American columnist George Will once said – columnists must have three seductive skills – he must be pleasurable, concise and gifted at changing the subject frequently. To a large extent – some of these qualities and need not be in that order apply to politicians also.
For BJP and Indian voters, Narendra Modi has been ‘pleasurable’ – the lethal combination of being a champion of Hindutva cause and a development catalyst has only endeared him more to the voters. Modi’s way of communicating with people too has been very good – crisp and direct and yes, he has been very successful in changing the course of debates.
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On the other hand, Congress and opposition politics always seemed to have contributed in helping the BJP cause. They forget that more than half-the-problems India faces predate Modi’s prime ministership. But at the same time, they keep repeating some mistakes. In 2017 during assembly elections in Gujarat, Mani Shankar Aiyer called Modi a “neech (low level)” person.
In 2019 parliamentary polls, the likes of Sam Pitroda started contributing liberally towards BJP cause when the Balakot anti-terror attack during Modi-led dispensation was compared with UPA’s ‘well decided’ move not to attack Pakistan post 26/11.
The BJP smelt the rat and none other than Prime Minister Modi called such remarks ‘shame’ and said Pitroda, onetime associate of Late Rajiv Gandhi, has tried to add to the ‘celebration’ of Pakistan National Day.
“Why we are doing everything to help BJP?,” said a leader on a day Tom Vadakkam, once said to be close to Congress leadership, decided to join the saffron party. Winning over Vadakkam into the saffron fold was Amit Shah’s style of politics.
Even the announcement that Sonia Gandhi will contest from Rae Bareily and Rahul himself from Amethi had hardly any big time political message. These were too obvious and known facts and the moment Smriti Irani’s name came in for the seat; Mr Gandhi apparently drew cold feet. The saffron party worked to their plans and Chandra Prakash Mishra, a noted Brahmin leader from BSP, moved to the BJP.
Irked, a section of Congress leaders pushed the line that Rahul Gandhi should contest from Wayanad constituency in Kerala. Smriti Irani, Rahul’s rival of 2014, got the opportunity and pushed the hash tag ‘Bhag Rahul Bhag’ on the Twitter. In fact, many BJP leaders say the very talk about ‘second constituency’ for Rahul shows – Ms Irani had won the battle 50 per cent.
"The very idea of this talk going on of his relocation from Amethi to down south is enough indication as to which way the wind is blowing," the BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad has said before polls. There is no end to woes for a politician – like Rahul Gandhi – who does not think twice or even once before labelling baseless and a serious charge of corruption against country’s Prime Minister in office.
The ‘Chowkidar Chor hae’ was not only in bad taste and unbecoming of a party which has been in power for over six decades. The slogan has the potency of being more powerful and a negative catalyst than the slogan of ‘Maut Ka Saudagar’ in 2007 and ‘chaewalla’ jibes of 2014.
The BJP also questioned Rahul Gandhi’s source of income and - as expected - no convincing responses can come from Congress.
# Congress has not changed a bit and remains a family focussed party. Nowhere in the country has it been able to strike right chord with the masses. Sonia to Rahul - both have failed - to revive the party in West Bengal, Odhisa, Bihar, UP, Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Telangana. It lost out north east too.
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In the other opposition parties also, things did not go as per their plans. BJP handled parties like Trinamool Congress giving it a befitting fight and ultimately picked up 18 Lok Sabha seats. In more ways than one – the political parties were also forced to battle contradictions within themselves.
Middle class and Narendra Modi ? But what about anti-CAA protest?
The violent protests in university campuses against the Citizenship Amendment Act and over fee hike in JNU had given a strong impression that perhaps such a scenario reflects the 'resentment' of the Indian middle class.
Over the last two decades, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had enhanced his 'acceptability' among middle class and in two subsequent polls, people voted to keep a 'strongman' in power who by default brought in element of religiosity and had the image of a 'performer'.
On this backdrop, it will be relevant here to refer to a 2014 piece penned by French intellectual Christophe Jaffrelot, who discussed ‘Middle Class obsession’ about Narendra Modi and incidentally highlighted my book 'Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth' published in 2012.
Jaffrelot says (in 2014) – “The negative reasons why the middle class “votes for Modi” are most obvious. There is a total rejection of the UPA regime, because of corruption and dynastic politics. There is also a fatigue with the government’s style of leadership and distrust vis-à-vis its policies.
In spite of the fact that the middle class has benefited from Manmohanomics more than any other social group, it resents his inability to make growth sustainable (growth has declined in all emerging countries, including China, but that’s no reason for not blaming the government) and to counter the erosion of the rupee, which makes life so much more complicated abroad.
The “positive” reasons are more interesting. First, a section of the middle class perceives Narendra Modi as a super-CEO. One of his biographers, Nirendra Dev, points out that he “functions like a modern day CEO laying emphasis on the outcome and often allegedly putting the rules and normal norms in the backburner” (Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth, 2012).
This image relies on a whole set of beliefs: he is less a politician than a manager (an assumption harking back to his past career as an organisation man, a pracharak) and he is for the liberalisation of the economy (didn’t he claim that he would transform Gujarat into “the SEZ of India” as early as 2007?).
This last quality has affinities with the middle class’s trust in the private sector to modernise the economy. The upper layer of this class already lives in new towns where education, health, security, water, electricity etc are privatised.
If the middle class wants a super-CEO at the helm of India, it is also because it does not valorise parliamentary democracy as much as before, compared to a more managerial decision-making process.
In 2008, the CSDS survey on the State of Democracy in South Asia showed that in India, 51 per cent of the respondents from the “elite” “strongly agreed” and 29 per cent “agreed” with the proposition: “All major decisions about the country should be taken by experts rather than politicians”.
Among interviewees from the “mass”, 29 per cent “strongly agreed” and 22 per cent “agreed”, probably because they were not prepared to undermine one of their main assets: numbers.
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| What others said: 2002 |
Five years later, the popularity of democracy among the middle class has probably eroded further. The aggregated data that the CSDS has just made public show that, as a whole, satisfaction with the working of democracy has declined from 55 per cent to 46 per cent, a clear reflection of the impact of corruption and the criminalisation of politics, which affect almost equally all the political forces that have governed a state for some time.
There is also a caste element in the middle class’s affinities with Modi. He is perceived to be opposed to reservations, a preoccupation among the merit-oriented middle class ever since the Mandal moment. Reluctance towards reservations is common in the BJP, but it is naturally more remarkable in the case of Modi, given his OBC background.
For the upper caste middle class, he demonstrates that OBCs can succeed in life without positive discrimination and can even reject this policy as counterproductive.
This assimilation of Modi into anti-reservationism has something to do with the fact that he comes from the state where the first massive anti-quota movement took place in the 1980s, while he was at the helm of the RSS in the state as prant pracharak — before becoming organising secretary of the state BJP in 1987.
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