As a proud member of the Khan Market gang, I rarely see anything good in the RSS. Qualifying for membership of this ‘gang’ requires faith in the values of classical liberalism. Values to which the RSS does not subscribe. In my view, a free-market economy is the only way that India has half a chance of eradicating poverty. This conflicts with the voodoo economic ideas of the RSS. It was voodoo economics that made Modi cancel 85% of our currency overnight. I happen to know from conversations with RSS ‘economists’ that this is an idea that came straight from his long years of training in the RSS school of economics.
Having clarified that I am not a fan of the RSS, I would like to say that when I heard Mohan Bhagwat’s speech last week, I was in total agreement with what he said. He analyzed dispassionately what had gone wrong with Modi’s vaunted claim that in this election he was going to get not a simple majority in Parliament, but a spectacular majority with more than 400 seats. This did not happen, according to the head of the RSS, because he had stopped being a real ‘sevak’ (servitor) of the people. A real ‘sevak’ never becomes arrogant about his achievements and never thinks of them as his personally.
After the RSS leader’s speech, I searched in vain for a Hindi word that would be the equivalent of hubris. The word hubris means to compete with the gods and is more appropriate to describe Modi in his second term in office. In the last days of the campaign, he went so far as to declare that he believed he had been sent by God himself to serve India. And so manifested more hubris than I have seen in any other Indian politician.
It alienated not just ordinary voters but many people who desperately wanted Modi to return as prime minister because of the obsolete, Marxist economic ideas spouted by
Rahul Gandhi
during the campaign. I spent some time last week talking to some of India’s richest businessmen and the consensus among them was that they believed that Modi was needed because the ‘other lot’ do not seem ready. But nearly everyone agreed that Modi needed to be pulled down from the hubristic perch on which he has been sitting. He needs to stop thinking of himself as a messenger of God and remember that he is just a politician.
A politician who has done many good things in the past decade but one who has also done some very bad and dangerous things, he has deliberately allowed an atmosphere of hatred and fear to spread. This has affected not just our Muslim communities who have been targeted by
BJP
policies like love jihad, lynchings and bulldozer justice, it has affected Hindus who are not deliberately targeted. No Hindu journalist, NGO or opposition leader who has spoken out against the crushing of dissidence has been spared. The drawing rooms and coffee houses of Delhi were once places raucous with dissident opinions and political debate. They no longer are. Now people look over their shoulders before criticizing Modi or one of his policies. This kind of fear is more suited to totalitarian countries, so democracy watchdogs have taken to saying that India is only partly free and not truly democratic.
It is these things that must change now. As someone who is attacked daily on social media for being an ‘enabler’ of Modi, I believe I need to reiterate that I was an unashamed Modi Bhakt at one point and the reason for this was that I believed that he would do better for India than the Dynasty. Ugly entitlement in the Dynasty comes so naturally that Rahul Gandhi said in Varanasi last week that had his sister contested in this seat Modi would have lost.
It brought back horrible memories of those days when Rahul’s Mummy was de facto prime minister. She could do anything she wanted, including putting the name of her son-in-law on that list at airports that spares VIP travellers metal detection and frisking. She was so powerful that her kitchen cabinet, the National Advisory Council, could override policies made by the real Cabinet. There was nothing democratic about what happened in those days and if I supported Modi in 2014, it was because I believed he would be more democratic and less entitled. I believed that he would govern rather than rule.
It is sad that he blew his chance to show that India deserves a prime minister who governs rather than rules. It is sad that he fooled himself into living in a narcissistic fantasy in which he plastered his pictures on everything from bus stations and airports to COVID vaccination certificates. Sad that he did not discover that dissidence in a democracy is healthy and not an act of treason. Why he did these things is mostly because he surrounded himself with servile ministers and bureaucrats.
Modi now has a third chance. And it is my sincere hope that he uses it to rectify the mistakes he made and to govern with more consensus than he has so far shown. This is not just my hope but the hope of those who celebrated when the BJP lost its majority in Parliament. These people are not Modi’s enemies but his well-wishers. May he see them that way.