The Narendra Modi-led BJP government has completed seven years in office. The landscape of India’s political economy has witnessed an almost meteoric transformation during these years, if one could see it from the singular perspective of a ruling party’s own growth to power.
In these seven years, the BJP has consolidated itself as a political force across most Indian states— winning one state election after another, from UP in the North to Assam in the North-East, emerging as one of the most dominant national parties under the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah’s duopoly.
The Indian economy has during these years, however, tanked to the worst performance levels observed since 1991, and in some ways since Independence, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. The government’s dreadful handling of the surging pandemic, the increasing centralisation of economic power, and continued ad hoc decision-making offer little hope for any chance of a robust economic recovery at least until the next general elections in 2024.
Even before the pandemic, India’s youth unemployment rate had touched 23% in 2019. Its annual GDP performance crashed to -8.0% in 2020-21, the worst amongst all developing nations (Bangladesh grew at 3.8% in 2020), and on Covid-19 fatality per million population, India stands now at 212 (as per May 21). For a nation that has been for years one of the world’s biggest vaccine producers and which was till seven years ago amongst the fastest growing economies, these economic growth and pandemic numbers are shocking.
But it isn’t just the economy that has been the worst casualty of the seven-year-old Modi regime. The state of Indian democracy and its public institutions, from being put into a state of ‘quarantine’ during Modi’s first term (2014-2019), now seem to have entered a state of ‘lockdown’, as seen during his second term.
A pandemic’s presence has been insidiously used by the current administration to delegitimise India’s parliamentary due process. Standing Committees of Parliament, which exist to analyse the functioning of the government in a non-partisan manner, haven’t met since the pandemic began.
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Even when Parliament has functioned, railroading of bills without adequate review, discussion or parliamentary scrutiny has now been standardised as every public institution seems decapacitated by their subjugation and the blatant disregard for constitutional values and institutional autonomy.
Institutional credibility and public confidence in organisations like the CBI, the Election Commission and even the Supreme Court has hardly ever been eroded to the extent one sees now, further widening the State-citizen trust deficit.
Besides, not since the time of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency have so many people— social activists, human rights champions, political dissenters, environmentalists— been jailed or subjected to police action and harassment for political reasons than in the last few years. It appears as if a new ‘State-citizen compact’ has been put in place where a culture of ‘institutive impunity’ is both practised and preached with the support of the police and the approval of an apathetic State, using this across the nation to entice mobs and rioters to seed communal hatred and social distrust.
With such reflections on these seven years, it is difficult to be hopeful for India’s democracy and the wellbeing of its citizenry going forward.
Still, if one tried hard to find a ray of hope, one can perhaps look closely at the recent case of the US. After four years of President Trump, during which the US saw a serious democratic backslide in its own governance systems and institutions, and as Trumpian ‘populism’ went about altering the ‘moral’ order by which America governed itself and projected itself to the world, Joe Biden’s electoral victory has helped restore America’s ‘dented image’ somewhat.
Once perceived as a moderate incrementalist, Biden has gone beyond his own political-ideological dispositions to promote big legislative packages that make many on the progressive left happy. He strongly believes that in a post-Trump world, America is fighting not just to “preserve its middle-class” (through better jobs, higher wages, more affordable healthcare and social security), but to “survive as the leading nation of the world.”
As David Brooks, after interviewing Joe Biden, recently wrote: “Some people get their worldviews from ideological constructs or philosophical movements like ‘conservatism’ or ‘progressivism’. Biden derives his worldview from lived experience, especially the world of his youth, and how his parents taught him to see that world. It created the moral underpinnings of the big legislative packages he is proposing.”
India is perhaps at an inflection point itself, like America was, where it desperately needs to find its ‘Joe Biden’. Someone who can go beyond ‘ideological constructs’ to use her/his ‘lived experience’ — and that of the people— as a guiding force to lead the nation’s citizenry to “build back better.”
What matters is not only how a leader perceives an issue, but also where (s)he sees it from. In Biden’s case, he sees most issues that plague America from the perspective and lens of the ‘common man’, ‘the lower-middle-income class’ he grew up around. More notably, an intense focus on ‘human dignity’ in his governing philosophy makes him a rare national leader in a time when ‘dignity’ and human rights-based political discourse is in scarce supply among those helming nations.
Even in the handling of the pandemic, since Biden came to office, the US has done well to provide more stimulus, relief to its people, and more decisively mass-vaccinate its population.
Seven years of Modi-Shah rule in India has created a gaping hole in the nation’s social and economic landscape. People’s faith in the functioning of the nation-state— and its capacity to improve their lives — has soured. A pandemic wreaked havoc and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions, and so many more are likely to be affected in the weeks and months to come. In such a time, a quest to find a ‘progressive’ voice in the political opposition— who can help restore people’s confidence in the State, help invest in improving our social and economic capital, and be rooted to work for the wellbeing of the working and middle classes— is warranted.
(The writer is Director, Centre for New Economic Studies, O P Jindal Global University)
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