The administration of things

Right is Left

The BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah fought a pitched battle over the issue of national security and nationalism through the Pulwama-Balakot episode in the summer election. The party emerged victorious, something of a surprise even for the winners.

Post-poll victory, Modi, Shah and the party want to put behind the bruised feelings generated by a vitriolic campaign. The mantra of the Modi government is to get busy with governance with clearly marked targets. The $5 trillion economy target is the overarching one that subsumes many other things, including doubling farmers’ income by 2022, providing medical care through the insurance scheme Ayushman Bharat, push for smart cities and many other things.

The prime minister and his cabinet colleagues believe that these are issues over which there could be no major differences. Who does not want India to become a $5 trillion economy or does not want farmers’ income to double by 2022? The Modi government says that it is open to suggestions on how to achieve these targets.

The diminished Opposition in the Lok Sabha is at its wit’s end and is not in a position to corner the Modi government. Modi and his ministers reel out figures at the drop of a hat, which can neither be confirmed nor denied. The government’s claim that it has built 9.6 crore toilets and that it has achieved 98% open defecation free (ODF) status remains uncontested because no independent audit had been carried out to check the truth of the figure.

There cannot be much debate on the issue of the construction of toilets by the government between 2014 and 2018. The government is armed with statistics, and the only way to counter those statistics is to bring out the real figures through manual enumeration of some kind. The Opposition is too weak-kneed to go out and check the things that the Modi government claims to have done. Modi is also clever enough to argue that even if the numbers claimed by him and his colleagues are not accurate, the intention to build toilets as part of the Swachh Bharat Mission was a noble one, and mere nit-picking on the exact figures is nothing but querulousness on the part of his critics.

The critics of the government outside the Opposition circles are so furious with the victory of the right-wing BJP that they have resorted to two extreme responses. The first one is that of despair, bemoaning the fact that the modern liberal India of the last 70 years is being demolished. Some of the self-critical voices, like former Ashoka University vice-chancellor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, speak of the end of liberalism as we know it, and the need to rethink the assumptions of liberalism.

The other response is that of the die-hard ideological opponents of the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who detect emergent fascism lurking in every corner. Their counter to this new-fangled fascism is to regurgitate the verities of Nehruvian liberalism, which are anaemic at best.

Prime Minister Modi is in the comfortable position of not having to respond either to the political Opposition or to the ideological proletariat comprising the intellectual class. Whenever and wherever he can, Modi batters the weakened Congress and its post-Independence legacy of Nehru-Gandhi domination in the Congress party and in the country.

He is discreetly silent over the foundations of India’s vast developmental projects started during the Nehru era and over the foundations of the Indian atomic energy programme, which led to the nuclear weapon capability, the space programme, the beginnings of the information technology revolution in the 1970s and 1980s under Indira Gandhi, and the beginnings of the end of socialism under Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s. Modi exercises his privilege of a politician who is not bound to be even-handed and fair in his criticism of his rivals. So, the bleating of Congress leaders in Parliament and outside that Modi ignores the rich record of achievements of the
Nehru-Gandhi era falls on deaf ears.

Totalitarians

The ominous aspect of Modi’s governance project, both in his first term and at the beginning of his second, is that he believes in the idea encapsulated in the phrase of early 19th century French socialist thinker Saint-Simon, “administration of things”, that governance is a matter of getting the maximum benefits for the people from the State machinery.

It boils down to good administration, and there cannot be too many differences, least of all ideological, in choosing the most efficient mode for getting things done. Modi’s openness is then limited to accepting solutions to administrative snags. That is why, the prime minister is only too willing to crowdsource ideas for his party’s election manifesto as well as for his monthly radio talk, Mann Ki Baat.

Modi is moving towards a stage where politics is taken out of the realm of ideas and reduced to that of minding the administrative machinery. Despite all their vehemence against ‘Urban Maoists’, Modi and other BJP leaders are themselves in the totalitarian revolutionary mould of the Maoists, and their ideological progenitors, the socialists.

The genealogical links between the ideological Left and the Right have been explained by German sociologist Werner Sombart nearly a century ago, and the old-fashioned European liberal Friedrich Hayek took note of it in his famous 1944 tract, “Road To Serfdom”. Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and the other anti-Left firebrands in the BJP would be shocked to know how much they have in common with the ‘Urban Maoists’ in terms of intellectual outlook.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in New Delhi)