Mathew John 
A decade ago, we were caught napping and before we knew it, the “terrible twins” had snatched away our freedom. Then out of nowhere and against all odds — predatory agencies that hobbled the opponents, a thoroughly compromised Election Commission of India (ECI), the unimaginable resources of the regime, a shamelessly partisan media and a bickering Opposition — the people of India delivered a fractured ‘no outright winners’ verdict and a body blow to the “400 paar” party.
Rahul Gandhi has rightly singled out the poor of this country as the heroes of this nation’s most crucial electoral battle between two contending ideas of how India is to be governed — as a kleptocratic oligarchy or as ordained by our Constitution. For rejecting and pushing back autocracy, crony capitalism and communalism and upholding the Constitution, they are rightly hailed for the tentative restoration of democracy. The word “tentative” has been used advisedly, knowing that so long as the authoritarian is still in the saddle, albeit downsized, we need to watch out.
Last week, Narendra Modi interloped on the G 7 summit to briefly escape the torment of unremitting public obloquy back home where, among other embarrassments, a chappal was hurled at the self-confessed divine being. He was unintentionally on the mark when he proclaimed to the G 7 leaders that the recent Lok Sabha election was the victory of the entire democratic world. He was attempting to give a positive spin to what was a pyrrhic victory for his party — dependent on the support of mercurial coalition partners — which has frustrated his ambitions of a dictatorship in perpetuity, but he fooled nobody. Unsurprisingly for a closet Nazi, the high point of Modi’s undistinguished sojourn was the selfie with the hard-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgi Meloni, who is an admirer of Mussolini.
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The most discussed happening of this hectic election season has been the seismic erosion and unravelling of the carefully choreographed Modi brand that has been riding the wave of success and adulation for two decades. That programmed image building, mainly based on falsehood and embellishment, involving a host of celebrity consultants and crores of dollars has come badly unstuck.
Like eventually happens to every jumlebaaz, Modi has contributed to his own undoing with his unbecoming conduct and stunningly grotesque statements during this election, of which some stick out like a sore thumb. Apart from his ugly rants against Muslims that referenced ghuspetias (infiltrators), buffaloes, mangalsutra, mujra et al, Modi claimed that his intercession with Netanyahu had stopped the fighting in Gaza during Ramadan, and that Mahatma Gandhi was unknown to the world till Attenborough’s Gandhi hit the screens. But what took the cake was his insane delusional claim of transfiguration into divinity. People have finally realised that for too long they have been hoodwinked by an ill-educated, dishonest and narcissistic person.
Modi’s mask has been ripped off and so has his aura of dominant invincibility. He has shrunk to ordinary flesh and blood and is now a very vulnerable human being with his back to the wall. But beware! Winston Churchill had warned against driving anyone to desperation because even a cornered rat is dangerous. And this man is prime minister of India, which makes the threat he poses very potent.
The perceptive American comedian, Bill Maher has observed that ‘secrecy is the freedom that tyrants dream of’. Modi 1.0 and Modi 2.0 thrived in a culture of cloak-and-dagger secrecy and lack of transparency. Secrecy has been the pivotal tack of the authoritarian and be sure it will be his modus operandi this time around.
There is a clear method in Modi’s retention of the same set of senior ministers, including those who shied away from fighting the recent election. The ostensible reason trotted out for the status quo is the need to ensure continuity of policy but that’s a red herring. Modi needs his old partners in crime to ensure that the profusion of sins and wrongdoing committed by them and their ministries in policy and execution in the last few years remain under wraps. There are bagfuls of skeletons in the cupboard. And so, expect this new dispensation to use every possible means to remain opaque in its functioning, even as it goes about covering its tracks and past misdeeds.
Openness in government functioning is the sine qua non of a democracy. Even as this Modi.2.25 government attempts to shroud its working in secrecy, the job of the Opposition and the people would be to prise open the innards of the government for all to see. And we must not forget or forgive. In the haunting words of Milan Kundera, “the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We cannot allow the sheer wickedness of the past ten years to be wished away or buried.
Without doubt, the newly energised Opposition that has played a stellar part in reclaiming our better selves, will make life hell for Modi and his cronies and insist on investigation into scams like the electoral bonds, Adanigate, Rafale, Pegasus and other high-profile cases. We can also trust the Opposition to do its utmost to abrogate or amend Modi’s best-loved laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA) and such like, that he weaponised to reinforce and fortify his tyranny.
There are numerous less discussed but lethal distortions and perversions in the power structure instigated by Modi and gang that need urgent investigation and correction. In an inexhaustible list, indicated below are some important concerns that must be addressed without loss of time:
- Statistics of performance are key to decision-making, but that aspect of governance and management has been mangled almost beyond repair. Key statistical indices have been falsified or erased or kept hidden from public scrutiny. We are so mired in statistical fudging that our figures are at complete odds with the data and assessments of international rating agencies. Our statistical record-keeping must be set right in mission mode.
- The system of awarding high value contracts has been non-transparent and has often been manipulated to ensure that contracts only go to the favoured few. The standing joke in the corridors of the mantralayas is that under the Modi system of tendering, the winner is decided even before the race begins.
- The most far-reaching damage wrought by Modi and his cabal has been to the education system which has been adversely impacted in any number of ways. The deranged innovations range from introducing half-baked new systems of admission and testing to needless standardisation and stultifying abridgement of syllabi. There has been a dangerous lowering of standards in domain-centric knowledge. The educational institutions have been packed with indoctrinated but otherwise unqualified individuals with bad intent, a disastrous fallout of which has been a rash of examination leaks. And to top it all, these malicious half-literates are rewriting and doctoring our history.
- Behind the catchy slogan “na khaunga na khane dunga”, the Modi regime has presided over corruption of a mind-boggling scale, not only individual but wholesale subornation of systems and institutions. Statutory and anti-corruption bodies such as the Lokpal, the Central Information Commission (CIC), the ECI, the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) have been reduced to mere ciphers, with flunkeys who occupy the top posts, slavishly doing the government’s bidding.
How does one sort out this godawful mess, with almost every institution sullied by the earlier regime’s dangerous machinations? Yes, the Opposition and the political class in general are critical in this fight to reclaim our republic. They certainly have the numbers in parliament, the quality and the resolve to take on Modi and Shah – the menacing duo who have run amok these last few years and are still around. But that won’t be enough.
At this critical time, two institutions charged with protecting the Constitution, namely the judiciary and the bureaucracy, have a crucial role to play for restoring the nuts and bolts of our democracy. But having been collaborators of the tyrant for the last few years, can they now be trusted to do the right thing by the country? Time will tell, and one can only hope that there are enough of them with a conscience to help right the ship of State.
And the media? The great American black activist, Malcolm X, was spot on when he said that the media was the most powerful entity on earth as it has the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent. That’s what our criminal mainstream media has been doing with deadly effect for ten interminable years, instigating and justifying hate and violence. Can such a compromised, inhuman media that have been propagandists for a ruthless, amoral regime change tack and be harnessed for the public good? That seems improbable. India today desperately needs investigative journalists of the Woodward-Bernstein kind who would lay bare the evil perpetrated by the Modi regime in the last ten years. We need Tarun Tejpals, Ashish Khaitans, Anirudh Bahls to excavate the innards of wickedness perpetrated by Modi and gang.
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With the institutions ordained to protect our freedoms all too often compromised, there is a halting consensus among social scientists that the building of an equal and just society is not possible without the active participation of the main stakeholder i.e. civil society. The silent majority will have to step forward if our democracy is to rediscover its egalitarian essence. After what this country has been through in the last few years, one cannot overstress the importance of the citizens’ active and persistent participation in the working of society, even if it involves street protests and acts of civil disobedience.
Such a prescription has few takers among the middle class and entrenched elite who heartily endorse Modi’s repeated stress on the sanctity of the rule of law that he has artfully yoked to national interest and security. One wonders whether the prime minister would brand the students protesting the NEET results as andolanjeevies, like he has labelled other agitators against the injustices perpetrated by his earlier regime.
The demonisation of protest movements and protesters by the governing elite reminds one of an instance of gallows humour at the height of the anti-Vietnam war social upheavals in the 1960s, when a Harvard Law School student addressed a largely conservative audience thus: “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. The Republic is in danger, danger from within and without. We need law and order! Without law and order our nation cannot survive!”
His words were greeted with thunderous applause and when it died down, he unleashed his punchline: “These words were spoken in 1932 by Adolf Hitler.”
Having escaped the tyrant’s noose by the skin of our teeth, we cannot be complacent. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are legatees of the land sanctified by Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar and not the ugly sectarian world cooked up by Savarkar and his Hindutva imposters.
Mathew John is a former civil servant.