example, though he had
developed a fairly hardline rhetoric on the issue of US–China relations and
appointed a number of known China-bashers to key positions, we were all
well aware of the much publicized bonhomie that was on display when
President Xi visited Mr Trump at his Mar-A-Lago resort, something that took
everyone watching by surprise. This reaffirmed the growing belief that with
Mr Trump no assumptions can be taken for granted. Many Indian-Americans
had enthusiastically supported the Trump candidacy, believing his victory
would be good for India; now Indians were not so sure. There was the
episode of Mr Trump’s singling out of India in his statement withdrawing
from the Paris Accord, unfairly accusing India of not contributing adequately
to the fight against climate change and being essentially a freeloader on
global energy policies. 675 This was understandably seen in Delhi as a
setback for Indo–US relations.
 The Indians approached the summit with a mixture of anxiety and low
expectations. New Delhi was anxious to ensure that a personal rapport could
be established between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump, who till then had
only interacted briefly over a congratulatory phone call; but they had no
reason to expect any significant breakthrough. Though the visit didn’t end up
generating a ‘bromance’ between the two, unlike Mr Modi’s first-name-terms
relationship with ‘Barack’, it went well enough, featuring Narendra Modi’s
famous public hug of the former president, which seemed to take Donald
Trump by surprise but did not seem to displease him.
Still, the summit was low on actual substance, once you examine the nuts
and bolts of the joint statement that was published. PM Modi did say a lot of
things that President Trump wanted to hear, including promising to spend
more taxpayer money buying American goods, including purchasing twenty
Guardian drones. Indian investment in the US, based on data from the
Department of Commerce, also creates nearly 197,000 jobs in that country—
and that, given the transactional nature of Donald Trump’s calculations,
should be something the US appreciates. 676 On the Indian side however
there was a feeling that India accomplished very little in return. The issue of
H1B visas, an area of significant concerns for India with its ever expanding
IT sector but a campaign target for Donald Trump, wasn’t brought up. And
overall, while the joint statement highlighted several aspects of what India
could offer to the US, particularly defence acquisitions and market access,
there was little discussion on what the US could offer India. 677
The up-and-down pattern has continued: a strong speech by the Trump
administration and its then secretary of state on Pakistan’s habit of running
with the terrorist hares while hunting with the American hounds have given
Indians much cheer, 678 but a strong attack from the president himself on
Indian tariffs, singling out Harley Davidson motorcycles, 679 has inaugurated
a trade skirmish of mutual retaliatory tariffs that could yet plunge the
countries into a trade war. Amid all these mixed signals, reports indicate that
Prime Minister Modi has invited President Trump to be the chief guest at
India’s Republic Day commemorations on 26 January 2019, though the
President has not apparently accepted the invitation yet. If he does accept,
though, a word of caution might be in order. As the respected military
historian, Srinath Raghavan, wrote in The Print , ‘If the government expects
Trump to turn solicitous of India’s interests after presiding over the pomp of
a Republic Day parade, it is clearly out to lunch. As America’s closest allies
have realized, pandering to Trump is useless and counterproductive.’ 680
But it is undeniably true that whether it is Republicans or Democrats in
America or the Congress or, more recently, the BJP in India, the
fundamentals of the relationship between our two countries are sound and
will survive political change in either country.
The transformation of the India–US relationship from estrangement to
strategic partnership is well advanced, and the relationship has clearly
acquired a depth that goes beyond the utilitarian measurement of successful
transactions even if it faces the occasional setback. The strong foundations I
just mentioned have been developed both by various governments over the
past two decades but very often also in spite of governments.
Ideologically, India identifies and has a close relationship with American
democracy, liberal internationalism, and so far anyway, the cosmopolitanism
emerging from widespread immigration. As I have observed frequently
before, for both countries, soft power is an integral component of what drives
their role in the world—the power of attraction. For Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye,
who invented the concept, the United States is the archetypal exponent of soft
power. The fact is that the US is the home of Boeing and Intel, Google and
the iPod, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, Coke, jeans,
McDonald’s and Starbucks—in short of most of the major products that
dominate daily life around our globe. The attractiveness of these assets, and
of the American lifestyle of which they are emblematic, is that they permit
the US to persuade others to adopt the US’s agenda, rather than relying
purely on the dissuasive or coercive ‘hard power’ of military force. For India
too, Bollywood, bhangra and bhelpuri have done more to enhance its
presence in the world than the Ministry of External Affairs or the Indian
army. When you can find an Indian restaurant or a yoga class in any small
town in America, you know Indian soft power is working in the US.
The prominence of Indians in American life and on US television
screens, their vital role as fundraisers for US politicians, their presence on
Congressional staffs and governmental office, all point to Indians playing an
influential role in American public life. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi
has jokingly talked about the ‘samosa caucus’: there have been two Indian-
American governors, and currently six Congresspersons, a senator and the
US ambassador to the UN are of Indian descent. For the most part, they have
shown a willingness to stand up and be heard on issues that matter to India. I
believe that in the long term, Indian Americans will come to play the same
role in relation to US policy on India as Jewish Americans play in relation to
US policy on Israel, and for similar reasons.
But soft power is at risk from hardline Hindutva. Reports of assaults on
minorities in India reflect poorly on India’s soft power in America. And when
protestors at a World Hindu Congress organized in Chicago are beaten up by
delegates, as occurred in September 2018, it casts doubt both on the
homeland’s values and on those of the people espousing them in America.
681
But there are also harder factors at work than soft power. In economic
and transactional terms, cooperation has been growing steadily stronger,
despite occasional irritants. Take arms sales: in 2001–04 India purchased
arms and defence supplies worth $400 million from the US. From 2005 to
2008 this multiplied into $3.2 billion (with the purchases including the USS
Trenton, twenty General Electric F-404 engines for the Tejas fighter, six C-
130J Super Hercules mission aircraft, and eight Boeing P-8I maritime control
aircraft). Thereafter, between 2009 and 2013, India’s defence purchases went
even higher to $5.7 billion (including 500 CBU-97 sensor-fused weapons for
Jaguar aircraft, 40 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, six C-130J Hercules, and 10
Boeing C-17 Globemaster-III transport aircraft). 682 In other words, the total
value of defence purchases made by India between 2008 and 2013 was ten
times the value of deals signed in 2001–04. However, so far India has largely
bought non-combat support equipment from the US, and little lethal
equipment. Still, the US has now overtaken Russia, India’s traditional
defence supplier, in terms of the value of trade. 683
Where do we go from here? India has, admittedly, a low defence
technology base, which does not allow it to take advantage of all the options
the US could offer and while this is a good beginning, the challenge is to
raise the bar and take our technological cooperation to the next level.
So the fundamentals undergirding our relationship include our democratic
systems, mutual understanding, no significant areas of difference with the
end of the Cold War, growing defence cooperation, comparable soft power
assets and a thriving Indian-American community. There is also an increasing
convergence of geopolitical views, particularly on China’s rise and the threat
it poses in East Asia, including to India.
Yet for all these areas of convergence, there have been equally strong
areas of divergence in the relationship and how our two countries manage
and navigate these differences will prove crucial to developing an enhanced
strategic partnership.
It’s in the nature of democracies to disagree—including with each other.
In examining defence cooperation, for instance, it is apparent that constraints
exist on both sides of the fence: Indian defence procurement procedures,
which are being revised, do not go down well with US suppliers, while US
licensing constraints do not agree with India. For instance, the Government of
India’s latest Make in India campaign is reinforcing our traditional preference
for, if not entirely developing weaponry at home, at least co-manufacturing it
with foreign investors, instead of making full purchases from abroad. There
are structural difficulties on the American side for such a Make in India
strategy, since the US has longstanding export control requirements that
make any transfer of technology in such fields conditional on direct and close
scrutiny of End Use Monitoring, to which India cannot fully agree, besides
requiring an assortment of bureaucratic sanctions. Both countries, ultimately,
need to make an effort to find a compromise that is mutually agreeable. In
fact, it was to facilitate this that in 2012 the Government of India set up the
Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTII), under which so far India
and the US have agreed to start cooperation on various pathfinder projects—
but given that by the beginning of last year progress has only been made on
two of those projects it is clear that big, momentous developments are yet to
occur. 684
It has helped that the Government of India has now decided to increase
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in defence to 49 per cent, 685 making its
traditional formula somewhat more palatable to the US, but in general, the
Indian preference to domesticate high technology, including in defence, goes
against the American tendency to embed India into the global defence supply
chain. While increased FDI will soften this impasse somewhat, legislation on
this alone will not satisfy the US, which also wants clarity on labour laws,
control of management and on intellectual property rights. So it is too early to
get hopes too high.
Beyond defence procurement, trade between the two countries has also
seen progress over time albeit still nowhere close to optimal levels. Data from
the Department of Commerce suggests that the bilateral trade relationship
between the United States and South Korea, a country whose GDP is just
around 40 per cent of India’s, enjoys a volume of trade nearly twice the size
of India’s current trade with the US. The US–China trade for that matter is
six times the Indian figure. India is currently the ninth largest goods trading
partner of the US at $67.7 billion in goods trade as of last year. 686 The
deficit in trade stands at more than $30 billion, in favour of India, with trade
between the two countries estimated at $140 billion in 2017. 687 This modest
deficit is really not such a big deal for an economy the size of the US, but
when President Trump keeps mentioning it as an issue, it really doesn’t help.
688
Similarly, FDI between the two countries has also witnessed a marginal
increase between 2015–16, US FDI in India stood at $28.3 billion in 2015, an
increase by 4.4 per cent from the previous year, while India invested a more
modest $9.3 billion in FDI in 2015, an improvement by 3.7 per cent from the
previous year. The numbers from trade and defence relationships do point to
a healthy relationship, though a lot more can be done in this regard.
But areas of convergence are only one side of the coin and naturally as
two leading powers of the twenty-first century, the two countries do not
necessarily see eye to eye on all issues.
There is a perception among critics, not just in India, that these areas of
convergence are ‘soft’ and ‘feel-good’ aspects of the relationship that mask a
lack of substantive progress on the hard strategic, economic, political and
security issues that analysts here consider more important. Take the issue of
H1B visas, an area of critical importance in US–India relations. Since 2007,
Indian citizens have been the largest group of H1B applications to the United
States, with over 21 lakh applicants between 2007–17. 689 But with Mr
Trump’s pursuance of his campaign goals to ensure less H1B approvals and
therefore more security for US jobs, Indians who want to work in the US
have been significantly affected. This is particularly true for India’s IT sector
professionals who have been recognized globally for their capability and
skill.
Similarly, at a national security level, how understanding is the United
States of India’s security concerns, especially vis-à-vis Pakistan? Here
President Obama and, to an extent, President Trump, after some recent tough
talk about Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism, have inspired confidence that
the United States does indeed pay serious attention to India’s core national
security interests. But the past hyphenation of India and Pakistan is an area of
significant irritation for the leadership on the Indian side, and needs to be
abandoned again as it was under President George W. Bush.
It almost appears that there is a strategic attempt of mollifying India in
this regard without developing a narrative of concrete substance. To take a
simple example, just prior to PM Modi and President Trump’s interaction in
July 2017, the US had assigned the tag of ‘global terrorist’ to Syed
Salahuddin, the leader of the Hizbul Mujahedeen. 690 But it has no practical
effect: as they say in New York, that and 65 cents will get you a cup of
coffee. While it was a token of recognition of India’s security concerns, it
was unfortunately not accompanied by, or followed up with, any action
against Pakistan, the state that provides Salahuddin and his terrorist
colleagues safe haven and succour in the first place.
Similarly, while there has been some appreciation from President Trump
for India’s role in Afghanistan, there continues to be greater receptivity to
Pakistani objections than New Delhi considers reasonable. New Delhi
remains seriously concerned about the possibility of a US withdrawal from
Afghanistan that implicitly leaves the country to the mercies of the Pakistani
ISI, which has been known to foment and guide terrorist actions against
India. Cooperation between India and the United States on counterterrorism
has improved after 26/11, but the two countries have not gone much beyond
information sharing (though the access somewhat belatedly granted to the
Pakistani-American terrorist enabler David Coleman Headley helped
overcome Indian misgivings about the depth of this cooperation). This is one
area where real teeth could be added, not least to reassure Indians that the
United States’ understandable desire to cut its losses in ‘Af-Pak’ would not
leave our country more vulnerable to the depredations of those who stand to
gain from an American departure.
India is also wary of the possibilities of a greater US–China relationship
under President Trump. As some analysts have observed, China’s greatest
bargaining chip with the United States has been its capability of keeping a
leash on North Korea, something that the Trump administration will greatly
value. Should Mr Xi present himself as a suitable middleman between the
two countries and assuage the heightening tensions, President Trump may
take America closer to China. At a time when ambitious Chinese expansion
projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China–Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Silk Route are being viewed with increasing
concern by New Delhi, which views these developments as national security
and sovereignty concerns, such a warming up of US–China relations could to
some degree come at the expense of the US–India relationship.
The US could also show more interest in resisting China’s irredentist
claims to Indian territory, particularly its habit of dubbing Arunachal Pradesh
as ‘South Tibet’, an issue on which the United States has stayed
conspicuously neutral. The question of the strategic content of the
relationship goes beyond the subcontinent. Barack Obama’s support in the
Indian Parliament for New Delhi’s claims to a seat on a reformed security
council has not been followed by any instructions to American diplomats
around the world to execute this commitment or even to pursue this objective.
691 The suspicion remains that what Indians saw as a substantive triumph
during President Obama’s visit in fact amounted to little more than a
rhetorical flourish.
Of course Indians must beware of seeing the US relationship in terms of a
checklist of Indian expectations alone.
Former US ambassador Robert Blackwill was once reported to have said:
‘India wants the US to invest, India wants the US to keep its markets more
open, India wants more visas for its professionals, India wants us to be
helpful on Kashmir and in dealing with Pakistan, India wants US support for
membership of the UN Security Council, India wants this and India wants
that. Tell me what will India give in return?’ 692 This is not elementary
transactionalism alone, since Mr Blackwill was very much an exponent of the
support-India-for-its-own-sake school of American foreign policy-making.
Rather, it reflected a genuine level of exasperation. The fact is that
Washington has reason to feel that New Delhi has not done enough to define
its own sense of its role as an emerging great power, and consequently has no
settled vision of what it wants from a strategic partnership with the United
States.
India is gradually moving from its traditional obsession with preserving
its own strategic autonomy in the face of external pressure to a broader
acceptance of its own responsibilities in shaping the world in which it wants
to thrive. But it has been curiously diffident, even reluctant, to do so. The
vision I depicted in my 2012 book Pax Indica: India and the World of the
21st Century is no closer to realization five years later. India has the capacity,
the human and technological resources to play a major role alongside the US
in the stewardship of the global commons, from cyberspace to outer space.
But there is not yet a fully-fledged consensus on what that entails and how far
it permits the two countries to flesh out the meaning of the expression
‘natural allies’ first used by both governments at the beginning of the century.
And India needs to find the political will to play such a role with confidence.
 Unfortunately, the turbulence of the Trump era and the backlash against
globalization may make the management of our areas of divergence difficult,
but given the alignment of our strategic interests, this will not be impossible.
Part of the success of the India–US relationship will lie in how effectively
the two countries manage the differences that inevitably will arise between
them. Diplomats like to pretend that there are no difficulties or
misunderstandings, when in fact several have arisen in the recent past. An
illustrative list in recent years would include different priorities on terrorism
and mismatched threat perceptions, incompatible views on Pakistan as a
credible partner for peace and continued disagreements on aspects of trade
relations, none more evident than in their duelling positions on the Doha
Round. There are also issues of style—American insensitivity and Indian
preachiness have tended to rub each other the wrong way. But on geopolitical
fundamentals, there is no real clash of interests. On no issue of vital national
interest to either country (with the possible exception of Iran) is the other
arrayed on the ‘wrong’ side.
The twenty-first century world is one in which an emphasis on the shared
values of both countries—democracy and pluralism, tolerance and
transparency, and respect for personal liberty and human rights—has greater
salience than ever. For the first time in human history, a majority of the
world’s population lives in democracies. The idea that the two principal ones
have special interests and responsibilities is not a fashionable one, but it
could become one of the defining features of the new era.
As democracies, India and the United States have the additional
responsibility of establishing and running international structures to cope
with the myriad challenges of the twenty-first century that go beyond the
capacity of any one state or alliance to resolve. These include terrorism and
nuclear proliferation, but also less conventional threats: state failure,
transnational organized crime, the spread of pandemics, piracy in
international waters, the management of cyberspace and the military misuse
of outer space, to name a few. The threat of Islamist fanaticism and the rise of
an authoritarian China also pose specific national security challenges to the
United States and India that, if handled well and in cooperation, could assure
a safer world.
The United States has to come to terms with a world whose centre of
gravity has clearly moved away from the Atlantic to Asia, and to determine
where it sees itself in relation to the incontestable rise of China and the
growing prowess of India. If the relationship with India is going to become as
important to American security as Europe’s once was, wouldn’t America
need to revise its own positions on the threats and challenges faced by India?
And yet the fundamental driver for long-term relations between the United
States and India remains the importance of America—the nation, not just the
government—as a partner in India’s own remaking. As I have argued before
the basic task for India in international affairs is to wield a foreign policy that
enables and facilitates the domestic transformation of India. The relationship
with the United States is part of an effort to make possible the transformation
of India’s economy and society through our engagement with the world,
while promoting our own national values (of pluralism, democracy, social
justice and secularism) within our own society.
The India–US partnership contributes towards a global environment that
is supportive of these internal priorities, and that facilitates our energy
security, our food security and our environmental future. When we succeed in
our national transformation, we will be including more and more of our
people in the great narrative of hope that has been the narrative of social and
economic development in America over the last two hundred years. If all
goes well, India will be bringing 500 million villagers into the global village.
That will mean 500 million more in the market for American products, 500
million more consumers, service providers and partners. India hopes the US
will welcome them to the global village; and America hopes that India will
pursue policies that will make it easier for America to do so.
But when one looks at Mr Modi’s substantive contribution to this
important relationship, once we get past the theatrics, it is surprisingly thin.
After Mauritius, the US is the largest investor in India, but there’s been no
significant uptick. 693
And now with President Trump having mentioned India as one of the
countries with which the balance of trade has to be ‘rectified’ the road ahead
will only get rockier, not smoother. Will Prime Minister Modi have the
sagacity to make our relationship with the US what it should be, as his prime
ministerial term lurches towards its inglorious conclusion? On the basis of
what he has been able to accomplish thus far, I doubt it very much.

662 ‘Kissinger hails India as world power’, The Hindu , 7 November 2004.
663 ‘Indian students in US dwarf America’s FDI in India, spend whopping $6.54 bn’,
Financial Express , 14 November 2017 and Corinne Abrams, ‘This map shows where
India’s huge diaspora lives’, Wall Street Journal , 19 January 2016.
664 Quoted in Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–
1964 , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 15.
665 ‘U.S. imposes sanctions on India’, CNN , 13 May 1998.
666 ‘Chronology of the Indo-US nuclear deal’, Times of India , 9 October 2008.
667 ‘India will succeed so long as it’s not splintered on religious lines: Barack Obama’,
Financial Express , 27 January 2015.
668 Varghese K. George, Open Embrace: India-US Ties in the Age of Modi and Trump ,
New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2018, p. viii.
669 ‘Twitter report shows rise in govt requests to remove info’, Indian Express , 21
September 2017.
670 ‘Bill Gates to Narendra Modi: You need to generate new healthcare models for India’,
FirstPost , 14 August 2015.
671 ‘Big Modi govt push for health? Key schemes face cut in funds’, Times of India , 12
February 2018.
672 Abantika Ghosh, ‘Activists cry foul as WCD Ministry funds slashed by half’, Indian
Express , 1 March 2015.
673 ‘Swachh Bharat: Who Built More Toilets? UPA Did Better Than NDA’, The Quint , 5
August 2015; Aroon Deep, ‘Swachh Bharat spent ₹530 crore on publicity in three years—
but little on grassroots awareness’, Scroll.in , 22 November 2017.
674 ‘U.S.-India Joint Statement and Fact Sheets’, U.S. Embassy & Consulates in India.
675 ‘What Donald Trump said about India in his announcement on Paris climate accord’,
Indian Express , 2 June 2017.
676 ‘Briefing document, 11 January 2018’, US India Strategic Partnership Forum , p. 2.
677 ‘Full text of the joint statement between PM Narendra Modi and US President Donald
Trump at the White House’, The Hindu , 27 June 2017.
678 Ashok Kumar Mehta,‘The enigma that is US-Pak ties: Pakistan must stop providing
sanctuaries to terrorists’, DNA , 18 October 2017.
679 Datunorro Clark, ‘Trump attacks Harley-Davidson for moving production overseas to
offset tariffs’, NBC , 26 June 2018.
680 Srinath Raghavan, ‘Narendra Modi’s charm and grand Republic Day invite won’t fix
ties with Donald Trump’, The Print , 17 July 2018.
681 Varghese K. George, ‘Jostling and arrests at World Hindu Congress’, The Hindu , 9
September 2018.
682 Ajai Shukla, ‘India-US defence ties grow with assertive Modi govt’, Business Standard
, 21 January 2015.
683 Rajat Pandit, ‘US pips Russia as top arms supplier to India’, Times of India , 13 August
2014.
684 Benjamin Schwartz, ‘The Trajectory of US-India Defense Trade’, U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and ‘Defence Trade and Technology Initiative: India, US agree on 2 new
“pathfinder” projects’, Economic Times , 14 July 2018.
685 Amrita Nair Ghaswalla, ‘Govt may soon allow 100% FDI in defence’, Hindu Business
Line , 20 August 2017.
686 ‘U.S.-India Bilateral Trade and Investment’, Office of the United States Trade
Representative , 22 March 2017.
687 ‘India-US trade estimated to touch $140 billion in 2017’, Hindu BusinessLine ,3
February 2018.
688 Amiti Sen, ‘India to tell US not to judge ties on the basis of trade deficit’, Hindu
BusinessLine , 8 July 2018.
689 ‘Over 21 lakh Indians applied for H-1B visa in 11 years’, Hindu BusinessLine , 1
August 2017.
690 ‘Why US tag of “global terrorist” for Salahuddin matters to Indian govt’, Indian
Express , 28 June 2017.
691 Ed Henry and Sara Sider,‘Obama backs permanent seat for India on Security Council’,
CNN , 8 November 2010.
692 Ashley Tellis, ‘New Delhi, Washington: Who gets what?’, Times of India , 30 January
2010.
693 ‘Mauritius largest source of FDI in India, says RBI’, Economic Times , 19 January
2018.
 chapter forty-three

KOWTOWING TO CHINA?

The kowtow (or koutou in the pinyin form of Mandarin Chinese) was to be
performed before the emperor of China from ancient times. Although it
possibly originated in an even earlier era, it was well established by the time
the Qin dynasty came to power around 221 BCE . Although there are various
forms of the kowtow, it is essentially a gesture of deep respect towards one’s
elders and superiors and can involve bowing, prostrating, kneeling or a
combination of all three. In the past, the requirement of the kowtow in the
presence of Chinese rulers caused resentment among foreign ambassadors
and non-Chinese dignitaries because it was a gesture of submission. Today,
the kowtow is no longer in vogue. But as President Xi Jinping grows ever
more powerful it is clear that he expects most of the foreign heads of states he
deals with to kowtow to him in all but form. This is a problem that India has
to deal with head-on, as more than most we have to figure out how to deal
with China and its all-powerful ruler in a way that best suits our own
interests.
As I have pointed out earlier, Narendra Modi has visited China and the
US more than he has visited any other country in the world. 694 He and
President Xi Jinping have met on numerous occasions, most recently in
Wuhan and then in Johannesburg. But for all this, there doesn’t seem to have
been much headway made on the most serious issues confronting the two
nations—border conflicts, the trade imbalance, China’s growing aggressions
as it seeks to fulfil its regional and global aspirations, to name just a few. As
with the chapter on Indo–US relations that precedes this, a detailed analysis
of the India–China relationship is beyond the scope of this chapter, so let me
just focus on a few aspects.
Possibly the most pressing issue is the conflicts on the border, the
Doklam standoff continued for many months in 2018 before the two sides
stood down; but the problems this year have their genesis in a long-standing
dispute over the border that does not seem to be likely to ease up any time
soon, notwithstanding the conciliatory noises that are made from time to
time. To sort out the long-unresolved border issue alone would require an
extraordinary act of statesmanship and there are no signs that Mr Modi, as
prime minister, has either the inclination or capability to achieve it.
Before Doklam, relations between the two countries took on an icy chill
when Chinese leaders turned furious over the Dalai Lama’s April 2017 visit
to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as
its own. On 8 April, over loud protests from China’s government, the Dalai
Lama addressed devotees from far and wide at the historic monastery in the
border town of Tawang, where the sixth Dalai Lama was born more than
three centuries ago. 695
India and China view both the Dalai Lama and Arunachal Pradesh very
differently. From India’s perspective, the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of
the Tibetan Buddhist community, and so has the right to minister to his
followers at the great Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Tawang. And, because
Arunachal Pradesh is a state of the Indian union, what happens there is
India’s decision alone.
In China’s view, however, Arunachal Pradesh is not really India’s. Yes, it
officially belongs to India, they say, but only because of the McMahon Line,
a boundary drawn by British imperialists in 1911, which China no longer
accepts (though China did settle its boundary with Myanmar along the same
line). The Chinese government refers to Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet.
In any case, says China, the Dalai Lama is not a spiritual leader, but a
political one. And, given his support for Tibetan self-rule (Chinese officials
angrily call him a ‘splittist’ 696 ), his visit to a sensitive border area was
viewed as a deliberate provocation.
According to China’s spokesman, allowing the Dalai Lama to visit
Arunachal Pradesh could harm bilateral relations, with India facing the
‘consequences.’ China also summoned Indian Ambassador Vijay Gokhale to
register a formal protest. 697
India, for its part, took a conciliatory approach. The Ministry of External
Affairs first attempted to assuage China, stating that ‘no additional colour
should be ascribed to the Dalai Lama’s religious and spiritual activities.’
And, in the face of China’s increasingly intemperate fulminations, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s government reiterated its respect for the ‘One-
China’ policy, urging China’s government not to generate ‘artificial
controversy.’ 698
But China was not mollified. Instead, when the Dalai Lama arrived in
Arunachal Pradesh, the Chinese official media declared that China might be
‘forced to take tough measures.’ The Global Times , an English language
tabloid published by the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s
Daily , took a particularly belligerent tone. Citing China’s GDP, which is
‘several times higher than that of India,’ and its military capabilities, which
‘can reach the Indian Ocean’—not to mention its proximity to troubled
Kashmir—it asked, ‘if China engages in a geopolitical game with India,’ who
will win? 699
The same Global Times editorial stressed that this visit by the Dalai Lama
to Arunachal Pradesh was different from his previous six—the last of which
was in 2009—because he was ‘received and accompanied’ by India’s junior
home minister, Kiren Rijiju. India saw nothing unusual in Rijiju, an
Arunachali politician, being present for a major spiritual occasion. In
democracies, such public events involving popular religious figures are
common, and politicians often enjoy the attention they attract by attending
them.
But China preferred to use Rijiju’s attendance as evidence that the event
was, in fact, political, suggesting that India was using the visit as ‘a
diplomatic tool to put pressure on China.’ The fundamental point, the Global
Times stressed, was that the Dalai Lama ‘is a highly politicized symbol in
China’s diplomacy,’ so much so that a country’s attitude toward him affects
almost ‘the entire relationship’ with China. 700
Despite the Modi government’s refusal to back down in 2017, it climbed
down in 2018, when it asked ‘senior leaders’ and ‘government functionaries’
to stay away from events planned in March and April by the Tibetan
government in exile to mark the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s arrival
in India; this move was, ostensibly, to avoid exacerbating the Doklam crisis.
701
The Modi government has been engaged in an awkward diplomatic
trapeze act to avoid provoking China while simultaneously avoiding the
impression of bending too far to accommodate its powerful neighbour. To
give credit where credit is due, Mr Modi has tried to work with China, but
with little to show for his efforts. His government hailed his July 2018
meeting with President Xi Jinping as an example of getting diplomacy back
on track, only to be confronted with the embarrassment of confirming that it
had been a ‘no-agenda meeting’—in other words, one in which India has
been unable to raise any of the issues relating to its neighbour’s troublesome
conduct, from Kashmir and CPEC to Masood Azhar, stapled visas, Arunachal
Pradesh and Doklam. It does not appear to have occurred to Mr Modi that to
have no agenda is in fact to adopt your adversary’s agenda, since he prefers
to talk on his own terms rather than about your issues.
Such setbacks in dealing with China have been common throughout Mr
Modi’s tenure. For example, in 2014, PM Modi not only welcomed Chinese
President Xi Jinping to his hometown, Ahmedabad, on his own birthday; on
that same trip, he also lifted the previous government’s restrictions on
Chinese investments in sensitive sectors of the Indian economy, such as ports
and telecoms. 702 Chinese soldiers promptly crossed the disputed frontier
with India in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, going so far as to
pitch tents on land that India considers its sovereign territory. 703
That mini-crisis was followed by a series of policy setbacks that reflected
China’s scant regard for India’s sensitivities on various issues. China opposed
India’s bid (strongly supported by the United States) for membership in the
Nuclear Suppliers Group. 704 It blocked India’s request to name Masood
Azhar, the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed (a Pakistani terrorist group), to a
United Nations Security Council blacklist, despite support for the move from
the council’s fourteen other members. 705
China has also built its CPEC through Pakistan-controlled parts of
Kashmir. 706 China itself recognizes that the territory is disputed, yet its
government completely ignored India’s objections to the violation of its
sovereignty.
Against this background, China’s expectation that India would respect its
sensitivities was a bit rich. Yet China’s arrogant approach is not new. In fact,
its reaction to the Dalai Lama’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh as well as
Doklam, is of a piece with its behaviour in the South China Sea, where China
insists that sovereignty should be determined according to its ‘nine-dash
line.’ 707
China expects other countries to fall into line when it makes such a
demand, as the Philippines has done under President Rodrigo Duterte. 708
And China has proved willing to turn up the heat on those that don’t, such as
Japan and Vietnam. 709
 But India is somewhat bigger than China’s other regional neighbours, and
is made of sterner stuff. Rather than adopting a confrontational stand, China’s
leaders should work with us. If they don’t, and instead move to follow
through on their threats, they may well discover that India, too, has cards to
play.
In Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century , I laid out
a number of areas for possible co-operation with China, particularly in the
multilateral arena. It is entirely possible that the relationship with China can
veer away from confrontation towards at least coexistence if not extensive
cooperation. That was also the conclusion reached by the Parliamentary
Standing Committee for External Affairs in its review of India-China
cooperation in 2017–18. But to pull this off successfully requires an adroit
combination of political firmness, military preparedness to discourage any
PLA adventurism (strong defences would serve to prevent military means
actually having to be used), hard-headed economic negotiations and skilful
diplomacy. It cannot be achieved through bursts of enthusiasm followed by
sullen negativity, which have characterized the Modi government’s attitude
so far. Polite namaskars must be India’s alternative to the kowtow.

694 Varun B. Krishnan, ‘Modi’s foreign visits: A look at the PM’s travel patterns and
expenses’, The Hindu , 21 July 2018.
695 ‘Live: China Wrong to Slam Delhi Over Dalai Lama, Says Arunachal CM’, The Quint ,
5 April 2017.
696 Jaime FlorCruz, ‘Analysis: Why the Dalai Lama angers China’, CNN , 18 February
2010.
697 Apurva, ‘Don’t use Dalai Lama to harm our interests: China to India’, Indian Express ,
7 April 2017.
698 ‘Elizabeth Roche, ‘India stands firm on Dalai Lama’s Arunachal visit in face of China
opposition’, Livemint , 5 April 2017.
699 ‘India’s use of Dalai Lama card tactless’, Global Times , 6 April 2017.
700 Ibid.
701 Shubajit Roy, ‘Dalai Lama events in Delhi cancelled, Tibetans shift “Thank You India”
function to Dharamsala’, Indian Express , 6 March 2018.
702 ‘PM Modi welcomes Xi Jinping in Ahmedabad; India, China sign 3 pacts’, Times of
India , 18 September 2014.
703 Victor Mallet, ‘China-India border stand-off overshadows Xi Jinping’s deals’,
Financial Times , 18 September 2014.
704 ‘US reaffirms support to India’s NSG bid’, Indian Express , 11 January 2018.
705 Elizabeth Roche, ‘China again blocks bid in UN to list Masood Azhar as a global
terrorist’, Livemint , 2 November 2017.
706 ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Pakistan’s road of high hopes’, Indian Express ,
18 April 2016.
707 David Lague, ‘Analysis: China’s nine-dashed line in South China Sea’, Reuters , 25
May 2012.
708 Panos Mourdoukoutas, ‘Duterte’s South China Sea Flip-Flops Will Put The Philippines
In A Place It Doesn’t Want To Be’, Forbes , 30 May 2018.
709 ‘Japan Will Soon Help Vietnam Extract Gas from the South China Sea. How Will
China Respond?’, National Interest , 11 August 2018.
 chapter forty-four

BARGAINING WITH BANGLADESH

Of the many foreign policy decisions made by the Modi government, the only
one I would deem an unqualified success was its ratification of the Land
Boundary Agreement with our eastern neighbour. The boundary dispute dates
back to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.
The Partition of India by the British was a slapdash affair, concocted by a
collapsing Empire in headlong retreat from its responsibilities. The border
between the new states of India and Pakistan was hastily drawn by a lawyer,
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India, and left numerous practical
problems in its wake. In the eastern part of Pakistan, now (since 1971) the
independent country of Bangladesh, Radcliffe’s lines left two sets of
anomalies behind: territories ‘awarded’ to one country that the other country
(and its citizens) refused to relinquish (known to the lawyers as ‘adverse
possessions’), and tiny enclaves formally belonging to one country but
located within, and totally surrounded by, the territory of the other. There are
111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh spread over 17,000 acres and 51
Bangladesh enclaves in India spread over 7,110 acres, 710 so that a settlement
would involve a net transfer of some 40 square kilometres of territory from
India to its eastern neighbour.
Initial attempts to resolve these anomalies soon foundered on the hostility
that had sprung up between the two nations soon after Partition. Bangladesh’s
independence from Pakistan as a result of Indian intervention in 1971 opened
up the possibility of a resolution, and a Land Boundary Agreement was
actually concluded in 1974, but a military coup in Bangladesh and
subsequent strains in the relationship with India put that agreement on
indefinite hold. Though there were periodic bouts of bonhomie in the two
countries’ relationship through the 1990s, a succession of Indian
governments proved unable, or unwilling, to squander the political capital
necessary to legitimize the transfer of territory required to settle the dispute.
In 2011, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pushed anew for a
permanent settlement, but his efforts stumbled in the face of domestic
resistance, both from a coalition ally and from the Opposition, especially the
BJP, whose votes would have been indispensable for the constitutional
amendment required to implement the deal. The BJP had blocked the Bill in
Parliament, with the then Leader of the Opposition in the Upper House, Arun
Jaitley, a lawyer himself, arguing that the territory of India was an integral
part of the Constitution and ‘cannot be reduced or altered by an amendment.’
711
The BJP’s victory, however, was followed by a U-turn on most of the
policy positions it had adopted in Opposition. The boundary with Bangladesh
proved no exception. Visiting Dhaka as her first foreign stop after becoming
foreign minister, the BJP’s Sushma Swaraj pledged to go through with the
Land Boundary Agreement, and referred it to the Parliamentary Standing
Committee on External Affairs for review. 712 The committee, which I head,
deliberated over three weeks of hearings, summoning senior representatives
of the Foreign Ministry, the Home Ministry and the government of the most
affected state, West Bengal. On Monday, 7 December 2014, it unanimously
recommended that Parliament proceed to ratify the Constitutional
Amendment. Mr Jaitley, now the country’s finance minister and a prominent
member of the cabinet, refrained from reiterating his previous views, and
with Prime Minister Modi himself announcing his support for the deal,
passage through Parliament seemed assured. But it took the government four
more months—and a last-minute hurdle in the form of a demand by the
Assam unit of the BJP that the state be left out of the deal, something stoutly
resisted by the Congress—before they finally brought it to Parliament,
unchanged, for passage. 713
The agreement faced no hurdles in Bangladesh, which gains the most
from a settlement, both territorially and in stature in relation to its giant
neighbour. In India, the most problematic issue remains the perception of a
surrender of territory. It has never been sufficiently explained to the public
that neither country will, in fact, actually be giving up any territory it
currently controls. The enclaves are lawless tracts within sovereign countries,
where the writ of their nominal overlord does not run. India, for instance, has
no access to the Indian enclaves within Bangladesh—there are no customs
posts, border markings, post offices or police thanas to reflect their notional
Indian sovereignty. The people inhabiting these enclaves are theoretically
Indian citizens, without any of the rights and privileges Indian citizens in the
rest of India are able to exercise. Ending the anomaly will merely regularize
the reality, and any loss of territory is purely on paper.
Still, any residents of the Indian enclaves who wish to migrate to India
after the settlement would have a legal right to do so. If they fail to exercise
this option, their status is converted to Bangladeshi, along with the territory
they inhabit. Most people are expected to opt to remain where they are,
though, since any connection to the rest of India must have faded since 1947.
The agreement will be a major boost to the already warm relations
between New Delhi and Dhaka. The Awami League government in
Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina Wajed has extended India an unprecedented
level of cooperation in the area of security and counterterrorism. Under less
friendly regimes, Bangladesh had been a haven for assorted terrorist and
militant groups who used to wreak havoc in India and find refuge in
Bangladesh. Hasina’s government has not just denied these groups shelter but
actively intercepted them, arrested some of their leaders and even handed
wanted terrorists over to the Indian government. As she pointed out to me
when we met in Dhaka in October 2014, if bombs are not going off in Assam
these days, it is because of her government’s actions against the terrorists
who used to set them off.
If Indians and in particular Assamese are sleeping safer these days, it is
thanks to the government in Dhaka. Giving Bangladesh legal rights to
territory within its own borders is the least India can do to say thank you.
With the 100th Constitutional Amendment, we have finally done so.

710 Shubhajit Roy, ‘Everything you need to know: Land swap in offing with Bangladesh to
end disputes’, Indian Express , 2 December 2014.
711 Manan Kumar, ‘Why Narendra Modi made a U turn on Land Boundary Agreement?’,
DNA , 2 December 2014.
712 ‘Sushma bid to build Dhaka bridge - No breakthrough on two pacts opposed by
Mamata, say officials’, Telegraph India , 27 June 2014.
713 P Vaidyanathan Iyer,‘Congress braces for a fight if Assam kept out of land boundary
deal’, Indian Express , 1 May 2015.
 chapter forty-five

HAVE WE LOST NEPAL?

In the United States of the early 1950s, as Mao’s Communist party regime
consolidated its hold on China and marched into Tibet, exiling Washington’s
favourite Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-Shek, to the island of Taiwan, the
American strategic community was convulsed in a debate over ‘Who Lost
China?’ I only hope that nearly seven decades later their Indian equivalents
will not be letting out the anguished cry, ‘Who Lost Nepal?’
As a result of a slew of unpopular decisions, India seems bent on driving
Nepal into the arms of China and others. As I have pointed out, it is
significant that the first state visitor, Prime Minister of Nepal K. P. Sharma
Oli received, after being sworn in on 15 February 2018, was the Pakistani
prime minister, S. K. Abbasi. 714
There is, of course, only one place for fingers to be pointed, and that is at
our own government in New Delhi. Despite its increasingly feeble denials,
India’s de facto blockade of Nepal for the past few years has choked the
country’s economy, cut off its oil supplies, caused genuine hardship and
provoked a groundswell of hostility against our country—from the one place
on the planet whose relationship with us is so fraternal that we maintain open
borders with it.
How did this come to pass, and why? India’s displeasure at Nepal’s new
constitution and its refusal to accommodate the desires of its Madhesi and
Tharu population was understandable. The people of the Terai (or the
Madhes, as Indians prefer to call the region south of the hills abutting our
border) are in many ways kin to—and essentially indistinguishable from—
their brethren on our side of the frontier.
Some Nepalis consider Madhesis to be essentially transplanted Biharis,
but they have been there for centuries and more, and no one contests their
legitimate claim to an honoured role in shaping Nepal’s political destiny. But
rather than choosing an inclusive path by giving them their own autonomous
regions or provinces, the new constitution of the country that came into effect
in September 2015 essentially rendered them a minority in almost every
province bar one.
The unhappiness of most of the Madhesi people with this decision, and
the rioting that followed the announcement of the new provinces, added to
India’s disquiet, since problems in Nepal inevitably spill over into India. It is
unofficially estimated that at the height of the Nepalese civil war less than a
decade ago, 7 million of Nepal’s 27 million people had sought refuge in India
(undocumented, since Nepalis need no passports to come here).
If the anger in the Terai leads to a separatist movement, for instance,
India will likely bear the brunt of a new refugee crisis. New Delhi felt,
understandably, that Kathmandu’s leadership, overwhelmingly composed of
the dominant hill elites, should have taken India’s concerns into account
before announcing a constitution so fraught with potential problems.
But it’s a far cry from feeling fraternal concern about a vital neighbour
making a major political error and manifesting that irritation through virtually
cutting off that country’s lifeline from our country, thereby giving rise to
profound resentment of what is justifiably portrayed as Big Brother’s
bullying. The suspicion that in doing so the BJP government was pandering
to voters in Bihar’s assembly polls that were being held at the time was not
entirely unfounded.
The fact is there’s enough blame to be cast on our side too. The foreign
secretary was sent as a special envoy to warn Kathmandu not to embark on a
negative course, but that was just days before the constitution was
promulgated and after it had already been agreed among all the major
national political parties. The time for discreet but strong-arm diplomacy was
months earlier, when the signs were apparent that the constitution was likely
not to be the inclusive one India had hoped for.
The then foreign secretary was an outstandingly able diplomat, but he
was no Nepal expert and had never served there. A political envoy, or an all-
party team of Indian political leaders with well-established contacts in that
country, should have been dispatched before the summer with a clear and
unambiguous message of the importance India attached to a formula
acceptable to all shades of Nepali opinion.
I have reason to believe our embassy, which was led by Ambassador
Ranjit Rae (who was succeeded by Manjeev Singh Puri in 2017), read the
warning signs in time and sent urgent messages to New Delhi calling for
early diplomatic intervention. These were ignored. As I have mentioned
earlier, one astute observer told me privately that the ‘PMO took its eyes off
the ball’.
That was the Modi government’s first mistake. By the time it woke up to
the impending crisis and dispatched the foreign secretary to Kathmandu, it
was already too late. The time for quiet, discreet but effective diplomacy had
long since passed; the constitution was already a ‘done deal’ before we even
showed our cards.
When the constitution-makers in Kathmandu went ahead and issued the
constitution they had already agreed upon, India reacted with a pique
unbecoming of a major regional power. We showed our displeasure publicly
by, in effect, cutting off essential supplies on which all Nepalis are
dependent.
The problem was not just that this came across as overbearing, but that it
had all the subtlety of a blunderbuss: instead of sending a message to the elite
in the hills, we hurt people we didn’t want to hurt—the aam aadmi of
Nepalis. An ordinary worker in Kathmandu who can’t get an auto-rickshaw
to take his pregnant wife to a hospital because there’s no petrol in the pumps
isn’t going to worry about the niceties of constitutional inclusiveness. He is
just going to curse India for doing this to him. We made enemies of the very
people we have always claimed are our brothers.
And what has the Modi government achieved by doing this? A basic rule
of international politics is that you apply pressure calibrated to a desired
outcome—in this case, changes acceptable to the people of the Terai. But
instead we imposed a blockade after the constitution had already been
adopted; it would be impossible for any government in Kathmandu to change
it at this stage under Indian pressure without being perceived as surrendering
its sovereignty. So we incurred deep unpopularity in the hills without gaining
anything concrete for the Madhesis—a lose-lose proposition.
On top of that New Delhi allowed itself to be identified with the losing
side in the prime ministerial race, unsubtly backing Sushil Koirala and
turning the once-Indophile Oli into a raging anti-Indian chauvinist. Well, Oli
is now the prime minister, Delhi: deal with it.
That was how an over-centralized Modi regime succeeded in alienating
Nepal. Today, China is busy making inroads into the north, building roads,
opening railway lines into Nepal, and grandly offering landlocked Nepal
access to its ports as an alternative (though hardly a credible alternative,
given their distance from the country) to Nepal’s traditional sea outlet in
Kolkata. For all the professions of fraternal bonhomie that have accompanied
later interactions between the Indian and Nepali prime ministers, it is clear
that a significant change has occurred in the relationship, to which India has
no choice but to adjust. The decision by Prime Minister Oli to pull his
country out of the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral
Technical and Economic Cooperation) military exercise at the last minute in
September 2018 pointed to continued mistrust between the two governments,
to which Mr Modi’s policies and conduct appear to have contributed. 715
The Modi mess in Nepal adds to the growing sense of disquiet amongst
students of Indian foreign policy about the Modi government’s management
of relations on the subcontinent. A combination of arrogance and ineptitude
is all too often visible where subtlety and pro-active diplomacy could have
delivered the desired results.

714 Elizabeth Roche, ‘Why India is keeping a close eye on Pakistan PM’s visit to Nepal’,
Livemint , 5 March 2018.
715 Shastri Ramachandran, ‘Nepal PM KP Oli sees “mischief” in India visit of ruling party
chairman’, DNA , 13 September 2018.
 chapter forty-six

LET US BE HUMANE TO THE ROHINGYAS

The Rohingya crisis has led to a great deal of incoherent commentary in our
media and around the world of late. Globally, the story has centred around
the demonization of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate
who is the de facto leader of her country. She is being assailed as complicit in
her military’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority. There have even
been calls to strip her of her Nobel; headline writers have dubbed her ‘ig-
nobel’. This is misguided and ill-informed, since it is the Burmese military
that controls the Rohingya policy and not her, but that is another story and
need not detain us here.
There are roughly 40,000 Rohingyas in India at the moment and our
attitude towards them has ranged from the appalling to the less than
humanitarian. When the crisis first spilled over our border our response was
disgraceful. The minister of state (Home), Kiren Rijiju, declared his
government’s intention to deport all Rohingya refugees—even those with
documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) recognizing them as such—as illegal migrants. 716
This would have been an extraordinary step to take, because India has
had a proud humanitarian record of granting asylum to persecuted groups for
over 2,000 years. Swami Vivekananda, in his famous address to the World
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, spoke of his country as a haven
for the persecuted, taking pride in Hindus’ acceptance of Jewish and
Zoroastrian refugees. 717 In recent years, Tibetans, Bengalis persecuted by
the Pakistani army in 1971, ethnic Tamils from Sri Lanka, Nepalis fleeing
their civil war, the Chakmas of Bangladesh, Afghans and an assortment of
individual Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians, and Africans have been among those
given refuge in India, with various degrees of formal legality. This is our
traditional practice and there has been little serious dissent about it anywhere
in the country.
There is one major difference, though: unlike the majority of those cases
(the individual Middle Easterners and Afghans excepted), the Rohingyas are
all Muslim. The arguments advanced by Mr Rijiju all revolve around this
inconvenient fact. The Rohingyas, he says, are susceptible to recruitment by
terrorist groups; they ‘pose grave security challenges’; their presence leads to
social, political and cultural problems; and the government is anxious to
‘ensure the demographic pattern of India is not disturbed’. 718 In other words,
we didn’t want to play host to large numbers of Muslim refugees. This is, in a
word, appalling (and the government has not offered a shred of evidence for
the suggestion that Rohingyas are in any way complicit in terrorism in our
country).
There was no immediate threat to the Rohingyas, however, because our
government had overlooked an inconvenient fact before Mr Rijiju made his
statement: we had no place to deport the Rohingyas to. They all hail from
Rakhine province in Myanmar, where their ancestors settled under British
rule some 150 years ago, but Myanmar refuses to recognize them among the
135 ethnic groups listed under its 1982 Citizenship Act, considering them
foreigners. 719
Yangon therefore has no obligation to take back people it considers
foreigners, whose presence in their country they, however outrageously,
deem illegal. (Indeed, in Myanmar, the very word Rohingya is taboo: they
can only be called ‘Bengali’, in other words illegal migrants from
Bangladesh. 720 ) But Bangladesh acknowledges no responsibility for people
who have, for the most part, resided in the Arakan area for a couple of
centuries.
After a massive outcry, the government walked back its inhumane idea of
involuntary deportation and has now begun talking of providing assistance to
Bangladesh to resettle Rohingya refugees there as well as providing
assistance to Rakhine state so that the refugees can return there safely. 721 All
this is much better than our government’s initial reaction to the Rohingyas,
but it is still far from implementability. In the meantime, the legal status of
these unfortunates remains indeterminate, depriving them of the possibility of
finding legal employment, or of improving their makeshift (and often
wretched) living conditions.
 Legalities aside, there is also a simple moral case here. Our so-called
Hindu nationalists are, as usual, forgetting the values on which the Hindu
faith is based, one cardinal principle of which is ‘atithi devo bhava’, the guest
is like God. The timeless values invoked by Swami Vivekananda—and more
recently by Pandit Nehru in welcoming the Tibetan refugees—cannot be cast
aside to suit the prejudices of the ruling party, without doing violence to the
principles they embody. To make matters worse, the BJP government has
been actively promoting the passage of a new law, the Citizenship
Amendment Bill, that would grant the right of Indian citizenship to refugees
from Myanmar and every other of India’s subcontinental neighbours,
provided they are not Muslim. 722 The Bill proposes citizenship to six
persecuted minorities who come to India from neighbouring countries, but it
names Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists alone—not
Muslims. Humanitarian policy that discriminates on the basis of religion is
not humanitarianism at all, but bigotry.
Refugees bring a great deal to their host countries. Albert Einstein was a
refugee. Tom Stoppard was a refugee. In our own country, Milkha Singh was
a refugee. They fled their homelands for their lives and found a welcome in a
new home, to which they brought lustre through their own achievements.
A country of over 1.3 billion people can easily welcome 40,000
Rohingyas. Let us stop allowing the ruling party’s bigotry to undermine more
than two millennia of Indian tradition. Let us be humane to the Rohingyas—
and in that way, let us be true to ourselves.
II

The Rohingya situation finds an echo in a second potential humanitarian

disaster that also involves Bengali Muslims, this time in Assam. Seventy-one
years after the partition of India, and forty-seven years after the subsequent
rebirth of the former East Pakistan as Bangladesh, one of the legacies of the
messy division of the subcontinent has come back to haunt the country. The
crisis in mid-2018 over the publication of a National Register of Citizens
(NRC) in the Indian state of Assam has thrown into doubt the citizenship, and
the future, of some four million human beings, with incalculable
consequences for the peace of the region.
The departing British partitioned India in 1947 on the basis of religion, in
order to create a Muslim state, Pakistan, out of Muslim-majority provinces in
the West and East of India. East Pakistan seceded in 1971 to form
Bangladesh after a brutal and genocidal campaign by the Pakistani army had
driven some 10 million refugees to India. Once India had vanquished
Pakistan in war and the Pakistani army in the east surrendered, the refugees
streamed back home to newly-independent Bangladesh. But some, perhaps,
stayed on in India, merging seamlessly into the population.
Over the course of the next few years, they were joined by millions of
other migrants from Bangladesh, fleeing economic hardship and land scarcity
in an overcrowded country. While those who slipped into the Indian state of
West Bengal were easily assimilated by their fellow Bengalis, those who
made new homes in the north-eastern state of Assam were culturally,
linguistically, ethnically and religiously different from the majority of their
Assamese neighbours. Fearing they were being squeezed out of land and job
opportunities in their own country, Assamese students began mass protests in
the 1980s, which occasionally erupted into violence and made Assam all but
ungovernable. A pair of savage massacres of Bengali Muslim migrant
groups, including of some 3,000 in the Assamese village of Nellie in 1983,
revealed the extent of the crisis. The agitation was only defused when then
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi concluded an ‘Assam Accord’ in 1985,
pledging to identify all those who had migrated illegally from Bangladesh
into Assam since 1971.
This was easier said than done, and despite estimates of 20 million illegal
immigrants from Bangladesh, an assortment of tribunals set up to identify
foreigners failed to spot more than a few thousand over the years. No
concrete action was taken, and the problem was left to simmer for decades by
successive governments. But the election of a hardline Hindutva government
in 2014 revived the process, under Supreme Court supervision. When it
concluded the main phase of its work at the end of July, it published the
NRC, a list of persons who could provide proof of antecedents in Assam
preceding the accord’s cut-off date of 1971. Just over 4 million people, who
could not, found themselves rendered, in effect, stateless.
There is still time to appeal the findings of the register, and it is
anticipated that some of the more obvious errors of omission—some
members of a family listed and others not, for instance—will be swiftly
rectified. But the question that bedevils Assam today is: what happens to the
rest?
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is
simultaneously taking credit for having identified ‘foreigners’, and sheltering
behind the protection of the Supreme Court’s supervision of the process. The
implication is that this is a neutral exercise that has nothing to do with
politics. But at bottom the exercise is indeed intensely political—since it is
about who can own land, claim jobs and vote in BJP-ruled Assam.
Whatever the size of the final list of foreigners deemed ineligible for
Indian citizenship, it is assumed that the excluded will be overwhelmingly, if
not entirely, Bengali Muslims. What will happen to them? Some speak glibly
of deporting them to Bangladesh. But there is no deportation agreement in
place between New Delhi and Dhaka, and Bangladesh has made it clear that
it assumes no responsibility for people who are not on its soil. Will they be
turfed out of their homes in Assam and find themselves with no place to go?
Some suggest the setting up of camps to house these people temporarily
till Bangladesh can take them back, a prospect that has human rights groups
horrified—not least since that day may never come. Indeed, Bangladesh is
one of the few neighbouring countries with which the present government of
India has been able to maintain good relations. Creating a migration crisis, or
worse still, attempting forced deportations, will destabilize a relationship that
is vital to India.
The human implications of the NRC list are also troubling. Many who
may indeed have come to India after 1971 (and are therefore deemed
ineligible under the terms of the accord) have lived in Assam for over four
decades and know no other home. Can they now be stripped of the rights they
have exercised in democratic India most of their lives?
It has been cynically suggested that a principal purpose of the exercise
has been to strip Bengali Muslims of the right to vote, as general elections
loom in early 2019. In a state of 26 million inhabitants, disenfranchising 4
million could have a significant impact on the electoral fortunes of the ruling
party, which is not known to enjoy much support among India’s Muslim
electorate. But the legal implications of such an action have yet to be parsed,
and will be open to challenge in the courts.
So far, the crisis created by the NRC has been non-violent, but as
tensions mount on both sides of the issue, the risk of an eruption is ever-
present. Is an accord arrived at in 1985, setting a cut-off date in 1971,
necessarily the best framework to resolve the issue in 2018? Can democratic
India afford to ignore the human rights of a few million people who have
been living on its soil for decades? While protecting India’s sovereignty and
the integrity of its citizenship are laudable principles, can they be applied in
practice to create stateless people whose lives would suddenly be plunged
into limbo?
There are no clear answers to any of these questions, though passionate
voices on both sides of the argument have no doubt what those answers
should be. At a time when the BJP’s majoritarian assertiveness has already
raised concerns around the world, the answers India finds will mark a hugely
important step in the evolution of its turbulent democracy.

716 Krishna N. Das and Sanjeev Miglani, ‘India says to deport all Rohingya regardless of
U.N. registration’, Reuters , 14 August 2017.
717 ‘Full text of Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago speech of 1893’, Business Standard , 11
September 2017.
718 Deepak K. Singh, ‘Embrace the Rohingya’, Indian Express , 13 September 2017.
719 Angela Dewan, ‘Who are the Rohingya and why are they fleeing?’, CNN , 13
September 2017.
720 ‘The Most Unwanted: A gripping account of Rohingya refugees living in India’, Indian
Express , 26 June 2018.
721 ‘India extends support to Bangladesh for resolving Rohingya crisis’, The Hindu , 9
April 2018.
722 Nafees Ahmed, ‘Rohingyas flee Myanmar: India must drop religious criteria in refugee
law’, Business Standard , 6 September 2017.
 chapter forty-seven

LOOTING AND SCOOTING

One of the questions that maddens right-thinking Indians is this one: why do
so many Indians accused of fraud and cheating flee abroad, particularly to
London, and why can’t we just bring them back to face justice?
The string of high-profile fugitives from the law who have managed to
escape India in recent years—in order of disappearance, Lalit Modi, Vijay
Mallya, and Nirav Modi, but also many lesser-known figures before and
between them—has brought the spotlight on to the issue of extradition. One
of the basic principles of criminal law is that it is applicable to only the
territory of the state of origin; it does not extend to foreign jurisdictions.
However, because of the increasingly transnational nature of crime, and the
habit of criminals taking refuge in foreign countries to escape the reach of the
law, extradition laws were framed to bridge the limitations of criminal law.
Extradition is the transfer of a person by a state in which he or she
resides, to another state where such person is required to face a criminal trial
or to serve a sentence for an offence for which that person has already been
convicted. Therefore, a request for extradition can take place when a person
is under investigation, under trial or when convicted.
The Extradition Act, 1962, governs the law of extradition in India.
Section 3 of the Act states that the Act is applicable to foreign states notified
by the central government. That notification takes place when India enters
into an extradition treaty with another country. This has to be negotiated;
when both countries agree, an extradition treaty sets out the conditions and
procedure for extradition, which, by and large, incorporate the basic
internationally accepted principles of extradition law.
The extradition request must be in relation to an ‘extraditable offence’:
not all criminal offences come under this definition, as it usually
encompasses serious offences. This is determined by each individual treaty.
For instance, Article 2 of the 1997 Extradition Treaty signed by India and the
USA states that if an offence attracts more than one year of imprisonment,
then it shall be considered an ‘extraditable offence’. Extradition treaties also
incorporate the principle of ‘dual criminality’, whereby the offence for which
a person is being extradited, must be a criminal offence in the requesting
country as well as in the requested country.
But that’s not all. When you request extradition, you have to furnish
compelling justification—that is, the requesting country must provide
material to establish a prima facie case against the concerned person, to the
satisfaction of the requested country, in order to commence an extradition
process. Legal principles specify that the extradited person must be only
prosecuted for the offence mentioned in the extradition request, and not for
any other offence. If the requesting country wishes to prosecute the person
for additional offences, the person must be returned to the requested country
and a fresh process of extradition has to be considered.
Finally, the person must be assured a fair trial in the requesting country,
in line with internationally accepted human rights standards. The requested
state is not supposed to enquire into the nature of the criminal justice system
in the requesting state; however, if the criminal justice system in the
requesting state is seen, on the face of it, to be contrary to fundamental tenets
of justice, then the requested state may question the procedure of the
requesting state. These principles are incorporated to protect individuals from
political persecution and fishing expeditions by vindictive foreign
governments. Many European states refuse to extradite wanted criminals to
India on the grounds that India retains the death penalty, which most
European democracies consider a barbaric practice. India has, in some cases,
promised a European court that the extradited offender will not be executed,
and has obtained extradition only on the basis of such an assurance. That was
how Portugal agreed to extradite the notorious gangster Abu Salem; had he
been arrested in India, he would almost certainly have faced the noose for the
crimes for which he was convicted.
Extradition treaties are also governed by the ‘principle of reciprocity’,
under which, if a foreign country has a stated position that it won’t extradite
its nationals to other countries, then India also bars the extradition of its
nationals to such a country. This practice is followed by India in relation to
certain countries in the Middle East, such as Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia
and the UAE, whose nationals are not extraditable to India from their home
countries.
India has extradition treaties with forty-two countries and more limited
‘arrangements’ with nine others. 723 While India’s treaty partners have treaty
obligations to consider India’s requests, in the absence of a treaty, it is a
matter for the foreign country to consider, in accordance with its domestic
laws and procedures, whether it wants to agree to India’s extradition request
or not. Nevertheless, India can extradite individuals from countries with
which it does not have extradition treaties if it is backed by the principle of
reciprocity. In other words, if India assures the requested state that in future it
will similarly extradite a person from the country if a proper extradition
request is made, then the requested state may extradite a person wanted by
the Indian authorities. But just because we have an extradition treaty does not
mean we will immediately get a fugitive extradited; there is a process to be
followed, and we have not been doing too well with it.
An extradition request is sent by the requesting country through
appropriate diplomatic channels. If a case is pending before a court in India
and the accused evades the summons of the court, then it may issue a warrant
of arrest. This can be sent to foreign authorities for execution, if the accused
is in a foreign jurisdiction, as per Section 105 of our country’s Criminal
Procedure Code, and the procedure for this process is governed by the Mutual
Legal Assistance Treaties (referred to as ‘MLATs’) between the concerned
countries.
However, despite the existence of an extensive legal framework to
extradite fugitives, India has a dismal record in successfully convincing other
jurisdictions, particularly the UK, about the need to extradite such people. 724
Why has London become such a haven of choice for fleeing Indian crooks?
The dismal conditions in Indian jails, the slow pace of our criminal
prosecution mechanism as well as the presence of the death penalty, have
been cited by British courts as reasons for their denial of extradition requests
by India. In a case seeking the extradition of Sanjeev Kumar Chawla, a man
accused of cricket match-fixing in 2000, even though the court in London
was convinced that there existed a prima facie case against him, it held that
the poor conditions in Tihar Jail amount to a violation of his basic human
rights and therefore declined the request. 725 Similarly, India’s request for the
extradition of Jatinder Angurala, a person accused of financial fraud, was
declined by a court in the UK, as the request was made in 2015, even though
the acts were supposedly committed in the early 1990s. The British court
concluded that it would be unfair to extradite an aged person after such a long
passage of time.
The largest number of successful extraditions since 2002 (nineteen
persons out of a grand total of just sixty-five fugitives extradited to India
altogether 726 ) has been from the UAE. It is depressing to note that despite
numerous extradition requests against various individuals in the UK, only one
person has been extradited to India in the past twenty-five years. The failure
of the Indian authorities to undertake prison reforms and improve our system
of criminal prosecution has therefore acted as a major hurdle in India’s efforts
to nab fugitives abroad.
The case now proceeding against Vijay Mallya, and the failure to proceed
against Lalit Modi, are litmus tests for the Indian extradition process. If India
fails to successfully rebut Mallya’s reported claims of political victimization,
then the courts in the UK may look at the Indian request in a negative
manner. As his lawyers have once again harped on the poor conditions of
jails in India, the lawyers for the Government of India have stressed that
Mallya will be kept in Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai, with facilities better than
the average Indian jail. At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how the
UK courts will react to this in Mallya’s case. However, in relation to Lalit
Modi, even though India was reported to have forwarded the warrant for
arrest against Modi for money laundering, his sympathizers in the present
government, who have been revealed to include the foreign minister herself,
have shown no interest in proceeding with a formal extradition request.
Indeed, in response to a question in the Lok Sabha on 9 August 2017, the
MoS for External Affairs claimed that ‘the Ministry of External Affairs has
not received any formal request for extradition of Mr Lalit Modi from the
concerned law enforcement agencies in India.’ 727
India’s dismal record in extraditing fugitives, particularly those in the
UK, must be immediately corrected through a comprehensive review of the
manner in which we present our extradition requests, as well as undertaking
extensive reforms in our criminal justice system in order to end the
perception of our jails as being guaranteed horror houses of grime,
deprivation and torture. The abolition of the death penalty, which has no
deterrence value nor any penological justification, would also improve our
image as a country committed to the ethos of justice. At the same time, we
must undertake a review of our bilateral extradition treaties, in order to
strengthen our ability to seek the extradition of individual fugitives.
However, above all, we require firm political will, which has been singularly
lacking in the Modi government, to ensure that the cases are brought to their
logical conclusion—otherwise we will soon become known as the country of
choice for those who wish to loot and scoot, since so few are successfully
brought back.

723 Poulomi Banerjee, ‘Chinks in India’s armour: Why Mallya may escape extradition’,
Hindustan Times , 22 May 2016.
724 ‘From Mallya to Nirav Modi, the UK remains the preferred hideout of Indian
fugitives’, Times of India , 15 June 2018.
725 ‘UK rejects two Indian extradition requests’, Times of India , 5 November 2017.
726 ‘List of fugitives extradited by foreign governments to India’, www.mea.gov.in
727 ‘No formal extradition request submitted against Lalit Modi to MEA’, Hindustan
Times , 14 May 2017.
 chapter forty-eight

PROTECTING OUR MIGRANTS

Among the unsung factors in India’s near-miraculous survival of the global

economic recession some years ago were the remittances that kept coming in
from our mainly blue-collar workers in the Gulf. India receives the highest
amount of remittances in the world at roughly $69 billion, almost three times
the amount of FDI that comes into the country. 728
By far the largest share comes from the Gulf countries—Bahrain, Kuwait,
Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—which contributed 32 per cent to
the total amount in 2017. And most of those represent the sweat and toil of
labourers, masons, clerks, shop assistants and other working class Indians
who never lost their faith in our country, or diluted their commitment to
India, at a time when well-heeled Indian capitalists preferred to invest their
money abroad.
And yet, despite their invaluable contributions to our country, many
Indian migrant workers continue to face exploitative working conditions,
forced labour, non-payment of wages and other forms of human rights abuse
that sometimes plunge them into slavery-like conditions. These workers, the
majority of whom are low-paid and semi-skilled or unskilled, are employed
as cooks, cleaners, domestic workers, plumbers and construction labourers.
And India could do far more to help them in their distress.
Let us look at the kinds of challenges that migrant workers face:

• Deception by visa brokers and recruiting agents : They are victims of

various forms of deception and trickery at the recruitment stage. These
include excess charges for visas and other travel documents, processing
of fake travel documents without informing the workers of their
illegitimate status, recruitment for non-existent jobs, misrepresenting the
job and working conditions, providing falsely inflated loans that lead to
 situations of bonded labour. As an MP, I have heard countless stories of
migrant workers landing in the wrong country and being stranded there,
being jailed for having the wrong documents, finding their salary or work
conditions are not what they were promised. This is compounded by:
• Lack of awareness of pre-departure training : Lack of authentic and
timely information relating to overseas employment, recruitment agencies
and emigration procedures makes workers dependent on intermediaries
and vulnerable to exploitation. And:
• Lack of access to remedies : The power differential between workers and
recruiting agents makes it difficult for workers who face abuse to secure
justice. Enforcement mechanisms are not strong enough and complaints
registered rarely lead to convictions.

International Migrants Day, 18 December, celebrates the spirit of millions of

migrants across the world. It recognizes that a large section of these men and
women put their freedom and sometimes even their lives at risk to follow
their dreams and aspirations. It’s a good occasion for us in India to think of
how we can protect our migrants better.
The Emigration Act, 1983, which has been used to regulate the
recruitment and employment of migrant workers, has been criticized by
government commissions and NGOs such as Amnesty International India.
The government-commissioned report by the Ministry of Overseas Affairs in
2009 stated in its recommendations: ‘The institutional failure in effectively
addressing corruption and fraudulence in the overseas recruitment system
cannot be rectified by cosmetic changes but calls for a comprehensive
institutional reform. The new institution should be liberal but capable of
tackling the complex layers of corruption and multiplicity of players with
greater coordination and efficiency to ensure free but orderly emigration of
Indian workers to the overseas labour market. It should also be preventive
and remedial in its focus when it seeks to streamline the overseas recruitment
system.’
Amnesty International India’s 2014 report titled ‘Exploited dreams:
Dispatches from Indian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia’ 729 highlighted
how India has failed to meet its international obligations to protect the rights
of migrant workers and prevent trafficking and forced labour. The Philippines
law on migrant workers in its statute places the dignity of its migrant workers
above their contribution to the national economy through their foreign
exchange remittances—and to that end seeks to provide adequate and timely
social, economic and legal services to its migrant population. ‘The existence
of the overseas employment program rests solely on the assurance that the
dignity and fundamental human rights and freedoms of the Filipino citizens
shall not, at any time, be compromised or violated’ says the Migrant Workers
and Overseas Filipinos Act, 1995.
Our Emigration Act expresses no such sentiment.
Their law also recognizes NGOs as key partners in the protection of
migrant workers and seeks to cooperate with them for the promotion of
migrant welfare. Ours doesn’t.
Recognizing the severe deficiencies of the existing law, the UPA
government had started the process of trying to improve emigration
legislation on the lines of the Philippines Migrant Workers Act, but this new
legislation has not yet come about. Previous reports by the Ministry of
Overseas Indian Affairs have specified the shortcomings of the recruitment
process and expressed the need to modernize the legislative framework into a
more effective instrument in facilitating legal migration and empowering
emigrants.
Now it’s time for the Modi government to treat this issue with the
seriousness it deserves. Based on research and field experiences,
organizations like Amnesty International India and MPs like myself have
come forward to call for a new law that provides adequate protection services
to migrant workers before they depart. When it comes to migrant workers, it
should be the state’s number one priority to protect their lives and dignity in a
foreign country. A new law that empowers workers with adequate
information and support from their home country will help reduce the
likelihood of exploitation abroad.
In a country like ours, with unemployment and underemployment
problems and excess human resources, a robust emigration law will help
fulfil the aspirations of millions of India’s citizens going abroad in search of
better economic opportunities.

728 ‘India highest recipient of remittances at $69 bn’, The Hindu , 23 April 2018.
729 www.amnesty.org , 4 July 2014, Index number: ASA 20/025/2014.
 chapter forty-nine

A MAN OF DESTINY? NOT QUITE

The phrase ‘man of destiny’ is most commonly associated with Napoleon

Bonaparte. It is used to describe Napoleon’s unshakeable belief in his own
destiny as someone who would rule the world despite his origins as a member
of an impecunious Corsican family and the numerous setbacks he
encountered in his drive to greatness.
Narendra Modi can certainly be described as Napoleonic in his single-
minded pursuit of power and his belief in his own destiny from a very young
age. Many of his admirers point to his visionary speeches, his soaring
ambition, and his unshakeable faith in his own and India’s destiny, as
evidence that he has the special qualities that the iconic French leader
possessed. However, while Napoleon is remembered, despite all his
shortcomings, for his brilliant foresight and his belief in, and implementation
of, many of the ideas that are fundamental to the world today—among them
religious tolerance, property rights, and equality before the law—the same
cannot be said of Narendra Modi. His speeches have been compelling, but he
has been unable to implement his ideas. At the same time, he has failed to
prevent or stop forces that have undermined India’s prospects. On his watch,
forces of bigotry, communalism and division have been unleashed that have
set India back decades, and make it difficult to rate him positively on
practically any quality that defines a great statesman and ruler.
In this chapter I will try and sum up much of what I have examined in
this book about the record thus far of India’s paradoxical prime minister.
(Any repetition of ideas previously expressed in the book is deliberate as I am
seeking here to reiterate what I believe are the main failings and
contradictions inherent in Narendra Modi.)
Let’s start with Mr Modi’s impact on the lives of Indians and Indian
society that I look at in Section II , ‘The Modi-fication of India’. Just one
incident will serve to sum up the deleterious effect he has had on so much
that is good and intrinsic to our country. His failing was hammered home to
him by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the greater BJP prime minister in most Indians’
reckoning, in 2002, when Mr Vajpayee rapped Mr Modi on the knuckles for
failing to observe raj dharma, the dharmic code of conduct that rulers are
expected to follow. One of the texts in which raj dharma is explicated is the
Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata. In the last essay he ever wrote, ‘Living with
the Mahabharata’, published in Seminar in April 2010, the great philosopher,
writer and Mahabharata scholar Chaturvedi Badrinath (1923–2010) defined
the dharma of the ruler in the following way: ‘The protecting of the people,
this is the highest dharma of the king. Indeed, the protecting of all living
beings with kindness towards them, is the highest dharma. Therefore, that
king who has the character of protecting with kindness, those who know what
dharma truly is regard as the highest dharma.’ 730
Mr Badrinath then goes on to say that good governance, according to the
Mahabharata, is to protect people from fear. He quotes the epic as laying
down the following injunctions: ‘Let the king protect his subjects from their
fear of him; from their fear of others; from their fear of each other; and from
their fear of things that are not human.’ Yet today the Modi regime has
generated what I have already quoted a columnist as dubbing ‘an ecosystem
of fear’. On every one of these counts, Narendra Modi and the government he
leads have failed dismally. The India we live in now is a society that is
polarized and fearful. Minorities, liberals, women and Dalits are harassed and
brutalized with impunity and lumpen thugs terrorize all and sundry in the
name of Hindutva.
This is the India Prime Minister Narendra Modi presides over, not the
secular, plural, free and equal society that our founding fathers had
envisioned and was built in its first six and half decades as a free nation. This
is the first test Prime Minister Modi fails when it comes to being regarded as
a ‘man of destiny’. No leader whose destiny is built on corroding the
destinies of millions can be said to be worthy of the name.
Let’s move on to his sorry record of misgovernance. In Section III ,
‘Moditva and Misgovernance’, I take a close look at the multiple areas in
which Mr Modi and his government have made a hash of governing India,
often taking the country backwards rather than letting it surge forward. The
rise of widespread communal violence, mob lynchings and the bizarre
phenomenon known as ‘cow vigilantism’; the shrinking space for dissent,
with those who dare to think differently experiencing the daily fear of
vulnerability to intimidation and coercion; the etiolation of freedom of
expression and freedom of the press, the bulwarks of any democracy; the
sidelining and often demonization of India’s minorities, to a point where
many feel unwelcome in Modi’s new India; the unleashing of a crude form of
mob bigotry, both on the streets and on social media, that are perceived as
enjoying the patronage of the authorities; the hollowing out of institutions
built up over decades, whose independence and impartiality are being
systematically stifled; the eradication of checks and balances and the
exaltation of government-sponsored definitions of nationalism that reduce
alternative viewpoints to the category of ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-Hindu’,
themselves seen as largely synonymous; and the creation of a ‘new normal’
in society which makes acceptable the diffusion of a malevolent communal
poison in the name of a triumphant majoritarianism that has eroded the
fundamental values of India’s secular and nominally egalitarian republic—all
of these have cast a blight on the meaning of our citizenship in Modi’s new
India.
Moving on, we come to an area in which PM Modi’s performance has
been inglorious—the economy, as described in Section IV , ‘The Failure of
Modinomics’. The book details a checklist of spectacular failures, headed by
a GDP growth rate that, as has been noted, has fallen by nearly 2 per cent
because of the twin self-inflicted blows of demonetization and the botched
rollout of GST. Demonetization, in particular, has badly dented investor
confidence, drastically reducing much-needed investment in the economy.
The recently released ‘back-series’ figures show that GDP growth under
UPA-1 (8.87 per cent) and UPA-2 (7.65 per cent) was higher than the first
four years of NDA-2 (7.35 per cent). Worse, the GDP fell for five
consecutive quarters under Mr Modi, hitting a low of 5.7 per cent in the first
quarter of 2017–18. The IMF projects GDP growth of 7.3 per cent in the
current financial year, lower than it was under UPA and than it might have
been had the economy not been dealt the ‘double tap’ of demonetization and
GST. The growth that has occurred has largely been because of an
unsustainable government spending spree (at two and a half times private
consumption). Manufacturing has contracted, exports have declined (well
below the UPA-era peak of $312 billion in 2013–14) 731 , growth in
industrial production has slowed and agriculture is stagnating (or worse,
given the annual rise in the number of farmer suicides). The current account
deficit is projected to grow from 1.9 per cent to 2.6 per cent of GDP this year.
Unemployment is on the rise, despite far-fetched claims of new jobs being
generated, which are not apparent to those who should supposedly be
working in them. Petrol and diesel prices, whose worldwide fall was not
reflected in India thanks to the Modi government’s disgraceful decision to dip
its hands into the pockets of the public with record levels of fuel taxes, are
again on the rise, hurting the common man and having a knock-on effect on
the prices of all essential commodities. 732 And after declaring ‘No more tax
terrorism’, the Modi government inflicted tax demands on entire new
categories of victims, shaking investor confidence.
Amid this sorry catalogue of economic ruin, the BJP has built itself up
into the wealthiest political party in India by far. 733 It is flush with funding
from business and has passed a law allowing political parties to receive
foreign financial contributions that permit it to tap into its network of
supporters abroad who no longer carry an Indian passport. 734 It has also
introduced ‘electoral bonds’ that can be purchased anonymously and donated
to political parties, in order to ensure that it can collect additional
contributions while assuring contributors that the sources of its funding need
not be revealed. 735
Finally, we come to another great example of the image-building PM
Modi excels at, this time on the global stage. Here we have a decidedly
mixed record of pretension—the prime minister claims that India’s standing
has gone up in the world thanks to him, that an Indian passport finally has
value it did not enjoy before his ascent, and that prior to his ascendancy,
Indians abroad were ashamed to call themselves Indian—that contrasts
embarrassingly with what has actually been achieved on the ground and the
reality of global perception as I have discussed in Section V , ‘Flights of
Fancy’.
Yes, Mr Modi is capable of evolution. His reaction to my Dubai Ports
World proposal was in my mind when I publicly raised the question of why
Mr Modi, in the extensive international travels of his first year, had not
visited a single Islamic country. It must be said that he amply made up for it
in subsequent years, in particular focusing on improving bilateral relations
with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to both of which he made successful visits.
(He nonetheless also managed a visit to Israel in a way that did not elicit any
protest from the neighbouring Arab states, and welcomed an Israeli prime
minister to India for the first time.) If as prime minister he has been able to
overcome his prejudices and those of his followers in the greater interests of
the nation, that is certainly to be welcomed. But in this he was following the
well-worn footsteps of his predecessors, who had laid the groundwork for
him to tread upon.
Where he acted in accordance with the time-honoured traditions of
continuity in foreign policy, Mr Modi kept India on an even keel. But where
he attempted his own initiatives, he has left behind a sorry legacy—with
Narendra Modi’s India snubbed in the Seychelles, marginalized in the
Maldives, negated in Nepal, sidelined in Sri Lanka, undermined in the US,
compromised by China and provoked by Pakistan (and found wanting).
Meanwhile, India’s inestimable asset, its global soft power, was battered by
the unsavoury reporting worldwide of the mounting intolerance, bigotry and
lumpen violence unleashed by his supporters. 736 To compound matters came
the Rafale fighter deal. The UPA government had chosen to purchase 126
Rafales from France that would be assembled by the public-sector Hindustan
Aeronautics Limited in Bangalore. Prime Minister Modi abruptly reduced
these to 36 aircraft off the shelf at three times the price per aircraft. In
addition, there were several other questions that were raised, especially by
Congress president Rahul Gandhi who demanded a JPC probe into the Rafale
deal; the prime minister has simply refused to answer them. 737
As I hope I have managed to show in this book, much of what the Modi
government is all about has turned out to be little more than a series of empty
gestures and marketing gimmicks, while only smidgens of substance have
been achieved on the ground. I have demonstrated how all his highly touted
initiatives in Gujarat, over three terms as chief minister, have actually left the
state worse off on several fronts. In similar fashion, as he nears the end of his
term as prime minister, the country is reeling on several fronts—a fearful
populace, an economy that has been hobbled by foolhardy initiatives, a
painful lack of jobs, a devastating number of farmer suicides, insecure
borders, instability in Kashmir and the palpable failure in implementation of
even laudable initiatives like Swachh Bharat, skill development and Beti
Padhao Beti Bachao. In short, Mr Modi’s rule has been bad for India, and it
all rises from the Modi paradox that I have described in chapter after chapter
—his inability to rise above his narrow-minded, mean-spirited, sectarian
political origins to the levels of statesmanship and good governance that a
country like India needs and that many hoped he could deliver. Winning
elections thanks to the ruthless management of constituencies, as well as the
exploitation of the worst traits of his core constituency, does not a great
leader make.
As the writer Arundhati Roy observed in late August 2018, when a half-
dozen left-leaning civil rights activists were suddenly arrested on what were
widely seen as a flimsy grounds, ‘the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi
are losing popularity at an alarming pace (for them). This means that we are
entering dangerous times. There will be ruthless and continuous attempts to
divert attention from the reasons for this loss of popularity, and to fracture the
growing solidarity of the opposition. It will be a continuous circus from now
to the elections—arrests, assassinations, lynchings, bomb attacks, false flag
attacks, riots, pogroms. We have learned to connect the season of elections
with the onset of all kinds of violence. Divide and Rule, yes. But add to that
—Divert and Rule.’ 738 The arrests and prosecutions would be one form of
diversion; worse might yet follow, though perhaps warning about it in
advance might discourage it.
There is no doubt that the one area Narendra Modi has succeeded in is his
own self-projection. Many who have not examined his record in detail still
ascribe to him qualities of decisiveness, devotion to duty, incorruptibility and
determination that in their eyes mark him out as a great leader. He continues
to lead in most public opinion polls as the most deserving prime minister of
the country. This may be a tribute to his marketing savvy, his stirring
speeches, his repeated projections of his own personality, his assiduous and
mellifluous use of every communications tool from monthly radio broadcasts
to daily tweets, his relentless burnishing of his own outsize image, or simply
a reflection that mass public opinion can be easily swayed by rhetorical
flourishes and skilled PR. But this is really the ultimate paradox of our
paradoxical prime minister—that his perceived stature rests on appearances
that are themselves belied by the multiple failures of the administration he
leads.
Compounding all this is the man’s extraordinary ego. Narendra Modi had
been seen, even as chief minister, as being above his party affiliation; he
reported to no one, felt accountable to no one (especially after the BJP lost
power in the national general elections in 2004) and took his own decisions,
without regard even for the views of his old organization, the RSS. In the
end, therefore, he must be judged for himself; since he claims all successes as
his own, his transcendent failures must inevitably also be laid at his own
door.
It is all very well to say, as PM Modi did during his Independence Day
address on 15 August 2018, that he was ‘impatient because many countries
have moved ahead and India has to go forward… I am restless because I have
to improve the quality of life of our citizens… I am concerned because India
has to be at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution… I am eager
because I want the country to use its resources and abilities…’ 739 , but what
the citizens of India need to ask their prime minister is this: when will you go
beyond making fine speeches and actually do something good and lasting for
this country, where in addition to being ‘impatient’, ‘restless’, ‘concerned’
and ‘eager’, you show through your actions that you are concerned about the
welfare of every last Indian rather than just winning elections and imposing
your fraudulent agenda on a hapless nation?
In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that people are no
longer taking PM Modi at his word. The Modi paradox is beginning to take
effect. His government’s failures are being highlighted and it is to be hoped
that voters in 2019 will no longer give him the mandate to play fast and loose
with the lives and fortunes of millions of his countrymen.
Perhaps one indication that the tide may be turning against him is the fact
that some of his closest supporters are breaking ranks with him and his party.
A BJP MP, Nana Patole, resigned from his party and from the Lok Sabha in
2017, declaring that the prime minister was a one-way communicator who
did not care to listen to voices on the ground, even of his own party. His two
largest allies in the NDA coalition (in terms of Lok Sabha seats), the Telugu
Desam and the Shiv Sena, have repeatedly and publicly expressed their
disenchantment with him, with the Telugu Desam going so far as to quit the
coalition and move a motion of no-confidence in his government in 2018.
On 12 March 2017, writing in The Pioneer , erstwhile BJP Rajya Sabha
MP and newspaper editor Chandan Mitra had this to say: ‘Indians cutting
across caste and class, religion and belief have reposed faith in a man they
believe is India’s Man of Destiny, one who will lead the country to a Golden
Age of Peace and Prosperity.’ In July 2018, Mitra quit the BJP and shortly
thereafter joined the Trinamool Congress party of Modi’s bitter critic Mamata
Banerjee, in whom he now publicly reposes his faith. If so many of Modi’s
most prominent erstwhile followers no longer see him as India’s ‘Man of
Destiny’, then neither should anyone else.
730 Shanti Parva, 71.26, 27.
731 (In a few places in the text figures denominated in foreign currencies have not been
converted into Indian rupees for reasons of context, source material or comparison.)
732 As of 3 September 2018, a litre of petrol was selling at ₹79.15 in Delhi, ₹86.56 in
Mumbai, ₹82.24 in Chennai and ₹82.06 in Kolkata; ‘Petrol, diesel prices hit all-time high’,
NDTV , 3 September 2018.
733 Sunetra Choudhury, ‘BJP richest national party, with ₹1,034 crore declared income:
report’, NDTV , 11 April 2018.
734 Pragya Srivastava, ‘Modi govt legitimises foreign poll funding; Subramanian Swamy
calls it “terrible”: What you must know’, Financial Express , 22 March 2018.
735 Anshuman Tiwari, ‘Electoral bonds: How Modi government is incentivising India’s
biggest political scam’, DailyO , 18 January 2018.
736 Ellen Barry, ‘Toll From Vigilante Mobs Rises, and India Begins to Recoil’, New York
Times , June 2017;
737 Aviral Virk, ‘Why the Cost of the Rafale Deal is Modi Govt’s Worst Kept Secret’, The
Quint , 26 July 2018; Sagar, ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’, Caravan , 1 September 2018.
738 Arundhati Roy, ‘My Name is Arundhati Roy and #MeTooUrbanNaxal’, The Wire , 30
August 2018.
739 ‘PM’s address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the 72nd
Independence Day’, www.pmindia.gov.in , 15 August 2018.
 chapter fifty

THE NEW INDIA WE SEEK

‘New India’ is the latest phrase our current prime minister has been trying to
create a buzz around. During his address to the nation from the ramparts of
the Red Fort on the occasion of the anniversary of India’s 71st Independence
Day in 2017, he is reported to have used the phrase ten times in one hour. Or
in other words, as the old saying goes ‘Every speaker has his moment. The
problem is that most of them stretch that moment to an hour.’
What is this ‘New India’ he is urging us to create? The prime minister
speaks of an India free from the shackles of casteism and communal tension,
an India that successfully solves its endemic problems of corruption,
nepotism and terrorism, an India where every woman, man and child would
be given an empowered and dignified standard of living, thanks to a society
that harnesses India’s entrepreneurial spirit to become an economic
powerhouse. But, as usual, between the rhetoric and the reality there falls a
great shadow. For all these statements and ideals (which one can find very
little to disagree with), one is struck by the complete lack of any idea of how
our country is going to achieve any of this. On the contrary, the road to New
India appears littered with the wreckage of all that was good and noble about
the old India.
Whether it is the ‘Achhe Din’ of 2014 or the ‘New India’ of the present,
under the BJP government, these phrases appear to be mere subterfuge, a
smokescreen for the real agenda of New India that this government has
pursued since coming to power four years back.
As a progressive Indian, I too want a New India. But not this kind of New
India.
The New India I want is a country where you won’t get lynched for the
food you eat, marginalized for the faith you hold dear, criminalized for the
person you love and imprisoned for making use of fundamental rights
guaranteed by your own Constitution.
Instead, we must look forward to a New India that celebrates and
welcomes pluralism, an idea vindicated by history itself.
To me, this New India must be fundamentally rooted in the idea of India
that our founding fathers believed in. After all, as I’ve asked in a different
context, if you don’t know where you are coming from, then how can you
know where you are going?
This nebulous ‘Idea of India’—though the phrase is Rabindranath
Tagore’s—is, in some form or another, arguably as old as antiquity itself. 740
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru saw our country as an ‘ancient palimpsest’ on which
successive rulers and subjects had inscribed their visions without erasing
what had been asserted previously. 741 We not only coexist, but thrive in our
diversity which is our strength. Swami Vivekananda spoke of a Hinduism
that not merely tolerates other faiths but accepts them as they are. This
acceptance of difference has been key to our country’s survival, making
‘unity in diversity’ the most hallowed of independent India’s self-defining
slogans.
India, as I have long argued, has always been more than the sum of its
contradictions. I write in the introduction about the Indian idea, which is that
a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, conviction, culture,
cuisine, costume and custom, and still rally around a consensus. And that
consensus is around the simple idea that in a democracy you don’t really need
to agree—except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. It is the idea
of an ever-ever land—emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a
shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.
India’s democracy imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens. As I
have stressed here and elsewhere, the Indian pluralism is you can be many
things and one thing. The Indian idea is the opposite of what Freudians call
‘the narcissism of minor differences’; in India, we celebrate the commonality
of major differences. So the idea of India is of one land embracing many. For
New India to succeed and indeed thrive, it will have to embrace this inclusive
vision and draw its inspiration from the key tenets of the core ‘Idea of India’.
Only by maintaining a commitment towards a democratic and pluralistic
ethos can New India be able to fulfil the aspirations of all Indians.
Interestingly, the need for our government to preside over a harmonious
plural society springs not just from the core values of our country and need
for insaniyat (or humanity), to use Mr Vajpayee’s phrase, to guide our
leaders’ actions, but also from good old-fashioned economics. An eye-
opening report, 742 first published on Indiaspend.org , a public interest NGO,
pointed out that ‘if India discards religious beliefs that perpetrate caste and
gender inequalities it could more than double its per capita GDP growth of
the last sixty years in half the time.’ Did someone say, ‘sabka saath sabka
vikas ’?
At the same time, we must also be conscious that preserving our
ideological commitment to pluralism, acceptance and the freedom provided
by our democratic systems is only one-half of the battle. Providing a decent
standard of living to the people of India, particularly those from economically
vulnerable groups, is the second commitment that we must undertake in our
blueprint for a New India.
Our inclusive vision of New India must be complemented by inclusive
development as we move forward. We can talk of a New India, and yet, many
of the battles India has been fighting—and must continue to fight—continue
to centre around our principal basic problems of roti, kapda, makaan and
now, sadak, bijli and paani, plus no doubt broadband (to most people in our
mobile phone age, 4G is more important than Modi-ji). The prestigious
Forbes magazine list of the world’s top billionaires had to make room for 119
Indian dollar billionaires in 2018, with a combined net worth of $440 billion,
greater than the GDP of a majority of member states of the United Nations.
743 But at the same time we have 363 million people living below the poverty
line. And it’s not the UN/ World Bank’s poverty line of $1 a day, now
revised to $1.25, but the Indian poverty line, which in the rural areas is ₹32 a
day—in other words, a line that’s been drawn just this side of the funeral
pyre. 744 This is our reality and this is what our blueprint for a New India
must address—creatively, quickly, and securely.
New India must be built on the liberalization we embarked upon in 1991.
Economic growth remains vital to pulling people out of poverty. But the
fruits of that growth—the revenues that come from it—must be shared with
those who are excluded from its benefits. The magic of the market will not
appeal to those who cannot afford to enter the marketplace. As India
navigates its development, we must focus on ensuring that the benefits of
growth are shared across the nation—by our youth, who are struggling to find
jobs, and by our poorest, for whom true development would be life changing.
Any discussion about New India, about India’s future, centres on India’s
youth. After all, who else are we building this New India for if not the
young? We have trained world-class scientists and engineers, but nearly 40
per cent of our compatriots are illiterate, and we have more children who
have not seen the inside of a school than any other country in the world does.
745 We have a potentially young, dynamic labour force that could deliver to
us that demographic ‘dividend’ so often proclaimed across global platforms.
China, Japan, and even South Korea (our major East Asian competitors) are
facing a serious demographic squeeze, and the rest of the world is ageing.
India’s youth should not only be part of India’s development, but drive it.
This requires us to provide them with both education and employment
opportunities on an unprecedented scale. The last Budget, however, had no
specific schemes for youth unemployment, except the unsuccessful old skill
development scheme. Ignoring the problem has only made matters worse.
Young people may be celebrated as ‘bhagyavidhatas’ by our prime minister,
but their current reality is one of shrinking opportunities. As I have pointed
out, the prime minister’s boasts about creating crores of jobs have no
grounding in the harsh reality. His own government’s figures show he is
nowhere close to meeting his own target. It is no wonder, then, that as a
recent survey reported 70 per cent of young people are anxious about their
job situation and prospects. 746 Development cannot be the preserve of older
generations. New India cannot be the plaything only of Old Indians.
Achieving inclusive development also rests on the government working
for its poorest citizens. It is painful to see their struggles exploited for
political gain. Promises are made in abundance during desperate election
campaigns with little thought for their realization. When the dust settles, they
are left as observers to economic growth.
However, the exploitation of the poor that we see today seems to
continue beyond elections. They are abused as a part of government projects
for the purpose of ostensibly meeting targets. A UN Special Rapporteur
recently reported after a trip to India, that public authorities coerce
individuals into building and using toilets by threatening to revoke their
ration cards. 747 We cannot claim to be helping the poor if we are treating
their human rights as dispensable, free to be traded for the purpose of
fulfilling individual policy aims. No matter how much it needs to be done, for
those affected, sanitation is certainly not a substitute for food. Until their
needs and rights are considered in a holistic way, for every policy made, we
cannot hope to include them in India’s development.
Ad hoc policies to improve the opportunities available for India’s poorest
and India’s youth are clearly insufficient for the size of the problem that we
are facing in the present, let alone its growth in the future. To include these
groups in India’s development, they must be protected from adverse effects
from other policies. We need grown-up economic management, not slogans
and sound bites. Policies must be conceived in consultation with all
stakeholders and implemented carefully in coordination with everyone
affected to ensure that ill-thought plans do not cause inadvertent harm to our
economy, especially to the most economically vulnerable.
We may yet be able to address our staggering economic challenges if our
leaders develop the capacity to look at the bigger picture. Even during the
best phases of our growth in recent years, growth was never only about per
capita income figures or enabling businesses. It was always a means to an
end. And the ends we cared about were the uplift of the weakest sections of
our society, the expansion of possibilities for them, the provision of decent
healthcare and clean drinking water.
So what should be the animating idea of our New India? It is the idea of
one nation made of many different kinds of people. An India where it does
not matter what religion you practise, what language you speak, what caste
you were born into, what colour your skin is. In our New India it should only
matter that you are Indian.
Our New India must be an India that respects all religions, all faiths, all
beliefs, all cultures, all languages, all regions, all castes and all classes. That
Idea of India is under threat today from those who seek not just to rule India,
but to change India’s very heart and soul.
What we want in India is unity. They want uniformity.
We believe in an India that unites our people. They seek to divide us.
Our ideology binds our people together. Theirs separates one Indian from
another.
What we need in New India is the strengthening of democratic
institutions at all levels, with transparency and accountability enforced
through the Right to Information Act and an active Parliament. They seek to
weaken these institutions, hollow out RTI, disregard Parliament and promote
one-man rule.
What we require in our New India is a leadership that empowers people
and harnesses their collective strength in the pursuit of national objectives,
not someone who sees people as instruments of his own power.
Our New India must derive its support and strength from all sections of
our diverse society. Their ‘New India’ speaks of one faith and reduces others
to second-class status.
Their idea of ‘New India’ is one of exhortation: Make in India, Digital
India, StartUp India, StandUp India, Sit Down India. Our New India must be
one of consultation. We must never speak of ‘India Shining’ without asking
who India is shining for. Our New India must follow policies that both
promote higher economic growth and also ensures that the benefits of our
growth are enjoyed by the poor and disadvantaged sections of our society.
The choice is clear. We can have a New India that belongs to all of us,
led by a government that works for all of us. Or we can have a ‘New India’
that belongs to some, and serves the interests of a few.
You can choose a New India that embodies hope, or one that promotes
fear. You can support a New India united in striving, or an India divided by
hatred.
I believe we can look forward to a New India with confidence, if not with
optimism. But we must build this New India on solutions to our major
challenges. We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the
hardware of development, the ports, the roads, the airports, all the
infrastructural progress we need to make, and the software of development,
the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India to be able to have
a couple of square meals a day, to be able to send his or her children to a
decent school and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in
their lives to transform themselves. We have to tackle and end corruption.
We need to conquer these challenges, real challenges which none of us in
India can pretend don’t exist. But it must take place in an open society, in a
rich and diverse and plural civilization, one that is open to the contention of
ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of the
outside world, wedded to the democratic pluralism that is India’s greatest
strength, and determined to liberate and fulfil the creative energies of its
people.
We must remain faithful to our founding values of the twentieth century
if we are to conquer the challenges of the twenty-first and build the New
India that we seek.
Our New India will shine. But it must shine for all.
740 Sisir Kumar Das, ed., ‘Chapter VII’, The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore,
Volume Three: A Miscellany, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996, p. 288.
741 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India , New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994,
p. 59.
742 ‘Secularisation the path to growth’, Business Standard , 19 August 2018; The study,
entitled ‘Religious Change Preceded Economic Change in the 20th Century’, was
published in the journal Science Advances and was conducted jointly by researchers at the
University of Bristol in the UK and the University of Tennessee in the US. Its key finding
was that ‘secularization precedes economic development and not the other way around, as
is commonly believed’. One of the co-authors of the report, Damian Ruck, a post-doctoral
researcher at the University of Bristol said that India’s per capita GDP growth per annum
‘could have been higher if Indians were less rigid in their religious views’.
743 ‘Forbes billionaires 2018 ranking: With $40 bn, Mukesh Ambani richest Indian; Jeff
Bezos tops global rich list’, FirstPost , 7 March 2018.
744 ‘New poverty line: ₹32 in villages, ₹47 in cities’, Times of India , 7 July 2014.
745 ‘India has a third of world’s illiterates’, Times of India , 8 March 2017.
746 ‘Youth unemployment bucks India’s rapid growth’, Financial Express , 21 April 2017.
747 Leo Heller, ‘End of Mission Statement by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights
to safe drinking water and sanitation Mr. Léo Heller’, United Nations Human Rights
Commission, 10 November 2017.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book, more than any of my other works, has been in many ways a
collective effort, with the author being inspired, guided, assisted and pushed
by the extraordinary team at Aleph Book Company. My friend and editor,
David Davidar, whose original idea this volume was, has been closely
associated with the book at every stage of its conception and execution. His
colleague, Simar Puneet, and the tireless researcher Rosemary Sebastian have
also played a vital, indeed indispensable, role in bringing The Paradoxical
Prime Minister to readers. Bena Sareen came up with a great cover. No
words of gratitude can do justice to their role—so I will have to content
myself with a heartfelt ‘thank you, team’.
There was little time, in this process, to consult and seek inputs from
others, but I have benefited from the counsel of those close to me who have
read parts of the manuscript at various stages, especially Manu Pillai, Raghav
Sharma, my niece, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and my son, Kanishk Tharoor.
Some of the material in the book also benefited from the inputs of my
dedicated colleagues John Koshy and Arvind Abraham. To all of them, my
grateful thanks. Though their insights have greatly improved the book, the
responsibility for its contents and conclusions remain mine alone.
I aired some of the ideas in the book, in different forms, in my columns
and writings for a variety of publications, notably Project Syndicate ,
NDTV.com , The Quint , The Print, The Week , The Hindu, Urbane , National
Herald and Indian Express . Their offering a home to my words and ideas is
gratefully acknowledged.

Shashi Tharoor
September 2018